How is ADA doing nowadays?
I was thinking about this too. True story from the early 90s in my IT career. I worked as a civilian employee of a branch of the US military. I'm not going to say which one because I actually liked and respected the members. One of my co-workers was assigned to a project that involved trying to make a piece of equipment portable. Today, it would be no problem. But 30+ years ago, it was a big ask. The project was done by a military contractor and there was a requirement to use ADA on it. My co-worker had to learn how to manage the equipment and the company that made it told him that they wrote the whole thing in C and put a very small ADA program on the front end that just called the C program to do all the work. He said they assured him that doing so was in full compliance of the way the ADA requirement was specified.
Diminished maybe, but not all that much.
I think we can reasonably assume that if there's a huge blackout, it won't last forever. A lot of smart people will work hard on getting things up and running again. A few years ago in the USA it lasted for a bit longer, what was it, a week or two? Recently in Spain it lasted a few days. But all those power stations and power grid operators don't just shrug and go home. So getting through those days is probably all it takes for any reasonably realistic scenario.
And you can build things up piecewise. I've got my solar now. The next thing will be a battery. Once I have that, I can think about an electric car.
Does VMWare have a contract clause that permits them to 'audit' a former customer? Under what country's laws would this be conducted? NL or US?
The fact that the company continues to use VMware - legally although they can no longer update it - sort of means that they aren't really a former customer. If they stopped using it completely when they decided not to pay Broadcom's subscription fee, I'd agree that they are a former customer. So that probably gives Broadcom the right to audit them. In my career at various jobs we sometimes had to go through this kind of audit as some companies were super paranoid that their customers might be using more copies of something than they paid for. It's been a while so I can't really remember specifics, but I vaguely recall that a company I worked for got busted during a similar audit as some people in another part of the company didn't respect the licensing agreement and just used the product beyond what we paid for and we had to pay some kind of fine/license fee to get straight.
And most humans donâ(TM)t work at night either, making addressing that demand a bit easier.
I've recently started looking at my power consumption on a 15-minute graph, and it turns out that power usage isn't all that much less during the night. In fact, at times it is higher because all the lights are turned up. But even at night, there's the fridge and freezer, the house electronics, security cameras, etc.
Turns out the stuff I need for work - a notebook and an external screen - barely register.
Yes, and different inverters. I've got a very small solar array, and the micro-inverter on it doesn't even work if it can't find the main power grid to sync to.
A battery will get you over some power grid outage, but not totally off-grid.
You are totally wrong.
I've installed a really small solar array and on sunny days I produce more electricity than I use. I'm sure it'll be a lot less in winter. BUT - I have a wood-burning heater which needs only a bit of electrical power for its control system. I'm pretty sure I can produce enough of that even in winter. So in theory, with the addition of a battery to cover the night, I could survive even if the power grid went down for an extended time.
Solar as a provider of independence doesn't mean everything needs to run on solar. Sometimes, it's just an enabler for another system.
So, in a nutshell, AI runs the risk of creating unrealistic relationship expectations and simulate perfection? No way. That's a completely new thing in the world. Romance novels, movies, gold diggers or marriage swindlers or just, frankly, a whole lot of ordinary people into "presenting themselves" in order to "score" a good catch, rather than being authentic and looking for a good match - I'm sure all of these things are hypothetical, don't already do essentially the same thing just with a lot less processing power, and cause the same issues.
But hey, this one has "AI" in it, so hype!
Was to to have a way decouple from the petroleum supply chain and its volatility. An electric car coupled with rooftop solar and suitable battery storage is a good way to declare your energy independence.
This. I've started with solar. Now that in good weather I produce more than I consume, I'm thinking about adding storage next. Once you have solar power with storage, an EV or at least a plug-in hybrid becomes a logical next step.
because obviously developed world economies are going to transition fastest.
That's not necessarily a given.
Developing countries have the advantage of not having an established base. For example, mobile phones took Africa by storm and were available in many places where landlines were not. And with smartphones, for a while Africa was leading in mobile payment systems - exactly because it didn't have the established base the developed world has.
With solar power and batteries dropping in price, solar is an obvious choice for people in developing countries where the power grid is unreliable. Once you have solar power and storage anyways, an EV means independence from oil prices and not having to drive to a petrol station to refill.
EVs are coming down in price rapidly. They might soon be an actual alternative outside the developed world.
Sure but the advantage of crops is you can easily scale your solar collectors by planting more acres. There are soybean farms with a half million acres out there that would produce significant amounts of biodiesel if used for that purpose. Now algae is a lot more efficient in a physics sense, but an equivalent algae facility would be on the order of 100,000 acres. The water requirements and environmental impacts of open algae pools would be almost unimaginable. Solar powered bioreactors would increase yields and minimize environmental costs, at enormous financial costs, although possibly this would be offset by economies of scale.
Either way a facility that produces economically significant amounts of algae biodiesel would be an engineering megaproject with higher capital and operating costs than crop based biodiesel, but an algae based energy economy is a cool idea for sci fi worldbuilding. In reality where only the most immediately economically profitable technologies survive, I wouldnâ(TM)t count on it being more than a niche application.
It isn't just fanboys. Tesla stock is astronomically overpriced based on the sales performance and outlook of what normal people consider its core business -- electric cars (and government credits). For investors, Tesla is *all* about the stuff that doesn't exist yet, like robotaxis.
Are they wrong to value Musk's promises for Tesla Motors so much? I think so, but it's a matter of opinion. If Tesla actually managed to make the advances in autonomous vehicle technology to make a real robotaxi service viable, I'd applaud that. But I suspect if Musk succeeds in creating a successful robotaxi business, Tesla will move on to focus on something other than that. Tesla for investors isn't about what it is doing now, it's about not missing out on the next big thing.
The real problem with biodiesel would be its impact on agriculture and food prices. Ethanol for fuel has driven global corn prices up, which is good for farmers but bad in places like Mexico where corn is a staple crop. Leaving aside the wildcat homebrewer types who collect restaurant waste to make biodiesel, the most suitable virgin feedstocks for biodiesel on an industrial scale are all food crops.
As for its technical shortcomings, if it even makes any economic sense at all then that's a problem for the chemists and chemical engineers. I suspect biodiesel for its potential environmental benefits wouldn't attract serious investment without some kind of mandate, which would be a really bad thing if you're making it from food crops like oil seeds or soybeans.
Just one point: "free love" actually has a historical definition. It means that sexual activity should not be regulated by governments. That would also, technically, include the right to practice celibacy.
If you steal from one author it's plagiarism; if you steal from many it's research. -- Wilson Mizner