Most types of military capability can act as force multipliers, even if they are incapable of being used in a directly offensive capacity. This is particularly true of anti-ballistic missile defense.
If the US becomes capable of protecting itself from possible Russian or Chinese nuclear missile strikes, then it gains enormous leverage on the global stage: it would be able to dictate the terms of most agreements to any one it wanted to, because their would be no effective check against the direct use of military force. Even if the US population wouldn't brook the use of nuclear weapons against hostile targets, there'd be nothing to stop conventional military from simply seizing whichever assets it wanted to, and then daring the Chinese or Russians to take it back - after all, they won't be able to win the conventional war, and they won't be able to win the nuclear war either.
Of course, nobody sits back and just lets that happen and ABM has predictable consequences: it can only hit so many missiles. So if you're looking to check and protect yourself from US aggression, and you can't develop reliable ABM, you do the next best thing: you build more missiles. A lot more missiles. In fact you keep building missiles until you think you have enough to defeat the missile shield.
What that number is is also something you can't reliably estimate. And due to the defensive nature of ABM, you create another problem - whether or not you depend on it becomes perceptual and untestable. With offensive MAD, you can be sure you're going to get hit somehow. With a defensive posture, there's a very real risk you may have undue confidence in your system when it's not actually that reliable. So now you've got greatly escalating numbers of nuclear missiles in the world to try and check your ABM, but also no way of knowing whether it will actually protect you until it's tested - other then the perception of your leaders in how effective it might be.
No but thermodynamics has some rather stern things to say about how much of that you're going to be able to recover as electricity again, not to mention the considerable issues associated with letting the laser system and optics themselves heat up into any sort of useful temperature for a heat engine.
Fusion has been breaking even thermally for quite some time now.
What it doesn't do is run continuously, which makes practical extraction difficult. But the fact that we've made steady progress towards this goal, and found no physical laws preventing it (instead we have learned a great deal about plasma physics and how it relates to efficient fusion confinement) means we should continue researching it.
Sugar cane also works for Brazil because they don't have nearly as many cars on the road in the first place. There's also the very serious hazard of using arable land to grow fuel rather then food, and the follow on effects that can have on global food prices.
Biofuels are really a non-starter - it's inefficient solar power, with all sorts of limitations and where and how much of it you can use. It also is only an answer for transportation fuel at that. There's no possible way we could satiate our electricity demands using biofuels (when you need 60% of the arable land in the US to manage the oil needs of transportation alone - optimistically).
Fusion research has to be done, no matter the cost, until we either definitely establish it can't be done, or we succeed. Given the positive results that we have that, it seems likely we can succeed - but nothing that complex is ever easy or quick.
It's kind of an important issue for making it a general purpose file system, since with things like SSD's and the like you can easily end up suddenly finding yourself wanting to migrate down a size in data capacity. Also the whole "throw disks into the pool" attitude that ZFS takes means you can end up creating non-optimal situation quickly, but have a much harder time backing out of them.
Molecular biology is highly sophisticated, highly advanced molecular manufacturing. We are very much nowhere near being able to accomplish anything as impressive, except by hijacking the natural frameworks that already exist and our tools for doing so are ridiculously primitive, really.
It's hard to properly express this to people who haven't interacted with molecular biology, or nanoparticles or surface science, but when you start to appreciate how irritating the problems are (and how blind you are like, 99% of the time to what you've actually made) then you realize that, while we've made staggering amounts of progress, ideas like molecular manufacturing via CAD/CAM seem like their millenia away (they're not, but it is really really hard).
The poster above you is wrong - GPS is effected by relativity, but it's a known effect already compensated for. While I suppose we could start talking about rotational frame dragging as well, that's also a well-studied and well understood effect which can be corrected for. Worst case is that a handheld receiver might not have the computational power to handle it, but nothing about relativity fundamentally prevents using GPS.
EVs have the *potential* of being holistically cleaner, but that depends on a number of factors that your average consumer doesn't think much about. It's very much like CFLs -- it all depends on the implementation. Zero point emission is not the whole story.
You don't need the average consumer to think about or care about the wider ramifications: we know they won't, that's why we have regulation. Minimal impact to them, huge collective benefit for civilization.
Just try it with Gnome Shell or Unity - it doesn't work. You end up in the perverse situation of having a menu suddenly take up an entire 24" screen, which amongst other things shatters your mental "context" for whatever you're working on (and is a nightmare if you're trying to follow instructions on a website, for example).
If people must insist on doing this (and I see no reason to really, since what matter is easy data syncing and app interoperability) then it makes far more sense to build what you need, and figure out a nice, easy to develop for way to map between things. It should be apparent from the web that you can't use one-size fits all interfaces, so I don't know why we need to retread the concept.
Halogens don't improve on the physics of an incandescent though. The luminous efficiency improvements are due to the fact that the halogen cycle lets you run the lamp hotter, which pushes more of the peak of the black body emitter to where you want it. It's still, fundamentally, a black body emitter.
And I suspect if anybody did a study, they'd find CFLs actually use more energy & increase the carbon footprint more than incandescents, because of the extra energy needed to ship them from China & then drive the dead CFL to a recycling center to dispose of the hazardous mercury.
As opposed to...the energy needed to ship incandescents from China, then drive them in garbage trucks to a landfill site?
It would be similar to how the ACEEE's study showed EVs are no cleaner than a 45mpg gasoline vehicle (and less clean than a natural gas Civic or 88mpg Lupo TDI).
Which completely ignores the fact that electricity is independent of it's energy source, whereas natural gas, diesel and petrol are all fossil fuels which can't be easily substituted.
Indeed, I know a few people who are working on some commercial software with one. This is kind of a big deal (although the risk that someone made subtle alterations to say, the Linux kernel, is also a very big deal).
I know the sequence off by heart now, although it's largely centered on that "Six Sixes is Thirty Six" which feels like it has symmetry.
I can't go higher then that easily by the same path - 12 * 6 I remember as 12 * 5 + 12, which is notable because it's the first time you cross 10 in the sequence.
It isn't necessary to learn multiplication tables. They are an utterly useless thing to learn. I never learned them - or more importantly, I never learned them by rote. The critical moment for me was well after I'd muddled through 4th grade and started messing around with BASIC, and thinking about how numbers relate to each other. Once I realized the 9 times table must always just be the 10 times table minus the multiplier, I suddenly found I was able to remember or quickly do all the others since the principle is the same, and more importantly the method was universally helpful: find a simpler problem that's easier to do.
The "math investigations" sound awful, but far too many people get hung up on rote learning multiplication tables as though it magically confers mathematical understanding, whereas it does no such thing, and insistence on it is exactly the type of thing which is to the detriment of actually teaching mathematics.
Python is still a pretty "messy" development environment IMO.
It's insistence on centralizing things into site-packages and the like does not make it very user friendly for the beginner (and packaging Python apps is frustrating).
Javascript has the big benefit that 90% of the functionality is built right into the web browser someone would be using for the Kahn academy. The syntax has plenty of cross-over with more low level languages and you don't spend forever figuring out basic string handling. Probably more importantly - it's what drives all the "cool stuff" on the web. It has the massive benefit that once you start teaching it, people can see something neat and hit "Inspect" in their browser and look at how it was done (once you run the minified code through a formatter of course).
No but when the view shifts around based on the angle of my head relative to the mirror, being able to reference things against the mirror let's me process the information quickly. I find it hard to interpret what I see without being able to see a little of the side of the car. We're talking about something I might do in a glance - so it makes a big difference that I can look and know, rather then look and not be sure. If I have to actually think about it, then it's defeating the point by and large.
The front and rear bumpers I do have trouble knowing there the limits are. I've never been able to internalize it - my feeling for is that they are further away then they are, but it makes a poor correction to simply be thinking "well I can probably go a closer then I think I can".
I don't know why you'd mention the tires - they're inside the profile defined by the side of the car.
Slashdot Mirror
*sigh*
Most types of military capability can act as force multipliers, even if they are incapable of being used in a directly offensive capacity. This is particularly true of anti-ballistic missile defense.
If the US becomes capable of protecting itself from possible Russian or Chinese nuclear missile strikes, then it gains enormous leverage on the global stage: it would be able to dictate the terms of most agreements to any one it wanted to, because their would be no effective check against the direct use of military force. Even if the US population wouldn't brook the use of nuclear weapons against hostile targets, there'd be nothing to stop conventional military from simply seizing whichever assets it wanted to, and then daring the Chinese or Russians to take it back - after all, they won't be able to win the conventional war, and they won't be able to win the nuclear war either.
Of course, nobody sits back and just lets that happen and ABM has predictable consequences: it can only hit so many missiles. So if you're looking to check and protect yourself from US aggression, and you can't develop reliable ABM, you do the next best thing: you build more missiles. A lot more missiles. In fact you keep building missiles until you think you have enough to defeat the missile shield.
What that number is is also something you can't reliably estimate. And due to the defensive nature of ABM, you create another problem - whether or not you depend on it becomes perceptual and untestable. With offensive MAD, you can be sure you're going to get hit somehow. With a defensive posture, there's a very real risk you may have undue confidence in your system when it's not actually that reliable. So now you've got greatly escalating numbers of nuclear missiles in the world to try and check your ABM, but also no way of knowing whether it will actually protect you until it's tested - other then the perception of your leaders in how effective it might be.
It invites disaster from every angle.
No but thermodynamics has some rather stern things to say about how much of that you're going to be able to recover as electricity again, not to mention the considerable issues associated with letting the laser system and optics themselves heat up into any sort of useful temperature for a heat engine.
Fusion has been breaking even thermally for quite some time now.
What it doesn't do is run continuously, which makes practical extraction difficult. But the fact that we've made steady progress towards this goal, and found no physical laws preventing it (instead we have learned a great deal about plasma physics and how it relates to efficient fusion confinement) means we should continue researching it.
Sugar cane also works for Brazil because they don't have nearly as many cars on the road in the first place. There's also the very serious hazard of using arable land to grow fuel rather then food, and the follow on effects that can have on global food prices.
Biofuels are really a non-starter - it's inefficient solar power, with all sorts of limitations and where and how much of it you can use. It also is only an answer for transportation fuel at that. There's no possible way we could satiate our electricity demands using biofuels (when you need 60% of the arable land in the US to manage the oil needs of transportation alone - optimistically).
Fusion research has to be done, no matter the cost, until we either definitely establish it can't be done, or we succeed. Given the positive results that we have that, it seems likely we can succeed - but nothing that complex is ever easy or quick.
Now that would solve the problem entirely.
It's kind of an important issue for making it a general purpose file system, since with things like SSD's and the like you can easily end up suddenly finding yourself wanting to migrate down a size in data capacity. Also the whole "throw disks into the pool" attitude that ZFS takes means you can end up creating non-optimal situation quickly, but have a much harder time backing out of them.
ZFS has no support for resizing or restriping it's RAID pools, or shrinking the storage units.
It's a giant missing feature on an otherwise excellent FS.
Molecular biology is highly sophisticated, highly advanced molecular manufacturing. We are very much nowhere near being able to accomplish anything as impressive, except by hijacking the natural frameworks that already exist and our tools for doing so are ridiculously primitive, really.
It's hard to properly express this to people who haven't interacted with molecular biology, or nanoparticles or surface science, but when you start to appreciate how irritating the problems are (and how blind you are like, 99% of the time to what you've actually made) then you realize that, while we've made staggering amounts of progress, ideas like molecular manufacturing via CAD/CAM seem like their millenia away (they're not, but it is really really hard).
The poster above you is wrong - GPS is effected by relativity, but it's a known effect already compensated for. While I suppose we could start talking about rotational frame dragging as well, that's also a well-studied and well understood effect which can be corrected for. Worst case is that a handheld receiver might not have the computational power to handle it, but nothing about relativity fundamentally prevents using GPS.
Eh, my LED halogen replacements are just fine for me. They're a pleasant warm white, and working great.
EVs have the *potential* of being holistically cleaner, but that depends on a number of factors that your average consumer doesn't think much about. It's very much like CFLs -- it all depends on the implementation. Zero point emission is not the whole story.
You don't need the average consumer to think about or care about the wider ramifications: we know they won't, that's why we have regulation. Minimal impact to them, huge collective benefit for civilization.
Just try it with Gnome Shell or Unity - it doesn't work. You end up in the perverse situation of having a menu suddenly take up an entire 24" screen, which amongst other things shatters your mental "context" for whatever you're working on (and is a nightmare if you're trying to follow instructions on a website, for example).
If people must insist on doing this (and I see no reason to really, since what matter is easy data syncing and app interoperability) then it makes far more sense to build what you need, and figure out a nice, easy to develop for way to map between things. It should be apparent from the web that you can't use one-size fits all interfaces, so I don't know why we need to retread the concept.
Because heat pumps and geothermal heating - both of which are readily available - are far more energy efficient.
As I understand it, it's far less mercury then a coal-powerplant would put into the atmosphere powering an equivalent incandescent lightbulb.
It seems pretty likely that it would be more effective to install a small dehumidifier unit and then silicone up all the cracks in the place.
Space heaters are highly inefficient for the heating domain anyway.
Halogens don't improve on the physics of an incandescent though. The luminous efficiency improvements are due to the fact that the halogen cycle lets you run the lamp hotter, which pushes more of the peak of the black body emitter to where you want it. It's still, fundamentally, a black body emitter.
And I suspect if anybody did a study, they'd find CFLs actually use more energy & increase the carbon footprint more than incandescents, because of the extra energy needed to ship them from China & then drive the dead CFL to a recycling center to dispose of the hazardous mercury.
As opposed to...the energy needed to ship incandescents from China, then drive them in garbage trucks to a landfill site?
It would be similar to how the ACEEE's study showed EVs are no cleaner than a 45mpg gasoline vehicle (and less clean than a natural gas Civic or 88mpg Lupo TDI).
Which completely ignores the fact that electricity is independent of it's energy source, whereas natural gas, diesel and petrol are all fossil fuels which can't be easily substituted.
Or you know, because the 27 km underground tunnel for the particle beams was already there?
Indeed, I know a few people who are working on some commercial software with one. This is kind of a big deal (although the risk that someone made subtle alterations to say, the Linux kernel, is also a very big deal).
6, 12, 18.
I know the sequence off by heart now, although it's largely centered on that "Six Sixes is Thirty Six" which feels like it has symmetry.
I can't go higher then that easily by the same path - 12 * 6 I remember as 12 * 5 + 12, which is notable because it's the first time you cross 10 in the sequence.
It isn't necessary to learn multiplication tables. They are an utterly useless thing to learn. I never learned them - or more importantly, I never learned them by rote. The critical moment for me was well after I'd muddled through 4th grade and started messing around with BASIC, and thinking about how numbers relate to each other. Once I realized the 9 times table must always just be the 10 times table minus the multiplier, I suddenly found I was able to remember or quickly do all the others since the principle is the same, and more importantly the method was universally helpful: find a simpler problem that's easier to do.
The "math investigations" sound awful, but far too many people get hung up on rote learning multiplication tables as though it magically confers mathematical understanding, whereas it does no such thing, and insistence on it is exactly the type of thing which is to the detriment of actually teaching mathematics.
Soon to boom - questions about generating PGP certificates
This would be an overall good thing for the world. We want more people using strong encryption, using Tor, and so on.
Python is still a pretty "messy" development environment IMO.
It's insistence on centralizing things into site-packages and the like does not make it very user friendly for the beginner (and packaging Python apps is frustrating).
Javascript has the big benefit that 90% of the functionality is built right into the web browser someone would be using for the Kahn academy. The syntax has plenty of cross-over with more low level languages and you don't spend forever figuring out basic string handling. Probably more importantly - it's what drives all the "cool stuff" on the web. It has the massive benefit that once you start teaching it, people can see something neat and hit "Inspect" in their browser and look at how it was done (once you run the minified code through a formatter of course).
No but when the view shifts around based on the angle of my head relative to the mirror, being able to reference things against the mirror let's me process the information quickly. I find it hard to interpret what I see without being able to see a little of the side of the car. We're talking about something I might do in a glance - so it makes a big difference that I can look and know, rather then look and not be sure. If I have to actually think about it, then it's defeating the point by and large.
The front and rear bumpers I do have trouble knowing there the limits are. I've never been able to internalize it - my feeling for is that they are further away then they are, but it makes a poor correction to simply be thinking "well I can probably go a closer then I think I can".
I don't know why you'd mention the tires - they're inside the profile defined by the side of the car.
Actually a good portion of it is going to the stockholders of insurance companies.