Most certainly not. Even your own link says it: "also leaves the soil enriched through the plant matter left after harvesting, creating a natural fertilizer for other crops, which is the basis for crop rotation". That is the positive spin on "puts nitrogen into the ground, where it will leak into waterways".
Organic and natural are lovely positive words, but things are not harmless just because they are natural or organic.
There is research going on to allow various wheat and barley strains to fix their own nitrogen by implanting genes from peas and beans. If these are used in agriculture substantially less nitrogen fertilizer will be required on farms growing these crops.
If you knew what you were talking about, you would know that nitrogen fixating plants leak nitrogen into the soil and therefore eventually into the water. Just like nitrogen fertilizer, except you cannot easily control the amount being fixated.
But then again, if you knew what you were talking about, you wouldn't need to go on a rant against Greenpeace and "anti-GM rent-a-mod luddites".
Even though 48fps is undeniably more realistic and technologically superior, I have yet to hear a good argument for why it actually provides a benefit in the context of films.
24fps is horribly distracting and makes panning impossible. Peter Jackson ignored the problem for Lord of the Rings. Go look at the opening scenes where they walk on the mountain. On a TV without motion compensation it is like watching a slide show, and in the theatre it was even worse.
The anti-lock brakes literally reduced my breaking power by pushing back on the brake pedal as I was trying to stop.
That is not how ABS works. Each wheel is handled individually. Even if the rear wheels were covered in oil, ABS would not take away braking power from front wheels with grip.
To beat ABS, you need a brake pedal per wheel. Good luck dealing with that. And fuck you.
Most accidents would be greatly mitigated by full-on braking (with ABS of course) that one second earlier than humans manage in most cases. The system can let the human decide which way to go around obstacles or even whether to go around at all. As long as the car prevents skidding and rolling over and keeps getting rid of as much energy as possible, that will greatly help.
Automated cars are already so good that most racing events ban most of the computer assists.
They quickly ended up in a stall with approximately zero horizontal speed. This is not something you would deal with by instinct, it is so far out of normal flying conditions that only training can teach you what to do.
There were two major problems with the way the systems work on that plane. The alarms went silent when the computers were completely lost and had no idea what was going on. As soon as things approached normality, the stall alarms etc. came back. This apparently shocked the copilot enough that he kept doing the wrong thing (pulling back on the stick), which kept the alarms off. Also, the captain seems to have been unaware of the input the copilot was giving the plane. As in, the captain did not know that the copilot was pulling back hard on the stick, and the captain apparently never got the idea to ask. The pilot who is not currently flying the plane should always have an easy way to figure out what the other pilot is doing.
As far as I know neither flaw has been corrected. The first flaw may be unfixable in general, but the second one is easily fixed by using a yoke instead of a stick, and making both yokes move in unison (and in unison with what the autopilot does as well). Boeing does that, even on their fly-by-wire 777.
Compressed air storage is fairly old hat. It is horribly inefficient and you can only economically save up for a few days, unlike the way hydro is able to save power up for months.
Wind power in temperate climates luckily works well with hydro: Wind produces most power in winter where hydro is at risk of running dry, and less in summer when reservoirs are full. If you have any hydro at all, it is almost certainly not worth it to do compressed air storage.
Not necessarily, there may be money to be made if this thing guzzles cheap power all night so it can ejaculate expensive power during peak air-con hours.
If your power system is based on natural gas, there won't be any cheap power at night. Natural gas power plants do not need to run at a loss through the night, unlike most other forms of power generation.
The bit about natural gas in the submission is simply wrong. There happens to be a natural gas power plant somewhere nearby, but the two facilities have nothing in common. It is unlikely that the storage facility will be storing power while the natural gas power plant is providing it.
It makes no sense. Natural gas turbines are dirt cheap compared to other forms of power generation and natural gas is way too expensive to waste on compressing air. Gas turbines are also quite small, the world's largest turbine seems to be 340MW. Since they start up and shut down rapidly (tens of minutes), they are easy to regulate: you just turn the off when they aren't needed.
I can't disagree with that, but that's a *really* narrow definition of fair.
True, "fair" is not a very accurate description. However, it is difficult to say that someone has been screwed after something happened, if they are actually better off than they would have been if it didn't happen. "Unfair" I'll accept, but "screwed" does not fit.
Any pointers on how to convert "what we've got" into a "free market economy where nobody gets screwed?"
No, just like I don't have any pointers on how to convert what we've got into a communist economy where nobody gets screwed. Both capitalist and communist beliefs are intended to be ways to organize society which ultimately benefit everyone.
I believe that both sides (and in fact most types of economic philosophy) agree on one thing though: we must not permit business models that rely on someone getting screwed, and certainly not accept that pretty much all business models rely on screwing someone. If it is that bad, we must fix it. Even worse, if laws are helping the bad guys, we must get those laws repealed. Which brings us back to copyright law, which forbids certain transactions which in a free market would have made both parties better off.
Approximately no one offers source code with their proprietary programs today, even though they risk nothing by doing so because of copyright. There is no greater incentive, it simply cannot get any worse.
And I don't believe that less software will be written. There will hopefully be a lot less duplication of effort, which may end up taking some jobs away (jobs which are the equivalent of digging holes and filling them up again anyway). However, history shows that when technology makes a particular set of jobs obsolete, new jobs are invented to take their place. I predict a golden age where the amount of genuinely new, useful software increases greatly.
As to whether fewer people will write novels and music, that is an entirely different discussion. Copyright for software is new; it was not until the 80's that the law was reasonably settled and such fundamental decisions made as whether copyright makes sense on something binary without source code. Still, if you want to enter that discussion, just take a look at fanfiction. As an example, look up fanfiction for "Once Upon a Time". Web site after web site full of mostly short stories but also full length novels. All of it most likely illegal under current law. If it was legal, there would undoubtedly be even more. Few of those authors are likely to get any benefit from copyright. The amount of material written that way dwarfs the amount going through old-fashioned publishing companies. There is no lack of authors today, and there will not be a lack of authors if copyright is abolished.
You may be right and things wouldn't work out in practice. Still, I think it's worth a shot.
Anyway, a world where everyone has the right to share is worth fighting for, even if it leaves us less well off. I still don't believe we will be worse off; human ingenuity should flourish once the artificial barriers to cooperation are gone.
Should the experiment fail, it will not be particularly difficult to bring back copyright. No more difficult than it is to enforce it today, anyway.
I am not saying that we are living in a free market economy. I am saying that in a free market economy, every single trade is fair, insofar as both parties gain from the trade. One of them might gain a million times more than the other, but both gain, or the trade would not happen.
I am not even in favour of free market economies. Capitalism should be attacked on its real faults (of which there are plenty), not on imagined ones.
Pretty much all business models rely on screwing somebody else -- that's how capitalism works.
No, it isn't. A free market economy is based on trade where both parties benefit from each trade. I realize that capitalism can exist without a free market, but a free market economy IS an example of a capitalist economy where no one gets screwed. Therefore screwing somebody else is not an inherent part of how capitalism works.
Of course source code is important in the absence of copyright. In an ideal world we would all have the source code to everything we run, so we can verify that our devices are working for us, not for someone else. It's just an entirely different fight, one it makes no sense to take on in a time where you are often legally prohibited from reverse engineering the devices which you supposedly own.
Easy access to source code for GPL'd programs is important because the idea is to expand the amount of software that people share. If it is easy to take Free Software and publish only the binary without source code, those who write Free Software are likely to forever be chasing behind. They spend their time forever reverse engineering the improvements made by people who do not share the source code, if they are even allowed to do so.
In a world without copyright, there would not be such large incentives to keeping source code hidden, simply because the pay-per-copy model would be difficult to sustain. It would be very tempting to instead join up with the groups who are freely sharing, so you can benefit from the joint work instead of being an outsider and constantly behind. Certainly some would choose to keep their source code private, but since it would be comparatively few, the reverse engineering effort would be surmountable. Also, with so many programmers mostly freed up from independently reinventing the wheel, there would be enough manpower to reinvent the small amount of software made by people who are unwilling to share.
In short, in a world WITH copyright, the typical state is that Free Software is chasing behind, and therefore it is necessary to use every available option to try to catch up. The GPL is an attempt at making the playing field slightly more level. WITHOUT copyright, Free Software would typically be ahead of proprietary software in most areas, and it would be unnecessary to have provisions like mandated access to source code.
Fair enough, I won't argue whether dense urban living is psychologically healthy or not. Either way, it is not an issue which warrants hoping for lots of people dying.
This is wrong. Solar irradiation at 1 AU is somewhere in the region of 1350W/m^2. The Earth has a diameter of approximately 6371000m, which is a disc of 1.27*10^14 m^2. This gives 1.72*10^17W or 0.172EW. Over a year, 365.25*86400s, this comes to 5.400.000EJ.
Wikipedia is wrong.
In fact, from a different page on Solar energy, "Photosynthesis captures approximately 3,000 EJ per year in biomass." Pretty impressive if solar irradiation is only 1,600EJ. And unlike the 1,600 EJ figure, this one actually comes with a useful citation.
"Approximately 5.7 x 1024 J of solar energy are irradiated to the earth's surface on an annual basis. Plants and photosynthetic organisms utilize this solar energy in fixing large amounts of CO2 (2x1011 t = 3x1021 J/year), while amounts consumed by human beings are relatively small, (3 x 1020 J/year) (1), representing only 10% of the energy converted during photosynthesis."
So, it is time for you to revise your ideas about how humanity should live.
Top speed limiters are of little interest; few accidents happen on highways. Their purpose is mostly to make the tires cheaper, as many jurisdictions require tires which are rated for top speed even if the maximum speed limit happens to be much lower. Tires rated beyond 250km/h are expensive. Some manufacturers offer to remove the limit if you take their driving courses, which provides another source of revenue.
If you have to upgrade infrastructure anyways then there's got to be a better way to do it from top to bottom then a stretch-limo Lamborghini look-a-like
Is there? You need it to be light per-passenger because you don't have low rolling resistance of rail, so you can't afford the waste of floor space in trains (aisles etc.). You need it to be stable because you don't have the secure catch offered by rail, so it needs to be quite low and can't look like a bus.
Metal wheels on rail also makes for generally lousy acceleration and braking, which in turn leads to complicated safety systems and long gaps between trains. Building a road for this ought to be a lot cheaper than electric high speed rail.
Of course that is no use if the bus is extremely expensive. Current trains can easily cost USD 50,000 per seat, so if it can get anywhere near that figure it is a win. Operating costs may be higher, at least until it is made driverless.
The big question is whether people will use it. Right now there is a "rail effect" where putting in a rail service with exactly the same characteristics as a bus service will attract perhaps a third more passengers. Even if it isn't faster or more reliable. Missing out on 1/4th of the passengers could easily kill off this idea.
Note to mods: "flamebait" would be repeating this little gem: "comparable countries like China, Brazil, and Indonesia"
From an outside point of view it is amusing (and somewhat sad) to see the change in the US perception of its role in the world. A world leader comparing itself to Indonesia, ha!
Slashdot Mirror
You owe the poster an apology:
Most certainly not. Even your own link says it: "also leaves the soil enriched through the plant matter left after harvesting, creating a natural fertilizer for other crops, which is the basis for crop rotation". That is the positive spin on "puts nitrogen into the ground, where it will leak into waterways".
Organic and natural are lovely positive words, but things are not harmless just because they are natural or organic.
We do not grow legume in Denmark, but we do grow peas, and there is run-off off from those.
Your name calling is pretty pathetic even for Slashdot. Go take lessons in how to insult people, or at least learn how to spell.
There is research going on to allow various wheat and barley strains to fix their own nitrogen by implanting genes from peas and beans. If these are used in agriculture substantially less nitrogen fertilizer will be required on farms growing these crops.
If you knew what you were talking about, you would know that nitrogen fixating plants leak nitrogen into the soil and therefore eventually into the water. Just like nitrogen fertilizer, except you cannot easily control the amount being fixated.
But then again, if you knew what you were talking about, you wouldn't need to go on a rant against Greenpeace and "anti-GM rent-a-mod luddites".
Even though 48fps is undeniably more realistic and technologically superior, I have yet to hear a good argument for why it actually provides a benefit in the context of films.
24fps is horribly distracting and makes panning impossible. Peter Jackson ignored the problem for Lord of the Rings. Go look at the opening scenes where they walk on the mountain. On a TV without motion compensation it is like watching a slide show, and in the theatre it was even worse.
The anti-lock brakes literally reduced my breaking power by pushing back on the brake pedal as I was trying to stop.
That is not how ABS works. Each wheel is handled individually. Even if the rear wheels were covered in oil, ABS would not take away braking power from front wheels with grip.
To beat ABS, you need a brake pedal per wheel. Good luck dealing with that. And fuck you.
Most accidents would be greatly mitigated by full-on braking (with ABS of course) that one second earlier than humans manage in most cases. The system can let the human decide which way to go around obstacles or even whether to go around at all. As long as the car prevents skidding and rolling over and keeps getting rid of as much energy as possible, that will greatly help.
Automated cars are already so good that most racing events ban most of the computer assists.
They quickly ended up in a stall with approximately zero horizontal speed. This is not something you would deal with by instinct, it is so far out of normal flying conditions that only training can teach you what to do.
There were two major problems with the way the systems work on that plane. The alarms went silent when the computers were completely lost and had no idea what was going on. As soon as things approached normality, the stall alarms etc. came back. This apparently shocked the copilot enough that he kept doing the wrong thing (pulling back on the stick), which kept the alarms off. Also, the captain seems to have been unaware of the input the copilot was giving the plane. As in, the captain did not know that the copilot was pulling back hard on the stick, and the captain apparently never got the idea to ask. The pilot who is not currently flying the plane should always have an easy way to figure out what the other pilot is doing.
As far as I know neither flaw has been corrected. The first flaw may be unfixable in general, but the second one is easily fixed by using a yoke instead of a stick, and making both yokes move in unison (and in unison with what the autopilot does as well). Boeing does that, even on their fly-by-wire 777.
Compressed air storage is fairly old hat. It is horribly inefficient and you can only economically save up for a few days, unlike the way hydro is able to save power up for months.
Wind power in temperate climates luckily works well with hydro: Wind produces most power in winter where hydro is at risk of running dry, and less in summer when reservoirs are full. If you have any hydro at all, it is almost certainly not worth it to do compressed air storage.
Not necessarily, there may be money to be made if this thing guzzles cheap power all night so it can ejaculate expensive power during peak air-con hours.
If your power system is based on natural gas, there won't be any cheap power at night. Natural gas power plants do not need to run at a loss through the night, unlike most other forms of power generation.
The bit about natural gas in the submission is simply wrong. There happens to be a natural gas power plant somewhere nearby, but the two facilities have nothing in common. It is unlikely that the storage facility will be storing power while the natural gas power plant is providing it.
It makes no sense. Natural gas turbines are dirt cheap compared to other forms of power generation and natural gas is way too expensive to waste on compressing air. Gas turbines are also quite small, the world's largest turbine seems to be 340MW. Since they start up and shut down rapidly (tens of minutes), they are easy to regulate: you just turn the off when they aren't needed.
I can't disagree with that, but that's a *really* narrow definition of fair.
True, "fair" is not a very accurate description. However, it is difficult to say that someone has been screwed after something happened, if they are actually better off than they would have been if it didn't happen. "Unfair" I'll accept, but "screwed" does not fit.
Any pointers on how to convert "what we've got" into a "free market economy where nobody gets screwed?"
No, just like I don't have any pointers on how to convert what we've got into a communist economy where nobody gets screwed. Both capitalist and communist beliefs are intended to be ways to organize society which ultimately benefit everyone.
I believe that both sides (and in fact most types of economic philosophy) agree on one thing though: we must not permit business models that rely on someone getting screwed, and certainly not accept that pretty much all business models rely on screwing someone. If it is that bad, we must fix it. Even worse, if laws are helping the bad guys, we must get those laws repealed. Which brings us back to copyright law, which forbids certain transactions which in a free market would have made both parties better off.
Approximately no one offers source code with their proprietary programs today, even though they risk nothing by doing so because of copyright. There is no greater incentive, it simply cannot get any worse.
And I don't believe that less software will be written. There will hopefully be a lot less duplication of effort, which may end up taking some jobs away (jobs which are the equivalent of digging holes and filling them up again anyway). However, history shows that when technology makes a particular set of jobs obsolete, new jobs are invented to take their place. I predict a golden age where the amount of genuinely new, useful software increases greatly.
As to whether fewer people will write novels and music, that is an entirely different discussion. Copyright for software is new; it was not until the 80's that the law was reasonably settled and such fundamental decisions made as whether copyright makes sense on something binary without source code. Still, if you want to enter that discussion, just take a look at fanfiction. As an example, look up fanfiction for "Once Upon a Time". Web site after web site full of mostly short stories but also full length novels. All of it most likely illegal under current law. If it was legal, there would undoubtedly be even more. Few of those authors are likely to get any benefit from copyright. The amount of material written that way dwarfs the amount going through old-fashioned publishing companies. There is no lack of authors today, and there will not be a lack of authors if copyright is abolished.
You may be right and things wouldn't work out in practice. Still, I think it's worth a shot.
Anyway, a world where everyone has the right to share is worth fighting for, even if it leaves us less well off. I still don't believe we will be worse off; human ingenuity should flourish once the artificial barriers to cooperation are gone.
Should the experiment fail, it will not be particularly difficult to bring back copyright. No more difficult than it is to enforce it today, anyway.
I am not saying that we are living in a free market economy. I am saying that in a free market economy, every single trade is fair, insofar as both parties gain from the trade. One of them might gain a million times more than the other, but both gain, or the trade would not happen.
I am not even in favour of free market economies. Capitalism should be attacked on its real faults (of which there are plenty), not on imagined ones.
Pretty much all business models rely on screwing somebody else -- that's how capitalism works.
No, it isn't. A free market economy is based on trade where both parties benefit from each trade. I realize that capitalism can exist without a free market, but a free market economy IS an example of a capitalist economy where no one gets screwed. Therefore screwing somebody else is not an inherent part of how capitalism works.
Of course source code is important in the absence of copyright. In an ideal world we would all have the source code to everything we run, so we can verify that our devices are working for us, not for someone else. It's just an entirely different fight, one it makes no sense to take on in a time where you are often legally prohibited from reverse engineering the devices which you supposedly own.
Easy access to source code for GPL'd programs is important because the idea is to expand the amount of software that people share. If it is easy to take Free Software and publish only the binary without source code, those who write Free Software are likely to forever be chasing behind. They spend their time forever reverse engineering the improvements made by people who do not share the source code, if they are even allowed to do so.
In a world without copyright, there would not be such large incentives to keeping source code hidden, simply because the pay-per-copy model would be difficult to sustain. It would be very tempting to instead join up with the groups who are freely sharing, so you can benefit from the joint work instead of being an outsider and constantly behind. Certainly some would choose to keep their source code private, but since it would be comparatively few, the reverse engineering effort would be surmountable. Also, with so many programmers mostly freed up from independently reinventing the wheel, there would be enough manpower to reinvent the small amount of software made by people who are unwilling to share.
In short, in a world WITH copyright, the typical state is that Free Software is chasing behind, and therefore it is necessary to use every available option to try to catch up. The GPL is an attempt at making the playing field slightly more level. WITHOUT copyright, Free Software would typically be ahead of proprietary software in most areas, and it would be unnecessary to have provisions like mandated access to source code.
Fair enough, I won't argue whether dense urban living is psychologically healthy or not. Either way, it is not an issue which warrants hoping for lots of people dying.
Solar irradiation of the earth is 1600 EJ
This is wrong. Solar irradiation at 1 AU is somewhere in the region of 1350W/m^2. The Earth has a diameter of approximately 6371000m, which is a disc of 1.27*10^14 m^2. This gives 1.72*10^17W or 0.172EW. Over a year, 365.25*86400s, this comes to 5.400.000EJ.
Wikipedia is wrong.
In fact, from a different page on Solar energy, "Photosynthesis captures approximately 3,000 EJ per year in biomass." Pretty impressive if solar irradiation is only 1,600EJ. And unlike the 1,600 EJ figure, this one actually comes with a useful citation.
The cited page, FAO on Energy conversion by photosynthetic organisms, chapter 2 has this to say:
"Approximately 5.7 x 1024 J of solar energy are irradiated to the earth's surface on an annual basis. Plants and photosynthetic organisms utilize this solar energy in fixing large amounts of CO2 (2x1011 t = 3x1021 J/year), while amounts consumed by human beings are relatively small, (3 x 1020 J/year) (1), representing only 10% of the energy converted during photosynthesis."
So, it is time for you to revise your ideas about how humanity should live.
Forget GPS. It will be done by image recognition.
Top speed limiters are of little interest; few accidents happen on highways. Their purpose is mostly to make the tires cheaper, as many jurisdictions require tires which are rated for top speed even if the maximum speed limit happens to be much lower. Tires rated beyond 250km/h are expensive. Some manufacturers offer to remove the limit if you take their driving courses, which provides another source of revenue.
Speed limiters will be standard in all new cars in just a few years. At most 5.
If you have to upgrade infrastructure anyways then there's got to be a better way to do it from top to bottom then a stretch-limo Lamborghini look-a-like
Is there? You need it to be light per-passenger because you don't have low rolling resistance of rail, so you can't afford the waste of floor space in trains (aisles etc.). You need it to be stable because you don't have the secure catch offered by rail, so it needs to be quite low and can't look like a bus.
Metal wheels on rail also makes for generally lousy acceleration and braking, which in turn leads to complicated safety systems and long gaps between trains. Building a road for this ought to be a lot cheaper than electric high speed rail.
Of course that is no use if the bus is extremely expensive. Current trains can easily cost USD 50,000 per seat, so if it can get anywhere near that figure it is a win. Operating costs may be higher, at least until it is made driverless.
The big question is whether people will use it. Right now there is a "rail effect" where putting in a rail service with exactly the same characteristics as a bus service will attract perhaps a third more passengers. Even if it isn't faster or more reliable. Missing out on 1/4th of the passengers could easily kill off this idea.
It would have trouble with many driveways and all speed bumps.
So do trains. This is a way to make cheaper high speed rail, by avoiding the actual rail.
Note to mods: "flamebait" would be repeating this little gem: "comparable countries like China, Brazil, and Indonesia"
From an outside point of view it is amusing (and somewhat sad) to see the change in the US perception of its role in the world. A world leader comparing itself to Indonesia, ha!