Of course the Earth is flat. However it creates a field that warps time and space to give the illusion of being (roughly) spherical. The math is too complex to reproduce here, but I'm sure it is available somewhere on the internet.
"The current use of a PDF-based application is phenomenally better than it was before when the applications required a specific program to be downloaded in order to fill them out. That was frustrating to say the least, highly non-portable, and full of bugs."
No kidding. After I retired from real 40-50 hour a week IT work, I worked part time for a school in Vermont. Every year we got two or three new/altered forms from various state agencies trying to collect data on all sorts of stuff. Some of the stuff was probably pure bureaucracy, but a lot of it looked meaningful.
Not one of their data collection tools/techniques actually worked out of the box. Not one. Never. I was able to tweak some to usability. The state fixed others. Much of the time, everyone gave up and we just sent in the data as a text file or email or sheet of paper and they presumably reentered it by hand.
Where PDF shines is its ability to accurately render a document pretty much EXACTLY the way its author intended. HTML usually can't do that. Nor was it intended to. The M stands for MARKUP -- which is not the some thing as LAYOUT.
Other than that, I can't say much nice about PDF. When confronted with a purportedly editable pdf form, my experience has been that trying to edit the bloody thing without paying for Acrobat is a waste of time in both Linux and Windows. (foxit purportedly can edit pdfs, but I found the user interface to be beyond my limited comprehension). Anyway I just convert editable pdfs to Jpeg and use an image editor like kolourpaint. Probably not what the agencies distributing the stuff have in mind, but it satisfies MY obligations.
In fairness, government folk face a major problem when trying to gather data in a usable format other than unadorned ascii text. There really doesn't seem to be any such format. Those folks have a day job and that job surely is not dealing with the IT industry's near total lack of meaningful standards.
"Are you willing to give up 25% of the electricity generated to power line losses"
Are you sure about that number? I made a serious attempt a few years ago to find a reasonable number for transmission losses.and the best I could come up with was in the 5-8% range. While some "transmission" losses are a function of distance, a lot of them are at the source and destination. As a practical matter, almost all electricity is used someplace other than where it is generated, so I concluded that the distance related losses probably aren't all that high.
The article is so poorly written that my guess is that it is the product of a couple of possibly competent guys talking to a "professional communicator" who understood about 17% of what he or she was told. That seems to happen a lot with press releases and science articles.
Let's not let the fact that the article is a disaster and the estimated emissions saving claims seem preposterous obscure the fact that upgrading the US-Canadian power grids may well be a really good idea. Even if it costs an impressive amount of money. I doubt the California Energy Crisis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis) engineered by Enron could have happened had the US had a power grid that allowed transfer of large amounts of energy from wherever it was available to California's cities.
Hydro-Quebec has HVDC feeds from its hydro dams near James Bay in Northern Quebec to Montreal and Northern New England. Has had for a long time. They work fine.
IIRC The US has roughly 20GW of pumped storage generation although I'm not sure that all of it is actually in use. Niagara-Mohawk operates two pumped storage facilities used to buffer off-peak power from the generators at Niagara Falls -- one at Lewiston near the falls and one at Gilboa-Blenheim SW of Albany. They also work fine I'm told, but they aren't cheap. Based on Gilboa-Blenheim, I'm guessing that 1GW of new pumped storage capacity might run between 500M and one billion dollars. And I'm not sure how many sites are available that have both adequate water and a convenient place to store it high above the generators/pumps. (The drop at G-B is about 1000 ft)
Hey, we're just talking automated taxis here. They'll (probably) work fine where taxis work fine now. And they (probably) will not work especially well where taxis don't work well now -- rural areas, intracity business trips, etc.
Seems to me like there are an awful lot of folks planning to make a living if not a fortune off advertising and data mining. It's working OK so far, but I have a feeling that there's more than one thing that can go wrong with those plans.... and on a rather grand scale.
> Currently making biofuels from corn takes more energy (in planting, harvesting, pesticides, fertilizers, transport and manufacture) than it produces, so there's o benefit for the enviroment and doesn't reduce the amount of co2 produced, it increases it.
Close enough. Some corn ethanol has a small positive energy yield. Some is negative. Depends on crop yield. Either way corn ethanol looks to be more of a crop subsidy than a planetary salvation.
Biodiesel is, I'm pretty sure, better because it doesn't require an energy intensive distillation step. But I suspect that the numbers are probably pretty grim.
Filtering then burning used cooking oil in a diesel engine looks to be genuinely green. But how much used cooking oil can even Americans generate?
Fossil fuels aren't a renewable resource. Eventually they will get pretty expensive. Further, while the Romans or Incas or the Zhou dynasty could probably have run their societies on biofuels had they known how to build diesel engines, it seems unlikely that our overpopulated planet can grow enough fuel plants to run modern industrial societies. If we're going to grow our fuels, I think we're gonna need a bigger planet.
Nothing wrong with sails for commerce if the economics work. Conceptually at least, wind powered freighters might eventually require neither an engine nor a crew except maybe to get into or out of port. It'll be a few decades before something like that can be deployed though.
The military however, is prone to impatience. I doubt we'll see headlines like US INVASION OF MADAGASCAR DELAYED BY UNFAVORABLE WINDS any time soon.
Biodiesel is pretty close to mineral diesel wrt to energy density. And it'll burn in a diesel engine. What might be a problem is that although many of its properties are very similar to the mineral stuff, it's not identical chemically. Biodiesel is a mixture of vegetable fats whereas the mineral stuff is mostly straight chain hydrocarbons. The vegetable fats tend to gel when cold and tend to form varnishes when left on surfaces. Those are not necessarily desirable qualities in emergency equipment that may be unused or lightly used for long periods of time, but are expected to work reliably when called into service.
Of course a ship could run on algae -- of you don't mind 16 year transit times from Norfolk to Key West. One suspects that sails would be more reliable and faster.
> This is important if we're to ever have long space flights.
According to the article, mold was a problem with the zinnia. Perhaps we should forget trying to replicate terrestrial horticulture just like back in Kansas, and focus on growing edible and/or decorative molds.
My initial reaction would be that anyone who allows an internet connection anywhere inside a nuclear power plant, storage facility, or weapons system is in serious need of psychiatric help. Is that going to make office work, etc a bit harder? I should think it will. So what?
Not a bad question at all. The US is one of the big three markets for vehicles along with China and the EU. Doubtless some government involvement will be needed if for no other reason than to define what "operation" of an autonomous vehicle consists of and who can operate one and when. e.g. Can your eight year old take an autonomous vehicle to school? And to play football after school? And how many of his/her friends can (s)he take along?
BTW, Are these national issues or state and local issues?
And probably some signs on federal roads need to be altered. And maybe some speed limits. And maybe lanes and parking areas need to be better deliniated.
Surely it'll cost some money. But why $4B (over 10 years apparently)? Why not $222B or $20M?
Frankly this proposal seems probably well intentioned but basically clueless. BTW I'm a democrat and my basic objection to Obama is that he talked a lot more liberal when campaigning that he turned out to be when governing. I'm not against taxes or spending. But I'd like to preserve the illusion that there is intelligent life somewhere along the banks of the Potomac
I understand dropping cooperating industrial loads during peak usage periods, but when you reach the point of dropping household HVAC loads, doesn't that indicate that your utility is running with very thin margins? What are you going to do next year when loads are a little higher? Or the year after that?
Could you reassure me that there is intelligent life somewhere in this scenario and this isn't just a case of decision making by MBAs skating on thin ice because, after all, it's never failed them before.?
There are "old school" thermostats with timers and multiple settings. It's a safe bet they are less aggravation to install and configure than internet enabled digital stuff. Try Amazon or any hardware store.
There are legitimate uses for internet enabled hardware. But except for security monitors, there probably aren't all that many of them. The world probably will never have much need for digital toothbrushes or internet enabled pencil sharpeners.
My experience has been that virtually everything digital I own or have encountered has substantial usability and or reliability issues. That's possibly correctable, but I don't see many people trying to fix it.
"President puts forward the budget and congress approves."
The president presents a budget proposal. But the actual spending legislation is put together by the House of Representatives which can add funding for other things and is under no obligation to follow any of the president's recommendations. Indeed, before the 1920s, the president wasn't even legally required to submit a budget proposal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
They just need to find space in ROM for the reboot code and additional features like password theft, inserting ads into your internet traffic and monitoring your home network for competitor's products -- which it will attempt to brick.
Of course the stupid thing should have a mechanical fail-safe built in. I think the only reason it doesn't is that consumer electronic and IT folk in general are not used to building stuff they are going to get sued for when it malfunctions. That's by way of contrast to automobile electronics where packs of ravenous lawyers circle ominously waiting for the slightest misstep.
That's why I personally think that the Internet of Things is largely going to be a debacle, but that (mostly) autonomous cars are going to (eventually) become a reality.
Sure, but the cloud is saving the planet from global warming. Not to mention the monetary savings in heating fuel experienced by Nest users. (Well those that survived the last cold front anyway)
Perhaps Slashdot needs a template for standardized reporting of the little catastrophes associated with malfunctions of the Internet of Horrors. There are gonna be a lot of them.
If the drive from A to B is interesting, sure. But if you somehow have to navigate I5 from the I805 split to downtown San Diego or Commonwealth Ave in Boston on a daily basis, being in control loses its charm after a while. Much better to spend your hour(s) in traffic answering eMail, working on your screen play, or listening to Grieg or Coltrane or Kris Kristoferson. Let the car handle the tedious details, and consult you when something like a 147 car pileup goes wrong. "Sorry to interrupt you master, but it's solid cars from here to Trenton. Estimated time to your destination is 3 hours, 17 minutes. Would you like to consider an alternate route or perhaps a beer break?"
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps the problem is one of people making rude suggestions to siri. Just because she's imaginary doesn't mean that she doesn't have feelings.
Of course the Earth is flat. However it creates a field that warps time and space to give the illusion of being (roughly) spherical. The math is too complex to reproduce here, but I'm sure it is available somewhere on the internet.
"Now it's Proprietary Document Format."
PDF = Preposterous Document Format ?
"The current use of a PDF-based application is phenomenally better than it was before when the applications required a specific program to be downloaded in order to fill them out. That was frustrating to say the least, highly non-portable, and full of bugs."
No kidding. After I retired from real 40-50 hour a week IT work, I worked part time for a school in Vermont. Every year we got two or three new/altered forms from various state agencies trying to collect data on all sorts of stuff. Some of the stuff was probably pure bureaucracy, but a lot of it looked meaningful.
Not one of their data collection tools/techniques actually worked out of the box. Not one. Never. I was able to tweak some to usability. The state fixed others. Much of the time, everyone gave up and we just sent in the data as a text file or email or sheet of paper and they presumably reentered it by hand.
Where PDF shines is its ability to accurately render a document pretty much EXACTLY the way its author intended. HTML usually can't do that. Nor was it intended to. The M stands for MARKUP -- which is not the some thing as LAYOUT.
Other than that, I can't say much nice about PDF. When confronted with a purportedly editable pdf form, my experience has been that trying to edit the bloody thing without paying for Acrobat is a waste of time in both Linux and Windows. (foxit purportedly can edit pdfs, but I found the user interface to be beyond my limited comprehension). Anyway I just convert editable pdfs to Jpeg and use an image editor like kolourpaint. Probably not what the agencies distributing the stuff have in mind, but it satisfies MY obligations.
In fairness, government folk face a major problem when trying to gather data in a usable format other than unadorned ascii text. There really doesn't seem to be any such format. Those folks have a day job and that job surely is not dealing with the IT industry's near total lack of meaningful standards.
"Are you willing to give up 25% of the electricity generated to power line losses"
Are you sure about that number? I made a serious attempt a few years ago to find a reasonable number for transmission losses.and the best I could come up with was in the 5-8% range. While some "transmission" losses are a function of distance, a lot of them are at the source and destination. As a practical matter, almost all electricity is used someplace other than where it is generated, so I concluded that the distance related losses probably aren't all that high.
The article is so poorly written that my guess is that it is the product of a couple of possibly competent guys talking to a "professional communicator" who understood about 17% of what he or she was told. That seems to happen a lot with press releases and science articles.
Let's not let the fact that the article is a disaster and the estimated emissions saving claims seem preposterous obscure the fact that upgrading the US-Canadian power grids may well be a really good idea. Even if it costs an impressive amount of money. I doubt the California Energy Crisis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis) engineered by Enron could have happened had the US had a power grid that allowed transfer of large amounts of energy from wherever it was available to California's cities.
A couple of nits:
Hydro-Quebec has HVDC feeds from its hydro dams near James Bay in Northern Quebec to Montreal and Northern New England. Has had for a long time. They work fine.
IIRC The US has roughly 20GW of pumped storage generation although I'm not sure that all of it is actually in use. Niagara-Mohawk operates two pumped storage facilities used to buffer off-peak power from the generators at Niagara Falls -- one at Lewiston near the falls and one at Gilboa-Blenheim SW of Albany. They also work fine I'm told, but they aren't cheap. Based on Gilboa-Blenheim, I'm guessing that 1GW of new pumped storage capacity might run between 500M and one billion dollars. And I'm not sure how many sites are available that have both adequate water and a convenient place to store it high above the generators/pumps. (The drop at G-B is about 1000 ft)
Hey, we're just talking automated taxis here. They'll (probably) work fine where taxis work fine now. And they (probably) will not work especially well where taxis don't work well now -- rural areas, intracity business trips, etc.
Seems to me like there are an awful lot of folks planning to make a living if not a fortune off advertising and data mining. It's working OK so far, but I have a feeling that there's more than one thing that can go wrong with those plans. ... and on a rather grand scale.
> Currently making biofuels from corn takes more energy (in planting, harvesting, pesticides, fertilizers, transport and manufacture) than it produces, so there's o benefit for the enviroment and doesn't reduce the amount of co2 produced, it increases it.
Close enough. Some corn ethanol has a small positive energy yield. Some is negative. Depends on crop yield. Either way corn ethanol looks to be more of a crop subsidy than a planetary salvation.
Biodiesel is, I'm pretty sure, better because it doesn't require an energy intensive distillation step. But I suspect that the numbers are probably pretty grim.
Filtering then burning used cooking oil in a diesel engine looks to be genuinely green. But how much used cooking oil can even Americans generate?
Fossil fuels aren't a renewable resource. Eventually they will get pretty expensive. Further, while the Romans or Incas or the Zhou dynasty could probably have run their societies on biofuels had they known how to build diesel engines, it seems unlikely that our overpopulated planet can grow enough fuel plants to run modern industrial societies. If we're going to grow our fuels, I think we're gonna need a bigger planet.
Nothing wrong with sails for commerce if the economics work. Conceptually at least, wind powered freighters might eventually require neither an engine nor a crew except maybe to get into or out of port. It'll be a few decades before something like that can be deployed though.
The military however, is prone to impatience. I doubt we'll see headlines like US INVASION OF MADAGASCAR DELAYED BY UNFAVORABLE WINDS any time soon.
Biodiesel is pretty close to mineral diesel wrt to energy density. And it'll burn in a diesel engine. What might be a problem is that although many of its properties are very similar to the mineral stuff, it's not identical chemically. Biodiesel is a mixture of vegetable fats whereas the mineral stuff is mostly straight chain hydrocarbons. The vegetable fats tend to gel when cold and tend to form varnishes when left on surfaces. Those are not necessarily desirable qualities in emergency equipment that may be unused or lightly used for long periods of time, but are expected to work reliably when called into service.
Of course a ship could run on algae -- of you don't mind 16 year transit times from Norfolk to Key West. One suspects that sails would be more reliable and faster.
> This is important if we're to ever have long space flights.
According to the article, mold was a problem with the zinnia. Perhaps we should forget trying to replicate terrestrial horticulture just like back in Kansas, and focus on growing edible and/or decorative molds.
My initial reaction would be that anyone who allows an internet connection anywhere inside a nuclear power plant, storage facility, or weapons system is in serious need of psychiatric help. Is that going to make office work, etc a bit harder? I should think it will. So what?
> Why is he getting involved in this at all?
Not a bad question at all. The US is one of the big three markets for vehicles along with China and the EU. Doubtless some government involvement will be needed if for no other reason than to define what "operation" of an autonomous vehicle consists of and who can operate one and when. e.g. Can your eight year old take an autonomous vehicle to school? And to play football after school? And how many of his/her friends can (s)he take along?
BTW, Are these national issues or state and local issues?
And probably some signs on federal roads need to be altered. And maybe some speed limits. And maybe lanes and parking areas need to be better deliniated.
Surely it'll cost some money. But why $4B (over 10 years apparently)? Why not $222B or $20M?
Frankly this proposal seems probably well intentioned but basically clueless. BTW I'm a democrat and my basic objection to Obama is that he talked a lot more liberal when campaigning that he turned out to be when governing. I'm not against taxes or spending. But I'd like to preserve the illusion that there is intelligent life somewhere along the banks of the Potomac
I understand dropping cooperating industrial loads during peak usage periods, but when you reach the point of dropping household HVAC loads, doesn't that indicate that your utility is running with very thin margins? What are you going to do next year when loads are a little higher? Or the year after that?
Could you reassure me that there is intelligent life somewhere in this scenario and this isn't just a case of decision making by MBAs skating on thin ice because, after all, it's never failed them before.?
There are "old school" thermostats with timers and multiple settings. It's a safe bet they are less aggravation to install and configure than internet enabled digital stuff. Try Amazon or any hardware store.
There are legitimate uses for internet enabled hardware. But except for security monitors, there probably aren't all that many of them. The world probably will never have much need for digital toothbrushes or internet enabled pencil sharpeners.
My experience has been that virtually everything digital I own or have encountered has substantial usability and or reliability issues. That's possibly correctable, but I don't see many people trying to fix it.
"President puts forward the budget and congress approves."
The president presents a budget proposal. But the actual spending legislation is put together by the House of Representatives which can add funding for other things and is under no obligation to follow any of the president's recommendations. Indeed, before the 1920s, the president wasn't even legally required to submit a budget proposal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
They just need to find space in ROM for the reboot code and additional features like password theft, inserting ads into your internet traffic and monitoring your home network for competitor's products -- which it will attempt to brick.
Of course the stupid thing should have a mechanical fail-safe built in. I think the only reason it doesn't is that consumer electronic and IT folk in general are not used to building stuff they are going to get sued for when it malfunctions. That's by way of contrast to automobile electronics where packs of ravenous lawyers circle ominously waiting for the slightest misstep.
That's why I personally think that the Internet of Things is largely going to be a debacle, but that (mostly) autonomous cars are going to (eventually) become a reality.
Sure, but the cloud is saving the planet from global warming. Not to mention the monetary savings in heating fuel experienced by Nest users. (Well those that survived the last cold front anyway)
Perhaps Slashdot needs a template for standardized reporting of the little catastrophes associated with malfunctions of the Internet of Horrors. There are gonna be a lot of them.
If the drive from A to B is interesting, sure. But if you somehow have to navigate I5 from the I805 split to downtown San Diego or Commonwealth Ave in Boston on a daily basis, being in control loses its charm after a while. Much better to spend your hour(s) in traffic answering eMail, working on your screen play, or listening to Grieg or Coltrane or Kris Kristoferson. Let the car handle the tedious details, and consult you when something like a 147 car pileup goes wrong. "Sorry to interrupt you master, but it's solid cars from here to Trenton. Estimated time to your destination is 3 hours, 17 minutes. Would you like to consider an alternate route or perhaps a beer break?"