The Trump administration on Monday proposed rules that would allow drones...
This immediately primes a bunch of people to look for fault with the rules, and another bunch of people to ignore any possible faults with the rules. Why not say "The FAA on Monday..."?
Is this something driven by political office holders/appointees, or is it just the FAA doing its job and modernizing its rules as best it can? Technically anything federal government does can be attributed to the Trump administration, but it is misleading to make this attribution unless the action was directed by someone at the Whitehouse.
The TFA does say
In 2017, President Donald Trump launched a program to expand testing of drones in what the White House said would “open the skies for delivery of life-saving medicines and commercial packages (and) inspections of critical infrastructure.”
This is some justification for bringing the administration into it, but without more information I'm left wondering how much influence this program had on the proposed rules. Does anyone have information to show a connection?
This really is a return to its roots for advance fee scams. A famous 19th century version of the scam was the Spanish prisoner. A wealthy person is imprisoned, needs a little bit of cash to escape, and will reward you afterwards.
Where is its safe initial aim point when doing a return to launch site (RLS) on the west coast? Is the landing site close enough to the coast for this also to be at sea?
The west coast launch a couple of days ago could have done RLS, but was not allowed to because another rocket was readying for launch on another pad, and they didn't want an unexpected booster falling on them. I expect (justified or not) this event will reinforce that worry.
Paternal leakage would almost always cause heteroplasmy (unless the father happened to have the same mitochondrial genome as the mother.) Sequencing can indeed detect biparental inheritance.
If an individual was heteroplasmic due to paternal leakage when they were conceived, and the individual was female, she could pass this heteroplasmy to her children. There is a 'bottleneck' in mitochondrial genome number per cell, and if those genomes are randomly chosen from the mother's heterplasmic selection, the proportion of the two alleles will randomly shift. The smaller the bottleneck, the greater this random change will be.
I'm a coauthor on some papers looking at mitochondrial heteroplasmy where I was doing the maths to figure out the size of this bottleneck. (In penguins, about 30, in salmon, about 100 - but uncertainty was quite large, I think about 30%.) As I recall, different organisms can have quite different bottleneck sizes, and I think human bottleneck is quite small. (I haven't looked this up, so don't rely on it.) This means it would likely be only a few generations before the heteroplasmy resolved itself (one of the alleles would 'fix')
Modern sequencing techniques could not only very accurately measure the heteroplasmy proportions, it could also detect whether some sequences had undergone recombination, as it can give separate reads of thousands of individual DNA strands. The data I was working with used older 'Sanger' sequencing and could only give approximate averages over many strands.
Only to a limited extent. It depends on how often this happens, and whether mitochondrial recombination is a thing.
"Normal" (nuclear) DNA undergoes recombination: there are two (not quite identical) copies of the genome, and bits get swapped between the copies, so a chromosome you got from your mum has bits that came from both of your maternal grandparents.
It is hard to know whether this process also happens in mitochondria, because the mitochondrial genomes seldom differ, and when they do, it is very likely they do so at only one place. If there is no mitochondrial recombination, then all mitochondrial genomes are inherited strictly from one parent, one grandparent, one great-grandparent etc. Mitochondrial Eve holds up fine, it is just that now those mitochondrial lineages very rarely are inherited through a male. The ancestry is still strictly a tree, where a 'parent' may have multiple 'children', but a 'child' has only on 'parent'. ('Child' and 'parent' here are individual mitochondrial genomes.)
I know there is research into mitochondrial recombination, but I don't know the field well enough to comment on the conclusions of this research.
Once you have recombination, the tree breaks down, and two mitochondrial lineages can merge together into a hybrid. However, if this is very rare (as seems to be the case) then the tree rooted at Mitochondrial Eve is still a very good approximation. In particular, it is still very likely that the entire sequences of all modern human mitochondria are descended from the mitochondria of a single woman.
I came here to point out that the summary is rather overstating the case, but your link does a much better job of it than I could.
The concept of paternal inheritance of mitochondria is sufficiently known to science that it has a term to describe it: "paternal leakage". It is something which has been observed in a number of organisms, although I think it is always rare. (As I recall, interspecies hybrids are more prone to paternal leakage, so sometimes what you observe in the lab may not be happening in nature.)
I'm at home, so I don't have institutional access to read the paper, but from the abstract and the blog post above, it looks like an exciting result - just not as exciting as the media reporting makes out. This is like finding a species suspected to have been extinct for a few decades, rather than being like finding the Loch Ness Monster.
If Blue Origin develop New Glenn into a heavy variant (three cores) and if BFR doesn't happen as planned, they'll be the only cheap option for getting very heavy payloads into space, and can make a profit if lots of people decide they want to take advantage of this by designing very heavy payloads. There were a whole lot of 'if's in there.
FH has similar capabilities to NG, is already flying, has hardware proven by 60 launches, and has construction facilities optimized during the building of >60 rockets. Both rockets expend their second stage, but FH's second stage is smaller, so I expect is cheaper.
Few current payloads require the capability of FH or NG. Where SpaceX can offer F9 for smaller payloads, NG is all or nothing. Even if both rockets were equally mature in manufacturing and launch experience, I think the F9/FH combo would be more economic than NG.
If NG turns out cheaper than FH and the market reacts by building many payloads requiring NG or FH, then NG may turn out OK in the long term - but nobody would have been committing serious money to building such payloads prior to FH's test launch, so they are years away still.
Blue Origins huge advantage is they have very deep pockets behind them. If NG flies, recovering R&D costs is optional. Unless Musk cashes out of Tesla, SpaceX has to pay for R&D as they go.
When I was near finishing my PhD, I had my most recent backup close to hand, an older backup in another building, and a still older (but only a month or so) backup in a different city. I wasn't going to lose my thesis to no house fire or meteor strike.
There are many companies hoping to compete in this market. Starting from this wikipedia page, I find
(rocket, company, country, first or planned first launch date, payload to low Earth orbit) Operational: Kuaizhou 1A, ExPace, China, 2017, 300kg Electron, Rocket Lab, New Zealand and USA, 2018, 225kg Zhuque-1, Landspace Technology, China, 2018, 300kg
In development: OS-M2, OneSpace, China, 2018, 205kg Vector-R, Vector Launch, USA, 2018, 60kg Vector-H, Vector Launch, USA, 2019, 160kg SSLV, ISRO, India, 2019, 500kg Bloostar, Zero 2 Infinity, Spain, 2019, 140kg Hyperbola-1, i-Space, China, 2019, 300kg Arion 2, PLD Space, Spain, 2021, 150kg
I think there are a few more too. Payloads are not necessarily to the same orbit, so are only an approximate comparison of capability. I haven't fact checked this list. Future launch dates are of course speculative.
According to Wikipedia: Founded 2006 in New Zealand by a New Zealander, and funded by another New Zealander. They launched a sounding rocket in 2009, proving their rocket design. First outside funding mentioned was in 2013. (I take no responsibility for Wikipedia's potted history being complete or accurate.)
I'm sure that once the money came along, so did extra expertise, so it isn't 100% New Zealand innovation, but that is where the big steps were taken.
Rocket Lab wants to be in the small-sat launch market. They've recently opened a new factory to build lots of Electron rockets. They've been announcing plans for new launch sites for the Electron. They are making no moves to build bigger rockets.
The strategy you propose, to emulate SpaceX by making a few small-sat launchers and then shifting to large satellites, looks to me to be crazy, because the large satellite market is already dominated by a successful disrupter (SpaceX) and is being competed for by some very deep pockets (Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos).
Many companies are aiming at the small-sat market. It makes much more sense to me to believe they are attempting what they say they are attempting - competing in the small-sat market - than to believe they have a pipe dream of out competing SpaceX on their home turf, with very limited resources.
The Chinese company may be an exception - they may have (or believe they have) a protected Chinese market.
I neither agree nor disagree with your business case analysis, as I have no relevant expertise.
I don't know what their long term goals are, but this rocket is competition with Rocket Lab's Electron rocket, not SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.
Zhuque: (alternative news source) Mass at launch 27 tonnes, 300 kg payload to 300 km LEO or 200 kg to 500 km sun synchronous orbit.
Electron: Mass at launch 10.5 tonnes, 150-225 kg payload to 500 km sun synchronous orbit
Falcon 9: Mass at launch 549 tonnes, 22,800 kg payload to LEO in expendable mode.
There are about a dozen companies looking to compete in this ~200kg payload market. Rocket Lab are in the lead at the start of this race, but there is still a long way to go.
Interesting point. I suspect there is a fair bit of flexibility in the system - stuff that we could turn into kerosene with a bit more processing, but currently don't because there is a market for it in it current form; also possibilities that we could fuel jets with alternative hydrocarbons - I think the turbines could easily take anything which is liquid, low viscosity, and burns easily.
There is serious money from serious airplane companies going into researching electric (battery) aircraft, but in the foreseeable future this might be your 50 seater commuter plane doing a one hour hop, it won't be a long haul flight.
Responding to grandparent post: I don't think the prospect of fuel dumping has any significant effect on the fuel loading decisions. They load enough fuel to reach the destination plus extra for contingencies (I think typically enough for 90 minutes of holding plus time to fly to alternate landing airport, sometimes more if weather delays seem likely.)
So safety sets a lower limit, and economics discourages you from loading any more than that limit. If you have too much fuel, you need to use more fuel to keep it in the air. A number I remember (not reliable) is about 3% per hour. So if two jets identical except in fuel load fly for 10 hours, the plane which started with 1000kg more fuel will end up with only 700kg more fuel. (Yes, there are circumstance where you might load extra fuel, especially for short haul flights.)
I am not a lawyer, but there is something called a "declaratory judgement". You could think of a declaratory judgement as being about something that could happen but hasn't yet.
Wikipedia: A declaratory judgment, also called a declaration, is the legal determination of a court that resolves legal uncertainty for the litigants. It is a form of legally binding preventive adjudication by which a party involved in an actual or possible legal matter can ask a court to conclusively rule on and affirm the rights, duties, or obligations of one or more parties in a civil dispute...
I'm your neighbour, and for years I've been yelling at you about how your driveway goes over my land, and that I'm going to sue you one of these days sonny boy see if I don't. You think I'm full of crap and would have no case. Now you want to do an expensive paving job on your driveway. The scenario you fear is: you pay lots of money for the job, then I get annoyed and actually get around to suing, and to your surprise I win, and you have to tear up the expensive job and have it redone. If you could be guaranteed I'd sue you in the near future, it would be fine: you'd fight the case, and at the end you'd know exactly what you could or could not do. But I'll probably never sue, so you face the prospect of never paving your driveway.
The declaratory judgement allows you to force this case into court, even though you are not the putatively wronged party. You ask the court to make a declaratory judgement that your driveway is not on my land, and then the court finds either for you or for me, and either way you have clarity.
So rather than waiting for Trump to use the text alert and then sue him for inappropriate use, you might seek a declaratory judgement as to what an appropriate use is. As mentioned above, I am not a lawyer, so I don't know whether this falls within the stuff you can get a declaratory judgement over.
In a 1951 or 1952 magnetic audio recording (Tape? We didn't have new-fangled tape! We made do with WIRE!) Tom Lehrer sings about how to cheat with a slide-rule.
Sometimes you need an answer to a question and population statistics and correlation are all that you can use.
"I propose to raise 200 kids identically except with 100 kids getting to live in polluted air and 100 control kids in clean air, and then we'll give them IQ tests and stuff when they are 20."
Research funder: "It would take 20 years to get an answer? No funds for you. We have decisions we need to make NOW." Then, should it somehow get that far: Ethics committee: "Hell, no."
So instead you make a list of every confounding factor you can think of (maybe being poor causes lower intelligence, and poor people often have no choice but to live in polluted areas, so you measure household income during childhood for your cohort), do a big multi-dimensional regression, and see what factors influence the result.
This isn't perfect - in particular, there might be an important factor that you didn't think of, or is too hard to measure, which correlates with pollution level. In the end, you have decisions to make (how much should we spend to mitigate air pollution?) and it is daft to refuse to do population statistics studies because you could only be 98% confident in their results rather than 100% confident.
Also, such studies are usually just part of the answer. There are also studies looking for plausibility of mechanisms. One group shows that certain pollutants can get from the air into blood. Another group shows that these chemicals can cross the blood-brain barrier. Another group shows that these chemical interact with neurotransmitters. The population study shows pollution having an adverse effect on intelligence. Put all this together and you have a plausible causal story.
We also don't have randomized controlled doubly blinded trials of the health effects of smoking, or of having a parachute when jumping out of an airplane.
I was taught to use log and trig tables at high school, although everyone had a calculator so this was a case of the curriculum not having caught up with current needs. I wasn't taught slide rule, but I taught myself. With a slide rule, Sine Rule calculations are nearly as easy as a multiplication or division - I could do them much faster than the folks using calculators (although with lower precision.) For Cosine Rule, they are not so useful.
Key points: * This had been discussed with the board before the announcement * The board agreed that the next step was to discuss with large shareholders. * It would be unfair for the big shareholders to know of this proposal but not the small shareholders, hence a public announcement. (It isn't clear to me whether the board specifically agreed to this announcement, or whether Musk felt it was a logical consequence of the previous point.) * "Funding secured" means the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund has been eager to do this for quite some time, although Musk would like there to be other investors too.
I feel somewhat but not completely reassured by this explanation.
One ton of rock to absorb half a ton of CO2. One ton of carbon burns to produce nearly 4 tons of CO2 (C mass 12, CO2 mass 44) So for every ton of coal you mine and burn, you'll need to mine about 7 tons of ultramafic rock to absorb it - and this is before we consider the energy requirements of the mining and reacting of the rock.
It is important to voting integrity that you not be able to prove to anyone else how you voted. Otherwise people can buy votes, and check that the voter has followed through before paying up - or abusive parents/spouses can demand a voter vote in a particular way and punish them if they didn't.
In a perfect system, everyone can see what the votes are (so they can verify the count), everyone who voted can see that their votes are included in the tally correctly, and yet they can also provide fake proof of a different vote to anyone trying to influence them, such that this influencer has no way to know whether the provided proof is fake or not. Also, you need to separate votes in different races for the public record - otherwise Influencer can supply a 'how to vote' card with a distinctive pattern of votes in races the influence doesn't care about, but can be used to prove the voter voted as demanded.
I've seen some amazingly clever uses of cryptographic methods, so I wouldn't say this is impossible, but it certainly is hard.
The TPP trade deal was negotiated over many years in great secrecy while denying the elected representatives of the negotiating nations the chance to see what was being negotiated on their behalf.
In the end, Trump refused to sign on, and the deal morphed into the CPTPP, an agreement between the non-USA members of the TPP, with a bunch of USA-insisted-on provisions being 'suspended'. CPTPP is not in force yet but looks like it is happening.
I am not at all an expert on any of this stuff. Corrections are welcome.
Slashdot Mirror
The TFA starts:
The Trump administration on Monday proposed rules that would allow drones ...
This immediately primes a bunch of people to look for fault with the rules, and another bunch of people to ignore any possible faults with the rules. Why not say "The FAA on Monday ..."?
Is this something driven by political office holders/appointees, or is it just the FAA doing its job and modernizing its rules as best it can? Technically anything federal government does can be attributed to the Trump administration, but it is misleading to make this attribution unless the action was directed by someone at the Whitehouse.
The TFA does say
In 2017, President Donald Trump launched a program to expand testing of drones in what the White House said would “open the skies for delivery of life-saving medicines and commercial packages (and) inspections of critical infrastructure.”
This is some justification for bringing the administration into it, but without more information I'm left wondering how much influence this program had on the proposed rules. Does anyone have information to show a connection?
This really is a return to its roots for advance fee scams. A famous 19th century version of the scam was the Spanish prisoner. A wealthy person is imprisoned, needs a little bit of cash to escape, and will reward you afterwards.
Where is its safe initial aim point when doing a return to launch site (RLS) on the west coast? Is the landing site close enough to the coast for this also to be at sea?
The west coast launch a couple of days ago could have done RLS, but was not allowed to because another rocket was readying for launch on another pad, and they didn't want an unexpected booster falling on them. I expect (justified or not) this event will reinforce that worry.
Paternal leakage would almost always cause heteroplasmy (unless the father happened to have the same mitochondrial genome as the mother.) Sequencing can indeed detect biparental inheritance.
If an individual was heteroplasmic due to paternal leakage when they were conceived, and the individual was female, she could pass this heteroplasmy to her children. There is a 'bottleneck' in mitochondrial genome number per cell, and if those genomes are randomly chosen from the mother's heterplasmic selection, the proportion of the two alleles will randomly shift. The smaller the bottleneck, the greater this random change will be.
I'm a coauthor on some papers looking at mitochondrial heteroplasmy where I was doing the maths to figure out the size of this bottleneck. (In penguins, about 30, in salmon, about 100 - but uncertainty was quite large, I think about 30%.) As I recall, different organisms can have quite different bottleneck sizes, and I think human bottleneck is quite small. (I haven't looked this up, so don't rely on it.) This means it would likely be only a few generations before the heteroplasmy resolved itself (one of the alleles would 'fix')
Modern sequencing techniques could not only very accurately measure the heteroplasmy proportions, it could also detect whether some sequences had undergone recombination, as it can give separate reads of thousands of individual DNA strands. The data I was working with used older 'Sanger' sequencing and could only give approximate averages over many strands.
Only to a limited extent. It depends on how often this happens, and whether mitochondrial recombination is a thing.
"Normal" (nuclear) DNA undergoes recombination: there are two (not quite identical) copies of the genome, and bits get swapped between the copies, so a chromosome you got from your mum has bits that came from both of your maternal grandparents.
It is hard to know whether this process also happens in mitochondria, because the mitochondrial genomes seldom differ, and when they do, it is very likely they do so at only one place. If there is no mitochondrial recombination, then all mitochondrial genomes are inherited strictly from one parent, one grandparent, one great-grandparent etc. Mitochondrial Eve holds up fine, it is just that now those mitochondrial lineages very rarely are inherited through a male. The ancestry is still strictly a tree, where a 'parent' may have multiple 'children', but a 'child' has only on 'parent'. ('Child' and 'parent' here are individual mitochondrial genomes.)
I know there is research into mitochondrial recombination, but I don't know the field well enough to comment on the conclusions of this research.
Once you have recombination, the tree breaks down, and two mitochondrial lineages can merge together into a hybrid. However, if this is very rare (as seems to be the case) then the tree rooted at Mitochondrial Eve is still a very good approximation. In particular, it is still very likely that the entire sequences of all modern human mitochondria are descended from the mitochondria of a single woman.
I came here to point out that the summary is rather overstating the case, but your link does a much better job of it than I could.
The concept of paternal inheritance of mitochondria is sufficiently known to science that it has a term to describe it: "paternal leakage". It is something which has been observed in a number of organisms, although I think it is always rare. (As I recall, interspecies hybrids are more prone to paternal leakage, so sometimes what you observe in the lab may not be happening in nature.)
I'm at home, so I don't have institutional access to read the paper, but from the abstract and the blog post above, it looks like an exciting result - just not as exciting as the media reporting makes out. This is like finding a species suspected to have been extinct for a few decades, rather than being like finding the Loch Ness Monster.
If Blue Origin develop New Glenn into a heavy variant (three cores) and if BFR doesn't happen as planned, they'll be the only cheap option for getting very heavy payloads into space, and can make a profit if lots of people decide they want to take advantage of this by designing very heavy payloads. There were a whole lot of 'if's in there.
FH has similar capabilities to NG, is already flying, has hardware proven by 60 launches, and has construction facilities optimized during the building of >60 rockets. Both rockets expend their second stage, but FH's second stage is smaller, so I expect is cheaper.
Few current payloads require the capability of FH or NG. Where SpaceX can offer F9 for smaller payloads, NG is all or nothing. Even if both rockets were equally mature in manufacturing and launch experience, I think the F9/FH combo would be more economic than NG.
If NG turns out cheaper than FH and the market reacts by building many payloads requiring NG or FH, then NG may turn out OK in the long term - but nobody would have been committing serious money to building such payloads prior to FH's test launch, so they are years away still.
Blue Origins huge advantage is they have very deep pockets behind them. If NG flies, recovering R&D costs is optional. Unless Musk cashes out of Tesla, SpaceX has to pay for R&D as they go.
When I was near finishing my PhD, I had my most recent backup close to hand, an older backup in another building, and a still older (but only a month or so) backup in a different city. I wasn't going to lose my thesis to no house fire or meteor strike.
There are many companies hoping to compete in this market. Starting from this wikipedia page, I find
(rocket, company, country, first or planned first launch date, payload to low Earth orbit)
Operational:
Kuaizhou 1A, ExPace, China, 2017, 300kg
Electron, Rocket Lab, New Zealand and USA, 2018, 225kg
Zhuque-1, Landspace Technology, China, 2018, 300kg
In development:
OS-M2, OneSpace, China, 2018, 205kg
Vector-R, Vector Launch, USA, 2018, 60kg
Vector-H, Vector Launch, USA, 2019, 160kg
SSLV, ISRO, India, 2019, 500kg
Bloostar, Zero 2 Infinity, Spain, 2019, 140kg
Hyperbola-1, i-Space, China, 2019, 300kg
Arion 2, PLD Space, Spain, 2021, 150kg
I think there are a few more too. Payloads are not necessarily to the same orbit, so are only an approximate comparison of capability. I haven't fact checked this list. Future launch dates are of course speculative.
New Zealand innovation, California money.
According to Wikipedia: Founded 2006 in New Zealand by a New Zealander, and funded by another New Zealander. They launched a sounding rocket in 2009, proving their rocket design. First outside funding mentioned was in 2013. (I take no responsibility for Wikipedia's potted history being complete or accurate.)
I'm sure that once the money came along, so did extra expertise, so it isn't 100% New Zealand innovation, but that is where the big steps were taken.
Rocket Lab wants to be in the small-sat launch market. They've recently opened a new factory to build lots of Electron rockets. They've been announcing plans for new launch sites for the Electron. They are making no moves to build bigger rockets.
The strategy you propose, to emulate SpaceX by making a few small-sat launchers and then shifting to large satellites, looks to me to be crazy, because the large satellite market is already dominated by a successful disrupter (SpaceX) and is being competed for by some very deep pockets (Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos).
Many companies are aiming at the small-sat market. It makes much more sense to me to believe they are attempting what they say they are attempting - competing in the small-sat market - than to believe they have a pipe dream of out competing SpaceX on their home turf, with very limited resources.
The Chinese company may be an exception - they may have (or believe they have) a protected Chinese market.
I neither agree nor disagree with your business case analysis, as I have no relevant expertise.
I don't know what their long term goals are, but this rocket is competition with Rocket Lab's Electron rocket, not SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.
Zhuque: (alternative news source)
Mass at launch 27 tonnes, 300 kg payload to 300 km LEO or 200 kg to 500 km sun synchronous orbit.
Electron:
Mass at launch 10.5 tonnes, 150-225 kg payload to 500 km sun synchronous orbit
Falcon 9:
Mass at launch 549 tonnes, 22,800 kg payload to LEO in expendable mode.
There are about a dozen companies looking to compete in this ~200kg payload market. Rocket Lab are in the lead at the start of this race, but there is still a long way to go.
to hide.
So be sure to vote for politicians who will pass laws to give state access to every aspect of your digital life.
And if a policeman passes your location on to your ex partner who has raped and beaten you, it is your fault for having had something to hide.
The Dragon capsule is no where near being man-rated, so the changes of actually flying with a human is ZERO right now.
says someone commenting on an article about the timetable for crew-rating the Dragon capsule in the near future.
Here are some articles about the crew-rating of Dragon and Starliner:
https://www.nasaspaceflight.co...
https://www.nasaspaceflight.co...
Interesting point. I suspect there is a fair bit of flexibility in the system - stuff that we could turn into kerosene with a bit more processing, but currently don't because there is a market for it in it current form; also possibilities that we could fuel jets with alternative hydrocarbons - I think the turbines could easily take anything which is liquid, low viscosity, and burns easily.
There is serious money from serious airplane companies going into researching electric (battery) aircraft, but in the foreseeable future this might be your 50 seater commuter plane doing a one hour hop, it won't be a long haul flight.
Responding to grandparent post: I don't think the prospect of fuel dumping has any significant effect on the fuel loading decisions. They load enough fuel to reach the destination plus extra for contingencies (I think typically enough for 90 minutes of holding plus time to fly to alternate landing airport, sometimes more if weather delays seem likely.)
So safety sets a lower limit, and economics discourages you from loading any more than that limit. If you have too much fuel, you need to use more fuel to keep it in the air. A number I remember (not reliable) is about 3% per hour. So if two jets identical except in fuel load fly for 10 hours, the plane which started with 1000kg more fuel will end up with only 700kg more fuel. (Yes, there are circumstance where you might load extra fuel, especially for short haul flights.)
I am not a lawyer, but there is something called a "declaratory judgement". You could think of a declaratory judgement as being about something that could happen but hasn't yet.
Wikipedia:
A declaratory judgment, also called a declaration, is the legal determination of a court that resolves legal uncertainty for the litigants. It is a form of legally binding preventive adjudication by which a party involved in an actual or possible legal matter can ask a court to conclusively rule on and affirm the rights, duties, or obligations of one or more parties in a civil dispute...
I'm your neighbour, and for years I've been yelling at you about how your driveway goes over my land, and that I'm going to sue you one of these days sonny boy see if I don't. You think I'm full of crap and would have no case. Now you want to do an expensive paving job on your driveway. The scenario you fear is: you pay lots of money for the job, then I get annoyed and actually get around to suing, and to your surprise I win, and you have to tear up the expensive job and have it redone. If you could be guaranteed I'd sue you in the near future, it would be fine: you'd fight the case, and at the end you'd know exactly what you could or could not do. But I'll probably never sue, so you face the prospect of never paving your driveway.
The declaratory judgement allows you to force this case into court, even though you are not the putatively wronged party. You ask the court to make a declaratory judgement that your driveway is not on my land, and then the court finds either for you or for me, and either way you have clarity.
So rather than waiting for Trump to use the text alert and then sue him for inappropriate use, you might seek a declaratory judgement as to what an appropriate use is. As mentioned above, I am not a lawyer, so I don't know whether this falls within the stuff you can get a declaratory judgement over.
In a 1951 or 1952 magnetic audio recording (Tape? We didn't have new-fangled tape! We made do with WIRE!) Tom Lehrer sings about how to cheat with a slide-rule.
https://ww3.haverford.edu/phys...
(Track #11.)
Do androids count with RPN?
I think you mean
Count RPN with androids do?
Sometimes you need an answer to a question and population statistics and correlation are all that you can use.
"I propose to raise 200 kids identically except with 100 kids getting to live in polluted air and 100 control kids in clean air, and then we'll give them IQ tests and stuff when they are 20."
Research funder: "It would take 20 years to get an answer? No funds for you. We have decisions we need to make NOW."
Then, should it somehow get that far:
Ethics committee: "Hell, no."
So instead you make a list of every confounding factor you can think of (maybe being poor causes lower intelligence, and poor people often have no choice but to live in polluted areas, so you measure household income during childhood for your cohort), do a big multi-dimensional regression, and see what factors influence the result.
This isn't perfect - in particular, there might be an important factor that you didn't think of, or is too hard to measure, which correlates with pollution level. In the end, you have decisions to make (how much should we spend to mitigate air pollution?) and it is daft to refuse to do population statistics studies because you could only be 98% confident in their results rather than 100% confident.
Also, such studies are usually just part of the answer. There are also studies looking for plausibility of mechanisms. One group shows that certain pollutants can get from the air into blood. Another group shows that these chemicals can cross the blood-brain barrier. Another group shows that these chemical interact with neurotransmitters. The population study shows pollution having an adverse effect on intelligence. Put all this together and you have a plausible causal story.
We also don't have randomized controlled doubly blinded trials of the health effects of smoking, or of having a parachute when jumping out of an airplane.
I was taught to use log and trig tables at high school, although everyone had a calculator so this was a case of the curriculum not having caught up with current needs. I wasn't taught slide rule, but I taught myself. With a slide rule, Sine Rule calculations are nearly as easy as a multiplication or division - I could do them much faster than the folks using calculators (although with lower precision.) For Cosine Rule, they are not so useful.
Here.
Key points:
* This had been discussed with the board before the announcement
* The board agreed that the next step was to discuss with large shareholders.
* It would be unfair for the big shareholders to know of this proposal but not the small shareholders, hence a public announcement. (It isn't clear to me whether the board specifically agreed to this announcement, or whether Musk felt it was a logical consequence of the previous point.)
* "Funding secured" means the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund has been eager to do this for quite some time, although Musk would like there to be other investors too.
I feel somewhat but not completely reassured by this explanation.
One ton of rock to absorb half a ton of CO2. One ton of carbon burns to produce nearly 4 tons of CO2 (C mass 12, CO2 mass 44) So for every ton of coal you mine and burn, you'll need to mine about 7 tons of ultramafic rock to absorb it - and this is before we consider the energy requirements of the mining and reacting of the rock.
I've found video of takeoff, but not of landing. I see no landing gear. Does landing also involve a bunch of people running and holding it?
It is important to voting integrity that you not be able to prove to anyone else how you voted. Otherwise people can buy votes, and check that the voter has followed through before paying up - or abusive parents/spouses can demand a voter vote in a particular way and punish them if they didn't.
In a perfect system, everyone can see what the votes are (so they can verify the count), everyone who voted can see that their votes are included in the tally correctly, and yet they can also provide fake proof of a different vote to anyone trying to influence them, such that this influencer has no way to know whether the provided proof is fake or not. Also, you need to separate votes in different races for the public record - otherwise Influencer can supply a 'how to vote' card with a distinctive pattern of votes in races the influence doesn't care about, but can be used to prove the voter voted as demanded.
I've seen some amazingly clever uses of cryptographic methods, so I wouldn't say this is impossible, but it certainly is hard.
The TPP trade deal was negotiated over many years in great secrecy while denying the elected representatives of the negotiating nations the chance to see what was being negotiated on their behalf.
In the end, Trump refused to sign on, and the deal morphed into the CPTPP, an agreement between the non-USA members of the TPP, with a bunch of USA-insisted-on provisions being 'suspended'. CPTPP is not in force yet but looks like it is happening.
I am not at all an expert on any of this stuff. Corrections are welcome.