I was being facetious. I am completely in favor of electic transportation with central power generation.
I was pointing out the irony of the matter that most of the people affected by the pollution from industry and power generation tend to be poor because there's no way a wealthy neighborhood would ever allow anything to pollute their airspace. Cities like Louisville, KY have entire sections of the city that are predominantly poor folk and industrial plants. The wealthy folk can afford to move elsewhere or take the time to fight against bad things happening in their back yards.
OK. Cars convert gasoline to energy in the neighborhood of 17% efficiency after all things like wind, friction, heat loss, and whatnot are taken into effect.
Power plants are 50-70% efficient in converting dinosaur bits into energy. Much is lost over the wire, being stored in batteries, and being transmitted back out. It's probably a wash for efficiency.
Cars, however, have MANY fewer restrictions on what they can belch out per watt of work generated. Cars pollute everywhere they go. Changing pollution levels on cars involves hundreds of millions of source points for pollution. SUVs get around most of those restrictions by being classified as trucks or other categories (6000lb plus vehicles like the Escalade get around a lot of pollution laws).
Centrally generated electricity is cleaner (not clean but cleaner) by orders of magnitude than burning it at the point where it's going to be used. Not only that but central power plants can be placed in poor neighborhoods where most of us never have to see the pollution and those that do don't vote.
Hybrids are better than nothing but it's just plain lazy to sit and say that it's all we need to research/do.
Remember this: Management is where geeks go to die.
I have had so many bosses in the past who were clearly great programmers at one point in their career. Once they moved to management, they lost touch with current technology. Yeah, they read trade rags and can spout buzzwords but they don't understand fundamentally what the latest XML gismo is when they've never written anything that creates/parses XML.
Oh yeah, it's also a lot harder to read/. when you're stuck in management meetings 5 hours a day. Programmers can surf all day as long as they can flip deskops or flip browser tabs to something serious when a coworker walks into your workspace.
I've been happy to get out of my two previous management positions and know that, with as much as I made fun of the CMS/COBOL/VMS/REXX wonks for being in the wrong decade, I don't want to atrophy into something like that.
HDTV is a joke. It's a waste of money and time. There were thousands of better things that we could have used that money on. Not to mention that it was mandated to be in every TV and every broadcast by a certain date. We had to pay for it once to be mandated and now we have to pay for it again to be used. THANKS! Just what I wanted... To be able to see the noise hairs and sweat on an NBA player.
This sounds like one of those conspiracy folk who feel that widescreen DVDs are a conspiracy by Asians and short people cause they see horizontally better.
Thought the government mandated digital broadcasts, not specifically HD content but a certain date (and the broadcasters keep pushing that date back). Thought they did that to force the industry into updating its broadcast technology for the first time in decades.
Oh yeah, if we have enough detail to see nose hairs on an NBA player, you'd better believe it won't be sweaty men in baggy shorts I'll be watching.
It sounds to me like you're just trying to justify that $60k (or whatever) you spent on college.
Didn't spend 1 dollar/euro/pound/RMB/yen on college. I had scholarships and jobs whole way through.
I think that the/. anti-intellectual crowd just have a huge chip on their shoulders about college regardless of whether or not they actually started or finished a degree program.
The biggest theme I'm seeing in the complaints has to do with taking nothing but technical/engineering classes and not making it very far in any discipline.
Yeah, intro classes and required program classes in most fields have a T/A (usually from another country) and like 80-250 students. Once you get through those and get to the graduate level courses, you get to interact with a professor who usually will put as much care and attention into a student's education as the student does.
If the students don't give a shit and would rather be off fragging themselves, the profs won't care either. GIGO.
If more of the people complaining took courses that weren't cookie cutter EE, CS, ME, Physics, or Math courses, they might have learned that there are whole other worlds in universities.
I made it halfway through engineering school before switching to full time philosophy. In my field, the best courses were ones where the professors had complete freedom of curriculum and the students actually got to guide the course with their interest. I learned a lot more there than writing silly ass tower of hanoi solutions and comparing memory allocation functions.
School is NOT about learning, it's about fitting in a given society. You can learn FINE on your own. Books exist, libraries exist.
The most important thing I learned from my undergradaute education was how to learn. I learned that it wasn't all about rote and carrying "How to get better grades" books but about learning how to efficiently learn something conceptually and thoroughly. It's also about learning from someone else instead of reading everything only through one's own lenses and making the world contort to one's own world view.
I've been out of graduate school for five years now and see an ever widening chasm between people like me who went to university and made something out of it and that other category who hit their career ceilings early in life.
Those who think they can learn on their own and think that their genius and reading whatever books they choose to read can only get so far in life. There may be the odd genius who does great things despite this but too many others (/.ers included) never learn the humility and disciple that comes from going through a university education.
It's so great to see so many solipsists on/. I was beginning to think I was the only one.
China does love its coal. They have more than half of the top ten most polluted cities in the world. I've been through their coal country and coughed up stuff I never knew could fit in my repiratory tract in either direction.
They are going to make the shift to nookular and hydro power much more smoothly than us. This is because:
They have less infrastructure to scrap than we do by abandoning coal and fossil fuels
They don't care so much about safety and accidents that kill a few hundred people (plenty more where those came from )
They don't care so much about environmental impacts of huge damns
Couple all of that with the world's largest cheap labor force and you have something that will definitely be more than competitive with the US and the EU.
I'd also say that China and the US are just as unsavory as Iran. It all just depends on from whence you're doing the observing.
If you reallly want to put power generation in space, why do it with expensive, finite resources that can come crashing down and cause harm back on earth.
Solar panels in space never have to deal with clouds or the sun setting. They're cheaper and can generate power for up to 4 billion years or the heat-death of sol - whichever comes first.
I personally don't think I'd want to be the person in the errant plane that flies into the path of the microwave beam and we've have to beam the power down reasonably close to where it's needed because our power transmission is so inefficient but other than that, it's perfect.
Japanese scientists are currently working on a new technology they're calling "the train" that promises to be able to carry goods and people long distances. I suspect it's somewhere past the vaporware stage and electric models might even be possible in a place called Europe.
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I was being facetious. I am completely in favor of electic transportation with central power generation.
I was pointing out the irony of the matter that most of the people affected by the pollution from industry and power generation tend to be poor because there's no way a wealthy neighborhood would ever allow anything to pollute their airspace. Cities like Louisville, KY have entire sections of the city that are predominantly poor folk and industrial plants. The wealthy folk can afford to move elsewhere or take the time to fight against bad things happening in their back yards.
OK. Cars convert gasoline to energy in the neighborhood of 17% efficiency after all things like wind, friction, heat loss, and whatnot are taken into effect.
Power plants are 50-70% efficient in converting dinosaur bits into energy. Much is lost over the wire, being stored in batteries, and being transmitted back out. It's probably a wash for efficiency.
Cars, however, have MANY fewer restrictions on what they can belch out per watt of work generated. Cars pollute everywhere they go. Changing pollution levels on cars involves hundreds of millions of source points for pollution. SUVs get around most of those restrictions by being classified as trucks or other categories (6000lb plus vehicles like the Escalade get around a lot of pollution laws).
Centrally generated electricity is cleaner (not clean but cleaner) by orders of magnitude than burning it at the point where it's going to be used. Not only that but central power plants can be placed in poor neighborhoods where most of us never have to see the pollution and those that do don't vote.
Hybrids are better than nothing but it's just plain lazy to sit and say that it's all we need to research/do.
Lawn Jarts!
I have had so many bosses in the past who were clearly great programmers at one point in their career. Once they moved to management, they lost touch with current technology. Yeah, they read trade rags and can spout buzzwords but they don't understand fundamentally what the latest XML gismo is when they've never written anything that creates/parses XML.
Oh yeah, it's also a lot harder to read
I've been happy to get out of my two previous management positions and know that, with as much as I made fun of the CMS/COBOL/VMS/REXX wonks for being in the wrong decade, I don't want to atrophy into something like that.
This sounds like one of those conspiracy folk who feel that widescreen DVDs are a conspiracy by Asians and short people cause they see horizontally better.
Thought the government mandated digital broadcasts, not specifically HD content but a certain date (and the broadcasters keep pushing that date back). Thought they did that to force the industry into updating its broadcast technology for the first time in decades.
Oh yeah, if we have enough detail to see nose hairs on an NBA player, you'd better believe it won't be sweaty men in baggy shorts I'll be watching.
Mine's been bukkake for a year and a half or so. I live in a small town in the Bible Belt so it's my own little joke on them they'll never get.
Didn't spend 1 dollar/euro/pound/RMB/yen on college. I had scholarships and jobs whole way through.
I think that the
The biggest theme I'm seeing in the complaints has to do with taking nothing but technical/engineering classes and not making it very far in any discipline.
Yeah, intro classes and required program classes in most fields have a T/A (usually from another country) and like 80-250 students. Once you get through those and get to the graduate level courses, you get to interact with a professor who usually will put as much care and attention into a student's education as the student does.
If the students don't give a shit and would rather be off fragging themselves, the profs won't care either. GIGO.
If more of the people complaining took courses that weren't cookie cutter EE, CS, ME, Physics, or Math courses, they might have learned that there are whole other worlds in universities.
I made it halfway through engineering school before switching to full time philosophy. In my field, the best courses were ones where the professors had complete freedom of curriculum and the students actually got to guide the course with their interest. I learned a lot more there than writing silly ass tower of hanoi solutions and comparing memory allocation functions.
The most important thing I learned from my undergradaute education was how to learn. I learned that it wasn't all about rote and carrying "How to get better grades" books but about learning how to efficiently learn something conceptually and thoroughly. It's also about learning from someone else instead of reading everything only through one's own lenses and making the world contort to one's own world view.
I've been out of graduate school for five years now and see an ever widening chasm between people like me who went to university and made something out of it and that other category who hit their career ceilings early in life.
Those who think they can learn on their own and think that their genius and reading whatever books they choose to read can only get so far in life. There may be the odd genius who does great things despite this but too many others (/.ers included) never learn the humility and disciple that comes from going through a university education.
It's so great to see so many solipsists on
They are going to make the shift to nookular and hydro power much more smoothly than us. This is because:
Couple all of that with the world's largest cheap labor force and you have something that will definitely be more than competitive with the US and the EU.
I'd also say that China and the US are just as unsavory as Iran. It all just depends on from whence you're doing the observing.
Solar panels in space never have to deal with clouds or the sun setting. They're cheaper and can generate power for up to 4 billion years or the heat-death of sol - whichever comes first.
I personally don't think I'd want to be the person in the errant plane that flies into the path of the microwave beam and we've have to beam the power down reasonably close to where it's needed because our power transmission is so inefficient but other than that, it's perfect.
Japanese scientists are currently working on a new technology they're calling "the train" that promises to be able to carry goods and people long distances. I suspect it's somewhere past the vaporware stage and electric models might even be possible in a place called Europe.