260 people maintaining 420,000 lines of code, written to precise externally provided specifications that change once every few years.
This is fine for NASA, but if you want something that does roughly what you need before your competitors come up with something better, you'd better find some brogrammers.
My understanding was this wouldn't work well for BitCoin, because the raw computing power people are throwing at it with GPUs and ASICs easily dwarfs even significant numbers of zombies, and even WebGL can't help you (too limited an instruction set).
Of course by this point the matter is hearsay... but still, Bitcoin is a tough nut to crack these days.
Seriously now: Handheld cellular-networked supercomputers are this short of being sold in newspaperstands and gumball machines for less than a days worth of MC Donalds burger-flipper wages. What do you need such a non-profit for?
I don't want to rain on the GPs parade, but this seems more like a pet project/hobby to me than anything else. If it really is a charity, well then, call it a charity and do charity work.
No one needs an organization that hands out free leftover computers anymore. Not with brand new Nexus 7s being sold for 179,- Euros in the bargain bin at the tech store just around the corner from where I work right now. That's my humble opinion anyway.
My 2 cents.
The funny thing is that whaling is a western thing but post WW2 the Japanese were encouraged to start whaling to augment their diet. And it sorta stuck. When the article claims "once popular in school meals" what they really mean is: once the only meat in school meals. It is like claiming "levertraan" (fishoil) was popular in Holland... it was given to lots of kids to boost their vitamin intake but it sure as hell wasn't popular.
Whaling in Japan is mostly an issue that most don't care about but for a small group it has become an identity issue. It is the same group who claim mass child rape was essential to the Japanese psyche during WW2. (See Yokohama's mayor recent claims). To most Japanese it is an embarrassment but they have trouble not getting accused of being non-japanese the same as everyone has when they are confronting those wrapping themselves in their nations flag.
You might as well post about the NRA and their antics and ask Americans how they feel about it. You get the same kind of "oh gosh, I am embarrassed but they are waving my flag so if I attack them I am a traitor".
People who will change society by orders of magnitude a few decades or centuries down the road are considered borderline insane today.
Actually, by the usual measure they often _are_ borderline insane. RMS is a great example. His ragging on about GNU/Linux instead of Linux etc., his appalling table manners (I've heard first hand that they are bound to make you throw up), etc. are mannerisms that cloud the greatness of the ideals he holds dearest. His deed of introducing the GPL and putting is power where his mouth is ang giving us the GPL and the GNU Toolkit will have more positive consequences for humanity further down the road than a Mark Zuckerberg could only dream of. And every expert knows this.
It's quite common that people really helping humanity move forward become famous only after they've died - if at all - and society gradually grows to see what they did for us all or what they saw coming (Ada Livingston, Tesla,
That all been said, I have to second the initial claim that there basically is a solid measure of decadence, especially in the field of IT, that is leading us nowhere. I've spent my recent years scrum mastering for browsergames, fiddling with FOSS CMSes (and we all agree that the world surely does not need any more of those) and now techleading the development of travel booking sites. With all the power as a developer and IT expert at my hands today nothing to brag about, really.
However, I *do* have a daughter and she needs to be put well on her way, and if assigning tickets to webdevs for the next generic webapp is what helps me follow through with my responsibility, I guess I'll have to swallow my pride until she's out of the house and on her own. Then I might actually finally drop IT as a main career all together and put my skills into action for some greater cause, such as protecting/defending the environment or pushing for some advancement in womans rights somewhere or something.
My 2 cents.
Hydrogen is not a power source, it's an energy storage medium.
I have never liked this line of argument. After all, it's essentially true of gasoline, too; it's just that nature did the work. (And, in a lot of cases, the hydrogen is mined too; yay natural gas.) Both are chemicals which are oxidized to release heat energy. If the meaningful difference is whether nature or we did the work, then they're both storage media.
You go on to cite energy capacity differences; those are only meaningful in apples to apples comparisons.
Any line of reasoning that assumes hydrogen is a power source - rather than just a storage medium with very poor energy density - is unfortunately based on a flawed premise.
I don't think this is actually correct.
Where do you find the actual meaningful difference to be? It's apparently not in that they're both exothermic chemistry based on the same element.
Other power sources aren't even remotely similar - eg nuclear, wind.
Why are two things that are virtually identical being seen as distinct? Is the issue whether nature put the power in instead of us? Is the difference between a power source and an energy storage medium found solely in whether you primarily imagine our having to put energy in to make them viable?
Does gasoline become an energy storage medium, despite zero actual changes, when they start sourcing it from CO2 in the atmosphere?
What is the meaningful net effect of being in one category or the other? You seem to be suggesting that the problem isn't just the energy density (and that in itself is misleading in many ways,) but rather a more sophisticated issue of whether it's a source or a medium - and that that is what's undermining their thought.
You can get hydrogen out of the ground, and you can spend energy to manufacture gasoline from the air, both today. If they're both sourced that way, does that mean that the lines of reasoning you're whargarbling at without actually showing an error, merely stating that there is one, suddenly become more ratified?
What if it happened to cost as much energy to get gasoline out of the ground as is received by burning it? That isn't the case today, but someday it will be, unless we stop using it. On that day, will it have become an energy storage medium?
Is the line about whether we have to invest energy to derive energy from it? Because calling something an energy storage medium based on how much power it takes to acquire seems ridiculous to me, as much so as does classing one chemical exothermic with nuclear and wind but against another chemical exothermic based on production rate, but I can't see any definition that seperates the two that doesn't end up with that apparent nonsense result.
Why is it that so many hydrogen cars and busses are actually doing well, if it's such a flawed premise?
Why are you measuring energy per liter? Liter is a unit of volume. The amount of energy per liter here is a direct function of pressure. No mention is made of pressure in two of the three cases.
Cryogenically stored? Room temperature? The temperature of the hydrogen or gasoline has virtually nothing to do with the amount of energy released by burning it.
Where did you get these numbers? They don't agree with the ones on Wikipedia. Granted, I'm a Wikipedia skeptic; if you can cite a valid source I'm happy to take it, but I remain somewhat doubtful that you'll be able to.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
The proper measure here is not the energy density; that is and always has been asinine. The proper measure here is the specific energy - that is, by weight, not by volume. Hydrogen doesn't become a better fuel (oh sorry, "energy storage medium,") just because you put it under pressure. That's ridiculous. What matters is how much energy you can carry by weight, allowing for a practical limit on storage size. Hydrogen as a whole is not meaningfully better as a storage medium every time you learn to make an improved storage tank.
Hydrogen cars have worked very well for 30 years. They're cheap, they're efficient, and they let us move the burden of production to better controlled sources than a small engine. And no, that's not because of some phantom line between media and sources; the same thing would be true if you chose to distill gasoline from the air, which many people are doing, just not yet at market cost. If gasoline is both a fuel and a power storage medium, then I submit to you with respect that the distinction is masturbatory garbage, and does not in fact exist at all.
The real problem with hydrogen cars is simple: you can't get fuel just about anywhere you go. Chicken and egg.
. . . IMO - it's almost certainly the book/teacher.
True; but STILL . . . I went for a few years coding without really having much of a need for math beyond Algebra. Then I started getting into some interesting projects. I had to force myself to learn calculus. (realizing that: - a lot of basic calculus is already embodied in programming structures - it's just expressed differently in mathematics. Already having a background in programming gave me an insight to calculus that made it a LOT easier to understand, than when I struggled with pre-calc in High School).
"Virtually all electric car advocates agree that when toting up the environmental pros and cons of electric cars, it's only fair to include powerplant emissions."
It's like they say... Only Nixon could go to China. Regardless of the merits of their arguments, these guys ain't Nixon. Wake me when the electric car skeptics agree.
Wouldn't that make it an assault keyboard or laptop or whatever?
The phone company also does not make money ads by broadcasting said crap to everyone in the world.
Analogy shot down!
With your bare hands?!?
