Looking at how they've done it, they've improved the efficiency of their coal plants, shut down a lot of rushbelt industries, and switched domestic usage from coal to gas. That's all great, but these are "easy" efficiency gains, just bringing themselves up to modern Western practice.
I suspect it's going to be tough for them to avoid growing emissions as they continue to grow economically, now that they've done the easy stuff - at least, without using a lot of nuclear power.
If you're heating your pool with gas or electricity, we're talking thousands of dollars a year worth of gas in that alone.
On top of that, there's the cost of runnning the filter. Typically, that involves a 1 HP (750 watt) motor running for eight hours a day or more.
I've never quite understood this statement. Why not strive for improvements in energy efficiency which will reduce expenses?
Energy efficiency is great, but it's not going to be the solution to global warming. What's likely to happen is that the cost savings from energy efficiency will result in more economic growth that, you guessed it, results in more energy use.
Reducing energy usage substantially will require fundamental changes to the Western, and particularly the American, way of life. Swapping your current SUV for a hybrid ain't enough. Housing will have to be rebuilt from the ground up. It'll have to be much smaller, and air conditioning will have to be reduced substantially. Private swimming pools will likely have to go. Consumer goods will have to be more expensive to be energy-efficient, and not nearly as luxurious - that room-sized fridge-freezer combo will have to go, as will that wall-sized plasma TV. Plane travel will have to become rarer - as well as chewing fuel, apparently contrails do have a not insubstantial effect on global warming.
And the above will all be pretty much in vain - because China and India will continue to grow quickly and burn lots of coal in the process.
In my view, the only practical solution is to find ways of getting energy that don't cause global warming. And we need to do something fairly dramatic right now. And nuclear is the only feasible option for that something.
How do you know that the algorithms aren't going to be weak for the same text pairs?
It's well known that encrypting twice doesn't always improve your security, so it wouldn't be surprising if hashing twice didn't always improve your security either.
The point I was trying to make is that Doom (at least the original Doom) was not about plot. It was about the novel sensation of running around in first person perspectivein the dark trying to kill monsters before they killed you. Remember the first time you wandered through a darkened warehouse and one of the bad guys got behind you? The scream, and the immediate 180 to a big closeup of some incredibly ugly piece of crap laying into you, sticks in your mind.
That was the essence of Doom, and the bit I'd love to see replicated on the big screen, not some random piece of crud "plot" that John Romero dreamed up the week before the release date.
From my brief impressions of the joint, the place was a complete cultural and recreational desert. Great if you want to make money and get the hell out, not much good for anything else.
Along those lines, are we spending more energy extracting the hydrogen from the water than we will be getting out of the whole scheme?
Whenever you convert energy from one form to another, you will always end up with less useful energy than you started with. Otherwise, you'd have a perpetual motion machine.
However, there are also considerable losses in transmitting electricity over the grid. There is the ability of hydrogen-powered fuel-cell cars to act as peak-power generators and remove the need for expensive extra generation capacity; given all that it might work out more economically efficient than the current grid if the losses from hydrogen production are not too large.
You're also missing another factor. Our current distributable, mobile, and convenient energy sources (crude oil derivatives) are an environmental disaster, have to be imported from nasty, unstable parts of the world, and are running out. So even if it's not super-efficient, if we can make hydrogen from non-fossil-fuel using energy sources with reasonable efficiency it might be a feasible alternative just as a mobile energy source.
Not that I'm arguing that they should be banned, but why the hell would you want one? Unless you're a soldier, cop, security guard, or some kind of "high-value target" (politician, judge in Columbia, in witness protection) I can't imagine a potential situation where you'd conceivably want one.
Do any Slashdotters actually own such a garment, and have you ever worn the thing other than for show ?
A substantial amount of research has been done on pornography dating as far back as the 1960's.
The trouble is that you can't do an experimental study that forces one randomly-selected group of people to watch pornography and another group to avoid it - well, you can, but only for a short period of time, and short-term reactions aren't really of great interest.
So you're left with quasi-experimental correlational-type studies. Say you wanted to show that watching porn causes people to spend too much time on Slashdot. You go to the local CS department, and get people to answer two questions : how much porn they watch and how much time they spend on Slashdot. You then do a correlation, and you find a strong connection between the two. You submit your findings to a conference,reporting your conclusion that porn causes excessive Slashdot-reading.
You go to the conference, present your paper. The room dissolves into fits of giggles. You assume that they're giggling because this is about porn, but you soon learn they're actually laughing at you. You've fallen for the oldest statistical fallacy in social science research - correlation implying causation. A young postdoc asks, "did you ask your participants whether they were single or had partners?". You didn't. Then it hits you - people who watched porn and spent lots of time on/. might have the time for both because they don't have partners...
So you redo your study, this time asking the participants for their relationship status. You use some slightly fancier factorial statistics to exclude the effect of relationship status. You still find a correlation. You go to the next conference. They laugh at you again. "Did you ask about the political views of your participants?", one rather middle-aged-hippie type from Berkeley asks. You're a bit puzzled by this, so you reply "No, why?". "Well, bear with me..." as they ramble on for a few minutes before getting to their point "...I remember from the old days; there were always a lot of libertarians who posted to USENET, maybe lots of them post to Slashdot, and libertarians aren't likely to have any moral objection to pornography. Have you considered this possibility"? To which you reply, "I'm afraid not".
This, repeated for about one million different factors, 900,000 of which aren't easily measured, is why these kind of controversial questions in the social sciences are so difficult to determine from the kinds of studies that are logistically and ethically feasible to do.
They had bugs...
on
Apollo 12 at 35
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The Apollo 11 landing was nearly aborted due to computer problems, according to this account which goes into some detail.
I love the bit where the writer describes the recommendation by the software engineer to ignore the reported errors as "a gutsy call". There's these guys, in a tiny little spacecraft, about to land on the moon, with most of the world watching, and the prestige of the USA and indeed democracy and capitalism at stake. The computer's screaming error messages. If you call for an abort, the moon effort is a flop (at least temporarily). If you call proceed and the thing craters, you're going to be the guy whose screwup killed two American heroes. "Gutsy"...more like balls of titanium!
We have some of the highest sales tax, the highest standards of living...
...and as other posters have pointed out, people are still moving there at a sufficient rate to inflate the property market to pretty outrageous levels. That suggests to me that maybe a race to the bottom in tax scales isn't the be-all and end-all of making a state a good place to do business.
The fact is, historically only TWO strategies have succeeded in ending terrorism: Genocide (Titus) and Surrender (Augustine).
That's not true. Might I point to the examples of, say the Malayan Emergency, or the reasonably successful Australian-led stabilisation operation in East Timor after their independence referendum (where you had a bunch of Indonesian-supported thugs wreaking havoc). Why did these operations succeed? By most reports, they did a lot better job of keeping the local populace on side.
Or, slightly more verbosely, we can't build a space elevator because we can't construct a strong enough "ribbon". Carbon nanotubes are theoretically strong enough, but nobody has yet reported a macroscopic piece of material made from them that has the required tensile strength. While there is a lot of nanotube research going on, there's no guarantee that the right materials will be available soon. There's no guarantee that such materials will ever be available.
Don't get me wrong, I sincerely hope that the space elevator can be built. But until I can hold, in my hand, the requisite bit of unobtanium with enough tensile strength, I'll stifle my excitement.
For instance, try the article on computer security. Last I checked, it's been hijacked by people who have a misconceived faith that capabilities are the be-all and end-all of every single security problem facing the IT world today. I would like to fix it, but it would take me a couple of weeks to properly research and write a quality replacement and there's plenty of other articles to write. Then you've got the fans of Konrad_Zuse who consistently overstate his importance to the development of the computer.
Finally, it's interesting you mention the Halting problem. IIRC, about a year ago somebody added a big section about reformulating "the halting problem in mathematics". It was almost incomprehensible. After checking with a few other editors I ended up removing the lot.
Are you trying to tell me that there are *more* "conservative" (they're really radicals) people Shrub could potentially appoint than Ashcroft?
Just how scary do your wingnuts get?
In any case, I don't know whether you were intending to but you've alluded to an interesting point. Justice Ashcroft anyone?
Sure, you got over the line. Just. But when you compare it with Clinton and Reagan (to pick the two most recent) the margin was tiny. As to the "biggest popular vote", guess who's number two in that list? You got it - John Kerry. The country's population continues to increase, funnily enough, and turnout for both sides was high this time.
Anyway, I don't give a toss. The US dollar is going to tank, massively, over the next couple of years. Your economy will be completely screwed. And no matter how hard you try, you won't be able to pin the blame on gays, Clinton's penis, or black people. The rest of the world will cry crocodile tears and happily divert their exports to China and India. And perhaps, finally, people like you will reconsider whether it was wise to hand the country over to such an incompetent party hack.
I don't simply mean 'keeping the antenna aligned' type stuff. I mean the actual physics/mechanics of this large spinning body that we don't have any experience in building and how to keep it from tearing itsself apart.
While you are right that we haven't built a large spinning spacecraft before, the physics of "not tearing itself apart" would seem to be breathtakingly simple. The rotation will apply a constant (magnitude) acceleration to the craft pulling it towards the center of rotation (which, if you go with a tether-counterweight design, is a point somewhere along the tether). That's what gives the sensation of gravity. There would also be Coriolis forces and whatnot, which I'm not competent to calculate but would be of much smaller magnitude.
In any case, calculating the stresses involved, and the structural strength required for the craft, would be an extremely simple exercise for any competent engineer. All the forces acting are extremely well-understood and easy to model.
Don't get me wrong, there would be challenges with this kind of artificial gravity, for instance:
Whether living in it for a substantial time (months) has health effects that we haven't anticipated.
How to deploy the counterweight and start the spin.
How to design a tether that won't break if it's hit by a micrometeorite.
How to change course while the system is spinning (not impossible, apparently, but it's not as straightforward as when you just fire one rocket in the required direction).
While none of the current NASA plans include artificial gravity, I don't see any evidence that they think it's infeasible. For instance, see this story about a student project in which they designed a mission where humans orbited, but did not land on, Mars. They used artificial gravity in their design. A guy from NASA reviewed their work, and, according to the story, said he believed that the design was feasible.
Gravity: We need gravity to keep our muscle mass and bones strong. Considering these astronauts will experience no gravity for six months each way I do not see how this will be possible. Life on the space station for this period of time can not be used as evidence that it is possible to for extended hibernation space travel. Astronauts on the space station spend hours each day exercising in order to delay the breakdown of muscle and bone. I don't think a manned mission to Mars will be possible until we can "create" gravity.
There are several possible ways around this:
Rotate the spacecraft. More to the point, attach your spacecraft to a counterweight (like the empty upper stage of the rocket you used to lift you off earth), and spin the system. Instant "gravity", add water and stir. Poses a few minor engineering difficulties (high data rate antennas need to follow the earth, getting the spin started, doing course corrections while keeping the tether taut etc) but it's certainly doable.
Do the trip faster. There are technologies available that could almost certainly be developed within your lifetime to do the trip much faster than present technologies. Aside from the 1950's-tech Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, which could certainly be developed but is unlikely to be politically acceptable, there are a number of things like ion drive and the recent Magbeam proposal on the drawing boards that could reduce the trip time in half at least.
As to the political will, these things can change very quickly. Imagine if China announced they were going to send a mission to Mars to claim it for China...
I'll agree with you, if nanotube guys can achieve one little thing first; I'd like them to actually
create macroscale pieces of nanotube of the requisite strength, and use them to construct a bridge over, say, the Cam River.
Until then, let's not throw away our space program on the basis of a pipedream.
So Knuth is the only open source developer to write his own code and thats freakish?
That's not what I meant at all. What I meant was by the comment that Knuth is a "freak" that Knuth is a freakishly talented individual. And, yes, Knuth's situation is pretty unique, even for open source developers. Not only does he have tenure (that means they can't sack him), because of his reputation he's able to spend his time doing pretty much whatever he wants to do free of the restrictions on ordinary academics, like that little thing, "teaching", or sweating over whether he's going to get published. So he could hack away at TeX as and when the mood took him, without any pressure from his boss to actually produce anything, or any users badgering him for a new release, or figuring out how the other developers had screwed up, or trying to implement broken bits of the standard (because there *was* no standard).
They are *not* the typical circumstances under which most developers have to work.
Sure, no one has found any bugs Knuth's TeX in years.
Knuth is a freak of nature who spent eight years writing a program on his own, largely for his own edification and completely free of commercial pressure. Few others have that freakish ability, fewer still get to work on their pet project by themselves for that long before offering it to the world. So there are limits to how many lessons can be drawn from this very unusual example.
I'm not sure that geeks and goths are all that opposite.
There's a fair overlap between the tastes of at least a certain subset of geeks and a certain subset of goths (or sort-of-goth) in terms of music, books, tv shows, and so on - they probably bump into each other at Buffy conventions and the like:) Both groups tend to have a dislike of the mainstream subculture - they may well have both suffered through high school.
And finally, goth girls seem to often be quite intelligent and worldly, and they seem to appreciate somebody they can have a decent conversation with. Most geek guys, if they can get over their shyness, can do that.
In Australia, you can buy an iRiver H320 (or the 40 gig 340 model), which can do exactly what you're asking for, and has a colour screen like the new ipod, has a built-in FM radio, and plays ogg files. Alternatively, the new iRiver pmp-120 (which also plays video) has the same abilities.
Of course, they don't support iTunes if that's a big deal for you...
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect it's going to be tough for them to avoid growing emissions as they continue to grow economically, now that they've done the easy stuff - at least, without using a lot of nuclear power.
If you're heating your pool with gas or electricity, we're talking thousands of dollars a year worth of gas in that alone. On top of that, there's the cost of runnning the filter. Typically, that involves a 1 HP (750 watt) motor running for eight hours a day or more.
I was going to use that example in my post, too. Ceasar cypher keys being a group and all :)
Energy efficiency is great, but it's not going to be the solution to global warming. What's likely to happen is that the cost savings from energy efficiency will result in more economic growth that, you guessed it, results in more energy use.
Reducing energy usage substantially will require fundamental changes to the Western, and particularly the American, way of life. Swapping your current SUV for a hybrid ain't enough. Housing will have to be rebuilt from the ground up. It'll have to be much smaller, and air conditioning will have to be reduced substantially. Private swimming pools will likely have to go. Consumer goods will have to be more expensive to be energy-efficient, and not nearly as luxurious - that room-sized fridge-freezer combo will have to go, as will that wall-sized plasma TV. Plane travel will have to become rarer - as well as chewing fuel, apparently contrails do have a not insubstantial effect on global warming.
And the above will all be pretty much in vain - because China and India will continue to grow quickly and burn lots of coal in the process.
In my view, the only practical solution is to find ways of getting energy that don't cause global warming. And we need to do something fairly dramatic right now. And nuclear is the only feasible option for that something.
It's well known that encrypting twice doesn't always improve your security, so it wouldn't be surprising if hashing twice didn't always improve your security either.
That was the essence of Doom, and the bit I'd love to see replicated on the big screen, not some random piece of crud "plot" that John Romero dreamed up the week before the release date.
Um, we're talking about Doom, right? What plot? From what I can recall the plot went something like "Demons. Bad. Kill them all."...
From my brief impressions of the joint, the place was a complete cultural and recreational desert. Great if you want to make money and get the hell out, not much good for anything else.
Whenever you convert energy from one form to another, you will always end up with less useful energy than you started with. Otherwise, you'd have a perpetual motion machine.
However, there are also considerable losses in transmitting electricity over the grid. There is the ability of hydrogen-powered fuel-cell cars to act as peak-power generators and remove the need for expensive extra generation capacity; given all that it might work out more economically efficient than the current grid if the losses from hydrogen production are not too large.
You're also missing another factor. Our current distributable, mobile, and convenient energy sources (crude oil derivatives) are an environmental disaster, have to be imported from nasty, unstable parts of the world, and are running out. So even if it's not super-efficient, if we can make hydrogen from non-fossil-fuel using energy sources with reasonable efficiency it might be a feasible alternative just as a mobile energy source.
Do any Slashdotters actually own such a garment, and have you ever worn the thing other than for show ?
The trouble is that you can't do an experimental study that forces one randomly-selected group of people to watch pornography and another group to avoid it - well, you can, but only for a short period of time, and short-term reactions aren't really of great interest.
So you're left with quasi-experimental correlational-type studies. Say you wanted to show that watching porn causes people to spend too much time on Slashdot. You go to the local CS department, and get people to answer two questions : how much porn they watch and how much time they spend on Slashdot. You then do a correlation, and you find a strong connection between the two. You submit your findings to a conference,reporting your conclusion that porn causes excessive Slashdot-reading.
You go to the conference, present your paper. The room dissolves into fits of giggles. You assume that they're giggling because this is about porn, but you soon learn they're actually laughing at you. You've fallen for the oldest statistical fallacy in social science research - correlation implying causation. A young postdoc asks, "did you ask your participants whether they were single or had partners?". You didn't. Then it hits you - people who watched porn and spent lots of time on /. might have the time for both because they don't have partners...
So you redo your study, this time asking the participants for their relationship status. You use some slightly fancier factorial statistics to exclude the effect of relationship status. You still find a correlation. You go to the next conference. They laugh at you again. "Did you ask about the political views of your participants?", one rather middle-aged-hippie type from Berkeley asks. You're a bit puzzled by this, so you reply "No, why?". "Well, bear with me..." as they ramble on for a few minutes before getting to their point "...I remember from the old days; there were always a lot of libertarians who posted to USENET, maybe lots of them post to Slashdot, and libertarians aren't likely to have any moral objection to pornography. Have you considered this possibility"? To which you reply, "I'm afraid not".
This, repeated for about one million different factors, 900,000 of which aren't easily measured, is why these kind of controversial questions in the social sciences are so difficult to determine from the kinds of studies that are logistically and ethically feasible to do.
I love the bit where the writer describes the recommendation by the software engineer to ignore the reported errors as "a gutsy call". There's these guys, in a tiny little spacecraft, about to land on the moon, with most of the world watching, and the prestige of the USA and indeed democracy and capitalism at stake. The computer's screaming error messages. If you call for an abort, the moon effort is a flop (at least temporarily). If you call proceed and the thing craters, you're going to be the guy whose screwup killed two American heroes. "Gutsy"...more like balls of titanium!
...and as other posters have pointed out, people are still moving there at a sufficient rate to inflate the property market to pretty outrageous levels. That suggests to me that maybe a race to the bottom in tax scales isn't the be-all and end-all of making a state a good place to do business.
That's not true. Might I point to the examples of, say the Malayan Emergency, or the reasonably successful Australian-led stabilisation operation in East Timor after their independence referendum (where you had a bunch of Indonesian-supported thugs wreaking havoc). Why did these operations succeed? By most reports, they did a lot better job of keeping the local populace on side.
Or, slightly more verbosely, we can't build a space elevator because we can't construct a strong enough "ribbon". Carbon nanotubes are theoretically strong enough, but nobody has yet reported a macroscopic piece of material made from them that has the required tensile strength. While there is a lot of nanotube research going on, there's no guarantee that the right materials will be available soon. There's no guarantee that such materials will ever be available.
Don't get me wrong, I sincerely hope that the space elevator can be built. But until I can hold, in my hand, the requisite bit of unobtanium with enough tensile strength, I'll stifle my excitement.
Finally, it's interesting you mention the Halting problem. IIRC, about a year ago somebody added a big section about reformulating "the halting problem in mathematics". It was almost incomprehensible. After checking with a few other editors I ended up removing the lot.
In any case, I don't know whether you were intending to but you've alluded to an interesting point. Justice Ashcroft anyone?
Anyway, I don't give a toss. The US dollar is going to tank, massively, over the next couple of years. Your economy will be completely screwed. And no matter how hard you try, you won't be able to pin the blame on gays, Clinton's penis, or black people. The rest of the world will cry crocodile tears and happily divert their exports to China and India. And perhaps, finally, people like you will reconsider whether it was wise to hand the country over to such an incompetent party hack.
While you are right that we haven't built a large spinning spacecraft before, the physics of "not tearing itself apart" would seem to be breathtakingly simple. The rotation will apply a constant (magnitude) acceleration to the craft pulling it towards the center of rotation (which, if you go with a tether-counterweight design, is a point somewhere along the tether). That's what gives the sensation of gravity. There would also be Coriolis forces and whatnot, which I'm not competent to calculate but would be of much smaller magnitude.
In any case, calculating the stresses involved, and the structural strength required for the craft, would be an extremely simple exercise for any competent engineer. All the forces acting are extremely well-understood and easy to model.
Don't get me wrong, there would be challenges with this kind of artificial gravity, for instance:
While none of the current NASA plans include artificial gravity, I don't see any evidence that they think it's infeasible. For instance, see this story about a student project in which they designed a mission where humans orbited, but did not land on, Mars. They used artificial gravity in their design. A guy from NASA reviewed their work, and, according to the story, said he believed that the design was feasible.
There are several possible ways around this:
As to the political will, these things can change very quickly. Imagine if China announced they were going to send a mission to Mars to claim it for China...
Until then, let's not throw away our space program on the basis of a pipedream.
That's not what I meant at all. What I meant was by the comment that Knuth is a "freak" that Knuth is a freakishly talented individual. And, yes, Knuth's situation is pretty unique, even for open source developers. Not only does he have tenure (that means they can't sack him), because of his reputation he's able to spend his time doing pretty much whatever he wants to do free of the restrictions on ordinary academics, like that little thing, "teaching", or sweating over whether he's going to get published. So he could hack away at TeX as and when the mood took him, without any pressure from his boss to actually produce anything, or any users badgering him for a new release, or figuring out how the other developers had screwed up, or trying to implement broken bits of the standard (because there *was* no standard).
They are *not* the typical circumstances under which most developers have to work.
Knuth is a freak of nature who spent eight years writing a program on his own, largely for his own edification and completely free of commercial pressure. Few others have that freakish ability, fewer still get to work on their pet project by themselves for that long before offering it to the world. So there are limits to how many lessons can be drawn from this very unusual example.
There's a fair overlap between the tastes of at least a certain subset of geeks and a certain subset of goths (or sort-of-goth) in terms of music, books, tv shows, and so on - they probably bump into each other at Buffy conventions and the like :) Both groups tend to have a dislike of the mainstream subculture - they may well have both suffered through high school.
And finally, goth girls seem to often be quite intelligent and worldly, and they seem to appreciate somebody they can have a decent conversation with. Most geek guys, if they can get over their shyness, can do that.
Anyway, that's my 2c...
Of course, they don't support iTunes if that's a big deal for you...