Weren't "my baby dancing to $somesong" videos fair use though? If the baby only dances to music, and the dancing can't be fully appreciated without the music as context, then that should be a good fair use case as far as I understand it. Though I guess some companies consider fair use to be a problem in itself.

I've had this happen to one or two of my own videos of competitive videogame speedrunning. You can't show that without showing parts of the game, and the videos certainly don't act as competition to the game company itself (rather the opposite), so those should also be fair use.

But to have google remove those ads, one needs to go through a scary form where one basically declares oneself to be ready for a full DMCA process and potential court battle about the fair use. Before doing so, I shoud at least consult a lawyer, but finding and consulting a lawyer is a bit much for a simple youtube video, so almost nobody does this. Overall, the result is that fair use doesn't really exist on youtube.

Youtubers with popular videos get an offer from google to "monetize" the videos. If they accept, google inserts ads into your video, and pays them some of what they earn from advertisers". If you don't do this then there will normally be no ads in your youtube videos (though there may be ads elsewhere on the page, I guess - I use adblocking, so I'm not sure).

So a standard youtube video is non-commercial, since the person who created and/or uploaded the video gets no compensation for doing so. A subset of "monetized" videos are commercial because of the income from the inserted ads. I can see the FAA being against the latter kind of youtube drone video, but not the former kind.

Wow, that's a bit underwhelming. That works out to be an average of 5 W/m^2, doesn't it? Where is all the energy lost? Starting from 1000 W/m^2, which already takes into account atmospheric losses, we divide by 3 to take the day/night cycle into account, by 2 for bad weather and by 10 for solar cell efficiency (10% seems to be mid-of-the-range commercial cell efficiency), and we still get 16 W/m^2. That's pretty bad, but it's still 3 times better than Topaz.

The number I used for solar previously corresponds to an efficiency of 33% with perfect weather at the equator, which is doable with research cells, I think. But I'm far from an expert on this, as you can see.

Do you know why the topaz solar farm gets such poor efficiency?

Yes, solar power doesn't have the highest power density of our power sources. 1000 W/m^2 isn't that bad, though, if one could actually sustain that. For comparison, the world's highest-output coal power plant at Taichung has a surface area of 1.3e6 m^2 and and an installed capacity of 5.5 GW, which gives 4300 W/m^2.

But the coal needs to be mined too. Taichung uses about 15 million tonnes of coal per year. Assuming the Haerwusu coal mine is representative, and that it can pump out coal forever, then with its yearly production of 20 million tons, it can supply 1.3 Taichungs continuously. So the effective surface area of Taichung's power production is 67 square km / 1.3 = 50 square km. That gives Taichung a power density of 110 W/m^2. Huh, that's surprisingly low. If one had installed solar panels over that area instead (though of course, solar panels aren't free), then even with a yearly average efficiency factor of 10% they would rival Taichung.

That's just to say that currently popular power sources can be quite area-demanding too.

I just looked through Nerval's Lobster's last 15 contributions. All were article submissions, Nerval's Lobster doesn't appear to comment on anything. Here's the list:

• Was Linus Torvalds Right About C++ Being So Wrong? [Dice]
• Do Tech Companies Ask For Way Too Much From Job Candidates? [Dice] [Hiring]
• 'Chappie': What It Takes to Render a Robot [Dice]
• Demand for Linux Skills Rising This Year [Dice] [Hiring]
• Who's Afraid of Android Fragmentation? [Dice]
• H-1B Visas Proving Lucrative for Engineers, Dev Leads [Dice*] [Hiring]
• In Space, a Laptop Doubles As a VR Headset [Dice*]
• What Does It Mean to Be a Data Scientist? [Dice]
• Which Freelance Developer Sites Are Worth Your Time? [Dice*] [Hiring]
• JavaScript, PHP Top Most Popular Languages, With Apple's Swift Rising Fast [Dice*]
• Building a Good Engineering Team In a Competitive Market [Dice*] [Hiring]
• What Makes a Great Software Developer? [Dice*] [Hiring]
• The Highest-Paying States for Technology Professionals [Dice] [Hiring]
• What Will Google Glass 2.0 Need to Actually Succeed? [Dice*]

Every single one of them is from dice, though only a few of them actually make that explicit (the non-explicit ones are marked [Dice*]. A large fraction of them are related to human resources and hiring people, which I've marked [Hiring]. So its like Nerval's Lobster is using Slashdot as advertising and recruitment channel for Dice.

The average quality of these submissions was very low in my opinion - lots of vacuous pointy-haired-boss buzzword stuff. Very un-nerdy. How did these get through submission moderation? Were they even subjected to it?

Here's how you arrive at that number: 100 billion neurons (correct), each firing at 200 Hz (big overestimate, all the neurons are never firing at their max speed. A more typical number would be a few Hz), each sending signals to 1000 other neurons (underestimate, I think. The average number of synapses per neuron is about 7000). You now multiply those numbers together and say that that's the total number of calculations. That's how you get 20 million billion.

Let's do the same for a CPU. A modern Intel i7 has 1.4 billion transistors, each cycling at about 4 Ghz. Each transistor is connected to three others. So we get a total of 20 billion billion "calculations" per second.

Wow, that's a lot! But it's also nonsense. A single transistor sending a signal to another transistor isn't a useful calculation. And a single neuron firing at another neuron isn't a useful calculation either. Each neuron fires based on the total firing rate it receives, and a series of pulses is needed to stimulate it to fire itself. Secondly, lots of neurons firing together is needed to achieve even very basic things. The "20 million billion" number for the brain is probably overestimated by at least as much as the "20 billion billion" number for the CPU.

So why is the brain's output so much more impressive than a CPU's output? Probably for the same reason that a 1 MHz computer running quicksort performs better than a 1 GHz computer running bogosort. Algorithms matter.

How do you compute the FLOP equivalent of what the brain does? I would be very interested in seeing how that's done.

I don't think it's obvious that one couldn't do real-time 3D vision and context-sensitive pattern recognition with a low-power modern cpu and beat the brain. It's so hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison here, as there's so much we still don't understand about how the brain does things. When does the object recognition actually take place? How often is this information updated, and for which objects? What spatial and temporal resolution is used for the processing of various parts of the field of vision (and probably some heavier tasks operate on a much lower resolution representation).

The brain clearly uses a very clever algorithm, and a similarly clever algorithm running on today's computer hardware is what one would have to compare with. Sadly, we don't have such an algorithm. But just to illustrate that this really is to a large degree an algorithm issue (though this example goes a bit off-topic when it comes to the energy use): I think you will agree that even a small modern CPU has more processing power than a dragonfly. But we still don't have drones that can compete with a dragonfly in moving through a complex 3d environment at high speed.

To make a planet-eating black hole from an accelerator experiment you need to assume that Hawking ratiation doesn't exist (or is extremely feeble), or those black holes would evaporate instantly before they can accrete any matter. So you would end up with planet-mass black holes orbiting stars.

Even if you turned off Hawking radiation, it would still be hard for a black hole from a particle accelerator to actually eat the planet. Let's say you have an accelerator much more powerful than the LHC, with a center-of-mass energy of 1 PeV. If all that were used to produce a black hole, it would have a mass of 1.8e-21 kg. An electron or proton a single hydrogen radius away from it (which we can use as a typical intermolecular distance in the Earth for simplicity) would feel an acceleration of 1e-11 m/s^2, which is absolutely tiny compared to the electrical forces that govern motion on those scales. A small black hole like that behaves much like a neutrino - it hardly interacts with anything. And it needs to do that to grow. I think we could have lots of these inside the Earth and not even notice (dun-dun-DUUN!).

Even if you included Hawking radiation but somehow only turned it on after the black hole had consumed the planet, you still wouldn't get rid of the planet-mass black hole, as a hole of that size evaporates extremely slowly, and would have a life time of more than 5e50 years.

Planet-mass black holes could be detected via gravitational microlensing. Planets are regularly detected this way. But it may be hard to distinguish those black holes from planets. As far as I know we can't exclude a population of these in orbit around a fraction of the stars in the milky way. The accretion events, when the planets are eaten, would probably be quite bright, and might be visible as mini-supernovas.

There's another basic form of payment one can get as a free software developer that isn't mentioned here (in the summary at least), and that's payment in the form of more free software. You spend some time writing some sofware, make it available under the GPL and encourage others to use it, modify it and share it. If in the end this leads to the production of at least one other free software project of similar size that you find useful, then you've made back the lost time you spend writing your program in the first place. As a bonus, the body of free software has grown by at least two in the process.

As an example, let's say I write a raytracing library, and it takes me 500 work hours to do so. Then somebody uses it to write something like Blender. If Blender saves me 500 work hours over the years, then that by itself makes it worth it. And as a very nice bonus, libraytrace+Blender together will save lots of time for many other people too, since they won't need to implement these things themselves.

The Earth-Sun L1 point is 1.5 Gm from the Earth, pretty much exactly 1% of the distance from the earth to the sun. So to fully cover the sun (as seen from one spot on Earth), the blind would have to be 1% of the Radius of the sun. That's basically the radius of the Earth, or 4 times the radius of the Moon. To cover the sun as seen from anywhere on Earth, you would need a slightly bigger radius due to perspective.

But one doesn't need to cover the whole sun (unless one wants to play the grandparent's nefarious games with Asia). A 1% reduction in insolation would already help a lot. So that gives us about 1% of the area of the earth, or 1.5e12 m^2. With graphene's density, that works out to be 1,120,000 kg for a single layer. For comparison, the international space station's mass is 450,000 kg, so that mass is within the realm of the possible to launch, even to the much greater distance of L1.

But a single layer of graphene is transparent, which isn't a good quality to have for blocking the sun. So much more than 1 layer would be needed. That would very quickly bring the mass into unrealistically high levels, corresponding to hundreds or thousands of space stations. And that still ignores the mass of the supports needed to keep the graphene extended and in the right shape, which would probably weigh more than the graphene itself.

Another problem inherent to such a large surface area is that the solar wind will exert a pretty large force on it. The solar wind has a pressure of about 4nPa, which multiplied with the huge surface area gives a force of 6 kN towards the Earth. So a rockets would have to be mounted on it to keep it in orbit. Or actually, one can compensate for this force by moving solar sail blind closer to the sun, where it would be able to orbit with the same angular velocity as the Earth without any correcing rockets on average. However, the solar wind isn't constant, so it would still need corrective rockets. And it would be in the way for all the current sun-observing satellites at L1. There would also be a tendency for the blind to rotate to show its thin direction to the solar wind, which would need to be counteracted.

This could probably be done, but I it would probably be by far the largest project ever attempted, and much more expensive than other, simpler ways of dealing with global warming, such as polluting less. It's a fun idea, though.