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Maybe someone googled for "what operating system runs on old satellites" and didn't realize that the Satellite made by Toshiba is a laptop, not an actual Earth orbiting device.

I, too, do not believe that any satellite is running Windows 95. To say the least, Win95 has not been optimized for power efficiency or running on resource-poor radiation hardened microprocessors, memory and support chips. Considering the Win95 is just a gui on top of MSDOS, running just MSDOS would make far more sense than Win95. Who would be using a mouse and looking at the screen on a satellite? Would they be using PCAnywhere on a space dial-up modem link?

Furthermore, Windows 95 has a timer wraparound bug that causes a crash every 49.7 days, and that bug wasn't found until the early 2000's, so anyone that used Win95 as a space OS has a dead satellite.

Win95 was used on the ground. Here's some info from people who were involved in all that back then.
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-t...

Also, I'm not seeing any evidence in the article that "hacking a satellite is surprisingly easy".

properly funding public research is WAY cheaper than these ruthless extortion tactics we've turned healthcare into for the past few decades.

We all want that to be true, unfortunately that isn't the case, and US keeps leading the world pharma innovation
I hate ruthless capitalism as much as the next guy, but reality is that it keeps outperforming any other system on most serious metrics.

Bison don't emit greenhouse gasses.

Citation needed. Bison are bovines just like cows and they have a similar digestive system. The answers on this page seem to indicate bison put out a large amount of methane, just like cows. Of course, they also exhale CO2 just like all animals so that's at least two greehouse gasses they emit.

Galileo's Square-Cube Law appears to work for all land-walking animals alive today, but the scientific community seems to ignore its problematic application to the dinosaurs. Is it because there would seem to be a number of dinosaurs which could not seemingly exist in today's gravity?

"How could dinosaurs get so big despite Galileo's square cube law?

The law - Square-cube law
From wikipedia

'The giant monsters seen in horror movies (e.g., Godzilla or King Kong) are also unrealistic, as their sheer size would force them to collapse.'

Wouldn't the law also affect dinosaurs like the Giraffatitan?

1 Answer
Apala Chaturvedi

Galileo's Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences contained what he considered to be one of his most profound insights: the square-cube law. If two cubes are made of the same material then they will have the same density. Yet since the two cubes have different area to volume ratios they will likewise have different stress at the base of each cube. If too much stress is placed on an object then it will fail, or in this case a large cube has a much greater possibility of collapsing. This is why sandcastles can only be a few feet high.

Galileo applied this to animals, what we now call allometry, and noted that a this implies the diameter of bones should be proportional to their length. It explains why ants can walk around on spindly little legs while lifting 50 times their body weight, compared to elephants with their tree-trunk sized feet who would strain to lift a quarter of their mass.

Also because of the Square-Cube Law, larger animals have less relative muscle strength than smaller animals. Both the muscle strength and bone strength are functions of the cross sectional area, while the weight of the animal is a function of volume.

It is because of relative muscle strength that an ant can lift fifty times its weight while a human can lift an amount equal to its own weight, and an Asian elephant can only lift 25% of its own weight. The greater muscle to weight ratio of smaller animals is what allows them to jump higher than several times their own height, while at the other extreme an elephant can not even jump.

While Galileo was successful in convincing the Church and the conservative science community that the world is not flat, the conservative science community has yet to embrace Galileo's Square-Cube Law even though it is clearly correct and fundamental to understanding every major science discipline.

Something additional to note is the common occurrence of serious bone diseases such as osteoporosis and arthritis observed in mammoth remains, for this could be called a vindication for the idea that mammoths existed at the very edge of the Square-Cube Law, or that a change in gravity is part of what destroyed them. There's additional discussion of the situation here

Out if interest I had a look at the way spaceX is funded or at least seed funded and it's clear that Musk has risked the fortune he earned from paypal (100 million) to get spaceX going. There is no doubt there is risk however he has his own skin in the game so I've never understood why people give him a hard time, just because he is living every kids dream and having a go? It say's a lot about the hater mentality that wants us to sit around doing nothing, not wearing deodorant criticizing people reaching for the stars.

I can't see him doing this without some sort of government funding and the la times seems to thinks so however I don't really see this as grounds for criticism, how could he do it without government funding and contracts?

Should Musk expect government funding to continue to develop rocket systems via spaceX. Why not? If his companies are meeting the specified goals to receive funding then why shouldn't they receive funding. We've been told for years by Boeing and Lockheed Martin that re-usable launch systems were not possible however clearly that is not true.

So while I don't think I fall into the category of being a fanboy, I certainly don't want to see him fail. So if you are going to make up allegations about the companies financial state, let's have a look at what you've got so we can evaluate it.

One thing is for sure, whatever you think of the guy, Musk has generated a lot of interest in space flight. There is nothing boring about a pair of launch boosters making a double sonic boom before they land.

So we tailor their class times to their biological rhythms and they turn into adults with juvenile biological rhythms. Will they ever really grow up?

I've had N24 for the last thirty years, so I can officially blow this smoke back into your face.

Juvenile:

* A prepubescent child.
* A person younger than the age of majority.
* A person younger than the age of criminal responsibility.
* An animal that is not sexually mature.
* A mindless insult that all-too-often passes itself off as intelligent discourse.

Last I checked, college students fuck like rabbits, so we'll dispatch item #1 with extreme prejudice.

Age of majority

Most countries set the age of majority at 18.

What is the normal age for college freshmen in the U. S.?

If someone goes straight to college campus from high school, the typical age of the incoming freshman in a U.S. college is 18 or 19.

So, by sophomore year, juveniles (as defined by a minority criteria) are already a distinct minority.

So what we have here is a juvenile-onset biological rhythm shift which persist well into young adulthood.

Young adulthood having recently become the age during which a majority of the population struggles to acquire a remunerative skillset among the top-three quartiles of career prospects and life outcomes.

Fewer U.S. Graduates Opt for College After High School — April 2014

Last October, just 65.9 percent of people who had graduated from high school the previous spring had enrolled in college, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said this week.

(The large chunk of the college admission population enrolled in the humanities starts the race a full quartile back, many drop-outs return to the fray later, and some high school dropouts have intrinsic skills, so even the dismal quartile from 25–50th percentile is by no means guaranteed merely by showing up.)

A really good example of the indirect path was in the news cycle this week:

Wylie was born to parents who were both physicians. At age 6 he was abused by a mentally unstable person, and the school tried to cover it up. In 2000 his father and he won a settlement of CA$290,000 against the school district. As a child he was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD.

He left school at 16 without a qualification, but by 17 was working for the Canadian opposition leader Michael Ignatieff. He taught himself to code at age 19. At 20, he began studying law at the London School of Economics.

In 2013 he was introduced to SCL Elections which would later create Cambridge Analytica.

Ignatieff was a catastrophic political leader, but the rest of his bio reads like a Who's Who entry (recent Order of Canada, and back to full professorship at Harvard).

Speaking of physicians, that's surely one profession that's never strayed into sparing the whip.

* How Much Do 30-Hour Shifts Suck for Medical Residents? — 8 March 2017
* No Doctor Should Work 30 Straight Hours Without Sleep — 15 December 2016
* Marathon 24- to 26-hour doctor shifts may be unsafe for patients: experts — 19 February 2016
* A Dangerous Study of Medical Resident

Paid accounts are supposed to support it, and custom work. Although, their site is sparse and low on explanations in general. I wish there were an option to self host, like matrix.

https://keybase.io/blog/2015-0...
https://www.quora.com/How-does...

New tech is B-O-R-I-N-G.

Everybody is data-mining the fuck out you (You are the product), or re-inventing the same shit over and over again.

* IRC -> HipChat / Slack
* IM -> ICQ -> Skype
* Voice Chat -> TeamSpeak -> Discord

etc.

Part of the problem is that Silicon doesn't really scale past 5 GHz. Commercial CPU's went deep until they hit the 5 GHz cap. A friend of mine finds today's commodity CPU's MHz a bit of a joke. Why? Because

* In 1977 he was working on a 4 GHz CPUs
* In 1990 he was working on a 20 GHz CPUs

I'll let _those_ dates sink for a second. NOTE: ALL of these CPUs were built with Gallium Arsenide.

Now this was for the military which is roughly 20 years ahead of the public sector. The problem is no one in the public sector could afford them. The commercial sector is REALLY good at driving prices down, but REALLY crappy at pushing the envelope of technology (because it is too expensive.) When you basically have an unlimited budget like the military you can basically R&D alternative tech such as GaAs. If you want to know what happened to GaAs there is quora Q&A.

It is a little hard to compete with GaAs when silicon is literally dirt cheap.

And as the public have _consistently_ shown, cheaper sells FAR more then better-but-expensive.

These days commercial CPU's are going wide. i.e. The gimped PS4's CPU is 8-core but only runs at 1.75 GHz.

Creating technology is becoming more and more expensive. In the 19760's the Jetsons popularized the idea of the flying car. And yet ~60 years later it is still a pipe dream.

Technology becoming boring is nothing new. The pioneer of modern electronics, Carver Mead basically summarized the fundamental problem:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

Microelectronics pioneer, Caltech professor emeritus, and all-around smart guy Carver Mead believes that the scientific revolution that began with the discovery of special relativity and quantum mechanics has stalled, and that it's up to us to kickstart it.

"A bunch of big egos got in the way," he told his audience of 3,000-plus chipheads at the International Soild-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco on Monday.

Expect nothing to change for the next 20 years.

Now "Get off my LAN"

If google did this

How cute. Google already does. Only without the housing - they have homeless employees that live on campus.

Facebook at least wants to give the illusion that their employees are free to go as far as 100 ft to home. Actually, Google does have its own housing project but they seem to not be that interested.

Just pointing out your spin, keep it up.

I would rather be shot with a .30-06, but I try to avoid both.

I doubt anybody is confused by a gun, then or now. They are pretty simple to use. I would prefer someone be able to carry less ammo and have a harder time readjusting after aiming, if they are shooting at me.

I personally think we should limit high capacity magazines (require additional licensing or tax stamps), severely limit hand guns, and outlaw the carry of loaded weapons, especially in a ready-to-fire state.
I'm astounded by how many dumb-asses think they need to carry with a hot round in the chamber. If it was really about safety they would be wearing a helmet and carrying a fire extinguisher, not a gun.

I could see it doing that 50% of the time depending on which side of the cycle it falls when power comes back but every time is definitely weird! Are you sure it was always doing this?

I have a microwave/convection oven like that: 50% of the time the inner plate will rotate clockwise, 50% counter-clock wise. It is designed like that from the factory since it doesn't really matter which way it rotates.

This seems to nail it pretty well, I remember 3-phase motors systematically turning backward when the phases were inverted. How your friend's clock could invert rotation systematically every time is rather puzzling although :
https://www.quora.com/What-det...

It appears you've fallen for a distortion.

There's a (semi-popular, at least) urban legend circulating, that Ray Bradbury actually mixed up Fahrenheit and Celsius[3], and that paper actually burns at 450 C, which is 842 F. The cited source is Handbook of Physical Testing of Paper[4], but the Handbook seems to have used a rayon-fiber paper treated with certain chemicals to increase its ignition temperature. While this is arguably, still 'paper', this is definitely one of the extreme cases at best, and nowhere near the average auto-ignition temperature of paper.

Source

An ejaculation releases 250 million sperm. Each sperm contains 3234 Mbp. Each basepair contains 2 bits. Male orgasms take 5-22 seconds on average.

So we can work out the bit rate. (( 250 million * 3234 million * 2bits)/13.5 seconds) in petabytes per second = 14.9722222 petabytes per second.

Aww yeah! Bandwidth, baby!

The largest ship has a displacement (weight empty) of 100,000 tons. I'll ignore buildings since TFA is talking about machines. Current launch costs to LEO bottom out at about $4000/kg, though it could drop to $2000/kg in the near future (have to see if Falcon Heavy's costs hold up). So getting enough materials into LEO to duplicate the largest machine currently built would cost (100,000 tons)*(1000 kg/ton)*($4000/kg) = $400 billion. Never mind the cost of fabrication and assembly.

By my impression, when they mean largest machine, they are talking dimensionally rather than mass. They are talking about building a cube out of truss that is 5 kilometers to a side. Even adding diagonal crossbeams for support, it might only be a fraction of the mass of that ship.

The largest ship has a displacement (weight empty) of 100,000 tons. I'll ignore buildings since TFA is talking about machines. Current launch costs to LEO bottom out at about $4000/kg, though it could drop to $2000/kg in the near future (have to see if Falcon Heavy's costs hold up).

So getting enough materials into LEO to duplicate the largest machine currently built would cost (100,000 tons)*(1000 kg/ton)*($4000/kg) = $400 billion. Never mind the cost of fabrication and assembly.

https://www.quora.com/How-do-y...

Agreed. However, that does not mean that there is not a considerable risk attached to this approach too. One serious failure and it could all come crashing down.

That's precisely what happened when the dotcom bubble burst. A very low percentage of startups are successful. Information regarding that:

https://www.entrepreneur.com/a...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/n...
https://www.quora.com/What-per...

Fox did shut down their comment section for several months. That was a while ago, however.
https://www.quora.com/Why-does...

OK, look let's rewind.

I think we were talking at crossed purposes and got pissed off at each other.

I agree Rust is not the most friendly language in very many ways. Part of that is an inherent feature of the language: it puts ownership front and centre, even more so than C++, and that can't change, because without it you may as well use C++. Part of that is hard simply because it's a very unusual way of programming and few people are used to it as it's the only even vaguely mainstream language with that model.

Some of it is because it's kind of young and skipped leg day. https://www.quora.com/Which-la...

However.

The thing that Rust does well, better I think than any other language is fine-grained multithreading on irregular problems. In that domain, it's the friendliest language there is because I've not seen any language which lets people write that code easily enough that it's tractable.

The main competitor is C++: if you go much higher level, you lose all the performance benefits of the multithreading and there wasn't any point in doing it. C++ itself doesn't provide any assistane in preventing data races and in practice, no C++ teams (despite there being 3 much larger ones) have managed to tackle the same problem successfully that's been tackled in Rust: that is multithreading a broser engine.

So is it relative more friendly than anything else in a domain if it's apparently the only practical choice for an important problem domain?

As an aside, one of the things that looks interesting to me in Rust is the error model.Checked exceptions in Java are a pain in the arse. Exceptions in C++ are dynamicly typed and somehow don't feel quite right in some ways (though they're often very easy to use). Error handling in Go is C like with lots of tedious return code checking. Rust essentially provides return codes with fully automatic checking of the codes. Is that the best? Don't know, time will tell. I vascilate on C++ exceptions weekly.

You should learn more.

https://www.quora.com/What-doe...

I think you confused legal and illegal. Legal in every state but California. https://www.online-paralegal-p... https://www.quora.com/Is-it-le...

I got "1981" from Wikipedia. Re-reading, it doesn't specifically say that the actual Windows 1.0 codebase started in 1981, just that Microsoft "began developing a graphical user interface (GUI) in 1981."

I'll agree that what Microsoft was working on in 1981 probably got thrown away and didn't become part of Windows 1.0. However, I think my larger point stands, that Microsoft was working on a GUI long before the Mac came out, and didn't need to steal the Mac OS source code for their own project.

it wasn't fear, but greed that motivated Bill Gates in 1982

"Greed" is an emotionally-charged word but I basically agree. Gates wanted Microsoft to make a GUI, and he did want to make money by doing it.

without Microsoft working on software development for the new MacOS, they might not have developed Windows, in the above article Jeff Raikes attributes Bill Gates' conversion to believing in GUIs specifically to exposure to the MacOS.

Here's the relevant quote: "...I think at that point in time, you know, it really clicked with Bill that, you know, graphic user interface was going to be the way, the way of the future." I'm not sure what you think this proves. One guy says that in his opinion, "it really clicked" for Bill Gates that GUIs would be important. But at least if we believe Wikipedia, Microsoft was already working on a GUI. And according to Bill Gates he was a believer in GUI ever since he saw the computers at Xerox PARC.

What if Apple had done what Bill Gates asked and built and released a MacOS for PCs in 1985? Would there be no Windows?

In 1985, Windows was still a joke. If MacOS had been widely released, Microsoft would have given up on Windows and just accepted MacOS as the new standard. Microsoft made a lot of money selling Mac applications.

When the customers voted against OS/2 and for Windows, Microsoft accepted this reality; they walked away from OS/2 and started pushing Windows. If mass release of MacOS had happened, Microsoft would have accepted this reality, and focused on selling apps and making money that way.

Here's a Quora answer I wrote that includes my thoughts on a mass release of MacOS. My opinion hasn't changed since I wrote that.

Now that Windows is huge and important, Microsoft won't walk away from it. But back in the day when Windows was a joke, if MacOS had seen a mass release as a new standard, Microsoft would not have had any reason to keep trying to turn Windows into something good.

the point wasn't that they stole the entire code base and ran it as is.

Please provide some kind of evidence to support your theory that Microsoft stole and used actual code from Apple. Frankly when Apple was suing Microsoft, if Microsoft had actually stolen code, Apple would have added that to the lawsuit. But the Apple suit was over this nebulous concept of "look and feel", not over code theft.

Microsoft pre-empted the lawsuit, they told then CEO John Scully if he tried to sue they would stop development of Word and Excel for the Mac. Apple needed both of those applications because they were losing market share already. Then, to permanently stop any lawsuits over it, Microsoft offered to licence some of the Mac technologies.

And, after agreeing not to sue, Apple sued. And in that lawsuit they didn't say anything about code theft. Evidence or it didn't happen.

About "sabotaging OS/2"... I assumed that what you meant by "sabotage" was deliberately inserting malicious code while Microsoft was working on OS/2. Your link is an example of Microsoft people trash-talking OS/2, including a demo that a user-mode application could take

That is a bit exaggerated. Yes, it will be more expensive than your mass produced computers but as long as it is in the range of what people can afford it is just a question if you are willing to pay the extra cost of having an open system.

It is the CPUs where the competition is lacking. There are plenty of motherboard vendors to choose from.
It shouldn't be hard to find someone qualified to design a motherboard and if the CPU gains traction then we would probably see a couple of proprietary motherboards for it but that sort of defeats the purpose.

It could be a bit tricky to design a motherboard with the limited capabilities of open source CAD programs, but you can get away with just PCIe lanes and the memory bus.
All other peripherals could be added to PCIe, and since we are looking for a high performance system the SSD won't have a SATA interface anyway.

Regarding affordability it won't be that expensive. Sure, it will be expensive compared to the mass produced boards, but the components for a single board won't be that much more than the current multilayer FPGA boards that hobbyists puts together.

Someone who really wants an open system could easily afford to order a single PCB from a PCB manufacturer and solder on the components themselves.
But why would you order just one? 5 8-layer PCBs the size of a standard ATX costs ~$750 including shipping if you want them withing 10-13 days. You get 10 for under $1000. Just get it and sell the rest on e-bay for $150 each.
But if it gains any traction at all then adafruit or some other electronics hobbyist store would probably pick them up.
When you get a batch of 200 you are down under $50 each.

The connectors and passive components are already manufactured in large series. Getting a handful of them costs next to nothing.
People even use the memory and PCIe connectors for other things since they are among the cheapest connectors you can find.

Apart from hifi audio projects that are stuck in the 70's most electronics hobbyists these days have no problems soldering anything you can find on a modern motherboard.
BGA packages are fairly rare on the larger boards since they are so sensitive to bending and hard to inspect in mass production.
Typically you would only go for BGA packages if you are looking to keep the size down like on the Raspberry or in phones.

No, the big problem is really the CPU.
Integrated circuits isn't something you can afford on a hobby basis.
Here is a fairly good breakdown of the cost.
Since people are talking about competing with modern systems we can expect $200k to get a single chip on a prototype wafer. That isn't really what you want to pay for a CPU that doesn't perform better than last decades proprietary ones.
Placing it in a case and bonding it to the pins aren't something you are going to do on your desk either, but I suspect you can get someone to do it for you for a cost that is insignificant compared to the chip.

The only plausible option I see here would be to set up crowdfunding to do a larger run but then you are back to square one.
How do you trust the one setting up the crowdfunding? They could easily switch out the open design with one that contains a backdoor and it is not easier for you to verify this than to verify that the next Intel CPU does what it is supposed to do.
And even if you are willing to trow out a couple of $100k to order a design you know is good. If the project gains traction the chip manufacturer will recognize the layout and can replace it with a backdoored version without you knowing.

Even if manufacturing a custom processor would be economically viable it doesn't actually solve anything.
You need to be able to manufacture the chip yourself or you need to be able to verify that a chip you ordered doesn't have backdoors.
The first option moves you up in the $billion range. It might be shareable if you let people who are interested i

Trading in stolen goods is an on-going crime, so the statute of limitations does not apply:
https://www.quora.com/If-a-cer...

On two-way (Angular default) vs. one-way (Flux) data binding: https://stackoverflow.com/ques...

But Mithril does one-way data binding naturally so you usually don't need much to be made explicit: https://github.com/MithrilJS/m...

But apps may still benefit from undoable commands or transactions being run against a data model, so sometimes a more formal flux/reflux/redux approach may be worth it -- or not. I feel it makes sens to keep things simple with POJOs and then see if a more formal data store model is needed.
https://www.quora.com/Which-is...

Cows get all the blame but termites emit more methane than cows.

I just stumbled upon a very nice explanation on why GPUs don't have branch predictors that is far more rigorous (although also somewhat more technical) than what I wrote.

Everyone is seeing how bitcoin has this great big distributed network and (in my experience) the people thinking we will us the same blockchain distribution haven't figured out that it's not going to be free to have multiple hosts for the chain.

link to another discussion: https://www.quora.com/In-a-pri...

I for one can't wait for Oracle to enter this market. (disclaimer - I hate Oracle).

> I'm glad the Framers added the right to speedy sale of BTC, but they could have also added one for trials.

It's likely that he waived that right in one way or another -

https://www.quora.com/Why-would-a-defendant-choose-to-waive-their-right-to-a-speedy-trial-Why-would-someone-sit-in-jail-for-longer-than-they-had-to

Why doesn't it scale? Is their any fundamental reason they couldn't use an LTE like technology to broadcast using similar (RF) bandwidth as LTE (I'm using broadcast to mean 1 sender many receivers)?

The broadcast part is pretty much scaled by definition.

for mealtime streaming they'd likely use 5mbps (Netflix HD), that gives a tower 200 homes at a 10-50% reduction in overall network bandwidth (20-100gbps tower), there are probably places that would work too (sparser suburbs, not universally).

There's potential to use caching too, to prevent popular content from hitting the back haul, the LTE network itself is apparently capable of up to 18(subdivided)*128(users)*600mbps (this seems really high, just reading this), if the top 10% of content is 75% of streaming (made up numbers but seem reasonable), that's essentially allows for a lot of streaming that doesn't hit the back haul (perhaps only the popular content can be streamed HD in real time).

if 75% of streams (and all live) are cached, then 20gbps back haul can handle all live (100 channels in HD for 2gbps, with a mix of 5-40mbps), + plus 75% of
  cached streaming for some small part of back haul, but a significant part of the Wireless network itself, plus another whole lot of 5 mpbs streams to the end user.

It seems very scalable to me even without being able to broadcast the signal (just caching the live TV, plus the last 1000 hours of streamed content (40mbps * 60 seconds * 60 Minutes / 8 (bits in a byte) gets me 20 TiB of storage for 1100 hours).
as
That can be the most popular 1000+ episodes of the week, which must be a huge percentage of the non on demand part, if a cell tower really is capable of 1.3tbps, that's 34k steams at 40mbps, assuming 1 in 3 people are streaming at a time, that leaves plenty of space for overhead and the 100mbps of capable of hitting the internet traffic do to back haul.

It seems very scalable to me.

I'm actually going to say that I think they could probably get away with streaming their own service at 40mbps, with only very rarely needing to drop uncached streams to 5mbps.

There are 6 Tmobile towers in my county of 200 thousand households, so it won't work to provide 40mbps for everything even with the newest tech everywhere, but I could see them being able to handle a significant number of households with those six towers (if we say each household is using 3 streams on average at peak (your number) and they allow one 1 ultimate quality and 2 HD per a house for 50 total mbps (I think that sounds really hi), that's 400 mbps at peak, each tower would need to be able to provide 1/3 theoretical maximum to cover 25% of the houses, if it's profitable they can build out more.

The Internet was unregulated up to 2015 when the FCC said it would regulate it under Title II of the 1934 Telecommunications Act

http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/2...

That's why some worry about how the FCC just ensured net neutrality. To enforce fairness rules, the agency will regulate network owners by scooping them up under Title II of the 1934 Telecommunications Act, a specific set of regulations that apply to phone companies. Telecoms say the rules don't match the services they provide. They don't trust the FCC's promise that it will apply only a tiny fraction of those rules and won't regulate rates and increase taxes.

"Assurances like these don't tend to last very long," warned Republican FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai. "Expect ... regulation to ratchet up as time goes on."

Trump made Pai head of the FCC and he rolled back that decision. Taking things back the way the were before 2015.

Regulation is what gave Comcast its regional monopolies.

https://www.quora.com/Why-are-...

I think the answer is much simpler that people realize. It is our govts fault 100% there isnt competition here in wa state.

Cities and towns are now requiring any and all utilities and services to contract through the cities which creates monopolies. My town for example ...

Brier wa, because of city contracts,

There is no choice for

Cable/internet city has Comcast contract, the city makes money off each subscribers bill. Basic cable with basic internet is 100 dollars a month.

Trash is only waste management, and they charge 100 dollars a month. The city gets a percent of each bill

Hard line telephone only Verizon, and just living in the area means that my cell phone bill has additional charges for utilities even though it utilizes a cell tower, because Verizon own the towers.

The city gets a percentage off total bill including taxes!!!

As you can see, it govt itself thats causing the problems, by first limiting competition, which keeps bills high, AND, because the city gets a bite, this also makes the bills higher because it gets passed to consumer. The real messed up part is that there are city and state taxes already included in the bill, but the city gets a percentage of the total bill including taxes, meaning they are double dipping, so even raising taxes is in the cities interest to inflate bills even more.

Net Neutrality is basically government creating monopolies and then saying 'you need us to protect you from those evil monopolies otherwise they might someday decide to charge you an extra ten bucks a month to access your favourite site'. What the government isn't doing is actually promoting competition by deregulating.

Which Caste is looting India since Independence? https://www.quora.com/Which-ca...
Please sign https://www.petition2congress....

Boeing didn't need to do that because the United Launch Alliance - Boeing and Lockheed - had a monopoly on launches and so it didn't need to improve anything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Now Musk is competing with them they're under a bit more pressure. Competition is a good thing.

In fact the only reason the US got to the moon was because of competition with the USSR. Post Cold War the US stopped doing manned space flight above LEO, and so did everyone else.

https://www.quora.com/Why-have...

(Almost) anything is possible technologically but as soon as you have a monopoly, progress will slow because there's no incentive to improve.

Is it any worse than the sheer amount of horsepower it takes to load a page on any modern web site?

Yes.

"Which means it would take about 435 years to mine a single bitcoin." (On a normal consumer PC rather than specialized coin farms.)

When human drivers kill 40,000 people a year in the US, but autonomous solutions "only" kill 30,000 people a year due to avoidable glitches, Greed will still arrogantly sell that as a win.

I doubt it. Guns, outside of law enforcement, suicides and gang-murders kill so few people it's barely a rounding error[1], and yet there are still plenty of people who want them banned. Same with terrorism, mass shootings, etc. It's about fear, not numbers.

[1] Citation

According to this, 53 qubits can simulate 1 gram of DNA: https://www.quora.com/Quantum-...

And Brahmin Are The Most Corrupt https://www.quora.com/Which-ca...

>Fission ~ 200 mega-electron-volts/per, fusion ~ 16 mega-electron-volts per.
This. Atom per atom, or per reaction, fission yields way more energy, because there are more nucleons involved in a heavy fissile atom than in a lightweight fusable one. In designing explosives, fusion usually functions as more of a high-energy neutron source for promoting more fission than for its own energy yield... unless you're building a neutron bomb, of course.
Per mass, OTOH, fusion produces more energy.
But also important is WHAT FORM of energy is released. Fission releases lots of stuff: highly energized atoms like Barium and Krypton, which themselves break down releasing more energy (some on-the-spot, others taking years or decades), and also enough high-energy neutrons to sustain chain-reaction, and finally a whole lot of gamma rays. Fusion, AFAIK, just produces stable (but hot) He and a really energetic Neutron. A key challenge to Fusion would appear to be how to convert that Neutron into useful energy, keeping in mind that the Neutron, being non-charged, won't by itself charge something like an alpha or beta particle might do, nor will it be contained by a magnetic field. It will shoot out and go where it wants until it hits another nucleus, and likely mess that atom up in some way as well as making it hot.

>Fission ~ 200 mega-electron-volts/per, fusion ~ 16 mega-electron-volts per.
This. Atom per atom, or per reaction, fission yields way more energy, because there are more nucleons involved in a heavy fissile atom than in a lightweight fusable one. In designing explosives, fusion usually functions as more of a high-energy neutron source for promoting more fission than for its own energy yield... unless you're building a neutron bomb, of course.
Per mass, OTOH, fusion produces more energy.
But also important is WHAT FORM of energy is released. Fission releases lots of stuff: highly energized atoms like Barium and Krypton, which themselves break down releasing more energy (some on-the-spot, others taking years or decades), and also enough high-energy neutrons to sustain chain-reaction, and finally a whole lot of gamma rays. Fusion, AFAIK, just produces stable (but hot) He and a really energetic Neutron. A key challenge to Fusion would appear to be how to convert that Neutron into useful energy, keeping in mind that the Neutron, being non-charged, won't by itself charge something like an alpha or beta particle might do, nor will it be contained by a magnetic field. It will shoot out and go where it wants until it hits another nucleus, and likely mess that atom up in some way as well as making it hot.

A gun makes a bullet go fast, and weighs about ten pounds.

Nonsense. A and doesn't weigh even one pound in the case of a pistol.

Handguns are only effective out to about 20 feet,

That's a lot of bullshit.

and even then two or three shots probably won't kill the bad guy.

That depends very much on how good your aim is.

The important bit of the system is the part which aims the gun at a vital part of the target's body and fires at the proper instant. That part is called the marksman. It weighs about 180 pounds.

What does yolo 9000 running on a raspberry pi zero weigh?

Everything you said was wrong.

Damore's memo was just misogynist bullshit.

That's a very cheap claim to make without any reasoning.

It's been reasoned many times before. For example here are two rather well written articles about it:

https://www.quora.com/What-do-...

https://www.economist.com/news...

Now, the defenses in respnse to these articles involve giving huge amounts of benefit of the doubt to the point of ignoring almost everything implied or that follows from the arguments in the memo. That's one option I guess except that here's James Damore in his own words:

https://www.salon.com/2017/09/...

https://mobile.twitter.com/Jam...

https://mobile.twitter.com/Jam...

I think it's clear from these comments that my (and others) inferences about where the memo was coming from were actually correct.

Anyway bring on the -1 trollbait mods! If there's one thing James Damore supporters can't stand it's the free speech they claim to support.

And one more thing: if you actually support some varian of improving things for men, then don't support this guy and his bullshit about gender roles. If you've ever pointed out how few men there are in certain jobs here, then don't support Damore's bullshit about gender roles because that is enforcing that separation. If you've ever complained about how men often pursue dangerous, but well paid jobs (contributing to increase workplace deaths for men) then don't spport this gender role bullshit because that's where a lot of the pressure comes from.

IOW this bullshit is bad for men and women. If you're a man and not a feminist you should still not support it because its bad for you. This guy and his army of supportes are trying to coerce you into a mould whether you want to be in it or not via this enforcement of gender roles.

It should be your choice not theirs.

And you're confusing accumulated debt with deficit spending.

The debt is just the sum of the deficits.

We can easily afford universal health care simply by implementing a fair equitable tax system so that the rich pay their fair share.

The top 2.7% pay 51% of all individual income taxes collected. And the top 0.1% pay 39.2% of all taxes collected. It's hard to imagine how they're not already paying 'their fair share'.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...

In 2014, people with adjusted gross income, or AGI, above $250,000 paid just over half (51.6%) of all individual income taxes, though they accounted for only 2.7% of all returns filed, according to our analysis of preliminary IRS data. Their average tax rate (total taxes paid divided by cumulative AGI) was 25.7%. By contrast, people with incomes of less than $50,000 accounted for 62.3% of all individual returns filed, but they paid just 5.7% of total taxes. Their average tax rate was 4.3%.

The relative tax burdens borne by different income groups changes over time, due both to economic conditions and the constantly shifting provisions of tax law. For example, using more comprehensive IRS data covering tax years 2000 through 2011, we found that people who made between $100,000 and $200,000 paid 23.8% of the total tax liability in 2011, up from 18.8% in 2000. Filers in the $50,000-to-$75,000 group, on the other hand, paid 12% of the total liability in 2000 but only 9.1% in 2011. (The tax liability figures include a few taxes, such as self-employment tax and the "nanny tax," that people typically pay along with their income taxes.)

All told, individual income taxes accounted for a little less than half (47.4%) of government revenue, a share that's been roughly constant since World War II. The federal government collected $1.54 trillion from individual income taxes in fiscal 2015, making it the national government's single-biggest revenue source. (Other sources of federal revenue include corporate income taxes, the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare, excise taxes such as those on gasoline and cigarettes, estate taxes, customs duties and payments from the Federal Reserve.) Until the 1940s, when the income tax was expanded to help fund the war effort, generally only the very wealthy paid it.

Since the 1970s, the segment of federal revenues that has grown the most is the payroll tax - those line items on your pay stub that go to pay for Social Security and Medicare. For most people, in fact, payroll taxes take a bigger bite out of their paycheck than federal income tax. Why? The 6.2% Social Security withholding tax only applies to wages up to $118,500. For example, a worker earning $40,000 will pay $2,480 (6.2%) in Social Security tax, but an executive earning $400,000 will pay $7,347 (6.2% of $118,500), for an effective rate of just 1.8%. By contrast, the 1.45% Medicare tax has no upper limit, and in fact high earners pay an extra 0.9%.

All but the top-earning 20% of American families pay more in payroll taxes than in federal income taxes, according to a Treasury Department analysis.

Still, that analysis confirms that, after all federal taxes are factored in, the U.S. tax system as a whole is progressive. The top 0.1% of families pay the equivalent of 39.2% and the bottom 20% have negative tax rates (that is, they get more money back from the government in the form of refundable tax credits than they pay in taxes).

Even if you confiscate 100% of all wealth from all the billionaires you'd get $1.7 trillion, and only once.

https://www.quora.com/How-much...

US has about 425 billio

Yeah, it's an example of a low trust society. Which is why, despite having vast natural resources Nigeria has a GDP(PPP) per capita of $5900 table, i.e. it does pretty badly.

https://www.cia.gov/library/pu...

The opposite case in Japan. Almost no natural resource but it's a very high trust society. And it does pretty well with a GDP(PPP) per capita of $41,300.

GDP(PPP) per capita isn't everything of course. I mean I'd prefer Japan over Nigeria even if you reverse their prosperity levels. Funny thing is Japan got levelled completely in WWII and grew very quickly back to first world prosperity. So actually a Japan rebuilding from devastation but keeping its high trust society status would be an awesome place to be. Same with the more high trust bits of the USA. The low trust bits of the USA are almost as bad as Nigeria though.

Wikipedia used to be written by anonymous IPs and refined by the veterans. After ten years of banning any new user who gets into a content disagreement with the 1%, the 1% have successfully secured their hold on the site from any new editors.

> I'm not saying it's perfect...

Not in so many words, but you are implying that the record groove represents a perfect analog of the signal "down to the size of individual molecules."

The problem with that is it's just not true. In practice, high-performance digital exceeds the fidelity of ANY vinyl recording under the best conditions.

CD audio does not have the frequency response of vinyl, that's true. Digital recording and mastering does, with much lower noise and greater dynamic range than analog tape or vinyl.

So please, go on listening to your records, but you should really familiarize yourself with digital recording technology before you criticize it.

Fortunately through the magic of the internet, someone else has also put in the legwork and done a better job than me anyhow.

Try here:

https://www.quora.com/What-do-...

https://www.economist.com/news...

And a contrarian opinion: "No, the Google manifesto isn’t sexist or anti-diversity. It’s science":

* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/eceRedirect?articleId=35903359

Written by "Debra Soh writes about the science of human sexuality and holds a PhD in sexual neuroscience from York University." The Globe and Mail leans centre-left from a Canadian political perspective. She also wrote a part in this quartet:

* http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-respond/

I would have been very interested in reading it and would have upmodded

[Citation needed]

No seriously. The evidence makes no difference, if you go against the ideology of the troll-mod hivemind, you get downvoted.

but had you backed up your criticisms of his citations with research invalidating those papers, which weren't riddled with flaws, biases, etc, themselves, I would have been very interested in reading it and would have upmodded.

Interesting that he doesn't have to demonstrate that his papers aren't riddled with flaws, but I do. Hmm....

Anyway, I'm not going to waste my breath trotting out detailed, cited arguments to get trollmodded into oblivion as has happened before, so I'll leave you with these two articles which thoroughly take apart the manifesto:

https://www.quora.com/What-do-...

https://www.economist.com/news...

If you haven't put any effort into your thoughts, why should anyone listen to them?

Like I said I put in the legwork when this first blew up and I got exactly the same downmods as before. I'm not going to waste my time on that again.

Also, I can't find any quotes from Damore's piece on this story, you only seem to be quoting other Slashdot posters.

It wasn't the first story. The document was long, by the time I'd actually given it a thorough read, that thread was long past. It takes time to read a long thing and write down cogent arguments.

Fortunately through the magic of the internet, someone else has also put in the legwork and done a better job than me anyhow.

Try here:

https://www.quora.com/What-do-...

https://www.economist.com/news...

Downmods are nothing, anyhow.

Well, they aren't good for the quality of the discourse. So far my post has bounced from 2 to down to -1 up to 3 and back down to -1 again. Clearly there's a mod war going on over it.

https://www.quora.com/Has-anyb...

That's my point. Not everyone at NASA is a rocket scientist. Some are regular administrators, managers, etc.

Those administrators aren't the ones deciding whether on not a printer would be useful on the space station. If anything I'm fairly confident they would try to keep one off the station to reduce costs if possible. They manage the budgets and might veto an idea but they would need the engineers thumbs up and cooperation to get a printer on the station. They use paper on the space station and I'm fairly confident they do so for good reasons. Remember that anything they send up there generally has to last for a long time. Paper doesn't have a power budget. There is the old saying that if you shoot a GPS with a bullet you have a piece of junk. Shoot a paper map with a bullet and you still have a map. Probably applies here too.

Now why they use an inkjet instead of a laser is an interesting question. I presume they had a good reason though I'm curious how often they have to replace the ink and what the relative launch costs would be. Lasers emit some fumes and the toner is a particulate that carries a charge so I'm guessing that played a role.