It's impossible to make a battery close to the energy density of gasoline. We're talking a thousandfold increase, not 10x.
The Energy density of gasoline is 32 MJ/L. The energy density of the best batteries is about 4 MJ/L. That is 8-fold less, not 1000.
But a gasoline engine is about 15% efficient, while an electric engine is about 90% efficient. So even if the energy density of a battery is 1/6th that of gasoline, it will give you the same range.
If all the advances which were announced had played out as announced though they would probably have increased by a hundredfold or more.
Most research doesn't pan out. Not in batteries, or in any other area of scientific endeavour. That doesn't mean we should stop doing science. It also doesn't mean that we should stop reporting on science. If you don't want to read about science and technology, then GO SOMEWHERE ELSE. Go watch cat videos, or whatever. Good riddance. I am sick of all the SJW articles and other crap on Slashdot, so it is very annoying to read people like you whining about articles reporting real science and potential technological improvements. Articles on things like battery research are exactly what Slashdot is for.
I'd be happy with one breakthrough battery for all the battery breakthrough stories I've seen on Slashdot for the last ten years...
Lithium batteries have more than doubled in energy density over that period, while dropping in price. That improvement resulted from the research, summarized and discussed on Slashdot, that you are now dismissing.
If you don't want to read about leading edge scientific research, then please go chat on Facebook or some other mainstream forum, and leave Slashdot to the true geeks.
What I'd rather see is Monsanto and anyone else who wants to sell GM seed forced to use the terminator gene in all of their products.
Monsanto wanted to include the terminator gene in their products. They backed down in the face of vociferous protests from anti-GMO activists and extremely negative press coverage.
Monsanto would love a law making terminator genes mandatory. But there is zero chance of that happening. Anti-GMO groups would fight that the for the same reason that anti-smoking groups fight e-cigarettes: They fix much of the problem, thus giving the protest groups less of a cause, and less of a reason to exist.
Unfortunately it's about as likely as solving global warming by switching power generation to clean abundant fairy dust.
Why is it unlikely? There are almost no significant disagreements between China and America. There is a dispute over some uninhabited rocks that are claimed by both China and Japan. There is also a dispute between China and the Philippines over Scarborough Shoal, which is also uninhabited. Since we have mutual defense treaties with both Japan and the Philippines, these disputes involve us. But that's it: a handful of rocks.
China has territorial disputes with India, Vietnam, Indonesia, etc. But none of those countries are American allies, so it isn't our problem.
Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, etc. are also not in dispute. America recognizes them all as part of China.
China violates the rights of Chinese citizens, but that is not something that we can control, or even significantly influence. Besides, they are no worse than many other countries that are our allies.
So why is it inevitable that America and China be adversaries? I think the main reason is that Russia is not longer a big threat, and we need a boogey man to justify the MIC. Since China has it's own MIC to appease, this mutual scare mongering works out well for everyone.
Someone willfully saved seed he knew to belong to Monsanto, and then he got nailed.
That was Percy Schmeiser. He planted canola adjacent to his neighbors Roundup-Ready crop, then saved the seed from that section of his field, and only from that section. The following year, he sprayed his field with Roundup to kill the plants without the Monsanto gene. He now had pure RR canola, which he used and benefited from in the following years. Monsanto asked him to pay a license fee, he refused, so Monsanto sued him. Since this was clearly a case of blatant intentional infringement, and Schmeiser openly admitted to it, Monsanto won.
It's still wrong
Why is it wrong? Or at least any more wrong than enforcing any other patent?
I believe you can read the OP as meaning "commercial CONSUMER operating systems", which UNIX was not.
Yes it was. BSD was available, for free, on desktop systems, before Linux. The only difference was that BSD required a floating point co-processor, while Linux did not. But plenty of desktops had 387s.
I suspect that part of "NASA is doomed" is that without clear, consistent goals, NASA just seems like a money pit.
NASA is a money pit. What they need are clear, consistent, affordable goals. The mission to Mars would cost a TRILLION dollars, and there is no way in hell that that is going to happen. Obama is happy to get some geek votes by spending a few billion on the project, but once it starts costing real money, it is virtually guaranteed to be cancelled. We aren't going to spend a trillion dollars on something that the average taxpayer doesn't give a crap about.
NASA should focus on shorter term robotic missions, that cost a billion or less, and do real science. Those can be funded and completed in one political cycle.
this is a problem, if you have more people in the 60's that needed pension than people in 20-40
The one-child policy started in 1979. Those babies are now 36. They will retire in another 29 years. By then we should have advanced AI and plenty of robots to do the work. If is funny how the "crisis de jour" swings between "we won't have enough people to do all the jobs" and "robots are taking over and people will starve because there won't be any jobs".
I wonder why the Chinese government did not pass a law that if you abort your first child (excluding medical reasons) you do not get a second attempt.
They don't do it because doctors already make plenty of money from the bribes for performing the sonograms to determine the gender in the first place, which is illegal. They don't need additional income in bribes for not reporting the abortions.
In fact the source of the problem is education and economic development.
The evidence shows the opposite. Sex-selective abortions are worst in areas with higher education and development. In China, the problem is worst in the coastal cities. In India, it is worst in richer provinces like Gujarat. One reason is that richer and more educated people have greater access to sonograms, and can afford the abortions.
Why did you feel the need to drop boys and girls into different, grossly stereotyped buckets?
We don't drop them into buckets. We offer a range of projects, and THEY select which they want to work on. All of the projects are equally challenging, and all of them allow for a lot of individual creativity and innovation.
How has Scratch been working? Have the kids been getting good results?
The kids love it. We start in 4th grade and continue for 5th and 6th. Scratch is mostly drag-and-drop, which is nice because the kids don't type well. The school is dropping cursive writing, and instead teaching touch typing (an infinitely more useful skill) so the typing should be less of problem in the future. Scratch is nice because you don't have to worry about syntax. The program will always run. It may not do what you expect, but it will do something. That makes the learning curve less steep. Scratch is graphical, and mostly used to create interactive animations. Kids this age are very visually oriented.
For 4th graders? I don't think so. With Scratch, they can have something up and moving around on the screen the first day. In a week, they can get a shooter working (boys) or an animated dollhouse (girls). With a language like Pascal, they are going to be bogged down in syntax, and there is no native graphical output.
Pascal is a poor choice for older kids as well. It has no OO, and uses ancient BEGIN END syntax. Java or Python are much better choices. They use modern syntax, are object based, are widely used in industry, prepare the kids for college, jobs, etc. Java is also the language used for the AP-CS test.
The DPP would disagree. You can no longer conflate Taiwan with the KMT.
The KMT is the current ruling party. The DPP talks about independence when they are in opposition, but when they have actually been in power they don't do that. China has made it clear that a declaration of independence would be an act of war. America has more ambiguously let it be known that they would be unlikely to support Taiwan if they made such a reckless provocation. America officially recognizes Taiwan to be part of China, just like South Carolina (including Fort Sumter) is part of the USA.
...and a skewing towards males, for cultural reasons, that means there's a pretty big gender gap.
Sex selective abortion is common in many Asian countries, so the one-child policy is not the root cause. Many provinces in India have a more severe problem with female infanticide than China.
Also, in Chinese provinces that have already relaxed the policy from one child to two, the problem has gotten worse. Families are reluctant to abort their first baby, and less than 10% of first born baby girls are aborted. But if the first baby is a girl, then they want to be damn sure the second is a boy (so they have someone to support them in old age), so a second girl is much more likely to be aborted.
The PRC doesn't see it that way, as you should know. Neither does the USA, actually
Neither does Taiwan. They officially consider themselves to be part of China. Taiwan also considers Tibet, Xinjiang, and all the islands in the South China Sea to be part of an indivisible China. Although China has recognized the independence of Mongolia, Taiwan has not, and considers Mongolia to also be Chinese territory.
what is the solution that all the whining masses and spineless politicians are likely to accept.
1. Improve education, especially early education of girls. Literate women have fewer babies than illiterate women. 2. Improve healthcare, especially for early childhood diseases. People have fewer babies when they are confident their kids will survive. 3. Public pensions. People will have fewer kids if they don't need them for financial support in old age. 4. Make contraceptives available and affordable. Many women have more kids than they want.
Population growth has declined, often dramatically, everywhere these policies have been adopted.
If even the chinese can't keep a policy like this going then what chance anyone else?
The Chinese are not ending it because it failed. They are ending it because it succeeded. Their population has stopped growing and has leveled off.
Trump... has an elegant solution: require H-1Bs be paid more than market wages. That way, it's only cost-effective to hire an H-1B if you honestly need them.
No. That way it is cost effective to lower salaries so that no American citizens will take the jobs. Then you can fill the positions with H-1Bs.
As an employer, I used to love the rule that H1-Bs had to be paid at least as much as Americans, because if an American asked for a raise, I could just tell them I couldn't increase their salary, because it was illegal to pay them more than the H1-Bs. So no raise for you! Heh heh.
There are very few technologies that don't involve computers, at least if you count microcontrollers as computers (which they are). The light bulb in my kitchen communicates with my Z-Wave hub, so I can turn it on/off and dim it using voice commands, or link it to a motion controller or timer. But there is bug, and about once every month or two it will start flickering. So I need to unscrew it, and screw it back in, to reboot the light bulb.
If China has had 1-child policy since '79, why has their population increased so much? Shouldn't it have halved by now (2 parents replaced by 1 child)?
When some species of spiders hatch, they eat their mother. In humans it is different. When a woman has a baby, she continues to live. So 2 doesn't become 1. 2 becomes 3.
In the long run, people die. So eventually, if the birth rate is below 2, the population will fall, but there is a lag of a generation before that happens. The women having babies in 1979 are only in the 50s and 60s today.
It is surprising to see how many people come up and ask how much the "tax" was on the third one.
I don't know how much for a 3rd, but the tax was 5000RMB, or about $700, for a 2nd child in Shanghai back in 2002, when I helped my wife's brother get a permit for his second kid. I have heard it was cheaper in the countryside, and in some western provinces, it wasn't being enforced at all.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you think you will survive if most 'natural' plants can not spread naturally anymore?
Please explain how a gene that prevents reproduction will "spread naturally".
It's impossible to make a battery close to the energy density of gasoline. We're talking a thousandfold increase, not 10x.
The Energy density of gasoline is 32 MJ/L. The energy density of the best batteries is about 4 MJ/L. That is 8-fold less, not 1000.
But a gasoline engine is about 15% efficient, while an electric engine is about 90% efficient. So even if the energy density of a battery is 1/6th that of gasoline, it will give you the same range.
If all the advances which were announced had played out as announced though they would probably have increased by a hundredfold or more.
Most research doesn't pan out. Not in batteries, or in any other area of scientific endeavour. That doesn't mean we should stop doing science. It also doesn't mean that we should stop reporting on science. If you don't want to read about science and technology, then GO SOMEWHERE ELSE. Go watch cat videos, or whatever. Good riddance. I am sick of all the SJW articles and other crap on Slashdot, so it is very annoying to read people like you whining about articles reporting real science and potential technological improvements. Articles on things like battery research are exactly what Slashdot is for.
I'd be happy with one breakthrough battery for all the battery breakthrough stories I've seen on Slashdot for the last ten years...
Lithium batteries have more than doubled in energy density over that period, while dropping in price. That improvement resulted from the research, summarized and discussed on Slashdot, that you are now dismissing.
If you don't want to read about leading edge scientific research, then please go chat on Facebook or some other mainstream forum, and leave Slashdot to the true geeks.
What I'd rather see is Monsanto and anyone else who wants to sell GM seed forced to use the terminator gene in all of their products.
Monsanto wanted to include the terminator gene in their products. They backed down in the face of vociferous protests from anti-GMO activists and extremely negative press coverage.
Monsanto would love a law making terminator genes mandatory. But there is zero chance of that happening. Anti-GMO groups would fight that the for the same reason that anti-smoking groups fight e-cigarettes: They fix much of the problem, thus giving the protest groups less of a cause, and less of a reason to exist.
Unfortunately it's about as likely as solving global warming by switching power generation to clean abundant fairy dust.
Why is it unlikely? There are almost no significant disagreements between China and America. There is a dispute over some uninhabited rocks that are claimed by both China and Japan. There is also a dispute between China and the Philippines over Scarborough Shoal, which is also uninhabited. Since we have mutual defense treaties with both Japan and the Philippines, these disputes involve us. But that's it: a handful of rocks.
China has territorial disputes with India, Vietnam, Indonesia, etc. But none of those countries are American allies, so it isn't our problem.
Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, etc. are also not in dispute. America recognizes them all as part of China.
China violates the rights of Chinese citizens, but that is not something that we can control, or even significantly influence. Besides, they are no worse than many other countries that are our allies.
So why is it inevitable that America and China be adversaries? I think the main reason is that Russia is not longer a big threat, and we need a boogey man to justify the MIC. Since China has it's own MIC to appease, this mutual scare mongering works out well for everyone.
Someone willfully saved seed he knew to belong to Monsanto, and then he got nailed.
That was Percy Schmeiser. He planted canola adjacent to his neighbors Roundup-Ready crop, then saved the seed from that section of his field, and only from that section. The following year, he sprayed his field with Roundup to kill the plants without the Monsanto gene. He now had pure RR canola, which he used and benefited from in the following years. Monsanto asked him to pay a license fee, he refused, so Monsanto sued him. Since this was clearly a case of blatant intentional infringement, and Schmeiser openly admitted to it, Monsanto won.
It's still wrong
Why is it wrong? Or at least any more wrong than enforcing any other patent?
The simple solution is to make it illegal to tell patients the sex of their child.
It is already illegal. People have to bribe the doctor to find out the gender, or find someone with a black market sonogram.
I believe you can read the OP as meaning "commercial CONSUMER operating systems", which UNIX was not.
Yes it was. BSD was available, for free, on desktop systems, before Linux. The only difference was that BSD required a floating point co-processor, while Linux did not. But plenty of desktops had 387s.
I suspect that part of "NASA is doomed" is that without clear, consistent goals, NASA just seems like a money pit.
NASA is a money pit. What they need are clear, consistent, affordable goals. The mission to Mars would cost a TRILLION dollars, and there is no way in hell that that is going to happen. Obama is happy to get some geek votes by spending a few billion on the project, but once it starts costing real money, it is virtually guaranteed to be cancelled. We aren't going to spend a trillion dollars on something that the average taxpayer doesn't give a crap about.
NASA should focus on shorter term robotic missions, that cost a billion or less, and do real science. Those can be funded and completed in one political cycle.
this is a problem, if you have more people in the 60's that needed pension than people in 20-40
The one-child policy started in 1979. Those babies are now 36. They will retire in another 29 years. By then we should have advanced AI and plenty of robots to do the work. If is funny how the "crisis de jour" swings between "we won't have enough people to do all the jobs" and "robots are taking over and people will starve because there won't be any jobs".
I wonder why the Chinese government did not pass a law that if you abort your first child (excluding medical reasons) you do not get a second attempt.
They don't do it because doctors already make plenty of money from the bribes for performing the sonograms to determine the gender in the first place, which is illegal. They don't need additional income in bribes for not reporting the abortions.
In fact the source of the problem is education and economic development.
The evidence shows the opposite. Sex-selective abortions are worst in areas with higher education and development. In China, the problem is worst in the coastal cities. In India, it is worst in richer provinces like Gujarat. One reason is that richer and more educated people have greater access to sonograms, and can afford the abortions.
Why did you feel the need to drop boys and girls into different, grossly stereotyped buckets?
We don't drop them into buckets. We offer a range of projects, and THEY select which they want to work on. All of the projects are equally challenging, and all of them allow for a lot of individual creativity and innovation.
How has Scratch been working? Have the kids been getting good results?
The kids love it. We start in 4th grade and continue for 5th and 6th. Scratch is mostly drag-and-drop, which is nice because the kids don't type well. The school is dropping cursive writing, and instead teaching touch typing (an infinitely more useful skill) so the typing should be less of problem in the future. Scratch is nice because you don't have to worry about syntax. The program will always run. It may not do what you expect, but it will do something. That makes the learning curve less steep. Scratch is graphical, and mostly used to create interactive animations. Kids this age are very visually oriented.
Pascal is still probably the best.
For 4th graders? I don't think so. With Scratch, they can have something up and moving around on the screen the first day. In a week, they can get a shooter working (boys) or an animated dollhouse (girls). With a language like Pascal, they are going to be bogged down in syntax, and there is no native graphical output.
Pascal is a poor choice for older kids as well. It has no OO, and uses ancient BEGIN END syntax. Java or Python are much better choices. They use modern syntax, are object based, are widely used in industry, prepare the kids for college, jobs, etc. Java is also the language used for the AP-CS test.
The DPP would disagree. You can no longer conflate Taiwan with the KMT.
The KMT is the current ruling party. The DPP talks about independence when they are in opposition, but when they have actually been in power they don't do that. China has made it clear that a declaration of independence would be an act of war. America has more ambiguously let it be known that they would be unlikely to support Taiwan if they made such a reckless provocation. America officially recognizes Taiwan to be part of China, just like South Carolina (including Fort Sumter) is part of the USA.
...and a skewing towards males, for cultural reasons, that means there's a pretty big gender gap.
Sex selective abortion is common in many Asian countries, so the one-child policy is not the root cause. Many provinces in India have a more severe problem with female infanticide than China.
Also, in Chinese provinces that have already relaxed the policy from one child to two, the problem has gotten worse. Families are reluctant to abort their first baby, and less than 10% of first born baby girls are aborted. But if the first baby is a girl, then they want to be damn sure the second is a boy (so they have someone to support them in old age), so a second girl is much more likely to be aborted.
It still is especially when you consider actual results.
The actual result was matching the population to the food supply and eliminating famine.
The PRC doesn't see it that way, as you should know. Neither does the USA, actually
Neither does Taiwan. They officially consider themselves to be part of China. Taiwan also considers Tibet, Xinjiang, and all the islands in the South China Sea to be part of an indivisible China. Although China has recognized the independence of Mongolia, Taiwan has not, and considers Mongolia to also be Chinese territory.
what is the solution that all the whining masses and spineless politicians are likely to accept.
1. Improve education, especially early education of girls. Literate women have fewer babies than illiterate women.
2. Improve healthcare, especially for early childhood diseases. People have fewer babies when they are confident their kids will survive.
3. Public pensions. People will have fewer kids if they don't need them for financial support in old age.
4. Make contraceptives available and affordable. Many women have more kids than they want.
Population growth has declined, often dramatically, everywhere these policies have been adopted.
If even the chinese can't keep a policy like this going then what chance anyone else?
The Chinese are not ending it because it failed. They are ending it because it succeeded. Their population has stopped growing and has leveled off.
Trump ... has an elegant solution: require H-1Bs be paid more than market wages. That way, it's only cost-effective to hire an H-1B if you honestly need them.
No. That way it is cost effective to lower salaries so that no American citizens will take the jobs. Then you can fill the positions with H-1Bs.
As an employer, I used to love the rule that H1-Bs had to be paid at least as much as Americans, because if an American asked for a raise, I could just tell them I couldn't increase their salary, because it was illegal to pay them more than the H1-Bs. So no raise for you! Heh heh.
There are very few technologies that don't involve computers, at least if you count microcontrollers as computers (which they are). The light bulb in my kitchen communicates with my Z-Wave hub, so I can turn it on/off and dim it using voice commands, or link it to a motion controller or timer. But there is bug, and about once every month or two it will start flickering. So I need to unscrew it, and screw it back in, to reboot the light bulb.
If China has had 1-child policy since '79, why has their population increased so much? Shouldn't it have halved by now (2 parents replaced by 1 child)?
When some species of spiders hatch, they eat their mother. In humans it is different. When a woman has a baby, she continues to live. So 2 doesn't become 1. 2 becomes 3.
In the long run, people die. So eventually, if the birth rate is below 2, the population will fall, but there is a lag of a generation before that happens. The women having babies in 1979 are only in the 50s and 60s today.
It is surprising to see how many people come up and ask how much the "tax" was on the third one.
I don't know how much for a 3rd, but the tax was 5000RMB, or about $700, for a 2nd child in Shanghai back in 2002, when I helped my wife's brother get a permit for his second kid. I have heard it was cheaper in the countryside, and in some western provinces, it wasn't being enforced at all.