Thanks for the info. I'll add this and "water desalinization" (from a post further down) to my mental list of solutions.

I had *thought* that aluminum refining required the melting of bauxite, which would make it inherently difficult to start and stop, but another poster points out that Alcoa tailors their production in this manner. I'm guessing that a "charge" of ore can be processed in a short amount of time, and that a refinery has a large number of small furnaces which can be individually shut down as needed.

Sure, it's easy today to look at the Sun and know it's a ball of (mostly) hydrogen, generating energy by combining those protons in a chain into helium through the process of nuclear fusion.

Sure, it's easy to today to look at slashdot and know that it's all (mostly) clickbait, generating revenue for Dice by tricking viewers into visiting websites who think that they can make money by spraying advertizing onto eyeballs in a vain attempt to...

Damn! I never realized how hard it is to make convoluted run-on sentences. So much for my attempt at sarcastic humor.

I have newly-found respect for the Slashdot editors.

How about we build nitrogen fixation factories near the baseload generation, keep the baseload on all the time, and make fertilizer during the times when the energy is otherwise not needed? Nitrogen fixation can be quickly started up and shut down without damage to the system, and requires an enormous amount of worldwide energy.

How about we build a smart grid, which incorporates electric vehicles on home charging systems? Charge the car during the day, then give back some of the stored energy at night when the car's in the garage.

How about we take recycled batteries from aging electric vehicles - batteries that can hold 80% of their original charge, but which are no longer good enough for electric vehicle operation - and stack them in warehouses to store and release energy as needed? Do batteries lose capacity at an exponential rate? If so, those 80% batteries should last a long time.

How about we mount the solar panels with a gap above the rooftops, so that the panels keep sunlight off of the roof, reducing [somewhat] the *need* for energy to be spent on air conditioning?

How about we look for solutions rather than assume that everything will be exactly like it is now, except with problems that cannot be solved?

The mafia style tactics were probably a reference to the sad case of Karen Silkwood, a whistleblower in the nuclear industry who had died under mysterious circumstances only a few years earlier.

This is a rational argument applied to the real world, and it doesn't hold true. Rational arguments are almost *never* true when applied to the real world, unless they start from a fundamental model and build up. (And in that case you can make testable predictions.)

Eighty percent of first businesses fail, but only 20% of *second* businesses fail, and it's not because people don't try to do it right the first time.

Both Thomas Edison and [head of IBM] Thomas J. Watson have extensive experience in this, and both have written positions on the subject. When someone approached Watson and asked "how can I increase my success rate", he responded "double your failure rate". When someone asked Edison how he could continue researching the electric light bulb after failing 5,000 times, he replied "I haven't failed 5,000 times, I know 5,000 ways that won't work" (source).

The rational argument fails when it's applied to the risk/reward formulation. Each time you fail you lose 1x the value of the experiment, but each time you succeed you regain 50x the value of the experiment in profit.

The mantra in the IT world is "fail fast, fail often", which reflects the risk-reward equation very well. It takes almost nothing to set up a website showing your idea to the world, and almost nothing to shutter it 6 months later.

But once in awhile, that idea becomes popular and profitable and you can recoup your investment many times over. That's why people should fail; or rather, not be afraid of failure.

Not because of any rationalization, but because it's historically the route to success.

Google glass failed, but I suspect that they allowed it to fail due to lack of persistent development.

The way most people work is that they try something, it doesn't work, and they give up. I've heard lots of things like "I can't learn to whistle, I've tried" and "I tried that, but it didn't work". Mostly it's amateurs building stuff and giving up on the first try: "I put the circuit together and it didn't work", or "I tried to build a spice rack for Marge, but it turned out awful".

If you really want to make something, you have to be prepared to throw the first one out and start over. If the circuit doesn't work, find out *why* it didn't work and fix it. If your spice rack is awful, spend some time on YouTube looking at proper technique, then spend some time using the router (or table saw, or whatnot) with pieces of scrap until you get the hang of it. Then start the project over.

Google glass could have been popular if they noted the feedback and piloted the project into more popular waters. For example:

1) A flip-down cover for the camera, so you can interact with people and they know you aren't recording them
2) A less restrictive interface, so that developers can show anything instead of storyboard images like a viewmaster. IOW, a direct graphical interface.
3) a less expensive device (costs $150 to make, $1500 to buy). (Note: Cell phones have largely the same functionality and don't cost $1500)

Rather than fix the problems, they decided to just let it die. Maybe they did market analysis and thought that it would never sell in any form, but I really doubt they went that far.

It seems like most pure EV's from the major manufacturers are so called 'compliance cars' built to meet (largely nonsensical) regulatory requirements. They are not widely advertised and no one buys them because they are so expensive compared to their IC counterparts and have significantly less range. The Tesla model S, an EV designed for its own sake, is a wonderful exception, but the price point puts it out of range for 95% of consumers.

Given the slow incremental improvement in battery technology, do you envision a cost effective, honestly mass market-palletable EV being possible in the next 10 years? Is GM working towards that goal?

I dunno... the cover art for this brilliant work 'kind of drew me in.

Apropos of nothing, when will Firefox be done?

It's not really that simple, and the grandparent's position is not without merit.

You'll note that *amateurs* are not allowed to operate drones commercially, and *commoners* are not allowed to start a business operating drones (for remote crop/herd inspection, search and rescue, real estate videos), but big players such as Amazon and FedEx will be granted commercial licenses to do so.

It's the same with any business in the US: the big, entrenched businesses are given all the exceptions, all the subsidies, and all the tax breaks in the name of "jobs", while making it impossible for new companies to form and hire grow. As a concrete example, it is impossible to start a company (however small) to compete against GE because GE pays no taxes.

It's a stupid policy that's indirectly driving the economy of the country into the ground. Big, entrenched companies don't hire more people when given money, *small* businesses hire people when they grow to become big ones. Propping up a big, weak company at the expense of stifling smaller companies is the source of much stagnation in this country.

We have an opportunity to make great progress in an emerging technology, and by holding the US back all the advances will be made in other economic climates.

Look for the US to become a third-world nation in the next decade or so.

Thank you for the awesome post.

So many times people simply say "no it isn't" in response to some article or position, it's refreshing to see someone who can put forth some qualifiers and make a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Bravo!

(And I'll award triple-word score for making a linear prediction within a logarithmic scale. That's not something most people can do.)

I suspect that we could persuade those caches to flush to RAM, simply by exhausting the number of possible lines for that address - if the cache is set-associative. Of course modern processors have multiple levels of cache, so that makes it harder.

Hi AC,

This is sort of self-contradictory, so I don't really need to respond to it directly. I just want to point one thing out. I can't afford to work for any company as less than a C-level employee. It would be a salary cut from my current business.

Not to mention that I'd not like it.