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China has NOT followed the rules of WTO. When America helped China join WTO, they had less than 90 tariffs. NOW, they are over 500. INSANE.
But America implementing tariffs makes us just as bad as China.
However, at times, it is needed since WTO has allowed CHina to keep pulling this BS.
And as to Yuan going up 10% over the last 9 months (which yuan was forced down over the last 5 years), "https://tradingeconomics.com/china/inflation-cpi"> and that is because they are getting inflation. They inflation is because they were dumping on the west, and then not wanting to buy western, esp. American, Debt. As such, they have no real choice.
The only one trolling is you, but you are paid to do so.

Why should Trump be tied to a prison toilet? He isn't under investigation for criminal activity.

Look at the YouTube support document for how to adjust your settings. The "good" or "low" setting on most video editors result in a smaller file size for uploading to YouTube.

https://code.google.com/archiv...

... then I can not put much weight into their theory.

Ahhh, c'mon. The Dinos are all dead, SOMETHING killed them. Asteroids, meteors, tar magnets, poisonous plants, global warming, SOMETHING. It's a heavy subject. So what if they got a few supporting things wrong? It's almost like you doubt their conclusions or something. If it feels right, it IS right -- right?

After all, everyone knows THIS is what actually happened.,

It isn't. Ignoring the fact that you're a chimera and a mosaic, which means you can have multiple combinations of those, we know from genetic genealogy that 111 markers will be sufficient to uniquely identify the group that comprises every relative up to three steps away (so third cousins, great grandparents, etc).

Fine, if you don't like my 50 common variants number, then I'll suggest 120 variants: 111 [oddly-specific] to get down to familial group, and another 10 or so to identify a single person within that group. Whether it's 50 or 500, that's still well within the realm of cheap targeted SNPchip technology.

You'd need far, far more markers to uniquely identify you.... You'd need full genome sequences from multiple collection spots across the body, plus sequencing of the sample, for that.

There's a big difference between uniquely identifying someone, and fully describing their genome. I agree that a full description of a person's genome would require extensive whole-genome sequencing, but that's not necessary for forensic purposes. For monozygotic twins it gets a bit trickier, but for any other comparisons uniqueness is less than half an hour of nanopore sequencing away:

Rapid re-identification of human samples using portable DNA sequencing

At roughly $10,000 a pop, plus borrowing a computer powerful enough to determine the point of intercept from the nearest sample, you're looking at more than most police departments have in budget even for coffee and doughnuts

Moving away from SNPchips, 40X genome coverage can be done for less than $1000 now.

Estimated PromethION sequencing costs from Clive Brown

FedEx was about to open a new distribution center in Indiana but they skipped it because they'd increased productivity so much at their existing centers they didn't need it. We've become massively more productive.

Also, anyone else find it telling that the phrase used to describe succeeding without help describes a physically impossible event? It's like a bad joke everybody ran with.

How does it feel to be so cultured and superior to people you disagree with?

Just wondering, if you met comic fans in person, would talk just like this to them IRL or do you just talk like this on the internet?

Found the pasty-white, sessile, basement-dwelling doughboy!

Seriously? Implicitly defending those weirdos who'd purchase comic books smeared with Stan Lee's blood.

Dude, if you came up out of your basement, would you get the bends?

I bet you don't even need a costume to dress up as PopinFresh on Halloween.

Oh, yeah, "Moutain Dew" is not an actual food group.

I don't know how many of you have tried it, but nvdia's GeForce Now service is exactly the kind of thing that could be severely hampered by a lack of Net Neutrality.

[Before I continue, let's get one thing straight: Net Neutrality doesn't mean companies like Netflix don't pay for bandwidth. Of course they do. They just don't have to pay MORE for bandwidth than some other service that might have ties to the ISP. Ok, everybody clear on that?]

Anyway, back to GeForce Now. I've been beta testing it and it's just fantastic. It's basically a way to stream your video games to machines that aren't powerful enough to play them. So, if you have some i3 laptop with weak graphics, you can still play GTA V on ultra quality. No lag, no bullshit. You just play the game and it's like you're sitting at some sick $5000 gaming PC. And it works. Works perfectly. I mean, you can tell they're still dialing it in over at nvidia, because some days there might be some audio stuttering, but then it gets fixed. This is a beta product after all.

OK, so the only thing is, this GeForce Now service uses a shit-ton of bandwidth. You've got to have a pretty fast internet connection and a lot of data gets used, as you can imagine. I've been using it for a couple months and I still haven't gone over my Spectrum data limit (though to be fair, I don't know what my data limit is).

Now let's say that a piece of shit ISP, say, Spectrum, decides that they're going to start their own game streaming service, but they're going to charge nvidia five times as much for getting their data to your house. Or worse, they charge YOU more for getting nvidia's data to your house. Remember, nvidia is already paying for bandwidth at their end, and naturally, you're already paying exorbitant amounts for bandwidth at your end. THE BANDWIDTH IS ALREADY BEING PAID FOR. Nobody's getting anything for free.

In summary: 1) GeForce Now is going to be a really interesting service to watch and 2) the repeal of Net Neutrality could absolutely mess up gamers, and 3) Ajit Pai is a piece of shit. Here is a photo of Ajit Pai so you know who I'm talking about:

https://www.google.com/search?...:

I don't care for all this; it happens now and then, not every day.

Yes, it happens every day. According to the Center for Disease Control, there are about 80-100 firearm deaths every day. Every year, about 115,000 people are shot. So yeah, it happens every day.

About 10 out of every 100,000 people will die from being shot in the US every year.

https://drive.google.com/file/...

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/...

I've been all over the board with everything from flatly ending poverty to criminal justice reform to a new bill of rights as a guiding principle.

Good on you, we need more smart people in congress!

Brute force: I have no friends. No sense of social need, so I don't get lonely or seek relationships. I ended up running for office because I'm tired of seeing beggars everywhere--it's painful to watch. (That's also how I ended up with a cat.)

Please be aware that most economics is based on measures of corporate profits that ignores the human condition.

Economics is an odd subject. The root of economics is that people economize: they seek the most ends for the least means. That means greed, financial sense, and rational behaviors are all the same thing. I figured out a while back that things don't have value; instead, people place a valuation on things: value is a property of your imagination. Things have a cost and a price--and the cost is generally abstracted by money, but ultimately must balance to a trade of labor time, so economics is rooted in the laws of physics.

The measure of economics is, thus, somewhat subjective: we set goals and then attempt to identify if we are objectively supporting those goals. In general, everyone is actually on the right page: the maximization of profits is the maximization of wealth and the minimization of human suffering.

The problem is in the way people measure profits and approach that maximization. Business profits are only a matter of cash flowing to one place; the total economy has a GDP (production), a GNI (total income--individual and corporate profits), and per-capita measurements of these (how much is produced/earned per person). GDP-per-Capita and GNI-per-Capita are roughly the same thing, but distinct.

The per-capita GNI and GDP are interesting because every new person is a producer and consumer, and is tax revenue and service cost. The Government has to provide welfare, roads, police, schools, and so forth; the GNI-per-Capita tells you how many dollars you'll get by taxing a percentage of all income, and the GDP-per-Capita attempts to describe how much stuff you're able to produce per person. I generally consider these things "wealth".

Others like to look at our national economy, our GDP, and our GNI, which describe our strength in the world as an economic superpower. From that perspective, maximizing our national economic production is the goal. That means a maximum population with a lot of poor, struggling workers managed by bare-minimum welfare.

Calling a nation "wealthy" because it has, as a nation-state, the most total production and global economic clout has obvious flaws. When you hear people talk about trillions of GDP, that's this kind of wealth. When you hear people talk about poor standards of living, that's the effect of low per-capita measures of wealth. Poor nations tend to be small, low-population, or undeveloped--or all of the above--so they have neither national economic power nor high standards-of-living.

If you want a rough guide to all this, just look from 10 inches and 10 miles: a poor per-capita nation has a median (or wealthy) family clothed in rags, struggling to eat in their grass hut; a wealthy GDP nation has a powerful military and can quite possibly hold its own in the role of Germany in WW3, even if it's full of farmers living in grass huts. High per-capita wealth measures get you Norway.

please consider that the welfare of the people is paramount to the stability of the country

And this is the second problem.

Hayeki

I've been all over the board with everything from flatly ending poverty to criminal justice reform to a new bill of rights as a guiding principle.

Good on you, we need more smart people in congress!

Brute force: I have no friends. No sense of social need, so I don't get lonely or seek relationships. I ended up running for office because I'm tired of seeing beggars everywhere--it's painful to watch. (That's also how I ended up with a cat.)

Please be aware that most economics is based on measures of corporate profits that ignores the human condition.

Economics is an odd subject. The root of economics is that people economize: they seek the most ends for the least means. That means greed, financial sense, and rational behaviors are all the same thing. I figured out a while back that things don't have value; instead, people place a valuation on things: value is a property of your imagination. Things have a cost and a price--and the cost is generally abstracted by money, but ultimately must balance to a trade of labor time, so economics is rooted in the laws of physics.

The measure of economics is, thus, somewhat subjective: we set goals and then attempt to identify if we are objectively supporting those goals. In general, everyone is actually on the right page: the maximization of profits is the maximization of wealth and the minimization of human suffering.

The problem is in the way people measure profits and approach that maximization. Business profits are only a matter of cash flowing to one place; the total economy has a GDP (production), a GNI (total income--individual and corporate profits), and per-capita measurements of these (how much is produced/earned per person). GDP-per-Capita and GNI-per-Capita are roughly the same thing, but distinct.

The per-capita GNI and GDP are interesting because every new person is a producer and consumer, and is tax revenue and service cost. The Government has to provide welfare, roads, police, schools, and so forth; the GNI-per-Capita tells you how many dollars you'll get by taxing a percentage of all income, and the GDP-per-Capita attempts to describe how much stuff you're able to produce per person. I generally consider these things "wealth".

Others like to look at our national economy, our GDP, and our GNI, which describe our strength in the world as an economic superpower. From that perspective, maximizing our national economic production is the goal. That means a maximum population with a lot of poor, struggling workers managed by bare-minimum welfare.

Calling a nation "wealthy" because it has, as a nation-state, the most total production and global economic clout has obvious flaws. When you hear people talk about trillions of GDP, that's this kind of wealth. When you hear people talk about poor standards of living, that's the effect of low per-capita measures of wealth. Poor nations tend to be small, low-population, or undeveloped--or all of the above--so they have neither national economic power nor high standards-of-living.

If you want a rough guide to all this, just look from 10 inches and 10 miles: a poor per-capita nation has a median (or wealthy) family clothed in rags, struggling to eat in their grass hut; a wealthy GDP nation has a powerful military and can quite possibly hold its own in the role of Germany in WW3, even if it's full of farmers living in grass huts. High per-capita wealth measures get you Norway.

please consider that the welfare of the people is paramount to the stability of the country

And this is the second problem.

Hayeki

I've been all over the board with everything from flatly ending poverty to criminal justice reform to a new bill of rights as a guiding principle.

Good on you, we need more smart people in congress!

Brute force: I have no friends. No sense of social need, so I don't get lonely or seek relationships. I ended up running for office because I'm tired of seeing beggars everywhere--it's painful to watch. (That's also how I ended up with a cat.)

Please be aware that most economics is based on measures of corporate profits that ignores the human condition.

Economics is an odd subject. The root of economics is that people economize: they seek the most ends for the least means. That means greed, financial sense, and rational behaviors are all the same thing. I figured out a while back that things don't have value; instead, people place a valuation on things: value is a property of your imagination. Things have a cost and a price--and the cost is generally abstracted by money, but ultimately must balance to a trade of labor time, so economics is rooted in the laws of physics.

The measure of economics is, thus, somewhat subjective: we set goals and then attempt to identify if we are objectively supporting those goals. In general, everyone is actually on the right page: the maximization of profits is the maximization of wealth and the minimization of human suffering.

The problem is in the way people measure profits and approach that maximization. Business profits are only a matter of cash flowing to one place; the total economy has a GDP (production), a GNI (total income--individual and corporate profits), and per-capita measurements of these (how much is produced/earned per person). GDP-per-Capita and GNI-per-Capita are roughly the same thing, but distinct.

The per-capita GNI and GDP are interesting because every new person is a producer and consumer, and is tax revenue and service cost. The Government has to provide welfare, roads, police, schools, and so forth; the GNI-per-Capita tells you how many dollars you'll get by taxing a percentage of all income, and the GDP-per-Capita attempts to describe how much stuff you're able to produce per person. I generally consider these things "wealth".

Others like to look at our national economy, our GDP, and our GNI, which describe our strength in the world as an economic superpower. From that perspective, maximizing our national economic production is the goal. That means a maximum population with a lot of poor, struggling workers managed by bare-minimum welfare.

Calling a nation "wealthy" because it has, as a nation-state, the most total production and global economic clout has obvious flaws. When you hear people talk about trillions of GDP, that's this kind of wealth. When you hear people talk about poor standards of living, that's the effect of low per-capita measures of wealth. Poor nations tend to be small, low-population, or undeveloped--or all of the above--so they have neither national economic power nor high standards-of-living.

If you want a rough guide to all this, just look from 10 inches and 10 miles: a poor per-capita nation has a median (or wealthy) family clothed in rags, struggling to eat in their grass hut; a wealthy GDP nation has a powerful military and can quite possibly hold its own in the role of Germany in WW3, even if it's full of farmers living in grass huts. High per-capita wealth measures get you Norway.

please consider that the welfare of the people is paramount to the stability of the country

And this is the second problem.

Hayeki

I used the provided link to "download all your data" and had it save a "takeout" ZIP file on my Google Drive. I then tried adding a few files to drive and removing them then "really" removing them. In both cases a "removed" file (in the Trashcan but not "really" removed) did not appear in the Takeout archive. I then created a new Takeout archive and had it send it as an email to my gmail account. In both cases it's everything from my drive, calendar, all emails, contacts, bookmarks, photos, etc.

In the expanded ZIP under the root "Takeout" dir there's an "index.html" with details on all the files. The 2nd archive i created even contained the first archive in it's entirety from the "Takeout" folder on my Drive.

Are you seeing something other than this?

Re: "What we have is theories that have made lots of verified predictions, and which have survived lots of falsification attempts."

You are pointing to the accuracy and precision of the mathematics of Relativity, while glossing over the fact that Einstein lifted all of this math from the aether theorists. The debate over Relativity has always been over the physical inference, not the accuracy and precision of the mathematics. There are countless examples, but here is just one:

William Day, A New Physics, 2000, p.118

"Relativity is a strange and novel theory that has provided equations with extreme accuracy with a theory that logically cannot be true. The theory is at most a way to rationalize a mathematical description by an imagined condition that gives a workable formula, much the way Newton devised an equation by calling gravity a force acting at a distance."

What we know is that Einstein had the luxury of fitting his physical inference to the mathematics. People who subsequently point to the accuracy and precision of the math to establish the physical inference's validity are pitching circular logic.

Re: "3) In other words, there are no falsifiable predictions, so the Electric Universe is not currently a scientific theory."

Each framework begins in a different theoretical place. The fact that plasma cosmology begins with plasmas, and works its way towards a better explanation for gravity, is not an argument against it; it's merely an observation that the two frameworks exhibit differing coverage. There is nothing extraordinary about this. You want a neat and tidy situation where you can compare apples to apples, but reality is not neat-and-tidy as you wish. That's hardly an argument for which idea will win out.

Re: "If there are such currents, and they're strong enough to have effects, why haven't we noticed some effects? That needs to be answered."

The currents are observed to be creating both stars and galaxies. You just don't see it because you've failed to learn the by-now extensive history of the Birkeland current concept.

Re: "Also, your attack on the Big Bang theories is irrelevant as well as ignorant (if you actually understood them, you'd have some idea why they're considered science, and you'd attack that idea)."

I very much understand the "evidence" of the CMB, and here are some details which your science journalism has failed to inform you about:

Anthony L. Peratt, Physics of the Plasma Universe, Second Edition, 2015, p.33-34.

"High-power microwave generation on earth belongs exclusively to devices using relativistic electron beams ... A relativistic electron beam that does not produce microwave radiation is unknown. These same basic mechanisms are likely to have their natural analogs in cosmic plasmas."

The idea that the microwaves coming at us from all directions must necessarily indicate an expansion is total nonsense. It is one of the greatest collective delusions in the history of modern science.

The idea of expansion was proposed by a Catholic priest:

Anthony L. Peratt, ‘Dean of the Plasma Dissidents’, The World & I, May 1988, p.190-197

"To Alfvén, the Big Bang was a fable -- a fable devised to explain creation. 'I was there when Abbé Georges Lemaitre first proposed this theory,' he recalled. Lemaitre was, at the time, both a member of the Catholic hierarchy and an accomplished scientist. He said in private that this theory was a way to reconcile science with St. Thomas Aquinas’ theological dictum of creatio ex nihilo or creation out of nothing."

You might take that into consideration when you contemplate why the Big Bang is so popul

Re: "How, tell me, should a planet not only move across the orbits of several other planets without disturbing them AT ALL but then suddenly change its velocity enough to actually change its orbit? Do you have a faint idea just how much energy is necessary for something like this?"

Who says that the planets were not disturbed at all? Plato clearly states the fact that they were indeed disturbed, and further, that all of mythology is an attempt to convey this event:

"Phaethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burned up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now, this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving around the earth and in the heavens, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth recurring at long intervals of time"

... then further on ...

"All of these stories, and ten thousand others which are still more wonderful, have a common origin; many of them have been lost in the lapse of ages, or exist only as fragments; but the origin of them is what no one has told"

What do you think he means by "a great conflagration of things upon the earth recurring at long intervals of time?" Plato of course had no idea what gravity was, but he appears to be describing a debris field that returns to the planet over many years. In fact, that's one very logical way to explain why cultures like the Mayans would construct calendars which far exceed the seasonal variations necessary to farm.

What I notice is that when data does not conform to peoples' pre-existing notions, they tend to just completely ignore it. Taken at face value, the following data would seem to suggest that something extremely fundamental has changed in our solar system:

"Earth and the other rocky planets aren't made out of the solar system's original starting material, two new studies reveal.

Scientists examined solar particles snagged in space by NASA's Genesis probe, whose return capsule crash-landed on Earth in 2004. These salvaged samples show that the sun's basic building blocks differ significantly from those of Earth, the moon and other denizens of the inner solar system, researchers said ...

McKeegan and his team measured the abundance of solar wind oxygen isotopes. Isotopes are versions of an element that have different numbers of neutrons in their atomic nuclei. Oxygen has three stable isotopes: oxygen-16 (eight neutrons), oxygen-17 (nine neutrons) and oxygen-18 (ten neutrons).

The researchers found that the sun has significantly more oxygen-16, relative to the other two isotopes, than Earth."

Re: "At the very least we could have seen a significant difference in temperature if the planet radiated 15% more energy than it receives."

Your expectations would seem to be wrong, but there have been additional vindications regardless:

Venus Express discovered that surface features were not quite where they should be, evidence that Earth's cloud-covered neighbour spins a little slower than previously measured ... Scientists have looked at the possibility of this change arising from short-term, random variations in the length of a Venus day, but have concluded that these should average themselves out over time.

R.A. Kerr, "Venus is looking too Pristine," Science, Vol. 250 (Nov. 16, 1990), p.912.

Re: "How, tell me, should a planet not only move across the orbits of several other planets without disturbing them AT ALL but then suddenly change its velocity enough to actually change its orbit? Do you have a faint idea just how much energy is necessary for something like this?"

Who says that the planets were not disturbed at all? Plato clearly states the fact that they were indeed disturbed, and further, that all of mythology is an attempt to convey this event:

"Phaethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burned up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now, this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving around the earth and in the heavens, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth recurring at long intervals of time"

... then further on ...

"All of these stories, and ten thousand others which are still more wonderful, have a common origin; many of them have been lost in the lapse of ages, or exist only as fragments; but the origin of them is what no one has told"

What do you think he means by "a great conflagration of things upon the earth recurring at long intervals of time?" Plato of course had no idea what gravity was, but he appears to be describing a debris field that returns to the planet over many years. In fact, that's one very logical way to explain why cultures like the Mayans would construct calendars which far exceed the seasonal variations necessary to farm.

What I notice is that when data does not conform to peoples' pre-existing notions, they tend to just completely ignore it. Taken at face value, the following data would seem to suggest that something extremely fundamental has changed in our solar system:

"Earth and the other rocky planets aren't made out of the solar system's original starting material, two new studies reveal.

Scientists examined solar particles snagged in space by NASA's Genesis probe, whose return capsule crash-landed on Earth in 2004. These salvaged samples show that the sun's basic building blocks differ significantly from those of Earth, the moon and other denizens of the inner solar system, researchers said ...

McKeegan and his team measured the abundance of solar wind oxygen isotopes. Isotopes are versions of an element that have different numbers of neutrons in their atomic nuclei. Oxygen has three stable isotopes: oxygen-16 (eight neutrons), oxygen-17 (nine neutrons) and oxygen-18 (ten neutrons).

The researchers found that the sun has significantly more oxygen-16, relative to the other two isotopes, than Earth."

Re: "At the very least we could have seen a significant difference in temperature if the planet radiated 15% more energy than it receives."

Your expectations would seem to be wrong, but there have been additional vindications regardless:

Venus Express discovered that surface features were not quite where they should be, evidence that Earth's cloud-covered neighbour spins a little slower than previously measured ... Scientists have looked at the possibility of this change arising from short-term, random variations in the length of a Venus day, but have concluded that these should average themselves out over time.

R.A. Kerr, "Venus is looking too Pristine," Science, Vol. 250 (Nov. 16, 1990), p.912.

David Talbott is the only person -- academics included -- to ever tell the complete history for how astrophysicists came to adopt magnetohydrodynamics as the model of choice for explaining cosmic plasmas. This single act, alone, is profoundly historical, because the story is sufficiently awkward that academics refuse to tell it.

Velikovsky was the first person to predict that Venus' temperature should be hot, and he did so at a time when the entire scientific community assumed Venus should be much like the Earth beneath the cloud cover. Velikovsky was of course a close friend of Einstein, who in his later years, took great interest in Velikovsky's work (Einstein's followers have traditionally and famously failed to live up to his own nuanced skepticism of his own work). You might try harder to ask how it could be that Velikovsky knew that Venus must be hot. He did so by studying ancient documents, which curiously recorded Venus' arrival in human-historical times into our solar system as a comet:

Venus and the Cosmic Connection

"Repeatedly, these calamities were attributed to a malicious deity almost invariably a goddess coming to wreak havoc upon the Earth. Although the actual names naturally varied, the deity involved turned out time and time again to be the one that cultures worldwide associated with the object we know today as the planet Venus. But they didn't talk about it as if it were a planet -- they described it as a comet. A Chinese text describes Venus as spanning the heavens, rivaling the Sun in brightness. Mexican astronomers referred to it as 'the star that smokes,' while on the opposite side of the world the same theme is found in the Hindu Vedas, the Hebrew Talmud, and the Egyptian description of Sekhmet. The Aztecs called Venus the 'heart' of Quetzlcoatl, which in turn means 'plumed serpent,' with feathers that signify fire. The serpent or dragon is one of the most common figures used in the ancient world to signify 'comet,' examples being the Greek Typhon, Egyptian Set, Babylonian Tiamat, Hindu Vrta, all of whom raged across the sky and brought destruction upon the world.

The word 'comet' comes from the Greek coma, meaning hair, and among ancient astronomers referred to a star with hair, or a beard. The same appellation was given to Venus. One of the Mexican names for Venus was 'the mane' -- the Peruvian name, chaska, means 'wavy-haired'; the Arabs call Venus 'the one with hair.' One of the most vivid comet images is the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, recognized universally as representing Venus. Ishtar is described as being 'the bright torch of heaven,' 'clothed in fire,' and the 'fearful dragon,' while her heavenly manifestation is known as the 'bearded star.'"

Velikovsky's successful prediction was one of the reasons for the Venus Pioneer mission: the scientists decided to generate their own evidence for a runaway greenhouse effect, in order to undermine Velikovsky's analysis from ancient texts. They miserably failed:

"The mystery of Venus' internal heat", Nov. 13 1980 issue of New Scientist

"Two years' surveillance by the Pioneer Venus Orbiter seems to show that Venus is radiating away more energy than it receives from the Sun. If this surprising result is confirmed, it means that the planet itself is producing far more heat than the Earth does.

F.W. Taylor, of the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford, presented these measurements at the Royal Society meeting last week. Venus's surface temperature is higher than any other in the solar system, at 480 C. The generally accepted theory is that sunlight is absorbed at Venus's surface, and re-radiated as infrared. The latter is absorbed in the atmosphere, which thus acts as a blanket keeping the planet hot. It is similar to the way a greenhou

I used to argue that executions work as a deterrent in low-crime, low-poverty areas where people are immediately fearful of execution, and not at all in high-crime areas where part of your day-to-day criminal life is the threat of death from everyone but the state (i.e. a state execution is the least-likely way you're going to die, so why would you care?).

The second argument there is probably correct. The first one has a flaw: most people are decent people anyway, and are hesitant to commit capital offense for their own internal reasons.

It turns out we can readily reduce crime with strong behavioral health programs and more attempts to stop the cycle of institutionalization--that committing a crime destroys your life such that you are unable to thrive and so are actively pressured to commit more crimes thanks to our criminal justice system's own actions against you--which takes things in the opposite direction. I've started collecting those things we need for the purpose.

https://docs.google.com/spread...

You're 100% wrong. Gun violence is usually HIGHER in areas with high gun ownership rates.

And automobile deaths are higher in the US (where people have cars) than in Somalia (where they mostly don't). You're confusing the tool with the action.

What matters is total homicide rate, not gun homicide rate. As for how those compare... they don't correlate. blindseer gave you a few numbers. Here's a comprehensive set, plotted with the calculated correlation coefficient: https://docs.google.com/spread...

I remember my school banning backpacks for the aesthetics/cleanliness aspects. Try walking between two rows of tightly packed student desks when the kids have unwieldy backpacks (some with a dozen+ zipper compartments). Maybe they should adopt a Japanese style standard sized school bag instead of allowing just any sized backpack.

Let's all pray now for the poor souls that had "hate speech", "terrorist" material or pictures of their kids in the bathtub on their local harddrives and were "... reporting you to the relevant authorities." Amen.

Cell phone requirements
(Slashdot doesn't allow easily readable formatting.)

> No abuse by suppliers of the OS or the hardware. There are areas in which Google (Now Alphabet, Inc.) is badly managed, in my opinion. No license provisions that give away important rights.
> No unwanted programs
> $1,000 or more is too much to pay. So, this list is focused on Android, not Apple phones.
> Support both the modern GSM and the original CDMA system, all bands. You never know which provider you will need to use; some may have poor coverage where you happen to be. (In the U.S., only AT&T and T-Mobile use GSM.) That issue is complicated, as mentioned in the link provided.
Which phones can I use on both software technologies, CDMA and GSM?
> Dual SIM. When you travel, you may want to buy a pre-paid SIM card, so that you can give a local phone number to people you meet. That is especially useful when traveling internationally.
> Replaceable battery. If the battery isn't replaceable, the manufacturer has arranged eventual failure.
> Good battery life, infrequent charging
> Good antenna
> Latest version of Android, always upgradeable (Now, Apr 2, 2018, version 8.0.)
> MicroSD slot: Have more storage without having to pay huge prices.
> Headphone jack: Sometimes you want it. For example, sometimes 2 people want to listen to the same music.
> Full resolution display, 1920 x 1080.
> OLED display?
> 5 GHz WiFi -- All WiFi bands
> Waterproof
> Fast charging
> Camera:
1) Optical stabilization
2) Mechanical stabilization
3) Works well in dim light, strong LED flash.
> Qualcomm Snapdragon or other latest processor
> Screen protector: Gorilla glass screen?
> Good sound quality:
1) Good sound quality through the speaker
2) Good call sound quality
> USB type C ?
> Able to transfer apps to the SD card.
> Stays cool when running several programs.
> User interface? (Huawei uses EMUI.)
> Included case: Don't pay ridiculously high prices for small bits of plastic.
> Near-field communication (NFC)
> Voice over Long-Term Evolution (VoLTE)
> Easily Transfer phone numbers to and from the phone.
> Android Auto?

The problem I think people are having is not that OSI did not initiate the open source movement as they claim, but that they somehow actually coined the very term "open source" as it applies to software.

The word was in use in that context long before 1998...

One can also without too much difficulty find references to the term "open source" simply by searching old *.programmer groups on usenet.

Here's a couple that I found without too much difficulty using google from 1993 and 1996.

Also, here's another one from the comp.os.linux newsgroup from 1993 when discussing binary-only software for Linux.

Speaking for myself, I first heard the term in the late 1980's, in connection with an MSDOS game called Moria. No link for that one I'm afraid, though... that was on a dial-up BBS, and not on the Internet. Perhaps a record of this usage exists somewhere online whose date can be verified, but I wouldn't know where or how to search for it.

Anyways, I think what people might be getting their shorts in a knot about is that OSI's claiming to have coined the term comes across as some form of attempted history revisionism, by repeating a factually untrue statement that might require a modest effort to verify frequently enough that people start believing it without checking because they've simply heard it so often.

The problem I think people are having is not that OSI did not initiate the open source movement as they claim, but that they somehow actually coined the very term "open source" as it applies to software.

The word was in use in that context long before 1998...

One can also without too much difficulty find references to the term "open source" simply by searching old *.programmer groups on usenet.

Here's a couple that I found without too much difficulty using google from 1993 and 1996.

Also, here's another one from the comp.os.linux newsgroup from 1993 when discussing binary-only software for Linux.

Speaking for myself, I first heard the term in the late 1980's, in connection with an MSDOS game called Moria. No link for that one I'm afraid, though... that was on a dial-up BBS, and not on the Internet. Perhaps a record of this usage exists somewhere online whose date can be verified, but I wouldn't know where or how to search for it.

Anyways, I think what people might be getting their shorts in a knot about is that OSI's claiming to have coined the term comes across as some form of attempted history revisionism, by repeating a factually untrue statement that might require a modest effort to verify frequently enough that people start believing it without checking because they've simply heard it so often.

The problem I think people are having is not that OSI did not initiate the open source movement as they claim, but that they somehow actually coined the very term "open source" as it applies to software.

The word was in use in that context long before 1998...

One can also without too much difficulty find references to the term "open source" simply by searching old *.programmer groups on usenet.

Here's a couple that I found without too much difficulty using google from 1993 and 1996.

Also, here's another one from the comp.os.linux newsgroup from 1993 when discussing binary-only software for Linux.

Speaking for myself, I first heard the term in the late 1980's, in connection with an MSDOS game called Moria. No link for that one I'm afraid, though... that was on a dial-up BBS, and not on the Internet. Perhaps a record of this usage exists somewhere online whose date can be verified, but I wouldn't know where or how to search for it.

Anyways, I think what people might be getting their shorts in a knot about is that OSI's claiming to have coined the term comes across as some form of attempted history revisionism, by repeating a factually untrue statement that might require a modest effort to verify frequently enough that people start believing it without checking because they've simply heard it so often.

I guess /. doesn't do URL's with pipes.

https://groups.google.com/foru...

https://groups.google.com/foru...|sort:relevance/comp.object.corba/z803p125OJ8/cF4BSsQ2B9cJ

From 1993, using "Open Source" (capitalized, no less):

https://groups.google.com/foru...

Also, although I can't find a link to it with a verified date, I remember playing an MSDOS game in the late 1980's called Moria that was also released as "open source". The term was, in fact, in widespread usage even before this.

OSI might be credited with the term "open source movement", but they did not invent the term "open source". The only reason why it's likely hard to find a lot of evidence of this on the internet prior to that time has more to do with that most of it wasn't yet even using the internet back then... but was largely on message boards of private or public BBS's.

Here you go: a February 3, 1997 post from comp.os.linux.development.system.

Quoting Victor Yodaiken in the above post:

Open source software allows us to settle these questions on technical issues and user preference.

Or how about this February 27, 1993 post by Thomas McWilliams?

Quoting:

The GPL and the open source code have made Linux the success that it is.

There are lots of results for "open source code" or sometimes "open source code model" before 1997.

So maybe the OSI guys made "Open Source" a thing for promotional purposes but the terms "open source", "open source model", "open source code" were all in use prior to being "coined" in 1998.

Here you go: a February 3, 1997 post from comp.os.linux.development.system.

Quoting Victor Yodaiken in the above post:

Open source software allows us to settle these questions on technical issues and user preference.

Or how about this February 27, 1993 post by Thomas McWilliams?

Quoting:

The GPL and the open source code have made Linux the success that it is.

There are lots of results for "open source code" or sometimes "open source code model" before 1997.

So maybe the OSI guys made "Open Source" a thing for promotional purposes but the terms "open source", "open source model", "open source code" were all in use prior to being "coined" in 1998.

Here you go: a February 3, 1997 post from comp.os.linux.development.system.

Quoting Victor Yodaiken in the above post:

Open source software allows us to settle these questions on technical issues and user preference.

Or how about this February 27, 1993 post by Thomas McWilliams?

Quoting:

The GPL and the open source code have made Linux the success that it is.

There are lots of results for "open source code" or sometimes "open source code model" before 1997.

So maybe the OSI guys made "Open Source" a thing for promotional purposes but the terms "open source", "open source model", "open source code" were all in use prior to being "coined" in 1998.

The Color of Crime, 2016 Revised Edition
Quote: "In 2013, a black was six times more likely than a non-black to commit murder, and 12 times more likely to murder someone of another race than to be murdered by someone of another race."
Another quote: "If New York City were all white, the murder rate would drop by 91 percent, the robbery rate by 81 percent, and the shootings rate by 97 percent."

Do black Americans commit more crime?
Quote: "Blacks were disproportionately likely to commit homicide and to be the victims. In 2008 the offending rate for blacks was seven times higher than for whites and the victimization rate was six times higher."
However, that web site is a TV station in Belfast Ireland.

There Are No Successful Black Nations.
The author of that article, Chigozie Obioma, is a black Nigerian.

Detroit bullet proof glass

Average annual income Haiti

Health Information for Travelers to Haiti

The Color of Crime, 2016 Revised Edition
Quote: "In 2013, a black was six times more likely than a non-black to commit murder, and 12 times more likely to murder someone of another race than to be murdered by someone of another race."
Another quote: "If New York City were all white, the murder rate would drop by 91 percent, the robbery rate by 81 percent, and the shootings rate by 97 percent."

Do black Americans commit more crime?
Quote: "Blacks were disproportionately likely to commit homicide and to be the victims. In 2008 the offending rate for blacks was seven times higher than for whites and the victimization rate was six times higher."
However, that web site is a TV station in Belfast Ireland.

There Are No Successful Black Nations.
The author of that article, Chigozie Obioma, is a black Nigerian.

Detroit bullet proof glass

Average annual income Haiti

Health Information for Travelers to Haiti

The Color of Crime, 2016 Revised Edition
Quote: "In 2013, a black was six times more likely than a non-black to commit murder, and 12 times more likely to murder someone of another race than to be murdered by someone of another race."
Another quote: "If New York City were all white, the murder rate would drop by 91 percent, the robbery rate by 81 percent, and the shootings rate by 97 percent."

Do black Americans commit more crime?
Quote: "Blacks were disproportionately likely to commit homicide and to be the victims. In 2008 the offending rate for blacks was seven times higher than for whites and the victimization rate was six times higher."
However, that web site is a TV station in Belfast Ireland.

There Are No Successful Black Nations.
The author of that article, Chigozie Obioma, is a black Nigerian.

Detroit bullet proof glass

Average annual income Haiti

Health Information for Travelers to Haiti

I expect that reading terms of service would go a long way to letting you know if your "likely" is "actual."

So let's do that. The Contributor TOS cites the general Google TOS and Google Payments TOS, which in turn cite the Google Privacy Policy and the Google Payments Privacy Notice. The Google Privacy Policy states in footnotes on "advertising services" and "linked with information about visits to multiple sites" that Google routinely uses Google Analytics data to "improve relevance" of advertising by building an anonymized interest profile about each viewer, aka the "TiVo thinks I'm gay" phenomenon. The latter footnote explicitly mentions "remarketing", a common adtech method that stalks viewers around the Web and whose common failure mode involves showing viewers things they'd already bought. Contributor is part of the Funding Choices service, which Google advertises as providing analytics to publishers about viewers who use third-party content blocking tools, though the Funding Choices TOS requires participating publishers not to correlate anonymized analytics data with actual PII.

My suggestion is that when a website — any website — offers terms of service you have to agree to, you actually read them

How long would you expect a reasonable person to spend carefully reading dozens of pages of terms of service before giving up?

I expect that reading terms of service would go a long way to letting you know if your "likely" is "actual."

So let's do that. The Contributor TOS cites the general Google TOS and Google Payments TOS, which in turn cite the Google Privacy Policy and the Google Payments Privacy Notice. The Google Privacy Policy states in footnotes on "advertising services" and "linked with information about visits to multiple sites" that Google routinely uses Google Analytics data to "improve relevance" of advertising by building an anonymized interest profile about each viewer, aka the "TiVo thinks I'm gay" phenomenon. The latter footnote explicitly mentions "remarketing", a common adtech method that stalks viewers around the Web and whose common failure mode involves showing viewers things they'd already bought. Contributor is part of the Funding Choices service, which Google advertises as providing analytics to publishers about viewers who use third-party content blocking tools, though the Funding Choices TOS requires participating publishers not to correlate anonymized analytics data with actual PII.

My suggestion is that when a website — any website — offers terms of service you have to agree to, you actually read them

How long would you expect a reasonable person to spend carefully reading dozens of pages of terms of service before giving up?

I expect that reading terms of service would go a long way to letting you know if your "likely" is "actual."

So let's do that. The Contributor TOS cites the general Google TOS and Google Payments TOS, which in turn cite the Google Privacy Policy and the Google Payments Privacy Notice. The Google Privacy Policy states in footnotes on "advertising services" and "linked with information about visits to multiple sites" that Google routinely uses Google Analytics data to "improve relevance" of advertising by building an anonymized interest profile about each viewer, aka the "TiVo thinks I'm gay" phenomenon. The latter footnote explicitly mentions "remarketing", a common adtech method that stalks viewers around the Web and whose common failure mode involves showing viewers things they'd already bought. Contributor is part of the Funding Choices service, which Google advertises as providing analytics to publishers about viewers who use third-party content blocking tools, though the Funding Choices TOS requires participating publishers not to correlate anonymized analytics data with actual PII.

My suggestion is that when a website — any website — offers terms of service you have to agree to, you actually read them

How long would you expect a reasonable person to spend carefully reading dozens of pages of terms of service before giving up?

I expect that reading terms of service would go a long way to letting you know if your "likely" is "actual."

So let's do that. The Contributor TOS cites the general Google TOS and Google Payments TOS, which in turn cite the Google Privacy Policy and the Google Payments Privacy Notice. The Google Privacy Policy states in footnotes on "advertising services" and "linked with information about visits to multiple sites" that Google routinely uses Google Analytics data to "improve relevance" of advertising by building an anonymized interest profile about each viewer, aka the "TiVo thinks I'm gay" phenomenon. The latter footnote explicitly mentions "remarketing", a common adtech method that stalks viewers around the Web and whose common failure mode involves showing viewers things they'd already bought. Contributor is part of the Funding Choices service, which Google advertises as providing analytics to publishers about viewers who use third-party content blocking tools, though the Funding Choices TOS requires participating publishers not to correlate anonymized analytics data with actual PII.

My suggestion is that when a website — any website — offers terms of service you have to agree to, you actually read them

How long would you expect a reasonable person to spend carefully reading dozens of pages of terms of service before giving up?

I expect that reading terms of service would go a long way to letting you know if your "likely" is "actual."

So let's do that. The Contributor TOS cites the general Google TOS and Google Payments TOS, which in turn cite the Google Privacy Policy and the Google Payments Privacy Notice. The Google Privacy Policy states in footnotes on "advertising services" and "linked with information about visits to multiple sites" that Google routinely uses Google Analytics data to "improve relevance" of advertising by building an anonymized interest profile about each viewer, aka the "TiVo thinks I'm gay" phenomenon. The latter footnote explicitly mentions "remarketing", a common adtech method that stalks viewers around the Web and whose common failure mode involves showing viewers things they'd already bought. Contributor is part of the Funding Choices service, which Google advertises as providing analytics to publishers about viewers who use third-party content blocking tools, though the Funding Choices TOS requires participating publishers not to correlate anonymized analytics data with actual PII.

My suggestion is that when a website — any website — offers terms of service you have to agree to, you actually read them

How long would you expect a reasonable person to spend carefully reading dozens of pages of terms of service before giving up?

I expect that reading terms of service would go a long way to letting you know if your "likely" is "actual."

So let's do that. The Contributor TOS cites the general Google TOS and Google Payments TOS, which in turn cite the Google Privacy Policy and the Google Payments Privacy Notice. The Google Privacy Policy states in footnotes on "advertising services" and "linked with information about visits to multiple sites" that Google routinely uses Google Analytics data to "improve relevance" of advertising by building an anonymized interest profile about each viewer, aka the "TiVo thinks I'm gay" phenomenon. The latter footnote explicitly mentions "remarketing", a common adtech method that stalks viewers around the Web and whose common failure mode involves showing viewers things they'd already bought. Contributor is part of the Funding Choices service, which Google advertises as providing analytics to publishers about viewers who use third-party content blocking tools, though the Funding Choices TOS requires participating publishers not to correlate anonymized analytics data with actual PII.

My suggestion is that when a website — any website — offers terms of service you have to agree to, you actually read them

How long would you expect a reasonable person to spend carefully reading dozens of pages of terms of service before giving up?

I expect that reading terms of service would go a long way to letting you know if your "likely" is "actual."

So let's do that. The Contributor TOS cites the general Google TOS and Google Payments TOS, which in turn cite the Google Privacy Policy and the Google Payments Privacy Notice. The Google Privacy Policy states in footnotes on "advertising services" and "linked with information about visits to multiple sites" that Google routinely uses Google Analytics data to "improve relevance" of advertising by building an anonymized interest profile about each viewer, aka the "TiVo thinks I'm gay" phenomenon. The latter footnote explicitly mentions "remarketing", a common adtech method that stalks viewers around the Web and whose common failure mode involves showing viewers things they'd already bought. Contributor is part of the Funding Choices service, which Google advertises as providing analytics to publishers about viewers who use third-party content blocking tools, though the Funding Choices TOS requires participating publishers not to correlate anonymized analytics data with actual PII.

My suggestion is that when a website — any website — offers terms of service you have to agree to, you actually read them

How long would you expect a reasonable person to spend carefully reading dozens of pages of terms of service before giving up?

I expect that reading terms of service would go a long way to letting you know if your "likely" is "actual."

So let's do that. The Contributor TOS cites the general Google TOS and Google Payments TOS, which in turn cite the Google Privacy Policy and the Google Payments Privacy Notice. The Google Privacy Policy states in footnotes on "advertising services" and "linked with information about visits to multiple sites" that Google routinely uses Google Analytics data to "improve relevance" of advertising by building an anonymized interest profile about each viewer, aka the "TiVo thinks I'm gay" phenomenon. The latter footnote explicitly mentions "remarketing", a common adtech method that stalks viewers around the Web and whose common failure mode involves showing viewers things they'd already bought. Contributor is part of the Funding Choices service, which Google advertises as providing analytics to publishers about viewers who use third-party content blocking tools, though the Funding Choices TOS requires participating publishers not to correlate anonymized analytics data with actual PII.

My suggestion is that when a website — any website — offers terms of service you have to agree to, you actually read them

How long would you expect a reasonable person to spend carefully reading dozens of pages of terms of service before giving up?

I expect that reading terms of service would go a long way to letting you know if your "likely" is "actual."

So let's do that. The Contributor TOS cites the general Google TOS and Google Payments TOS, which in turn cite the Google Privacy Policy and the Google Payments Privacy Notice. The Google Privacy Policy states in footnotes on "advertising services" and "linked with information about visits to multiple sites" that Google routinely uses Google Analytics data to "improve relevance" of advertising by building an anonymized interest profile about each viewer, aka the "TiVo thinks I'm gay" phenomenon. The latter footnote explicitly mentions "remarketing", a common adtech method that stalks viewers around the Web and whose common failure mode involves showing viewers things they'd already bought. Contributor is part of the Funding Choices service, which Google advertises as providing analytics to publishers about viewers who use third-party content blocking tools, though the Funding Choices TOS requires participating publishers not to correlate anonymized analytics data with actual PII.

My suggestion is that when a website — any website — offers terms of service you have to agree to, you actually read them

How long would you expect a reasonable person to spend carefully reading dozens of pages of terms of service before giving up?

AIs can be tricked with things way different than what would fool human mind:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/w...

Setting aside the fact that the existence of mathematics does not somehow make it correct, it is absolutely misleading to assert that there is no mathematics associated with either electrical cosmology (for example here) or the Electric Universe (for example here). In fact, understanding both require a deep appreciation for the Lorentz Force and Maxwell's Equations. Mathematics has been a part of electrical cosmology from its inception (for example here).

Math is crucial for understanding the critical ionization velocity effect; it has been used to show how Marklund convection can replace gravitational accretion as a system for forming stars (and unlike the idea of stars accreting gravitationally, the geometry matches observations of actual stars forming all at once in a burst). Don Scott could not have accurately predicted the structure of AGN jets without significant amounts of mathematics. He's a retired EE professor, so he has spent his life immersed in these mathematics which you claim the EU does not include.

Attempts to model space without electrodynamic plasma physics concepts are destined to fail. We know this because it's already been tried, and the approach has failed to explain the nature of the many cosmic plasma structures we observe.

Think about it this way: What is the first plasma we encounter as we leave the Earth? It's the ionosphere. You may not know a whole lot about the ionosphere, but if you've been paying attention at all, you will at least understand that it is layered. You might spend some time thinking about why that is. Why should differing concentrations of charge exist in layers at all? Why not just a smooth gradient of charge that tapers off as one leaves Earth? Why should differing, adjacent regions of charge not neutralize one another?

The math here explains why.

"As neither double layer nor circuit can be derived from magnetofluid models of a plasma, such models are useless for treating energy transfer by means of double layers. They must be replaced by particle models and circuit theory.

A simple circuit is suggested which is applied to the energizing of auroral particles, to solar flares, and to intergalactic double radio sources ... Double layers in space should be classified as a new type of celestial object." ("Double Layers and Circuits in Astrophysics", Hannes Alfven, IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, Dec 1986)

In a 1992 paper titled, "Double Layers Do Accelerate Particles in the Auroral Zone," the authors plainly state:

"the direct observational evidence for substantial (multi-kV) electrostatic potential structures in the auroral zone is plentiful [16-27].

The Earth's auroral zone is far from being fully understood, but observations clearly show that electrostatic-potential structures (called double layers or electrostatic shocks) reside in the auroral magnetosphere."

Observations of laboratory plasmas have shown that double layers are what lend plasmas their structure. When you see a plasma filament in a novelty plasma globe, you should be asking: Why is charge confined to this thin filament? Laboratory plasma physicists point to the double layer as the source of this structure.

You should also be asking these same types of questions about the Van Allen Radiation belts: How can it be that these belts have all of this

Setting aside the fact that the existence of mathematics does not somehow make it correct, it is absolutely misleading to assert that there is no mathematics associated with either electrical cosmology (for example here) or the Electric Universe (for example here). In fact, understanding both require a deep appreciation for the Lorentz Force and Maxwell's Equations. Mathematics has been a part of electrical cosmology from its inception (for example here).

Math is crucial for understanding the critical ionization velocity effect; it has been used to show how Marklund convection can replace gravitational accretion as a system for forming stars (and unlike the idea of stars accreting gravitationally, the geometry matches observations of actual stars forming all at once in a burst). Don Scott could not have accurately predicted the structure of AGN jets without significant amounts of mathematics. He's a retired EE professor, so he has spent his life immersed in these mathematics which you claim the EU does not include.

Attempts to model space without electrodynamic plasma physics concepts are destined to fail. We know this because it's already been tried, and the approach has failed to explain the nature of the many cosmic plasma structures we observe.

Think about it this way: What is the first plasma we encounter as we leave the Earth? It's the ionosphere. You may not know a whole lot about the ionosphere, but if you've been paying attention at all, you will at least understand that it is layered. You might spend some time thinking about why that is. Why should differing concentrations of charge exist in layers at all? Why not just a smooth gradient of charge that tapers off as one leaves Earth? Why should differing, adjacent regions of charge not neutralize one another?

The math here explains why.

"As neither double layer nor circuit can be derived from magnetofluid models of a plasma, such models are useless for treating energy transfer by means of double layers. They must be replaced by particle models and circuit theory.

A simple circuit is suggested which is applied to the energizing of auroral particles, to solar flares, and to intergalactic double radio sources ... Double layers in space should be classified as a new type of celestial object." ("Double Layers and Circuits in Astrophysics", Hannes Alfven, IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, Dec 1986)

In a 1992 paper titled, "Double Layers Do Accelerate Particles in the Auroral Zone," the authors plainly state:

"the direct observational evidence for substantial (multi-kV) electrostatic potential structures in the auroral zone is plentiful [16-27].

The Earth's auroral zone is far from being fully understood, but observations clearly show that electrostatic-potential structures (called double layers or electrostatic shocks) reside in the auroral magnetosphere."

Observations of laboratory plasmas have shown that double layers are what lend plasmas their structure. When you see a plasma filament in a novelty plasma globe, you should be asking: Why is charge confined to this thin filament? Laboratory plasma physicists point to the double layer as the source of this structure.

You should also be asking these same types of questions about the Van Allen Radiation belts: How can it be that these belts have all of this

Some places have only so much characters you can use. https://www.google.com/maps/pl... is not always an option, where https://goo.gl/maps/mFLLVxKUtJ... might be better or even the shorter https://tinyurl.com/4poyc6x

which is what anyone skilled in the art would come up with when asked to design a mining SOC

Yeah, here's the researcher. He looks like a legit chip guy. Probably some lawyers went looking for Bitcoin patents when the fiat value started to rise so this happened.

That said, nobody is going to be making SoC miners as ASIC miners are always going to be more profitable. Probably Intel could improve the power efficiency of Bitmain's ASIC chips, but patent-locked SoC chips that can do SHA256 aren't really going to cause people to worry. They may be useful for testing work on new blockchains with low difficulty, but that's dubious and extremely niche.