Medium sized power outages are generally caused by a failure of local transmission lines. These lines are frequently exposed to a variety of hazards, particularly trees, wind, ice, wildlife, and humans. There are only really two ways to secure against this, burying cables and building redundancy, both of which are quite expensive. Transmission fees in the USA are usually heavily regulated and the prices they may charge would not cover such an expense. It is also unclear if a market would want to pay for this, and it is very difficult to discriminate in price and service among customers who would.
Finally, bureaucracy and in-fighting between local utility providers sometimes blocks redundancy when it might otherwise available. Historical feuds, hurt feelings over regulatory decisions regarding service area, and disagreements over cost sharing to handle inter-network connections can leave one person at the end of a service line with no way to get power from another provider just down the road.
1. Peak demand. In car-culture areas there's a peak demand. *Someone* has to own the rush hour fleet. But no business is going to want to invest in a fleet that has 21 hours of downtime during non-peak loads.
This isn't the comparison which makes the most sense. The question is, "Can fleet ownership result in greater value for consumers significant enough to make a profit?". Most of the trips that residential vehicles make are commuter trips, but the vehicles making these trips are very often compromise vehicles, capable of doing a larger variety of tasks. If the surge is commuters, the commuter fleet can mostly be made of much smaller, task-oriented vehicles, reducing fleet costs. Many of these vehicles will be able to service multiple users sequentially, since the starting and ending times for work surge over a two-three hour period, increasing utility rates. A non-insignificant portion of this surge fleet will still be in use by people throughout the day. The reduced nuisance of parking could increase useage for things like lunch trips. The potential for there to be economies of scale is here and benefits from fleet ownership, so this cannot be simply dismissed.
The logic of where the savings exist can be thought of in terms of, "Are there savings that self-driving vehicles could accomplish with smaller modifications to the system?". If I had a way of making my self-driving vehicle available to people to pay me to use during the day, that would result in an overall increase in economic efficiency. If it was more convenient for people to rent specialty vehicles, utilization would increase and rental costs would decrease such that my every-day car could be optimized for commuting tasks and thus less expensive, more than offsetting the occasional rental costs of specialty rentals, increasing economic efficiency. These efficiencies are easier to realize with fleet ownership and thus there is room for cost savings for consumers and profits for a fleet owner.
2. Consumers want reliability and 100% availability. Consider Uber and Lyft that promise this, except during surge pricing periods. People hate this. It's economically correct in the case of Uber and Lyft, and an obvious idea, but surge pricing during rush hour isn't going to work. People will still own their own cars.
The problem with Uber, Lyft, car sharing, and taxies is that pockets of high useage have a lasting decrease in service availability in those areas. With self-driving vehicles, there is a very small cost to shifting resources to fill in empty pockets of the map. Yes, this becomes problematic the more rural one gets, but in urban and suburban environments, populations densities are high enough that with high levels of utilization, it could easily be economical to make it a very rare occurrence to not have a vehicle able to be at any address within a small number of minutes after being summoned.
3. Personalization and customization. Hey, I like my cars stock, but I still have my stuff in the center console, my presets on the stereo (yes, 760 am in the morning, I'm a dying breed), and my iPhone paired to Sync. A different car every day isn't going to cut it. And think about comfort, especially on a commute. If it's hit or miss as far as comfort, people are willing to pay for 100% access to a Fusion versus an Elantra (or choose an Elantra versus a smaller B-sized car).
Storing crap in one's car is probably the best argument for what will bother people about changing to this system, as having to lug crap out to the car while you are on the clock is a stress people will likely often buckle under; however, this seems like a problem which could be solved by some interesting lateral thinking. Radio presets are an easily solvable problem and luxury models are a method of price discrimination which would likely very quickly enter the marketplace, although it would be strains on my previous arguments. Much of the other elements of vehicle size an
Unfortunately, not. Educational theory is a highly divided and conservative field. There are still plenty of educators who doggedly believe that students learn by behaviorist incentive motivation (carrots and sticks) and that students are blank slates. The idea that education should consider and perhaps even change in response to the internal motivations of students is an idea which has been around for decades, but has continued to be slow to catch on. Perhaps research like this, as limited in its scope as it might be, can provide quantities to convince more that student curiosity is an important factor in learning.
This is yet another issue of lay definitions not lining up with definitions used by researchers. Curisotiy in this case is probably best understod as internally motivated and sustained interest compared to interest from external sources.
As long as we are hyping Erlang, the Erlang community is getting some disruption from a language developed by a prominent Rubyist called Elixir. Clojure-inspired metaprogramming, a Ruby-ish syntax, and it all compiles down to the same VM code that Erlang compiles into.
I wasn't referencing the linked articles, but commenting on the summary.
The Red Star OS is peppered with North Korean propaganda, and its calendar tells users it is not 2014, but 103 — the number of years since the birth of former North Korean leader Kim Il-sung.
The term "propaganda" may have inoccuous roots, but clearly holds a sinister connotation and it is juxtoposed in the same sentence with the bit about the North Korean year. This is the xenophobic fear mongering I was referencing.
So what? Is this supposed to be some menacing thing that one group of people use a different date system than I do? Should I be concerned that in Japan the state writes Heisei 26 as the year on official documents? There are serious problems in North Korea, but we don't need to stoop to xenophobic fear mongering to illustrate it.
Having worked in office environments, the amount of effort office workers could reserve by having access to a decent scripting language is immense; I once saw someone renaming over three thousand files by hand in order to change a date format. The potential drawbacks are also fairly obvious since businesses tend to do a terrible job of managing their IT tools and anarchistic coding is going to make this worse. However, the potential for productivity enhancements is there and it seems like a challenge which can be largely overcome, particularly if the workforce had these skills which were languishing. If this is the reality we should to push for, then some sort of programming experience which can be linked to useful activities seems like it would be worthwhile for many, from the drones in the office to automated farm equipment and CNC operators.
As a big fan of Ruby generally, I hate to take this side, but Ruby is definitely no longer for the 'cool' kids and the community has been shrinking a bit for a while now.
Your Google query chart is a bit wonky as it captures all sorts of oddities. Here is a revised chart which only looks at Computer + Electronics related searches using Google's categories for everything except Python, which I can't seem to figure out how to get it to appear.
The hopes underlying Bitcoin rely on the belief that this currency has qualities which other currencies lack, namely anonymity and freedom from government manipulation. This hearing seems to be a bunch of government officials saying that they love Bitcoin, but the government is already getting good at figuring out who is participating in transactions and wants to figure out how to regulate it, which would be a trick to pull off without making it vulnerable to government manipulation. What is left if these are no longer credible advantages?
It is this sort of uninformed armchair policy making which is the greatest obstacle to legitimate education reform. We defer to engineers on how to best keep a bridge from falling, but everybody seems to be an expert when it comes to knowing what is best and what works in education.
The biggest problem with your assertion that educational methods at the turn of the twentieth century had indisputably better results than schools today is that schools which produced artifacts of their success weren't in the business of educating all of their students to their fullest potential. The grading system, which we maintain, was designed as a system of discrimination intended to sort students by academic capability and eventually into different tiers of work performance. These schools set a rigid standard and those who failed to meet it were simply marked as inferior. The entire system was designed around conformity to a standard and those who failed to conform were tossed aside. By this measure, dropping out of school is not only accepted, a low rejection rate was considered to be a sign of poor standards. This entire mindset is incompatible with our modern vision of an inclusive education system with an intended goal of raising everyone to their maximal learning potential.
I honestly don't care too much about my phone's specs, but build-your-own laptops have never seemed to surface despite BYO desktops being an important surviving part of that shrinking sector. I just want to be able to buy processor and graphics upgrades and not have to purchase a new monitor and keyboard whenever I want a new mobile computer.
bad design creates false cues that misdirect users
I don't think I could agree with this any more. I didn't intend to take sides in the pro/anti skeuomorphism debate; I'm simply annoyed to see/. consistently framing skeuomorphism as fundamentally flawed instead of something which newbs and the artistically inept (e.g. suits) will rely on too heavily and apply when inappropriate.
Here we have Soulskill yetagain trying to act like skeuomorphic artistic design is some sort of big, bad thing which we should be concerned about. This is not an important issue in human interface design. This seems to be some sort of pet peeve lens which Soulskill keeps bringing up. Skeuomorphism may bother designers who don't want to be tied down to designs based on mid-twentieth-century conventions of office life and people who demand every last pixel of their screen be useful for them. ell, it may even be the plastic teak dashboard of the 21st century, but its presence or lack thereof has such a tiny impact on usability for all but the most constrained interfaces that it is not worth/.'s concern. Please stop.
Arguments of this sort should help us understand that talking about this problem as a matter of jobs numbers is a flawed strategy. We should be talking in terms of how economic production is distributed and how much of the risk workers should be expected to assume to provide the workforce flexibility required to accommodate these productivity enhancements. There is only a dilemma between protectionism and innovation if we are unwilling to take responsibility for the economic outcomes which give the vast proportion of productivity gains to the investor class.
The small minority of designers with an axe to grind about skeuomorphic interfaces does not deserve a shout-out. Interface design is just generally bad on consumer products, trading long-term productivity for short-term accessability. These designers who eschew skeuomorphic design rarely are proposing anything of real value aside from asthetic alterations; they don't like putting spiral binder holes on the interface, waah. If they were proposing real long-term productivity improvements and had decent arguments about how skeuomorphic details are impeding this, then I would be happy to listen, but comparing these designs vs. the sorts of designs I see the anti-skeumorphic community proposing and it just seems like they don't enjoy the asthetic.
When, exactly, does the increased information density of grids really help? Grids obscure organization, making navigating through information-dense views worse. Sure, you have more stuff, but it is more difficult to find what you want. More does not immediately mean better and increasing the cognitive load required to solve a problem is not a reasonable solution to utilize 'wasted space'.
Icons are not incompatible with list views and neither are pictures. Scrolling through a list of icons means that the user only has to focus on a single column of information. By narrowing the parameters of the search (simplifying a large, complex visual field) the user's brain is less likely to be distracted by non-useful information. This is not an anti-icon complaint, it is an organizational complaint.
To be clear, I am complaining more about sorted grids vs positional grids, where the physical location of a thing in the grid is largely static and hopefully user configurable. I do have gripes with the latter, but they are not the subject of this particular rant.
Grids are terrible for displaying sorted lists of item collections. Almost all of the time, we sort a collection along a single dimension; a grid positions items across two dimensions, but that second dimension holds no information about the sort being performed. If you have more than a few items, your brain has to bounce back and forth and conform to the line breaks that the computer has chosen in order to find items in the collection. Displaying a collection in a table with each collection item taking up one row and attributes of that item can be displayed in table fields (a.k.a. columns) allows for easier, more intuitive searching of the list based on those field values. It also leaves plenty of room for textual display, which fits quite well in a long, horizontal space.
Grids of icons have been a blight upon GUIs for decades. Why do they persist?
Here is a no-pre-requisite course from Stanford on the topic of the links between human behavior and biology. Listen and be educated on how ignorantly these people are framing the issue.
The interrelationship between biology and environment are inseparable and the value of a set of genetic markers related to violence in humans would have such a weak correlation as to predict almost nothing, but the opportunity for social misuse is huge. We should do (and are already doing) research into these relationships including relationships with violence, but we must be extremely careful about what we expect to get out of it and how we frame what the knowledge means so that the public is less likely to do stupid things with it.
Of course it couldn't possibly be that classrooms are frequently designed for the efficiency of the institution over the educational needs of students. Lecture-based education, unaccommodating clasroom policies, instruction and assistance provided by persons with almost no professional education training, uninformative grading systems, a culture of shape-up or ship-out, none of these could possibly be changed without compromising the integrity of the program. The industrial organization of education can efficiently educate students well only by reducing the diversity of student learning requirements and that is most easily accomplished by rejecting input units which fail to meet specification. Don't you dare criticize this structure as to do so would only be dumbing things down and that is unacceptable.
While critiques of this sort are still a bit controversial, simply because a lot of guessing has to be performed to account for various stages of the vehicles life, they also have a systematic bias which fails to account for an even greater environmental cost generated by the support infrastructure and social changes related to an extensive road network for personal vehicles. The environmental cost of so many roads covering so much of the landscape causing runoff, requiring maintenance, and leeching chemicals, re-radiating heat instead of trapping it in chemical bonds, and creating risks to wildlife is only the beginning. Medium density 'suburban' areas far from work and shopping, with huge, mostly unused lawns are much less possible without ready access to personal transportation and the infrastructure that requires supports and in many ways encourages lifestyles which use a lot of energy and harm the environment. That doesn't even include the cost to human health, psychology, and society, which are all areas where suburbia has received much criticism.
One thousand years? Seriously? If we think that the planet we currently inhabit is going to become more hostile for human habitation than any other place in the solar system in the next thousand years, what sorts of scenarios are we talking about? Even if we got hit by another major comet, this planet ould STILL be tremendously more habitable for humans than anywhere else. What sort of extraterrestrial habitation do we envision that wouldn't be orders of magnitude less expensive without leaving the gravity well?
By far, the greatest threats to humanity are certain non-malevolent activities of other humans. Might some extraterrestrial science help in solving some of the problems created by these activities? Sure. However, we need to keep in mind that sending some 'seed' of humanity to space isn't going to improve the lives of other humans here on Earth. Thinking that everyone is better off because of the 'success' of a few is the very sort of thinking which makes it more difficult to solve the social problems which are causing us to think this way to begin with. So, as much as I respect cosmologists and other space scientists, they need to set their egos aside before making policy recommendations to improve the lot of humanity.
So, you can extract the hydrogen effectively from the plant material, but now you have the energy in a form which is difficult to store and transport. This still requires producing large amounts of plant material which is an environmentally difficult-to-sustain prospect in order to capture solar energy. In the end, it has nearly all of the problems of ethanol plus a bunch of serious ones for a smallish efficiency gain.
How is "hoarding cash".... also known as saving.... equivalent to losing value?
The argument was that when there is price inflation, hoarding cash is discouraged because it is losing value. You seem to understand the concept, but misunderstood the statement.
In the financial systems we actually use, it's the opposite - inflation is the reason that savings lose value. This is not a good thing!
This is a bold statement which simply fails economic analysis. When money becomes less available for settling debts, then people who have debts become less able to service them, resulting in more defaults or the requirement for larger amounts of debt which generates more virtual currency. While we teach that saving is good in personal accounting, there is a reason that economists tell politicians that saving isn't particularly good for the economy as a whole. Appropriate amounts of positive inflation encourages people to either make their currency available through purchases or by lending it at lower interest rates. Deflation encourages hoarding of money and increases the cost of borrowing, which stifles economic growth.
Your cited Minneapolis Fed analysis is laughable. Linear regressions on charts of inflation vs economic growth? Without controls for government interventions during the event? Seriously? This sort of analysis shouldn't even be taken seriously at an undergraduate level, but unfortunately documents like this get produced all the time and get dragged to defend all sorts of preconceived notions.
By the way, Bitcoin is not intended to be deflationary.
How is it not designed to be deflationary? Introduction of new currency is designed to get slower and the presumption is that adoption will increase. When demand for currency outstrips supply, you get price deflation and everything about Bitcoin is intended for this result. Even if we presume that there is zero 'loss' of these, if things go as planned, we see deflation. Deflation leads to hoarding, hoarding leads to deflation and it all results in a bubble. Talk to currency traders and see what they think of a currency which increases eight-fold in less than two years. They will tell you that any position in it is simple gambling; can you force yourself to get off before the music stops?
While I am skeptical about a lot of things in this project, this likely isn't as bad as one might think. This is the full serial time to build all of the components, which could be parallelized, meaning that in production they would only have to worry about the single component with the longest generation time. This is probably still quite a long time using this technique.
Slashdot Mirror
Medium sized power outages are generally caused by a failure of local transmission lines. These lines are frequently exposed to a variety of hazards, particularly trees, wind, ice, wildlife, and humans. There are only really two ways to secure against this, burying cables and building redundancy, both of which are quite expensive. Transmission fees in the USA are usually heavily regulated and the prices they may charge would not cover such an expense. It is also unclear if a market would want to pay for this, and it is very difficult to discriminate in price and service among customers who would.
Finally, bureaucracy and in-fighting between local utility providers sometimes blocks redundancy when it might otherwise available. Historical feuds, hurt feelings over regulatory decisions regarding service area, and disagreements over cost sharing to handle inter-network connections can leave one person at the end of a service line with no way to get power from another provider just down the road.
1. Peak demand. In car-culture areas there's a peak demand. *Someone* has to own the rush hour fleet. But no business is going to want to invest in a fleet that has 21 hours of downtime during non-peak loads.
This isn't the comparison which makes the most sense. The question is, "Can fleet ownership result in greater value for consumers significant enough to make a profit?". Most of the trips that residential vehicles make are commuter trips, but the vehicles making these trips are very often compromise vehicles, capable of doing a larger variety of tasks. If the surge is commuters, the commuter fleet can mostly be made of much smaller, task-oriented vehicles, reducing fleet costs. Many of these vehicles will be able to service multiple users sequentially, since the starting and ending times for work surge over a two-three hour period, increasing utility rates. A non-insignificant portion of this surge fleet will still be in use by people throughout the day. The reduced nuisance of parking could increase useage for things like lunch trips. The potential for there to be economies of scale is here and benefits from fleet ownership, so this cannot be simply dismissed.
The logic of where the savings exist can be thought of in terms of, "Are there savings that self-driving vehicles could accomplish with smaller modifications to the system?". If I had a way of making my self-driving vehicle available to people to pay me to use during the day, that would result in an overall increase in economic efficiency. If it was more convenient for people to rent specialty vehicles, utilization would increase and rental costs would decrease such that my every-day car could be optimized for commuting tasks and thus less expensive, more than offsetting the occasional rental costs of specialty rentals, increasing economic efficiency. These efficiencies are easier to realize with fleet ownership and thus there is room for cost savings for consumers and profits for a fleet owner.
2. Consumers want reliability and 100% availability. Consider Uber and Lyft that promise this, except during surge pricing periods. People hate this. It's economically correct in the case of Uber and Lyft, and an obvious idea, but surge pricing during rush hour isn't going to work. People will still own their own cars.
The problem with Uber, Lyft, car sharing, and taxies is that pockets of high useage have a lasting decrease in service availability in those areas. With self-driving vehicles, there is a very small cost to shifting resources to fill in empty pockets of the map. Yes, this becomes problematic the more rural one gets, but in urban and suburban environments, populations densities are high enough that with high levels of utilization, it could easily be economical to make it a very rare occurrence to not have a vehicle able to be at any address within a small number of minutes after being summoned.
3. Personalization and customization. Hey, I like my cars stock, but I still have my stuff in the center console, my presets on the stereo (yes, 760 am in the morning, I'm a dying breed), and my iPhone paired to Sync. A different car every day isn't going to cut it. And think about comfort, especially on a commute. If it's hit or miss as far as comfort, people are willing to pay for 100% access to a Fusion versus an Elantra (or choose an Elantra versus a smaller B-sized car).
Storing crap in one's car is probably the best argument for what will bother people about changing to this system, as having to lug crap out to the car while you are on the clock is a stress people will likely often buckle under; however, this seems like a problem which could be solved by some interesting lateral thinking. Radio presets are an easily solvable problem and luxury models are a method of price discrimination which would likely very quickly enter the marketplace, although it would be strains on my previous arguments. Much of the other elements of vehicle size an
Unfortunately, not. Educational theory is a highly divided and conservative field. There are still plenty of educators who doggedly believe that students learn by behaviorist incentive motivation (carrots and sticks) and that students are blank slates. The idea that education should consider and perhaps even change in response to the internal motivations of students is an idea which has been around for decades, but has continued to be slow to catch on. Perhaps research like this, as limited in its scope as it might be, can provide quantities to convince more that student curiosity is an important factor in learning.
This is yet another issue of lay definitions not lining up with definitions used by researchers. Curisotiy in this case is probably best understod as internally motivated and sustained interest compared to interest from external sources.
As long as we are hyping Erlang, the Erlang community is getting some disruption from a language developed by a prominent Rubyist called Elixir. Clojure-inspired metaprogramming, a Ruby-ish syntax, and it all compiles down to the same VM code that Erlang compiles into.
I wasn't referencing the linked articles, but commenting on the summary.
The term "propaganda" may have inoccuous roots, but clearly holds a sinister connotation and it is juxtoposed in the same sentence with the bit about the North Korean year. This is the xenophobic fear mongering I was referencing.
So what? Is this supposed to be some menacing thing that one group of people use a different date system than I do? Should I be concerned that in Japan the state writes Heisei 26 as the year on official documents? There are serious problems in North Korea, but we don't need to stoop to xenophobic fear mongering to illustrate it.
Having worked in office environments, the amount of effort office workers could reserve by having access to a decent scripting language is immense; I once saw someone renaming over three thousand files by hand in order to change a date format. The potential drawbacks are also fairly obvious since businesses tend to do a terrible job of managing their IT tools and anarchistic coding is going to make this worse. However, the potential for productivity enhancements is there and it seems like a challenge which can be largely overcome, particularly if the workforce had these skills which were languishing. If this is the reality we should to push for, then some sort of programming experience which can be linked to useful activities seems like it would be worthwhile for many, from the drones in the office to automated farm equipment and CNC operators.
As a big fan of Ruby generally, I hate to take this side, but Ruby is definitely no longer for the 'cool' kids and the community has been shrinking a bit for a while now.
Your Google query chart is a bit wonky as it captures all sorts of oddities. Here is a revised chart which only looks at Computer + Electronics related searches using Google's categories for everything except Python, which I can't seem to figure out how to get it to appear.
The hopes underlying Bitcoin rely on the belief that this currency has qualities which other currencies lack, namely anonymity and freedom from government manipulation. This hearing seems to be a bunch of government officials saying that they love Bitcoin, but the government is already getting good at figuring out who is participating in transactions and wants to figure out how to regulate it, which would be a trick to pull off without making it vulnerable to government manipulation. What is left if these are no longer credible advantages?
It is this sort of uninformed armchair policy making which is the greatest obstacle to legitimate education reform. We defer to engineers on how to best keep a bridge from falling, but everybody seems to be an expert when it comes to knowing what is best and what works in education.
The biggest problem with your assertion that educational methods at the turn of the twentieth century had indisputably better results than schools today is that schools which produced artifacts of their success weren't in the business of educating all of their students to their fullest potential. The grading system, which we maintain, was designed as a system of discrimination intended to sort students by academic capability and eventually into different tiers of work performance. These schools set a rigid standard and those who failed to meet it were simply marked as inferior. The entire system was designed around conformity to a standard and those who failed to conform were tossed aside. By this measure, dropping out of school is not only accepted, a low rejection rate was considered to be a sign of poor standards. This entire mindset is incompatible with our modern vision of an inclusive education system with an intended goal of raising everyone to their maximal learning potential.
I honestly don't care too much about my phone's specs, but build-your-own laptops have never seemed to surface despite BYO desktops being an important surviving part of that shrinking sector. I just want to be able to buy processor and graphics upgrades and not have to purchase a new monitor and keyboard whenever I want a new mobile computer.
bad design creates false cues that misdirect users
I don't think I could agree with this any more. I didn't intend to take sides in the pro/anti skeuomorphism debate; I'm simply annoyed to see /. consistently framing skeuomorphism as fundamentally flawed instead of something which newbs and the artistically inept (e.g. suits) will rely on too heavily and apply when inappropriate.
Here we have Soulskill yet again trying to act like skeuomorphic artistic design is some sort of big, bad thing which we should be concerned about. This is not an important issue in human interface design. This seems to be some sort of pet peeve lens which Soulskill keeps bringing up. Skeuomorphism may bother designers who don't want to be tied down to designs based on mid-twentieth-century conventions of office life and people who demand every last pixel of their screen be useful for them. ell, it may even be the plastic teak dashboard of the 21st century, but its presence or lack thereof has such a tiny impact on usability for all but the most constrained interfaces that it is not worth /.'s concern. Please stop.
Arguments of this sort should help us understand that talking about this problem as a matter of jobs numbers is a flawed strategy. We should be talking in terms of how economic production is distributed and how much of the risk workers should be expected to assume to provide the workforce flexibility required to accommodate these productivity enhancements. There is only a dilemma between protectionism and innovation if we are unwilling to take responsibility for the economic outcomes which give the vast proportion of productivity gains to the investor class.
The small minority of designers with an axe to grind about skeuomorphic interfaces does not deserve a shout-out. Interface design is just generally bad on consumer products, trading long-term productivity for short-term accessability. These designers who eschew skeuomorphic design rarely are proposing anything of real value aside from asthetic alterations; they don't like putting spiral binder holes on the interface, waah. If they were proposing real long-term productivity improvements and had decent arguments about how skeuomorphic details are impeding this, then I would be happy to listen, but comparing these designs vs. the sorts of designs I see the anti-skeumorphic community proposing and it just seems like they don't enjoy the asthetic.
When, exactly, does the increased information density of grids really help? Grids obscure organization, making navigating through information-dense views worse. Sure, you have more stuff, but it is more difficult to find what you want. More does not immediately mean better and increasing the cognitive load required to solve a problem is not a reasonable solution to utilize 'wasted space'.
Icons are not incompatible with list views and neither are pictures. Scrolling through a list of icons means that the user only has to focus on a single column of information. By narrowing the parameters of the search (simplifying a large, complex visual field) the user's brain is less likely to be distracted by non-useful information. This is not an anti-icon complaint, it is an organizational complaint.
To be clear, I am complaining more about sorted grids vs positional grids, where the physical location of a thing in the grid is largely static and hopefully user configurable. I do have gripes with the latter, but they are not the subject of this particular rant.
Time for my occasional rant on grids.
Grids are terrible for displaying sorted lists of item collections. Almost all of the time, we sort a collection along a single dimension; a grid positions items across two dimensions, but that second dimension holds no information about the sort being performed. If you have more than a few items, your brain has to bounce back and forth and conform to the line breaks that the computer has chosen in order to find items in the collection. Displaying a collection in a table with each collection item taking up one row and attributes of that item can be displayed in table fields (a.k.a. columns) allows for easier, more intuitive searching of the list based on those field values. It also leaves plenty of room for textual display, which fits quite well in a long, horizontal space.
Grids of icons have been a blight upon GUIs for decades. Why do they persist?
Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology - Robert Sapolsky
Here is a no-pre-requisite course from Stanford on the topic of the links between human behavior and biology. Listen and be educated on how ignorantly these people are framing the issue.
The interrelationship between biology and environment are inseparable and the value of a set of genetic markers related to violence in humans would have such a weak correlation as to predict almost nothing, but the opportunity for social misuse is huge. We should do (and are already doing) research into these relationships including relationships with violence, but we must be extremely careful about what we expect to get out of it and how we frame what the knowledge means so that the public is less likely to do stupid things with it.
Of course it couldn't possibly be that classrooms are frequently designed for the efficiency of the institution over the educational needs of students. Lecture-based education, unaccommodating clasroom policies, instruction and assistance provided by persons with almost no professional education training, uninformative grading systems, a culture of shape-up or ship-out, none of these could possibly be changed without compromising the integrity of the program. The industrial organization of education can efficiently educate students well only by reducing the diversity of student learning requirements and that is most easily accomplished by rejecting input units which fail to meet specification. Don't you dare criticize this structure as to do so would only be dumbing things down and that is unacceptable.
As long as we are looking 'big picture'.
While critiques of this sort are still a bit controversial, simply because a lot of guessing has to be performed to account for various stages of the vehicles life, they also have a systematic bias which fails to account for an even greater environmental cost generated by the support infrastructure and social changes related to an extensive road network for personal vehicles. The environmental cost of so many roads covering so much of the landscape causing runoff, requiring maintenance, and leeching chemicals, re-radiating heat instead of trapping it in chemical bonds, and creating risks to wildlife is only the beginning. Medium density 'suburban' areas far from work and shopping, with huge, mostly unused lawns are much less possible without ready access to personal transportation and the infrastructure that requires supports and in many ways encourages lifestyles which use a lot of energy and harm the environment. That doesn't even include the cost to human health, psychology, and society, which are all areas where suburbia has received much criticism.
One thousand years? Seriously? If we think that the planet we currently inhabit is going to become more hostile for human habitation than any other place in the solar system in the next thousand years, what sorts of scenarios are we talking about? Even if we got hit by another major comet, this planet ould STILL be tremendously more habitable for humans than anywhere else. What sort of extraterrestrial habitation do we envision that wouldn't be orders of magnitude less expensive without leaving the gravity well?
By far, the greatest threats to humanity are certain non-malevolent activities of other humans. Might some extraterrestrial science help in solving some of the problems created by these activities? Sure. However, we need to keep in mind that sending some 'seed' of humanity to space isn't going to improve the lives of other humans here on Earth. Thinking that everyone is better off because of the 'success' of a few is the very sort of thinking which makes it more difficult to solve the social problems which are causing us to think this way to begin with. So, as much as I respect cosmologists and other space scientists, they need to set their egos aside before making policy recommendations to improve the lot of humanity.
So, you can extract the hydrogen effectively from the plant material, but now you have the energy in a form which is difficult to store and transport. This still requires producing large amounts of plant material which is an environmentally difficult-to-sustain prospect in order to capture solar energy. In the end, it has nearly all of the problems of ethanol plus a bunch of serious ones for a smallish efficiency gain.
How is "hoarding cash" .... also known as saving .... equivalent to losing value?
The argument was that when there is price inflation, hoarding cash is discouraged because it is losing value. You seem to understand the concept, but misunderstood the statement.
In the financial systems we actually use, it's the opposite - inflation is the reason that savings lose value. This is not a good thing!
This is a bold statement which simply fails economic analysis. When money becomes less available for settling debts, then people who have debts become less able to service them, resulting in more defaults or the requirement for larger amounts of debt which generates more virtual currency. While we teach that saving is good in personal accounting, there is a reason that economists tell politicians that saving isn't particularly good for the economy as a whole. Appropriate amounts of positive inflation encourages people to either make their currency available through purchases or by lending it at lower interest rates. Deflation encourages hoarding of money and increases the cost of borrowing, which stifles economic growth.
Your cited Minneapolis Fed analysis is laughable. Linear regressions on charts of inflation vs economic growth? Without controls for government interventions during the event? Seriously? This sort of analysis shouldn't even be taken seriously at an undergraduate level, but unfortunately documents like this get produced all the time and get dragged to defend all sorts of preconceived notions.
By the way, Bitcoin is not intended to be deflationary.
How is it not designed to be deflationary? Introduction of new currency is designed to get slower and the presumption is that adoption will increase. When demand for currency outstrips supply, you get price deflation and everything about Bitcoin is intended for this result. Even if we presume that there is zero 'loss' of these, if things go as planned, we see deflation. Deflation leads to hoarding, hoarding leads to deflation and it all results in a bubble. Talk to currency traders and see what they think of a currency which increases eight-fold in less than two years. They will tell you that any position in it is simple gambling; can you force yourself to get off before the music stops?
While I am skeptical about a lot of things in this project, this likely isn't as bad as one might think. This is the full serial time to build all of the components, which could be parallelized, meaning that in production they would only have to worry about the single component with the longest generation time. This is probably still quite a long time using this technique.