Both of your examples already store energy and turn on and off to modify the stored energy. Why? Your fridge would not enjoy turning the motor on and off several times a minute, or running below a certain speed. Your heater probably also functions in bursts, since it's easier to turn a heating element to full for a short time than allow for it to run at variable power. So, they have thresholds where they'll turn on and off at different temperatures; turn on at one end of the acceptable range, and turn off at the other end.
It would take only a cheap, trivially simple circuit to allow them to function as load balancers to the grid, with negligible loss to performance. And certain industries, like aluminum or electrolysis, could do load balancing on a seasonal scale.
Before you complain about the costs involved with variable power usage, the reason people will do it is because there will be a financial investment. Many areas already allow you to buy power more cheaply depending on demand, so there's already a financial incentive to do this if it is worthwhile.
Finally about those tax breaks: Where's my tax break for living near to a polluting, carcinogenic, ugly, property devaluing coal power plant? Yeah, that's what I thought.
Some renewables have inherent storage, and the power usage of some very power-hungry industries can be varied easily, eliminating a huge portion of the storage that would otherwise be needed.
Labeling an article as satire would take all the fun out of it for those of us who 'get it'.
Boy have you got it wrong... it is going to be totally AWESOME to tag actual news stories with the "satire" tag, and watch the morons who believe everything they read be certain it's all fake. (Yes, I know it's not a user-generated tag, but automatic tags can still be applied since they won't judge content.)
That said, the math may expose places that he might want to target for further investigation. I'd say this would be a worthwhile exercise if he uses the as a way of narrowing down a list, and/or perhaps applying the math more generally to a huge super set of obscure locations to generate some locations he hadn't considered previously for inclusion in his evaluation.
Using math like that may not be perfect, but it allows his search space to be every single city in the whole country, converting it into a sorted list. Then next step is to search for information about any of the variables you couldn't automatically account for on the top several items, and for factors that might be unique to the city. Only then would one visit or move in.
Now, some would say all this is a lot of unnecessary trouble, but think about this: where you live is one of the major decisions in your life, yet few people take it very seriously. (However, looking at the article it seems he made a rather nasty mistake -- using a bunch of correlations to calculate "walkability", whereas he might be better off using such variables directly based on their desirability, or at least check how they correlate to other factors as well.)
Thank goodness you Americans can carry guns so you're safer. We can't carry guns up here and, hey that's funny, I can walk almost anywhere here any time.
Actually, the areas with the most relaxed gun laws in the US, *are* the safest. And those areas where they put the most restrictions on guns, have the highest crime rates. It has been a pretty undeniable trend wherever it can be observed. And when the courts force certain cities or states to relax their gun restrictions, crime falls, dramatically.
Also, countries with higher gun ownership rates than the US, have lower crime than many nations where guns are completely banned. In the UK, you're more likely to be stabbed than shot, but that doesn't make it a nice safe place.
But which is the cause, and which is the effect? (Yes, even when one comes after another there can be non-obvious cause and effect. Think about it for a moment.)
Maybe it's time to apply some gun restrictions on cops. I know what you'll say, "If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns." But I'm OK with people who go to jail if they should shoot an innocent person, having guns. It's the people who can shoot someone without facing the consequences who have the most potential to abuse their guns.
It says "beta" on it and I'm already traumatized because just now they tried (again) to make me use beta. Is there a way to make them quit messing with me, or do I have to go to soylentnews?
Yes you can use the Schwarzschild argument. Expanding space is only a handwaving rationalization, a coordinate-dependent way of thinking that is not compatible with the principle of general covariance.
I've never heard anything about that, care to explain? It also seems contrary to what I know, see below.
A less-known fact about black holes is that the bigger they are, the lower the density. If you use the Schwarzschild radius, for an arbitrarily large mass, the radius gets arbitrarily large, and the density gets arbitrarily close to zero. If this applied to expanding space, then it wouldn't be an open question as to whether the universe was infinite or not, as if it were we would be guaranteed to be in a black hole. Then again, maybe we are in a black hole and don't know how to tell the difference.
If the gravitational source density was ever more than zero, then it follows that the contents of the universe were less massive in the past. In an inertial set of coordinates, not the screwy Freidmann coordinates, it can be understood that the shards of the Big Bang, flying apart at next to lightspeed, still add mass to the universe today, but at a diluted density.
If you use inertial coordinates, then you don't have gravity because gravity is equivalent to acceleration (this was the insight Einstein used to think up General Relativity). In particular I'd like to see how you deal with expanding spacetime in an inertial reference frame.
Option 1: Store the Chinese data in China. The Chinese government owns all their bits.
Option 2: Store the Chinese data in the US and route it through China. The Chinese government owns all their bits. And so does the US.
It's pure marketing, of course. If they were really interested in security, they'd store only encrypted data without the key. But then it wouldn't be searchable, and a bunch of idiots would forget their encryption key and be angry because there'd be no magic recovery system.
You can't use the Schwarzschild radius calculation for expanding space. The only kind of new part was the bit about not becoming a black hole if it should re-collapse.
"A Swedish father has come under fire for interacting with the real world."
A Swedish father has come under fire for bragging about something which, if taken at face value, means he risked his kids' lives for nothing. It is a valuable and worthwhile experience, just not for the officially given reason. But as a journalist, he knows how to write a headline. No headline if he said it was about exposing his kids to the real world, but mention videogames and you move some papers.
Bet you didn't know that solar panels are already over 3X the efficiency of living plants (compared to the top crop, sugarcane, at 7-8% peak biomass efficiency, even less for sugar). The best solar cells are currently about 44.7% efficiency. And then you have to account for the loss for eating it; typically 10% efficiency per trophic level (and worse for longer-lived animals). You'd be lucky to get 1% energy efficiency, even as a vegan. And you might think you're not eating coal and natural gas, but where do you think we get ammonia from, or transporting the crops? I'm not sure what the energy efficiency of manufacturing robots is, but I'm willing to bet it's better than for humans.
The last job: robot owner. And it might be just the one guy, who bought everything (and has an army of well-armed robots in case anyone gets any ideas).
[...] And as joblessness increases those programs will steadily expand until, well fuck it, just give everybody enough money to buy basic food and housing and be done with it. There's no reason for anybody to go homeless or hungry in America. [...] But teh socialisms!!11!one!1!!" Well, the alternative is teh riotz!!!1!! [...]
I get the feeling that by the time robots are ready to take all the jobs, they'll also be taking the jobs of the military, police, and prison guards -- which would vastly reduce the costs of locking up every protestor (there's enough laws that they'll have broken one of them, and they can always make more), especially since most of those protestors would be already getting their necessities from the government. Will there really be any riots when you'll be automatically recognized and the police consist of bots with nothing better to do than follow around inconvenient people and make their life hell?
Capitalism doesn't work when labor is not scarce. Capitalism only works by imposing artificial scarcity on capital.
Capitalism will work just fine with a robotic workforce, for the people who invested capital in the productive stuff. It just wouldn't work out very well for the people offering to sell their labor at a higher price per value. And people with piles of capital don't usually like supporting everyone else, so things will probably turn out badly for them.
Every college already uses remote instruction in the form of textbooks written by someone not at the college. Now computers are allowing for even more interesting things to be done from far away. I expect the future will have computers playing a greater role in education, allowing for students to self-pace and improving the education of both gifted and special needs students. Though some will be happy enough not to have a physically present instructors, others will still want one and more traditional classes will be around for a long time. However, more choices are a good thing, and in this case will also allow for a great increase in part-time students.
It is theoretically possible to do marketing with good intentions -- there are people who would really benefit from a product but don't know about it. If you could target your ads to exactly those customers, well enough to make up for showing the ad to people who wouldn't benefit from it and especially not to people who would buy it and regret it, then it would be a net positive.
Of course you'd need to get a well-intentioned marketer working for a well-intentioned company who can tell the difference between a slacker and a well-intentioned marketer. So, it's basically impossible.
When I read the article, the thought I had was that I installed AdBlock Plus only to disable the popups that Firefox didn't block with its built-in blocker when popups evolved to get around it. Is there still not an ad blocker that blocks only the most annoying ads such as popups?
AdBlock Plus has the option to block everything, or allow unobtrusive ads. Presumably the latter option will help convince people to tone down the spam while allowing ad revenue.
Not that I care much, if not him someone else would've thought this one up. Pop-overs, pop-unders, pop-ins, insertions, insertions by your own ISP, unbidden playing of something VERY LOUD, possibly with video attached, what-have-you. There's something about advertising that invariably brings out the most obnoxious in the advertiser. Or even outright evil, like advertising toolbars and other malware.
If they don't notice they've been breached, are they still required to go through with the embarrassing and expensive analysis and report of the breach?
Slashdot Mirror
Both of your examples already store energy and turn on and off to modify the stored energy. Why? Your fridge would not enjoy turning the motor on and off several times a minute, or running below a certain speed. Your heater probably also functions in bursts, since it's easier to turn a heating element to full for a short time than allow for it to run at variable power. So, they have thresholds where they'll turn on and off at different temperatures; turn on at one end of the acceptable range, and turn off at the other end.
It would take only a cheap, trivially simple circuit to allow them to function as load balancers to the grid, with negligible loss to performance. And certain industries, like aluminum or electrolysis, could do load balancing on a seasonal scale.
Before you complain about the costs involved with variable power usage, the reason people will do it is because there will be a financial investment. Many areas already allow you to buy power more cheaply depending on demand, so there's already a financial incentive to do this if it is worthwhile.
Finally about those tax breaks: Where's my tax break for living near to a polluting, carcinogenic, ugly, property devaluing coal power plant? Yeah, that's what I thought.
Some renewables have inherent storage, and the power usage of some very power-hungry industries can be varied easily, eliminating a huge portion of the storage that would otherwise be needed.
Labeling an article as satire would take all the fun out of it for those of us who 'get it'.
Boy have you got it wrong... it is going to be totally AWESOME to tag actual news stories with the "satire" tag, and watch the morons who believe everything they read be certain it's all fake. (Yes, I know it's not a user-generated tag, but automatic tags can still be applied since they won't judge content.)
I'd much prefer that cops get treated like a civilian when they shoot somebody.
Glad you agree with me.
Better idea -- should a civilian shoots someone, they should get treated exactly the same whether they are police or not. Also, police are civilians.
That said, the math may expose places that he might want to target for further investigation. I'd say this would be a worthwhile exercise if he uses the as a way of narrowing down a list, and/or perhaps applying the math more generally to a huge super set of obscure locations to generate some locations he hadn't considered previously for inclusion in his evaluation.
Using math like that may not be perfect, but it allows his search space to be every single city in the whole country, converting it into a sorted list. Then next step is to search for information about any of the variables you couldn't automatically account for on the top several items, and for factors that might be unique to the city. Only then would one visit or move in.
Now, some would say all this is a lot of unnecessary trouble, but think about this: where you live is one of the major decisions in your life, yet few people take it very seriously. (However, looking at the article it seems he made a rather nasty mistake -- using a bunch of correlations to calculate "walkability", whereas he might be better off using such variables directly based on their desirability, or at least check how they correlate to other factors as well.)
Actually, the areas with the most relaxed gun laws in the US, *are* the safest. And those areas where they put the most restrictions on guns, have the highest crime rates. It has been a pretty undeniable trend wherever it can be observed. And when the courts force certain cities or states to relax their gun restrictions, crime falls, dramatically.
Also, countries with higher gun ownership rates than the US, have lower crime than many nations where guns are completely banned. In the UK, you're more likely to be stabbed than shot, but that doesn't make it a nice safe place.
But which is the cause, and which is the effect? (Yes, even when one comes after another there can be non-obvious cause and effect. Think about it for a moment.)
Maybe it's time to apply some gun restrictions on cops. I know what you'll say, "If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns." But I'm OK with people who go to jail if they should shoot an innocent person, having guns. It's the people who can shoot someone without facing the consequences who have the most potential to abuse their guns.
It says "beta" on it and I'm already traumatized because just now they tried (again) to make me use beta. Is there a way to make them quit messing with me, or do I have to go to soylentnews?
Yes you can use the Schwarzschild argument. Expanding space is only a handwaving rationalization, a coordinate-dependent way of thinking that is not compatible with the principle of general covariance.
I've never heard anything about that, care to explain? It also seems contrary to what I know, see below.
A less-known fact about black holes is that the bigger they are, the lower the density. If you use the Schwarzschild radius, for an arbitrarily large mass, the radius gets arbitrarily large, and the density gets arbitrarily close to zero. If this applied to expanding space, then it wouldn't be an open question as to whether the universe was infinite or not, as if it were we would be guaranteed to be in a black hole. Then again, maybe we are in a black hole and don't know how to tell the difference.
If the gravitational source density was ever more than zero, then it follows that the contents of the universe were less massive in the past. In an inertial set of coordinates, not the screwy Freidmann coordinates, it can be understood that the shards of the Big Bang, flying apart at next to lightspeed, still add mass to the universe today, but at a diluted density.
If you use inertial coordinates, then you don't have gravity because gravity is equivalent to acceleration (this was the insight Einstein used to think up General Relativity). In particular I'd like to see how you deal with expanding spacetime in an inertial reference frame.
What makes the system so unique is that it operates on the basis of trust.
It does sound like a unique privacy system, if it is based on trust.
Option 1: Store the Chinese data in China. The Chinese government owns all their bits.
Option 2: Store the Chinese data in the US and route it through China. The Chinese government owns all their bits. And so does the US.
It's pure marketing, of course. If they were really interested in security, they'd store only encrypted data without the key. But then it wouldn't be searchable, and a bunch of idiots would forget their encryption key and be angry because there'd be no magic recovery system.
You can't use the Schwarzschild radius calculation for expanding space. The only kind of new part was the bit about not becoming a black hole if it should re-collapse.
"A Swedish father has come under fire for interacting with the real world."
A Swedish father has come under fire for bragging about something which, if taken at face value, means he risked his kids' lives for nothing. It is a valuable and worthwhile experience, just not for the officially given reason. But as a journalist, he knows how to write a headline. No headline if he said it was about exposing his kids to the real world, but mention videogames and you move some papers.
Bet you didn't know that solar panels are already over 3X the efficiency of living plants (compared to the top crop, sugarcane, at 7-8% peak biomass efficiency, even less for sugar). The best solar cells are currently about 44.7% efficiency. And then you have to account for the loss for eating it; typically 10% efficiency per trophic level (and worse for longer-lived animals). You'd be lucky to get 1% energy efficiency, even as a vegan. And you might think you're not eating coal and natural gas, but where do you think we get ammonia from, or transporting the crops? I'm not sure what the energy efficiency of manufacturing robots is, but I'm willing to bet it's better than for humans.
Machine learning engineers, robotics engineers, project managers, pimps, prostitutes, and politicians.
The last job: robot owner. And it might be just the one guy, who bought everything (and has an army of well-armed robots in case anyone gets any ideas).
[...] And as joblessness increases those programs will steadily expand until, well fuck it, just give everybody enough money to buy basic food and housing and be done with it. There's no reason for anybody to go homeless or hungry in America. [...] But teh socialisms!!11!one!1!!" Well, the alternative is teh riotz!!!1!! [...]
I get the feeling that by the time robots are ready to take all the jobs, they'll also be taking the jobs of the military, police, and prison guards -- which would vastly reduce the costs of locking up every protestor (there's enough laws that they'll have broken one of them, and they can always make more), especially since most of those protestors would be already getting their necessities from the government. Will there really be any riots when you'll be automatically recognized and the police consist of bots with nothing better to do than follow around inconvenient people and make their life hell?
Capitalism doesn't work when labor is not scarce. Capitalism only works by imposing artificial scarcity on capital.
Capitalism will work just fine with a robotic workforce, for the people who invested capital in the productive stuff. It just wouldn't work out very well for the people offering to sell their labor at a higher price per value. And people with piles of capital don't usually like supporting everyone else, so things will probably turn out badly for them.
Every college already uses remote instruction in the form of textbooks written by someone not at the college. Now computers are allowing for even more interesting things to be done from far away. I expect the future will have computers playing a greater role in education, allowing for students to self-pace and improving the education of both gifted and special needs students. Though some will be happy enough not to have a physically present instructors, others will still want one and more traditional classes will be around for a long time. However, more choices are a good thing, and in this case will also allow for a great increase in part-time students.
It is theoretically possible to do marketing with good intentions -- there are people who would really benefit from a product but don't know about it. If you could target your ads to exactly those customers, well enough to make up for showing the ad to people who wouldn't benefit from it and especially not to people who would buy it and regret it, then it would be a net positive.
Of course you'd need to get a well-intentioned marketer working for a well-intentioned company who can tell the difference between a slacker and a well-intentioned marketer. So, it's basically impossible.
When I read the article, the thought I had was that I installed AdBlock Plus only to disable the popups that Firefox didn't block with its built-in blocker when popups evolved to get around it. Is there still not an ad blocker that blocks only the most annoying ads such as popups?
AdBlock Plus has the option to block everything, or allow unobtrusive ads. Presumably the latter option will help convince people to tone down the spam while allowing ad revenue.
Not that I care much, if not him someone else would've thought this one up. Pop-overs, pop-unders, pop-ins, insertions, insertions by your own ISP, unbidden playing of something VERY LOUD, possibly with video attached, what-have-you. There's something about advertising that invariably brings out the most obnoxious in the advertiser. Or even outright evil, like advertising toolbars and other malware.
Don't worry, the free market will fix it!
Just build a bunch of cities underwater, and giant floating cities, and you'll have cables everywhere.
Thank goodness we don't have any here, otherwise they'd jump all over this.
If they don't notice they've been breached, are they still required to go through with the embarrassing and expensive analysis and report of the breach?