Electricity is typically only 20% of a country's energy needs, which also range from transportation to agricultural.

It's nowhere near accurate to say these countries have run on 100% renewable energy. Electricity, perhaps. But not energy.

It only serves to give us an extremely distorted view on how easily solved the energy equation can be with renewables.

For both tickets and lottery machine?

Was it worth seeing in the theaters? Absolutely.

My local theater smells like piss and it’s in a nice area. So no for a lot of people.

We stopped doing the whole "putting minorities in camps" thing literally decades ago.

Yeah, now we just put them in for-profit prisons and have the highest-incarceration rate in the world.

Yes.

Fast trains need well maintained tracks, specially built for the speed, and the curves also have to take that in mind. The advent of cars and later planes have pretty much undermined rail in America in terms of people transport and many lines are only suitable for slow-moving cargo trains, some as low as 10mph.

We're talking track that will bounce up and down out of the ground a good 18 inches into the air. I've seen this often enough with an approaching train in some sections. That track couldn't take 60 mph trains, let along several hundred mph.

America, may as well be trackless for the most part for rail that is in any condition and design for high speed rail. Buses have pretty much put an end to trains as a serious passenger mover, too bad they will never reach speeds that would make it a serious distance mover for anybody but the person with time on their hands, a tourist or sightseer.

Heard the same. Because company is branching out in India itself, I'm expected to travel quite a bit, so I'm not sure on every region, plus mobile internet in between.

I'm going to India for over a year, coming up soon. Although my company is sending me to essentially train my replacements, and then another round after that... sigh, at least the money is good.

I expect to have internet (I don't see how not) but Idk how steady or fast it is in that area so I'm downloading wikipedia on a usb drive just in case. I have my own favorite books, like Pointers on C by Kenneth Reek but that's book specific. As well as some Lisp history and underlying math (original paper).

There is the classic SICP, Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, Concrete Mathematics, etc.

Of course this is all heavy, so I'm putting it in a kindle or tablet. A b/w kindle with some type of manual charger as backup would be ideal.

But you know better than I what your goals are. Don't pack too much, especially dead tree books. Just 1 or 2 of those. You're going to the Himalayas! Enjoy it. Plan on getting through 1 challenging book and don't waste the rest of time reading. It'll still be there when you get back.

I'm going to say there will be a window roomba for skyscrapers within a decade. It's too lucrative a market not to pursue.

The improvement in suction cups have been here for a while. Short of some innovative cleaning system that require little/no water, resupply and dirt offloading can be handled by some ancillary robot that runs back and forth to some main hub.

All that will really be needed is some safety system to keep it falling from pedestrians. If it's a cable, then the ancilliary robot might be done away with as tubing can feed solution downward although I'm dubious about a capable pump upward without weighing the robot down too much.

What will stop it is that human labor is still cheap. Unless insurance costs price them out of the market, robots are doable but fall under that "more trouble than it's worth" niche. So while someone may develop something, not sure on uptake.

I know Nasa anticipated smaller RTGs in the mid-90s for probe Missions to Pluto and beyond, just wasn't sure if that wish ever went anywhere.

Why was this designed to use mainly solar instead of a radioisotope thermoelectric generator like the voyager probes?

A comet's trajectory out of the solar system would have been interesting thing to ride on, but then solar wouldn't be a viable option.

Knuth won in 1974 though, so fair enough.

Also, Lamport didn't win for Latex, but for his work on distributed computing.

It will not. It's much cheaper to take public transportation in most cities; the only time it would make sense would be on longer trips, because you are saving alot of time by taking Lyft or Uber, but you sure the hell aren't saving money.

I think it will hurt because people will always pay a reasonable convenience fee. Oh, you're right on steady customers of public fare that take public transit daily. But there's all those people taking special trips and the like.

When I was a college student, I had no car, and a 7 minute car ride to the grocery store, 20 mins and checkout, and 7 minute ride back turned into a 1h30m to 2hr15m with the bus depending on time of day. Would I have taken lyft or uber over the bus for a few bucks? Hell yes. It's not as if the bus ride allowed me to study, it was too short for that, 15 mins at most, it was the waiting at a stop not really conducive to study.

But why is this phrased on /. that it be a problem if the answer is yes? Competition is a good thing. And even government monopolies shouldn't be protected forever.

On a brain cell level, but if we zoom out, so to speak, there should come into scope some system we can label where the brain does multipe things at once reliably: balance, process sound and vision, etc.

What interests me the most are the levels of subconscious/consciousness and where all this combines to create our singular, waking awareness.

Highly disagree, OP sounds like a ripe candidate for solar water, not to be confused with photovoltaics. Solar thermal is highly efficient and pretty cheap in comparison.

A modest setup would need only three hours a day sun just to supply hot water for daily use, and a bigger setup or more time for supplying hot water for heat (radiant heat using water is extremely common there).

He's asking for heat and not electricity per se, solar water is ideal for that and many times cheaper than PV for the same results.

We might be seeing a major milestone towards the march to quantum computers. Getting 2 photons to interact with each other via a single rubidium atom is a big step. The process still has high noise but I think that can be overcome, but wow, strong interaction between photons.