Was there any outcry when Battlefield Viet Nam came out? Because you can totally frag G.I.s in that game, and there are plenty of Viet Nam vets still around.
Yeah. My point was kind of that Denmark is able to do what it's doing because it has the option of importing electricity that is "always on". I would guess there's not enough hydroelectric capacity in continental Europe to act as a backup if, say, the entire region tried to rely primarily on wind/solar.
"Portuguese households have long paid about twice what Americans pay for electricity, and prices have risen 15 percent in the last five years, probably partly because of the renewable energy program..."
"It is not fully clear that their costs, both financial and economic, as well as their impact on final consumer energy prices, are well understood and appreciated."
"To lure private companies into Portugal’s new market, the government gave them contracts locking in a stable price for 15 years — a subsidy that varied by technology and was initially high but decreased with each new contract round."
"The relative costs of an energy transition would inevitably be higher in the United States than in Portugal."
"Denmark, another country that relies heavily on wind power, frequently imports electricity from its energy-rich neighbor Norway when the wind dies down..."
...there's no incentive for anybody to make a more fuel efficient car? Because anywhere you make an efficiency someone will be expected to pay more for the efficiency...
You just described exactly why someone would be motivated to make a more fuel efficient car: because he can then charge more for it. If the increase in his manufacturing costs is less than the premium he can charge for the new technology (based on its increased efficiency) then he profits. This is greatly influenced by the cost of fuel. At $2.77 per gallon, manufacturers can only accommodate a small increase in production costs if they want cars based on the new technology to be profitable.
Even taking that into account, it doesn't strike me as a "given" that going hybrid still gives you the most bang for your buck with respect to reducing carbon emissions. For instance, you could buy a high-efficiency non-hybrid vehicle and take the difference in cost between that vehicle and a hybrid and spend it on carbon offsets. Would that be better? Probably not, but I'd have to do the math. Since I'm bored right now, here's some math:
A Honda Civic EX-L w/ automatic transmission costs $21,805 and gets 28 mpg (1)
A Honda Civic Hybrid w/ leather interior (like the EX-L) costs $25,000 and gets 37 mph (1)
One gallon of gasoline translates to about 20lb CO2 emitted.
If I drive around 12,000 miles in a given year, going hybrid means I emit about one ton less CO2 per year and spend $288 less on gas.
Carbon offsets generally range from $10-15 per ton C02. We'll use a figure of $12.50 and assume these actually "work" as advertised.
If I take my $288/year in gas savings from the hybrid and use it to buy carbon offsets, my true yearly CO2 savings is 23 + 1 = 24 tons CO2.
Suppose I drive the car for 10 years. That's a total lifetime savings of 240 tons C02 by going hybrid.
How much would I need to spend up front on carbon offsets if I want the non-hybrid in order to offset 240 tons CO2? 240 * 12.50 = $3000.
If I drive the car fewer than 120,000 miles then the non-hybrid looks better. If I drive it more than 12,000 miles then the hybrid looks better. Of course, this ignores the battery's lifespan, which is a large "expected expense" for hybrids. This analysis also suggests that the majority of reduction in CO2 emissions comes from re-investing gas savings in carbon offsets. If you buy a hybrid and don't do this then you're really not saving much over the non-hybrid in terms of reduced CO2 emissions. Just 10 tons over 10 years, which would cost $125 to offset. Of course, you could be doing it purely for monetary savings. Only, in order to "break even" in that respect you have to drive the hybrid slightly more than 120,000 miles at today's gas prices. This also fails to account for the fact that the gas savings are spread out over ~10 years whereas the savings from buying a non-hybrid come "up front". If we want to truly capture that, we'd need to calculate what sort of interest one could earn on ($25,000 - $21,805) over ten years, then compare that to how much you could earn by investing $288/yr over ($25,000 - $21,805) / $288 years.
(1) Fuel efficiency numbers taken from Consumer Reports "overall mileage" rating, which exactly matches the mpg I get on my Civic EX.
It only throws my definition out the window if I had claimed Childs committed theft. I never claimed any such thing. Whether or not Childs was charged with theft has no bearing on the definition of theft. Nor does it have any bearing on the definition of murder, rape, or any other crime. Personally I feel like what he did was theft "in spirit" and the code should be revised to reflect that fact. As it is written now, though, you're right- if what he did were likely to be considered "theft" then they probably would have charged him with it.
Did I say he was charged with theft? No. Follow the thread. "commodore64" suggested it might have been theft. "uglyduckling" responded and said, "No, it's not theft, because theft is {X}". I responded with "Actually, {X} does not define theft."
All that aside, the fact that he was charged and convicted of DoS does not "throw my legal definition out the window". Unless you think Child's conviction somehow invalidates the portion of California's penal code that defines theft.
Sorry, that is not the definition of theft. Here is California's definition of theft. The item taken need only be "property", not an object, and includes services. There is no stipulation that the taker have no intent to return the item. In Child's case, if his withholding passwords were indeed thought to be theft, the value of the property would make it grand theft. Interestingly, since he didn't use a firearm, the maximum sentence would be one year. Though, I suppose the state could file a civil suite against him to recoup their losses. Not sure how that works.
If I sacrifice everything but my King and a Bishop to checkmate you, why is that intrinsically a better strategy than sparing some of my pieces?
Winning with only a king and a bishop remaining is no "better" than winning with all your pieces remaining. A win is a win. That said, winning a game while having many more pieces remaining than one's opponent may imply that the difference between your skill and your opponent's is greater than if you won with only a kind and bishop left. There may be some merit to working that into an algorithm if the goal is to predict the outcome of future matches.
Another data point that might be valuable is simply "how many moves did the game take before checkmate"? Without any other knowledge, the guy who beats me in 10 moves is likely to be a better player than the guy who takes 50 moves to beat me.
It's not inconceivable that one might apply an artificial means of gauging "margin of victory" to the domain of chess. Some sort of differential in the "value" of the pieces remaining for each contestant when the game ends. For the three teams that beat ELO, do their ratings systems only take "win/loss" as input, or do they also get the board's configuration at the point when the game ended?
However, it is a big surprise that Elo has been bettered done so quickly!
Not really. Jeff Sagarin has had two systems of rating sports teams for a while now. One, ELO_CHESS, is based purely on win-loss, while the other, PURE POINTS, takes into account margin of victory. According to him, the latter is better at predicting future results. From his analysis:
In ELO CHESS, only winning and losing matters; the score margin is of no consequence,
which makes it very "politically correct". However it is less accurate in its predictions for
upcoming games than is the PURE POINTS, in which the score margin is the only thing that matters.
PURE POINTS is also known as PREDICTOR, BALLANTINE, RHEINGOLD, WHITE OWL and is the best single PREDICTOR
of future games.
If I were to buy/build a new system today I'd want an OCZ Vertex 2. Thing is, I'm fairly paranoid about quality issues when it comes to SSD manufacturers not named Intel. And Intel's best offering just doesn't measure up w.r.t writes. Since I'm "sort of" in the market right now, I may wait until this Christmas and pick up Intel's successor to the G2. Which, considering the year-old G2 is still very competitive (at least with respect to reads), should totally blow away everyone else's offerings.
For a good while now the size of drives has been mostly meaningless to me. I don't store any movies or music. My current XP installation, with MS Office and Eclipse, takes up about 10 GB. I'm much more interested in "fast" than I am "big".
For a good while now the size of drives has been mostly meaningless to me. I don't store any movies or music. My current XP installation, with MS Office and Eclipse, takes up about 10 GB. I'm much more interested in "fast" than I am "big".
...and guess that the main culprits in these crashes are overclocked (possibly by the manufacturer) GPUs in tricked out systems with inadequate cooling.
I wouldn't know where to start learning C++, PHP, Java, HTML5, or PERL, much less how to choose one over the other for a particular application.
Those are some pretty disparate technologies you've listed here. Of them, I only know Java and I manage to make a living. My advice would be to first sit down and figure out what sort of programming you actually want to "do" with an eye towards choosing something realistic. Do you want to write thick apps on Windows? Then gear up on C++ and Windows development in general. Though, I'd say that focus probably has a pretty high barrier to entry. Do you want to write business software deployed on *nix? Java's probably the way to go. Etc. Once you know what you want to do, the question of which knowledge to acquire is much more straightforward.
Yeah, except you can't ignore those things. Before you get the dirt cheap nuclear power you have to build the "not exactly dirt cheap" nuclear plant. Also you can't ignore the fact that nuclear plants have a small chance of blowing up and killing lots of people. So, you have to cover that potential liability via insurance. Solar plants don't have that risk so they don't need this type of insurance, meaning it doesn't need to be factored into their cost.
The more recent nuclear plants built in the U.S. have a capacity of 1200MW. The SEGS solar installation in California has a capacity of 354MW and covers 1600 acres. Figure you can linearly increase the output of solar with size, so to generate a capacity of 1200W with SEGS technology you'd need about 22 sq. km. Paris is about 87 sq. km.
Obviously personal solar is less efficient, but it has a near-zero space requirement since it can be installed in pre-existing spaces (e.g. your roof). I realize that's not what this article was talking about.
Couple thoughts. First, both prices include subsidies, which are greater for Solar. The article claims removing subsidies means solar would need an extra 9 years to surpass nuclear, but that assumes linear trends continue. That isn't a given. Second, I don't fully understand why nuclear power should get more expensive over time. Have we become more risk averse thereby safety measures more expensive? Extra regulation? Is fuel more expensive now than it used to be?
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Was there any outcry when Battlefield Viet Nam came out? Because you can totally frag G.I.s in that game, and there are plenty of Viet Nam vets still around.
Yeah. My point was kind of that Denmark is able to do what it's doing because it has the option of importing electricity that is "always on". I would guess there's not enough hydroelectric capacity in continental Europe to act as a backup if, say, the entire region tried to rely primarily on wind/solar.
You just described exactly why someone would be motivated to make a more fuel efficient car: because he can then charge more for it. If the increase in his manufacturing costs is less than the premium he can charge for the new technology (based on its increased efficiency) then he profits. This is greatly influenced by the cost of fuel. At $2.77 per gallon, manufacturers can only accommodate a small increase in production costs if they want cars based on the new technology to be profitable.
Even taking that into account, it doesn't strike me as a "given" that going hybrid still gives you the most bang for your buck with respect to reducing carbon emissions. For instance, you could buy a high-efficiency non-hybrid vehicle and take the difference in cost between that vehicle and a hybrid and spend it on carbon offsets. Would that be better? Probably not, but I'd have to do the math. Since I'm bored right now, here's some math:
If I drive the car fewer than 120,000 miles then the non-hybrid looks better. If I drive it more than 12,000 miles then the hybrid looks better. Of course, this ignores the battery's lifespan, which is a large "expected expense" for hybrids. This analysis also suggests that the majority of reduction in CO2 emissions comes from re-investing gas savings in carbon offsets. If you buy a hybrid and don't do this then you're really not saving much over the non-hybrid in terms of reduced CO2 emissions. Just 10 tons over 10 years, which would cost $125 to offset. Of course, you could be doing it purely for monetary savings. Only, in order to "break even" in that respect you have to drive the hybrid slightly more than 120,000 miles at today's gas prices. This also fails to account for the fact that the gas savings are spread out over ~10 years whereas the savings from buying a non-hybrid come "up front". If we want to truly capture that, we'd need to calculate what sort of interest one could earn on ($25,000 - $21,805) over ten years, then compare that to how much you could earn by investing $288/yr over ($25,000 - $21,805) / $288 years.
(1) Fuel efficiency numbers taken from Consumer Reports "overall mileage" rating, which exactly matches the mpg I get on my Civic EX.
It only throws my definition out the window if I had claimed Childs committed theft. I never claimed any such thing. Whether or not Childs was charged with theft has no bearing on the definition of theft. Nor does it have any bearing on the definition of murder, rape, or any other crime. Personally I feel like what he did was theft "in spirit" and the code should be revised to reflect that fact. As it is written now, though, you're right- if what he did were likely to be considered "theft" then they probably would have charged him with it.
Did I say he was charged with theft? No. Follow the thread. "commodore64" suggested it might have been theft. "uglyduckling" responded and said, "No, it's not theft, because theft is {X}". I responded with "Actually, {X} does not define theft."
All that aside, the fact that he was charged and convicted of DoS does not "throw my legal definition out the window". Unless you think Child's conviction somehow invalidates the portion of California's penal code that defines theft.
Sorry, that is not the definition of theft. Here is California's definition of theft. The item taken need only be "property", not an object, and includes services. There is no stipulation that the taker have no intent to return the item. In Child's case, if his withholding passwords were indeed thought to be theft, the value of the property would make it grand theft. Interestingly, since he didn't use a firearm, the maximum sentence would be one year. Though, I suppose the state could file a civil suite against him to recoup their losses. Not sure how that works.
I take back what I said, then. It is moderately surprising that there have already been three solutions that outperform ELO based solely on win/loss.
Winning with only a king and a bishop remaining is no "better" than winning with all your pieces remaining. A win is a win. That said, winning a game while having many more pieces remaining than one's opponent may imply that the difference between your skill and your opponent's is greater than if you won with only a kind and bishop left. There may be some merit to working that into an algorithm if the goal is to predict the outcome of future matches.
Another data point that might be valuable is simply "how many moves did the game take before checkmate"? Without any other knowledge, the guy who beats me in 10 moves is likely to be a better player than the guy who takes 50 moves to beat me.
It's not inconceivable that one might apply an artificial means of gauging "margin of victory" to the domain of chess. Some sort of differential in the "value" of the pieces remaining for each contestant when the game ends. For the three teams that beat ELO, do their ratings systems only take "win/loss" as input, or do they also get the board's configuration at the point when the game ended?
Not really. Jeff Sagarin has had two systems of rating sports teams for a while now. One, ELO_CHESS, is based purely on win-loss, while the other, PURE POINTS, takes into account margin of victory. According to him, the latter is better at predicting future results. From his analysis:
50 Gbps is bandwidth. What's the latency? That'd be kinda important for the purposes of remoting RAM.
If I were to buy/build a new system today I'd want an OCZ Vertex 2. Thing is, I'm fairly paranoid about quality issues when it comes to SSD manufacturers not named Intel. And Intel's best offering just doesn't measure up w.r.t writes. Since I'm "sort of" in the market right now, I may wait until this Christmas and pick up Intel's successor to the G2. Which, considering the year-old G2 is still very competitive (at least with respect to reads), should totally blow away everyone else's offerings.
For a good while now the size of drives has been mostly meaningless to me. I don't store any movies or music. My current XP installation, with MS Office and Eclipse, takes up about 10 GB. I'm much more interested in "fast" than I am "big".
Ah hell. Wrong thread. The internets are hard.
For a good while now the size of drives has been mostly meaningless to me. I don't store any movies or music. My current XP installation, with MS Office and Eclipse, takes up about 10 GB. I'm much more interested in "fast" than I am "big".
Way to look on the bright side, Firefox.
...and guess that the main culprits in these crashes are overclocked (possibly by the manufacturer) GPUs in tricked out systems with inadequate cooling.
Yes. He could, of course, be mistaken.
Those are some pretty disparate technologies you've listed here. Of them, I only know Java and I manage to make a living. My advice would be to first sit down and figure out what sort of programming you actually want to "do" with an eye towards choosing something realistic. Do you want to write thick apps on Windows? Then gear up on C++ and Windows development in general. Though, I'd say that focus probably has a pretty high barrier to entry. Do you want to write business software deployed on *nix? Java's probably the way to go. Etc. Once you know what you want to do, the question of which knowledge to acquire is much more straightforward.
Maybe they were able to access your router because the password was still password1 ?
Yeah, except you can't ignore those things. Before you get the dirt cheap nuclear power you have to build the "not exactly dirt cheap" nuclear plant. Also you can't ignore the fact that nuclear plants have a small chance of blowing up and killing lots of people. So, you have to cover that potential liability via insurance. Solar plants don't have that risk so they don't need this type of insurance, meaning it doesn't need to be factored into their cost.
The more recent nuclear plants built in the U.S. have a capacity of 1200MW. The SEGS solar installation in California has a capacity of 354MW and covers 1600 acres. Figure you can linearly increase the output of solar with size, so to generate a capacity of 1200W with SEGS technology you'd need about 22 sq. km. Paris is about 87 sq. km.
Obviously personal solar is less efficient, but it has a near-zero space requirement since it can be installed in pre-existing spaces (e.g. your roof). I realize that's not what this article was talking about.
Couple thoughts. First, both prices include subsidies, which are greater for Solar. The article claims removing subsidies means solar would need an extra 9 years to surpass nuclear, but that assumes linear trends continue. That isn't a given. Second, I don't fully understand why nuclear power should get more expensive over time. Have we become more risk averse thereby safety measures more expensive? Extra regulation? Is fuel more expensive now than it used to be?