If you're going all the way back to Mac LC, it'd be unfair not to mention the likes of Centris 650/PowerMac 7100 and Quadra 900, which were painful to upgrade.
And by painful, I assume you mean physically, as in all those thousands of cuts you'd get all over your hands from all the razor-sharp metal covers and stuff. The 6100, for all its limitations, was a much, much better design, IMO.
Not that I disagree with your point, but that was 370 years ago. Would you find something Obama says about racism "interesting" because his country still had slavery only 150 years ago?
Yes. It may have been 150 years ago, but that doesn't mean the country has changed as much as one might assume. For example, many of those former slaves didn't really get the right to vote until 1965. Even today, we're still struggling as a nation to tear down the walls that divide us.
The question that you must ask is whether Britain's government's tendency to devolve into corrupt secret courts has improved in the past 370 years. My suspicion is that it has not, and that, given the opportunity, the same thing would happen. Why? Because all governments, given the opportunity, try to grab every ounce of power that they can. It's the nature of the beast.
That is an interesting idea. Lets take a look at that. Over the last twelve years there have been hundreds of arrests and convictions for plots or attempts to use vehicle bombs to kill people in the United States, and other terrorism related offenses. It has been reported that this program has helped to stop some of those attempts. Presumably if you stop it, successful attacks will become more common.
Bzzt. That's what the people in power would certainly like you to believe, but they have presented no evidence whatsoever that this is the case. The absolute minimum standard of proof required is at least one case in which the foiled perpetrator:
was not already under surveillance.
would not have been discovered with a plain-old warrant for a wiretapping order against a foreign phone number.
would have had the means to do harm without the government's interference (i.e. not a "find some idiot on the Internet and egg him on and then provide the fake bomb" case).
would likely not have been discovered in some other way prior to committing the act.
I have no doubt whatsoever that Feinstein, McCain, and Obama think that this program prevented attacks. That does not make it so. Not everyone is capable of stepping back from scary situations and looking at them objectively, and most of the people currently in power in our country, sadly, are severely deficient in that ability. But even supposing that, in fact, there are cases that meet all the criteria above—in which some heinous crime was prevented by this program that could not have been prevented in any other way—does that make the program right? I would argue that one of the greatest logical fallacies in modern times is the simplistic and naïve notion that the ends can somehow justify the means.
For example, in the medical arena, there has been much debate over the years about whether it is acceptable to use information gathered from Nazi scientists conducting experiments on Jews during World War II. From an ethical standpoint, on the one hand, it means that something good can come from horrible acts, but on the other hand, in some very small way, it could be seen as justifying those acts, hence there is strong pressure to reject the results of Nazi research outright. Now try to argue that we should have allowed the Nazis to continue experimenting on Jews so that we could gain medical knowledge. That's an "ends justify the means" argument.
Mind you, no one has died because of illegal wiretapping (*) and similar, so it arguably isn't the same degree of evil. On the other hand, the potential gains of this wiretapping are tiny compared with, for example, the potential benefits of Nazi research into hypothermia, antibiotics, etc.; even in the best-case scenario, these programs can only occasionally prevent an incident, most of which would have been otherwise prevented in some other way. And the total harm, if you add up the small impact on the privacy of millions of Americans, is huge. The impact on society as a whole is arguably greater than the impact caused by the deaths of a few hundred test subjects (though admittedly not when viewed from the perspective of those test subjects). So when I say that it arguably isn't the same degee of evil, I truly do mean that the point is arguable.
That might be a legitimate answer if the government placed the weapons battery there. It isn't a legitimate answer when it is some random criminal standing on the roof.
In the U.S., the police would never bomb an American hospital to kill a single criminal. Why should such actions be excused simply because they occur on foreign soil? Ostensibly, if that action is necessary to preserve the lives of American soldiers in the heat of the moment, it might be acceptable, but if there is any time at all to plan, then it really isn't any more acceptable there than here, IMO.
After all, the particular event that inspired this story took place on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. If you were a "military age male" on the Afghani/Pakistan border and were NOT a militant, wouldn't you get the fuck out of there?
Let me turn that on your head. If you had been living in your family home for all your life and a bunch of hoodlums came into your neighborhood and started shooting up the place, would you A. leave, or B. stay to spite them? Many people would choose A., but many would choose B.
If you make it so nobody wants to be anywhere near the militants unless they are fighting alongside them, then it will be very easy to tell who is a militant and who is not.
Wrong. You don't make it so nobody wants to be anywhere near the militants. You teach the families of the innocent victims to hate America and Americans for assuming guilt by proximity. There's a difference. It is policies like these that fuel terrorism and anti-American sentiment around the globe.
I never said anything about felonies. Okay, I'll concede that the word "prison" implies it, so s/prison/prison or jail/. Congratulations. You are the pedant king.
First, the most commonly cited scenario is one in which you are guilty of a different crime. For example, if you are accused of murder and asked what you were doing on the night of May 5th, and the answer is "having sex with my under-age girlfriend who is a year younger than I am, in a state where doing so is illegal," the 5th amendment protects you from incriminating yourself on an unrelated charge that the government knows nothing about, and which could cause collateral damage to another person who has nothing whatsoever to do with the original charge. It is potentially a solid alibi, but one that has negative ramifications.
Now the author of this paper might argue that this "disproportionately favors the guilty", but that makes the naïve assumption that all crimes are equal and that all crimes should be prosecuted. It is arguably not in the public's best interest to prosecute every possible crime, because under such circumstances, our current body of law leads to a world in which everyone is in prison. Therefore, there is no legitimate public need for you to be required to confess to a crime that the government does not know about. As a general rule, if no one has reported the crime, chances are good that no one was actually harmed by it, which means that prosecuting the offending person would be a waste of taxpayer resources that would detract from the ability to prosecute serious crime.
Thus, it should be clear that the 5th amendment serves a useful purpose. It protects against noise in the legal system.
Second, a refutation. The fifth amendment is one of several rights that collude to protect against a number of scenarios, such as coerced confessions. No, eliminating it would not, by itself, allow coerced confessions, but it would remove one defense against them. The whole point of our constitution is to provide a set of strong protections that work together to make it absolutely clear that certain actions by the government are not allowed. They're like support posts that hold up the roof of your house. When you walk around the house, you might look at a single post and say, "This support post isn't really necessary." And for each individual post, you might be right, but when you take too many of them out at the same time, the whole house comes tumbling down on top of you.
That is why we must treat any erosion of our rights as unacceptable under any and all circumstances—not because removal of any single right will allow an abuse, but because each right interacts with the others to form a coherent structure, without which our entire system of rights comes crashing down like a house of cards.
The parent has a rather exceptional use-case, normal people wouldn't be driving 20 hours round trip to visit their parents every weekend.
No, but most people will, statistically speaking, need to do an emergency trip at least once in their lives to pick up their kid who broke his leg at camp, to be there for a parent's final moments, or simply because they decided at the last minute to spend their three-day weekend in Florida. It isn't an everyday event, but it also isn't always an event you can plan for ahead of time, which means that a lot of people won't be willing to give up their gasoline-powered cars for all-electric vehicles—because they know that such situations do occur once in a while and that when such a situation arises, they won't want to be driving all around town trying to find a rental car company (or worse, a car dealer) to rent them a car on an emergency basis so that they can make that emergency trip.
This is what makes the electric car problematic. However, if all the car companies agreed on a standard connection scheme for external engine pods, the problem goes away. Each family would have one engine that once a year, they would put a quarter gallon of gasoline into, start up, and run until it is out of fuel. Such a scheme eliminates the biggest roadblock to electric car adoption—the impracticality of providing a battery that can handle those unusual long-distance trips.
As one of the few posters here who opposes digital piracy, I'm struck by the how quickly people's views change over from "information wants to be free... the copyright holders need to adopt to reality of how the Internet works" to "this is an unprecedented invasion of privacy, whooooaaa we never assented to this!"
The two acts are very, very different. Copyright doesn't protect the privacy of the content creators. It protects their profits. Digital data that you willingly provide to anyone who asks (even if for a price) is inherently not private.
To turn piracy into a privacy analogy, piracy is like a newspaper posting a picture of you mooning the mayor in the court square. Government invasion of personal privacy is like a newspaper posting a picture of you sunbathing in the nude that they took through a hole in your fence.
480 miles is an outlier. Most gasoline-powered vehicles only go about 300 miles.
That said, in the absence of fast charging, even a 500-mile range is a long way from being able to replace gasoline-powered vehicles. The critical questions are:
How far you can realistically drive in a day?
How much capacity will the battery lose before the car is junk?
If the answer to the first question is 12 hours, you need a 720-mile range, because you're not going to be able to charge it during the day. And if the answer to the second question is that after ten years, it is down to 60% of its usable life, then to achieve a 720-mile range at ten years, you would need a 1200 mile range when the vehicle is new. Add at least a 15% safety margin, and you conclude that we need somewhere approaching a 1400–1500-mile range before purely electric vehicles can fully replace gasoline-powered vehicles.
What this ignores, of course, is the potential for convertible vehicles. An electric vehicle with a trailer hitch can be trivially converted into a hybrid vehicle by adding a gasoline engine with a tank on a small, wheeled pod. The pod could connect to the car's electrical system, monitor the battery level, and charge up the batteries when needed. As far as the vehicle design is concerned, the only required changes would be a couple of additional power lines to a connector near the trailer hitch and a standard communication protocol for querying the battery level.
That's way low for traditional commercial publishing. Scientific publishing is cheaper because somebody else has done the design work, all the papers look alike, and they aren't publishing in multiple formats. Unlike scientific papers, commercial publishing houses typically don't use PDF, and they typically design each book or book series with its own look and feel.
Electronic publishing is only cheaper if you limit yourself to a single output renderer, e.g. "We're only going to support iBooks" or "We're only going to support PDF output". As soon as you try to generalize your publishing process, you're in for great pain, because there are dozens of readers, and each one implements the specifications slightly differently. Right now, eBook publishing makes 1990s-era web design seem completely standardized by comparison. When you're actually trying to design a book or book series for EPUB and KF8 and KEPUB and sometimes Mobi, particularly if you factor in testing costs on dozens of different devices, your design costs can easily be more than an order of magnitude higher for an electronic edition.
With sufficiently large distribution, all those up-front costs get lost in the noise, but most books don't sell nearly enough copies for that to happen, so for a typical book those much higher up-front costs mostly cancel out the savings from avoiding the printing cost and from the slightly lower typical channel cost. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the average eBook were actually more expensive to produce, in terms of per-unit cost, than traditional dead-tree-and-ink books.
Private fiber links will likely render even that use obsolete eventually. It's just a question of how long it will take before the cost comes down and availability goes up.
This study is only about scheduled surgeries, i.e. non-emergency surgeries. That said, there is a continuum between the two, so it is plausible that they're more likely to be somewhat urgent, or else they would have put them off until a few weeks later so the doctor could go play golf.:-D
That said, I think the fatigue theory has a lot of merit. It is common knowledge that surgeries performed later in the day have higher rates of complications, surgical errors, anesthesia mistakes, etc. There's no reason to believe that surgeries later in the week would not be similarly affected, for precisely the same reason.
An application including the library doesn't include the API.
Actually, it does. A compiler cannot know how to work with an object without first reading a header file, class file, etc. that defines its interface. If (and only if) the interface definition itself is protected by copyright, then the act of including a header file or class file is, by definition, combining that interface definition with the new application's code, which makes it a derivative work in precisely the same way that a mix tape is a derivative of the original recordings.
This is why interfaces are considered to not be protectable by copyright. It is a fundamental requirement for software authorship to be legal.
If Java API's are copyrightable, does this mean that Oracle has a copyright interest in every program ever written that uses those APIs?
They would be a derivative work, so arguably, yes. IMO, if Oracle somehow magically wins this case, Google's next move should be to buy Novell and counter-sue Oracle for violating their UNIX API copyright for the past 31 years, at which point, it's buh-bye, Oracle.
Fair point. Mobi is just HTML, and really crufty HTML at that. You're correct about kindlegen converting the CSS to tags and attributes, with a very limited dialect. Fortunately, KF8 is supported on just about everything but fairly old Kindles and iOS. (Don't get me started on that last part.)
Of course they can. The agents can't (unless they're very technically inclined), but there's nothing preventing the organization as a whole from doing so. Nothing whatsoever. Software can be changed, silently and without any hint that it has been changed. For all we know, this has already happened.
No, from a philosophical point of view, there's no difference between walking through the millimeter-wave scanners at an airport and texting naked photographs of yourself to your boyfriend or girlfriend. Both indicate a complete lack of concern for your own privacy.
Although the X-ray versions have been removed, the equally invasive millimeter-wave versions are still there. The only difference is that now you have to spend a little time changing the device configuration to save off the images instead of being able to see them live.
IANAAP, but AFAIK, it could still be the same mass and hollow if the composition below the surface were dramatically different than the surface composition. The average density of Mars is estimated to be 3.93 grams per cc. Osmium has a density of 22.59 grams per cc. So more than four-fifths of Mars could be hollow even just using the elements we know about today.
First, cosmic rays aren't "the real problem". They're a tiny part of the problem. AFAIK, there's a general consensus that high-speed particles are of lower concern than the low-speed particles that this magnetic shielding blocks, for precisely the same reason that the high-energy particles that pass through us every day even on Earth's surface aren't a big deal. Yes, the energy threshold below which particles are deflected is likely lower in the design described by this article, but the biological importance of that difference is not actually known.
Second, this recent article is giving numbers based on using the same sort of shielding Curiosity uses, which AFAIK means no shielding at all other than the materials that the craft is made of. Sure, that's one possible design, but it's far from the best case scenario, unlike what the article implies. And that was the point I was trying to make. In the labs, they've made huge headway, but this still appears to be making assumptions based on sending a glorified Apollo capsule to Mars. That just doesn't seem like a realistic scenario to me.
Wasn't the magnetic shielding problem basically solved, at least in lab simulations, many years ago, using materials that are well understood and well within our ability to carry into orbit? So how is this still a "huge problem"?
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And by painful, I assume you mean physically, as in all those thousands of cuts you'd get all over your hands from all the razor-sharp metal covers and stuff. The 6100, for all its limitations, was a much, much better design, IMO.
Yes. It may have been 150 years ago, but that doesn't mean the country has changed as much as one might assume. For example, many of those former slaves didn't really get the right to vote until 1965. Even today, we're still struggling as a nation to tear down the walls that divide us.
The question that you must ask is whether Britain's government's tendency to devolve into corrupt secret courts has improved in the past 370 years. My suspicion is that it has not, and that, given the opportunity, the same thing would happen. Why? Because all governments, given the opportunity, try to grab every ounce of power that they can. It's the nature of the beast.
Bzzt. That's what the people in power would certainly like you to believe, but they have presented no evidence whatsoever that this is the case. The absolute minimum standard of proof required is at least one case in which the foiled perpetrator:
I have no doubt whatsoever that Feinstein, McCain, and Obama think that this program prevented attacks. That does not make it so. Not everyone is capable of stepping back from scary situations and looking at them objectively, and most of the people currently in power in our country, sadly, are severely deficient in that ability. But even supposing that, in fact, there are cases that meet all the criteria above—in which some heinous crime was prevented by this program that could not have been prevented in any other way—does that make the program right? I would argue that one of the greatest logical fallacies in modern times is the simplistic and naïve notion that the ends can somehow justify the means.
For example, in the medical arena, there has been much debate over the years about whether it is acceptable to use information gathered from Nazi scientists conducting experiments on Jews during World War II. From an ethical standpoint, on the one hand, it means that something good can come from horrible acts, but on the other hand, in some very small way, it could be seen as justifying those acts, hence there is strong pressure to reject the results of Nazi research outright. Now try to argue that we should have allowed the Nazis to continue experimenting on Jews so that we could gain medical knowledge. That's an "ends justify the means" argument.
Mind you, no one has died because of illegal wiretapping (*) and similar, so it arguably isn't the same degree of evil. On the other hand, the potential gains of this wiretapping are tiny compared with, for example, the potential benefits of Nazi research into hypothermia, antibiotics, etc.; even in the best-case scenario, these programs can only occasionally prevent an incident, most of which would have been otherwise prevented in some other way. And the total harm, if you add up the small impact on the privacy of millions of Americans, is huge. The impact on society as a whole is arguably greater than the impact caused by the deaths of a few hundred test subjects (though admittedly not when viewed from the perspective of those test subjects). So when I say that it arguably isn't the same degee of evil, I truly do mean that the point is arguable.
(*) That we know of.
That might be a legitimate answer if the government placed the weapons battery there. It isn't a legitimate answer when it is some random criminal standing on the roof.
In the U.S., the police would never bomb an American hospital to kill a single criminal. Why should such actions be excused simply because they occur on foreign soil? Ostensibly, if that action is necessary to preserve the lives of American soldiers in the heat of the moment, it might be acceptable, but if there is any time at all to plan, then it really isn't any more acceptable there than here, IMO.
Let me turn that on your head. If you had been living in your family home for all your life and a bunch of hoodlums came into your neighborhood and started shooting up the place, would you A. leave, or B. stay to spite them? Many people would choose A., but many would choose B.
Wrong. You don't make it so nobody wants to be anywhere near the militants. You teach the families of the innocent victims to hate America and Americans for assuming guilt by proximity. There's a difference. It is policies like these that fuel terrorism and anti-American sentiment around the globe.
I never said anything about felonies. Okay, I'll concede that the word "prison" implies it, so s/prison/prison or jail/. Congratulations. You are the pedant king.
Two points.
First, the most commonly cited scenario is one in which you are guilty of a different crime. For example, if you are accused of murder and asked what you were doing on the night of May 5th, and the answer is "having sex with my under-age girlfriend who is a year younger than I am, in a state where doing so is illegal," the 5th amendment protects you from incriminating yourself on an unrelated charge that the government knows nothing about, and which could cause collateral damage to another person who has nothing whatsoever to do with the original charge. It is potentially a solid alibi, but one that has negative ramifications.
Now the author of this paper might argue that this "disproportionately favors the guilty", but that makes the naïve assumption that all crimes are equal and that all crimes should be prosecuted. It is arguably not in the public's best interest to prosecute every possible crime, because under such circumstances, our current body of law leads to a world in which everyone is in prison. Therefore, there is no legitimate public need for you to be required to confess to a crime that the government does not know about. As a general rule, if no one has reported the crime, chances are good that no one was actually harmed by it, which means that prosecuting the offending person would be a waste of taxpayer resources that would detract from the ability to prosecute serious crime.
Thus, it should be clear that the 5th amendment serves a useful purpose. It protects against noise in the legal system.
Second, a refutation. The fifth amendment is one of several rights that collude to protect against a number of scenarios, such as coerced confessions. No, eliminating it would not, by itself, allow coerced confessions, but it would remove one defense against them. The whole point of our constitution is to provide a set of strong protections that work together to make it absolutely clear that certain actions by the government are not allowed. They're like support posts that hold up the roof of your house. When you walk around the house, you might look at a single post and say, "This support post isn't really necessary." And for each individual post, you might be right, but when you take too many of them out at the same time, the whole house comes tumbling down on top of you.
That is why we must treat any erosion of our rights as unacceptable under any and all circumstances—not because removal of any single right will allow an abuse, but because each right interacts with the others to form a coherent structure, without which our entire system of rights comes crashing down like a house of cards.
No, but most people will, statistically speaking, need to do an emergency trip at least once in their lives to pick up their kid who broke his leg at camp, to be there for a parent's final moments, or simply because they decided at the last minute to spend their three-day weekend in Florida. It isn't an everyday event, but it also isn't always an event you can plan for ahead of time, which means that a lot of people won't be willing to give up their gasoline-powered cars for all-electric vehicles—because they know that such situations do occur once in a while and that when such a situation arises, they won't want to be driving all around town trying to find a rental car company (or worse, a car dealer) to rent them a car on an emergency basis so that they can make that emergency trip.
This is what makes the electric car problematic. However, if all the car companies agreed on a standard connection scheme for external engine pods, the problem goes away. Each family would have one engine that once a year, they would put a quarter gallon of gasoline into, start up, and run until it is out of fuel. Such a scheme eliminates the biggest roadblock to electric car adoption—the impracticality of providing a battery that can handle those unusual long-distance trips.
The two acts are very, very different. Copyright doesn't protect the privacy of the content creators. It protects their profits. Digital data that you willingly provide to anyone who asks (even if for a price) is inherently not private.
To turn piracy into a privacy analogy, piracy is like a newspaper posting a picture of you mooning the mayor in the court square. Government invasion of personal privacy is like a newspaper posting a picture of you sunbathing in the nude that they took through a hole in your fence.
480 miles is an outlier. Most gasoline-powered vehicles only go about 300 miles.
That said, in the absence of fast charging, even a 500-mile range is a long way from being able to replace gasoline-powered vehicles. The critical questions are:
If the answer to the first question is 12 hours, you need a 720-mile range, because you're not going to be able to charge it during the day. And if the answer to the second question is that after ten years, it is down to 60% of its usable life, then to achieve a 720-mile range at ten years, you would need a 1200 mile range when the vehicle is new. Add at least a 15% safety margin, and you conclude that we need somewhere approaching a 1400–1500-mile range before purely electric vehicles can fully replace gasoline-powered vehicles.
What this ignores, of course, is the potential for convertible vehicles. An electric vehicle with a trailer hitch can be trivially converted into a hybrid vehicle by adding a gasoline engine with a tank on a small, wheeled pod. The pod could connect to the car's electrical system, monitor the battery level, and charge up the batteries when needed. As far as the vehicle design is concerned, the only required changes would be a couple of additional power lines to a connector near the trailer hitch and a standard communication protocol for querying the battery level.
That's way low for traditional commercial publishing. Scientific publishing is cheaper because somebody else has done the design work, all the papers look alike, and they aren't publishing in multiple formats. Unlike scientific papers, commercial publishing houses typically don't use PDF, and they typically design each book or book series with its own look and feel.
Electronic publishing is only cheaper if you limit yourself to a single output renderer, e.g. "We're only going to support iBooks" or "We're only going to support PDF output". As soon as you try to generalize your publishing process, you're in for great pain, because there are dozens of readers, and each one implements the specifications slightly differently. Right now, eBook publishing makes 1990s-era web design seem completely standardized by comparison. When you're actually trying to design a book or book series for EPUB and KF8 and KEPUB and sometimes Mobi, particularly if you factor in testing costs on dozens of different devices, your design costs can easily be more than an order of magnitude higher for an electronic edition.
With sufficiently large distribution, all those up-front costs get lost in the noise, but most books don't sell nearly enough copies for that to happen, so for a typical book those much higher up-front costs mostly cancel out the savings from avoiding the printing cost and from the slightly lower typical channel cost. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the average eBook were actually more expensive to produce, in terms of per-unit cost, than traditional dead-tree-and-ink books.
Private fiber links will likely render even that use obsolete eventually. It's just a question of how long it will take before the cost comes down and availability goes up.
This study is only about scheduled surgeries, i.e. non-emergency surgeries. That said, there is a continuum between the two, so it is plausible that they're more likely to be somewhat urgent, or else they would have put them off until a few weeks later so the doctor could go play golf. :-D
That said, I think the fatigue theory has a lot of merit. It is common knowledge that surgeries performed later in the day have higher rates of complications, surgical errors, anesthesia mistakes, etc. There's no reason to believe that surgeries later in the week would not be similarly affected, for precisely the same reason.
Actually, it does. A compiler cannot know how to work with an object without first reading a header file, class file, etc. that defines its interface. If (and only if) the interface definition itself is protected by copyright, then the act of including a header file or class file is, by definition, combining that interface definition with the new application's code, which makes it a derivative work in precisely the same way that a mix tape is a derivative of the original recordings.
This is why interfaces are considered to not be protectable by copyright. It is a fundamental requirement for software authorship to be legal.
They would be a derivative work, so arguably, yes. IMO, if Oracle somehow magically wins this case, Google's next move should be to buy Novell and counter-sue Oracle for violating their UNIX API copyright for the past 31 years, at which point, it's buh-bye, Oracle.
What does photoshopping your head onto a naked body have to do with scanners that can map out the shape of your naked body? Just not comparable.
Fair point. Mobi is just HTML, and really crufty HTML at that. You're correct about kindlegen converting the CSS to tags and attributes, with a very limited dialect. Fortunately, KF8 is supported on just about everything but fairly old Kindles and iOS. (Don't get me started on that last part.)
Of course they can. The agents can't (unless they're very technically inclined), but there's nothing preventing the organization as a whole from doing so. Nothing whatsoever. Software can be changed, silently and without any hint that it has been changed. For all we know, this has already happened.
No, from a philosophical point of view, there's no difference between walking through the millimeter-wave scanners at an airport and texting naked photographs of yourself to your boyfriend or girlfriend. Both indicate a complete lack of concern for your own privacy.
Although the X-ray versions have been removed, the equally invasive millimeter-wave versions are still there. The only difference is that now you have to spend a little time changing the device configuration to save off the images instead of being able to see them live.
FTFY. Pretty much every eBook format other than PDF—EPUB, Mobi, KF8, KePub, etc.—is based on HTML and CSS.
IANAAP, but AFAIK, it could still be the same mass and hollow if the composition below the surface were dramatically different than the surface composition. The average density of Mars is estimated to be 3.93 grams per cc. Osmium has a density of 22.59 grams per cc. So more than four-fifths of Mars could be hollow even just using the elements we know about today.
First, cosmic rays aren't "the real problem". They're a tiny part of the problem. AFAIK, there's a general consensus that high-speed particles are of lower concern than the low-speed particles that this magnetic shielding blocks, for precisely the same reason that the high-energy particles that pass through us every day even on Earth's surface aren't a big deal. Yes, the energy threshold below which particles are deflected is likely lower in the design described by this article, but the biological importance of that difference is not actually known.
Second, this recent article is giving numbers based on using the same sort of shielding Curiosity uses, which AFAIK means no shielding at all other than the materials that the craft is made of. Sure, that's one possible design, but it's far from the best case scenario, unlike what the article implies. And that was the point I was trying to make. In the labs, they've made huge headway, but this still appears to be making assumptions based on sending a glorified Apollo capsule to Mars. That just doesn't seem like a realistic scenario to me.
Wasn't the magnetic shielding problem basically solved, at least in lab simulations, many years ago, using materials that are well understood and well within our ability to carry into orbit? So how is this still a "huge problem"?
Green. Soylent, specifically.
Ewww.