This has to be the most pointless post I have ever read. Everyone knows what amateur astronomer means. What the hell are you complaining about? What do you suggest we call him? An amateur telescope user?
For current battery tech it is. In the future it may be a negligible difference.
However, rapid charge will be necessary for long consumer trips.
Alternatively, cars/trucks owned by massive corporations will have the option of implementing a battery swap infrastructure. This is also an alternative for consumers, but brings up problems (you would need to be leasing the batteries).
Unless the electricity is coming from wind or solar power (or nuclear if you forget about waste storage), in which case the EV1 is far superior as far as "MPG" goes.
First of all, only public key encryption algorithms based on factoring would be broken. Others would still be strong (until a quantum algorithm was written to break them).
More importantly, properly applied one-time-pad encryption would still be unbreakable. I wouldn't be surprised if certain military/intelligence organisations were already using one-time-pad's that were distributed before missions (on DVD or HDD).
It is also worth noting that public-key encryption is already breakable at typical bit-strengths, if you are given enough time (all of the RSA challenge numbers have been factored). For certain applications timing is everything. For others, it is imperative that the code never be broken (thus one-time-pad's must be used). Quantum computers will still take a while to break a code, and it will be a looooong time (on a technological scale) before the average person has access to one. Thus, decrypting with a quantum computer will still take a significant amount of time, so for certain applications public key encryption will still rule. As quantum computers begin to permeate, more secure encryption will be necessary.
Finally, lets remember that quantum encryption is likely to be possible in the future. It is reasonable to assume that it will advance at a similar speed to quantum computers. Thus, strong encryption will still exist.
Re:Great idea
on
The Geek Atlas
·
· Score: 2, Informative
While we are making suggestions:
The Mirror Lab at The University of Arizona is absolutely amazing. I'm not sure if they do public tours or not (they gave us a tour for a graduate recruitment site visit), but it is definitely worth checking out if you are into astronomy/optics/engineering. When we were there, they were working on two 8.4 meter off-axis parabolic mirrors for a multiple mirror telescope. It's absolutely incredible how precise they can grind these mirrors down to when they are 8.4 meters in diameter.
Or you could release a low quality version of the picture as CC, and keep your rights on the high quality version that would be sought for anything professional enough to merit paying for a licence. Win-Win. You advertise your picture on one of the most visited websites ever, but can still sell licenses for the high quality pic.
I swear, all the people out there complaining about not having enough copyright are blind to what they can do with what they have. Giving them more won't solve anything.
So you are the naive type of the second sort. Taking the word of the person who was stopped by the police, as retold by the Daily Mail of all things. (Are you British, do you actually know that paper?)
The fact that he was only stopped by the police, rather than actually having been charged with anything makes it obvious that the police drastically overreacted. Four police cars, a riot van, and a helicopter to stop something that isn't bad enough to merit a fine?
The price of oil is going to rise eventually, once peak production is hit. However, the real problem with being dependant on foreign oil is that we are sending billions of dollars a year to those countries. This slowly drains our economy. Also, it is nice to have control of the things you depend on.
I'm not sure that is entirely true. High capacity SSDs will need to write large chunks to have good write speeds, and to reduce wear. Having a separate small chunk cache will still be necessary.
It would destroy the content creators overnight, and then we'd get no quality content.
Not exactly. It would destroy the content creating business. There would not be for-profit corporations spending millions of dollars to produce, market, and distribute content. However, artistic expression would survive just as it did before copyright was invented.
There is no doubt that the world would be drastically different without copyright. There would almost assuredly be less content. Probably even less 'quality' content. However, at times I think that the average American's life revolves around this content a bit too much. People are so busy entertaining themselves that we forget about the future. We live in fictional worlds. We seek immediate satisfaction. People work all day in their service jobs so that they can afford that new TV with the HD player, and a collection of HD movies. People may be content with their entertainment driven lives, but at what cost? How much of Earth's resources are being expended for our entertainment, while our understanding of the world around us increases at a snails pace?
For the 2006 Edge question, Geoffrey Miller wrote an essay titled "Runaway Consumerism Explains the Fermi Paradox" (about half-way down the page), in which he suggests that the reason we have not come across extraterrestrial intelligence is that all intelligent races reach a point where they become consumed in their own creations. They completely lose interest in the real world. "Having real friends is so much more of an effort than watching Friends on TV. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done so by filming Star Wars."
There was a time when hearing a tale from a traveling bard was a rare treat. Those days have been replaced by ones full of fiction and fantasy. Is this a bad thing? No.. Well.. maybe... Yes? Who knows? The answer is completely subjective.
Exactly what I was going to say. However, I think Hawkins is wrong to assume Humans were the first species with memes. I would argue that memes have been important ever sense "families" (packs, tribes, ect.) became important, which was well before Homo sapiens.
You should check out Dungeon Crawl. It is open source and actively developed. There are a couple of servers for online play, too. It is far more fun than Nethack. I haven't tried ADOM, but I've heard there are some really bad bugs in the last version (it is closed source).
Putting backspace next to the space bar actually doesn't sound like a bad idea. I never use my left thumb to space. They could split the space bar in two, and have the right side space, and the left side backspace. It would take a lot less hand movement to correct an error.
So what if corporations are just using FOSS to get what they want? Isn't that what we wanted in the first place when FOSS was invented? It doesn't matter how it is used, just so long as everyone has access to the source.
The ordinary view? WTF is THAT supposed to mean? Is it something like "consensus"?
FYI, very few real scientists have accepted some "ordinary view" or "consensus". You may go back as far as you like in history. Those individuals who discovered valuable and meaningful knowledge were generally frowned upon for challenging the "ordinary view".
There is a scientific consensus in every field, and the majority of they time the scientific consensus is right. There have been very few paradigm shifts in science. Quantum Mechanics and Special Relativity are perfect examples. I'm sure there are more in the field of Biology and Climatology, though. None-the-less, scientific consensus is very common.
And, yes. I insist that today's generation is indeed subscribing to a new religion, generally accepted on nothing more than faith. There is over fucking whelming evidence that global warming and global cooling has happened repeatedly, both historically and prehistorically. Wild fluctuations that have gone above and below the extremes in which life "as we know it" might be supported.
All past global temperature changes have coincided perfectly with atmospheric CO2 levels. When CO2 concentrations increased, temperatures increased. When CO2 concentrations decreased, temperatures decreased. In the last 150 years, CO2 levels have increased by 100ppmv (35% increase). The last ice age corresponded with a decrease of approximately 100ppmv. That signifies how tremendous a change we are enacting.
When oil production begins decreasing (which is almost guaranteed to occur in the next 30 years, since we seem to be near peak production), gas prices will rise rapidly. It is much better to begin transitioning to a national lifestyle that can cope with high gas prices now, than for our entire economy to collapse later. If that means more people in the cities, than in the suburbs, then so be it. If that means more people telecommuting, then so be it.
The US hit peak oil production in 1970, 40 years after the peak in US oil discoveries.
World oil discoveries peaked in 1964: 44 years ago. Oil production WILL peek, and when it does EVERYONE will be wishing we had invested more in alternatives.
I don't think anyone is trying to argue that ethanol is more efficient than petroleum. However, the US cannot supply enough petroleum to meet its needs. It has to look elsewhere. It would be very beneficial for our economy if we could internalise automotive fuel production. Bio-fuels have some promise in that direction. The only other real options are battery or hydrogen based vehicles.
However, you are a bit off-topic. CO2 caps are more about electric plants (much larger CO2 producers) than automotives. This (by no mistake) happens to be where the alternatives shine. Nuclear Fission is well proven, and is the perfect place to start. If you don't believe Fission is viable as a prime energy source, you are ignoring the fact that France produces 70% of its grid energy from Fission. It is true that our energy needs dwarf that of France's, but there is more than enough fuel available (if used correctly) to last for 100,000 years.
In addition, wind and solar are in the perfect position to take up the slack. The technology is there, and when currently external costs (environmental, health, long-term viability) are taken account for, they are more than competitive. All that is needed is some incentive for investment. Cap and trade provides that incentive. It is not a 'blanket tax increase'. No one will pay any taxes if the proper investments in alternative energy are made. In the long run we will save money by reducing health problems and by providing a slow transition to a source of energy that is viable for much longer than coal, gas, and oil.
On the topic of 'Global Warming' (AKA 'Climate Change'): We know more about the CO2 cycle than you let on. You are right that the process has existed for millennia; during the paleozoic era oxygen was 35% of the atmosphere (compared to 21% today). However, calling the amount of CO2 we have added to the atmosphere 'minuscule' is "insanely irresponsible and unscientific". The atmospheric CO2 concentration has risen 35% to 384 ppm (as of 2007) since 1832 (before the industrial revolution). A 35% increase is not 'minuscule'.
You are correct that deforestation effects global weather patterns more profoundly than CO2, but only in the very short term. The half-life of most of the particles put into the air by slash&burn is minuscule (days and weeks). However, the half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is 38 years. THAT is why CO2 is the most important green-house gas. Eventually it IS absorbed by the ocean, but by increasing the amount of CO2 in the ocean we dramatically increase its acidity; marine life is extremely sensitive to such changes. A large portion of the human population relies of fish for their main source of food. These people can't afford to lose their food source to an increase in ocean acidity, and they can't afford to wait for acid resistant marine life to evolve.
Nuclear, solar, and wind are in the PERFECT position to take up the slack. The technology is there, and when currently external costs (environmental effects, health effects, long term viability) are taken into account, these energy sources are more than competitive. All that is needed is some incentive for investors. As is, only the really ballsy investors are putting money into alternative energy. A bill such as this would create an influx of investment capital for research, development, and, most importantly, implementation.
The solar irradiance outside of our atmosphere is only 40% stronger than that on the surface. 1400 W/m^2 compared to 1000 W/m^2. Also, most of the extra energy is in a relatively small number of high energy photons (from which we can only extract a fraction of the energy), and a large number of low energy photons (which are too low energy to absorb). So you really don't get much of a boost. Not enough to consider sending a satellite into orbit and beaming back the power, anyway.
Terrestrial solar is superior to space solar in every way.
As far as I know, they WILL be using photovoltaic cells to actually generate the energy. Then you have the conversion loss, fringe loss, and collection loss. Your going to be looking at a pretty inefficient system.
If we are generous and estimate 50% efficiency for the photovoltaic, and 90% each for the rest. 1400 W/m^2 *.5 *.9 *.9 *.9 = 510 W/m^2. You could get that much power from the same photovoltaic cell and a relatively cheap concentrator system. And I don't see how you can say that this works day and night. It seems to me that a geostationary satallite (which would be necessary so that it can stay within range of the ground based collector rectenna) would be in the shade almost as much as the ground.
Once you consider the huge cost of putting something in orbit, this space solar idea becomes an economical joke. Its just a way for PGEC to say they are investing in the future. It is a political stunt. The project will be abandoned well before a satellite is ever put into orbit.
I just had a random idea, actually. What if you could create a bacteria that harboured all of the DNA of terrestial creatures, but did not activate any of it. Instead it only activates the DNA needed for the bacteria to survive. I'm not a biologist, but it seems like having a store of genes could speed up evolution. Not fast enough to watch, but maybe speed it up by 10x. Of course, that assumes that the genes are useful in the new environment.
Slashdot Mirror
This has to be the most pointless post I have ever read. Everyone knows what amateur astronomer means. What the hell are you complaining about? What do you suggest we call him? An amateur telescope user?
For current battery tech it is. In the future it may be a negligible difference.
However, rapid charge will be necessary for long consumer trips.
Alternatively, cars/trucks owned by massive corporations will have the option of implementing a battery swap infrastructure. This is also an alternative for consumers, but brings up problems (you would need to be leasing the batteries).
Unless the electricity is coming from wind or solar power (or nuclear if you forget about waste storage), in which case the EV1 is far superior as far as "MPG" goes.
First of all, only public key encryption algorithms based on factoring would be broken. Others would still be strong (until a quantum algorithm was written to break them).
More importantly, properly applied one-time-pad encryption would still be unbreakable. I wouldn't be surprised if certain military/intelligence organisations were already using one-time-pad's that were distributed before missions (on DVD or HDD).
It is also worth noting that public-key encryption is already breakable at typical bit-strengths, if you are given enough time (all of the RSA challenge numbers have been factored). For certain applications timing is everything. For others, it is imperative that the code never be broken (thus one-time-pad's must be used). Quantum computers will still take a while to break a code, and it will be a looooong time (on a technological scale) before the average person has access to one. Thus, decrypting with a quantum computer will still take a significant amount of time, so for certain applications public key encryption will still rule. As quantum computers begin to permeate, more secure encryption will be necessary.
Finally, lets remember that quantum encryption is likely to be possible in the future. It is reasonable to assume that it will advance at a similar speed to quantum computers. Thus, strong encryption will still exist.
While we are making suggestions:
The Mirror Lab at The University of Arizona is absolutely amazing. I'm not sure if they do public tours or not (they gave us a tour for a graduate recruitment site visit), but it is definitely worth checking out if you are into astronomy/optics/engineering. When we were there, they were working on two 8.4 meter off-axis parabolic mirrors for a multiple mirror telescope. It's absolutely incredible how precise they can grind these mirrors down to when they are 8.4 meters in diameter.
Or you could release a low quality version of the picture as CC, and keep your rights on the high quality version that would be sought for anything professional enough to merit paying for a licence. Win-Win. You advertise your picture on one of the most visited websites ever, but can still sell licenses for the high quality pic.
I swear, all the people out there complaining about not having enough copyright are blind to what they can do with what they have. Giving them more won't solve anything.
So you are the naive type of the second sort. Taking the word of the person who was stopped by the police, as retold by the Daily Mail of all things. (Are you British, do you actually know that paper?)
The fact that he was only stopped by the police, rather than actually having been charged with anything makes it obvious that the police drastically overreacted. Four police cars, a riot van, and a helicopter to stop something that isn't bad enough to merit a fine?
Aluminum foil, and enough to be sure.
.
(Why does firefox's spellcheck only have the British spelling of 'aluminium'?)
The price of oil is going to rise eventually, once peak production is hit. However, the real problem with being dependant on foreign oil is that we are sending billions of dollars a year to those countries. This slowly drains our economy. Also, it is nice to have control of the things you depend on.
I'm not sure that is entirely true. High capacity SSDs will need to write large chunks to have good write speeds, and to reduce wear. Having a separate small chunk cache will still be necessary.
It would destroy the content creators overnight, and then we'd get no quality content.
Not exactly. It would destroy the content creating business. There would not be for-profit corporations spending millions of dollars to produce, market, and distribute content. However, artistic expression would survive just as it did before copyright was invented.
There is no doubt that the world would be drastically different without copyright. There would almost assuredly be less content. Probably even less 'quality' content. However, at times I think that the average American's life revolves around this content a bit too much. People are so busy entertaining themselves that we forget about the future. We live in fictional worlds. We seek immediate satisfaction. People work all day in their service jobs so that they can afford that new TV with the HD player, and a collection of HD movies. People may be content with their entertainment driven lives, but at what cost? How much of Earth's resources are being expended for our entertainment, while our understanding of the world around us increases at a snails pace?
For the 2006 Edge question, Geoffrey Miller wrote an essay titled "Runaway Consumerism Explains the Fermi Paradox" (about half-way down the page), in which he suggests that the reason we have not come across extraterrestrial intelligence is that all intelligent races reach a point where they become consumed in their own creations. They completely lose interest in the real world. "Having real friends is so much more of an effort than watching Friends on TV. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done so by filming Star Wars."
There was a time when hearing a tale from a traveling bard was a rare treat. Those days have been replaced by ones full of fiction and fantasy. Is this a bad thing? No.. Well.. maybe... Yes? Who knows? The answer is completely subjective.
Exactly what I was going to say. However, I think Hawkins is wrong to assume Humans were the first species with memes. I would argue that memes have been important ever sense "families" (packs, tribes, ect.) became important, which was well before Homo sapiens.
You should check out Dungeon Crawl. It is open source and actively developed. There are a couple of servers for online play, too. It is far more fun than Nethack. I haven't tried ADOM, but I've heard there are some really bad bugs in the last version (it is closed source).
Putting backspace next to the space bar actually doesn't sound like a bad idea. I never use my left thumb to space. They could split the space bar in two, and have the right side space, and the left side backspace. It would take a lot less hand movement to correct an error.
So what if corporations are just using FOSS to get what they want? Isn't that what we wanted in the first place when FOSS was invented? It doesn't matter how it is used, just so long as everyone has access to the source.
The ordinary view? WTF is THAT supposed to mean? Is it something like "consensus"?
FYI, very few real scientists have accepted some "ordinary view" or "consensus". You may go back as far as you like in history. Those individuals who discovered valuable and meaningful knowledge were generally frowned upon for challenging the "ordinary view".
There is a scientific consensus in every field, and the majority of they time the scientific consensus is right. There have been very few paradigm shifts in science. Quantum Mechanics and Special Relativity are perfect examples. I'm sure there are more in the field of Biology and Climatology, though. None-the-less, scientific consensus is very common.
And, yes. I insist that today's generation is indeed subscribing to a new religion, generally accepted on nothing more than faith. There is over fucking whelming evidence that global warming and global cooling has happened repeatedly, both historically and prehistorically. Wild fluctuations that have gone above and below the extremes in which life "as we know it" might be supported.
All past global temperature changes have coincided perfectly with atmospheric CO2 levels. When CO2 concentrations increased, temperatures increased. When CO2 concentrations decreased, temperatures decreased. In the last 150 years, CO2 levels have increased by 100ppmv (35% increase). The last ice age corresponded with a decrease of approximately 100ppmv. That signifies how tremendous a change we are enacting.
When oil production begins decreasing (which is almost guaranteed to occur in the next 30 years, since we seem to be near peak production), gas prices will rise rapidly. It is much better to begin transitioning to a national lifestyle that can cope with high gas prices now, than for our entire economy to collapse later. If that means more people in the cities, than in the suburbs, then so be it. If that means more people telecommuting, then so be it.
The US hit peak oil production in 1970, 40 years after the peak in US oil discoveries.
World oil discoveries peaked in 1964: 44 years ago. Oil production WILL peek, and when it does EVERYONE will be wishing we had invested more in alternatives.
I don't think anyone is trying to argue that ethanol is more efficient than petroleum. However, the US cannot supply enough petroleum to meet its needs. It has to look elsewhere. It would be very beneficial for our economy if we could internalise automotive fuel production. Bio-fuels have some promise in that direction. The only other real options are battery or hydrogen based vehicles.
However, you are a bit off-topic. CO2 caps are more about electric plants (much larger CO2 producers) than automotives. This (by no mistake) happens to be where the alternatives shine. Nuclear Fission is well proven, and is the perfect place to start. If you don't believe Fission is viable as a prime energy source, you are ignoring the fact that France produces 70% of its grid energy from Fission. It is true that our energy needs dwarf that of France's, but there is more than enough fuel available (if used correctly) to last for 100,000 years.
In addition, wind and solar are in the perfect position to take up the slack. The technology is there, and when currently external costs (environmental, health, long-term viability) are taken account for, they are more than competitive. All that is needed is some incentive for investment. Cap and trade provides that incentive. It is not a 'blanket tax increase'. No one will pay any taxes if the proper investments in alternative energy are made. In the long run we will save money by reducing health problems and by providing a slow transition to a source of energy that is viable for much longer than coal, gas, and oil.
On the topic of 'Global Warming' (AKA 'Climate Change'): We know more about the CO2 cycle than you let on. You are right that the process has existed for millennia; during the paleozoic era oxygen was 35% of the atmosphere (compared to 21% today). However, calling the amount of CO2 we have added to the atmosphere 'minuscule' is "insanely irresponsible and unscientific". The atmospheric CO2 concentration has risen 35% to 384 ppm (as of 2007) since 1832 (before the industrial revolution). A 35% increase is not 'minuscule'.
You are correct that deforestation effects global weather patterns more profoundly than CO2, but only in the very short term. The half-life of most of the particles put into the air by slash&burn is minuscule (days and weeks). However, the half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is 38 years. THAT is why CO2 is the most important green-house gas. Eventually it IS absorbed by the ocean, but by increasing the amount of CO2 in the ocean we dramatically increase its acidity; marine life is extremely sensitive to such changes. A large portion of the human population relies of fish for their main source of food. These people can't afford to lose their food source to an increase in ocean acidity, and they can't afford to wait for acid resistant marine life to evolve.
Nuclear, solar, and wind are in the PERFECT position to take up the slack. The technology is there, and when currently external costs (environmental effects, health effects, long term viability) are taken into account, these energy sources are more than competitive. All that is needed is some incentive for investors. As is, only the really ballsy investors are putting money into alternative energy. A bill such as this would create an influx of investment capital for research, development, and, most importantly, implementation.
Part of research and development is testing the results.
The solar irradiance outside of our atmosphere is only 40% stronger than that on the surface. 1400 W/m^2 compared to 1000 W/m^2. Also, most of the extra energy is in a relatively small number of high energy photons (from which we can only extract a fraction of the energy), and a large number of low energy photons (which are too low energy to absorb). So you really don't get much of a boost. Not enough to consider sending a satellite into orbit and beaming back the power, anyway.
Terrestrial solar is superior to space solar in every way.
As far as I know, they WILL be using photovoltaic cells to actually generate the energy. Then you have the conversion loss, fringe loss, and collection loss. Your going to be looking at a pretty inefficient system.
If we are generous and estimate 50% efficiency for the photovoltaic, and 90% each for the rest. 1400 W/m^2 * .5 * .9 * .9 * .9 = 510 W/m^2. You could get that much power from the same photovoltaic cell and a relatively cheap concentrator system. And I don't see how you can say that this works day and night. It seems to me that a geostationary satallite (which would be necessary so that it can stay within range of the ground based collector rectenna) would be in the shade almost as much as the ground.
Once you consider the huge cost of putting something in orbit, this space solar idea becomes an economical joke. Its just a way for PGEC to say they are investing in the future. It is a political stunt. The project will be abandoned well before a satellite is ever put into orbit.
I just had a random idea, actually. What if you could create a bacteria that harboured all of the DNA of terrestial creatures, but did not activate any of it. Instead it only activates the DNA needed for the bacteria to survive. I'm not a biologist, but it seems like having a store of genes could speed up evolution. Not fast enough to watch, but maybe speed it up by 10x. Of course, that assumes that the genes are useful in the new environment.
Seeding, mining, and replicating maybe, but waiting around for billions of years for intelligent life to evolve? Unlikely.
I think I've done enough conventions to know how to spell "Melllvar".