Slashdot Mirror

Fish don't split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Rather they extract oxygen dissolved in water. However it seems like there are significant theoretical barriers to such a device because humans need a lot of O2 and seawater only has 7ppm. So you'd need to pass 192 litres of water per minute over the gill surface to get 1 litre or oxygen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_gills_(human)

As sea water contains 7 ppm oxygen, 1,000,000 kg (1,000 tonnes) of sea water holds 7 kg (1,000 short tons holds 14 lb) of O2, the equivalent of 5,350 litres (1,410 US gal) of oxygen gas at atmospheric pressure.

An average diver with a fully closed-circuit rebreather needs 1 liter (roughly 1 quart) of oxygen per minute.[8] As a result, at least 192 litres (51 US gal) of sea water per minute would have to be passed through the system, and this system would not work in anoxic water.

On the other hand

Another potential source of oxygen generation is plastron respiration.[10] A foam with hydrophobic surfaces immersed in water becomes superhydrophobic, which provides a water-air interface across which oxygen can diffuse into the foam. In nature, this method is used by some aquatic insects (such as water boatman, Notonecta) and spiders (such as Dolomedes triton) to breathe underwater without a gill. This method was experimentally proven by professor Ed Cussler on his dog

They don't say how big the apparatus was or what the flow rate was. There's an interview with Cussler here.

http://www.naturesraincoats.com/Experiments_Plastron%20Respiration.html

If you look here it seems like artificial gills do need a high flow rate.

There's an interesting New Scientist article about artificial gills here

http://s3.amazonaws.com/lcp/artedi/myfiles/Breathing%20in%20oceans.pdf

I don't see how Aereo is any different than those cable providers who just were retransmitting from an antenna, and those cable providers have to ask permission.

A few years ago, there was a precedent set by Cablevision that no retransmission consent required For a customer that rents an antenna.

In ABC's petition. They take issue with the fact, that Aereo is using a massive number of tiny coin-cell sized very inexpensive antennas mounted on a PCB

Each customer gets an antenna, but they are dynamically assigned. Also, each customer's stream gets transcoded and saved to a customer-specific directory on shared hard drives.

So at some point the customer's stuff is getting blended in some sense; the customer isn't renting 100% of the delivery infrastructure, only the antenna and some disk space used to receive their content.

One of the arguments before the court is their system is engineered as a Rube Goldberg-like contrivance whose sole purpose is to attempt to circumvent the intent of Congress and the copyright law; in regards to, the requirement for consent to retransmission, AND the exclusive rights to public performance.

Recommdation 31: Governments should not use their offensive cyber capabilities to change the amounts held in financial accounts or otherwise manipulate the financial systems;

http://disinfo.com/2013/12/report-suggests-nsa-may-manipulating-financial-data/

http://disinfo.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/LwJ1J6r.jpg

The US has been *reducing* the amount spent on "trying to fix social problems" (or anything that primarily benefits everyday citizens, for that matter) for at least 3 decades now, not increasing it!

That's completely wrong. In fact, we are spending a larger and larger portion of our budget on social programs:

http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/Hist/BudGDP.jpg

http://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/infographics/2012/10/SR-fed-spending-numbers-2012-p2-2-chart-3_HIGHRES.jpg

Science, infrastructure, and other spending that benefits everyday citizens is being squeezed out by ineffective welfare programs.

The linked gif seems to show the debris "tail" mostly flowing back along the comet's direction of travel, with some off-axis blow evident in the later post-encounter image. I would have expected the "tail" to always be pointing *away* from the sun as it made this fly-by. Derp?

-DC

There are generally two tails - the dust tail (which lies along the orbit path, like bread-crumbs in a fairy tale) and the (plasma) gas tail (which is blown by the solar wind, mostly directly away from the Sun). When you are just past perihelion ( as at the end of the linked-to video above) the dust tail can actually point (more or less) towards the Sun.

http://images.shrineofapple.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/gallery/appleiiplus/top/appleiiplus-level1-1.jpg there it is.

you know what's real funny? the site uses gif animations as banners.

In Soviet Russia, downloads pirate YOU!!!!

iPhone 5 got its ass handed to it due to the weak CPU in it.

Weak CPU, or weak physics engine that didn't use OpenCL or the Accelerate framework...

In fact the benchmark technical guide says explicitly:

The GPU load is kept as low as possible to ensure that only the CPUâ(TM)s capabilities are stressed.

Which is a really stupid way to compare things as anything that relied on advanced physics would be using some kind of accelerator for computation other than the CPU. It also means it's not using any of the real-world physics engines a game would be using.

Sure the iPhone Physics score will be down a lot if you tie both hands behind its back and throw it in a river.

http://pe-images.s3.amazonaws.com/basics/photoshop-actions/lower-layer-opacity-65.gif

If the overall point is that an employee of a company that has complete access to your systems, has complete access to your systems, that hardly seems to rise to the specificness of the claim "The Windows Flaw That Cracks Amazon Services". The supposed Windows flaw is irrelevant to the fact all systems are equally vulnerable in such a context, by much more mundane means.

Still, since I have been a customer of Amazon EC2 for several years and know something about it, and have had such security discussions with my clients' CEO in originally selecting them--the article, to address its claims credibly, should at least address the actual security context as Amazon asserts it is, say, here:

http://awsmedia.s3.amazonaws.com/pdf/AWS_Security_Whitepaper.pdf

Amazon Corporate Segregation
Logically,the AWS Production network is segregated from the Amazon Corporate network by means of a complex set of network security segregation devices. AWS developers and administrators on the corporate network who need to access AWS cloud components in order to maintain them must explicitly request access through the AWS ticketing system. All requests are reviewed and approved by the applicable service owner. Approved AWS personnel then connect to the AWS network through a bastion host that restricts access to network devices and other cloud components, logging all activity for security review. Access to bastion hosts require SSH public- key authentication for all user accounts on the host. For more information on AWS developer and administrator logical access,see AWS Access below.

AWS Access
AWS developers and administrators on the Amazon Corporate network who need to access AWS cloud components must explicitly request access through the AWS ticketing system. All requests are reviewed and approved by the appropriate owner or manager.

Account Review and Audit
Accounts are reviewed every 90 days; explicit re-approval is required or access to the resource is automatically revoked. Access is also automatically revoked when an employee's record is terminated in Amazon's Human Resources system. Windows and UNIX accounts are disabled and Amazon's permission management system removes the user from all systems. Requests for changes in access are captured in the Amazon permissions management tool audit log. When changes in an employee's job function occur, continued access must be explicitly approved to the resource or it will be automatically revoked.

Certainly, this claim could be contended with or otherwise discussed as to the degree of risk posed by the "crack". Handwaving "an Amazon employee could" is rather... light, though.

You've bought the false narrative. GZ didn't "follow" or "stalk" TM at any time. Scroll back up for a good writeup on what actually happened.

Zimmerman himself said he was following Martin while on the call to 911. Here is the quote from the transcript:

Dispatcher: Are you following him?
Zimmerman: Yeah
Dispatcher: Ok, we don't need you to do that.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/326700/full-transcript-zimmerman.pdf

Zimmerman was in his car, he got out, Martin didn't pull him out.

Yes, it is...

Note the difference: the latter is a belief system, the former isn't.

Only because you phrased it as such. In actuality, the atheist disbelieves in a deity given a lack of proof one way or the other - That still very much counts as a "belief", regardless of how positively or negatively you chose to word it.

Now, I have to agree with you that saying we can't know anything about the divine amounts to an assertion of faith. Merely saying we don't know and moving on from a moot question, however, does not.

I think, though, that we really have more subtlety here than two distinct groups. You already brought up "weak" atheism, we have the same for agnosticism (and theism, and gnosticism). Referencing that chart, any stance (in the absence of evidence, which describes our current reality) outside the center amounts to an irrational belief system. Personally, however, I consider it more of an error to posit that we can have information about something which may not even exist, than to say we cannot (as distinct from "do" and "do not"); but I will grant that as a slight deviation from pure rationality on my part.

Not bad, it's certainly not Van Gogh, but not bad.

Azul Zing and their Pauseless and C4 collector algorithms are leading the pack of pause-free JVM GC options at the moment..

http://paperhub.s3.amazonaws.com/d14661878f7811e5ee9c43de88414e86.pdf

http://www.azulsystems.com/

There is a good image example on their page comparing the two. The left image is their scanner, the right is the kinnect.

And here's my favorite.

"Siri, I'm bleeding really bad, can you call me an ambulance?"

"From now on, I'll call you 'An Ambulance'. OK?"

(This was apparently changed in one of the updates.)

This may be speech recognition, but it isn't any sort of content recognition. It's just pattern matching, and only those patterns which the coders have anticipated.

The "solution" to the shark "threat" has been around for a while now, basically a metal armor - google 'shark suits san diego' to see it.

It has two attack weapons as well.

Gah, Larry Wall and his "natural language" crap, he's a terrible language designer and an even worse linguist. And I'm sure you've seen the Perl 6 periodic table of operators, which I'm fairly sure the Perl core think is a good thing, not an utterly obvious example of why Perl 6 is still not near release.

Powershell 3 seems to have a bunch of syntax improvements that make it better though, had a look earlier, you can now write "(dir).fileName" rather than "dir | % { $_.fileName }" and everything works the same now with both a single output or a list of outputs, along with a bunch of other stuff that should make it less of a symbol-fest. However, in the mean time I've finally remembered the syntax for FOR in cmd.exe, and have written most of what I need as a file-processing library in Python. I'm not a Windows admin, that'll do for me.

PS. lol, just remember that one of the new syntax features is that instead of writing $_ you can now use $PSItem - apparently lots of people had complained about strange, meaningless symbols being confusing. Fancy that!

FASCIA doesn't make me think of any scary diseases ;) - what it reminds me of is:

muscle diagram - Fiber cable diagram #1, Fiber cable diagram #2

How odd, just last night I was reading John Kiriakou's recent open letter in which he outlines how the Lieutenant prison boss tried to instigate a fight between him and another prisoner (*)? See page 4-5.

I told the CO that I could kill the guy with my thumb. He's about 5'4" and 125 pounds compared to my 6'1" and 250 pounds.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/705038/john-kiriakou-letter-from-loretto-1.pdf

(*) The prison Lieutenant Told John that some Iraqi Kurd from Buffalo, who is basically in prison because he wouldn't testify against his parishioners, had been ordered to kill him. John later found out that the Lieut. told this same Kurd that John had been ordered to kill _him_. The idea being to get a fight going and lock them both up in solitary forever.

Hey! Unions are what made the US education system so effective!
http://usc-mat.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/us-schools-vs-international3.jpg

Draw your own concs.

done

Well, from a "fame" point of view my preferences start with Salvador Dali and go all the way through these kinds of things: https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.hipchat.com/12597/40078/qbgc218xns2dxu1/1061-god-of-war-battle-wallpaper-wallchan-1366x768.jpg

Yet another Slashdot article presenting 3D printing. More specifically, homebrew 3D printing. It's been quite the rage on Slashdot lately. Almost, though not quite, as much as Bitcoin stories.

I chose to provide what so many of these stories fail to provide, a picture of the complete product. This particular picture comes from the same person that the story was about. On his picture site are pictures of his printer, the PengPad and output for the printer.

The linked picture of printed output clearly shows a crudely finished object made from stacked layers of strings of molten plastic. It is obviously poorly finished, akin to a skilled amateur's wood carving. Upon observing the extensive layering, one cannot escape the conclusion that it has poor strength. Perhaps most damning of all, it is clear that the tolerances of the finished product are very limited and unreliable.

These are all just observations of the finished product from yet another, seemingly over-hyped article on 3D printers. My post was simply intended to ground the hype in a little dose of reality.

  What is bizarre is your butt-hurt post of apparent defense of 3D printers. Apparently, you have a serious problem with anyone that points out that homebrew 3D printers aren't 'all that'. But, if you'd like to provide an actual example of a finished homebrew 3D printed product that disproves my examples, I strongly encourage you to do so. Let me get you started with this, oh so useful, iPhone tripod bracket. Super handy(?). How about something more useful like this lens cap holder.

So far as I can see, my original point remains. 3D printing is very cool, but actual results are of poor quality and questionable use. The reality is not matching the level of hype.

Yet another Slashdot article presenting 3D printing. More specifically, homebrew 3D printing. It's been quite the rage on Slashdot lately. Almost, though not quite, as much as Bitcoin stories.

I chose to provide what so many of these stories fail to provide, a picture of the complete product. This particular picture comes from the same person that the story was about. On his picture site are pictures of his printer, the PengPad and output for the printer.

The linked picture of printed output clearly shows a crudely finished object made from stacked layers of strings of molten plastic. It is obviously poorly finished, akin to a skilled amateur's wood carving. Upon observing the extensive layering, one cannot escape the conclusion that it has poor strength. Perhaps most damning of all, it is clear that the tolerances of the finished product are very limited and unreliable.

These are all just observations of the finished product from yet another, seemingly over-hyped article on 3D printers. My post was simply intended to ground the hype in a little dose of reality.

  What is bizarre is your butt-hurt post of apparent defense of 3D printers. Apparently, you have a serious problem with anyone that points out that homebrew 3D printers aren't 'all that'. But, if you'd like to provide an actual example of a finished homebrew 3D printed product that disproves my examples, I strongly encourage you to do so. Let me get you started with this, oh so useful, iPhone tripod bracket. Super handy(?). How about something more useful like this lens cap holder.

So far as I can see, my original point remains. 3D printing is very cool, but actual results are of poor quality and questionable use. The reality is not matching the level of hype.

Who said anything about hacking? Look, when you manage to get your GED, then you'll realize that 'hackers' like those portrayed in movies largely do not exist. What I am speaking of, simply, are the grass-roots activists and impromptu bartenders, as one Republican nominee found-out, that can catch you off-guard, using perfectly legal technology, in public places.

And you know it will happen...because politicians will never stop being corrupt, nor will they ever stop appearing in public. This is every politician (not the guy with wings): link.

I read the document as well and find no language suggesting anything about TOS violations. In addition, even the summary article was misquoted. It said "if you violate the terms of service on a government website." But I couldn't even find that in the actual draft.

I can almost prove my point by reductio ad absurdum. For example, Clair De Lune, Rhapsody in Blue, or [insert your fave pop/rock piece here] is as good as the sound of a mosquito in your ear according to you and other relativists.

I'm sorry but you haven't come close to proving anything. Some people might well find a mosquito whine more pleasing than [insert "great" piece of music here]. I mean, people choose to listen to dubstep and death metal -- mosquito whine jazz isn't really absurd. If someone says, "I like mosquito whine jazz", you cannot demonstrate that they are wrong.

Also it would mean a featureless or noisy blur is as good as say this: http://mandelbulbs.s3.amazonaws.com/gallery/400/LimeSpine2.jpg

I have no idea WTF that unattractive image is supposed to be, but I've seen paintings in museums that were far closer to featureless or noisy blurs than to that. If someone says "I like this blurry image", you cannot demonstrate that they are wrong.

You say that, but I tend to think there's a beautiful mathematical underpinning for music/art which no one has really discovered yet, and will take a lot of hard work to uncover the patterns.

I can almost prove my point by reductio ad absurdum. For example, Clair De Lune, Rhapsody in Blue, or [insert your fave pop/rock piece here] is as good as the sound of a mosquito in your ear according to you and other relativists. Also it would mean a featureless or noisy blur is as good as say this:
http://mandelbulbs.s3.amazonaws.com/gallery/400/LimeSpine2.jpg

I know, I'll just use Siri... Well, fuck.

Actually, There is a free version courtesy of Google. Android has an ASL available version. preview image and github link

The Sabre Pyramid. By this time next year, everyone will have one.

If that's Perl, then this is PHP.

http://grupthinkpro.s3.amazonaws.com/grupthinklive80240347b2eab6b15fd4935656ba50e8

Nobody will ever top Florida "A55 RGY" with the big orange in the middle serving as the letter "O."

A55 O RGY

Unfortunately, those single orange license plates have all been phased out in favor of the double orange license plate.

In other words, we don't deserve nice things.

http://grupthinkpro.s3.amazonaws.com/grupthinklive80240347b2eab6b15fd4935656ba50e8

Nobody will ever top Florida "A55 RGY" with the big orange in the middle serving as the letter "O."

A55 O RGY

Step aside, Slashdot... *puts on shades*... I got this.

Your new 'best plate ever'.

Thanks, Bay Area!

http://grupthinkpro.s3.amazonaws.com/grupthinklive80240347b2eab6b15fd4935656ba50e8

Nobody will ever top Florida "A55 RGY" with the big orange in the middle serving as the letter "O."

A55 O RGY

The fact that it says "Sunshine State" beneath is just perfect.

http://grupthinkpro.s3.amazonaws.com/grupthinklive80240347b2eab6b15fd4935656ba50e8

Nobody will ever top Florida "A55 RGY" with the big orange in the middle serving as the letter "O."

A55 O RGY

In this artcle they cite a 2001 Boeing paper which I find very interesting.

All those MBA bosses should have a look, it seems very few have learned any lesson since then.

The point is made that not only is the work out-sourced; all the profits associated with the work are out-sourced, too.
...
A strong warning is included about the perils of sub-optimum solutions in which individual cost are minimized in isolation.

It is quite enlightening, given that their problem today could very likely come from those interdepartmental interactions not thoroughly planned enough.

Why shut it down? it draws ~1amp surely your car battery can supply that for several days without issue

Here's specs from an Optima car battery (an AGM battery that handles deep discharge much better than standard lead plate batteries):

http://jci_media.s3.amazonaws.com/9613/4583/5078/REDTOP_Full_Specs_Sheet.pdf
Open Circuit Voltage (Fully charged): 12.8 volts
Internal Resistance (Fully charged): .0030 ohms
Capacity: 44 Ah (C/20)
Reserve Capacity: BCI: 90 minutes

So it can supply one amp for 44 hours...so in less than 2 days, the battery will be dead. My car often sits for 2 days or longer without starting it.

Even if I could keep the power consumption below 0.5 amps, that's still enough power draw to drain the battery in less than a week and I don't want to have to remember to switch the camera off when I leave the car at the airport for 5 days.

Damn straight. I was born a decade before Swartz, but he did far more with his life than I have with mine. He had passion and used it for both technological and political ends. I have yet to hear of anything he did which didn't make me wish I was more like him. The charges against him were for acts that I 100% support and believe the laws and punishments against what he did are profoundly unjust (like many laws we hear about these days).

I'm going to put this picture up on my wall to remind me daily about what a worthwhile life looks like and that we should value each and every day that we are alive.

I'll absolutely disagree with this. It's generally considered bad form to overload operators in any language unless the operators provide the exact same semantics as built-in types. I didn't even know Perl 6 allowed user-defined operators - now I hate the language even more. That, even with the built-ins, at the period table of perl operators, that there's even a class titled "ambiguous" ought to be a sign they've gone too far.

This is why I refuse to, and never will submit myself to Perl development or maintenance.

Mind showing the left side of that package, or would such honesty interfere with your agenda?

http://www.getbuckyballs.com/blog/wp-content/themes/buckyballs/images/xblog-graphic.jpg.pagespeed.ic.KAJoHdy4ZS.jpg

http://images1.vat19.com/covers/large/buckyballs-standard.jpg

http://sale.images.woot.com/Maxfield___Oberton_216_Piece_Magnetic_Buckyballs_Set___2_PackuhdDetail.jpg

http://www.wired.com/geekmom/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/orig_box_with_case-350x486.jpg

http://alyssaroyse.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/screen-shot-2012-09-20-at-4-42-56-pm.png

http://media.oregonlive.com/themombeat/photo/11374268-large.jpg

http://ds_product_photos.s3.amazonaws.com/large/16261.jpg

Same exact packaging you show. Except in these pictures you can see the left side of the packaging more easily. The warning is pretty obvious to me.

Sort of off topic, but I kind of liked this cartoon as an answer to that question.

Sustained wind?

http://lowres-picturecabinet.com.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/47/main/1/142181.jpg

You could probably do a GIS, but here's what I got: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-l0Ex80FUwbs/TueRBWaMwXI/AAAAAAAARR8/7SpbgVEsLF8/s1600/google%2Bpolice%2B666.jpg https://s3.amazonaws.com/phandroid/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/KOREAPOLICEGOOGLE.jpg https://doc-08-8g-3dwarehouse.googleusercontent.com/3dwarehouse/secure/hhulr73hmmak89paul31eote4ben7ngk/56qnjuc9i64jub1ebqpel3f5tg68rrd2/1351404000000/lt/*/9f4e6547a96c8b03203f35d9b3b48203?ts=1250444857000&ctyp=other

WP7.8 is the absolute epitome of troll face.

If you're a user you bought a phone which had a staggeringly poor selection of applications. Just when it looked like it was starting to get some traction Microsoft announced thant WP8 would be based on a new API, WinRT. WP7 Silverlight apps would run on WP8 but only in compatibility mode. What about XNA. Well some Microsoft bloggers have been talking up MonoGame but the actual details of what will happen are going to be kept secret until launch. I.e. no SDK.

So obviously at that point no one in the right mind is going to develop for WP7. If you go here

http://pages.appcelerator.com/Q32012AppceleratorIDCSurveyReport.html

You don't need to give it real data, just random junk for the name, phone number and email

Or this might work

http://www.appcelerator.com.s3.amazonaws.com/pdf/Appcelerator-Report-Q3-2012-final.pdf

There's a graph of developer interest on WP7 on page 7. In Jan 2012 40% of developers were thinking of developing for WP7. By August when it had fallen to about 20%. The reason for that is that Microsoft had announced a new and better but incompatible platform.

This is not the first time this has happened. Development for Windows Mobile essentially stopped when people like Opera and Skype found out that WP7 would be incompatible with their WM6.5 code. Admittedly Microsoft bought Skype so sooner or later it will be an WP exclusive. But Microsoft didn't need to buy companies to make them support Windows - those companies did it because it sold well.

So if you're one of the schmucks that bought a WP7 phone what do you get? WP7.8. It's got the same start screen as WP8. but it can't run WP8 applications. People are going to develop apps for WP8 because that is the future.

So you've got a phone that looks a bit like the future until you try to install anything new on it, in which case it won't let you.

As someone who went from WM6.5 to Android it's actually funny how much of a catastrophe Windows Phone has been.

Comment posting limits (and time...) won't let me respond to many individual comments, so I will see if I can address a few things at the same time here.

For a given angular momentum of something going around a black hole, you can work out what potential energy it would have at different radii. In a normal Newtonian case, you can think of having some satellite orbiting at some speed. If you try to push that satellite further in, while still maintaining its angular speed, it will try to pop back out since it is essentially going too fast to orbit at a smaller radius. There is a minimum in the potential energy of the satellite where it would have a circular orbit for that given angular momentum, as it would just stay at that radius. The potential energy about this radius would be like a bowl, if you push the satellite inward, it would roll back down toward the radius corresponding to a circular orbit. Momentum would of course carry it beyond that point, so it would oscillate in radius between some place closer and some place further from the circular orbit. This would give you an elliptical orbit where the radius goes between two values. The potential energy for over radius for a given angular momentum would look roughly like the red curve in the image here.

Now, for a black hole, GR gives some differences from Newtonian gravity when you get closer. The potential energy curve now looks more like this. There is still a stable orbit, as you can see it could oscillate around the minimum there like a marble in a bowl. In other words, small pushes on a perfectly circular orbit will turn it into a slightly elliptical orbit that is still pretty close to the circular one. However, if you push it far enough inward to get over that bump, the orbital radius would be like a marble just rolling down that hill toward the black hole. Now, the size of that bump changes depending on what angular momentum you are talking about. As you increase the angular momentum, which in Newtonian gravity would just give you a smaller radius for a circular orbit, that bump gets smaller. There is a point where the bump goes away, such that you just now have a curve that decreases with decreasing radius. Hence, a particle in such an orbit would continue to move closer to the black hole, as there is lower potential energy the closer it gets.

This is all due to the geometry of space around a black hole. Weird stuff like the circumference of a circle not being 2 pi r depending on how you measure the r from the black hole, which is why orbits no longer have the same stability they have in Newtonian gravity. This is not an effect due to gravitational waves. The orbiting particle can be something like a proton where the gravitational waves would be too small to matter. However, if you are talking about the orbit of a massive object, like a star or second black hole, then the gravitational waves become significant. In that case, the orbit at any radius would slowly decay due to emitting gravitational waves. Once the decay orbit hits the radius of the innermost stable orbit, the decay would greatly accelerate.

This is also not an effect of rotation or frame dragging, as it happens with a non-spinning black hole solution too. However, spinning black holes and frame dragging do factor into it, such that for a spinning black hole, the inner most stable orbit is smaller if you are going in the right direction around the black hole. Although there are other effects that the frame dragging causes. You get things like the ergosphere, a region where due to frame dragging, you would have to go faster than light to look stationary from an outside viewer, so all matter within that region is spinning around the black hole.

This is also quite distinct from the event horizo

If a little bit of stray bacteria gives you food poisoning, go back into your sterilized hamster ball and leave the rest of us with functional immune systems alone.

Ever calculate the costs of driving faster? For example, driving 55 mph instead of 65 saves about 10% on fuel.

I don't know if that's true... supporting citations, anyone? I think the original 1973 law may have *intended* to save fuel, but my brief search yielded a few citations that would seem to cast some doubt on limits actually having that effect:

• A 1986 paper (a pdf, booh, sorrry) stating total fuel savings to be 1% and that independent studies found a 0.5% savings.
• In 2009 The American Trucking Associations called for raising the limit to 65 mph and also national fuel economy standards claiming that the lower speed limit was not effective at saving fuel.
• Observations supporting the idea that municipal governments benefit substantially from speeding tickets as a source of revenue (one striking example: Westlake, TX took in $42,000 per citizen over nine years for its speed traps).