The colour distortions NTSC and PAL suffer from on high frequency luminance changes are interesting and a fascinating insight into the world before digital. Every geek should IMO understand this because it's interesting and cool and easy to understand. I'll try and simplify the explanation...
The artefact in question results from a colour (analogue) TV trying to display a picture where the luminance (brightness to you and I) changes rapidly, i.e. with a high frequency. Viewers of old will be used to people with stripy shirts suddenly and stragely developing psychedelic colour patterns. Why do you get them? That's the interesting part:
When NTSC was devised they had to design a system that was backwards compatible i.e. used the same bandwidth to transmit a colour signal. Worse than that they had to have the signal such that the colour signal would be interpreted by a B&W receiver as a B&W image correctly. So what they did was look at the signal and realise that although the bandwidth allocated allowed for rapid luminance changes, no set at the time (in domestic usage anyway) was capable of displaying them. Therefore they could transmit a high frequency signal on top of the luminance signal that existing sets would filter out, they would act like a low pass filter, and average it out back to the original signal. They could therefore superimpose a high frequency signal on top of the old luminance only signal. Now, how to carry information with this signal? Well you kept the frequency of this superimposition constant but you could vary both its amplitude and its phase* relative to a reference signal. This combined with some maths behind luminance and chrominance processing (wikipedia is your friend here) meant that you had good old luminance information for old sets, and two colour components that could be extracted by a compliant set, but would be ignored by older sets. Now where the artefact in question comes from should now be obvious, a high frequency luminance change looks indistinguishable from no intensity change with a certain colour information. The system was designed to minimise these, but they had to happen at least slightly. As TV sets and studio cameras have improved over the years there have become more of these artefacts as we have got better at displaying fine detail, so what wasn't a problem now shows the limits of the system.
If you want information about how the colour reference signal was sent or to explain more please do ask, PAL and NTSC are one of my favourite geeky subjects. It's engineering from an almost forgotten era and a sign of just how clever some engineers are/were.
*The difference between phase modulation and frequency modulation are somewhat academic for the purposes of this discussion, let's just say that phase modulation makes more sense because we have a reference waveform to compare it to.
Why yes I can post pictures on the internet that are taken on private premises where there is an expectation of privacy and then bitch when someone else who has no right to be on that property does similar. Okay to take an example at the far end. I post some pictures from a particularly wild party on the internet. Someone else trespasses on the party and takes some pictures that maybe are similar maybe they're not, it doesn't matter. They had no right to be there or to take those photos so they should have no right to publish them and doing so would be an invasion of privacy. Can we at least agree on that? After that it's a matter of degrees of how similar the photos are which a court of law might find that in this case it's so similar it's as good as no difference, but to simply state that you have published photos of this house on the internet therefore you have no right to privacy to photos of that house is lunacy.
I'm happy that as always half the point of a court of law is the question of where do you draw the line. Take another example, If I publish photos of me on the internet then why should I care if someone else does so? Why am I different from a house in this respect? Actually it turns out I'm not if you take a photo of me while you are in a public place then there's nothing I can do about it. It's only on private property that you normally have a leg to stand on. So why the difference here?
Why one law for copyright though and one for privacy? Yes I have many blog posts online that anyone can read. If google printed a book of my blog posts and started selling said book then I'd be rightly annoyed. Why is this any different? Actually no it's worse than that; it's as if I had my blog posts behind a registered users site that you had to log in to access and google then went and copied my information under their terms.
So all they need to up their rate of production is put them through a transformer.
Checking the local electronics catalogue they're only a few $ for one that will give me 100V from 10V so it looks like I have their production problems solved!
Long distance power transmission is almost always DC for a number of reasons The first of these is are in DC there are no induction losses. The alternating current along transmission lines will inductively couple to each other and provide a loss in a similar manner to the crosstalk you get in everything from digital circuits to audio cables. DC just doesn't lose power this way.
AC is great for easy step up and step down in voltage, but it has a number of problems. In a transmission system you have two main limits, the maximum voltage you can use (limited by insulators used) and the I^2R losses in the cabling. Let's first assume no resistive losses or at least that you're not limited by heat loss: For a given cable and insulators you can therefore either run e.g. 1000V DC or 1000V AC Remember though that the AC is 1000V peak so the actual RMS voltage is effectively 1/sqrt(2) so 707V. Therefore for a given cable and insulator pair AC can carry less power. The only way to reduce the I^2R losses is to run at higher voltages where currents required are less so DC will always be superior here provided your inverter technology is sufficiently efficient. Which for lengths of more than about 20km starts to happen.
What was true for the electrical systems of 20 years ago never mind back in the days of Edison is no longer the case, the AC vs DC situation is not as simple as it used to be.
I think of Christian fundamentalism as an interesting meme. Like a disease that can flourish in a healthy host only so long as that host is healthy. As soon as times get hard again maybe reality will bite and those who ignore reality and instead choose the world they invented will have a harsh lesson in reality.
It seems like a historical certainty as soon as a population becomes rich and powerful, they become decadent and ignore what made them strong in the first place. In ancient Rome the decadence took the form of orgies and politics at the expense of the military(to use a cliché), perhaps in the US the decadence takes the form of belief at the expense of the science and engineering that made America so powerful. It's all very sad really but at least this time around we shouldn't lose any knowledge in the fall that happens when reality kicks in.
But this is kind of the problem. Elections that happen in Europe don't affect you very much. Over in Europe however the elections you have in the States affect us greatly yet we have no say in them.
At least that's kind of how it seems when I see someone like JWB being elected...
"Forests naturally deal with fire quite well thank you" Agreed, but that's not the point the gp was trying to make. The average stable forest isn't the o2 source or co2 sink that some environmentalists would have you think. Only by removing matter from the forest and using it/burying it where it won't rot will it sequester co2 thereby reducing humanity's effect. The point being a stable forest releases co2 from wood rotting or being burnt. If it absorbed co2, then its mass would constantly increase. What is actually happening in a stable forest is that there is an almost perfect balance and therefore a healthy stable forest is more or less carbon neutral.
Now if you were to occasionally cut down the wood and put it to other uses (e.g. housing or tables as gp mentions) and allow new growth, then you have a co2 capturing scheme. If you cut it down and build concrete buildings in it's place or just let it turn to desert/scrubland then you're the human race and deserve what you'll get...
And this is a problem why? Your current company is not you. You are you. Why can't you get a job in the next rocket company? If it gets the contract it will need to expand so why not go to them with the contract?
Which is why - off the top of my head - there are 6 igniter circuits, 5 detonators per srb (only 1 is needed to do the job) and quadruple redundant control electronics. This is why man-rating a rocket is HARD and why these things take such a large workforce to run.
What is family friendly for you is family unfriendly for me. I like the idea of children being educated about life before they experience it. Who are they to say what is family friendly? Who is anyone? Can i specify that I'd rather they hid violence from children than sex?
You're also forgetting the effect of pride. Let's assume Show A was started by executive A. He is moderately successful and moves on to a different job - from what I hear they move around a lot. Show A is still finding its audience when executive B shows up and is put in charge. If show A is successful then executive B looks bad because it is his predecessor's show. If he outright cancels it then he looks petty. So what does he do? Simple move it around all over the schedule so that it can never find its audience. Or get in touch with a friendly accountant to make it look as if it is losing money. Then it's just the numbers Likewise if his daughter really likes show B (even if it is mindless trash) then he can move it into a better timeslot, get big name guest stars to appear, give it better publicity bigger budget, all things that will help catch a bigger audience.
I don't think these people are evil, but their motivation is not to produce the best TV it's to give the impression they're doing a good job so they get promoted. If that can be done by taking a crappy nothing show and vastly increasing the ratings by correct investment then i believe they would do it. But with all these things it's the lowest common denominator that wins and the only thing we can do is support the shows and encourage other people to watch good shows, and ideally buy the box sets.
See I kind of likened it to you don't destroy the last small pox virus sample that you have. I assumed that the grand plan was that they were basically frelling around with the humans, keeping them busy, keeping them running, but keeping them contained. All the emo religious rubbish was just a double bluff to lead humans into thinking the wrong things and keeping galactica confident so that they were manipulatable.
"The problem with allowing gravity control is that the same technology required for artificial gravity also gives a reactionless drive." In a short story i wrote quite a while ago there was a technology where you could make a small singularity. The deck plating therefore had dozens of these black holes per meter and therefore you had gravity. yes it was a little lumpy as the field from one hole mereged with another and there was a noticable gravity gradient (tidal forces from the crew's head to toe). But control of gravity none the less this then gave you a reall weird ship layout where you would have the floor of one room adjacent to the floor of the room below it (if you can picture that) They could also create a much large singularity at the front of the ship to cancel out the acceleration forces under hard acceleration - removing the need for g couches.
However there is no way you could use this technology as a reactionless drive that I could think of.
Ok it was a bad short story because hawking radiation would kill the crew, but the idea was there...
How can we be sure what is in the public's interest? Why isn't it in the public interest that people's past are no longer hidden in mystery(as long as it applies to everyone)? I'm quite serious that yes I have tried to re-invent myself over the years and to some extent have succeeded but I don't understand why people want to try and hide from their past.
I know that some information should remain confidential, medical conditions, bank details, conversations about proposed purchases etc but I can't think of any information that I count as confidential that I would post anywhere online (i.e. blogs, facebook, twitter etc)
Now I grant you that information like DOB, mother's maiden name can be used for ID theft but that has been a poor security model for a very long time. I mean really who keeps their birthday a secret? It will never and hasn't for centuries been a secret what someone's parents are called so the problem isn't the problem of someone joining up the dots or the fact that the information is out there - it always has been. Making something more convenient is not a problem it's called progress. The fact that progress exposes the flaw in what you've been doing all this time is your problem no anyone else's.
Now if you want to talk about dystopian futures where some have the power to watch over the citizens and some don't then I'm right there terrified of the government with you. If we have a society though where everyone watches the watchers because everyone is the watcher then I'm much less worried and in fact think it would be a great boon. Take for example universal CCTV - very very frightening when only the police/select few have access to it. They could pick and choose segments to order to frame people. If however everyone had access to everything that was CCTV'd in a public place and there were appropriate SW tools to help people search and catalogue it then provided everyone has access then I believe you are less open to being abused/framed not more. I believe the same applies with online privacy, the more information is out there and the better the average person can connect the dots themselves then the better and safer we all are.
Hang on, what happened to the Geek's warcry of "Information wants to be free"?
So the big problem here is that if you have ever been an idiot or done something you'd rather forget then either you or one of your friends will purposely or accidentally post it on the internet in a way that can be linked back to you. I think like the record companies cannot put the genie of digital music/mp3s/filesharing back ion the bottle we as a society can't put all of personal privacy back in the bottle without also losing personal freedom. Unless you want draconian laws restricting information - which I thought was the antithesis of the internet - then we have to accept that if we do embarrassing stuff in public then that will stick with us. But that's no different from real life, if while drunk I told my best friend's wife I thought she was hot then that will stay with me for the rest of my life too. The difference is strangers/employers can get that information too, but remember they can do it for everyone so the lesson for me here is not to not make mistakes but to make less mistakes than the next guy and to learn from those lessons sooner. That said I wouldn't want to employ someone who didn't have a good time at University, If they didn't know how to have a party and relax then I'd be concerned they were a well rounded person. So seeing photos of someone drunk off their face could well help you if you met me interviewing you. The door swings both ways...
Last figures I saw for the UK had transport consuming approximately as much energy as electricity and domestic heating combined. So I'd say your estimates at number of new power plants is about right that you'd need approximately double the number of power plants if you want them to supply transport and electric.
Why is this a bad thing though? What's wring with getting rid of the power plants from under the hood and putting them together into a more efficient centrally managed resource?
Oh and energy consumption wise, averaged over the nation it doesn't matter if you trickle charge the car over a 24 hour period or charge it in a nanosecond, assuming constant efficiency for both methods the number of power stations needed is the same. The goal here is to get the power source from a gas burner under the hood to central/renewables generation elsewhere and surprise surprise that means you need LOTS more central generation/renewable, but none of this is news.
I know Americans are stereotypically quite large people but how large do you have to be to be too large for an A2??? As for the performance remember that energy consumption of a vehicle will over average terrain be proportional to its wind resistance not its weight.
Bearing that in mind, what kind of use case for a vehicle requires even half the performance demonstrated here? (assuming a larger car would have at most twice the wind resistance) If you're going on long continent crossing journeys the range of the car and time taken to recharge it is greater than how often you should be stopping for a break so that you aren't a hazard to other road users. And that's assuming that this technology doesn't scale, i.e. that twice as large a car could just have two of these battery packs giving the same recharge time.
Yeah because it's not like the UK has any experience with terrorism, I mean there was that whole pesky IRA thing, but it's not like it lasted for 8 decades or anything...
All the good business practice reasons aside a good reason to have planned obsolescence, I imagine a good reason to not support an infinite size drive is the same reason to still ship 32 bit operating systems. In the case of an OS doubling the size of your pointers means a lot more data to fetch from memory which increases the size of programs and slows them down. I can imagine in the world of the data structures that are used for hard drives that if you were to build the standard today knowing what we know now we'd have the disk structure described by a bunch of 32 bit pointer each of which could be optionally upgraded to 64 or 128bit. That's be enough for anyone right? As i understand it it's the legacy description of the disk arrangement that means that you describe your disk as having x platters, y tracks and z sectors that leads to these weird limits because they have been expanded a bit at a time. If you increased each of these to 32 bit pointers you could imagine a massive increase in overhead which while it might be in the noise compared to the latencies of the rest of the hard drive system is a big change in architecture and almost certainly a massive change to the hardware, drivers, test suites, test equipment, OS, OEM equipment etc. While adding a bit here and a bit there is an easy sell to the standards body.
Slashdot Mirror
The colour distortions NTSC and PAL suffer from on high frequency luminance changes are interesting and a fascinating insight into the world before digital. Every geek should IMO understand this because it's interesting and cool and easy to understand. I'll try and simplify the explanation...
The artefact in question results from a colour (analogue) TV trying to display a picture where the luminance (brightness to you and I) changes rapidly, i.e. with a high frequency. Viewers of old will be used to people with stripy shirts suddenly and stragely developing psychedelic colour patterns. Why do you get them? That's the interesting part:
When NTSC was devised they had to design a system that was backwards compatible i.e. used the same bandwidth to transmit a colour signal. Worse than that they had to have the signal such that the colour signal would be interpreted by a B&W receiver as a B&W image correctly.
So what they did was look at the signal and realise that although the bandwidth allocated allowed for rapid luminance changes, no set at the time (in domestic usage anyway) was capable of displaying them. Therefore they could transmit a high frequency signal on top of the luminance signal that existing sets would filter out, they would act like a low pass filter, and average it out back to the original signal. They could therefore superimpose a high frequency signal on top of the old luminance only signal. Now, how to carry information with this signal?
Well you kept the frequency of this superimposition constant but you could vary both its amplitude and its phase* relative to a reference signal. This combined with some maths behind luminance and chrominance processing (wikipedia is your friend here) meant that you had good old luminance information for old sets, and two colour components that could be extracted by a compliant set, but would be ignored by older sets.
Now where the artefact in question comes from should now be obvious, a high frequency luminance change looks indistinguishable from no intensity change with a certain colour information. The system was designed to minimise these, but they had to happen at least slightly. As TV sets and studio cameras have improved over the years there have become more of these artefacts as we have got better at displaying fine detail, so what wasn't a problem now shows the limits of the system.
If you want information about how the colour reference signal was sent or to explain more please do ask, PAL and NTSC are one of my favourite geeky subjects. It's engineering from an almost forgotten era and a sign of just how clever some engineers are/were.
*The difference between phase modulation and frequency modulation are somewhat academic for the purposes of this discussion, let's just say that phase modulation makes more sense because we have a reference waveform to compare it to.
All that and you don't even know me ;-)
Why yes I can post pictures on the internet that are taken on private premises where there is an expectation of privacy and then bitch when someone else who has no right to be on that property does similar.
Okay to take an example at the far end. I post some pictures from a particularly wild party on the internet. Someone else trespasses on the party and takes some pictures that maybe are similar maybe they're not, it doesn't matter. They had no right to be there or to take those photos so they should have no right to publish them and doing so would be an invasion of privacy.
Can we at least agree on that?
After that it's a matter of degrees of how similar the photos are which a court of law might find that in this case it's so similar it's as good as no difference, but to simply state that you have published photos of this house on the internet therefore you have no right to privacy to photos of that house is lunacy.
I'm happy that as always half the point of a court of law is the question of where do you draw the line. Take another example, If I publish photos of me on the internet then why should I care if someone else does so? Why am I different from a house in this respect? Actually it turns out I'm not if you take a photo of me while you are in a public place then there's nothing I can do about it. It's only on private property that you normally have a leg to stand on. So why the difference here?
Why one law for copyright though and one for privacy?
Yes I have many blog posts online that anyone can read. If google printed a book of my blog posts and started selling said book then I'd be rightly annoyed.
Why is this any different? Actually no it's worse than that; it's as if I had my blog posts behind a registered users site that you had to log in to access and google then went and copied my information under their terms.
So what you're saying is that if you sell your house (with a modern estate agent) then you have forever given up all rights of privacy?
So all they need to up their rate of production is put them through a transformer.
Checking the local electronics catalogue they're only a few $ for one that will give me 100V from 10V so it looks like I have their production problems solved!
Yep there's a lot of sand, almost 3 lizards and a bird that are going to suffer with this deadly plan
*sigh* hate to reply to myself but:
20km underground
several hundred km overground.
More coffee needed...
Long distance power transmission is almost always DC for a number of reasons The first of these is are in DC there are no induction losses. The alternating current along transmission lines will inductively couple to each other and provide a loss in a similar manner to the crosstalk you get in everything from digital circuits to audio cables. DC just doesn't lose power this way.
AC is great for easy step up and step down in voltage, but it has a number of problems. In a transmission system you have two main limits, the maximum voltage you can use (limited by insulators used) and the I^2R losses in the cabling. Let's first assume no resistive losses or at least that you're not limited by heat loss: For a given cable and insulators you can therefore either run e.g. 1000V DC or 1000V AC Remember though that the AC is 1000V peak so the actual RMS voltage is effectively 1/sqrt(2) so 707V. Therefore for a given cable and insulator pair AC can carry less power.
The only way to reduce the I^2R losses is to run at higher voltages where currents required are less so DC will always be superior here provided your inverter technology is sufficiently efficient. Which for lengths of more than about 20km starts to happen.
What was true for the electrical systems of 20 years ago never mind back in the days of Edison is no longer the case, the AC vs DC situation is not as simple as it used to be.
I think of Christian fundamentalism as an interesting meme. Like a disease that can flourish in a healthy host only so long as that host is healthy. As soon as times get hard again maybe reality will bite and those who ignore reality and instead choose the world they invented will have a harsh lesson in reality.
It seems like a historical certainty as soon as a population becomes rich and powerful, they become decadent and ignore what made them strong in the first place. In ancient Rome the decadence took the form of orgies and politics at the expense of the military(to use a cliché), perhaps in the US the decadence takes the form of belief at the expense of the science and engineering that made America so powerful.
It's all very sad really but at least this time around we shouldn't lose any knowledge in the fall that happens when reality kicks in.
But this is kind of the problem. Elections that happen in Europe don't affect you very much.
Over in Europe however the elections you have in the States affect us greatly yet we have no say in them.
At least that's kind of how it seems when I see someone like JWB being elected...
"Forests naturally deal with fire quite well thank you"
Agreed, but that's not the point the gp was trying to make. The average stable forest isn't the o2 source or co2 sink that some environmentalists would have you think. Only by removing matter from the forest and using it/burying it where it won't rot will it sequester co2 thereby reducing humanity's effect.
The point being a stable forest releases co2 from wood rotting or being burnt. If it absorbed co2, then its mass would constantly increase. What is actually happening in a stable forest is that there is an almost perfect balance and therefore a healthy stable forest is more or less carbon neutral.
Now if you were to occasionally cut down the wood and put it to other uses (e.g. housing or tables as gp mentions) and allow new growth, then you have a co2 capturing scheme. If you cut it down and build concrete buildings in it's place or just let it turn to desert/scrubland then you're the human race and deserve what you'll get...
And this is a problem why?
Your current company is not you. You are you. Why can't you get a job in the next rocket company? If it gets the contract it will need to expand so why not go to them with the contract?
Which is why - off the top of my head - there are 6 igniter circuits, 5 detonators per srb (only 1 is needed to do the job) and quadruple redundant control electronics.
This is why man-rating a rocket is HARD and why these things take such a large workforce to run.
It's the old phrase.
A big pile of explosives blows things up
A perfectly functioning rocket blows things *up*
"You could have a feature length film in one cut without any waste. It would take a lot of skill to do it well -- from both the cast and the crew."
Also known as theatre ;-) ;-)
Okay this is spoken as someone who's done loads of Theatre and no Film, so yes I know it's not the same, but still
What is family friendly for you is family unfriendly for me.
I like the idea of children being educated about life before they experience it. Who are they to say what is family friendly? Who is anyone? Can i specify that I'd rather they hid violence from children than sex?
You're also forgetting the effect of pride.
Let's assume Show A was started by executive A. He is moderately successful and moves on to a different job - from what I hear they move around a lot. Show A is still finding its audience when executive B shows up and is put in charge. If show A is successful then executive B looks bad because it is his predecessor's show. If he outright cancels it then he looks petty. So what does he do? Simple move it around all over the schedule so that it can never find its audience. Or get in touch with a friendly accountant to make it look as if it is losing money. Then it's just the numbers
Likewise if his daughter really likes show B (even if it is mindless trash) then he can move it into a better timeslot, get big name guest stars to appear, give it better publicity bigger budget, all things that will help catch a bigger audience.
I don't think these people are evil, but their motivation is not to produce the best TV it's to give the impression they're doing a good job so they get promoted. If that can be done by taking a crappy nothing show and vastly increasing the ratings by correct investment then i believe they would do it. But with all these things it's the lowest common denominator that wins and the only thing we can do is support the shows and encourage other people to watch good shows, and ideally buy the box sets.
See I kind of likened it to you don't destroy the last small pox virus sample that you have. I assumed that the grand plan was that they were basically frelling around with the humans, keeping them busy, keeping them running, but keeping them contained. All the emo religious rubbish was just a double bluff to lead humans into thinking the wrong things and keeping galactica confident so that they were manipulatable.
Boy was i disappointed at the ending
"The problem with allowing gravity control is that the same technology required for artificial gravity also gives a reactionless drive."
In a short story i wrote quite a while ago there was a technology where you could make a small singularity. The deck plating therefore had dozens of these black holes per meter and therefore you had gravity. yes it was a little lumpy as the field from one hole mereged with another and there was a noticable gravity gradient (tidal forces from the crew's head to toe). But control of gravity none the less
this then gave you a reall weird ship layout where you would have the floor of one room adjacent to the floor of the room below it (if you can picture that)
They could also create a much large singularity at the front of the ship to cancel out the acceleration forces under hard acceleration - removing the need for g couches.
However there is no way you could use this technology as a reactionless drive that I could think of.
Ok it was a bad short story because hawking radiation would kill the crew, but the idea was there...
How can we be sure what is in the public's interest? Why isn't it in the public interest that people's past are no longer hidden in mystery(as long as it applies to everyone)? I'm quite serious that yes I have tried to re-invent myself over the years and to some extent have succeeded but I don't understand why people want to try and hide from their past.
I know that some information should remain confidential, medical conditions, bank details, conversations about proposed purchases etc but I can't think of any information that I count as confidential that I would post anywhere online (i.e. blogs, facebook, twitter etc)
Now I grant you that information like DOB, mother's maiden name can be used for ID theft but that has been a poor security model for a very long time. I mean really who keeps their birthday a secret? It will never and hasn't for centuries been a secret what someone's parents are called so the problem isn't the problem of someone joining up the dots or the fact that the information is out there - it always has been. Making something more convenient is not a problem it's called progress. The fact that progress exposes the flaw in what you've been doing all this time is your problem no anyone else's.
Now if you want to talk about dystopian futures where some have the power to watch over the citizens and some don't then I'm right there terrified of the government with you. If we have a society though where everyone watches the watchers because everyone is the watcher then I'm much less worried and in fact think it would be a great boon.
Take for example universal CCTV - very very frightening when only the police/select few have access to it. They could pick and choose segments to order to frame people. If however everyone had access to everything that was CCTV'd in a public place and there were appropriate SW tools to help people search and catalogue it then provided everyone has access then I believe you are less open to being abused/framed not more.
I believe the same applies with online privacy, the more information is out there and the better the average person can connect the dots themselves then the better and safer we all are.
Hang on, what happened to the Geek's warcry of "Information wants to be free"?
So the big problem here is that if you have ever been an idiot or done something you'd rather forget then either you or one of your friends will purposely or accidentally post it on the internet in a way that can be linked back to you.
I think like the record companies cannot put the genie of digital music/mp3s/filesharing back ion the bottle we as a society can't put all of personal privacy back in the bottle without also losing personal freedom. Unless you want draconian laws restricting information - which I thought was the antithesis of the internet - then we have to accept that if we do embarrassing stuff in public then that will stick with us.
But that's no different from real life, if while drunk I told my best friend's wife I thought she was hot then that will stay with me for the rest of my life too. The difference is strangers/employers can get that information too, but remember they can do it for everyone so the lesson for me here is not to not make mistakes but to make less mistakes than the next guy and to learn from those lessons sooner.
That said I wouldn't want to employ someone who didn't have a good time at University, If they didn't know how to have a party and relax then I'd be concerned they were a well rounded person. So seeing photos of someone drunk off their face could well help you if you met me interviewing you.
The door swings both ways...
Last figures I saw for the UK had transport consuming approximately as much energy as electricity and domestic heating combined. So I'd say your estimates at number of new power plants is about right that you'd need approximately double the number of power plants if you want them to supply transport and electric.
Why is this a bad thing though? What's wring with getting rid of the power plants from under the hood and putting them together into a more efficient centrally managed resource?
Oh and energy consumption wise, averaged over the nation it doesn't matter if you trickle charge the car over a 24 hour period or charge it in a nanosecond, assuming constant efficiency for both methods the number of power stations needed is the same. The goal here is to get the power source from a gas burner under the hood to central/renewables generation elsewhere and surprise surprise that means you need LOTS more central generation/renewable, but none of this is news.
I know Americans are stereotypically quite large people but how large do you have to be to be too large for an A2???
As for the performance remember that energy consumption of a vehicle will over average terrain be proportional to its wind resistance not its weight.
Bearing that in mind, what kind of use case for a vehicle requires even half the performance demonstrated here? (assuming a larger car would have at most twice the wind resistance) If you're going on long continent crossing journeys the range of the car and time taken to recharge it is greater than how often you should be stopping for a break so that you aren't a hazard to other road users.
And that's assuming that this technology doesn't scale, i.e. that twice as large a car could just have two of these battery packs giving the same recharge time.
Yeah because it's not like the UK has any experience with terrorism, I mean there was that whole pesky IRA thing, but it's not like it lasted for 8 decades or anything...
All the good business practice reasons aside a good reason to have planned obsolescence, I imagine a good reason to not support an infinite size drive is the same reason to still ship 32 bit operating systems.
In the case of an OS doubling the size of your pointers means a lot more data to fetch from memory which increases the size of programs and slows them down. I can imagine in the world of the data structures that are used for hard drives that if you were to build the standard today knowing what we know now we'd have the disk structure described by a bunch of 32 bit pointer each of which could be optionally upgraded to 64 or 128bit. That's be enough for anyone right?
As i understand it it's the legacy description of the disk arrangement that means that you describe your disk as having x platters, y tracks and z sectors that leads to these weird limits because they have been expanded a bit at a time. If you increased each of these to 32 bit pointers you could imagine a massive increase in overhead which while it might be in the noise compared to the latencies of the rest of the hard drive system is a big change in architecture and almost certainly a massive change to the hardware, drivers, test suites, test equipment, OS, OEM equipment etc. While adding a bit here and a bit there is an easy sell to the standards body.
Just a thought anyway...