But how different is telling a drone "kill the person with this face" to telling a missile "fly here and blow up". The video seems to show ez-assassination technology (tm) being used by "the wrong" humans, not AI going rogue and deciding who lives and who dies on its own.

To me, the video is scary not because of AI, but because of how easy and inconsequential it portrays murder. It makes you wonder if that isn't sort of the end goal of advanced warfare technology - the more surgical it becomes the further it deviates from our idea of what war is - this is drone warfare and it's nebulous legality taken to the very extreme.

What I perhaps find unsettling in myself is that I find this somehow worse than open warfare - as if its not the loss of life that bothers me, but the sinister efficiency of it. Is that really a valid criticism? Why is it "more ok" to fly a plane to drop a bomb on some foreigner than for a drone to do it - is it because it simply costs/risks us more, that technology like this cheapens human life?

The AI takin over is scary too. I just hope they work out in time that the only winning move is not to play.

Cheers for that. I decided to double my sifting efficiency and watched https://videosift.com/video/Drone-Flight-of-the-Year to that soundtrack... they synched up like Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon... and I'm not even high! (I started the drone flight after about 50 seconds if you want to try it yourself).

Off to listen to some Joe Satriani now that I'm in the mood for real guitar.

There was a show, islands of the future, on Netflix now, that had a large scale demonstration and explanation of it, used to store wind energy and power an island.
Unfortunately, I don't know of a comparison with batteries with concrete numbers.
I think you hit the nail on the head with what you said about efficiency, but for large scale storage, it has to be better when you factor in the energy costs of making, replacing, and disposing batteries, even including the cost of replacing the turbines.
...and all that ignores the ecological issues, where ponds beat battery factories hands down.

Hadn't heard of that, but I get the concept. Cool idea.

Off the top of my head, I'm concerned about pump and generator efficiency. You're going to use some amount more energy to pump a volume of water up to the high basin than you will get back by gravity feeding it through generators. To be fair, efficiency is a problem with using and recharging chemical batteries as well, but the limited amount that I remember from college engineering courses tells me that efficiency in the electrical / solid state world tends to be more easily obtained than in the mechanical world.

And as another "to be fair", efficiency is a bigger concern for things like fossil fuels, where burning one unit of fuel produces a set amount of energy and you have to improve efficiency to get the most value out of that energy. With things like solar and wind being "free" energy when active but requiring storage for when the source is inactive (night / calm winds), efficiency still certainly matters, but not as much as with a scarce / non-renewable source of energy.

Anyway, I'd like to see concrete numbers comparing the utility and efficiency (in various metrics) of your hydro storage vs battery storage.

Here's a thought experiment:

Imagine a power technology emerging that makes the cost of electricity virtually zero and the supply virtually endless.

Since the emergence of life, the task of survival is the quest for energy in one form or another. Most of the critical advancements by humanity have been driven by the need to acquire, distribute and store energy. When you're sitting at your computer being productive for a paycheck, you are serving the same goal as prehistoric hunter-gatherers, you're just doing it via a much more complex system of acquisition and distribution.

The more efficiently we acquire energy, the less effort it takes to satisfy our individual energy needs and the more time we have for other pursuits such as culture and exploration.

What happens when the effort necessary to acquire a life's worth of energy approaches zero?

In an emergency people helping people is a basic right. Impounding a vehicle and even arresting the owner serves no purpose then to feed the ego of law enforcement. How about working together and maybe even registering said vehicles with law enforcement and getting an ID for such emergencies. Hundreds of years of disasters and there seems to be a lack of communication and efficiency or even simple planning for things like this. I know emergency relief is a massive undertaking, but there are ways to go about it that includes people that are just trying to assist. There are more people in need then there are state and federal "professionals".


** "....Because I said So!!" obviously this officer is a father. Cracked up because my dad use to say the same thing when he wasn't being listened to or questioned.

"And if you prefer one or the other, I can adapt. Humans are good at that. ;-) "

No, they're not. Or did you miss the part where some of the smartest people on the planet crashed millions of dollars into another planet? People are TERRIBLE at these kinds of things. One conversion? Fine. Ten conversions? No problem. Hundreds, thousands or millions of conversions? The probability of error tends to 100%.

It would definitely be more efficient if everyone used one common language (especially for cross cultural endeavours such as business and engineering). In fact, that kinda happens by default and that language tends to be English.

However, there are practicalities in play. First up, there aren't just two languages, there are hundreds, and there is a broad split in the number of speakers of each language. Whereas in metric v imperal, the US is the ONLY country in the developed world that hangs onto imperial.

Second, learning a new language is an order of magnitude more work than changing to using metric.

I'm speaking from experience here; in the course of my life, I've studied Irish, French, German, Spanish and Japanese, and I am in no way close to fluent in any of them

On the other hand, when I left Ireland, it was officially metric but imperial was still common (distances were in KM, speed limits in miles, people used imperial weights for humans, metric for food). When I moved to NZ, everything is metric, and honestly, relearning happens without effort. Once you immerse yourself, you eventually just start thinking in the new system.


Finally, metric is just a better system for everything. There isn't a single scenario where imperial is a more useful measurement.

Come on America, join us. It's awesome and you don't really want to use "English" units, do you? Did you fight a war to get rid of them? What would George Washington say!? It's unamerican, I tells ya!

Thanks for those insights---so, is NOTAR a bit less efficient in transferring power (ran out of horsepower to correct the yaw because of that?)

Or do you think it was just the gust was so large (the turbulence at a crest could have been ferocious) that it wouldn't have matter what model helicopter or whether it had NOTAR or a regular tail rotor--it simply would have been overmastered?

Pretty sure there's a more efficient way to mow your lawn.

Looks very cool and I want one because of that, but it seems like a massively inefficient design for something where efficiency is pretty important. Why the steel frame? Why not aluminum or one of those fancy bike alloys if aluminum isn't strong enough? Why the big wheels and fat tires with all their extra weight and increased rolling friction just for the sake of aesthetics? The minibike layout does seem pretty good for an electronic bike though.

I could see this being much safer (and therefore more viable) than the Hyperloop.

Although I'm curious how it could ever be more efficient than just using an electric train.

As far as non-standard trains climbing steep grades, "cog railways" have existed over 150 years. (these aren't cable-pulled funiculars)

I -love- riding the trains in France. They're efficient, clean and fast -- not to mention cheap and they go places you want to go in the country, or beyond.

He says he's "done for the day" because of it. Probably intends to get a new shear pin "tomorrow" and continue mowing. Depending on how far away everything is, it could be more efficient to avoid two extra tractor trips just to repair a pin.

Always leave it to the laziest guy to come up with the most efficient way.