Many years ago, I was playing an early RPG game, where I had named my characters after the moons of Saturn -- Titan, Mimas, Enceladus... A younger co-worker walked past and noticed. He got all excited and asked me, "So you played Starcon II?" I told him no, those were just the names of Saturn's actual moons. He thought someone had made up all those names just for the game. And all the constellations as well. Turns out he knew a lot more actual Astronomy than he realized. He just didn't know which things were real and which ones were made up. Pkunk? Shofixiti? Utwig? as opposed to Camelopardalis, Pyxis, or Vulpecula?

Unless you want all of the ISPs to be regulated even more, and have state inspectors drop by every "gas station" monthly to check to see if the measurements are accurate. If they get enough complaints, they may make all sorts of new laws and regulations, and you may not like the results. Best case the cost of business will go up, and the costs will be passed on to you and me.

My ISP has pretty accurate metrics, by my reckoning. This has always been my experience. The industry is largely self-policing because of competition. If you think you're being ripped off, you can usually go elsewhere, and if you complain publicly enough (Like Slashdot, maybe?), they're aware of the possibility to lose other customers. I would appreciate it if you tried to work it out with AT&T yourself and don't get any regulators involved that might eventually impact MY bill.

I doubt this. I would have to see the math to be convinced. The heat transfer rate to the surrounding ground is going to be the issue. Unless you have a lot of groundwater, I don't think there is enough heat transfer to make a difference when there are thousands of gallons of gasoline involved.

As I understand it, the heat transfer rate in dry ground is not high. This is what makes passive annual heating and cooling possible. It is also what limits the effectiveness of geothermal heat pumps.

As I understand it, this is exactly what Google's strategy is--rack up millions of miles in the car, under as many different situations as they can. Record EVERYTHING. If there is ever a situation where the car chooses a wrong strategy and the driver has to take over, flag it for review. Evaluate the situations and see if the engineers think the car did it right. If not, FIX THE ALGORITHM.

Over time, the car should be handling more and more obscure situations. The collective experience of all the cars in the fleet can be funneled into the master algorithm, and it shouldn't be long before each car will have the equivalent of millions of miles of driving experience. And mistakes where the car chooses badly in a new obscure situation should only happen once. After which the algorithm gets updated and the fleet software gets a revision.

The computer algorithm may not have a great ability to come up with the correct decision in a new experience, but it has superb rule-using abilities. They just need to add rules (human picked rules) every time they see a new obscure situation. Since there are an infinite number of possible new obscure situations, it will never reach absolute perfection. However, it will approach perfection relatively quickly. Especially after widespread adoption. They could get a lot more experience miles if commercial and civilian drivers submitted instrument recordings of all miles driven. More especially every time they thought the car made a mistake. Most especially if it resulted in an accident.

Besides, it doesn't need to be perfect--it only needs to be substantially better than human drivers. The bar is set quite low.

I expect all the situations you have brought up have been encountered by Google's cars more than once. If all of these situations have not been handled in the algorithm by now, I would be quite surprised.

This was also my experience. I saw the display model at the local Radio Shack and was fascinated. The owner let me take the programming manual home overnight. It was extremely well written. The next day when I brought it back, I could program in BASIC. I was breaking into the program and modifying it, and I was definitely hooked. I got a loan and bought one that day.

BASIC was limited. But there was T-Bug, the program that allowed you to jailbreak the computer and modify memory in hex. Ultimate control!

It was my introduction to the speed of machine language. Or maybe the slowness of interpreted BASIC. My first non-BASIC game was a version of Snake/Dominoes. After painstakingly writing the program in Hex on graph paper and typing it into the TBug hex editor, I hit the Run command and it flashed and was still. It took me a while to figure out that it worked perfectly, except that it was so blinkin' fast that the game was already over. I had to put wait loops inside of loops inside of loops to slow it down.

I once wrote a brute force program to solve crypto-rhythms (math problems using letters instead of digits where you had to figure out which letter stood for which digit). In BASIC it took hours. In machine code, it took seconds.

Ah, the speed of the 1 Mhz Z-80.

Also, introduction to discrete logic hardware. I bought the technical reference manual, which included schematics of the entire thing. I accidentally fried one of the 74xx chips, but there were a couple of unused gates and with a few wires I was able to re-route the logic and bring it back up. Invaluable experience.

The Mormons have plans to convert the entire pile of images into a searchable database -- in the next six months. I understand it will be available on-line for you and me to use free of charge.

This is no small task. They have thousands of volunteers that have been doing this for years, with other indexing projects, but they have been ramping up for this project, training new volunteers and getting ready to jump on it. The program they use downloads images a page at a time from their storage server, and highlights various parts of the image while the volunteer types the data into input forms. Each page gets sent to two different indexers, who transcribe the data independently. The program checks the data, and any discrepancies are sent to a third arbitrator volunteer who decides which data is correct.

So yeah, they're serious about this stuff. And although they try to maximize the accuracy, by the very nature of the amateur volunteers some mistakes are bound to slip through. If this project is anything like the 1930 census they already have indexed, you can still get to the original scans to check the data yourself. After you have found a record by searching the indexed database, if you have an account on ancestry.com, a click or two will bring up the scanned image of the page that name was on.

As far as Mormons being a huge part of the traffic, I expect the indexing server needs a copy, but other than that, most of them will be downloading the images from their server. I don't expect there are many Mormons requesting their own copies if the data.

As far as privacy goes, I've seen worse. I have a third cousin who is into genealogy. Somehow he got my family's personal information and stuck it on his web site--all about our mutual third great grandfather. One feature is a tree of all of his descendants. It has names, birthdates, family connections (mother's maiden name, for example) and such. After repeated requests to remove me from his list, we're still there. In contrast, the Mormon family search won't show you any information on people who are still alive. There's a good chance your data is in their database if you have a close family member who is Mormon. Just nobody can get to it until after you are dead. They seem to be making a reasonable effort to maximize genealogical research capabilities while trying to avoid privacy problems.

I see what you mean, but it's not the large body of water, per se, that gives more pressure at the bottom of the dam. It's the head, or the vertical distance between the turbine and the water level at the top of the lake. I'm not talking about putting turbines in a fast moving stream, either. The small hydro plant I'm talking about achieved this head by pulling the water out of the river and into an enclosed pipe a few miles upstream. The river had quite a bit of drop (several hundred feet) between the diversion and the plant. The pressure at the plant, minus some friction, would be the same as if they had erected a huge dam several hundred feet tall. Of course in this case it was MORE efficient, because the topology simply wouldn't have worked for a dam that big at that place.

Maybe you could argue it is less efficient because it didn't use ALL the water in the river. I think dams like Hoover dam are designed to do that most of the time. I guess they could have done that in the pipeline plant as well, if they had used a bigger pipe, but then they would have had the migratory fish issue.

Come to think of it, I HAVE seen another hydroelectric power plant of this type, right where Provo Canyon opens up into Utah Valley. There's a pipeline that runs along the canyon wall, and then there at the base it runs straight down into a small plant.

Not necessarily. Only if there is a big dam with a reservoir behind it. Hydro can be done without the dam, and it's just as efficient. It doesn't have the bonus of evening out the annual flow fluctuations, but it solves the flooding and migratory fish issues.

Close to where I grew up there was a small hydroelectric power plant of this type. Some water was diverted into a pipeline a few miles upstream. The pipe roughly followed the bank of the river, and the water gushed back into the river after turning the turbines at the actual power plant. The ecological effect on the river was less flow for a few miles.

I don't know why there aren't more of this type of power plant around.

In my experience this idea works very well. Get the siblings together and they can feed off each other and just cover lots of memories.

Or spouse, parents, best friends, old roommates, co-workers, or even classmates or cousins. Anyone who spent a lot of time with her or experienced things with her.

One of the things that is fun is they never remember the same experience the same. One of my brothers has a scar on his cheek. It happened in a car accident. But each of his older siblings had a story where they thought they were the one that caused his scar.