I've only heard it from tech press who are constantly cheerleading Tesla and Musk. I've questioned the number of Tesla stories on Slashdot before and been downvoted by fanboys, their marketing, sales methods, spats with journalists etc just aren't technology stories.
So you consider this news not "/. worthy"?
If there's one thing I've learn with Elon, it's that he's usually not joking about his "project". Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, Solarcity, the battery gigafactory and now even Hyperloop is becoming more and more real.
I think that the guy earned his right to have an article in/. about his new electric VTOL jet aircraft concept.
It seems since our new Slashlords have taken over there have only been 1 in 10 stores about the great Elon. WTF Timmy? Work harder.
Yeah! And let's stop those repetitive posting about Linux altogether, we have enough of them already!/sarcasm
More seriously though, why are you complaining? A quick search of the tag "x elonmusk" show about 1 story per week. Furthermore, I'm very interested to follow those space launch and rocket engineering kinda fall into the spirit of/. afaik.
Doesn't really matter. When you hit your supply limits, you can only increase efficiency.
Fission is going to become the new oil eventually. It's a limited resource. Hydrogen less so, but no guarantee that we'll be able to do that efficiently on a containable scale.
"Deuterium can be extracted from water and tritium is produced from lithium, which is found in the earth's crust. Fuel supplies will therefore last for millions of years."
Of course, we'll need a better energy source than coal or oil if we eventually want to become completely green.
Coal and oil are both incredibly energy dense. To be self-sustaining, you'll need to use less energy more than you need to find a better power source.
Human population of growing. So no matter how efficient you become, like recycling you're only delaying the problem.
Generation IV nuclear fission power plan, nuclear fusion power plant or even space-based solar power are all green alternative that could be available within the century.
It may look like an economical disaster now, but this if our future. The way humanity grows, we won't be able to feed the world for another century (if I'm wrong, let's say two centuries then, doesn't matter). There's a lot of confusion about the scientific research of the environmental impact of the food production (especially meat production) but it seems far from negligible.
I've saw a Swiss design a few years ago about a self-sufficient farm skyscraper design that could produce food for 10k people. This sort of tech allows us to grow food without pesticide, without razing forest, use a lot less water and could be used anywhere on earth. Of course, we'll need a better energy source than coal or oil if we eventually want to become completely green.
Or course, it won't slow much the deforestation and we're likely to raze everything before we start building those type of factory but I won't mind if we start sooner.
If you wanted to bring example of great France war story to counter-attack about prank about the white flag, why did you skip Napoleon?
An absolutely annihilated 6 of the 7 coalition again France. That's similar, but not comparable to, six WWII won in a span of 20 years. It is no small feat. And, toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars, there was an order in the coalition to not engage and retreat if they meet an army that Napoleon lead.
Most history enthusiast today only remember his major flaw in the invasion of Russia, but putting that aside, he could be considered the greatest military mind of history.
Just a little thought, why does the network that control of a nuclear facility need to be connected to the internet? I'm not saying it should be unplugged, but why they couldn't simply make two separate network? One for computer, the other to control the facility.
There is a reason for the quote: Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Wrong, Brooks' law doesn't apply here and you're completely missing the point.
Brooks' law is about work parallelization. It mean that if it take 100 hours for a worker to do a project, 2 workers won't necessarily make it in 50 hours and that 100 worker will certainly not make it in 1 hour.
Here's a good example on how statistic work in this case:
You have a test that got 1% chance to detect a disease and you want to test how many people have it. You make the test on a million person and you got 10 positive result. The conclusion is that, statically, 10 000 got the disease out of the million, not 10.
Your statement is true only if you are 100% confident that you'll detect 100% of the planet by scanning a star for X time. Which isn't the case here.
If you simplified to a 2d world then we should be able to see every single planet.
As I said, I've made my example 2D so simplify my explanation but 3D isn't much harder (see below)
So if you scan 72000 stars and found 4 planets, you can make the assumption that there are 4 planets out of 72000 stars.
Wrong, plain wrong.
You have a test that got 1% chance to detect a disease and you want to test how many people have it. You make the test on a million person and you got 10 positive result. The conclusion is that, statically, 10 000 got the disease out of the million, not 10.
Your statement is true only if you are 100% confident that you'll detect 100% of the planet by scanning a star for X time. Which isn't the case here.
Not only is the sample size ridiculously low to make such conclusions, but in a 2d universe given the longest orbital period's worth of observation you should be able to see every planet pass a star at some point.
I assume you're basing your figures on a single instant of observation rather than the longest concievably defined galactic year. Realistically we would have to compromise somewhere in between.
The make a precise statistical deduction of Jupiter-class planet, all you need is the odd of you detecting the planet when it pass by it's star and the odd that the planet pass by it's star during the X time you're looking at it.
The first depend on many factor out of my knowledge like distortion between us and the star that will either erase the signal or add false positive.
The second is mostly 3D space calculation where you need the distance between you and the star, the size of the star, the odd that the orbit if it's planet pass between us so you could get what are the % of time that the planet is visible during it's orbit. For instance, for 360 degree orbit, you can only see the planet for 0.01 degree. In this case, the orbital period (be either 12 years or a few month) is irrelevant but could affect the first factor.
But neither one of us has the slightest clue what they're talking about, I assure you that.
It's rather premature to declare all those systems devoid of planets when our primary means for detecting possible planets is when they pass between our planet and their star at the same time we observe them. Jupiter takes 12 years to make an orbit. As a simple logic problem, that means that we have to one opportunity to observe Jupiter passing between Sol and some sort of earth-analog in another system.... and that makes the HUGE assumption that that earth-analog is aligned with the solar system's orbital plane. If the earth analog happens to be staring down north-south on Sol, it isn't going to detect any planets.
There are a few other ways to detect planets, but those are special cases, again, very rare, and detecting very unique planets.
Detecting Sol-like systems is still extremely difficult.
Well unless the scientist working on this are total moron, you can quite easily do some statistic analysis to guess the number of Jupiter-like planet in other planetary system even with those complication . Here's a quick example. Let's suppose the world is in 2D and make every orbit are perfectly round to simplify things. A planet have a 360 orbit and let's say we can only see the planet for 0.01 (so 1/36000) of their orbit with 100% accuracy. So if you scan 72000 star and find 4 planets, you can then make the assumption that there's 2 gas planet per planetary system on average.
Because it's data. On Slashdot, data doesn't matter. Only being in agreement with the prevailing wisdom will earn you mod points.
Now fuck off, you obvious M$ $hill.
I'm a new guy in that company so I have nothing to do with the choice of OS installed on our systems. And it wasn't really different on other company I've worked for. My point was simply that MS is still heavily used in business but oh well, fuck me I'll go grab my M$ check now.
(Not really. All you really just did is make us all wonder why you are wasting our time here on Slashdot rather than going somewhere where you might belong.)
I don't get it. I just got hired in a little SME and I've found that all system work on MS product. Oh well, fuck me I guess.
To the guy that down-voted me, I wonder why you did it.
The guy said that windows was only for gaming and I took the time to scan the OS of every machine in our SME and found out they were all running Microsoft product. How is this irrelevant?
The only people I know who still use Windows only use it for gaming. Otherwise, they either have a Mac or use Linux. On the server side, it's been Linux for more than a decade now.
Hmm interesting. Let's look at the system of our SME.
PCs : Windows 7 and 10 File Server : Windows Server Database management system : Microsoft SQL Server Internal Web server : Microsoft SharePoint The drive OS of our Industrial Robot : Windows Embedded Their HMI : Look like Windows XP but I'm not sure The HMI of our industrial equipment : Look like an old Windows Embedded SMT : Windows XP and 7 (Not sure if embedded or not).
I really tried to help you and find a single linux OS somewhere but all I was able to find was Android cellphone or Rasbian on some Raspberry Pi of our R&D department. I asked our IT guy (a firm Linux user) and there's nothing running on linux here. Oh yeah and our president is using a iPad.
I believe in optimism, but think that the problems are enormous. Scenes from movies are not solutions, and no one is building self sustaining cities or story towers for everyone else out of good will alone.
I'm also all for extending life and eradicating disease, but we have a lot of issues to work out.
As for covering the planet, that is a horrible thought.
"I hear the directors of Genetic Control have been buying all the
properties that have recently been sold, taking risks oh so bold.
It's said now that people will be shorter in height,
they can fit twice as many in the same building site."
- Genesis (Peter Gabriel, Anthony Banks, Phil Collins, Steven Hackett and Michael Rutherford)
Funny that you criticize my reference in a movie but use a reference from a song yourself in the same post. And to be clear here, I've used that reference to illustrate my thoughts, they weren't based on it. And no matter how we hate it, it's probably where we're heading unless humanity get wiped out.
As for saving the world on goodwill. No but money is. And when, in the future, we'll reach the limit of traditional farming while the demand continue to grow, the consequence will be the grow of the value of food. And when this will happen, those "pricey food tower building" will become a lot more interesting for investors.
In my mind, the real problem is the energy production. If humanity continue to grow, we'll need better (and cleaner) way to produce a "lot" of energy. I have my hope on fusion and/or solar space station, but it's a long shot.
About this, I'll bring one of my answer to a similar statement about the fear of overpopulation.
I actually want to start this argument.
What is the problem with "overpopulation" How do you define it?
Is a planet overpopulated because we can't produce enough food for everyone? About this, here's a conceptual 21th centory farming tower : http://www.popsci.com/cliff-ku...
With this, you can produce food for 50k people with a 30 story tower. So, unless I make a huge mistake somewhere, it's untrue that the earth can only produce food for 10 or so billion people.
Or is it the pollution and the destruction of the nature? I am going to say something really sad here, but will humanity really need nature to survive in the 22th century? A good image is the planet Coruscant from the Star Wars franchise, the planet is one big city, nothing else. Yeah it's sad and I love nature too, but there's tech to remove our dependency of mother nature.
Or is it the pollution and the global warming? Well, there is something to be worried. But I'm a optimist one. The reason why we are slow to fight global warming is mostly an economical one. But guess what, one of the first city to drown will be New York with a estimated GMP over a trillion dollars. So I think that, soon enough, there'll suddenly a lot more money available to fight global warming (Well, "soon" is a long shot since the sea is rising a few millimetres each years). And I also have faith in new green tech on the way to help us out.
I don't get what you mean. What does eternal oblivion before birth have to do with this? I was in oblivion before birth so I should embrace it?
Well, it wasn't so bad the last time around, was it?
It wasn't so bad? I didn't existed. I didn't have any happy moment. I didn't learn new stuff. I didn't meet new people. So no, I'm not in a hurry to go back there.
Slashdot Mirror
I've only heard it from tech press who are constantly cheerleading Tesla and Musk. I've questioned the number of Tesla stories on Slashdot before and been downvoted by fanboys, their marketing, sales methods, spats with journalists etc just aren't technology stories.
So you consider this news not "/. worthy"?
If there's one thing I've learn with Elon, it's that he's usually not joking about his "project". Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, Solarcity, the battery gigafactory and now even Hyperloop is becoming more and more real.
I think that the guy earned his right to have an article in /. about his new electric VTOL jet aircraft concept.
It seems since our new Slashlords have taken over there have only been 1 in 10 stores about the great Elon. WTF Timmy? Work harder.
Yeah! And let's stop those repetitive posting about Linux altogether, we have enough of them already! /sarcasm
More seriously though, why are you complaining? A quick search of the tag "x elonmusk" show about 1 story per week. Furthermore, I'm very interested to follow those space launch and rocket engineering kinda fall into the spirit of /. afaik.
they are reportedly moving the factory from 6-8 cores produced per year to 18 at present, and expect to reach 30 by the end of the year
Hooray for more space junk!
And since when this is a problem?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=R0PYe-4090g
Hmm...what is that?
Oh wait, nevermind you were talking about fission, not fusion.
Doesn't really matter. When you hit your supply limits, you can only increase efficiency.
Fission is going to become the new oil eventually. It's a limited resource. Hydrogen less so, but no guarantee that we'll be able to do that efficiently on a containable scale.
From http://www.ccfe.ac.uk/introduc...
"Deuterium can be extracted from water and tritium is produced from lithium, which is found in the earth's crust. Fuel supplies will therefore last for millions of years."
Of course, we'll need a better energy source than coal or oil if we eventually want to become completely green.
Coal and oil are both incredibly energy dense. To be self-sustaining, you'll need to use less energy more than you need to find a better power source.
Human population of growing. So no matter how efficient you become, like recycling you're only delaying the problem.
Generation IV nuclear fission power plan, nuclear fusion power plant or even space-based solar power are all green alternative that could be available within the century.
Yah! We can start talking about space elevator again!
I love news like this one.
It may look like an economical disaster now, but this if our future. The way humanity grows, we won't be able to feed the world for another century (if I'm wrong, let's say two centuries then, doesn't matter). There's a lot of confusion about the scientific research of the environmental impact of the food production (especially meat production) but it seems far from negligible.
I've saw a Swiss design a few years ago about a self-sufficient farm skyscraper design that could produce food for 10k people. This sort of tech allows us to grow food without pesticide, without razing forest, use a lot less water and could be used anywhere on earth. Of course, we'll need a better energy source than coal or oil if we eventually want to become completely green.
Or course, it won't slow much the deforestation and we're likely to raze everything before we start building those type of factory but I won't mind if we start sooner.
If you wanted to bring example of great France war story to counter-attack about prank about the white flag, why did you skip Napoleon?
An absolutely annihilated 6 of the 7 coalition again France. That's similar, but not comparable to, six WWII won in a span of 20 years. It is no small feat. And, toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars, there was an order in the coalition to not engage and retreat if they meet an army that Napoleon lead.
Most history enthusiast today only remember his major flaw in the invasion of Russia, but putting that aside, he could be considered the greatest military mind of history.
So much fails in this one single post.
To me space will become nothing more then a expensive tourist trap. The one percent will have another reason to spend their money.
So you prefer that they kept their money in bank? I tough that one of the problem with 1%er is that they doesn't spend enough money.
I have yet to read a practical use for these private space ventures except for supplying the Space station which SpaceX has obtained that contract.
Here's one reason. But I could name you a dozen over the top of my head (Tourism, mining, electricity production, telecom, science etc.) that could become feasible if SpaceX achieve to offer commercial space flight for a fraction of the actual price.
Otherwise none of these space ventures seem important in space exploration.
Yeah, money is clearly not a factor for space exploration.
They are just rich guys with a fantasy for space. Giving wealthy people a thrill ride is not space exploration.
Really? Rich guy are the only one interested in SpaceX news because of space tourism?
Huh? Were you thinking of stowing away in the Falcon's first stage?
Huh? Ohhhh!! So that's why I've been failing all my space tourism mission in Kerbal Space Program so far.
Just a little thought, why does the network that control of a nuclear facility need to be connected to the internet? I'm not saying it should be unplugged, but why they couldn't simply make two separate network? One for computer, the other to control the facility.
Am I missing something?
So, 9 women can produce 1 baby in 1 month?
There is a reason for the quote: Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Wrong, Brooks' law doesn't apply here and you're completely missing the point.
Brooks' law is about work parallelization. It mean that if it take 100 hours for a worker to do a project, 2 workers won't necessarily make it in 50 hours and that 100 worker will certainly not make it in 1 hour.
Here's a good example on how statistic work in this case :
You have a test that got 1% chance to detect a disease and you want to test how many people have it. You make the test on a million person and you got 10 positive result. The conclusion is that, statically, 10 000 got the disease out of the million, not 10.
Your statement is true only if you are 100% confident that you'll detect 100% of the planet by scanning a star for X time. Which isn't the case here.
I hope so.
If you simplified to a 2d world then we should be able to see every single planet.
As I said, I've made my example 2D so simplify my explanation but 3D isn't much harder (see below)
So if you scan 72000 stars and found 4 planets, you can make the assumption that there are 4 planets out of 72000 stars.
Wrong, plain wrong.
You have a test that got 1% chance to detect a disease and you want to test how many people have it. You make the test on a million person and you got 10 positive result. The conclusion is that, statically, 10 000 got the disease out of the million, not 10.
Your statement is true only if you are 100% confident that you'll detect 100% of the planet by scanning a star for X time. Which isn't the case here.
Not only is the sample size ridiculously low to make such conclusions, but in a 2d universe given the longest orbital period's worth of observation you should be able to see every planet pass a star at some point.
I assume you're basing your figures on a single instant of observation rather than the longest concievably defined galactic year. Realistically we would have to compromise somewhere in between.
The make a precise statistical deduction of Jupiter-class planet, all you need is the odd of you detecting the planet when it pass by it's star and the odd that the planet pass by it's star during the X time you're looking at it.
The first depend on many factor out of my knowledge like distortion between us and the star that will either erase the signal or add false positive.
The second is mostly 3D space calculation where you need the distance between you and the star, the size of the star, the odd that the orbit if it's planet pass between us so you could get what are the % of time that the planet is visible during it's orbit. For instance, for 360 degree orbit, you can only see the planet for 0.01 degree. In this case, the orbital period (be either 12 years or a few month) is irrelevant but could affect the first factor.
But neither one of us has the slightest clue what they're talking about, I assure you that.
Er... no you cannot.
It's rather premature to declare all those systems devoid of planets when our primary means for detecting possible planets is when they pass between our planet and their star at the same time we observe them. Jupiter takes 12 years to make an orbit. As a simple logic problem, that means that we have to one opportunity to observe Jupiter passing between Sol and some sort of earth-analog in another system.... and that makes the HUGE assumption that that earth-analog is aligned with the solar system's orbital plane. If the earth analog happens to be staring down north-south on Sol, it isn't going to detect any planets.
There are a few other ways to detect planets, but those are special cases, again, very rare, and detecting very unique planets.
Detecting Sol-like systems is still extremely difficult.
Well unless the scientist working on this are total moron, you can quite easily do some statistic analysis to guess the number of Jupiter-like planet in other planetary system even with those complication . Here's a quick example. Let's suppose the world is in 2D and make every orbit are perfectly round to simplify things. A planet have a 360 orbit and let's say we can only see the planet for 0.01 (so 1/36000) of their orbit with 100% accuracy. So if you scan 72000 star and find 4 planets, you can then make the assumption that there's 2 gas planet per planetary system on average.
Am I missing something?
Yes build a factory, in a desert where there is no water. What are they thinking?
Yeah, make me wonder why Las Vegas didn't die from thirst. Oh wait......booze!
Because it's data. On Slashdot, data doesn't matter. Only being in agreement with the prevailing wisdom will earn you mod points.
Now fuck off, you obvious M$ $hill.
I'm a new guy in that company so I have nothing to do with the choice of OS installed on our systems. And it wasn't really different on other company I've worked for. My point was simply that MS is still heavily used in business but oh well, fuck me I'll go grab my M$ check now.
Cool Anecdote bro!
(Not really. All you really just did is make us all wonder why you are wasting our time here on Slashdot rather than going somewhere where you might belong.)
I don't get it. I just got hired in a little SME and I've found that all system work on MS product. Oh well, fuck me I guess.
To the guy that down-voted me, I wonder why you did it.
The guy said that windows was only for gaming and I took the time to scan the OS of every machine in our SME and found out they were all running Microsoft product. How is this irrelevant?
The only people I know who still use Windows only use it for gaming. Otherwise, they either have a Mac or use Linux. On the server side, it's been Linux for more than a decade now.
Hmm interesting. Let's look at the system of our SME.
PCs : Windows 7 and 10
File Server : Windows Server
Database management system : Microsoft SQL Server
Internal Web server : Microsoft SharePoint
The drive OS of our Industrial Robot : Windows Embedded
Their HMI : Look like Windows XP but I'm not sure
The HMI of our industrial equipment : Look like an old Windows Embedded
SMT : Windows XP and 7 (Not sure if embedded or not).
I really tried to help you and find a single linux OS somewhere but all I was able to find was Android cellphone or Rasbian on some Raspberry Pi of our R&D department. I asked our IT guy (a firm Linux user) and there's nothing running on linux here. Oh yeah and our president is using a iPad.
I believe in optimism, but think that the problems are enormous. Scenes from movies are not solutions, and no one is building self sustaining cities or story towers for everyone else out of good will alone.
I'm also all for extending life and eradicating disease, but we have a lot of issues to work out.
As for covering the planet, that is a horrible thought.
"I hear the directors of Genetic Control have been buying all the
properties that have recently been sold, taking risks oh so bold.
It's said now that people will be shorter in height,
they can fit twice as many in the same building site."
- Genesis (Peter Gabriel, Anthony Banks, Phil Collins, Steven Hackett and Michael Rutherford)
Funny that you criticize my reference in a movie but use a reference from a song yourself in the same post. And to be clear here, I've used that reference to illustrate my thoughts, they weren't based on it. And no matter how we hate it, it's probably where we're heading unless humanity get wiped out.
As for saving the world on goodwill. No but money is. And when, in the future, we'll reach the limit of traditional farming while the demand continue to grow, the consequence will be the grow of the value of food. And when this will happen, those "pricey food tower building" will become a lot more interesting for investors.
In my mind, the real problem is the energy production. If humanity continue to grow, we'll need better (and cleaner) way to produce a "lot" of energy. I have my hope on fusion and/or solar space station, but it's a long shot.
Overpopulation + 1?
About this, I'll bring one of my answer to a similar statement about the fear of overpopulation.
I actually want to start this argument.
What is the problem with "overpopulation" How do you define it?
Is a planet overpopulated because we can't produce enough food for everyone? About this, here's a conceptual 21th centory farming tower : http://www.popsci.com/cliff-ku...
With this, you can produce food for 50k people with a 30 story tower. So, unless I make a huge mistake somewhere, it's untrue that the earth can only produce food for 10 or so billion people.
Or is it the pollution and the destruction of the nature? I am going to say something really sad here, but will humanity really need nature to survive in the 22th century? A good image is the planet Coruscant from the Star Wars franchise, the planet is one big city, nothing else. Yeah it's sad and I love nature too, but there's tech to remove our dependency of mother nature.
Or is it the pollution and the global warming? Well, there is something to be worried. But I'm a optimist one. The reason why we are slow to fight global warming is mostly an economical one. But guess what, one of the first city to drown will be New York with a estimated GMP over a trillion dollars. So I think that, soon enough, there'll suddenly a lot more money available to fight global warming (Well, "soon" is a long shot since the sea is rising a few millimetres each years). And I also have faith in new green tech on the way to help us out.
So no, I'm not in a hurry to go back there.
Well, you will someday. Enjoy.
How incredibly sweet of you /sarcasm
Nah, that was a resentful comment.
I don't get what you mean. What does eternal oblivion before birth have to do with this? I was in oblivion before birth so I should embrace it?
Well, it wasn't so bad the last time around, was it?
It wasn't so bad? I didn't existed. I didn't have any happy moment. I didn't learn new stuff. I didn't meet new people. So no, I'm not in a hurry to go back there.