I probably agree with you, but I'm not quite sure how 1.5B is 17% of 25B.
Doesn't matter. What makes me nervous is that I remember all too clearly how a decade ago we were told that ludicrous sums in improbable financial instruments (CDOs, etc) was not a problem because everything would net out to zero. Except... it turns out that the bets don't net out to zero if some of the players can't cover their bets.
"a lot of Japanese are looking for other ways to invest their money."
Sure. And maybe US and other G7 assets are a bit overpriced. And maybe China isn't a great place to invest either. And who wants to bet money on the future of some tropical hellhole full of crazed, incomprehensible, and quite possibly incompetent gaijin? But...
"... at the same time, trading on margins, credit and futures of bitcoin as an underlying asset has surged from only $2 million in 2014 to a whopping $543 billion just in 2017 alone"
Half a trillion USD in speculative "investment" in a historically volatile (and somewhat imaginary) commodity? What could possibly go wrong? By way of comparison, the sum of all Japanese holdings of US Treasury notes is about 1 trillion USD.
I doubt they are ALL idiots, but that sounds more credible than most Muskisms.
Tesla has been cobbling cars together for a while. This is not their first rodeo. Why did Musk's operation select incompetent suppliers for the Model 3?
"If you don't think this will happen, think of the children, or the terrorists, or the terrorist children, or security, or whatever the problem is this week."
Bedbugs!! We need secure boot welded to Kernel Lockdown in order to fight the bedbug epidemic. (I'll also help fight global warming, prevent asteroid strikes, discourage illegal immigrants from voting, and save the skeets)
"There's zero evidence that dinosaurs existed after the asteroid"
Not zero. There's rather a lot of dinosaur material in early Paleocene strata in North America. The issue is whether it is (all) reworked from underlying cretaceous strata. In particular, a lot a folks think the saurian remains in the Ojo Alamo Formation in New Mexico are Paleocene . However, to my knowledge, no one has yet found an articulated Paleocene dinosaur skeleton. If articulated material is ever found, that'll probably settle the argument.
I'm guessing that the problem here is something called "the gmr." That's the first link in the Slashdot article. It looks to be a badly garbled summary of the paper which is accessible as a pdf from the second link.
I'm not going to waste time deconstructing the gmr material. It's kind of a shambles.
What the paper actually says if one tracks it down is that dinosaurs MAY have been in decline at the end of the Cretaceous -- true, but hardly proven. The sampling is so non-random that it's hard to tell. The paper itself seems to argue that caimans (a variety of crocodilian) don't reject a foodstuff just because it made them sick the last time they ate it. Birds OTOH, do. They then hypothesize that the dinosaurs might have been more like caimans than birds and that they poisoned themselves because, unlike, birds, they couldn't/didn''t avoid plants that made them sick.
That's not stupid, but if you ask me, it's rather a lot of conjecture based on a pretty limited factual foundation.
You might want to note that China rejected Marxism after the disastrous Cultural Revolution. Nowadays, they are capitalist -- perhaps more so than the US. What they aren't is a representative democracy. But then neither, in practice is the US which is more of a two party oligarchy Hard to think of a country that actually is a representative democracy.... Iceland maybe. Switzerland somewhat I'm told
There are wild grapes growing in the woods across the street from me. They are usually about 7mm in diameter with seeds about 3mm in diameter and, when ripe, taste like something you might use to remove paint. To me, they are a persuasive argument for selective breeding of plants. Lots of it.
(Not that I don't think MBAs, lawyers, and advertising folks won't manage to perpetrate some disasters on their way to "perfect" crops.)
It always astonishes me that anyone would deliberately breed the rather astonishing flavorless, but pretty much indestructable, "tomatoes" sold in America's supermarkets. Now the process of producing inedible foodstuffs can be accelerated.
"I, for one, am looking forward to CRISPR-enhanced lettuce, at my local grocery."
Grocery? Heavens no. The CRISPR enhanced lettuce will roll out of the grocery on its own, hitch a ride to your house, pick the lock, let itself in, lock the door behind it, climb into your fridge, discard any overly aged food, tuck itself into the vegetable tray, close the fridge door, and, if necessary, turn out the light in the fridge.
Just etch "Everything causes cancer--stop using everything' into the lenses of permanent resident's eyes. Visitors will be required to wear ECCSUV glasses at all times. The discussion will then move on to how to warn pets, livestock and wildlife of the grave dangers that surround them.
I actually do know what a phased array antenna is. I reckon it'll be fine for a fixed ground station. Trying to use a phased array in a moving vehicle or a cell phone-ish device seems to me likely to be conceptually possible but pragmatically unworkable with current technology.
You're right. I didn't do the math at 0400 local with no coffee. And yes 8ms is about right for minimum round trip delay. However, if you think about it for a while, you'll find that the majority of contacts will be made at slant ranges quite a bit longer than 1200km. The geometry is messy. And computing the average/typical range turns out to be even messier. I COULD do it (I think) and so could you most likely. But it'll take a bit of effort. My best guess would be 12-15ms round trip typical. But we're probably overlooking something.
Then there's the issue of which satellite gets used when multiple satellites are visible. I have no idea how that is going to be handled unless the "ground station" antennae are directional and pick their bird dynamically
Latency was my first question. The almighty internet sayeth -- altitude 1200 km, latency 25-35ms. Higher than I'd like and probably doesn't include delays on the ground at the other end of the link. But, very likely workable for most stuff.
My second question -- not so easily answered -- is how they manage contention since CDMA probably won't work.
Cost? Who the hell knows?
Overall, this could be a winner if they can solve about 7000 problems.
This does not sound like a big deal. Tesla provides the mechanic with a bag with a few bolts. Mechanic puts the car on a lift, removes three or four bolts. May not be as easy as it sounds if they are severely corroded or especially awkwardly placed, but mechanics deal with that all the time Mechanic installs new bolts and torques them to spec. Car is returned to bored customer sitting in lounge drinking lousy coffee. Some paperwork gets done. Cost maybe 25 cents for the bolts, $150 for labor.
Probably only half the Model S's ever get fixed.
Cost for half of 123,000 vehicles -- maybe $10,000,000. Compared to Tesla's other problems $10M is pocket change.
It's entirely possible that these airmasses aren't going to rain or snow anywhere after passing over the Tibetan Plateau. Getting up to the level of the plateau -- 14000 feet and up -- involves a lot of orographic uplift and squeezing out of moisture. Once they move on to lower elevation areas, they will drop and warm. The resulting humidity may well be too low to support precipitation.
The article, if you actually read the whole thing, acknowledges that there may not be a lot of moisture there to extract even in Tibet. It also makes it clear that this is only a proposal and has not been approved by Beijing.
Kurt Vonnegut - Player Piano "Player Piano is the first novel of American writer Kurt Vonnegut, published in 1952. It depicts a dystopia of automation, describing the negative impact it can have on quality of life. The story takes place in a near-future society that is almost totally mechanized, eliminating the need for human laborers...." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's quite a good read for a 68 year old futuristic novel.
Africa seems to be an entire continent with a population of 1.2 billion run on libertarian principles. Doesn't seem to be working out quite like Ayn Rand/MIlton Freidman fans would predict.
"Just what is wrong with lower skilled people getting less income?"
As you will likely discover, one problem is that unemployable people don't have much to do but sit around and think about ways to acquire money. Those are very likely to involve either violence -- hitting you over the head with a brick in order to make off with your wallet/purse/vehicle; or extortion -- nice house you have there, be a shame if something happened to it; or stealing infrastructure components -- no internet today, the vandals stole the whole damn local exchange as well as the attached cell tower.
Ask not for whom the automation demon tolls. It tolls for you.
Slashdot Mirror
I probably agree with you, but I'm not quite sure how 1.5B is 17% of 25B.
Doesn't matter. What makes me nervous is that I remember all too clearly how a decade ago we were told that ludicrous sums in improbable financial instruments (CDOs, etc) was not a problem because everything would net out to zero. Except ... it turns out that the bets don't net out to zero if some of the players can't cover their bets.
"a lot of Japanese are looking for other ways to invest their money."
Sure. And maybe US and other G7 assets are a bit overpriced. And maybe China isn't a great place to invest either. And who wants to bet money on the future of some tropical hellhole full of crazed, incomprehensible, and quite possibly incompetent gaijin? But ...
"... at the same time, trading on margins, credit and futures of bitcoin as an underlying asset has surged from only $2 million in 2014 to a whopping $543 billion just in 2017 alone"
Half a trillion USD in speculative "investment" in a historically volatile (and somewhat imaginary) commodity? What could possibly go wrong? By way of comparison, the sum of all Japanese holdings of US Treasury notes is about 1 trillion USD.
"... Finally, all new cars leased through Hyundai require that Genuine Parts be used for collision repairs"
Never leased a car, but I assume Hyundai actually owns the vehicle. Seems reasonable that they can dictate how it is repaired. No?
"... and our suppliers are all idiots."
I doubt they are ALL idiots, but that sounds more credible than most Muskisms.
Tesla has been cobbling cars together for a while. This is not their first rodeo. Why did Musk's operation select incompetent suppliers for the Model 3?
"If you don't think this will happen, think of the children, or the terrorists, or the terrorist children, or security, or whatever the problem is this week."
Bedbugs!! We need secure boot welded to Kernel Lockdown in order to fight the bedbug epidemic. (I'll also help fight global warming, prevent asteroid strikes, discourage illegal immigrants from voting, and save the skeets)
"There's zero evidence that dinosaurs existed after the asteroid"
Not zero. There's rather a lot of dinosaur material in early Paleocene strata in North America. The issue is whether it is (all) reworked from underlying cretaceous strata. In particular, a lot a folks think the saurian remains in the Ojo Alamo Formation in New Mexico are Paleocene . However, to my knowledge, no one has yet found an articulated Paleocene dinosaur skeleton. If articulated material is ever found, that'll probably settle the argument.
I'm guessing that the problem here is something called "the gmr." That's the first link in the Slashdot article. It looks to be a badly garbled summary of the paper which is accessible as a pdf from the second link.
I'm not going to waste time deconstructing the gmr material. It's kind of a shambles.
What the paper actually says if one tracks it down is that dinosaurs MAY have been in decline at the end of the Cretaceous -- true, but hardly proven. The sampling is so non-random that it's hard to tell. The paper itself seems to argue that caimans (a variety of crocodilian) don't reject a foodstuff just because it made them sick the last time they ate it. Birds OTOH, do. They then hypothesize that the dinosaurs might have been more like caimans than birds and that they poisoned themselves because, unlike, birds, they couldn't/didn''t avoid plants that made them sick.
That's not stupid, but if you ask me, it's rather a lot of conjecture based on a pretty limited factual foundation.
OK, here's a Wikipedia link, but you probably won't like THAT either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..."Down_and_Dirty/Earthquake_Survival"
You might want to note that China rejected Marxism after the disastrous Cultural Revolution. Nowadays, they are capitalist -- perhaps more so than the US. What they aren't is a representative democracy. But then neither, in practice is the US which is more of a two party oligarchy Hard to think of a country that actually is a representative democracy .... Iceland maybe. Switzerland somewhat I'm told
There are wild grapes growing in the woods across the street from me. They are usually about 7mm in diameter with seeds about 3mm in diameter and, when ripe, taste like something you might use to remove paint. To me, they are a persuasive argument for selective breeding of plants. Lots of it.
(Not that I don't think MBAs, lawyers, and advertising folks won't manage to perpetrate some disasters on their way to "perfect" crops.)
It always astonishes me that anyone would deliberately breed the rather astonishing flavorless, but pretty much indestructable, "tomatoes" sold in America's supermarkets. Now the process of producing inedible foodstuffs can be accelerated.
Ain't science grand?
"I, for one, am looking forward to CRISPR-enhanced lettuce, at my local grocery."
Grocery? Heavens no. The CRISPR enhanced lettuce will roll out of the grocery on its own, hitch a ride to your house, pick the lock, let itself in, lock the door behind it, climb into your fridge, discard any overly aged food, tuck itself into the vegetable tray, close the fridge door, and, if necessary, turn out the light in the fridge.
The issue presumably is competence, not character.
Trouble is that the only good food is kale. And kale is inedible.
Does make an OK packing material if properly dried
Just etch "Everything causes cancer--stop using everything' into the lenses of permanent resident's eyes. Visitors will be required to wear ECCSUV glasses at all times. The discussion will then move on to how to warn pets, livestock and wildlife of the grave dangers that surround them.
I actually do know what a phased array antenna is. I reckon it'll be fine for a fixed ground station. Trying to use a phased array in a moving vehicle or a cell phone-ish device seems to me likely to be conceptually possible but pragmatically unworkable with current technology.
But what the hell do I know?
You're right. I didn't do the math at 0400 local with no coffee. And yes 8ms is about right for minimum round trip delay. However, if you think about it for a while, you'll find that the majority of contacts will be made at slant ranges quite a bit longer than 1200km. The geometry is messy. And computing the average/typical range turns out to be even messier. I COULD do it (I think) and so could you most likely. But it'll take a bit of effort. My best guess would be 12-15ms round trip typical. But we're probably overlooking something.
Then there's the issue of which satellite gets used when multiple satellites are visible. I have no idea how that is going to be handled unless the "ground station" antennae are directional and pick their bird dynamically
Not a problem. You put the antenna on top of your mandatory, surgically implanted, tinfoil hat and don't use the internet during thunderstorms.
Latency was my first question. The almighty internet sayeth -- altitude 1200 km, latency 25-35ms. Higher than I'd like and probably doesn't include delays on the ground at the other end of the link. But, very likely workable for most stuff.
My second question -- not so easily answered -- is how they manage contention since CDMA probably won't work.
Cost? Who the hell knows?
Overall, this could be a winner if they can solve about 7000 problems.
This does not sound like a big deal. Tesla provides the mechanic with a bag with a few bolts. Mechanic puts the car on a lift, removes three or four bolts. May not be as easy as it sounds if they are severely corroded or especially awkwardly placed, but mechanics deal with that all the time Mechanic installs new bolts and torques them to spec. Car is returned to bored customer sitting in lounge drinking lousy coffee. Some paperwork gets done. Cost maybe 25 cents for the bolts, $150 for labor.
Probably only half the Model S's ever get fixed.
Cost for half of 123,000 vehicles -- maybe $10,000,000. Compared to Tesla's other problems $10M is pocket change.
It's entirely possible that these airmasses aren't going to rain or snow anywhere after passing over the Tibetan Plateau. Getting up to the level of the plateau -- 14000 feet and up -- involves a lot of orographic uplift and squeezing out of moisture. Once they move on to lower elevation areas, they will drop and warm. The resulting humidity may well be too low to support precipitation.
The article, if you actually read the whole thing, acknowledges that there may not be a lot of moisture there to extract even in Tibet. It also makes it clear that this is only a proposal and has not been approved by Beijing.
Kurt Vonnegut - Player Piano "Player Piano is the first novel of American writer Kurt Vonnegut, published in 1952. It depicts a dystopia of automation, describing the negative impact it can have on quality of life. The story takes place in a near-future society that is almost totally mechanized, eliminating the need for human laborers. ..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's quite a good read for a 68 year old futuristic novel.
Africa seems to be an entire continent with a population of 1.2 billion run on libertarian principles. Doesn't seem to be working out quite like Ayn Rand/MIlton Freidman fans would predict.
"Just what is wrong with lower skilled people getting less income?"
As you will likely discover, one problem is that unemployable people don't have much to do but sit around and think about ways to acquire money. Those are very likely to involve either violence -- hitting you over the head with a brick in order to make off with your wallet/purse/vehicle; or extortion -- nice house you have there, be a shame if something happened to it; or stealing infrastructure components -- no internet today, the vandals stole the whole damn local exchange as well as the attached cell tower.
Ask not for whom the automation demon tolls. It tolls for you.
Franklin, not Teddy. And Roosevelt might well have been more interested in protecting depositors than in protecting banks.