Stop arguing with strawmen. I really hope you got upvoted by shills, because the alternative is that some people have actually bought into the propaganda, which sickens me to consider.
The science that is settled is:
a) The average global temperature is rising
b) Increased CO2 levels cause increased temperatures
c) Humans are releasing far more CO2 than can naturally be absorbed
Those are the settled science - or as most people call them, facts. You will see GW defenders trot out the "settled science" line because people still try to deny those fundamental facts.
Those three facts lead to a settled conclusion:
d) Human activity is causing increases in global temperature.
Again, if you're arguing that, you are either grievously misinformed, or do not understand how logic works, or have decided that you want to argue for a point you know to be wrong.
That humans are contributing is settled science. The extent to which we are contributing is mostly-settled - we know we are the largest factor, but we don't have a complete and clear picture as to how secondary effects (ie. global-warming-caused global warming) or natural effects (solar variance) affect things.
The precise models of "given conditions A, B, C and D, what temperatures can we expect in the next X years at places Y and Z?" are not settled. Further, the data we give those models is not entirely precise, because getting absolute perfect knowledge of the entire planet is basically impossible.
But this does not invalidate the entire argument. You can say "physicists don't know how gravity works for supermassive singularities at nuclear scales", and say that physics is not "settled science". You would be correct. However, if you try to use that to argue that scientists don't know why the Earth orbits the Sun, you're committing serious errors of logic.
And if you then try to argue that you can build a giant but rickety skyscraper over the city, because it can't fall over because gravity isn't a settled science, well, you're just using broken logic to try to make a quick profit despite the fact that you will inevitably kill people when it falls over because hey, science may not be able to figure out the exact second it's going to collapse but we know it's not gonna stay up forever. I hope you managed to understand that metaphor there.
That gives me an idea. If you build this in a way that looks cool (obviously make it functional first and foremost, but style it whenever you get a chance), you could rent it out to Hollywood studios needing a set.
Make a control room with lots of blinkenlights, put in a window to something that glows (it can be the capacitors or whatever, if putting a window into a tokemak is a bad idea, which it probably is), have lots of big cables running around, and so on. And make every room spacious enough that you can fit a camera crew inside it. Charge them $50K/day to use it as a set, only conditions being that they can't alter or break the functional parts, and any new parts they add have to be removed once they stop using the set.
This doesn't have to fund the entire project, it just has to pay off the cost of the cosmetics and the downtime, and after that it's free money. If you spent a quarter-million dollars making it look like something out of Star Trek, you could pay that off with a week of filming Star Trek XII or whatever number they're up to now.
Plus - the public outreach. The general public are, unfortunately, idiots. You could be doing some amazing research, be the top lab in the world in your field, and they would just complain about "their" tax money being spent on it. But making something "mad bitchin'"? They can get behind that.
I think I'm sufficiently prepared for any likely disaster.
I'm not really at threat from earthquakes - the biggest one in recent history was only 5.8. Hurricanes are more common, but more to country folk (with the trees and lengthy loss of power - now that I live downtown, I'm not worried about that). Floods are a risk, but I live fairly high up on the hills so I should be decently protected from that. Any tsunami that can make it 100km inland is going to kill me no matter what, so no use prepping for that. There's always the unpredictable disasters - fire, asteroids, and whatnot - but my preparations should be sufficient for the stuff most likely to affect me.
I have a week's supply of clean water (plus whatever is in the fridge at any given time), as well as a good amount of non-perishable food. I have a flashlight and numerous spare batteries. I have a cell phone that can last two days without recharging, if I conserve. In my car, I have more emergency supplies (more food, first aid, and blankets in case I'm trapped in snow). I always keep at least a quarter tank in it, in case I need to evac. I'm well situated for the recovery - I'm within walking distance of a major rail line, an interstate highway, and a small dock, so once the pieces start getting put back together, I can be there. The only thing I'm really lacking is an emergency radio.
Most importantly, I've found that I tend to react well in disasters. I freeze for about five seconds while my brain dumps adrenaline into everything, but then I act both quickly, and mostly correctly. Fire alarm goes off at 1AM? I'm the first one out, and I still checked every door along the way to avoid flashovers. Earthquake? I went for the door frame - an incorrect response once I did the research, but a) that was what I had been taught, b) it was still better than the people who left the building, but stayed almost directly under the large glass windows, and c) it was *something* - a lot of people didn't do anything until someone started telling them to. So yeah, I'm mentally prepared in that I know what to do, and seem to have lucked into being one of the ones who actually does it when the time comes.
I read TFA. They're not using them as "storage" in the sense of active, accessible storage. It's a backup system.
What they're trying is, instead of storing redundant copies of everything on multiple drives (for resilience and geolocality), they're keeping one copy live and keeping backups on blu-ray.
So there's never a latency of minutes while it loads data from Blu-Ray, you just might be routed to Siberia or something to get the one active copy. If that copy's bad, error (restore from backup during next nightly batch or something).
Mr. Steele is my porn name. Am I exempt?
Why does everyone seem to think that the only way to store electricity is in a battery?
Flywheels are a thing. They might not scale up as effectively but they're definitely an option. But really, anything that stores electrical energy as potential energy will work.
But there's a better solution - hydropower storage.
Near where I live, there's a nice artificial lake made by a hydroelectric dam. Not too far away is a big nuclear power plant. During the night, power demand is very low, but nuclear reactors don't throttle down very well so there's an excess. You know what they do with that?
They pump water upstream, back into the reservoir, thus storing that electricity for when the demand is high the next day and they let it drop back down. That artificial lake basically gets artificial tides - every day the water level drops, and every night it rises back up.
Guess what? Most renewables are also at their highest output during the day. Why not use clean, renewable storage for this clean, renewable energy? Why does everyone seem to assume the choices are "nasty expensive chemical batteries" or "zero storage requiring demand-side hacks to keep things from falling apart"?
For Virginia, I skimmed through and found:
* Basically every county, city and even college police were involved. Specifically which department got each thing isn't listed.
* 2 "laser range-finder/target designators". They listed laser range-finders with a different name, so these are definitely ones that could illuminate a target for bombing. Scary.
* 4 explosive ordnance disposal robots
* 1 mine-resistant vehicle
* 23 5.56mm rifles, 14 7.62mm rifles, 4
* On a lighter note, a single electronic calculator, a bicycle, two golf carts and a "mule" were also listed. Whether that mule was an M274 truck or an actual mule is unspecified - the M274 was obsoleted in the '80s while mules continue to be used in Afghanistan, so an actual mule isn't that implausible.
It's not even a fad - it's dead on arrival. Most people don't even use 5.1 speakers. Hell, most don't even use 2.1. Anything that requires that much dedication of the room to audio is not going to sell to the mass market. Period.
3D TV at least had a vague hope of succeeding in the mass market. If they can ditch the glasses, they might actually succeed. But people are lazy and don't want to put any effort into their mindless entertainment. Putting glasses on to watch a movie was too much for them. Do you really think setting up a shitload of speakers all around the room is going to pass?
Odd that TSMC is so pessimistic, because Intel claims their 22nm node was their most high-yield ever, and even their 14nm yield is pretty high for this early in development. Perhaps the multi-gate FinFETs helped? I know TSMC is planning FinFET for 16nm later this year. That's not a "radical manufacturing breakthrough" but it is a pretty substantial change that could change their yields considerably.
Congratulations, you identified the densest possible circuits we can make. That doesn't even give an upper bound to Moore's Law, let alone an upper bound to performance.
Moore's Law is "the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles every two years". You can accomplish that by halving the size of the transistors, or by doubling the size of the chip. Some element of the latter is already happening - AMD and Nvidia put out a second generation of chips on the 28nm node, with greatly increased die sizes but similar pricing. The reliability and cost of the process node had improved enough that they could get a 50% improvement over the last gen at a similar price point, despite using essentially the same transistor size.
You could also see more fundamental shifts in technology. RSFQ seems like a very promising avenue. We've seen this sort of thing with the hard drive -> SSD transition for I/O bound problems. If memory-bound problems start becoming a priority (and transistors get cheap enough), we might see a shift back from DRAM to SRAM for main memory.
So yeah, the common restatement of Moore's Law as "computer performance per dollar will double every two years" will probably keep running for a while after we hit the physical bounds on transistor size.
Morse code did not originally have punctuation. A period is also referred to as a "stop" or "full stop", so they would just use S-T-O-P in the place of a period.
Irrelevant. By your logic, the only thing worth doing is whatever magically solves the problem on the planet, and anything else is useless. If I could snap my fingers and suddenly homophobia no longer exists (a limit case of zero penalty, large gain), you would be arguing against doing so because it doesn't create any jobs.
My argument is sound. The laws being waived are environmental laws - their goal is to help the environment. In unusual cases, it may be in the interests of the environment to waive those laws in order to get a bigger gain.
Further, this factory would have a significant impact on poverty, regardless of location. Modern factories are highly automated, with very few human staff. And those who do work there are going to be skilled laborers, ie. not people who are currently poor. The time for making thousands of jobs by opening a factory is over. You want a thousand jobs? Finance a hundred small businesses, or maybe re-institute the draft if you're really desperate for jobs.
Finally, you are ignoring secondary effects. More Tesla batteries means more electric cars, which means reduced transportation costs, which means any business relying on transportation has improved profit margins, which means you get economic growth and hiring, which means less poverty. Location doesn't even really matter - the economy is global.
After Goliath's defeat, giants ceased to command respect. - Freeman Dyson