Multiple studies have shown that PV payback in both carbon and energy (depending on your climate) is generally around 2-5 years. Not sure how you get 25 years; perhaps you should recheck those costs.
As a product, ehhhh. Who are they selling to? Certainly not Joe Consumer -- who has $499 to throw away on a 4GB iPod, even if it also happens to be a cellphone and web browser?
Please, I know someone who just bought his son an iPod for Christmas: $299 (CAD). Now he's buying him the bigger model plus a speaker set, because he's getting a good deal on it: $599 (CAD). And this is a guy that's owed me $1000 for over a year now.
I think you underestimate how much people like their accessories, and how poorly they manage their money. All sensible spenders are people, but not all people are sensible spenders.
Of course, I think the iPhone could very well be a good buy, but I own two cells and a Nokia 770 (and I still have my Sony clie, and a Newton I got off ebay); overall, the iPhone would have saved me money without compromising what I do with my gadgets.
To top it all off, they aren't really introducing anything new that would be a "even if they fail, at least they brought us..xyz." Touch screen on a portable phone is novel, but not necessary in any way.
The interface is novel as all hell. Have you seen it in operation? Compared to ordinary cell phones, it's the Second Coming. In particular, the browser experience is quite novel. I have a Nokia 770, and while browsing is adequate, the zoom in/out features are definitely not as good as the iPhone. Before I saw the iPhone, I thought the technique was decent, but as soon as I saw the multitouch-based zoom, I knew that it was The Right Way (TM).
The other novel (and yet not) feature is: no partitioned storage! I currently have a cell with 128 MB of storage, but only 150 texts allowed! Only 32MB of pictures via the built-in phone! What kind of stupidity is that? The iPhone brings computer-like storage management. Thank God.
And this is just basic phone stuff. I won't even go into the other novel stuff which people have mentioned (random access voicemail, etc.).
To be honest, I don't think the iPhone can flop, because it just sucks so much less than everything else.
The device is still locked down to all hell.
This would indeed be a serious problem IMO. However, such restrictions are not yet at all clear; phone's not out yet! So I'll reserve judgment until the final verdict is in.
How was that radio receiver "irreducibly complex"?!
Because it has a number of complex components which must function harmoniously in order to produce the reliable result they were selecting for. How did the genetic algorithm select for the intermediate stages of such a circuit when those components weren't useful yet? This is just like the canonical example of the "eye" as an irreducibly complex system.
Regardless of whether the algorithm had specific instructions even forbidding such a concept as a radio receiver, the fact the receiver is an algorithm itself derived from another algorithm shows unequivocably it not to be "irreducibly complex".
And once again, you are essentially stating that just because we don't know the algorithm that generated the irreducibly complex human eye, that there must be none. The other respondent hit it right on the head: there is no definitive test for irreducible complexity, and until someone comes up with one, it's all just nonsense.
You have a very very weak understanding of the concept of "irreducibly complex". Now, had you instead said the genetic algorithm produced a _physical_ antennae attached to and _separate_ from even the hardware (FPGA) itself
Irreducible complexity is a myth, which exploits our current ignorance as an argument against rational answers. How can the entire universe have evolved from the Big Bang? Gee, seems irreducibly complex to me. The argument is silly.
A few years ago I read an article on a genetic algorithm connected to a piece of reconfigurable hardware. The algorithm was supposed to develop a simple oscillator circuit and selected for a particular output waveform. It succeeded when in its original environment, but the researchers were baffled when the configured hardware no longer worked after it was moved. Turns out, the genetic algorithm evolved a radio receiver that mixed ambient EM signals and output the desired waveform. Interesting how an "irreducibly complex" piece of hardware like a radio receiver simply evolved even when such a form wasn't anywhere near the original selection criteria.
while your previous correspondent was correct that all of it degrades to heat anyway so that there is no real cooling from using these sources, what you are getting at is that there is no additional heating.
Yes, that is one side of it, but not the only argument. My problem with your argument, is that it considers the full life cycle of the process as instantaneous. Ultimately, the entire universe's energy will be reduced to heat, but so what? That has little bearing on the comparatively instantaneous timescale of our lives.
I will augment my essay in this regard soon, but it comes down to a simple argument: kinetic energy is converted to electrical energy on the order of Ek over timescale Tk->0, providing an instantaneous cooling effect. The inevitable conversion back to heat is delayed significantly, Ek -> Eh over timescale Th >>> Tk, as energy is stored or converted to sound, light, and other intermediate energy forms before it's inevitably reduced to completely unusable heat energy. In the meantime, the Earth is constantly radiating energy out into space, Er, which means over timescale Th, the Earth's temperature drops even lower while Ek is still in useful intermediate forms of energy.
Perhaps you have an argument why this is not a valid approach?
2.4 W/m^2 is exactly the value I used, but you're right that I misplaced a decimal in my original calculations (now corrected) [1]. It increased the number of wind farms needed by 1.4x. There's almost two orders of magnitude difference between the heat generated by human energy production and use, and the forcing behind global warming; it's a gap that will continue to narrow quite quickly as worldwide energy consumption increases. Still not a negligible effect for that reason alone, and any efforts to reap the ambient energies is well worth it, whether it be solar directly, or indirectly, like wind.
You could use wind energy to convert electricity to light in the optical passband and shine that out into space since it can escape the atmosphere, but the effect would be completely negligible.
AND
You other correspondent is correct, just about all of the wind energy turns into heat
An assertion is not a valid argument. With the requisite number of wind farms as indicated in my calculations, I demonstrated that the effect is quite noticeable and comparable to the forcing driving global warming. Where is your argument that it is negligible? Pointing out a flaw in mine would suffice in this regard. An assertion is neither.
There are losses dissipated as heat, as I acknowledged, but dispersed kinetic energy is much better than directed kinetic energy; dispersed energy does not produce storms, and the data that wind farms affect local climates is right there.
None of the nuclear, fossil or tidal power we use is of any importance to the heat input
Another unqualified assertion. The estimated energy consumption of the world is 15 TW, or 1.5 x 10^13 W in 2004 [1]. The energy driving global warming is 8.38 x 10^13 [2]. If, as you say, we should consider all human produced energy as immediately converted to heat, then the energy driving global warming is only 5.6x the energy produced by humans, which is hardly negligible. That means that more than a 1/6th of global warming is caused purely by heat losses from energy use! I'm skeptical, but this is the inevitable conclusion of your assertions. Given the acceleration of energy consumption, I think this will be a growing concern however.
Umm, no. 100% of the energy is dissipated as heat. Some of it does useful work first -- runs your PC for instance. But the PC dissipates the electricty as waste heat -- every last bit of it.
100% is eventually dissipated as heat. The photons emitted from your monitor are not heat, though they are eventually dispersed sufficiently to never be re-emitted and thus impart the random kinetic energy characterized as heat. 100% of the energy is not converted to heat until much, much later, just like every other process in the universe. If it were all immediate, we wouldn't be here.
The windmill may displace electricity that would otherwise be generated by fossil fuels, and therefore your hour of playing Halo would not increase CO2 levels in the atmosphere. If that's the goal, as I said, nuclear will get you a lot more CO2 reduction than windmills in the real world
That is not the only goal. Let me break it down for you:
E_i: Energy input to climate E_h: Energy generated by humans E_s: Energy input from sun
E_i = E_h + E_s
We have two scenarios:
E_h is independent of E_s: this constitutes the situation where all generation is via nuclear, fossil fuels, etc.
E_h is dependent on E_s: we use some of the sun's energy so E_h is instead also a function of E_s
For instance, assuming 60% generated by ordinary means, E_g, and 40% by sun-based means (solar, wind, etc.)
Since the energy from the sun is fixed at 1 E_s, we normalize based on E_s:
0.71 E_i = 0.43 E_g + E_s
Thus, if we switch to 40% renewable sources, the total energy input into the climate is only 71% of what it would be with traditional power generation. And this is completely disregarding impact of reduced C02 emissions. So it does cool the climate.
This process cannot cool the environment. It simply moves the heat energy to a different location, which the wind was doing in the first place.
The inefficiencies leading to heat dissipation are nowhere near 100%. The rest of the converted energy is "useful work", ie. movement of elevators, illumination of rooms and screens, etc. How much of the energy used to write your post was converted to heat? Perhaps 25%, the rest is useful work. If you expended 1kW, then 750 W were extracted from the climate.
The energy used in these appliances would have been used anyway, which means that the heat you refer to would have been generated before instead of recycled. With power from wind farms, it would have first been subtracted from the climate, then re-radiated at much lower levels for a net gain.
Any way you slice it, the climate is cooled, we reduce emissions, and we get renewable energy. I also agree with your assertion that nuclear will help, but it does not actively cool the climate, it merely reduces emissions. I won't address the wind turbine myths you mention, as I'm sure you can correct yourself with some research.
My personal fave are wind farms. Essentially you're converting the higher average kinetic energy circulating in the atmosphere into useful electrical energy thereby actively cooling the climate, while simultaneously reducing our dependency on fossil fuels via a renewable energy source. Wind farms also have the added benefit that the technology is here, unlike more speculative measures like plankton and sulfur. In fact, as cited in my mini-essay above, some research to this very end has already been conducted.
There is (and always will be) an inverse relationship between security and usability
Speculation at best. UI design is hard just as security is hard. In fact, the difficulties of both are directly related IMO. The question is, "how can the user convey their intent to the system?", because surely the user doesn't intend to loose a virus which destroys their computer. The flip side is, "how can the system translate those intents into enforceable security properties?" In other words, it's a matter of proper user-system communication via a trusted path, ie. good UI design and a good security architecture are both necessary to achieve the desired effects. There has been some good research on secure user interfaces, the most successful of which are based on capability security principles [1],[2],[3],[4].
Compartmentalising the applications in such a draconian fashion would appear to be heavily leaning towards the security side, and not the usability side of the argument [...] The article talks about the picture-viewer not being able to access the web.
Only because you have a monolithic view of "the application". Let me make the distinction clearer by rephrasing the usefulness of the security property we're interested in: why should the image rendering component of the application have access to the web? Really, only a small portion of the application would need net access if it needs it at all, but surely not the component that accepts a PNG file and renders it into a bitmap for display to the screen. And yet, in all systems widely in use today, the image rendering library has exactly this authority, and more (authority to delete your personal files for instance). It'd be amusing if it weren't so sad.
Most of the apps I use daily require web/internet access. I think that's only going to increase over time.
I agree, but isolating components from wielding permissions they don't need is simply necessary for good security. Fortunately, it's also good software design.:-)
Re:Water vapour is a "greenhouse gas"
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Water From Wind
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perhaps you should consider the scale of things and the full three dimensions to get some idea why people would not take such a suggestion seriously.
There have been numerous studies demonstrating that wind farms affect the local climate. What is the sum of all local climates? The global climate. Thus, a global deployment could actually have a measurable effect on global climate.
I fail to see how "full three dimensions" is relevant; kinetic energy conversion is the only process at work here. Reducing water vapour merely enhances the cooling effect by suppressing the greenhouse effect (assuming the condensation from the wind farm is sufficiently high).
Water vapour is a "greenhouse gas"
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Water From Wind
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· Score: 1
This article raises another interesting possibility to further enhance the above wind farm effect: water vapour is one of the most potent greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, and reducing the ambient moisture in the air would thus reduce greenhouse effects. Piggybacking this technique on a regular wind farm (if possible), could potentially have a significant effect.
You refuted your own argument. The highlights are the hints:
Nobody respects an altruist, neither in private life nor in international affairs. An altruist is a person who keeps sacrificing himself and his values, which means: sacrificing his friends to his enemies, his allies to his protagonists, his interests to any cry for help, his strength to anyone's weakness, his convictions to anyone's wishes, the truth to any lie, the good to any evil.
Which is not the same as saying that no cause is worth sacrifice as you imply. On the contrary, her "heroic" characters often sacrificed a great deal, including their lives, which to Rand was the ultimate good.
but not applicable in this case where the cancer is curable and will hopefully soon be in remision.
Curability seems beside the point. Even if it was curable but would bankrupt them, the same choice with the same tradeoffs still exists.
What is simply unreal to me is that a reasonably well off family with good insurance and finances can be struck down in this way.
Such is life. I hope it never happens to me; I'll never get a guarantee that it won't though, even living here in Canada.
Being forced to make not just difficult but totally unconscionable choices (in this case death or bankruptcy with a chance of life) due to insufficient finances is actually a pretty good definition of poor to me.
I dunno. Having the choice to trade your worldly possessions for survival against something that would have surely killed you even 15 years ago also seems like a pretty good definition of wealth to me.
I hope we can eventually establish a system where having such options freely available to everyone does not compromise our ability to fund research. I despair of such a centralized system being free from political and bureaucratic interference.
For now though, the wealthy will always have access to newer treatments before the rest of us. In a way, it's even a good thing, since by paying the high initial premium, they are actually funding research into refining it. And better assurance of survival in the face of life's uncertainties seems one of the best reasons to pursue wealth that I've ever heard.
I'll be sure to tell my friend who was self-employed, his wife got cancer and over the next three years they exhausted their health insurance, sold their house and belongings and now they and their kids have to live with other family because they have no money left and still need medical treatment. He'll be fascinated to know that he could have chosen not to be POOR.
To be perfectly clear, they did have a choice: they could have opted to discontinue treatment when health insurance ran out, or soon after. Perhaps not much of a choice, but a choice nonetheless.
In fact, if it were me dying of cancer, I would insist on discontinuing treatment instead of bankrupting my family. But hey, to each his own; don't fault me for thinking of my kids' future.
but I think more people are in a situation where they're perpetually broke than are able to climb out.
The simple explanation is not that they can't climb out, but that they just don't know how. Specifically, poor people don't know how to effectively manage their money. The simple solution is to educate them in simple finances in school before they tend to start dropping out. I think that would do more for the desperately poor than any other subject they will learn their entire lives.
That's an irrelevant detail of how I presented it. Let's say they're babies who don't know any better, or they're blind and deaf, or Snidely Whiplash has tied them to the tracks, or they were crossing the tracks, but some superglue had spilled onto the tracks from a passing truck.
None of which are irrelevant details because, again, we're discussing free agents not inanimates. If the people sleeping on the tracks are completely ignorant of their choices or victims of circumstance like the truly innocent victim in #2, then that's another different situation. Of course, in the heat of the moment, you probably don't know that and will just make an erroneous assumption which we can't fault you for given the information available.
That's an entirely different thing than saying it's irrational to not sacrifice a person you know to be innocent to save some people who might be innocent. Then again, people sacrifice themselves in such situations regularly.
Sure, the law would probably view it that way, but that doesn't mean the law has a rational basis. Law is based on morality, and morality is based on irrational biases built into the primate brain.
Law is not based on morality, it has its own philosophical basis [1] [2]. Western law tends to be based on a rational consequentialist philosophy. Don't try to apply your new shiny hammer to all of your old nails.:-)
Really there's no logical distinction between #1 and #2; in both cases, the outcome is that either one innocent person is going to die, or five are.
The logical distinction is that you are neglecting the choices of the sleeping people that led to the situation. They chose to sleep on the tracks, so they are not entirely innocent in the scenario. The second scenario had a "truly innocent" person sacrificed for their stupid choices. I think personal responsibility is an important distinction that has real-world implications, because people are active agents that make choices; it's not the same as doing the simple math on inanimate objects.
In the first scenario, we would say they were stupid people for sleeping on train tracks, and they died as a result of lack of foresight. Having sacrificed the individual in the second scenario, we'd say, "you're under arrest for murder".
Without knowing whether it's the forked track situation or the guy shoved onto the tracks situation, you have to decide whether to push the button. What do you do?
These are all different scenarios due to the differing amounts of information. We can't fault people for ignorance, as they always act on the best information available to them. So really, there IS a rational reason to choose differently in ALL the above scenarios.
some people believe that poor people are poor because they are lazy and violent, while others believe that people are poor because they don't have opportunities available to them
I believe the poor remain poor largely because the poor don't know how to manage money. People tend to learn money management from their parents in some form, and poor people with poor parents get caught in a cycle of earn-spend, instead of earn-save. Others have had this pointed out as well. Since this realization, I've been a strong supporter of more practical life-skills classes in school, like finances.
Does Apple have to change their name to "Apple Digital Entertainment" before you people will realize that Apple is not a computer hardware company anymore. One would think that the change to "Apple, Inc." would give people a clue, but apparently not.
He said "hardware company", not "computer hardware company". Big difference.
The original poster's statement is accurate. OS X has the capability of running on hardware other than Apple's, but Apple doesn't want to support it on anything but their own hardware.
Besides, what company would want that? Does Palm want you running its OS on your home-grown computer? Microsoft wants it because they're a software company and that's one of their primary revenue streams.
If it's true, there could be a very good reason why the iPhone is not open to 3rd party development: it's mostly custom hardware with a very low end CPU. Steve Jobs said it himself, the iPhone consists of a lot of custom silicon to get all those features into such a small package.
Compare the iPhone with the Nokia 770 or 800 internet tablets (which are Linux devices): iPhone is smaller, has a lot more storage, seems just as powerful internet feature-wise, is ALSO a phone, and yet squeaks out MORE battery life. How is it possible? Custom silicon would do it.
So the iPhone may not even have a general purpose CPU! It probably does since it "runs OS X" -- probably only to co-ordinate the multitasking features. The iPhone could very well consist of a bunch of special-purpose ASICs. 3rd party development on this sort of platform makes less sense. Time will tell I guess.:-)
Wind: Loud, ugly, possibly changing the climate and environment around them. Same problem as nuclear - no one wants them in sight
Offshore wind farms are growing in "popularity" for this very reason (and because winds are stronger out at sea).
As for changing the climate, here's a thought:
Global warming is increasing the average kinetic energy circulating in the climate
Greater kinetic energy results in stronger winds
Wind turbine farms slow down winds by converting a percentage of their kinetic energy into electrical energy
Conclusion: offshore wind turbine farms could help us reduce violent climate fluctuations resulting from global warming by converting ambient climate kinetic energy into electrical energy.
Slashdot Mirror
Multiple studies have shown that PV payback in both carbon and energy (depending on your climate) is generally around 2-5 years. Not sure how you get 25 years; perhaps you should recheck those costs.
As a product, ehhhh. Who are they selling to? Certainly not Joe Consumer -- who has $499 to throw away on a 4GB iPod, even if it also happens to be a cellphone and web browser?
Please, I know someone who just bought his son an iPod for Christmas: $299 (CAD). Now he's buying him the bigger model plus a speaker set, because he's getting a good deal on it: $599 (CAD). And this is a guy that's owed me $1000 for over a year now.
I think you underestimate how much people like their accessories, and how poorly they manage their money. All sensible spenders are people, but not all people are sensible spenders.
Of course, I think the iPhone could very well be a good buy, but I own two cells and a Nokia 770 (and I still have my Sony clie, and a Newton I got off ebay); overall, the iPhone would have saved me money without compromising what I do with my gadgets.
To top it all off, they aren't really introducing anything new that would be a "even if they fail, at least they brought us ..xyz." Touch screen on a portable phone is novel, but not necessary in any way.
The interface is novel as all hell. Have you seen it in operation? Compared to ordinary cell phones, it's the Second Coming. In particular, the browser experience is quite novel. I have a Nokia 770, and while browsing is adequate, the zoom in/out features are definitely not as good as the iPhone. Before I saw the iPhone, I thought the technique was decent, but as soon as I saw the multitouch-based zoom, I knew that it was The Right Way (TM).
The other novel (and yet not) feature is: no partitioned storage! I currently have a cell with 128 MB of storage, but only 150 texts allowed! Only 32MB of pictures via the built-in phone! What kind of stupidity is that? The iPhone brings computer-like storage management. Thank God.
And this is just basic phone stuff. I won't even go into the other novel stuff which people have mentioned (random access voicemail, etc.).
To be honest, I don't think the iPhone can flop, because it just sucks so much less than everything else.
The device is still locked down to all hell.
This would indeed be a serious problem IMO. However, such restrictions are not yet at all clear; phone's not out yet! So I'll reserve judgment until the final verdict is in.
This hardware is dirt cheap with economies of scale, so a $50 price tag IS possible.
Pure fantasy. Your "1-4 gb sdram" requirement alone costs $50 given current fabrication techniques.
How was that radio receiver "irreducibly complex"?!
Because it has a number of complex components which must function harmoniously in order to produce the reliable result they were selecting for. How did the genetic algorithm select for the intermediate stages of such a circuit when those components weren't useful yet? This is just like the canonical example of the "eye" as an irreducibly complex system.
Regardless of whether the algorithm had specific instructions even forbidding such a concept as a radio receiver, the fact the receiver is an algorithm itself derived from another algorithm shows unequivocably it not to be "irreducibly complex".
And once again, you are essentially stating that just because we don't know the algorithm that generated the irreducibly complex human eye, that there must be none. The other respondent hit it right on the head: there is no definitive test for irreducible complexity, and until someone comes up with one, it's all just nonsense.
You have a very very weak understanding of the concept of "irreducibly complex". Now, had you instead said the genetic algorithm produced a _physical_ antennae attached to and _separate_ from even the hardware (FPGA) itself
Are our eyes physically separate from ourselves?
Irreducible complexity is a myth, which exploits our current ignorance as an argument against rational answers. How can the entire universe have evolved from the Big Bang? Gee, seems irreducibly complex to me. The argument is silly.
A few years ago I read an article on a genetic algorithm connected to a piece of reconfigurable hardware. The algorithm was supposed to develop a simple oscillator circuit and selected for a particular output waveform. It succeeded when in its original environment, but the researchers were baffled when the configured hardware no longer worked after it was moved. Turns out, the genetic algorithm evolved a radio receiver that mixed ambient EM signals and output the desired waveform. Interesting how an "irreducibly complex" piece of hardware like a radio receiver simply evolved even when such a form wasn't anywhere near the original selection criteria.
while your previous correspondent was correct that all of it degrades to heat anyway so that there is no real cooling from using these sources, what you are getting at is that there is no additional heating.
Yes, that is one side of it, but not the only argument. My problem with your argument, is that it considers the full life cycle of the process as instantaneous. Ultimately, the entire universe's energy will be reduced to heat, but so what? That has little bearing on the comparatively instantaneous timescale of our lives.
I will augment my essay in this regard soon, but it comes down to a simple argument: kinetic energy is converted to electrical energy on the order of Ek over timescale Tk->0, providing an instantaneous cooling effect. The inevitable conversion back to heat is delayed significantly, Ek -> Eh over timescale Th >>> Tk, as energy is stored or converted to sound, light, and other intermediate energy forms before it's inevitably reduced to completely unusable heat energy. In the meantime, the Earth is constantly radiating energy out into space, Er, which means over timescale Th, the Earth's temperature drops even lower while Ek is still in useful intermediate forms of energy.
Perhaps you have an argument why this is not a valid approach?
2.4 W/m^2 is exactly the value I used, but you're right that I misplaced a decimal in my original calculations (now corrected) [1]. It increased the number of wind farms needed by 1.4x. There's almost two orders of magnitude difference between the heat generated by human energy production and use, and the forcing behind global warming; it's a gap that will continue to narrow quite quickly as worldwide energy consumption increases. Still not a negligible effect for that reason alone, and any efforts to reap the ambient energies is well worth it, whether it be solar directly, or indirectly, like wind.
k i.ashx/Wind_Farms_Against_Global_Warming
[1] https://www2897.ssldomain.com/higherlogics/www/Wi
Regarding:
n ergy_resources_and_consumption&oldid=107301570_ energy_budget&oldid=105407800
You could use wind energy to convert electricity to light in the optical passband and shine that out into space since it can escape the atmosphere, but the effect would be completely negligible.
AND
You other correspondent is correct, just about all of the wind energy turns into heat
An assertion is not a valid argument. With the requisite number of wind farms as indicated in my calculations, I demonstrated that the effect is quite noticeable and comparable to the forcing driving global warming. Where is your argument that it is negligible? Pointing out a flaw in mine would suffice in this regard. An assertion is neither.
There are losses dissipated as heat, as I acknowledged, but dispersed kinetic energy is much better than directed kinetic energy; dispersed energy does not produce storms, and the data that wind farms affect local climates is right there.
None of the nuclear, fossil or tidal power we use is of any importance to the heat input
Another unqualified assertion. The estimated energy consumption of the world is 15 TW, or 1.5 x 10^13 W in 2004 [1]. The energy driving global warming is 8.38 x 10^13 [2]. If, as you say, we should consider all human produced energy as immediately converted to heat, then the energy driving global warming is only 5.6x the energy produced by humans, which is hardly negligible. That means that more than a 1/6th of global warming is caused purely by heat losses from energy use! I'm skeptical, but this is the inevitable conclusion of your assertions. Given the acceleration of energy consumption, I think this will be a growing concern however.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=World_e
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Earth's
100% is eventually dissipated as heat. The photons emitted from your monitor are not heat, though they are eventually dispersed sufficiently to never be re-emitted and thus impart the random kinetic energy characterized as heat. 100% of the energy is not converted to heat until much, much later, just like every other process in the universe. If it were all immediate, we wouldn't be here.
The windmill may displace electricity that would otherwise be generated by fossil fuels, and therefore your hour of playing Halo would not increase CO2 levels in the atmosphere. If that's the goal, as I said, nuclear will get you a lot more CO2 reduction than windmills in the real world
That is not the only goal. Let me break it down for you:
E_i: Energy input to climate
E_h: Energy generated by humans
E_s: Energy input from sun
E_i = E_h + E_s
We have two scenarios:
For instance, assuming 60% generated by ordinary means, E_g, and 40% by sun-based means (solar, wind, etc.)
E_h = (0.6 E_g + 0.4 E_s) + E_s
This results in:
E_i = (0.6 E_g + 0.4 E_s) + E_s = 0.6 E_g + 1.4 E_s
Since the energy from the sun is fixed at 1 E_s, we normalize based on E_s:
0.71 E_i = 0.43 E_g + E_s
Thus, if we switch to 40% renewable sources, the total energy input into the climate is only 71% of what it would be with traditional power generation. And this is completely disregarding impact of reduced C02 emissions. So it does cool the climate.
Any way you slice it, the climate is cooled, we reduce emissions, and we get renewable energy. I also agree with your assertion that nuclear will help, but it does not actively cool the climate, it merely reduces emissions. I won't address the wind turbine myths you mention, as I'm sure you can correct yourself with some research.
My personal fave are wind farms. Essentially you're converting the higher average kinetic energy circulating in the atmosphere into useful electrical energy thereby actively cooling the climate, while simultaneously reducing our dependency on fossil fuels via a renewable energy source. Wind farms also have the added benefit that the technology is here, unlike more speculative measures like plankton and sulfur. In fact, as cited in my mini-essay above, some research to this very end has already been conducted.
There is (and always will be) an inverse relationship between security and usability
:-)
h tmlt mly ee.pdf
Speculation at best. UI design is hard just as security is hard. In fact, the difficulties of both are directly related IMO. The question is, "how can the user convey their intent to the system?", because surely the user doesn't intend to loose a virus which destroys their computer. The flip side is, "how can the system translate those intents into enforceable security properties?" In other words, it's a matter of proper user-system communication via a trusted path, ie. good UI design and a good security architecture are both necessary to achieve the desired effects. There has been some good research on secure user interfaces, the most successful of which are based on capability security principles [1],[2],[3],[4].
Compartmentalising the applications in such a draconian fashion would appear to be heavily leaning towards the security side, and not the usability side of the argument [...] The article talks about the picture-viewer not being able to access the web.
Only because you have a monolithic view of "the application". Let me make the distinction clearer by rephrasing the usefulness of the security property we're interested in: why should the image rendering component of the application have access to the web? Really, only a small portion of the application would need net access if it needs it at all, but surely not the component that accepts a PNG file and renders it into a bitmap for display to the screen. And yet, in all systems widely in use today, the image rendering library has exactly this authority, and more (authority to delete your personal files for instance). It'd be amusing if it weren't so sad.
Most of the apps I use daily require web/internet access. I think that's only going to increase over time.
I agree, but isolating components from wielding permissions they don't need is simply necessary for good security. Fortunately, it's also good software design.
[1] http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~ping/sid/design.
[2] http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~ping/sid/ideus.h
[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/957/
[4] http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/2005/2005posters/23-
perhaps you should consider the scale of things and the full three dimensions to get some idea why people would not take such a suggestion seriously.
There have been numerous studies demonstrating that wind farms affect the local climate. What is the sum of all local climates? The global climate. Thus, a global deployment could actually have a measurable effect on global climate.
I fail to see how "full three dimensions" is relevant; kinetic energy conversion is the only process at work here. Reducing water vapour merely enhances the cooling effect by suppressing the greenhouse effect (assuming the condensation from the wind farm is sufficiently high).
I suggested elsewhere that deploying wind farms could combat global warming by extracting kinetic energy from the climate; it probably isn't very much energy compared to the total amount of energy circulating in the atmosphere, but every little bit helps, and we get energy to boot.
This article raises another interesting possibility to further enhance the above wind farm effect: water vapour is one of the most potent greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, and reducing the ambient moisture in the air would thus reduce greenhouse effects. Piggybacking this technique on a regular wind farm (if possible), could potentially have a significant effect.
Which is not the same as saying that no cause is worth sacrifice as you imply. On the contrary, her "heroic" characters often sacrificed a great deal, including their lives, which to Rand was the ultimate good.
but not applicable in this case where the cancer is curable and will hopefully soon be in remision.
Curability seems beside the point. Even if it was curable but would bankrupt them, the same choice with the same tradeoffs still exists.
What is simply unreal to me is that a reasonably well off family with good insurance and finances can be struck down in this way.
Such is life. I hope it never happens to me; I'll never get a guarantee that it won't though, even living here in Canada.
Being forced to make not just difficult but totally unconscionable choices (in this case death or bankruptcy with a chance of life) due to insufficient finances is actually a pretty good definition of poor to me.
I dunno. Having the choice to trade your worldly possessions for survival against something that would have surely killed you even 15 years ago also seems like a pretty good definition of wealth to me.
I hope we can eventually establish a system where having such options freely available to everyone does not compromise our ability to fund research. I despair of such a centralized system being free from political and bureaucratic interference.
For now though, the wealthy will always have access to newer treatments before the rest of us. In a way, it's even a good thing, since by paying the high initial premium, they are actually funding research into refining it. And better assurance of survival in the face of life's uncertainties seems one of the best reasons to pursue wealth that I've ever heard.
I'll be sure to tell my friend who was self-employed, his wife got cancer and over the next three years they exhausted their health insurance, sold their house and belongings and now they and their kids have to live with other family because they have no money left and still need medical treatment. He'll be fascinated to know that he could have chosen not to be POOR.
To be perfectly clear, they did have a choice: they could have opted to discontinue treatment when health insurance ran out, or soon after. Perhaps not much of a choice, but a choice nonetheless.
In fact, if it were me dying of cancer, I would insist on discontinuing treatment instead of bankrupting my family. But hey, to each his own; don't fault me for thinking of my kids' future.
but I think more people are in a situation where they're perpetually broke than are able to climb out.
The simple explanation is not that they can't climb out, but that they just don't know how. Specifically, poor people don't know how to effectively manage their money. The simple solution is to educate them in simple finances in school before they tend to start dropping out. I think that would do more for the desperately poor than any other subject they will learn their entire lives.
That's an irrelevant detail of how I presented it. Let's say they're babies who don't know any better, or they're blind and deaf, or Snidely Whiplash has tied them to the tracks, or they were crossing the tracks, but some superglue had spilled onto the tracks from a passing truck.
:-)
None of which are irrelevant details because, again, we're discussing free agents not inanimates. If the people sleeping on the tracks are completely ignorant of their choices or victims of circumstance like the truly innocent victim in #2, then that's another different situation. Of course, in the heat of the moment, you probably don't know that and will just make an erroneous assumption which we can't fault you for given the information available.
That's an entirely different thing than saying it's irrational to not sacrifice a person you know to be innocent to save some people who might be innocent. Then again, people sacrifice themselves in such situations regularly.
Sure, the law would probably view it that way, but that doesn't mean the law has a rational basis. Law is based on morality, and morality is based on irrational biases built into the primate brain.
Law is not based on morality, it has its own philosophical basis [1] [2]. Western law tends to be based on a rational consequentialist philosophy. Don't try to apply your new shiny hammer to all of your old nails.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurisprudence
[2] http://www.iep.utm.edu/l/law-phil.htm
Really there's no logical distinction between #1 and #2; in both cases, the outcome is that either one innocent person is going to die, or five are.
The logical distinction is that you are neglecting the choices of the sleeping people that led to the situation. They chose to sleep on the tracks, so they are not entirely innocent in the scenario. The second scenario had a "truly innocent" person sacrificed for their stupid choices. I think personal responsibility is an important distinction that has real-world implications, because people are active agents that make choices; it's not the same as doing the simple math on inanimate objects.
In the first scenario, we would say they were stupid people for sleeping on train tracks, and they died as a result of lack of foresight. Having sacrificed the individual in the second scenario, we'd say, "you're under arrest for murder".
Without knowing whether it's the forked track situation or the guy shoved onto the tracks situation, you have to decide whether to push the button. What do you do?
These are all different scenarios due to the differing amounts of information. We can't fault people for ignorance, as they always act on the best information available to them. So really, there IS a rational reason to choose differently in ALL the above scenarios.
some people believe that poor people are poor because they are lazy and violent, while others believe that people are poor because they don't have opportunities available to them
I believe the poor remain poor largely because the poor don't know how to manage money. People tend to learn money management from their parents in some form, and poor people with poor parents get caught in a cycle of earn-spend, instead of earn-save. Others have had this pointed out as well. Since this realization, I've been a strong supporter of more practical life-skills classes in school, like finances.
Does Apple have to change their name to "Apple Digital Entertainment" before you people will realize that Apple is not a computer hardware company anymore. One would think that the change to "Apple, Inc." would give people a clue, but apparently not.
He said "hardware company", not "computer hardware company". Big difference.
The original poster's statement is accurate. OS X has the capability of running on hardware other than Apple's, but Apple doesn't want to support it on anything but their own hardware.
See Darwin.
Besides, what company would want that? Does Palm want you running its OS on your home-grown computer? Microsoft wants it because they're a software company and that's one of their primary revenue streams.
If it's true, there could be a very good reason why the iPhone is not open to 3rd party development: it's mostly custom hardware with a very low end CPU. Steve Jobs said it himself, the iPhone consists of a lot of custom silicon to get all those features into such a small package.
:-)
Compare the iPhone with the Nokia 770 or 800 internet tablets (which are Linux devices): iPhone is smaller, has a lot more storage, seems just as powerful internet feature-wise, is ALSO a phone, and yet squeaks out MORE battery life. How is it possible? Custom silicon would do it.
So the iPhone may not even have a general purpose CPU! It probably does since it "runs OS X" -- probably only to co-ordinate the multitasking features. The iPhone could very well consist of a bunch of special-purpose ASICs. 3rd party development on this sort of platform makes less sense. Time will tell I guess.
Offshore wind farms are growing in "popularity" for this very reason (and because winds are stronger out at sea).
As for changing the climate, here's a thought:
Conclusion: offshore wind turbine farms could help us reduce violent climate fluctuations resulting from global warming by converting ambient climate kinetic energy into electrical energy.
You heard it here first.