If you think the outrage expressed here is floundering and forced, you should imagine how we feel about your impotent, condescending reaction to our outrage. Please double check all harnesses and straps for safety before you parachute down from your own high horse. A horse so high your dismount could be sponsored by red bull.

What's funny is that you think being annoyed by Dreadlock Hitler is pathetic, but you're annoyed because the target looks like someone you don't like and listens to music you don't enjoy. I guess that's just fine, but we should all grow up!

You're right with me up to the point we reach the kinds of censorship you happen to support.

What's the penalty for incurring the ire of the social justice elite? Well, only that you'll be branded a sexist or whatever by the entire gaming media, perhaps have your Twitter account banned or your videos taken down from YouTube, or maybe you'll just be arrested on false charges of harassment. It's a storm that a strong individual might weather, but from which any company will steer away automatically. Of course it's censorship.

Games are being censored (they came for the japanese bikini simulators and I said nothing...); social media is being censored: Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia and any number of even less reputable sites are being censored - all in response to social justice histrionics. This crybaby, zero-offence, closed-minded, closed-mouthed malaise is damaging to our culture: damaging to art, to academia, to journalism. And if you acknowledge the need for open expression, you will oppose it.

"There is more than one way to burn a book," wrote Ray Bradbury of interest groups taking offence, "...each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever." You don't recognise any of this?

Yes, 'critics just don't have the talent to create' is a tired old fallacy and I regret echoing it, but there I was thinking particularly of the likes of Wu and Quinn: loathsome reptiles and degenerates whose own creative efforts are so miserably inept that to garner sales, patreon donations, and fraudulently positive reviews they resort to pretending themselves the brave minority voices raised against the misogynistic, LGBT-phobic, uni-racial establishment - in an industry that has never actually had any of those problems.

As for Anita Sarkeesian; that liar, mountebank, fascist collaborator, and 21st century Jack Thompson; that professional victim and demagogue who harnesses manufactured outrage for profit; or in the most generous possible light, that half-educated nincompoop who somehow rode a tide of hysterical activists-without-a-cause to a broadcast platform for her worthless, narcissistic rambling:
It isn't the fact of her fuck-witted critique to which the gaming community so righteously objects but the baffling inaccuracies and outright slanders therein, her self-promotion via false claims of harassment, her attacks on artistic expression and internet freedom.

And these are exactly the kind of sub-intellectual trash who will presume, against all standards of rectitude and conscience, to instruct their betters on what kind of jokes they're allowed to tell.

You never cede an inch to these fucking people. That's how you get Mary Whitehouse, or the Comics Code Authority, or McCarthy, or the FCC, the BBFC, the OFLC, the IWF.

OK, but the question, even if they are just harnessing the atom for peaceful means, still stands---What about Al Ghazali's prohibition against math?
Personally and culturally?

Obviously, they've rationalized it (again, let's assume every single intended use is peaceful. Unlike, for example, Pakistan's)---

I'm a bit curious what that looks like inside a person's brain.

Their specs say the LED runs at 100mw on "high".

1kg falling 1m is roughly 2.5 mwh, so yeah, you'll need either a lot of a rocks or a long fall to run much more than an LED for very long. Even then they can't be losing too much if they can have it running for 20 minutes.

I suppose its also worth remembering that gravity is harnessed on a massive scale for the generation of electricity by dams, so yeah, in some parts of the world its quite possible your computer would be gravity powered.

Har-de-har-har!

And your first paragraph pretty much spells out why solar PV is a dud investment for small plant/home plant if it were completely unsupported by a plethora of mechanisms designed to make it viable financially (and that's before even considering whether the energy cost is significantly offset by the energy produced), not to mention trying to make time to do things when your PV production is high so that you're not wasting it.

I try to load shift as much as possible, even went so far as to have most of the array facing the west where we'll scrape out some extra power when we're actually going to use it (eg. in the afternoon, particularly for running air conditioners in summer), but without feed in tariffs that are 1:1 with energy purchase prices and government subsidies on the installation of the system, the sums (at least in Australia) just do not ever come close to making sense.

But as I said in the first paragraph, that is all financial dickering, it has nothing to do with actual energy used vs energy generated. There is no free energy, you have to spend energy to make energy. You have to buil a PV array, pay for the wages of the people who install it, transport costs etc etc. They all drain energy out of the system. And most people in places where feed in tariffs are either on parity with the cost of purchasing energy when your PV isn't producing align their solar arrays with the ideal direction for greatest generation of energy that they can get the best profit for, not for generation of energy when energy demands spike.

The consequences of this are that at midday, energy is coursing in to the grid and unless your electricity provider has some capacity for extended storage and load shifting (eg. pumped hydro, large scale battery arrays), it's underutilised. Come peak time in the afternoon when people get home, switch on cooling/heating, start cooking etc when PV's production is very low, the electricity company still has to cycle up gas turbines to provide the extra power to get over that peak demand, and solar does little to offset that.

So carbon still get's pissed away every day, but as long as PV owners get a cheaper bill, it's all seen to be working like a charm... ; )

The energy current efficiency panels return is only on an order of 2-3x the energy input, which is barely enough energy returned to support a subsistence agrarian lifestyle (forget education, art, industrialisation). There's a reason that far better utilisation of coal and oil via steam heralded the massive breakthrough of industrialisation, it's because coal has close to a 30 to 1 return on energy invested. Same with petrochemicals, incredibly high return on energy.

The biggest advances in human civilisation came with the ability to harness energy more effectively, or finding new energy sources which gave high amounts of energy in return for the effort of obtaining them and utilising them. Fire, water (eg. mills etc), carbon sources, nuclear and so on. Even if you manage to get 95% efficiency on the panels for 100% of their lifetime (currently incredibly unlikely), you're only turning that number in to 8-12x the energy invested compared to 25-30x for coal/petro, 50x+ for hydro and 75-100+x for gen IV nuke reactors.

It's amazing that despite all the amazing precision, the part that sticks out most for me is him driving over that arc thingie. I honestly might be able to do that myself with a thousand attempts, a safety harness and a crane, but for some reason it sticks out.

Have to agree with andyboy that the editing could have used some work. It seemed more than half about "let's do a quick stunt at this scenic location and then pop to somewhere else" than "let's explore the skills of the rider". This was just a taste of how ample and numerous those skills are.

HAR!

This video was much more succinct than Carl Sagan's Cosmos series segment on the same subject.

If there were a type 2 civilization, with such a device that could harness an entire star's energy - how would we on earth detect that? Maybe everything we think is a black hole is actually one of these?

I used to do just this all the time as a kid. My friends and I would throw my inflatable raft into the pool and we'd battle it out, (or rather: 'paddle it out'? har!) tug of war style.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by blackfox42.

Hmm. Zombies. So Novel for 1990.

No, I didn't watch the video. No need, because: zombies. Please move on entertainment industry, because it was pathetic 10+ years ago, and today there isn't even a word in the english language that can describe the fail that is adding to this already "dead" genre. (har har)

Slow down with the theories that our 'advancements' will solve all problems, not create more, because all the things you listed have been fairly disastrous in the long run, many being large parts of the issue at hand, climate change, and things like putting a man on the moon or traveling the globe in hours have gone backwards, meaning it was simpler to do either 35-45 years ago than it is today (we can't get to the moon with NASA today, or get on a concord). Assuming new tech will come along and solve the problems we can't solve today is wishful thinking, assuming they'll come with no strings attached means you aren't paying attention, all new tech is a double edged sword in one way or another.
IF humans could harness their tech, capital, and energy altruistically, yes, we could solve world hunger, disease, displacement, etc. Humans have never in history done that though.
We already can't feed a large percentage of the planet. If a large percentage of farmable land is lost to sea level rise (won't take much) and also a large population displaced by the same (a HUGE percentage of people live within 10 miles of a coast or estuary), we're screwed. It will mean less food, less land to grow food, more displaced people, less fresh water, fewer fisheries, etc. We can't solve a single one of these problems today. What evidence do you have we could solve it tomorrow, when conditions will be exponentially less favorable?
For instance, something like 1/3 of the population survives on glacial water. It's disappearing faster than predicted. There's simply no technology to solve that problem, even desalination doesn't work to get water into Nepal. People seem to like water and keeping their insides moist, how would you suggest we placate them?

Anita Sarkeesian is the one who got what she wanted. Her actual job is to cry victimhood and harness the outrage it generates among her supporters to trick them into paying her to produce things of no value. She made a career out of becoming one of the damsels in distress she complains about. She's quite happy, of course, to exploit the same trick to confuse gullible morons into believing that all her critics are 'misogynist neanderthals'.