and the PC managed just four colors and monotone beeps
Huh ? Nope.
Yes, Amiga's capabilities were incredibly impressive (closer to an expensive arcade machine, than to home computer) (though they came at a price).
But PCs weren't as shitty as that.
By 1985, when then Amiga was launched, PC had a little bit more capabilities than that : - The original PC (1981)'s CGA card can also output 16 colours (but at a lower resolution of 160x200, and required a bit of hacking(*), so it wasn't much used. Though Sierra Online massively used it on the CGA composite-output of all their games back then). - The PCjr (1984)'s CGA+ card had 16 colors mode (320x200). - The Tandy PC (1984)'s TGA card 16 colors mode too (320x200) - The IBM's own EGA (1984, again) managed 16 colours at various resolution
So the PC was beyond 4 colors. Although, yes, Amiga's 32 with fully programmable palette (and even more hackability) where much more impressive.
Regarding sound : - The original PC Speaker is PWM (Pulse-Width momdulation capable). So it can in theory play digitized sounds. In practice, it doesn't have DMA, so it's the main CPU's job to push the samples one by one, so usually it's not possible to do much at the same time. (And given the low memory, it wasn't even possible to have more than the speech in RAM) Thus it was mostly used to do speech synthesis in small tools, and only for the title screen music in games. (I only have the 1987's example of Mach3, I can't manage to find a 1985 contemporary example).
- The PCjr and Tandy started a boom of special audio devices. Their was rather simple (multiple channels - 4 - of beeps and boops, with volume control - making also software controller sound envelope usable by some games). But it paved the way to later introduction of better audio (1987's adlib, creative music system, ibm music feature, etc.) - (of notice: Roland was also making a MIDI interface since 1984 - the MPU-PC. But back then that one was exclusively used for professional music. It was only the arrival of Roland's MT-32 in 1987 that sparked the massive use in games starting in 1988 by - again - Sierra).
So please, the PC's beeps and boops weren't motone - it was either speech (with static screen) or the first arrival of multi channel beeps and sound envelopes. But yeah, Amigas, having a dedicated chip able to handle 4 channels of digital audio while leaving the main CPU free was an incredible jump forward in sound capabilites, only reached on PC with arrival of Gravis UltraSound and SoundBlaster AWE 32 (and until that, previously emulated with software mixing on older Sound Blasters).
Note:
All the above (recently arrived IBM PC's EGA, and IBM PCjr, etc.) where a bit expensive machines. (The PCjr was negatively compared to contemporary 8bit home computers like C64)
But given the crazy expensive Amiga's introductory price, it's a valid comparison.
--- (*) That's with the official hacks published by IBM back then. Of course modern demo maker have found way to take the original IBM PC hardware To infinity and beyond (thousands of colors by creatively hacking the composite output).
In several jurisdiction on the European continent, contractors are already legally required to get their own insurance (in countries that don't provide it), save money for retirement, pay insurance for sick leave, factor in vacation time in their rates, etc.
This ends up working nicely there. It helps bringing down the amount of working poors.
So yeah, we "Evil Euro-Communists" have actually manage to find a way to fuck it less than your "Land of the Free (markets) !"
As opposed to the eagles being naturally immune to air pollution, not suffering of black lungs, etc. ?~
Pollution kills animals too. Wind farm actually kill a lot less of them. But you just notice the killing better because all of them happen at the same place. As opposed to pollution which is killing a couple orders of magnitude more animals, but is killing them silently and spread over a larger territory, so you're less likely to notice it.
Uranium mining is seriously dirty business, it's by far the most environmentally destructive resource to mine - mining coal is bad, but uranium mining is worse.
(Still you need to reduce that factor by around 5x ~ 6x, because it it need to be a little bit enriched to work as a fuel (0.7% natual to 3-4% fuel)).
I'm not saying the Uranium is clean.
I'm just saying that, whenever you speak about nuclear fission (or even nuclear fusion if that thing eventually takes of one day, before we've managed to drive ourselves into extinction), you have to keep in mind that the total amount of mass considered for a certain amount of energy is several orders of magnitude lower.
Or another angle to consider things : Coal requires millions times more mass than fission to produce energy. Coal contains radioactive isotopes, even if the quantity are very tiny. (Well like anything in nature, actually) But we're burning such an absurd mass of coal and dumping all its outputs in the environment (ash), to the point that the radioactive content of coal starts get significant. And research shows that coal is actually producing more radioactive waste than nuclear
But yeah in the end if we manage to go solar/wind/hydro, it's even better. But until then keep in mind that because of the quantities involved, environmental impact (both pollution and radioactive waste) isn't straight forward.
Ultimately both industries have another major advantage over coal as a local keystone industry: a lot less people dying young from blacklung.
We know how BrickerBot works and how bad that can be. This would be much, much worse.
Yup. Indeed.
this time instead of Smart LED bulbs staying dark or showing the wrong color, you're going to have the database server holding the important financial information getting broken.
But hey, at least the infected zombie bot won't disturb *you* anymore.
Republicans have seen too many Hollywood hacker movies.
speaking of movies...
In reality, the people who are victims of this type of data theft aren't going to have access to these "Beacon" tools. But copyright trolls and malware thugs almost certainly will.
Yup, the movies are definitely going to be the thing best protected by this act.
Movie shown in theater tends to be fingerprinted. (the purpose being to try to trace back where a copy was first leaked). This act basically gives authorization to the industry to install a backdoor (either forced through legislation, or unknowingly deploy in the style of Sony root-kit), that will nuke an user computer if it ever detects such type of fingerprints. (and make it also report back to the MPAA mothership in preparation of subsequent copyright lawsuits - of course claiming bazillions of revenue loss due to piracy)
This is definitely the evil twin of Digital Restrictrion Management (as if the original DRM wasn't evil already enough).
Copyright trolls are going to have a great day. The people affected by false positives that wrongfully b0rked their computer : not such a great day.
A real world exemple : electo-kardio-grams (traces of the heart activity). They are a useful tool to help daignose heart rythm problems.
Since a couple of decade already, given how simple the data is (less than a dozen of 1D signals), we already have managed to do automatic recognition. To the point that any modern EKG will give you a diagnostic printed after the traces them self on the report.
How do doctors use it ? We are trained to first look at the traces, see if they seem obviously wrong or not, then apply a couple of heuristics that we have learned (QT delay, signal elevation, etc) to check for everything, and then read the automatic diagnostic.
So if we missed something, the automated diagnostic can help point us in the right direction (e.g.: if the pathology isn't that obvious). But if we see something deeply wrong, we are not going to ignore it simply because the machine said "everything looks OK to me".
There's always going to be a doctor in the loop reviewing what the machines say, at least in the foreseeable future(*). In a way you can think of the AI as a not yet fully trained early-year student: can give useful information, can offload some work to it. But never trust it 100% without a review.
--- (*): at least for as long as the current AI (based on deep neural nets) are only as good as training pigeons to guide WW2 bombs. Perhaps if one day in the far distant future we manage to make much more clever AIs (e.g.: a high number of various DNN, all interlinked together, the same way as a biological brain has several cortical regions, from primary (visual cortex), through some more associative (faces recognition), to highly associative (interlinking all the rest)). Then it will be a question that boils to if this AI can manage to "pass exams".
Every new build water power plant (based on a hydro dam) has the problem of rotting vegetation. Has nothing to do with tropes or Alpes.
Has entirely to do.
In the most extremely exagerated case, the rotting vegetation is much more serious if you have submerged a whole chunk of tropical rain forest vs. only a bunch of rocks with a little bit of moss growing on them. In real life, seriously, alpine climates tend to generate a biotope with is a bit more on the less luxuriant side of the scalat (similar to what you find going to northern latitudes). There's a lot less thing to rot at the bottom if you have a lot less vegetation in the region and a lot less rich soil to begin with. (Or another way to put it as a caricature : do you see much submersible tropical rain forest here ?)
Also part of the decomposition process is assisted by the micro-organisms present in the water. Colder climate means less activity of micro-organism, meaning the dam doesn't emit as much methane as it would in warm waters.
In the end, a dam in Switzerland doesn't emit that much greenhouse gazes as one in Brazil.
So what is going to cover base load? Is geothermal and (ironically not very green) biomass enough to cover it in Switzerland?
Switzerland is an alpine country, and thus has functional low-pollution hydro that can be ramped up or down closely following demand. (As opposed to tropical country where hydro-dam are producing pollution, simply due to rotting and decomposing mass that got submerged at the bottom of the artificial lake)
Switzerland is also investing into wind and solar. (Though wind is receiving a bit of the same "not in my backyard" treatment like seen elsewhere - it's not as popular as in Germany). Switzerland is also making efforts to reduce it's energy foot-print. ("Minergy" norm for new buildings, public awareness programs, ban on conventional incandescent light-bulbs (though halogen incandescent are still sold), labeling of energy consumption on appliances, etc.)
The current hope is that it can manage to go through its energy transition like Germany, without requiring temporary increased coal until renewable is increased enough.
I for one will be laughing when they end up importing coal/gas power from neighbouring countries.
Given the above mentioned massive amount of on-demand hydro power, Switzerland is actually an energy *exporter*. At worst, if renewables aren't ready yet to replace the demand once the last nuclear plant is phased out, the exports will just decrease a bit.
I can't believe this gets voted on by the common man in the street,
Switzerland is a Direct Democracy everybody constantly(1)voting about everything(2) is how things are normally done.
(1): in practice: every ~3 months) (2): mostly 3-5 subjects such as new laws, public referendum, or reforms proposed through popular initiative, etc. But can occasionnaly have much more subjects
Voting is available in booth, through post, or recently : over internet.
who will be swayed by whatever the media has been reporting.
Switzerland isn't the US. We don't confuse "politics" with "wrestling matches".
In a country with such a long tradition of population voting, people tend to be much calmer, better informed, etc.
Also for various reason: like Switzerland functioning by consensus - there isn't a single president, the head of the executive is a council of *7 persons* (of varying political affiliation) that are forced to collaborate together, etc. it hasn't devolved into a bi-partisan shit-show were crushing the opponent is the most import stuff.
Though in this case, the people more familiar with the problems (living in region around nuclear plant) weren't favorable to this anti-nuke law, unlike the rest of the population deep into the mountains who have mostly only seen nukes through the news on TV (so most recently about Fukushima). So a bit of fear of the unknown might have some influence.
But in general debates in Swiss media has nothing to do with the kind of shit-show / attention grabbing scandal crap that you see in less democratic countries.
Shouldn't this sort of thing be looked at by people that understand costs, risks and benefits of the current and near future technologies?
Or shouldn't the people that understand costs, risks and benefit take the time to inform the population so they can better make an informed decision, instead of delving into conspiracy theories about what the politcos are doing in their back and/or the few decision-making person being a smaller and easier target for bribing/lobyying/corruption ?
Switzerland has a *very long* tradition of direct democracy voting (even back in the era when male peasants gathered in an assembly in the middle of the village to perform raised hands votes). People tend to be a bit more informed and curious, and use a bit more their brain than their guts when voting.
(Although I have to disclaim that personally, I am not against nuclear and dislike this decision. But hey, that what the majority voted. That part of the democratic game).
So has the problem with getting the latest video drivers been fixed?
Depends on the graphic card.
TL;DR: For Intel and AMD, you really don't give a fuck what you're running. (Or if you're into gaming, you *absolutely* try to run the latest possible kernel and Mesa combo to get all the latest belss and whistles).
e.g.: - Intel is exclusively doing opensource drivers (at least for their own cores. For the core that they sub licensed from PowerVR several years back, it's an entirely different story). The drivers are part of the upstream kernel, so getting a new kernel *IS* how you get a new driver.
- AMD has embraced opensource (beginning almost as far back as when they bought ATI - though the actual implementation has taken much time). They have a dual offering.
For a few special user (CAD software users, etc. who require opengl profiles) they still provide a closed source driver called AMDGPU-PRO. (As of note, it also shares some code with the current Windows drivers). For the rest, the opensource source drivers (based around Mesa) are their main target. They have been investing resources (some of the devs of the opensource Mesa drivers are on AMD's payroll). Recently, it has seen tremendous improvement and starts to beat the closed source driver on most use-cases.
Both above driverrs rely on the same opensource kernel module. So if you use the opensource driver, the situation is the same as Intel : getting the latest kernel *IS* how you get the latest kernel module. Only for the closed source AMDGPU-PRO does AMD spends ressource back-porting the kernel module to older kernel. (So if you are a CAD user, better stick to major distribution whose kernel are more likely to see such back-ports. Or move to a rolling release distro, but that would be unusual for this class of users).
The current only exception is Vulkan. AMD haven't finished the necessary work to opensource their official Vulkan implementation. So AMDGPU-PRO is the only way to get it. Meanwhile, opensouce developers have created RADV, their own unofficial Vulkan implementation for AMD cards. Currently, this implementation finally passes the conformancy tests and implements the Vulkan API completely, but isn't optimized yet. So often games run better using their openGL back-end (given that massive effort mentionned above) than using their Vulkan back-end (because as mentioned here, it's a small project, which only recently achieved full conformancy and hasn't even started optimizing).
regarding other API: AMD has recently opensource a new OpenCL implementation running on top of their ROCm computing platform. Now that this is opensourced, expect the optimizing to go faster, and eventually reaching the point that OpenGL has reached.
Over all the days of the absolutely aweful fglrx closed-source ATI driver are distant past.
I remember having to find the proper kernel headers (down to ver.a.b-c-ubuntu) when updating to latest nVidia OpenGL driver EVERY FUCKING TIME.
Bad news for you : Nvidia is still doing closed source drivers.
They basically recompile their Windows drivers for Linux, and write their own closed source "shim" kernel driver. Meaning that you're completely dependent on Nvidia condescending to port their code to your specific kernel.
Also don't expect features that normally work with this hardware on Windows, and that other manufacturer have successfully implemented on Linux to work for you. (Again, remember : Nvidia is basically recompiling their windows drivers. Some features have an API under Linux, but it's largely different and Nvidia doesn't botter) (eg.: see who long it took them to properly implement xrandr for output handling) (eg.: remember the whole fiasco around dual embed+discrete GPU on laptop working badly. Culminating with the public "Fuck you, Nvidia !" by Linus about their lack of collaboration) (eg.: it's 2017 already, and Nvidia still hasn't got their sh
Might be wise to get yourself acquainted with how RH manages kernel. {...} Since then it received numerous patches {...} mostly security and bug fixes
So, a sort of LTS kernel (though the concept wasn't as formally organised back in the 2.6.xx era.
Which brings us to another solution which wasn't mentioned in the summary : If you don't want to move *forward* to kernel 4.11 (I don't know maybe there's a regression or a dropped support that affects you), you can move *backward* to kernel 4.9 which is a LTS version and is going to be supported for quite a few years.
A yeah, I think I've heard about that one. It's a module that runs inside emacs, isn't it ? (Though not as popular as the kernel module inside emacs that FSF decided to use instead of Hurd).
And yet, even if the police managed to arrest these blackmailers, the movie will still hit the torrent and streaming sites over the next few weeks anyway.
Are these posters active in the workforce? Every relevant office in the world uses windows. {...} But out here in the functional world, windows is everywhere.
Depends of the field you work. Academic research ? Specially in fields like computational biology ? It's going to be exclusively UNIX. With Mac OS X being a bit more popular on the laptops and workstations of the researchers, and Linux having monopoly on the servers and compute nodes.
Suppose you assigned an AI to observe which user stories go in, and what code comes out as a result. How many programs would you have to complete before the AI is able to take over a majority of the work involved in building an application? {...} I'd honestly be surprised if they aren't already doing something like this.
Yes it's done. Not by google, but by others. The short answer is that the deep neural nets produce texts that looks like code on the first glance, but doesn't even compile. e.g.: The variables aren't even properly declared. it can write a formula (like "a = b + c") but isn't even able to realise the link with the declaration of the variable (that the "int a;" 10 lines above is linked to the "a").
The problem is the size and complexity of modern AI. The size of the context they can consider, the amount of abstract models hidden behind the code, etc.
Currently what AI has managed to recreate with deep neural nets, is on the level of WW2's Pigeon guided bombs. i.e.: leverage some image recognition net and similar basic tasks, and string a few together.
The complexity required to write actual code is several orders of magnitude bigger. Even some humans can't do it reliably, and you hope to do it with what currently is the equivalent of the visual cortex sub-part of bird's brain. Good luck with that.
Before achieving that we need : - more raw processing power (you'll need way much more neurons that currently used in today's deep neural nets) - advances in science to better understand how to combine together tons of such "function specific nets" to build a higher level of AI. (the same way a brain is a sum of lot of small specific region, each linked to a higher level/more abstract associative layer).
Stop treating government as a sporting contest where you cheer for your team to crush the other team.
Some countries like Switzerland have not a single head of executive, but a council of 7 people.
It the same was practiced in your country, that would lead to totally different campaigns. It would be very difficult for the candidate of one or the other of your bipartite system, to spend time arguing that the other is "an incompetent idiot", because with such system, they are guaranteed to then later have to work together reaching a consensus.
Hard to crush a team, when all the team *must in practice* work together.
The only big suspense would be who out of the minor parties are going to get the last of the coucil seats.
Yeah they save 700lbs by using aluminium instead of steel, but then they go and add about 1000 lbs of crap you don't need
TFA mentions the *total vehicle weight* has gone down from 4000lbs (~2000kg) to 3400 (~1700kg), extra crap included.
like heated cupwarmers,
what the fuck is a "heated cupwarmer" and how does it weights several kg ? (or maybe it is only "a thing" in the US and that's why I've never heard about it).
56 airbags
pressurized gaz canisters and firing mecanisms don't nearly weight as much as you think. so it doesn't count much on the total vehicle weight.
Also something that can reduce risks of critical wounds in case of collision (as long as you also wear the necessary seatbelt) doesn't count as "useless" in my book. Better add a few hundreds gram and avoid ending up with a broken skull or rib-cage with pneumo-/haemo-thorax.
and and a shitload pointless tech that keeps phoning home
big news for you : modern day electronics are suprisingly compact and lightweight. Your smartphone actually contains much more stuff (screen, big lithium battery) than needed for tech that can phone home. Also the power envelope of such electronics ( and basically means you can drive like a clueless distracted retard and the car will just sort it out for you.
(btw: adaptive cruise control, lane departure alert, and other such tech doesn't actually need to phone home to work. it requires a very fast feedback loop, and a cloud-processing and unreliable cell uplink aren't acceptable. the image processing actually run on chips and computers *inside* the car).
For the weight and power budget, see above.
And again (similar to airbags), a technology which helps avoiding that collision happens in the first place isn't pointless in my book. it's a very nice additional security feature, both for the safety of the above distracted retards AND for the safety of all the innocent by standers who might find themselves on their collision course (this could be even you or me).
I find the extra couple of watts and hundreds of grams an acceptable compromise for the safety of everybody on the road.
Also : The things which *do* phone home are usually thing in the category of car alarms/anti-theft features, and black-boxes/other insurance shit. That I would be much more likely to call "useless". But even if find the justification of presence is dubious, they don't count much in the total weight of a vehicle.
You can't push as far as you can on the accelerator because the wheels will spin with regular street tires.
A. I was under the impression that "flooring the gas pedal" and similar expression were a figure of speech for what I'm talking about (accelerating as fast as possible), not literally as in making sure that the pedal is level with the floor of the car. But maybe, I'm not expressing myself correctly (I am not a ntaive speaker, as you might have deduced already)
B. Actually with a modern car : Yes *YOU CAN*. Try it next time when entering the highway. It's been ages since the gas pedal isn't actually directly actuating the valve controlling the gaz admission anymore (or actuating anything else directly, for that matters). On modern cars, the gaz pedal is just an input that give the car information about how fast you want to go. The car reads it to get your intent, and then the on-board electronics try whatever they can to ful-fill it, within the set of parameters they have to comply to, including anti-skidding. So, when you litteraly push on the accelerator, you're not directly causing the tires to spin to fast and start skidding. You're just signaling the car that you want to go as fast as possible, and the electronics do the necessary step to help you achieve the above mentioned 0mph to 60mph (~90km/h) in the modern much shorter time. The engine will start revving up, but only within what the car can reasonably achieve. The "There is an art to it" part is handled by the car it self.
By the way, it's also closer to the behavior of modern cars when left on adaptive cruise control : when the way is clear they tend to accelerate rather fast, in order to achieve quickly their coasting speed in shorter period of time, spending less time in the least-efficiency "accelerating" mode, and more time in the efficient mode. (If your car's adaptive cruise control is designed to also work in city - aka "City Safe" by some constructors like Volvo - try using it and observe the car's acceleration behaviour. Also pay attention at the drop of you "average consumption per 100km" - or rise of "mileage per gallon" depending on how the computer counts it) (To go back to the beginning of this discussion: modern cars will self balance on the scale of efficiency vs. power. Modern car aren't build for either one or the other as the top post implied, they try to compromise given the specific needs at a time).
Which brings us to...
And yes the lights are usually very close together.
But unless the lights are *literally* 20 meters appart, over all you won't spend a high percentage of the time accelerating. You'll be spending most of the time at the normal street driving speed, and only accelerate after the red turn green, until you reach the before mentioned speed. So indeed modern cars aren't all "power to the detriment of efficiency".
Which brings us back to TFA : it shows number that, yes, overall, even if power is going up, the end result is that efficiency is getting better too, no matter what the top power of cars has become. Efficiency hasn't been neglected at the alter of power.
As far as I understand, the laws of physics dictate that many fast accelerations wear down the battery than casual driving. Correct me if I am wrong, but the laws of inertia also apply to a Tesla do they not?
Yes law of physics apply. To the car as a whole. If you want to accerelate a car, you need to give an energy delta of kinetic energy (Ekin = 0.5 m * v^2). The thing is, in reality, you'll never ever going to get away *with that little energy* in real life. There's tons of other things going on to consider where laws of physics will apply too, and will cause losses, meaning at the end, you'll need to spend a lot more joules than just the difference in Ekin.
On an electric motor, and on a pure ICE these extra losses are different.
Phage therapy {...} bacterias will also evolve resistance against it.
Luckily for us, bacteriophages themselves - as a type of primitive parasitic semi-life form, similar to viruses - are also subject of evolution and are also under evolutive pressure to adapt to keep having access to hosts in order to be able to replicate. They also replicate on a much higher speed than bacteria, meaning that they are much faster affected by evolution. (i.e.: it is realistically possible to imagine keeping culture of semi-resistant bacteria and trying to grow phages on them and get those to evolve. You might end up with mutated phages who'll be better at attacking these specific bacteria).
This is unlike the pharmacochemical industry which needs to come up with new formula of their own.
This is also less like the various yeasts which through evolution have came up with solutions against their resources competitors, and have historically been where antibiotics have been discovered. (Yeast does evolve, but at a much slower pace. A culture of yeast and semi-resistant bacteria is most likely to end up with the yeast starving).
If you invest $1B+ bringing a new antibiotic to market, but only manage to make $100M before it goes off patent (or $0 if it fails in phase IV clinical trials), you can't sustain that.
It all depends on who's doing the investement.
- Public sector - i.e.: countries investing in their universities - do *NOT* need to make a return on investment (i.e.: sell a profitable drug), they only want to make the science progress. The problem, is that the budget necessary is beyond the financial means they can invest into a project. i.e.: your government would gladly pay you to try new anti-biotics but doesn't have the money to it.
- So, nowadays, these investment are handled by pharmaceutical companies to whom this is really within budget - not to say small change (these sums looks probably like rounding errors next to their marketing budgets). But, as companies, they have to think about profitability. i.e.: they would have the money but don't want to throw it away on something that will never make profit.
- Thankfully we start to see whole continent-level academic collaboration (e.g.: universities accross whole europe), and now financing projects all the way to clinical use is within the financial reach of publicly funded projects.
Not all bacteria are harmful. This phage therapy needs to not wipe out the symbiotes that make it possible for us to stay alive.
Actually it's going the other way around :
- Antibiotics are rather indiscriminate and can kill large swaths of bacterial population, including commensal flora (= "the bacteria which normally live here", i.e.: non-dangerous). That's one of the reasons (the non-ecological/resistance one) why doctors try to avoid over-prescribing. (Just ask any girl who got yeast infection - e.g.: candida - because her flora got disturbed by a wide-spectum antibiotics) That's also a reason why antibiotics can be prescribed with micro-flora supplements (the antibiotics will kill the commensal flora in addition to the bacteria causing the disease you're trying to cure, so you need to import new microorganisms to compensate - usually Saccharomyces, a type of benign yeast) (Disclaimer: IAAD)
- Phage are the bacteria equivalent of viruses. They target *specific* surface receptors. It's like viruses and eukaryote (you might catch flu from a swine because surface cell receptors are close enough for a virus targeting one to be able to bind the other - ie. we're closely enough related. You'll probably never catch a virus usually affecting plants.) A phage might be able to recognize and bind a few related bacteria, but will never affect other completely different prokaryotes).
Lol when I'm driving my 500 hp vehicle I st{e}p on the gas at every light.
Yeah, once the traffic light turns back to green, you push as far as possible on the accelerator to have the car jump forward as fast as possible. But once you've reach the normal driving speed (which on modern car you'll reach in only half the time than before, according to the summary), what do you do ? Do you keep pushing the pedal all the way up to 250 km/h and/or until you collide something ?
Nope, at some speed, you'll coast, and at that point the emission of the car will drop dramatically. The car will automatically go for a different compromise point on the efficiency vs. power scale. (e.g.: it might even shut some cylinders down).
So, unless the road you drive is not only empty, but consist entirely of red lights spaced each only 20m appart (with red-light cameras to force you to stop and re-accelerate at each), you'll spend most time coasting, and only sporadically accelerating. So even if the acceleration are optimised for power and don't emit less, the rest of the time the car will be in efficient mode, and over the whole trip, they tend to emit less.
If I had a Tesla Model S I'd probably get frustrated that the battery couldn't even take me on a single night's cruise.
Actually, electric motors are much more power-efficient at accelerating. You won't be killing your battery as fast as you would be emptying the gas tank.
If you need to constantly stop and accelerate, electric motors are actually much better. That is the reason why electrical vehicle have been used by public services for quite some time. (e.g.: in France, Citroen have been making electric vans for the post office delivery service for nearly 4 decade. This thing even *predates lithium batteries*, the first vans used nickel) (e.g.: unlike in the US with Tesla which concentrate on passenger cars, in Europe most electrical vehicle company have also been producing electrical utility vehicle for quite some time. See also Renault's Z.E. Kangoo)
(This is also where part of the better mileage of hybrid vehicle comes from: if they accelerate on electric, they are more efficient).
Slashdot Mirror
From the Ars article :
and the PC managed just four colors and monotone beeps
Huh ? Nope.
Yes, Amiga's capabilities were incredibly impressive (closer to an expensive arcade machine, than to home computer) (though they came at a price).
But PCs weren't as shitty as that.
By 1985, when then Amiga was launched, PC had a little bit more capabilities than that :
- The original PC (1981)'s CGA card can also output 16 colours (but at a lower resolution of 160x200, and required a bit of hacking(*), so it wasn't much used. Though Sierra Online massively used it on the CGA composite-output of all their games back then).
- The PCjr (1984)'s CGA+ card had 16 colors mode (320x200).
- The Tandy PC (1984)'s TGA card 16 colors mode too (320x200)
- The IBM's own EGA (1984, again) managed 16 colours at various resolution
So the PC was beyond 4 colors. Although, yes, Amiga's 32 with fully programmable palette (and even more hackability) where much more impressive.
Regarding sound :
- The original PC Speaker is PWM (Pulse-Width momdulation capable). So it can in theory play digitized sounds.
In practice, it doesn't have DMA, so it's the main CPU's job to push the samples one by one, so usually it's not possible to do much at the same time.
(And given the low memory, it wasn't even possible to have more than the speech in RAM)
Thus it was mostly used to do speech synthesis in small tools, and only for the title screen music in games. (I only have the 1987's example of Mach3, I can't manage to find a 1985 contemporary example).
- The PCjr and Tandy started a boom of special audio devices.
Their was rather simple (multiple channels - 4 - of beeps and boops, with volume control - making also software controller sound envelope usable by some games).
But it paved the way to later introduction of better audio (1987's adlib, creative music system, ibm music feature, etc.)
- (of notice: Roland was also making a MIDI interface since 1984 - the MPU-PC. But back then that one was exclusively used for professional music.
It was only the arrival of Roland's MT-32 in 1987 that sparked the massive use in games starting in 1988 by - again - Sierra).
So please, the PC's beeps and boops weren't motone - it was either speech (with static screen) or the first arrival of multi channel beeps and sound envelopes.
But yeah, Amigas, having a dedicated chip able to handle 4 channels of digital audio while leaving the main CPU free was an incredible jump forward in sound capabilites, only reached on PC with arrival of Gravis UltraSound and SoundBlaster AWE 32 (and until that, previously emulated with software mixing on older Sound Blasters).
Note:
All the above (recently arrived IBM PC's EGA, and IBM PCjr, etc.) where a bit expensive machines.
(The PCjr was negatively compared to contemporary 8bit home computers like C64)
But given the crazy expensive Amiga's introductory price, it's a valid comparison.
---
(*) That's with the official hacks published by IBM back then.
Of course modern demo maker have found way to take the original IBM PC hardware To infinity and beyond
(thousands of colors by creatively hacking the composite output).
In several jurisdiction on the European continent, contractors are already legally required to get their own insurance (in countries that don't provide it), save money for retirement, pay insurance for sick leave, factor in vacation time in their rates, etc.
This ends up working nicely there.
It helps bringing down the amount of working poors.
So yeah, we "Evil Euro-Communists" have actually manage to find a way to fuck it less than your "Land of the Free (markets) !"
As opposed to the eagles being naturally immune to air pollution, not suffering of black lungs, etc. ?~
Pollution kills animals too.
Wind farm actually kill a lot less of them. But you just notice the killing better because all of them happen at the same place.
As opposed to pollution which is killing a couple orders of magnitude more animals, but is killing them silently and spread over a larger territory, so you're less likely to notice it.
Uranium mining is seriously dirty business, it's by far the most environmentally destructive resource to mine - mining coal is bad, but uranium mining is worse.
Luckily, because uranium in a fission reactor yields about a couple of million times more joules per kilogram when compared to burning coal in a plant, you end up needing mine overall less of it.
(Still you need to reduce that factor by around 5x ~ 6x, because it it need to be a little bit enriched to work as a fuel (0.7% natual to 3-4% fuel)).
I'm not saying the Uranium is clean.
I'm just saying that, whenever you speak about nuclear fission (or even nuclear fusion if that thing eventually takes of one day, before we've managed to drive ourselves into extinction), you have to keep in mind that the total amount of mass considered for a certain amount of energy is several orders of magnitude lower.
Or another angle to consider things :
Coal requires millions times more mass than fission to produce energy.
Coal contains radioactive isotopes, even if the quantity are very tiny. (Well like anything in nature, actually)
But we're burning such an absurd mass of coal and dumping all its outputs in the environment (ash),
to the point that the radioactive content of coal starts get significant.
And research shows that coal is actually producing more radioactive waste than nuclear
But yeah in the end if we manage to go solar/wind/hydro, it's even better.
But until then keep in mind that because of the quantities involved, environmental impact (both pollution and radioactive waste) isn't straight forward.
Ultimately both industries have another major advantage over coal as a local keystone industry: a lot less people dying young from blacklung.
I agree with that.
A better title would have been :
Scientists Develop Technology to Recapture CO2 Produced by Burning Natural Gas.
We know how BrickerBot works and how bad that can be. This would be much, much worse.
Yup. Indeed.
this time instead of Smart LED bulbs staying dark or showing the wrong color, you're going to have the database server holding the important financial information getting broken.
But hey, at least the infected zombie bot won't disturb *you* anymore.
Republicans have seen too many Hollywood hacker movies.
speaking of movies...
In reality, the people who are victims of this type of data theft aren't going to have access to these "Beacon" tools. But copyright trolls and malware thugs almost certainly will.
Yup, the movies are definitely going to be the thing best protected by this act.
Movie shown in theater tends to be fingerprinted. (the purpose being to try to trace back where a copy was first leaked).
This act basically gives authorization to the industry to install a backdoor (either forced through legislation, or unknowingly deploy in the style of Sony root-kit), that will nuke an user computer if it ever detects such type of fingerprints.
(and make it also report back to the MPAA mothership in preparation of subsequent copyright lawsuits - of course claiming bazillions of revenue loss due to piracy)
This is definitely the evil twin of Digital Restrictrion Management (as if the original DRM wasn't evil already enough).
Copyright trolls are going to have a great day.
The people affected by false positives that wrongfully b0rked their computer : not such a great day.
A real world exemple : electo-kardio-grams (traces of the heart activity).
They are a useful tool to help daignose heart rythm problems.
Since a couple of decade already, given how simple the data is (less than a dozen of 1D signals), we already have managed to do automatic recognition.
To the point that any modern EKG will give you a diagnostic printed after the traces them self on the report.
How do doctors use it ?
We are trained to first look at the traces, see if they seem obviously wrong or not,
then apply a couple of heuristics that we have learned (QT delay, signal elevation, etc) to check for everything,
and then read the automatic diagnostic.
So if we missed something, the automated diagnostic can help point us in the right direction (e.g.: if the pathology isn't that obvious).
But if we see something deeply wrong, we are not going to ignore it simply because the machine said "everything looks OK to me".
There's always going to be a doctor in the loop reviewing what the machines say, at least in the foreseeable future(*).
In a way you can think of the AI as a not yet fully trained early-year student: can give useful information, can offload some work to it. But never trust it 100% without a review.
---
(*): at least for as long as the current AI (based on deep neural nets) are only as good as training pigeons to guide WW2 bombs.
Perhaps if one day in the far distant future we manage to make much more clever AIs
(e.g.: a high number of various DNN, all interlinked together, the same way as a biological brain has several cortical regions, from primary (visual cortex), through some more associative (faces recognition), to highly associative (interlinking all the rest)).
Then it will be a question that boils to if this AI can manage to "pass exams".
Top poster :
The prior story on Slashdot is about Kernel 4.10 being EOL and here they are going with 4.9 which presumably is much older.
My post:
And that was even mentioned in the summary of the article about 4.10 that the above poster speaks about. :
That summary begins with
{.....}
But I guess that "didn't read the summary" is the new "didn't read the article".
And then :
In fact 4.10 has already reached EOL https://linux.slashdot.org/sto...
I see what you did.
Well played.
Every new build water power plant (based on a hydro dam) has the problem of rotting vegetation.
Has nothing to do with tropes or Alpes.
Has entirely to do.
In the most extremely exagerated case, the rotting vegetation is much more serious if you have submerged a whole chunk of tropical rain forest vs. only a bunch of rocks with a little bit of moss growing on them.
In real life, seriously, alpine climates tend to generate a biotope with is a bit more on the less luxuriant side of the scalat (similar to what you find going to northern latitudes).
There's a lot less thing to rot at the bottom if you have a lot less vegetation in the region and a lot less rich soil to begin with.
(Or another way to put it as a caricature : do you see much submersible tropical rain forest here ?)
Also part of the decomposition process is assisted by the micro-organisms present in the water. Colder climate means less activity of micro-organism, meaning the dam doesn't emit as much methane as it would in warm waters.
In the end, a dam in Switzerland doesn't emit that much greenhouse gazes as one in Brazil.
So what is going to cover base load? Is geothermal and (ironically not very green) biomass enough to cover it in Switzerland?
Switzerland is an alpine country, and thus has functional low-pollution hydro that can be ramped up or down closely following demand.
(As opposed to tropical country where hydro-dam are producing pollution, simply due to rotting and decomposing mass that got submerged at the bottom of the artificial lake)
Switzerland is also investing into wind and solar. (Though wind is receiving a bit of the same "not in my backyard" treatment like seen elsewhere - it's not as popular as in Germany).
Switzerland is also making efforts to reduce it's energy foot-print. ("Minergy" norm for new buildings, public awareness programs, ban on conventional incandescent light-bulbs (though halogen incandescent are still sold), labeling of energy consumption on appliances, etc.)
The current hope is that it can manage to go through its energy transition like Germany, without requiring temporary increased coal until renewable is increased enough.
I for one will be laughing when they end up importing coal/gas power from neighbouring countries.
Given the above mentioned massive amount of on-demand hydro power, Switzerland is actually an energy *exporter*.
At worst, if renewables aren't ready yet to replace the demand once the last nuclear plant is phased out, the exports will just decrease a bit.
I can't believe this gets voted on by the common man in the street,
Switzerland is a Direct Democracy everybody constantly(1)voting about everything(2) is how things are normally done.
(1): in practice: every ~3 months)
(2): mostly 3-5 subjects such as new laws, public referendum, or reforms proposed through popular initiative, etc. But can occasionnaly have much more subjects
Voting is available in booth, through post, or recently : over internet.
who will be swayed by whatever the media has been reporting.
Switzerland isn't the US. We don't confuse "politics" with "wrestling matches".
In a country with such a long tradition of population voting, people tend to be much calmer, better informed, etc.
Also for various reason:
like Switzerland functioning by consensus - there isn't a single president, the head of the executive is a council of *7 persons* (of varying political affiliation) that are forced to collaborate together, etc.
it hasn't devolved into a bi-partisan shit-show were crushing the opponent is the most import stuff.
Though in this case, the people more familiar with the problems (living in region around nuclear plant) weren't favorable to this anti-nuke law, unlike the rest of the population deep into the mountains who have mostly only seen nukes through the news on TV (so most recently about Fukushima).
So a bit of fear of the unknown might have some influence.
But in general debates in Swiss media has nothing to do with the kind of shit-show / attention grabbing scandal crap that you see in less democratic countries.
Shouldn't this sort of thing be looked at by people that understand costs, risks and benefits of the current and near future technologies?
Or shouldn't the people that understand costs, risks and benefit take the time to inform the population so they can better make an informed decision,
instead of delving into conspiracy theories about what the politcos are doing in their back
and/or the few decision-making person being a smaller and easier target for bribing/lobyying/corruption ?
Switzerland has a *very long* tradition of direct democracy voting (even back in the era when male peasants gathered in an assembly in the middle of the village to perform raised hands votes).
People tend to be a bit more informed and curious, and use a bit more their brain than their guts when voting.
(Although I have to disclaim that personally, I am not against nuclear and dislike this decision. But hey, that what the majority voted. That part of the democratic game).
So has the problem with getting the latest video drivers been fixed?
Depends on the graphic card.
TL;DR: For Intel and AMD, you really don't give a fuck what you're running.
(Or if you're into gaming, you *absolutely* try to run the latest possible kernel and Mesa combo to get all the latest belss and whistles).
e.g.:
- Intel is exclusively doing opensource drivers (at least for their own cores. For the core that they sub licensed from PowerVR several years back, it's an entirely different story).
The drivers are part of the upstream kernel, so getting a new kernel *IS* how you get a new driver.
- AMD has embraced opensource (beginning almost as far back as when they bought ATI - though the actual implementation has taken much time).
They have a dual offering.
For a few special user (CAD software users, etc. who require opengl profiles) they still provide a closed source driver called AMDGPU-PRO. (As of note, it also shares some code with the current Windows drivers).
For the rest, the opensource source drivers (based around Mesa) are their main target. They have been investing resources (some of the devs of the opensource Mesa drivers are on AMD's payroll). Recently, it has seen tremendous improvement and starts to beat the closed source driver on most use-cases.
Both above driverrs rely on the same opensource kernel module. So if you use the opensource driver, the situation is the same as Intel : getting the latest kernel *IS* how you get the latest kernel module.
Only for the closed source AMDGPU-PRO does AMD spends ressource back-porting the kernel module to older kernel.
(So if you are a CAD user, better stick to major distribution whose kernel are more likely to see such back-ports. Or move to a rolling release distro, but that would be unusual for this class of users).
The current only exception is Vulkan. AMD haven't finished the necessary work to opensource their official Vulkan implementation. So AMDGPU-PRO is the only way to get it.
Meanwhile, opensouce developers have created RADV, their own unofficial Vulkan implementation for AMD cards. Currently, this implementation finally passes the conformancy tests and implements the Vulkan API completely, but isn't optimized yet. So often games run better using their openGL back-end (given that massive effort mentionned above) than using their Vulkan back-end (because as mentioned here, it's a small project, which only recently achieved full conformancy and hasn't even started optimizing).
regarding other API :
AMD has recently opensource a new OpenCL implementation running on top of their ROCm computing platform.
Now that this is opensourced, expect the optimizing to go faster, and eventually reaching the point that OpenGL has reached.
Over all the days of the absolutely aweful fglrx closed-source ATI driver are distant past.
I remember having to find the proper kernel headers (down to ver.a.b-c-ubuntu) when updating to latest nVidia OpenGL driver EVERY FUCKING TIME.
Bad news for you : Nvidia is still doing closed source drivers.
They basically recompile their Windows drivers for Linux, and write their own closed source "shim" kernel driver.
Meaning that you're completely dependent on Nvidia condescending to port their code to your specific kernel.
Also don't expect features that normally work with this hardware on Windows, and that other manufacturer have successfully implemented on Linux to work for you.
(Again, remember : Nvidia is basically recompiling their windows drivers. Some features have an API under Linux, but it's largely different and Nvidia doesn't botter)
(eg.: see who long it took them to properly implement xrandr for output handling)
(eg.: remember the whole fiasco around dual embed+discrete GPU on laptop working badly. Culminating with the public "Fuck you, Nvidia !" by Linus about their lack of collaboration)
(eg.: it's 2017 already, and Nvidia still hasn't got their sh
Might be wise to get yourself acquainted with how RH manages kernel. {...} Since then it received numerous patches {...} mostly security and bug fixes
So, a sort of LTS kernel (though the concept wasn't as formally organised back in the 2.6.xx era.
Which brings us to another solution which wasn't mentioned in the summary :
If you don't want to move *forward* to kernel 4.11 (I don't know maybe there's a regression or a dropped support that affects you),
you can move *backward* to kernel 4.9 which is a LTS version and is going to be supported for quite a few years.
systemd has everything I need.
A yeah, I think I've heard about that one.
It's a module that runs inside emacs, isn't it ?
(Though not as popular as the kernel module inside emacs that FSF decided to use instead of Hurd).
No, 4.9.25 is less than a month old, and will continue to receive updates until January 2019.
4.10 came after 4.9.0, but 4.10 isn't an LTS version, so it's supported only until the next "unstable" version becomes stable
And that was even mentioned in the summary of the article about 4.9 that the above poster speaks about. :
That summary begins with
As it's not an LTS (Long Term Support) branch, the Linux 4.10 kernel series was doomed to reach end of life sooner or later,
the explanation is literally the first few words of the summary.
But I guess that "didn't read the summary" is the new "didn't read the article".
And yet, even if the police managed to arrest these blackmailers,
the movie will still hit the torrent and streaming sites over the next few weeks anyway.
Are these posters active in the workforce? Every relevant office in the world uses windows.
{...} But out here in the functional world, windows is everywhere.
Depends of the field you work.
Academic research ?
Specially in fields like computational biology ?
It's going to be exclusively UNIX.
With Mac OS X being a bit more popular on the laptops and workstations of the researchers,
and Linux having monopoly on the servers and compute nodes.
Suppose you assigned an AI to observe which user stories go in, and what code comes out as a result. How many programs would you have to complete before the AI is able to take over a majority of the work involved in building an application? {...} I'd honestly be surprised if they aren't already doing something like this.
Yes it's done. Not by google, but by others.
The short answer is that the deep neural nets produce texts that looks like code on the first glance, but doesn't even compile.
e.g.: The variables aren't even properly declared. it can write a formula (like "a = b + c")
but isn't even able to realise the link with the declaration of the variable (that the "int a;" 10 lines above is linked to the "a").
The problem is the size and complexity of modern AI.
The size of the context they can consider,
the amount of abstract models hidden behind the code, etc.
Currently what AI has managed to recreate with deep neural nets, is on the level of WW2's Pigeon guided bombs.
i.e.: leverage some image recognition net and similar basic tasks, and string a few together.
The complexity required to write actual code is several orders of magnitude bigger.
Even some humans can't do it reliably, and you hope to do it with what currently is the equivalent of the visual cortex sub-part of bird's brain.
Good luck with that.
Before achieving that we need :
- more raw processing power (you'll need way much more neurons that currently used in today's deep neural nets)
- advances in science to better understand how to combine together tons of such "function specific nets" to build a higher level of AI.
(the same way a brain is a sum of lot of small specific region, each linked to a higher level/more abstract associative layer).
Stop treating government as a sporting contest where you cheer for your team to crush the other team.
Some countries like Switzerland have not a single head of executive, but a council of 7 people.
It the same was practiced in your country, that would lead to totally different campaigns.
It would be very difficult for the candidate of one or the other of your bipartite system, to spend time arguing that the other is "an incompetent idiot", because with such system, they are guaranteed to then later have to work together reaching a consensus.
Hard to crush a team, when all the team *must in practice* work together.
The only big suspense would be who out of the minor parties are going to get the last of the coucil seats.
Yeah they save 700lbs by using aluminium instead of steel, but then they go and add about 1000 lbs of crap you don't need
TFA mentions the *total vehicle weight* has gone down from 4000lbs (~2000kg) to 3400 (~1700kg), extra crap included.
like heated cupwarmers,
what the fuck is a "heated cupwarmer" and how does it weights several kg ?
(or maybe it is only "a thing" in the US and that's why I've never heard about it).
56 airbags
pressurized gaz canisters and firing mecanisms don't nearly weight as much as you think.
so it doesn't count much on the total vehicle weight.
Also something that can reduce risks of critical wounds in case of collision (as long as you also wear the necessary seatbelt) doesn't count as "useless" in my book.
Better add a few hundreds gram and avoid ending up with a broken skull or rib-cage with pneumo-/haemo-thorax.
and and a shitload pointless tech that keeps phoning home
big news for you : modern day electronics are suprisingly compact and lightweight.
Your smartphone actually contains much more stuff (screen, big lithium battery) than needed for tech that can phone home.
Also the power envelope of such electronics ( and basically means you can drive like a clueless distracted retard and the car will just sort it out for you.
(btw: adaptive cruise control, lane departure alert, and other such tech doesn't actually need to phone home to work.
it requires a very fast feedback loop, and a cloud-processing and unreliable cell uplink aren't acceptable.
the image processing actually run on chips and computers *inside* the car).
For the weight and power budget, see above.
And again (similar to airbags), a technology which helps avoiding that collision happens in the first place isn't pointless in my book.
it's a very nice additional security feature, both for the safety of the above distracted retards AND for the safety of all the innocent by standers who might find themselves on their collision course (this could be even you or me).
I find the extra couple of watts and hundreds of grams an acceptable compromise for the safety of everybody on the road.
Also :
The things which *do* phone home are usually thing in the category of car alarms/anti-theft features, and black-boxes/other insurance shit.
That I would be much more likely to call "useless".
But even if find the justification of presence is dubious, they don't count much in the total weight of a vehicle.
You can't push as far as you can on the accelerator because the wheels will spin with regular street tires.
A. I was under the impression that "flooring the gas pedal" and similar expression were a figure of speech for what I'm talking about (accelerating as fast as possible), not literally as in making sure that the pedal is level with the floor of the car. But maybe, I'm not expressing myself correctly (I am not a ntaive speaker, as you might have deduced already)
B. Actually with a modern car : Yes *YOU CAN*. Try it next time when entering the highway.
It's been ages since the gas pedal isn't actually directly actuating the valve controlling the gaz admission anymore (or actuating anything else directly, for that matters).
On modern cars, the gaz pedal is just an input that give the car information about how fast you want to go. The car reads it to get your intent, and then the on-board electronics try whatever they can to ful-fill it, within the set of parameters they have to comply to, including anti-skidding.
So, when you litteraly push on the accelerator, you're not directly causing the tires to spin to fast and start skidding.
You're just signaling the car that you want to go as fast as possible, and the electronics do the necessary step to help you achieve the above mentioned 0mph to 60mph (~90km/h) in the modern much shorter time.
The engine will start revving up, but only within what the car can reasonably achieve. The "There is an art to it" part is handled by the car it self.
By the way, it's also closer to the behavior of modern cars when left on adaptive cruise control : when the way is clear they tend to accelerate rather fast, in order to achieve quickly their coasting speed in shorter period of time, spending less time in the least-efficiency "accelerating" mode, and more time in the efficient mode. (If your car's adaptive cruise control is designed to also work in city - aka "City Safe" by some constructors like Volvo - try using it and observe the car's acceleration behaviour. Also pay attention at the drop of you "average consumption per 100km" - or rise of "mileage per gallon" depending on how the computer counts it) (To go back to the beginning of this discussion: modern cars will self balance on the scale of efficiency vs. power. Modern car aren't build for either one or the other as the top post implied, they try to compromise given the specific needs at a time).
Which brings us to...
And yes the lights are usually very close together.
But unless the lights are *literally* 20 meters appart, over all you won't spend a high percentage of the time accelerating.
You'll be spending most of the time at the normal street driving speed, and only accelerate after the red turn green, until you reach the before mentioned speed.
So indeed modern cars aren't all "power to the detriment of efficiency".
Which brings us back to TFA : it shows number that, yes, overall, even if power is going up, the end result is that efficiency is getting better too, no matter what the top power of cars has become.
Efficiency hasn't been neglected at the alter of power.
As far as I understand, the laws of physics dictate that many fast accelerations wear down the battery than casual driving. Correct me if I am wrong, but the laws of inertia also apply to a Tesla do they not?
Yes law of physics apply. To the car as a whole.
If you want to accerelate a car, you need to give an energy delta of kinetic energy (Ekin = 0.5 m * v^2).
The thing is, in reality, you'll never ever going to get away *with that little energy* in real life.
There's tons of other things going on to consider where laws of physics will apply too, and will cause losses, meaning at the end, you'll need to spend a lot more joules than just the difference in Ekin.
On an electric motor, and on a pure ICE these extra losses are different.
(e.g.: an ICE will usually have a be
Phage therapy {...} bacterias will also evolve resistance against it.
Luckily for us, bacteriophages themselves - as a type of primitive parasitic semi-life form, similar to viruses - are also subject of evolution and are also under evolutive pressure to adapt to keep having access to hosts in order to be able to replicate.
They also replicate on a much higher speed than bacteria, meaning that they are much faster affected by evolution.
(i.e.: it is realistically possible to imagine keeping culture of semi-resistant bacteria and trying to grow phages on them and get those to evolve.
You might end up with mutated phages who'll be better at attacking these specific bacteria).
This is unlike the pharmacochemical industry which needs to come up with new formula of their own.
This is also less like the various yeasts which through evolution have came up with solutions against their resources competitors, and have historically been where antibiotics have been discovered. (Yeast does evolve, but at a much slower pace. A culture of yeast and semi-resistant bacteria is most likely to end up with the yeast starving).
If you invest $1B+ bringing a new antibiotic to market, but only manage to make $100M before it goes off patent (or $0 if it fails in phase IV clinical trials), you can't sustain that.
It all depends on who's doing the investement.
- Public sector - i.e.: countries investing in their universities - do *NOT* need to make a return on investment (i.e.: sell a profitable drug), they only want to make the science progress.
The problem, is that the budget necessary is beyond the financial means they can invest into a project.
i.e.: your government would gladly pay you to try new anti-biotics but doesn't have the money to it.
- So, nowadays, these investment are handled by pharmaceutical companies to whom this is really within budget - not to say small change (these sums looks probably like rounding errors next to their marketing budgets). But, as companies, they have to think about profitability.
i.e.: they would have the money but don't want to throw it away on something that will never make profit.
- Thankfully we start to see whole continent-level academic collaboration (e.g.: universities accross whole europe), and now financing projects all the way to clinical use is within the financial reach of publicly funded projects.
Not all bacteria are harmful. This phage therapy needs to not wipe out the symbiotes that make it possible for us to stay alive.
Actually it's going the other way around :
- Antibiotics are rather indiscriminate and can kill large swaths of bacterial population, including commensal flora (= "the bacteria which normally live here", i.e.: non-dangerous).
That's one of the reasons (the non-ecological/resistance one) why doctors try to avoid over-prescribing. (Just ask any girl who got yeast infection - e.g.: candida - because her flora got disturbed by a wide-spectum antibiotics)
That's also a reason why antibiotics can be prescribed with micro-flora supplements (the antibiotics will kill the commensal flora in addition to the bacteria causing the disease you're trying to cure, so you need to import new microorganisms to compensate - usually Saccharomyces, a type of benign yeast)
(Disclaimer: IAAD)
- Phage are the bacteria equivalent of viruses. They target *specific* surface receptors. It's like viruses and eukaryote (you might catch flu from a swine because surface cell receptors are close enough for a virus targeting one to be able to bind the other - ie. we're closely enough related. You'll probably never catch a virus usually affecting plants.)
A phage might be able to recognize and bind a few related bacteria, but will never affect other completely different prokaryotes).
Lol when I'm driving my 500 hp vehicle I st{e}p on the gas at every light.
Yeah, once the traffic light turns back to green, you push as far as possible on the accelerator to have the car jump forward as fast as possible.
But once you've reach the normal driving speed (which on modern car you'll reach in only half the time than before, according to the summary),
what do you do ? Do you keep pushing the pedal all the way up to 250 km/h and/or until you collide something ?
Nope, at some speed, you'll coast, and at that point the emission of the car will drop dramatically.
The car will automatically go for a different compromise point on the efficiency vs. power scale.
(e.g.: it might even shut some cylinders down).
So, unless the road you drive is not only empty, but consist entirely of red lights spaced each only 20m appart (with red-light cameras to force you to stop and re-accelerate at each), you'll spend most time coasting, and only sporadically accelerating.
So even if the acceleration are optimised for power and don't emit less, the rest of the time the car will be in efficient mode, and over the whole trip, they tend to emit less.
If I had a Tesla Model S I'd probably get frustrated that the battery couldn't even take me on a single night's cruise.
Actually, electric motors are much more power-efficient at accelerating.
You won't be killing your battery as fast as you would be emptying the gas tank.
If you need to constantly stop and accelerate, electric motors are actually much better. That is the reason why electrical vehicle have been used by public services for quite some time. (e.g.: in France, Citroen have been making electric vans for the post office delivery service for nearly 4 decade. This thing even *predates lithium batteries*, the first vans used nickel) (e.g.: unlike in the US with Tesla which concentrate on passenger cars, in Europe most electrical vehicle company have also been producing electrical utility vehicle for quite some time. See also Renault's Z.E. Kangoo)
(This is also where part of the better mileage of hybrid vehicle comes from: if they accelerate on electric, they are more efficient).