This does fall into the xkcd encryption scenario trap though. Pakistan is doing this because they really don't *need* any particularly compelling reason to get rid of you if they decide they don't like you.
All these information hiding exercises fail once you don't have to deal with rational actors making accusations anymore.
Probably most important to note is that the abstract suggests a minimum density of 23 g cm-3. Wikipedia's value for diamond density is 3.5 g cm-3.
This object is close to an order of magnitude more dense then diamond. Interestingly (since I was looking things up) - Osmium, the densest naturally occurring element is 22.59 g cm-3 (at room temperature, according to wikipedia).
Of course, this object is a gravity well in it's own right so I really doubt it's very homogenous in composition.
2700 people may have died, but what about the wounded? And we're not talking "guy got shot, made complete recovery" we're talking "missing legs, arms, faces". In Iraq alone the official number is over 33,000 and quite possibly a good deal higher.
PulseAudio isn't a bad concept, it's just that it doesn't work properly for far too many people. But the widespread adoption of tablet, smartphone and other "slim computing" devices does kind of speak to a need for a software-agnostic way to stream audio from server to client - requiring every application that wants to do this to implement streaming isn't a very sensible solution to the problem IMO.
75,000 years is a time longer then any advanced human civilization has ever existed on this planet. Even assuming continuous human civilization over this period, this is a timeframe representing very gradual change - longer then lifetimes, long enough to allow for population migration in a natural way.
Contrast to the current predictions: within a 100 years we could be looking at ecosystem collapses in the ocean, radical changes in farmland viability and seasonal flooding patterns. People alive today will still be alive when these changes happen - people living on the land today will watch it become unproductive over the course of a few decades.
There's no realistic way we can smoothly adapt to that sort of change. The farmland of the Roman empire became unproductive over the course of a few hundred years - yet that still was more then enough (amongst a few other factors) to set it up for a radical restructuring (fall).
Depends on what "rather small" is measured relative to. The atmosphere is rather large - even lifting a few tons of material up that high is considerably difficult. The U-2 and Global Hawk are both almost entirely engine, wing and fuel.
If you're a scientist then you'd know to do some reading before making any claims. If you think CO2's warming capability is the heat capacity of CO2 gas, then you're actually less informed then most climate skeptics. Or you know, sixth graders.
Trees emit CO2 at night during respiration processes.
They are not self-replicating CO2 sponges.
More importantly, land-clearing means there are less and less of them. While most of our oxygen comes from sea plankton, there's no convincing argument that on the whole we're increasing the biospheres CO2 adsorption capacity.
At present. But in a future likely to have more small-scale generators with predictable but not controllable outputs (i.e. solar and wind, dispersed across a nation, don't change output so quickly that the grid couldn't cycle to compensate but that does require monitoring and control networks) not to mention the eventual development of grid-scale energy storage (superconducting rings, flow batteries, pumped hydro etc.) a smart grid is a good investment to make sure those technologies can be leveraged in the future.
I'm not really sure if this is something that's ever going to take off. It's a nice idea but it's fraught with problems - EVs in the near term are still going to have some principle limitations regarding the cycle-life of their batteries. While running within the margins (80% of capacity, give or take) extends this a lot, I'm not sure anyone wants to find out how far that can be pushed just for the benefit of the electricity company.
The fact that the DNA in your head, or indeed the individual neurons, are not 13 cm's long really hasn't factored into your equations has it?
So what's the danger? What's the mechanism? You could be, I suppose, inducing electrical potential over long neural pathways. Of course, since your brain's entire mechanism of action involves doing exactly that...
Gamma radiation, and the various particles, only cause cancer by causing direct damage to nucleic acid bases, which, do it enough times frequently eventually results in cancer-mutations overcoming the bodies ability to correct and/or murder pre-cancer cells.
Microwave radiation (cellphones) can't do this - it's just not absorbed by nucleic acids, it does not excite atoms and cannot cause chemical (covalent) bonds to be created/broken. Now that said, it is absorbed by water (and other atoms), but it's absorbed as molecular vibrations - heat, hence your microwave oven. But its not like this is a unique process - IR radiation heats your body in the same way, and can penetrate the skin to quite a degree, so there's no unique properties there (and you absorb a ton more IR then microwaves) - and the temperatures required to break chemical bonds are far higher then anything remotely survivable.
We've had a decade of study of cellphone and related EM radiation and cancer, and no one has managed to show a causal link between the two. To my knowledge no one has even shown that genetic damage can be caused by microwave frequency radiation in vitro.
The problem is wind can't ensure baseload power. You can say "it never stops blowing" - but how low does it dip? Because that's the minimum you have to assume *will* happen. Which means you have to make up the loss with something else. It's practical for generators with a short startup time like coal and gas, but if you want to go no carbon then you pretty much can't even bother with wind at the moment. There's no practical, grid-scale load-levelling technology.
The Carnot limit only applies to heat engines. It doesn't apply to electronics or electrochemical systems.
So if you wrapped a Carnot engine in these, and added an electric motor booster to it's output, the system is no longer a Carnot engine, you've now got a hybrid (and can have much higher efficiency).
Conversely, grid computing time is - comparatively - "cheap". Purely from an academic perspective, it would be an interesting effort simply to see what happens mathematically when such an optimization is attempted since trialling a solution that was essentially "objective" in how it approached optimization might reveal some surprising results.
Why would this be a natural outcome of simplifying the tax code? The mathematical side of determining taxable income [i]is negligible[/i].
The hard part has always been defining "what is income" acceptably, and in such a way that it doesn't lead to massive gaming of the system - hence all the random outcomes.
Only an idiot would suggest that the best possible tax code is the one where taking the input income and determining the taxable income takes the least amount of literal computing time. It suggests that you have grossly misunderstood the problem.
You don't get rich by being taxed more then the rich. You don't get rich by having your education prospects progressively underfunded and devalued, or by losing your house and savings from having life-threatening medical conditions treated while you're not rich yourself, perhaps also interrupting and removing any future you might have going to college or blacklisting you from actually holding *any* employment if you happen to get cancer but survive cancer.
But you're right - it's people's own faults that they don't will themselves out of contracting hereditary cancer, or that their school has overcrowded classrooms and poor curriculum's, or that they can't afford after taxes and expenses to pursue educational opportunities. It's *much* more important that they help save money on those things now, so they'll be even richer when they get rich!
The rich generally depend on the enforcement of contracts, the protection of the police and military, fire services, education and employment, roads etc.
Sans society, the wealth of the rich is worth only as much as it's worth in some other society, to which they will need to flee just as fast as they can. Which might be a little bit hard, since absolutely everyone around them is suddenly going to be negotiating in terms of "pay me a $10 million or I guess you'll just happen to miss your flight and then you can negotiate with Big Larry and the Hellfire gang about the rightful owners of your estate mansion".
Just saying something is fair, doesn't make it so, and taking 20% of the poor man's disposable income but only 12% of the rich man's is pretty unfair, not to mention, economically counter-productive.
The funny thing is, nothing that you said sounds like a bad idea to me outside of having stuff constantly alert me about itself. Why shouldn't all those things have some form of networked intelligence built into them?
I'd very much like my soap dispenser to automatically add an item to my shopping list when it's running low.
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This does fall into the xkcd encryption scenario trap though. Pakistan is doing this because they really don't *need* any particularly compelling reason to get rid of you if they decide they don't like you.
All these information hiding exercises fail once you don't have to deal with rational actors making accusations anymore.
Fahrenheit is "more accurate" in the sense that less temperature change corresponds with the translation of more integral units.
Which I guess is important if you hate decimal points?
Probably most important to note is that the abstract suggests a minimum density of 23 g cm-3. Wikipedia's value for diamond density is 3.5 g cm-3.
This object is close to an order of magnitude more dense then diamond. Interestingly (since I was looking things up) - Osmium, the densest naturally occurring element is 22.59 g cm-3 (at room temperature, according to wikipedia).
Of course, this object is a gravity well in it's own right so I really doubt it's very homogenous in composition.
Or you know, an electric mower.
Which leads to ocean acidification which damages marine ecosystems and in turn exacerbates the depletion of fish stocks.
2700 people may have died, but what about the wounded? And we're not talking "guy got shot, made complete recovery" we're talking "missing legs, arms, faces". In Iraq alone the official number is over 33,000 and quite possibly a good deal higher.
Yeah we're going to have real problems with economic growth. The age of 100% efficient industrial processes was pretty revolutionary when it happened.
PulseAudio isn't a bad concept, it's just that it doesn't work properly for far too many people. But the widespread adoption of tablet, smartphone and other "slim computing" devices does kind of speak to a need for a software-agnostic way to stream audio from server to client - requiring every application that wants to do this to implement streaming isn't a very sensible solution to the problem IMO.
75,000 years is a time longer then any advanced human civilization has ever existed on this planet. Even assuming continuous human civilization over this period, this is a timeframe representing very gradual change - longer then lifetimes, long enough to allow for population migration in a natural way.
Contrast to the current predictions: within a 100 years we could be looking at ecosystem collapses in the ocean, radical changes in farmland viability and seasonal flooding patterns. People alive today will still be alive when these changes happen - people living on the land today will watch it become unproductive over the course of a few decades.
There's no realistic way we can smoothly adapt to that sort of change. The farmland of the Roman empire became unproductive over the course of a few hundred years - yet that still was more then enough (amongst a few other factors) to set it up for a radical restructuring (fall).
Depends on what "rather small" is measured relative to. The atmosphere is rather large - even lifting a few tons of material up that high is considerably difficult. The U-2 and Global Hawk are both almost entirely engine, wing and fuel.
If you're a scientist then you'd know to do some reading before making any claims. If you think CO2's warming capability is the heat capacity of CO2 gas, then you're actually less informed then most climate skeptics. Or you know, sixth graders.
Trees emit CO2 at night during respiration processes.
They are not self-replicating CO2 sponges.
More importantly, land-clearing means there are less and less of them. While most of our oxygen comes from sea plankton, there's no convincing argument that on the whole we're increasing the biospheres CO2 adsorption capacity.
At present. But in a future likely to have more small-scale generators with predictable but not controllable outputs (i.e. solar and wind, dispersed across a nation, don't change output so quickly that the grid couldn't cycle to compensate but that does require monitoring and control networks) not to mention the eventual development of grid-scale energy storage (superconducting rings, flow batteries, pumped hydro etc.) a smart grid is a good investment to make sure those technologies can be leveraged in the future.
I'm not really sure if this is something that's ever going to take off. It's a nice idea but it's fraught with problems - EVs in the near term are still going to have some principle limitations regarding the cycle-life of their batteries. While running within the margins (80% of capacity, give or take) extends this a lot, I'm not sure anyone wants to find out how far that can be pushed just for the benefit of the electricity company.
Yeah it's not like there are any important applications dependent on us understanding the fundamental laws of the universe.
The fact that the DNA in your head, or indeed the individual neurons, are not 13 cm's long really hasn't factored into your equations has it?
So what's the danger? What's the mechanism? You could be, I suppose, inducing electrical potential over long neural pathways. Of course, since your brain's entire mechanism of action involves doing exactly that...
Wouldn't matter if we did.
Gamma radiation, and the various particles, only cause cancer by causing direct damage to nucleic acid bases, which, do it enough times frequently eventually results in cancer-mutations overcoming the bodies ability to correct and/or murder pre-cancer cells.
Microwave radiation (cellphones) can't do this - it's just not absorbed by nucleic acids, it does not excite atoms and cannot cause chemical (covalent) bonds to be created/broken. Now that said, it is absorbed by water (and other atoms), but it's absorbed as molecular vibrations - heat, hence your microwave oven. But its not like this is a unique process - IR radiation heats your body in the same way, and can penetrate the skin to quite a degree, so there's no unique properties there (and you absorb a ton more IR then microwaves) - and the temperatures required to break chemical bonds are far higher then anything remotely survivable.
We've had a decade of study of cellphone and related EM radiation and cancer, and no one has managed to show a causal link between the two. To my knowledge no one has even shown that genetic damage can be caused by microwave frequency radiation in vitro.
The problem is wind can't ensure baseload power. You can say "it never stops blowing" - but how low does it dip? Because that's the minimum you have to assume *will* happen. Which means you have to make up the loss with something else. It's practical for generators with a short startup time like coal and gas, but if you want to go no carbon then you pretty much can't even bother with wind at the moment. There's no practical, grid-scale load-levelling technology.
The Carnot limit only applies to heat engines. It doesn't apply to electronics or electrochemical systems.
So if you wrapped a Carnot engine in these, and added an electric motor booster to it's output, the system is no longer a Carnot engine, you've now got a hybrid (and can have much higher efficiency).
Conversely, grid computing time is - comparatively - "cheap". Purely from an academic perspective, it would be an interesting effort simply to see what happens mathematically when such an optimization is attempted since trialling a solution that was essentially "objective" in how it approached optimization might reveal some surprising results.
Why would this be a natural outcome of simplifying the tax code? The mathematical side of determining taxable income [i]is negligible[/i].
The hard part has always been defining "what is income" acceptably, and in such a way that it doesn't lead to massive gaming of the system - hence all the random outcomes.
Only an idiot would suggest that the best possible tax code is the one where taking the input income and determining the taxable income takes the least amount of literal computing time. It suggests that you have grossly misunderstood the problem.
You don't get rich by being taxed more then the rich. You don't get rich by having your education prospects progressively underfunded and devalued, or by losing your house and savings from having life-threatening medical conditions treated while you're not rich yourself, perhaps also interrupting and removing any future you might have going to college or blacklisting you from actually holding *any* employment if you happen to get cancer but survive cancer.
But you're right - it's people's own faults that they don't will themselves out of contracting hereditary cancer, or that their school has overcrowded classrooms and poor curriculum's, or that they can't afford after taxes and expenses to pursue educational opportunities. It's *much* more important that they help save money on those things now, so they'll be even richer when they get rich!
The rich generally depend on the enforcement of contracts, the protection of the police and military, fire services, education and employment, roads etc.
Sans society, the wealth of the rich is worth only as much as it's worth in some other society, to which they will need to flee just as fast as they can. Which might be a little bit hard, since absolutely everyone around them is suddenly going to be negotiating in terms of "pay me a $10 million or I guess you'll just happen to miss your flight and then you can negotiate with Big Larry and the Hellfire gang about the rightful owners of your estate mansion".
No it's definitely you.
Just saying something is fair, doesn't make it so, and taking 20% of the poor man's disposable income but only 12% of the rich man's is pretty unfair, not to mention, economically counter-productive.
The funny thing is, nothing that you said sounds like a bad idea to me outside of having stuff constantly alert me about itself. Why shouldn't all those things have some form of networked intelligence built into them?
I'd very much like my soap dispenser to automatically add an item to my shopping list when it's running low.