None of the Scientists polled were in the physical sciences - all life sciences (other than one climate scientist). Hence all the questions are about living organisms.
Of course, the stated goal included "...on Earth", which kinda limits the "knowledge of the universe" questions, although Fusion is most definitely an "..on Earth" kinda question.
Incidentally, a circle with a radius of 60 miles centered around the VMWare campus in Palo Alto includes: Monterey, most of Carmel-by-the-Sea, Salinas, Hollister, Manteca, a fair chunk of Stockton, Fairfield, Rocktram (Napa just barely escapes), Novato, Point Reyes Station, and the Farallon Islands.
"Tell me you don't live around here, without saying you don't live around here..."
On December 1, there was a story on SFGate -- the online component to the San Francisco Chronicle -- covering an email Broadcom management sent to all employees announcing:
Said Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, "Remote work does not exist at Broadcom," but then clarified that sales workers and employees living more than 60 miles away from a Broadcom office would be able to stay remote. "Any other exception, you better learn how to walk on water, I'm serious."
The mandatory return-to-office reportedly went in to effect December 4. Now it seems his latest Genius Plan is to squeeze his customers, thinking he's got them over a barrel.
You'll forgive me if I'm not the least bit motivated to apply to work for the guy.
>>> You got an incomplete car that needed an OTA to make it work right.
You do realize that when I picked up my 2018 Model 3, it didn't even have a functional radio? IIRC, it was almost a year before a software update enabled the FM radio. That's not to mention all the other advertised features that were missing or badly handicapped.
Now, my wife's 2023 Model 3 is a beautiful, complete vehicle. Far better than my 2018. Of course, 2023 EV's have to compare themselves with a 2023 Model 3, and not a 2018. Despite having 100 or more years of experience building vehicles, other manufacturers are generally still 5 years behind Tesla.
I just had a problem with my 2018 Tesla Model 3 with 82,000 miles.
The headrest cover (a urethane-based fake leather) developed a blister that came apart, leaving an ugly sticky black spot.
I requested a price quote on a new headrest, because I was obviously out of warranty.
$35.60 was the response, and that included a mobile technician coming out to my place of work and doing the swap. The next day, I had a new headrest.
Maybe that's one of the reasons people prefer to buy Tesla's EV's and not anyone elses.
Ruminate for a second on how much that would cost for your car.
>> makers are cancelling ev because poor, first generation versions of EVs that don't measure up to a Tesla don't sell....
Fixed that for you....
https://www.statista.com/stati...
Note that Q4 2023 isn't on the graph....
Well, let's see.
The USA currently uses about 4,000 terawatt-hours of electricity a year (4x10^12 Wh). (https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-consumption-since-1975/). Let's call it 5x10^12 for ease of calculations.
Let's use an average of 5 hours of solar production a day (https://unboundsolar.com/solar-information/sun-hours-us-map), assuming that we build solar installations across the southern US and distribute power northwards via the power grid.
That means we need about (5*10^12 / 5) = 10^12 watts of solar panels.
Large-scale solar installations are currently running about $1/watt installed. (https://www.marketwatch.com/guides/solar/solar-farm-cost/)
That suggests about 10^12 dollars to completely power the US with solar - about $1 Trillion. And this assumes that buying solar panels on this scale doesn't drive costs down further.
The USA currently spends about $6 Trillion / year (https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1829)
So, for 16% of the USA Federal Budget, we could (ignoring certain physical realities) build out enough solar in one year to power the entire country. Or, in a more reasonable approach, let's take 20 years to build it out - that's about $50 Billion / year, perhaps 1/10 of the annual Military budget or 1/4 of the Agriculture budget, or about all of the Energy Department budget. Twenty year build out is a nice approach because the expected lifetime of Solar is around 20 years, so the industrial base we create to build out the system can continue to be used 20 years later to start a rolling replacement of the existing panels. It'd be interesting to see how much we could reduce Federal expenditures if we didn't have to protect our oil supplies.
Now, there are some missing dollars in this analysis. For example, there's no money for storage - the 5 hours a day that Solar is producing needs to provide electricity for 24 hours. But even doubling the cost doesn't make for a untenable situation, assuming we don't do something stupid like trying to create a lithium-ion battery farm large enough for storage. They're great for load-levelling, but not at the scale we're discussing. Pumped hydro or similar bulk energy storage solutions would be far more reasonable.
And this requires no new technology development that's "Just 20 years away from commecialization", only the creation of sufficient factories to crank out panels by the billions (We would be smart enough to build the industrial base domestically, wouldn't we?).
Earlier this year, I saw a string-based pin setter for the first time (Lucky Strike, San Francisco), and was appalled such a thing existed. Based on what I could see from my end, I initially thought the design's appeal was that it consumed less physical depth than free-standing pin setters -- a potentially desirable characteristic where square footage is at premium prices. It does make sense that it would consume less electricity, as there's no pin lifter that has to run continuously, but it never occurred to me that maintenance costs were lower (although I'd like to see numbers on this).
Yes, European bowling alleys have used string-based setters for a long time, but bear in mind that most European bowling is of the nine-pin variety, which uses much smaller balls and pins. Ten-pin alleys in Europe still use the free-standing pin setters.
And yes, the pin action is very different. The movement of the tethers against each other can pull down pins that otherwise would have been left standing. I witnessed this at least twice. And I can't imagine anyone picking up a 7-10 split with one of these things.
And maybe it's just me (and it probably is), but there seems a certain inauthenticity -- a certain chintziness -- to a string-based pin setter, like I'm playing with a cheap replica for kids rather than the real thing for grown-ups. ("Hey! Are you calling European nine-pins chintzy?" No, just... Unfamiliar. I'm sure there are whole schools of thought on how best to use the tethers to your advantage, and which tether materials are "better" than others. It clearly works for them.)
Anyway, point is, we had ads in our free content for about 50 years, and that's what paid for the content. We wished there were not ads, but it was part of life. And it was fine. [
... ]
It was not fine. Everyone put up with it, because there was no other real choice, but it was not fine.
Even at the time, people correctly complained that the ad block model made certain kinds of shows impossible. Do you think a televised production of Death of a Salesman would have the same emotional impact if it got interrupted every 10 minutes to sell beer?
Ads infuriated me as a child, and the intervening decades have done nothing to improve my opinion of them. Indeed, I regard them as vandalism, litter, pollution -- unnecessary, unwanted, and destructive by their very nature. I hate them so much that.... I pay for YouTube Premium. I visit YouTube exclusively with Firefox, I have never witnessed this reported start delay, and I never am troubled with ads.
Lots of almost correct there.
First of all, most current phones top out at in the 9-12W range - which puts them at about a 1C charge rate into their 10Wh battery. It's hard to charge much faster, because the generated heat is hard to get rid of. I don't see phones going past 15W any time in the near future because of the heat - not just from Qi inefficiency, but also heat generated in the battery. Tablets, on the other hand, could likely take advantage of higher charge rates simply due to the larger radiating surface area.
BPP nominally allows up to 5W of charging, but can be driven to just below 10W with a bit of gamesmanship. If you see a Qi charger that says it charges at 10W, it is almost assuredly a BPP based charger. Many phones won't take advantage of this higher rate on BPP because the foreign object detection in BPP is primitive - and you don't want a dime under the phone to heat up from magnetic induction to a pretty cherry red. Kinda hurts when you try to pick it up.
EPP nominally allows up to 15W of charging, but could probably be pushed to 30W using the same technique if the charger supported it, but I don't know of anything that does so. There are big issues with trying to do that when you don't have the fine physical alignment between Power Transmitter and Power Receiver coils that MagSafe brings to the table. EPP has more sophisticated foreign object detection, which makes the higher power much safer.
MPP currently goes to 15W, and significantly reduces heat generation due to the better alignment of TX and RX coils, and perhaps due to the higher frequency (EPP transfers power at 100-200 kHz, MPP at around 350 (360?) kHz). I don't have a great deal of experience with it.
The big problem with Qi 2.0 MPP is that it's incompatible with at least some Qi certified chargers and devices on the market. The embedded magnets that are great at aligning the coils can saturate the ferrite shield used behind the coils, causing all kinds of issues when charging power is ramped up. All you have to do is look at forums where Apple users complain that their non-Apple Qi charger won't charge their phone - of course, recent iPhones are NOT Qi certified because of the magnets, but you can't tell an Apple user that. The Qi committee knows this incompatibility, which is the main reason for the major version number bump on the spec - they feel that the alignment benefits of MagSafe outweigh the loss of backwards compatibility.
EV's take much, much better care of their batteries than Phones do (well, at least Teslas do; early Leaf owners might disagree...).
If Phone manufacturers wanted batteries to last 10 years, they'd give you an option to limit the charge to 80 or 90%, because charging to 100% regularly has significant impacts on battery degradation. Phone manufacturers also push the batteries to the limit - 100% charge on a phone battery might be considered 110% or so for an EV battery.
My Tesla Model 3 is five and a half years old with 82,000 miles (130,000 km) on it, and has roughly 90% of the original battery capacity. If it follows the Model S battery degradation curve, it'll have 80% of the original battery capacity at roughly 300,000 miles, as degradation rate dropped drastically on the Model S after the first 50,000 miles or so. I've owned a number of cars past 200,000 miles, and frankly the condition of the fabrics, plastics, trim, and everything else tends to be pretty poor by that time, so a 240 mile range (80% of the original 310 mile rating) will be the least of my worries.
Am I the only one who remembers, in the early days of Google, typing "Hardware Store near me" into Google, and getting a list of hardware stores....in Maine (abbreviation ME)? Believe me, most of the United States was between me and Maine.
>>> the number of 70 year olds is increasing, but the total number of people in health care is decreasing
The movement of AI into health care can't come soon enough. I'm tired of human doctors just going through the motions, I'd prefer an AI that could look at the totality of a patients symptoms, compare them with the totality of the medical literature and with the totality of known human body chemistry, and be able to spit back two or three likely diagnoses to pursue. Maybe this process is guided by a human doctor, but the outcomes would have to be better than what we have now.
Absolutely, for projects like this that don't use any copyrighted code, and for automated takedowns on YouTube, etc.
The Copyright lobby got ridiculous statutory damages enshrined in law ($750 per infringement, which really adds up when you join a Torrent swarm with 1000 peers...), so I think we should push for the same on the content producer side - $750 for each view of a video or use of a project that is impacted by an obviously invalid DMCA filing. If you can show that 10,000 people couldn't see your stream because it got taken down, well that becomes a nice little payday.
According to TFA:
"The bill defines a three-dimensional printer as a âoedevice capable of producing a three-dimensional object from a digital model.â
Umm, that sounds like a CNC mill to me....
"The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl." -- Dave Barry
