Comment Dammit! (Score 1) 91
They used my Comcast simulator without paying!
They used my Comcast simulator without paying!
I've been interested in this for some time. Here are some solutions I've come across:
Something like a standard battery
Flow batteries, where you store liquid electrolytes in tanks, and energy capacity is proportional to the capacity of the tanks
Salt/Liquid metal batteries. Take the process for smelting aluminium, and make it reversible. (The metal used need not be aluminium.) There is a good TED talk on this.
Fixed volume compressed gas storage: pump gas into a pressure vessel or abandoned mine
Fixed pressure compressed gas storage: pump gas into a bladder deep under water. This works well for off shore wind farms, as they have the deep water right there. Otherwise you need a convenient lake or flooded mine.
Elevated water reservoir. Needs the right topography and hydrography, so doesn't work everywhere.
Variable output hydro power: similar to the above, but instead of pumping water uphill you just increase/decrease the downhill flow that already exists, to match you output to the production shortfall of the time variable generators. If you already have hydro power, this is very cheap, possibly free. At worst you need to increase peak capacity by adding turbines.
Heat storage: store energy as heat in a large thermal mass, extract it with some form of heat engine.
Complementary to this, we can also try to time-shift demand:
Off-peak water heating. This has been around for many decades.
Off-peak heating/cooling using thermal storage (e.g. an insulated water tank under your house from which your radiators are fed.)
Off-peak charging of plug-in electric cars. (We can even use peak-hour extraction of power from the electric cars.) This is cheap in that those batteries are already there for other purposes. It does cost if they batteries have a limited number of recharge cycles (which currently they do.)
No wonder all the young men are all killing each other in the middle east: they have to live with ASCII porn.
God is Gates? No, no, no, that's gotta be downstairs.
AND making a profit at it. That's the diff between American busybodies and theirs.
Where in the Koran does it mention bandwidth?
"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's bandwidth"
I wish talk radio would omit Rush. He's made enough racist comments for 10 Mancows, yet never booted.
But Don't Know Where It Would Go
How about the Bridge to Nowhere?
I had a Gumby nightmare like that once.
Asking nerds what apps are good is like strolling into a literature forum and asking "I haven't read a book in 15 years - anything new out that you think is good?"
Well this "Twilight" series is a best seller. As is this "50 Shades of Grey".
I really with the old Twilight Zone was still running. I think that that premise would make a great episode.
I'm going to map my drive to work, by driving it a few dozen times.
And that is if you are the ONLY person with a robot car on that road. Which may be correct for the initial roll-out. But this is a great example of the "network effect". If 100 people in your state own robot cars then a LOT of your state will be continuously mapped / re-mapped / re-re-mapped / etc.
Are we really whining because a brand new technology can't do EVERYTHING for us? Because it only takes care of MOST of the drudgery?
There is space to be filled and page hits to be collected. Demanding instant perfection for every edge-case is a good way of doing both.
Google has logged over 700,000 miles in those vehicles. Without a single robot-controlled accident.
There might be problems in certain weather conditions. Or in certain other conditions. Or whatever. In which case the driver should take over.
And since it is software, eventually those problems should be solved.
Judging by how badly TFA was written.
If a new stop light appeared overnight, for example, the car wouldn't know to obey it.
Got it. So the cars cannot handle changes in traffic markers.
Google's cars can detect and respond to stop signs that aren't on its map, a feature that was introduced to deal with temporary signs used at construction sites.
So they cannot deal with new stop LIGHTS but they can deal with new stop SIGNS. WTF?
But in a complex situation like at an unmapped four-way stop the car might fall back to slow, extra cautious driving to avoid making a mistake.
And it would be "unmapped" for the first attempt. Right? Because the cars should be sending back data on road conditions and such to HQ. Right?
Maps have so far been prepared for only a few thousand miles of roadway, but achieving Google's vision will require maintaining a constantly updating map of the nation's millions of miles of roads and driveways.
And the car needs the map to drive, right?
Google's cars have safely driven more than 700,000 miles.
So they just drove over the same "few thousand miles of roadway" again and again and again and again? Until they got to 700,000 miles?
The car's sensors can't tell if a road obstacle is a rock or a crumpled piece of paper, so the car will try to drive around either.
As it should. Because you don't know if that piece of paper is covering a rock or a pothole or whatever.
For example, John Leonard, an MIT expert on autonomous driving, says he wonders about scenarios that may be beyond the capabilities of current sensors, such as making a left turn into a high-speed stream of oncoming traffic.
Isn't that one of the easier problems? The car waits until it detects a gap of X size where X is dependent upon the speed of oncoming vehicles and the distance it needs to cross PLUS a pre-set "safety margin".
This is the primary problem with "sweep" methods of collecting data.
There MIGHT be something in the "sweep" that MAY impact a current investigation. Therefore, ALL of the "sweep" must be hidden from the public.
Bullshit. There shouldn't be any difficulty in removing the items relevant to a current investigation. The should already be tagged as such. Then release the rest.
This is a case of "collect EVERYTHING and keep it FOREVER" so that anyone can be backtracked if the cops or politicians decide to do so. Where do you go? When? Why? What do you do there?
Now imagine a cop tracking your daughter to find out where she lives and where she works and which college she goes to and when she leaves for classes.
What, you don't have the new iBrator?
Your post reminds me of this scene:
It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.