> So we now it works. how does 7850 sq meter get you 40 MW at a 1000 watts per sqr. meter?
I should have written out my math, I was interrupted. I estimated 2 W/cm^2 from old science experiments as a child, or 20,000 W/m^2. That yields 157,000,000 Watts for the entire array, or 157 MW, not 40 MW, as you correctly pointed out. Even at 10% efficieny, that would still yield a respectable 15 MW/mirror.
Quite a few smart people, including me, are profoundly disturbed by the safety problems with nuclear fuels and by their limited reserves. Refining U-235 is quite expensive to fuel grade is quite expensive, and quite toxic. Moreover, the current reserves will only supply about 200 years of energy _at current rates of consumption_. That's currently roughly 12% of world energy production, for roughly 6 billion people, with many in dire poverty and quite low energy consumption.
If we assume that nuclear consumption grows by a factor of 4 due to increased population and increased reliance on nuclear fuels, and reduced by a factor of 2 by switching to breeder reactors and improving efficiency, it's still only a 100 year supply. And as reserves drop, it's going to become much more expensive to mine as the more accessible reserves are consumed,
Fusion has _never_ worked as a fuel source. The main sources of the requisite deuterium and/or tritium are the ordinary fission reactors. Given the limited availability and difficulty of refining the necessary deuterium and/or tritium from any natural source, it is unlikely to ever _be_ an effective fuel source. Even the cold fusion experiments, if successful, promised no solution to providing the necessary fuel source. So one should not rely on fusion ever being useful for energy until it is either able to use plain hydrogen. (Yes, the sun uses plain hydrogen: no, it's not a method that can fit in a normal Earth based fusion reactor.)
Perhaps, in theory, one could refine fusion fuels from solar wind, which is unusually rich in such isotopes. But if one has a large collecting surface in orbit to gather solar wind, why not use that as a direct solar mirror and gather the much higher density and safer optical energy for ordinary solar power? A 100 meter diameter solar mirror gathers approximately 40 MW of power. With typical American energy consumption at approximately 1 kW, that is enough energy for roughly 40,000 Americans.
> Or does this warning assume the worst case, where all these other features are turned off?
It seems not. But remember that Internet Explorer was written to be inseparable from the operating system itself, with effectively bare metal access to provide Microsft-only speed, power, and enforced reliance on Microsoft's system libraries. It was designed _not_ to be lmodular, and designed _not_ to be clealy segregated from the underlying operating system so that it would be impossible to remove or replace on a Windows system.
Is there a single word from Mozilla's current leadership that makes you think this could even theoretically be true? Because I've looked, and been unable to find even a hint that they intend to drop DRM at any point in the future.
> Sigh... I remember when the entire country was designated as a "Free Speech Zone".
The US has _never_ been a completely "Free Speech Zone". Look up what happened at the Kent State protests, or the McCarthy Era behavior of the House Un-American Activities Committee". Or look earlier to the Boston Commons, which helped trigger the US revolution, or the more recent and sometimes legally very strange handling of more recent Wall Street protests.
We are always at war, politically, between free speech, safety, and loyalty to the current regime. I'm pleased that the US has learned to handle these more peacefully, but am sometimes very disappointed at the subtler attempts to silence protests. The "free speech zones" are a very dangerous concept.
Running a vehicle just to charge a cell phone is _grossly_ inefficient, and expensive. A local generator charging batteries is more efficient. But why pay for gasoline, and maintaining a motor, or even pay for grid electricity, when a modest solar charger can pay for itself in a month?
> The higher the stakes the more the accomplishment of that task will make me proud/happy.
While true, this has little to do with the time wasted learning the basic layout of the build tools and auto-configuration tools. The time wasted constantly retweaking and hand-compiling individual components as source code is updated is just that for most programmers: time wasted.
API/ABI compatibility is not the same as cross platform compatibility: the difficulties with 'malloc' incompatibility that led to replace a core libc function clal are precisely the sort of thing that the LibreSSL developers can simply throw out. Replacing it for cross-platform is an excellent example of the difficulties of just such cross compatibility work: preserving the ABI for some of the odder platforms on which OpenSSL currently works is precisely the cross-platform work that the LibreSSL developers can discard. And yes, it will speed the performance of the code. (Rewriting and replacing malloc for cross-compatibility is _guaranteed_ to be slower than native libc functions.)
I'm not suggesting that OpenSSL did not need a stripping of debris and a rewrite. I'm suggesting that if you ignore cross-compatibility and the installled user base, it's much easier to clean up old code.
If you clear out the various multi-platform work for OpenSSL, _of course_ it can progress more quickly and more securely. The multi-platform work is where so much of the work has been done.
That seems to work very well for Al Quedah, some of whose leaders have very clear moral principles involving national autonomy and religiously based morals and ethics. Simply having strong "morals and ethics" is not enough.
This is a very confusing claim. Much of what is learned is _mis_learned, misrecollected, and confused by faulty recall. The amount we are expected to learn is coupled with a powerful, but fundamentally plastic and malleable distributed storage system. Such a system will inevitably have errors from the original "lissons" provided.
> THOUSANDS of people EACH YEAR in "major cities"? What colour is the sky in your world?
It's the color of the sky in Beirut, Islamabad, and Baghdad. The US has much less of such killings. and has the hard-won luxury to apply law and measured responses to the few such attacks on Us soil.
It does not have to be. With the phone number and data provided by the victim, there is enough _evidence_ to get a warrant and for any remotely competent police IT department to retrieve such data. There just isn't deemed to be enough return on the investment of the time getting the warrant, recovering the phone, and establishing ownership for an arrest and conviction. Since US jails are overwhelmed with low income drug offenders, the chances of modest personal crime like this leading to actual jail time are quite low.
For younger contributors, I do remember the first 'interracial', actually the first black/white, kiss on television. It was on Star Trek, and it caused some fascinating chats among my friends
It did cause a lot of controversy at the time. Among my very few contacts from so long ago, the universal agreement is that Nichelle Nichols was, and remains, a stunning woman woman whom any of us would be proud to have kissed at any point in her career.
> Your cite of the "recent" study fits with my memory from the old school. There are several kinds (at least two) of memory: long- and short-term; one is chemical, the other electrical.
They're both _neurological_. The physical layout of the neurons and their junctions is apparently as critical as the physical layout of electrical connections on a computer chip is to the programs that might run on it. And there's little distinction between "electrical" and "chemical". The "electrical" impulses in the brain are apparently fundamentally chemical, not "meticallic" electrical currents.
> We'll never make a truly human computer (or maybe "natural computer" is a better term) because we can't make it first and foremost desire self-preservation.
Any sophisticated system that does not protect its own assets will perish quite quickly under any kind of stress. "Self preservation" of a a _species_ is at the core of most evolutionary science. A casual search shows dozens of quite good papers on the nature of such evolution of of "self-preservation" as a fundamental and natural part of AI.
Repeatedly recalling an event, as for story telling, restores a subtly _altered_ copy of the memory. This has been shown by many experiments about the plasticity of human memory.
This is not true. Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the 1982 Nobel prize in literature for his book, "One Hundred Years of Solitude". He was denied US visas for his "subversive" attitudes, including his friendship with Fidel Castro. President Bill Clinton eventually lifted the restriction and helped him get a valid visa so he could visit the US.
> don't understand this comment, for the majority of companies H1B's are NOT a way to get cheap labour, they are a VERY expensive way to fill positions
Paying a US employee the prevailing wages, and risking that they will leave for another company if they're unhappy, can be even more expensive. It's especially expensive in larger organizations where the paperwork of handling H1B visas is streamlined and more efficient There are some classic cases of this: the canonical example is the legal team that presented a video on how *not* to hire US personnel but still follow H1B legal requirements.
don't understand this comment, for the majority of companies H1B's are NOT a way to get cheap labour, they are a VERY expensive way to fill positions
While a complex guidance system may be designed from the top down with such sorts of questions raised, a crashing vehicle is always a deadly weapon. Effort in reducing the risk of the accident, itself, by improving brakes, sensors, headlight effectiveness, and crash resistance of the vehicle itself is likely to be far more efficient and reliable than complex advance modeling or moral quandaries. The sophistication needed to evaluate the secondary effects of a crash is far, far beyond the capabilities of what must be a very reliable, extremely robust guidance system. Expanding its sophistication is likely to introduce far more _bugs_ into the system.
This is a case where "Keep It Simple, Stupid" is vital. Reduce speed in a controlled fashion: Avoid pedestrians, if they can be detected, because they have no armor. Get off the road in a controlled fashion.
> Or are the courts deliberately looking the other way because it is law enforcement doing the lying? They know they are lying and I would be surprised if the courts didn't know they are lying.
Historically, yes, the courts err on the side of law enforcement when reviewing testimony. The history of both the police and of the courts is filled with examples of this: it's an _inevitable_ part of the social and emotional bonds they both feel from being in the same business. It doesn't require planning or conspiracy to occur, it's a simple result of their both working in the same fields on related work.
Slashdot Mirror
> So we now it works. how does 7850 sq meter get you 40 MW at a 1000 watts per sqr. meter?
I should have written out my math, I was interrupted. I estimated 2 W/cm^2 from old science experiments as a child, or 20,000 W/m^2. That yields 157,000,000 Watts for the entire array, or 157 MW, not 40 MW, as you correctly pointed out. Even at 10% efficieny, that would still yield a respectable 15 MW/mirror.
Quite a few smart people, including me, are profoundly disturbed by the safety problems with nuclear fuels and by their limited reserves. Refining U-235 is quite expensive to fuel grade is quite expensive, and quite toxic. Moreover, the current reserves will only supply about 200 years of energy _at current rates of consumption_. That's currently roughly 12% of world energy production, for roughly 6 billion people, with many in dire poverty and quite low energy consumption.
If we assume that nuclear consumption grows by a factor of 4 due to increased population and increased reliance on nuclear fuels, and reduced by a factor of 2 by switching to breeder reactors and improving efficiency, it's still only a 100 year supply. And as reserves drop, it's going to become much more expensive to mine as the more accessible reserves are consumed,
Fusion has _never_ worked as a fuel source. The main sources of the requisite deuterium and/or tritium are the ordinary fission reactors. Given the limited availability and difficulty of refining the necessary deuterium and/or tritium from any natural source, it is unlikely to ever _be_ an effective fuel source. Even the cold fusion experiments, if successful, promised no solution to providing the necessary fuel source. So one should not rely on fusion ever being useful for energy until it is either able to use plain hydrogen. (Yes, the sun uses plain hydrogen: no, it's not a method that can fit in a normal Earth based fusion reactor.)
Perhaps, in theory, one could refine fusion fuels from solar wind, which is unusually rich in such isotopes. But if one has a large collecting surface in orbit to gather solar wind, why not use that as a direct solar mirror and gather the much higher density and safer optical energy for ordinary solar power? A 100 meter diameter solar mirror gathers approximately 40 MW of power. With typical American energy consumption at approximately 1 kW, that is enough energy for roughly 40,000 Americans.
> Or does this warning assume the worst case, where all these other features are turned off?
It seems not. But remember that Internet Explorer was written to be inseparable from the operating system itself, with effectively bare metal access to provide Microsft-only speed, power, and enforced reliance on Microsoft's system libraries. It was designed _not_ to be lmodular, and designed _not_ to be clealy segregated from the underlying operating system so that it would be impossible to remove or replace on a Windows system.
I do remember reading reprints of this quite prescient April 1st article 30 years ago.
http://www.textfiles.com/humor...
We knew they'd say this, right?
Is there a single word from Mozilla's current leadership that makes you think this could even theoretically be true? Because I've looked, and been unable to find even a hint that they intend to drop DRM at any point in the future.
> Sigh... I remember when the entire country was designated as a "Free Speech Zone".
The US has _never_ been a completely "Free Speech Zone". Look up what happened at the Kent State protests, or the McCarthy Era behavior of the House Un-American Activities Committee". Or look earlier to the Boston Commons, which helped trigger the US revolution, or the more recent and sometimes legally very strange handling of more recent Wall Street protests.
We are always at war, politically, between free speech, safety, and loyalty to the current regime. I'm pleased that the US has learned to handle these more peacefully, but am sometimes very disappointed at the subtler attempts to silence protests. The "free speech zones" are a very dangerous concept.
Running a vehicle just to charge a cell phone is _grossly_ inefficient, and expensive. A local generator charging batteries is more efficient. But why pay for gasoline, and maintaining a motor, or even pay for grid electricity, when a modest solar charger can pay for itself in a month?
> The higher the stakes the more the accomplishment of that task will make me proud/happy.
While true, this has little to do with the time wasted learning the basic layout of the build tools and auto-configuration tools. The time wasted constantly retweaking and hand-compiling individual components as source code is updated is just that for most programmers: time wasted.
API/ABI compatibility is not the same as cross platform compatibility: the difficulties with 'malloc' incompatibility that led to replace a core libc function clal are precisely the sort of thing that the LibreSSL developers can simply throw out. Replacing it for cross-platform is an excellent example of the difficulties of just such cross compatibility work: preserving the ABI for some of the odder platforms on which OpenSSL currently works is precisely the cross-platform work that the LibreSSL developers can discard. And yes, it will speed the performance of the code. (Rewriting and replacing malloc for cross-compatibility is _guaranteed_ to be slower than native libc functions.)
I'm not suggesting that OpenSSL did not need a stripping of debris and a rewrite. I'm suggesting that if you ignore cross-compatibility and the installled user base, it's much easier to clean up old code.
If you clear out the various multi-platform work for OpenSSL, _of course_ it can progress more quickly and more securely. The multi-platform work is where so much of the work has been done.
That seems to work very well for Al Quedah, some of whose leaders have very clear moral principles involving national autonomy and religiously based morals and ethics. Simply having strong "morals and ethics" is not enough.
They are standing outside the Apple store to buy the next Iphone. It remains a vibrant field.
> Everything that we do is learned...
This is a very confusing claim. Much of what is learned is _mis_learned, misrecollected, and confused by faulty recall. The amount we are expected to learn is coupled with a powerful, but fundamentally plastic and malleable distributed storage system. Such a system will inevitably have errors from the original "lissons" provided.
> THOUSANDS of people EACH YEAR in "major cities"? What colour is the sky in your world?
It's the color of the sky in Beirut, Islamabad, and Baghdad. The US has much less of such killings. and has the hard-won luxury to apply law and measured responses to the few such attacks on Us soil.
> What is that thing? Can its data be trusted?
It does not have to be. With the phone number and data provided by the victim, there is enough _evidence_ to get a warrant and for any remotely competent police IT department to retrieve such data. There just isn't deemed to be enough return on the investment of the time getting the warrant, recovering the phone, and establishing ownership for an arrest and conviction. Since US jails are overwhelmed with low income drug offenders, the chances of modest personal crime like this leading to actual jail time are quite low.
It is, indeed, a problem.
For younger contributors, I do remember the first 'interracial', actually the first black/white, kiss on television. It was on Star Trek, and it caused some fascinating chats among my friends
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
It did cause a lot of controversy at the time. Among my very few contacts from so long ago, the universal agreement is that Nichelle Nichols was, and remains, a stunning woman woman whom any of us would be proud to have kissed at any point in her career.
> Your cite of the "recent" study fits with my memory from the old school. There are several kinds (at least two) of memory: long- and short-term; one is chemical, the other electrical.
They're both _neurological_. The physical layout of the neurons and their junctions is apparently as critical as the physical layout of electrical connections on a computer chip is to the programs that might run on it. And there's little distinction between "electrical" and "chemical". The "electrical" impulses in the brain are apparently fundamentally chemical, not "meticallic" electrical currents.
> We'll never make a truly human computer (or maybe "natural computer" is a better term) because we can't make it first and foremost desire self-preservation.
Any sophisticated system that does not protect its own assets will perish quite quickly under any kind of stress. "Self preservation" of a a _species_ is at the core of most evolutionary science. A casual search shows dozens of quite good papers on the nature of such evolution of of "self-preservation" as a fundamental and natural part of AI.
> Is it that retrieval alters the memory or your processing of the retrieved memory that alters it? That's an important distinction.
"Yes".
It's not feasible to recall a memory without processing it in some way.
Repeatedly recalling an event, as for story telling, restores a subtly _altered_ copy of the memory. This has been shown by many experiments about the plasticity of human memory.
This is not true. Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the 1982 Nobel prize in literature for his book, "One Hundred Years of Solitude". He was denied US visas for his "subversive" attitudes, including his friendship with Fidel Castro. President Bill Clinton eventually lifted the restriction and helped him get a valid visa so he could visit the US.
http://mashable.com/2014/04/17...
> don't understand this comment, for the majority of companies H1B's are NOT a way to get cheap labour, they are a VERY expensive way to fill positions
Paying a US employee the prevailing wages, and risking that they will leave for another company if they're unhappy, can be even more expensive. It's especially expensive in larger organizations where the paperwork of handling H1B visas is streamlined and more efficient There are some classic cases of this: the canonical example is the legal team that presented a video on how *not* to hire US personnel but still follow H1B legal requirements.
don't understand this comment, for the majority of companies H1B's are NOT a way to get cheap labour, they are a VERY expensive way to fill positions
While a complex guidance system may be designed from the top down with such sorts of questions raised, a crashing vehicle is always a deadly weapon. Effort in reducing the risk of the accident, itself, by improving brakes, sensors, headlight effectiveness, and crash resistance of the vehicle itself is likely to be far more efficient and reliable than complex advance modeling or moral quandaries. The sophistication needed to evaluate the secondary effects of a crash is far, far beyond the capabilities of what must be a very reliable, extremely robust guidance system. Expanding its sophistication is likely to introduce far more _bugs_ into the system.
This is a case where "Keep It Simple, Stupid" is vital. Reduce speed in a controlled fashion: Avoid pedestrians, if they can be detected, because they have no armor. Get off the road in a controlled fashion.
> Or are the courts deliberately looking the other way because it is law enforcement doing the lying? They know they are lying and I would be surprised if the courts didn't know they are lying.
Historically, yes, the courts err on the side of law enforcement when reviewing testimony. The history of both the police and of the courts is filled with examples of this: it's an _inevitable_ part of the social and emotional bonds they both feel from being in the same business. It doesn't require planning or conspiracy to occur, it's a simple result of their both working in the same fields on related work.