Except possibly for some classified computer, current quantum computers cannot break common encryption used today. IBM has computers with enough qubits, but not enough depth to break it based on the published paper. Also, the runtime in the paper is not specified because it's likely exponential.

I really don't buy this. I really see the risk as very very small. These companies are giving generous severance packages to these workers and the vast majority of these people are extremely intelligent, career driven, positive people.

Giving them the opportunity to say goodbye to their friends via email and chat would not be abused by the vast majority of them. For the ones that do attempt to do so, it should be pretty easy to catch--and then you fire them with cause, cancelling their severence packages and blacklisting them.

Blocking internal email and chat can't reduce the company's risk that much. The workers lives' you're upending deserve at least to be treated humanely. If you do, they might come back some day in the future, and it'd really lessen the impact on morale.

Methane breaks down into water via OH hydroxyl radicals CH4->H2O.

Water vapor has a pretty significant greenhouse effect, but should fairly quickly fall out as preciptation. Everything's fine here. No problem! I'm sure that free C atom will just turn into diamonds that rain from the sky, right?

As someone who's worked on both database from the big red O company as well as MSSQL, I can assure you that it doesn't require a new release to cause a query plan regression. A simple change in the data going over some threshold causing the heuristics to be different can suddenly cause a massive performance issue in a production database that has been successfully running for years.

Especially for OLTP workloads, the optimal query plan is often fairly easy to compute and there often isn't "a better one in the future". Having the plan unexpectedly change isn't a feature, it's a bug. Plan pinning and SQL plan management is actually a great feature, unfortunately, it's nearly impossible without the enterprise version, which is literally $$millions$$.

When you're running a web application serving millions of users, consistent performance is key. 10% performance is great, but avoiding hangs, deadlocks, system overload, or 1000x performance regressions is key. Unfortunately, relational databases have tons of ways to encounter the latter. For instance, in Oracle, you absolutely can end up with a deadlock just from inserting rows too quickly--never reading or altering them. Theoretically, this shouldn't be able to cause a deadlock, but on Oracle, it can (Note: it also can on MSSQL but for totally different reasons and depends on isolation level). Hint: It's caused by the ITL (interested transaction list).

Having random deadlocks, hangs, performance issues, spins, or system overloads caused by the database misbehaving only under certain workloads is one of the most frustrating things to deal with in OLTP at scale. If you can't tell, I hate dealing with databases for their unpredictability (and am a huge fan of plan management and other designs to provide better predictability).

$2000? That seems highly excessive. Do you drive some extremely expensive luxury car?

The last headlight assembly I had to replace was ~$100, and my current car's assembly, which is high and low-beam LED's and all the surround and plastic is under $400.

This is false. The bible not only talks about abortion, but also about life and when it starts. Psalm 139:13-16 and Jeremiah 1:5 both describe people being known and knit by God before and inside their mother's womb. Combined with Exodus 20:13, it's quite easy to make valid theological arguments against abortion.

I do not believe the act of abortion is explicitly called out as a crime in either the Hebrew Scriptures or the New Testament. Theological arguments must be based on multiple verses. That said, the act of abortion is also in the bible. Specifically, it's used as a divination ritual for a woman accused of adultery. (Numbers 5:19-22,27-28)

Whether it's the word of God or not, the Bible not only mentions abortions but provides people the basis on which to make theological arguments.

I was going to ask for a citation, but then I realized that I too have fingers and Google.

Citation:
https://theconversation.com/ho...

As an American who would really rather not treat my neighbor to the north as an Enemy, recognizing the importance of everything you said (as well as making sure we have good relations), I hope we can send you as many covid shots as we can spare.

Keep the $10. It's money well spent, IMO.

One other follow up point--every 1-3 days, the Leaf top off the 12v battery if it's just sitting there. However, its topoff charge is insufficient and it slowly lets the battery drain. This behavior does not occur if the car is plugged in, but not charging.

The algorithm for maintaining the 12V battery in the Leaf is just whacked, and it's not even that hard to fix. It's stunning that Nissan still hasn't done so.

Sorry. You are correct--I should have been more specific. I meant that when the Leaf is plugged into the wall, the DC-DC charger was only enabled when the car was charging, not when it's plugged in but not charging.

The DC-DC converter also runs, as you said, when the car is in "ready to drive" (on) mode. Your snippet of the manual is correct:
"The key here is to understand that the car's built-in 12v recharger/maintainer is operating only when the drive battery is engaged, i.e. in ready-to-drive mode or with drive-battery charging (actually charging, not just plugged in)."

I also have an AGM in my Leaf for the same reason. Thanks for the correction!

The Nissan Leaf had this exact problem until ~2014 as well. Specifically, the computer won't go to sleep when it's plugged into the charger, and the DC-DC converter for the 12V battery only runs while it's charging. So if you leave it plugged in, not charging, for more than a few days, it'll completely drain the 12V battery. I expect Ford will roll out a fix soon and it'll be no big deal.

As an owner of a 2011 Leaf, I wouldn't really mind except Nissan never fixed it. They updated the 12V charging algorithm in 2014, and again in 2017, but they never provided a fix to earlier owners. Really poor product support. Now Leaf owners are hacking their cars and programming them to resolve bugs like this. https://github.com/openvehicle...

The Leaf also has other 12V charging issues and frequently leaves them stored at 50-80% SOC (Lead acid should always be left at 100% SOC). As a result, they sulfate and go bad early.

While I agree with most of your post, Elon's plans are more than daydreams. Musk does dream big, and he's even admitted his projected schedules are far overoptimistic.

For the most part, though, his good dreams do come to reality, just far late. Sure, some of the dreams turn out to be bad ideas and never come to fruition, but we *do* have Tesla cars that *almost* are driverless, and he's absolutely pushed the entire world towards a self-driving electric car future. He's also in the process of building (far late) rockets that will get us to Mars.

So to me they're not daydreams. They're very useful goals, with completely unrealistic schedules attached. Whether Tesla converts their current car batteries to stationary storage, or whether it happens with the next generation, I don't know, but I fully expect them to actually follow through and make it happen. Eventually.

I'm a big proponent of solar. I have a large solar system on the roof of my house. But this is specifically a scenario that offgrid solar+battery won't deal with well.

I've generated .5 kWh each day in the last 5 days (typical generation is 40 kWh/day in February). My daily consumption is around 33 kWh. I would need 20+ Tesla powerwalls to make it through this storm, or I'd have to get up on ladders on my roof in the middle of an icestorm to clear the snow & ice. Oh, and my heat pump doesn't operate at these temps, so I still need to heat my house with gas...

My solar system has been a huge benefit and I'm very happy with it. But, as it exists today, grid independent solar wouldn't work in this case either. Roof-mounted solar panels simply don't have the technology to deal with snow and ice. The manufacturer recommendation is: "don't mess with it, you might scratch the panel and void the warranty. Just let it melt. It'll melt quickly enough."

Defrosting & putting "windshield wipers" on solar panels is a solvable problem, but none of them currently have it. A grid is specifically necessary so that if one type of generation goes offline, other types can help balance.

Hey Ray, is there some way I can get ahold of you (personal website, etc?)

You just switched from efficiency to cost. While this is reasonable (and actually, I think cost is the bigger problem, because cost blocks adoption), it's not what the article or OP was highlighting.

Heat pumps, like you agreed, have 4x the efficiency of resistance heating in an optimal environment. In less optimal environments, it's less, but still dramatically better than 100% until it gets below 32F (central air) or -15F (mini-split). Gas furnaces and electric resistance heat have efficiencies in the 90% range (including transmission losses). A heat pump will almost always be massively more efficient than gas heating, and will cut the "energy consumption" (not cost) of a building by a large factor.

The problem is electricity is *expensive* per unit of energy. Natural gas is MUCH cheaper. And this is why (unless you live in Alaska or somewhere else very cold), even though your house would consume less energy with a heat pump, gas is cheaper.

It's all "figures lie and liars figure" anyway. Electricity efficiency is so high because we don't account for production inefficiencies. Electricity production efficiency typically runs in the ~40% range (with some new natural gas plants running at 60%). Solar is around 20%. Once you account for this, electricity's efficiency plummets, but hey, "cuts energy use by to 37%" isn't as great of a headline.

I think the better thing to look at is cost and impact to the environment.