The problem is that it's hard to construct a hypothesis that isn't testable except for hypotheses that they can't list on a test, e.g. God created the universe.
Okay, I suppose they could go absurd, like "Invisible trolls live under the bridge and occasionally eat small children", or philosophical, like "The universe is infinite" or "The enemy of my enemy is my friend", but....
You need to be able to handle a temperature gradient of almost three hundred degrees between the outdoors and the indoors, and if you're using inflatable housing, I doubt it will insulate particularly well. You think your power bill in the winter is high.... I think it might be pushing the limits of at least the RTGs that are readily available.
Now my quick back-of-the-envelope math says that with resistance heat, some of the larger RTGs could readily handle heating a decent size structure, but that's before you factor in lighting, melting of super-cooled ice for water and oxygen, electrolysis of oxygen, powering communication gear and science gear, etc. It might be doable, but I'd want to have solar backup. It doesn't take that much space for a rolled-up solar panel.
Electrolysis means splitting using electricity, so no, they don't. More to the point, plants don't convert CO2 to O2 at all. The oxygen released by plants comes from the water that they consume, not the carbon dioxide (source: HowPlantsWork.com).
Also, using plants to produce oxygen is a good idea in theory, but would likely require a relatively large enclosure relative to the number of people who live in it. It might be feasible once you have established a temporary base, but until you have built/assembled/inflated a few large, airtight structures on the planet's surface, it probably is not. A normal (but sealed) greenhouse might produce enough food for a handful of people, but it is unlikely to produce enough oxygen. Also, it would suck if you accidentally put something that plants don't like in your water supply and killed off half the plants. It's easy to store up enough dried emergency rations to last you until a supply mission arrives in a year or more. It's not so easy to store up that much oxygen.
Hard drives fill up pretty quickly, and high-density cassettes make a lot more sense than burning single DVD/Blu-ray discs.
Of course, with Blu-Ray prices at about $3-4 apiece for 25 gigabytes, they're about four times as expensive per gigabyte as hard drives, making this false economy by any standards even without factoring in the cost of the cassette.
Going to see a movie at a theater used to be the gold standard "non-monetized" form of entertainment, until they started inserting product placements, music, placing ads before the shows...
Which was precisely when I stopped going to the theater. I'm not going to pay seven bucks for a ticket so that you can show me ads. If I want to watch a bunch of ads, I'll wait a year and watch it on TV. Your choices are: A. free and ad-supported, B. not free and not ad-supported, or C. free and not ad-supported. There is no choice D.
Fuel for a return trip is mostly an excuse. You just need to do the return trip in two hops: bring enough fuel in the lander to get yourself to orbit, then dock with a giant tanker that carries enough fuel for the rest of the trip. Mars gravity is only about twice that of the Moon, and we got a lander into lunar orbit over fifty years ago, so I can't imagine a Mars ascent being that much of a leap.
The harder part is actually landing a pod big enough to provide long-term living quarters. You could probably do it with inflatable buildings and large air compressors, but you'd still need a supplemental oxygen supply and either a steady supply of food and oxygen or a means of producing your own.
The ideal solution would require landing somewhere with water ice. Water can provide oxygen by electrolysis. Sure, there are other ways to get oxygen (using CO2 electrolysis, for example), but that won't provide them with the water they'll need for other things like cooking, bathing, etc., so landing somewhere with an ample supply of water would be a big plus.
So combine some very powerful air compressors with oxygen generators, lots of heating coils, some inflatable buildings, some disassembled airtight greenhouses, two or three shipments containing large, rolled-up solar panel sheets, etc. and it might actually be feasible to create a long-term habitat on Mars for not a lot more than the cost of a few rover missions. Remember to provide at least three of everything so that they won't be screwed if one of them doesn't work, preferably in separate bundles within reasonable walking distance of a single drop zone. Then provide a small lander with enough reserve oxygen and power to last them a month or two just in case it takes them longer than expected to get things set up.
Which allows you to taper down the population of the domestic cattle, but if your eventual goal is the elimination of meat consumption, you're still going to have to deal with the population of the wild boars, the buffalo and other wild cattle (which are currently kept under control through hunting), deer, rabbits, etc.
Cows, too. We call them buffalo or bison, but they can interbreed with cattle and produce fertile offspring (sometimes). They aren't particularly common in the wild because of overhunting, but they once were, and in the absence of hunting, would be again.
It doesn't take computer models to see the air quality in China from all those coal plants. Even if anthropogenic global warming is a complete fairy tale, using coal for power still provably causes substantial harm to the local environment. There's absolutely no debate possible on that subject. It's a directly observable cause and effect that has been repeated thousands of times around the world.
So you're suggesting that the US and EU collude to prevent other countries from advancing beyond an agrarian society unless they make themselves dependent on technology from another country that doesn't have their and their people's best interests at heart?
No, I'm suggesting that although coal might seem advantageous in the short term, it is severely detrimental to the host country and indeed to the rest of the world in the long term, and actually poses serious local problems in the short term as well. Therefore, other nations that have already seen this happen firsthand should act like big brothers to discourage their younger siblings from making all the same mistakes.
Don't forget that China and India both have nuclear bombs and missiles.
Which is why the time to prevent Chinese dependence on coal was a few decades back, and it is too late now. We pretty much have to let China burn itself out and move on to more modern sources of power. However, the sorts of regulations that would have prevented China from becoming a coal-burning industrial nation a few decades back can prevent some other nation (no idea who yet) from becoming one a few decades from now. And that is why such laws are needed.
What you posted is the dumbest comment I have read all day. Do you think those animals will stop reproducing just because we stop building buildings around them? Their rate of reproduction is comparable to our current rate of consumption. In the absence of taking some explicit action to reduce that rate, if we lower our rate of consumption, the population will increase. Period. This is basic science.
If you want to decrease their rate of reproduction, either you have to increase the rate of consumption (or the rate of destruction without consumption) to lower the number of animals that exist or you have to throw them out in the wild and hope that they either starve or are picked off by predators. There's no third choice. You can't just magically say "We're going to reduce agricultural meat production" and expect the number of animals to decline on its own.
It's not the scientists who have framed the debate in this way. It's the politicians. As soon as it became a political discussion, it created an "us versus them" mentality between the Democrats and the Republicans. At that point, any hope of actually improving things through sane, well-reasoned legislation went out the window because neither party is capable of even remotely sane or reasonable discussion of any issue.
Awesome. Now I can carry a napalm canister and a loaded assault rifle when I fly instead of having to ship it by ground freight. That will make travel much more convenient. And a canister of VX, too, just in case I need it when I get where I'm going. And that full can of gasoline for my lawnmower.
I sincerely hope he didn't mean all liquids. There are some things that simply should not be allowed on aircraft, yet if legal, you just know that somebody would be stupid enough to carry them on. Now eliminating the ridiculous quantity limits and the requirement that you take them out of the bags for screening might be a good idea.
P.S. In case your sarcasm detector is defective, I live in Northern California, and therefore do not own a lawnmower.
The TSA as a jobs program is awesome in principle except that we should be paying them to do something useful instead of what they're doing. You know, like patrolling the thousands of miles of fence around airports, driving up and down the tens of thousands of miles of railroad tracks to watch for people planting bombs, installing crossing guards at railroad intersections, staffing suicide prevention hotlines to reduce the number of rail jumpers, screening applicants for visas, driving the border fences to watch for tunnels and other illegal smuggling across our borders, performing safety inspections of trucks at every weigh station (and having all the weigh stations open instead of just certain ones), performing random safety inspections on aircraft, and so on.
There are so many things the government could do to make travel safer. Why is it that they keep burning all this money and all these resources on things that won't?
The other quick way to bring CO2 down is by getting people to stop eating meat, by growing it like a vegetable... eventually. Meat farming is so wasteful.
That's just not a realistic solution. Cows multiply. With few natural predators remaining, as long as there is adequate food (grass, leaves, etc.), they will continue to multiply without bounds, resulting in increased global warming, not decreased global warming. Ditto for pigs, etc. We already see this problem with deer in much of the U.S. Were it not for regular hunting to keep the population under control, things would become dire rather quickly. The last thing we need to do is add cows and pigs to that list.
Unless, of course, you plan a program of euthanizing every last cow and then not eating the meat, in which case I would argue that it is your plan that is incredibly wasteful.
In parts of the U.S., it's already significantly cheaper to use solar power than fossil fuels. What is most needed at this point, at least in the U.S., is a more flexible, lower resistance power grid so that solar power from a sunny day in Texas can adequately make up for the bleak midwinter in Oregon. This is useful whether we move to "green" power or not.
The bigger problem is China and other early industrial nations. As long as new nations transition from agrarian economies to industrial economies using coal as their primary means of power production, no amount of regulation in modern countries is going to improve things; it will only keep them from getting worse at an ever-accelerating pace.
What we need to solve this is a ban on U.S. and European companies building coal-based plants in other countries—make it as hard as possible for developing nations to get their start using coal and as easy as possible for them to get their start using more modern power production.
Unfortunately his plan was to turn-off free TV (all channels 25 and up) and turn it over to wireless companies. That's not a solution... at least not as good as Fiber to every home.
It's a fundamentally unworkable solution to the problem. The reason we don't have enough capacity is not because we need more bandwidth. The reason we don't have enough capacity is that we're trying to use one tower every 15-30 miles to provide service to hundreds of thousands of people. If those folks are mostly using it occasionally (as they do with cell phones), it works reasonably well. When they're sitting there for hours on end surfing the Internet at home or work, it breaks down very badly. We're orders of magnitude away from being able to handle that.
Wireless works really well at short distances where each cell is talking to dozens of people (e.g. Wi-Fi). The larger the number of people per cell, the more infeasible it becomes due to interference from other devices, not to mention all the multipath problems inherent in wireless delivery over long distances. Even if you could make the bandwidth ten thousand times wider, we still wouldn't have enough bandwidth to service every man, woman, and child's home Internet needs somewhere like New York or San Francisco using cell towers. It's entirely the wrong solution to to the problem.
Instead, we should be focusing on making VoIP and VPNs roam transparently between cellular services and Wi-Fi, roam transparently between multiple Wi-Fi hot spots, etc. And we should be moving more towards providing free public Wi-Fi services at high densities so that only the last few feet are wireless.
Does a simple little game that was a 50K download on Palm OS really need to be a 1MB app on Android or iOS?
Depends on the app. If we're talking about an all-text game, that's a little extreme. On the other hand, if it contains any image assets at all, that is probably not unreasonable.
Remember that the original Palm hardware had 240 x 160 resolution in black and white. A current-generation iPhone has 960 x 640 resolution in 24-bit color, and it is usually bundled as dual-platform for iPad, which is 2048 x 1536 in 24-bit color. So if that 50k app on Palm were nothing but uncompressed image data, you would expect the iPad/iPhone version of the app to be a whopping 96 megabytes.
Obviously image compression helps with that, and obviously an app contains content other than image assets, both of which contribute to that being something of an overestimate. That said, using that as an upper bound, a mere one megabyte doesn't sound bad at all.
The original owner could have sold the phone without notifying the carrier.
There are only two situations where the original owner could have sold the phone:
1. The original purchaser bought a new phone. 99% of the time, this comes from the carrier, but either way, there's a new phone talking to their towers with the old SIM card. No mugger steals the phone but leaves you your SIM card, so this is an easy one to catch.
2. The original purchaser stopped using that company's service. This also can't happen usefully without notifying the carrier.
In other words, for all intents and purposes, the scam you're describing is infeasible. If the customer reports the phone stolen to the carrier, it's pretty safe to say that the phone was stolen... unless, of course, they merely reported it stolen so that they could claim that they were not at the scene of a crime, but that's another matter entirely....
The guy is still drawing a check, but doesn't have to work, and he's upset?
It all comes down to whether you have a good work-life balance or you live to work and work to live. A lot of retirees have the same reaction to retirement. Going from having a list of things that you have to get done to not having one can be stressful for some people.
For me, it would be awesome because I have so many tens of thousands of hours of backlog in my personal projects that I may never catch up as it is.... But if you don't have a wide range of outside creative interests, I could see how it could be very uncomfortable. It would be like starting your life over from scratch—a cold reboot of sorts.
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The problem is that it's hard to construct a hypothesis that isn't testable except for hypotheses that they can't list on a test, e.g. God created the universe.
Okay, I suppose they could go absurd, like "Invisible trolls live under the bridge and occasionally eat small children", or philosophical, like "The universe is infinite" or "The enemy of my enemy is my friend", but....
You need to be able to handle a temperature gradient of almost three hundred degrees between the outdoors and the indoors, and if you're using inflatable housing, I doubt it will insulate particularly well. You think your power bill in the winter is high.... I think it might be pushing the limits of at least the RTGs that are readily available.
Now my quick back-of-the-envelope math says that with resistance heat, some of the larger RTGs could readily handle heating a decent size structure, but that's before you factor in lighting, melting of super-cooled ice for water and oxygen, electrolysis of oxygen, powering communication gear and science gear, etc. It might be doable, but I'd want to have solar backup. It doesn't take that much space for a rolled-up solar panel.
Electrolysis means splitting using electricity, so no, they don't. More to the point, plants don't convert CO2 to O2 at all. The oxygen released by plants comes from the water that they consume, not the carbon dioxide (source: HowPlantsWork.com).
Also, using plants to produce oxygen is a good idea in theory, but would likely require a relatively large enclosure relative to the number of people who live in it. It might be feasible once you have established a temporary base, but until you have built/assembled/inflated a few large, airtight structures on the planet's surface, it probably is not. A normal (but sealed) greenhouse might produce enough food for a handful of people, but it is unlikely to produce enough oxygen. Also, it would suck if you accidentally put something that plants don't like in your water supply and killed off half the plants. It's easy to store up enough dried emergency rations to last you until a supply mission arrives in a year or more. It's not so easy to store up that much oxygen.
Of course, with Blu-Ray prices at about $3-4 apiece for 25 gigabytes, they're about four times as expensive per gigabyte as hard drives, making this false economy by any standards even without factoring in the cost of the cassette.
Which was precisely when I stopped going to the theater. I'm not going to pay seven bucks for a ticket so that you can show me ads. If I want to watch a bunch of ads, I'll wait a year and watch it on TV. Your choices are: A. free and ad-supported, B. not free and not ad-supported, or C. free and not ad-supported. There is no choice D.
Fuel for a return trip is mostly an excuse. You just need to do the return trip in two hops: bring enough fuel in the lander to get yourself to orbit, then dock with a giant tanker that carries enough fuel for the rest of the trip. Mars gravity is only about twice that of the Moon, and we got a lander into lunar orbit over fifty years ago, so I can't imagine a Mars ascent being that much of a leap.
The harder part is actually landing a pod big enough to provide long-term living quarters. You could probably do it with inflatable buildings and large air compressors, but you'd still need a supplemental oxygen supply and either a steady supply of food and oxygen or a means of producing your own.
The ideal solution would require landing somewhere with water ice. Water can provide oxygen by electrolysis. Sure, there are other ways to get oxygen (using CO2 electrolysis, for example), but that won't provide them with the water they'll need for other things like cooking, bathing, etc., so landing somewhere with an ample supply of water would be a big plus.
So combine some very powerful air compressors with oxygen generators, lots of heating coils, some inflatable buildings, some disassembled airtight greenhouses, two or three shipments containing large, rolled-up solar panel sheets, etc. and it might actually be feasible to create a long-term habitat on Mars for not a lot more than the cost of a few rover missions. Remember to provide at least three of everything so that they won't be screwed if one of them doesn't work, preferably in separate bundles within reasonable walking distance of a single drop zone. Then provide a small lander with enough reserve oxygen and power to last them a month or two just in case it takes them longer than expected to get things set up.
Is this like the joke about using lawyers for scientific research because the researchers got too attached to the rats?
Which allows you to taper down the population of the domestic cattle, but if your eventual goal is the elimination of meat consumption, you're still going to have to deal with the population of the wild boars, the buffalo and other wild cattle (which are currently kept under control through hunting), deer, rabbits, etc.
Not in carry-on, which is what we're talking about....
Cows, too. We call them buffalo or bison, but they can interbreed with cattle and produce fertile offspring (sometimes). They aren't particularly common in the wild because of overhunting, but they once were, and in the absence of hunting, would be again.
It doesn't take computer models to see the air quality in China from all those coal plants. Even if anthropogenic global warming is a complete fairy tale, using coal for power still provably causes substantial harm to the local environment. There's absolutely no debate possible on that subject. It's a directly observable cause and effect that has been repeated thousands of times around the world.
No, I'm suggesting that although coal might seem advantageous in the short term, it is severely detrimental to the host country and indeed to the rest of the world in the long term, and actually poses serious local problems in the short term as well. Therefore, other nations that have already seen this happen firsthand should act like big brothers to discourage their younger siblings from making all the same mistakes.
Which is why the time to prevent Chinese dependence on coal was a few decades back, and it is too late now. We pretty much have to let China burn itself out and move on to more modern sources of power. However, the sorts of regulations that would have prevented China from becoming a coal-burning industrial nation a few decades back can prevent some other nation (no idea who yet) from becoming one a few decades from now. And that is why such laws are needed.
Sigh. Humor is lost on this one.
What you posted is the dumbest comment I have read all day. Do you think those animals will stop reproducing just because we stop building buildings around them? Their rate of reproduction is comparable to our current rate of consumption. In the absence of taking some explicit action to reduce that rate, if we lower our rate of consumption, the population will increase. Period. This is basic science.
If you want to decrease their rate of reproduction, either you have to increase the rate of consumption (or the rate of destruction without consumption) to lower the number of animals that exist or you have to throw them out in the wild and hope that they either starve or are picked off by predators. There's no third choice. You can't just magically say "We're going to reduce agricultural meat production" and expect the number of animals to decline on its own.
It's not the scientists who have framed the debate in this way. It's the politicians. As soon as it became a political discussion, it created an "us versus them" mentality between the Democrats and the Republicans. At that point, any hope of actually improving things through sane, well-reasoned legislation went out the window because neither party is capable of even remotely sane or reasonable discussion of any issue.
Awesome. Now I can carry a napalm canister and a loaded assault rifle when I fly instead of having to ship it by ground freight. That will make travel much more convenient. And a canister of VX, too, just in case I need it when I get where I'm going. And that full can of gasoline for my lawnmower.
I sincerely hope he didn't mean all liquids. There are some things that simply should not be allowed on aircraft, yet if legal, you just know that somebody would be stupid enough to carry them on. Now eliminating the ridiculous quantity limits and the requirement that you take them out of the bags for screening might be a good idea.
P.S. In case your sarcasm detector is defective, I live in Northern California, and therefore do not own a lawnmower.
The TSA as a jobs program is awesome in principle except that we should be paying them to do something useful instead of what they're doing. You know, like patrolling the thousands of miles of fence around airports, driving up and down the tens of thousands of miles of railroad tracks to watch for people planting bombs, installing crossing guards at railroad intersections, staffing suicide prevention hotlines to reduce the number of rail jumpers, screening applicants for visas, driving the border fences to watch for tunnels and other illegal smuggling across our borders, performing safety inspections of trucks at every weigh station (and having all the weigh stations open instead of just certain ones), performing random safety inspections on aircraft, and so on.
There are so many things the government could do to make travel safer. Why is it that they keep burning all this money and all these resources on things that won't?
That's just not a realistic solution. Cows multiply. With few natural predators remaining, as long as there is adequate food (grass, leaves, etc.), they will continue to multiply without bounds, resulting in increased global warming, not decreased global warming. Ditto for pigs, etc. We already see this problem with deer in much of the U.S. Were it not for regular hunting to keep the population under control, things would become dire rather quickly. The last thing we need to do is add cows and pigs to that list.
Unless, of course, you plan a program of euthanizing every last cow and then not eating the meat, in which case I would argue that it is your plan that is incredibly wasteful.
In parts of the U.S., it's already significantly cheaper to use solar power than fossil fuels. What is most needed at this point, at least in the U.S., is a more flexible, lower resistance power grid so that solar power from a sunny day in Texas can adequately make up for the bleak midwinter in Oregon. This is useful whether we move to "green" power or not.
The bigger problem is China and other early industrial nations. As long as new nations transition from agrarian economies to industrial economies using coal as their primary means of power production, no amount of regulation in modern countries is going to improve things; it will only keep them from getting worse at an ever-accelerating pace.
What we need to solve this is a ban on U.S. and European companies building coal-based plants in other countries—make it as hard as possible for developing nations to get their start using coal and as easy as possible for them to get their start using more modern power production.
Average life expectancy in most parts of the first world is about 80 years, so yes, actually you would expect about 10% turnover in eight years.
That said, you would not expect 0% uptake among young people.
Now, now, it's not nice to call women names.
It's a fundamentally unworkable solution to the problem. The reason we don't have enough capacity is not because we need more bandwidth. The reason we don't have enough capacity is that we're trying to use one tower every 15-30 miles to provide service to hundreds of thousands of people. If those folks are mostly using it occasionally (as they do with cell phones), it works reasonably well. When they're sitting there for hours on end surfing the Internet at home or work, it breaks down very badly. We're orders of magnitude away from being able to handle that.
Wireless works really well at short distances where each cell is talking to dozens of people (e.g. Wi-Fi). The larger the number of people per cell, the more infeasible it becomes due to interference from other devices, not to mention all the multipath problems inherent in wireless delivery over long distances. Even if you could make the bandwidth ten thousand times wider, we still wouldn't have enough bandwidth to service every man, woman, and child's home Internet needs somewhere like New York or San Francisco using cell towers. It's entirely the wrong solution to to the problem.
Instead, we should be focusing on making VoIP and VPNs roam transparently between cellular services and Wi-Fi, roam transparently between multiple Wi-Fi hot spots, etc. And we should be moving more towards providing free public Wi-Fi services at high densities so that only the last few feet are wireless.
Depends on the app. If we're talking about an all-text game, that's a little extreme. On the other hand, if it contains any image assets at all, that is probably not unreasonable.
Remember that the original Palm hardware had 240 x 160 resolution in black and white. A current-generation iPhone has 960 x 640 resolution in 24-bit color, and it is usually bundled as dual-platform for iPad, which is 2048 x 1536 in 24-bit color. So if that 50k app on Palm were nothing but uncompressed image data, you would expect the iPad/iPhone version of the app to be a whopping 96 megabytes.
Obviously image compression helps with that, and obviously an app contains content other than image assets, both of which contribute to that being something of an overestimate. That said, using that as an upper bound, a mere one megabyte doesn't sound bad at all.
There are only two situations where the original owner could have sold the phone:
1. The original purchaser bought a new phone. 99% of the time, this comes from the carrier, but either way, there's a new phone talking to their towers with the old SIM card. No mugger steals the phone but leaves you your SIM card, so this is an easy one to catch.
2. The original purchaser stopped using that company's service. This also can't happen usefully without notifying the carrier.
In other words, for all intents and purposes, the scam you're describing is infeasible. If the customer reports the phone stolen to the carrier, it's pretty safe to say that the phone was stolen... unless, of course, they merely reported it stolen so that they could claim that they were not at the scene of a crime, but that's another matter entirely....
It all comes down to whether you have a good work-life balance or you live to work and work to live. A lot of retirees have the same reaction to retirement. Going from having a list of things that you have to get done to not having one can be stressful for some people.
For me, it would be awesome because I have so many tens of thousands of hours of backlog in my personal projects that I may never catch up as it is.... But if you don't have a wide range of outside creative interests, I could see how it could be very uncomfortable. It would be like starting your life over from scratch—a cold reboot of sorts.