Factoring primes is not known to be "hard" that is there is no such proof.
Actually factoring primes is really easy. For any prime p, it factors as just p. What you mean is in factoring a generic composite into primes. \end{nitpick}
Even if there is no efficient algorithm to factor primes it maybe that we can use inventions like quantum computers to possibly solve it.
See my reply to the other person who brought up quantum computers. Quantum computers can if implemented factor large numbers very efficiently. Moreover, we can't even prove at this point that factoring is itself classically hard (as you correctly noted). This is why I used a tower of exponentials in my example.
Not really. It is possible that there are physical discoveries that we're not expecting that will allow us to do extreme computations, but they aren't that likely to do that much.
Let's use your example of quantum computers. We have strong theorems about what a quantum computer can do compared to a classical computer. In particular, BQP, the class of problems that a quantum computer can do in polynomial time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BQP0 is in PSPACE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSPACE, the class of problems that a classical computer can do in polynomial space (where polynomial in both cases means polynomial in the length of the input). This means that a quantum computer *cannot* massively extend what one can do much beyond speeding up some calculations, and other theorems show that this is a general pattern. Holevo's theorem and a few other similar theorems say more or less that you cannot use n qubits to simulate n+1 bits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holevo's_theorem. And in fact, the conjecture strongly is that BQP is *much smaller* than PSPACE.
Now, you might say that you just meant quantum computing as an example. But people have actually thought about what possible computing analogs would make sense that would be even more powerful than quantum computers. So for example, Scott Aaronson has looked at models involving access to a hidden variable http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/qchvpra.pdf and it turns out that while they are naturally more powerful than quantum computers, again their are pretty strong limits on what they can do.
Moreover, we have pretty good ideas at this point of upper bounds on what physically can be computed and stored in an area. One example of this is the holographic principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle which puts pretty severe limits on how much information can be stored or presented. And even if the holographic principle is *wrong* (not implausible), and let's say that somehow it isn't just wrong in the obvious way (where the amount of information increases directly proportional to the volume) but in fact does so according to say a 20th power of the volume with a constant out front that in the relevant units is a hundred times as large as that in the holographic bound, one would *still* have nowhere near enough bits to plausibly do this sort of thing.
Frankly, when I give the sort of problem I mentioned earlier, instead of using a small stack of exponentials, I normally use the Ackermann function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ackermann_function and say something like A(100) +1, which is insanely bigger than the number I used. So even if you don't buy the arguments above, just use a number like that which is easy to specify mathematically and is mindboggingly larger.
We already know there are questions we can't answer. In fact, it isn't that hard to write down questions where barring extreme surprises, we can't answer them even given that they are essentially just simple computations. For example, does 2^(10^(10^500)) +1 have an even or odd number of distinct prime factors? That took two seconds to write down, but unless there's something very weird about numbers close to powers of 2 then we literally lack the computational power in the observable universe to answer that question. So we already have pretty hard physical limits on what we can know. This is just a question of whether there are also hard physical limits to questions that some people happen to care a lot about.
Would you actually not produce things if people would eventually in some sane amount of time get access to do what they want with your works? More to the point, how do you think things would be if Shakespeare was still copyrighted, or Jane Austen, or Shelley's Frankenstein? The point of copyright is to have a long enough period to encourage people to make their own works. If you really aren't comfortable with people maybe playing with your ideas 70 years after you've died, then that shows if anything that you've absorbed too many of the ideas of very long copyright times, and I daresay you are the exception rather than the rule even given that.
Paywalls are not like the other issues here. Paywalls are legitimate although often futile attempt for people to make a profit off their labor. The problem is precisely the long-term copyright issues that the article actually discusses where the people claiming copyright are either claiming it on highly derivative works or on works made fifty or more years ago. Putting in paywalls into the summary distracts from the serious issues here. Focus on the real problem.
This is a vast oversimplification. First, there was no intent to "keep the muzzies down" but rather to deal with an ongoing situation.
What's the difference?
Well, for one, many of the Palestinian Arabs at the time were Christian. For another, there's a massive difference between trying to keep a specific group down and trying to come up with a solution that doesn't result in massive genocide.
It's not really that crazy. The Jews' own holy books explain why everyone hates them. They were a racial minority that invaded a region which had already been hotly contested basically for all recorded history, put the men and mothers to the sword, and took the virgins as wives.
Definitely accurate, but worth noting that this sort of behavior was pretty par for the course in ancient times. The only difference here is that this a group in question that ended up surviving in some form to the modern age with their own personal history intact.
They got kicked out of that region eventually by force, and then the UK came up with a snazzy plan to keep the muzzies down by reinstalling the jews in a place they'd already been driven out of.
This is a vast oversimplification. First, there was no intent to "keep the muzzies down" but rather to deal with an ongoing situation. In particular, there had been a small Jewish population in various parts of the land since the Roman times (such as around Safed) and there had been systematic return to the land since the 1800s with a large Jewish population by the 1920s and a very large population post World War II. The plan in question was then to partition the land between two states https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_for_Palestine which the Jews accepted and the Palestinian Arabs by and large rejected.
The radiation profile and basic light curve over time fit roughly what is expected for this type of supernova but it is much more luminous than expected. It isn't like they are just declaring any suddenly luminous object to be a supernova.
This is part of the same general trend as battery technology gets better: we don't need fossil fuels for nearly as many things as we did previously. To some extent this one is a bit of a no-brainer, because leafblowers are not technologies where one has to worry terribly about being stranded if there's no nearby recharge station or if the range isn't far enough (which helped hold back electric cars). It will be interesting to see how far this goes. Some optimists (such a Elon Musk) think that we'll eventually have boats and airplanes which use batteries, thus relegating fossil fuel use to essentially some rockets which require the very high energy density, plastic and other petrochemical derivative production (which will take a lot longer to find alternatives for), and energy in the grid. Note by the way that because large generators like power plants are more efficient than small ones, as long as one has decent batteries and doesn't have terrible power plants on the grid, that's still a net gain.
However, I'm pessimistic about this sort of trend for a few reasons. First, many countries are still producing coal power plants, and although a natural gas or oil plant is often cleaner than a car or other device burning gasoline, this is often not the case for coal plants. In some developed countries, like the US, the total percentage of power produced by coal is going down but the total amount of coal production is roughly constant and projected to remain so for at least a few decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States. While newer coal plants are more efficient and cleaner, this is only by a comparatively small degree. Of course, if do eventually get cheaper nuclear (such as with more modern reactors or maybe even with thorium reactors) this situation may change- right now the fact that nuclear is held to much higher safety standards than fossil fuel plants is a large part of its very high cost.
More seriously for the very long-term hope of making batteries handle all transport technologies including ships and airplanes, it isn't clear that battery technology will improve that much over time. The primary thing that matters is energy density, which has two forms, energy per mass and energy per volume. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density Both need to be much better than they are today for electric airplanes to have any chance (lifespan and and number of cycle uses also need to improve but that's in some ways less of a barrier.) Energy density of batteries by both metrics batteries has increased by 5%-10% a year depending on the exact metric and choice of examples https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-battery-energy-density-improves-5-8-per-year which is exponential growth ( but with a much slower doubling time than something like Moore's Law. One has a doubling about once every 8 or 10 years.) Jet fuel has an energy density of around 45 MJ/kg, The most efficient batteries have a little under 1 MJ/kg. So one needs at least about 5 doublings before batteries can reasonably compete which will start to occur if they have an energy density of around 32/ MJ/kg. Similar remarks apply to energy density measured by joules per volume. However, there are technical reasons to think that batteries will stop doubling before that (see theabove quora link for details which argues that we can't make batteries much than four times as efficient before we start running into serious theoretical limits). At around 20 MJ/kg, one maybe could run planes practically but they would be much less convenient and practical than today's jets and that would be at the very upper end of the plausible limits. So it is likely that we will still see fossil fuels used for jets for the next 40 or 50 years.
There's a real problem here. For much of the Cold War, the NSA did its job, and it did it well: spying on the actual enemies of the US while helping make sure that the communications of the US and its allies were secure. They helped make the world safe for democracy. Unfortunately, the work gets very little publicity and it is also very hard to forgive them for things they've done since 9/11. Essentially,they've blown most of their hard-earned good will. It will probably take decades before it is reestablished.
Not using nuclear weapons at all is an important taboo precisely because it can get out of hand so quickly. No nuclear launches is a clear bright line, in some sense a Schelling point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory) . Once small nukes are in use, the bright line no longer exists.
To have a government like Finland or the Netherlands requires pretty left-wing policies and attitudes, including paying civil servants well, which requires a lot of tax money. If you keep insisting on low tax rates because we don't have a government type that doesn't arise unless one has somewhat higher tax rates, I'm not sure what to say.
I'm curious then. If someone offered to make you a bet on where you get $20 if the next President will be Trump with at least 425 electoral votes and you pay $20 if it isn't, would you take it? Note that that's a much less extreme landslide then the sort you are imagining but still a clear landslide so you should assign it a higher probability.
Being concerned about Islamist extremist taking over countries is a completely legitimate and substantial concern. But that isn't something that gets stopped by not letting Muslims into the US. At best, such a policy would be neutral on that matter.
No. The question always is what tradeoffs in context make sense given both the amount of damage being done and what damage would be done from the policies in question. If you said that we should restrict evangelical Christians from buying guns and someone used the argument about pro-life doctors, the same observation would hold. Understanding scale is always important.
Your analysis about Trump's chances are probably accurate. The rest, less so.
You can't do it. The only response, so far as I can find, is to cast aspersions on the person asking that question. Terms like bigot, predjudiced, racist, and extremist are used. Also outright lies such as "it's unconstitutional" (no, it's not), "it's impossible to tell who's a Muslim" (no, it's not), "that's not what America is about" (we've done it before), and so on.
That we've done something before is an absolutely terrible argument. We had slavery for much of our history. Note also that the claim isn't that it is impossible to tell who is a Muslim, but that it isn't easy. Your argument also ignores that a) the vast majority of Muslim immigrants are fine b) the actual threat is tiny- even in France after the last attack more people have died in 2015 in France by a factor of about 30 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate, and the numbers are even more extreme in the US. It also ignores that this is exactly the sort of thing that radicalizes moderates.
It is true that one doesn't need to be a bigot to support these policies, and there are legitimate arguments in favor of such policies, but that's more because almost any proposed policy has at least some positives http://lesswrong.com/lw/gz/policy_debates_should_not_appear_onesided/, and while it is true that one doesn't need to be a bigot to support Trump's policies, the fact is that many of his supporters are and the total set of policies as a whole paints a pretty unpleasant picture.
And yes, he has made blanket statements. Look at for example his comment from his announcement speech where he said:
When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
This wasn't a claim that most Mexican immigrants are good with a few bad apples. This was a statement that they are bad, except possibly "some" who might be good that he has to "assume" exist. This is about as blanket as one can get without using a universal quantifier. Similar remarks apply to his statements about Muslims and POWs (who are apparently losers for being captured while serving their country).
Everyone has mistatements about them in the media. The important thing in this case is that even when you put things he says in complete context they are still awful or based on factually incorrect claims. There's a reason that PolitiFact labeled Trump's entire set of falsehoods their Lie of the Year , never before has someone managed to have all three top spots in the running for lie of the year. Of course, Trump and others response that this was left-wing bias is also false, as one can see from the fact that the previous year's Lie of the Year was a specific statement by Obama http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2013/dec/12/lie-year-if-you-like-your-health-care-plan-keep-it/. Trump really is that bad on basic facts even *before* one talks about the morality or ethics of any of his ideas.
http://predictionbook.com/ is a website that allows one to record predictions along with a probability estimate for them. Others can then comment and give their own estimates. When a prediction comes due one can then judge it. It also has a nice graph that allows one to then see how accurate one has been (most humans are overconfident). It isn't perfect since for example it doesn't have categories for predictions; it would be nice for example to be able to say look at just one's predictions related to politics, or to the space program or something similar. But overall, I strongly recommend it.
I should read the entire TFA before commenting. Later down, they have a diagram that goes back for the previous 15 years and they note explicitly this massive jump and discuss it. (Also, I have to say I really like the way they've presented the data here. It is a novel but highly readable way of organizing the data.)
We're in a golden age of robotic exploration. The diagram doesn't really show this quite as much because it only goes back to the year 2003, but you can see it a little bit in this diagram based on how few lines trail off the left-hand side of the diagram and how many more don't just start sometime in the last decade but have very long lines. Since 2003 there has been no point where we haven't had at least three Mars missions ongoing giving back actual data and often four or five. Mars currently has 7 different active missions, and that number is set to actually grow over the next few years. The situation for other bodies looks not as extreme, but very similar. At the start of the diagram, there are zero Venus missions or Mercury, either active or underway, and since 2005 for both planets there's been at least one each active or underway for each planet. Similar statements apply to the other categories in the diagram. The only one we are roughly holding steady is missions to the gas giants. Even there there's been an uptick but not as large.
Slashdot Mirror
Factoring primes is not known to be "hard" that is there is no such proof.
Actually factoring primes is really easy. For any prime p, it factors as just p. What you mean is in factoring a generic composite into primes. \end{nitpick}
Even if there is no efficient algorithm to factor primes it maybe that we can use inventions like quantum computers to possibly solve it.
See my reply to the other person who brought up quantum computers. Quantum computers can if implemented factor large numbers very efficiently. Moreover, we can't even prove at this point that factoring is itself classically hard (as you correctly noted). This is why I used a tower of exponentials in my example.
Let's use your example of quantum computers. We have strong theorems about what a quantum computer can do compared to a classical computer. In particular, BQP, the class of problems that a quantum computer can do in polynomial time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BQP0 is in PSPACE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSPACE, the class of problems that a classical computer can do in polynomial space (where polynomial in both cases means polynomial in the length of the input). This means that a quantum computer *cannot* massively extend what one can do much beyond speeding up some calculations, and other theorems show that this is a general pattern. Holevo's theorem and a few other similar theorems say more or less that you cannot use n qubits to simulate n+1 bits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holevo's_theorem. And in fact, the conjecture strongly is that BQP is *much smaller* than PSPACE.
Now, you might say that you just meant quantum computing as an example. But people have actually thought about what possible computing analogs would make sense that would be even more powerful than quantum computers. So for example, Scott Aaronson has looked at models involving access to a hidden variable http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/qchvpra.pdf and it turns out that while they are naturally more powerful than quantum computers, again their are pretty strong limits on what they can do.
Moreover, we have pretty good ideas at this point of upper bounds on what physically can be computed and stored in an area. One example of this is the holographic principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle which puts pretty severe limits on how much information can be stored or presented. And even if the holographic principle is *wrong* (not implausible), and let's say that somehow it isn't just wrong in the obvious way (where the amount of information increases directly proportional to the volume) but in fact does so according to say a 20th power of the volume with a constant out front that in the relevant units is a hundred times as large as that in the holographic bound, one would *still* have nowhere near enough bits to plausibly do this sort of thing.
Frankly, when I give the sort of problem I mentioned earlier, instead of using a small stack of exponentials, I normally use the Ackermann function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ackermann_function and say something like A(100) +1, which is insanely bigger than the number I used. So even if you don't buy the arguments above, just use a number like that which is easy to specify mathematically and is mindboggingly larger.
We already know there are questions we can't answer. In fact, it isn't that hard to write down questions where barring extreme surprises, we can't answer them even given that they are essentially just simple computations. For example, does 2^(10^(10^500)) +1 have an even or odd number of distinct prime factors? That took two seconds to write down, but unless there's something very weird about numbers close to powers of 2 then we literally lack the computational power in the observable universe to answer that question. So we already have pretty hard physical limits on what we can know. This is just a question of whether there are also hard physical limits to questions that some people happen to care a lot about.
Would you actually not produce things if people would eventually in some sane amount of time get access to do what they want with your works? More to the point, how do you think things would be if Shakespeare was still copyrighted, or Jane Austen, or Shelley's Frankenstein? The point of copyright is to have a long enough period to encourage people to make their own works. If you really aren't comfortable with people maybe playing with your ideas 70 years after you've died, then that shows if anything that you've absorbed too many of the ideas of very long copyright times, and I daresay you are the exception rather than the rule even given that.
Paywalls are not like the other issues here. Paywalls are legitimate although often futile attempt for people to make a profit off their labor. The problem is precisely the long-term copyright issues that the article actually discusses where the people claiming copyright are either claiming it on highly derivative works or on works made fifty or more years ago. Putting in paywalls into the summary distracts from the serious issues here. Focus on the real problem.
This is a vast oversimplification. First, there was no intent to "keep the muzzies down" but rather to deal with an ongoing situation.
What's the difference?
Well, for one, many of the Palestinian Arabs at the time were Christian. For another, there's a massive difference between trying to keep a specific group down and trying to come up with a solution that doesn't result in massive genocide.
It's not really that crazy. The Jews' own holy books explain why everyone hates them. They were a racial minority that invaded a region which had already been hotly contested basically for all recorded history, put the men and mothers to the sword, and took the virgins as wives.
Definitely accurate, but worth noting that this sort of behavior was pretty par for the course in ancient times. The only difference here is that this a group in question that ended up surviving in some form to the modern age with their own personal history intact.
They got kicked out of that region eventually by force, and then the UK came up with a snazzy plan to keep the muzzies down by reinstalling the jews in a place they'd already been driven out of.
This is a vast oversimplification. First, there was no intent to "keep the muzzies down" but rather to deal with an ongoing situation. In particular, there had been a small Jewish population in various parts of the land since the Roman times (such as around Safed) and there had been systematic return to the land since the 1800s with a large Jewish population by the 1920s and a very large population post World War II. The plan in question was then to partition the land between two states https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_for_Palestine which the Jews accepted and the Palestinian Arabs by and large rejected.
The radiation profile and basic light curve over time fit roughly what is expected for this type of supernova but it is much more luminous than expected. It isn't like they are just declaring any suddenly luminous object to be a supernova.
This is part of the same general trend as battery technology gets better: we don't need fossil fuels for nearly as many things as we did previously. To some extent this one is a bit of a no-brainer, because leafblowers are not technologies where one has to worry terribly about being stranded if there's no nearby recharge station or if the range isn't far enough (which helped hold back electric cars). It will be interesting to see how far this goes. Some optimists (such a Elon Musk) think that we'll eventually have boats and airplanes which use batteries, thus relegating fossil fuel use to essentially some rockets which require the very high energy density, plastic and other petrochemical derivative production (which will take a lot longer to find alternatives for), and energy in the grid. Note by the way that because large generators like power plants are more efficient than small ones, as long as one has decent batteries and doesn't have terrible power plants on the grid, that's still a net gain.
However, I'm pessimistic about this sort of trend for a few reasons. First, many countries are still producing coal power plants, and although a natural gas or oil plant is often cleaner than a car or other device burning gasoline, this is often not the case for coal plants. In some developed countries, like the US, the total percentage of power produced by coal is going down but the total amount of coal production is roughly constant and projected to remain so for at least a few decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States. While newer coal plants are more efficient and cleaner, this is only by a comparatively small degree. Of course, if do eventually get cheaper nuclear (such as with more modern reactors or maybe even with thorium reactors) this situation may change- right now the fact that nuclear is held to much higher safety standards than fossil fuel plants is a large part of its very high cost.
More seriously for the very long-term hope of making batteries handle all transport technologies including ships and airplanes, it isn't clear that battery technology will improve that much over time. The primary thing that matters is energy density, which has two forms, energy per mass and energy per volume. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density Both need to be much better than they are today for electric airplanes to have any chance (lifespan and and number of cycle uses also need to improve but that's in some ways less of a barrier.) Energy density of batteries by both metrics batteries has increased by 5%-10% a year depending on the exact metric and choice of examples https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-battery-energy-density-improves-5-8-per-year which is exponential growth ( but with a much slower doubling time than something like Moore's Law. One has a doubling about once every 8 or 10 years.) Jet fuel has an energy density of around 45 MJ/kg, The most efficient batteries have a little under 1 MJ/kg. So one needs at least about 5 doublings before batteries can reasonably compete which will start to occur if they have an energy density of around 32/ MJ/kg. Similar remarks apply to energy density measured by joules per volume. However, there are technical reasons to think that batteries will stop doubling before that (see theabove quora link for details which argues that we can't make batteries much than four times as efficient before we start running into serious theoretical limits). At around 20 MJ/kg, one maybe could run planes practically but they would be much less convenient and practical than today's jets and that would be at the very upper end of the plausible limits. So it is likely that we will still see fossil fuels used for jets for the next 40 or 50 years.
There's a real problem here. For much of the Cold War, the NSA did its job, and it did it well: spying on the actual enemies of the US while helping make sure that the communications of the US and its allies were secure. They helped make the world safe for democracy. Unfortunately, the work gets very little publicity and it is also very hard to forgive them for things they've done since 9/11. Essentially,they've blown most of their hard-earned good will. It will probably take decades before it is reestablished.
Not using nuclear weapons at all is an important taboo precisely because it can get out of hand so quickly. No nuclear launches is a clear bright line, in some sense a Schelling point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory) . Once small nukes are in use, the bright line no longer exists.
Such an event can occur, it is a type of fizzle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fizzle_(nuclear_test) but the seismic data doesn't seem completely consistent with that.
To have a government like Finland or the Netherlands requires pretty left-wing policies and attitudes, including paying civil servants well, which requires a lot of tax money. If you keep insisting on low tax rates because we don't have a government type that doesn't arise unless one has somewhat higher tax rates, I'm not sure what to say.
Having a service where you are cheating customers by not revealing a major part of how a service works is a serious problem. Countries where people are more trusting of other people, corporations and their governments do better economically, and are better by a variety of other metrics (such as Gini coefficient). While there are serious correlation v. causation issues here, it is likely that a big part of this is that people are more willing to engage in transactions with people or institutions they aren't directly familiar with. See e.g. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/20/trust-wealth_n_851519.html, http://www.pewglobal.org/2008/04/15/where-trust-is-high-crime-and-corruption-are-low/, https://agenda.weforum.org/2015/10/how-trusting-are-european-nations/, and http://www.oecd.org/forum/the-cost-of-mistrust.htm. This means that large corporations bilking customers is damaging to all of us at a large scale.
I'm curious then. If someone offered to make you a bet on where you get $20 if the next President will be Trump with at least 425 electoral votes and you pay $20 if it isn't, would you take it? Note that that's a much less extreme landslide then the sort you are imagining but still a clear landslide so you should assign it a higher probability.
Being concerned about Islamist extremist taking over countries is a completely legitimate and substantial concern. But that isn't something that gets stopped by not letting Muslims into the US. At best, such a policy would be neutral on that matter.
How much is an electoral college landslide? 350? 370? More?
No. The question always is what tradeoffs in context make sense given both the amount of damage being done and what damage would be done from the policies in question. If you said that we should restrict evangelical Christians from buying guns and someone used the argument about pro-life doctors, the same observation would hold. Understanding scale is always important.
You can't do it. The only response, so far as I can find, is to cast aspersions on the person asking that question. Terms like bigot, predjudiced, racist, and extremist are used. Also outright lies such as "it's unconstitutional" (no, it's not), "it's impossible to tell who's a Muslim" (no, it's not), "that's not what America is about" (we've done it before), and so on.
That we've done something before is an absolutely terrible argument. We had slavery for much of our history. Note also that the claim isn't that it is impossible to tell who is a Muslim, but that it isn't easy. Your argument also ignores that a) the vast majority of Muslim immigrants are fine b) the actual threat is tiny- even in France after the last attack more people have died in 2015 in France by a factor of about 30 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate, and the numbers are even more extreme in the US. It also ignores that this is exactly the sort of thing that radicalizes moderates.
It is true that one doesn't need to be a bigot to support these policies, and there are legitimate arguments in favor of such policies, but that's more because almost any proposed policy has at least some positives http://lesswrong.com/lw/gz/policy_debates_should_not_appear_onesided/, and while it is true that one doesn't need to be a bigot to support Trump's policies, the fact is that many of his supporters are and the total set of policies as a whole paints a pretty unpleasant picture.
Yeah, I'm sure it is left-wing bias that the media hasn't covered the evidence for his assertions. It isn't that the assertions are simply false, like his repeated false claim about thousands of New Jersey Muslims cheering on 9/11 http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/22/donald-trump/fact-checking-trumps-claim-thousands-new-jersey-ch/, his repeated claim that Mexico is deliberately sending criminals to the US http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/aug/06/donald-trump/trump-mexican-government-they-send-bad-ones-over/, or simply stating demonstrably made up statistics http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/23/donald-trump/trump-tweet-blacks-white-homicide-victims/.
And yes, he has made blanket statements. Look at for example his comment from his announcement speech where he said:
When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
This wasn't a claim that most Mexican immigrants are good with a few bad apples. This was a statement that they are bad, except possibly "some" who might be good that he has to "assume" exist. This is about as blanket as one can get without using a universal quantifier. Similar remarks apply to his statements about Muslims and POWs (who are apparently losers for being captured while serving their country).
Everyone has mistatements about them in the media. The important thing in this case is that even when you put things he says in complete context they are still awful or based on factually incorrect claims. There's a reason that PolitiFact labeled Trump's entire set of falsehoods their Lie of the Year , never before has someone managed to have all three top spots in the running for lie of the year. Of course, Trump and others response that this was left-wing bias is also false, as one can see from the fact that the previous year's Lie of the Year was a specific statement by Obama http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2013/dec/12/lie-year-if-you-like-your-health-care-plan-keep-it/. Trump really is that bad on basic facts even *before* one talks about the morality or ethics of any of his ideas.
http://predictionbook.com/ is a website that allows one to record predictions along with a probability estimate for them. Others can then comment and give their own estimates. When a prediction comes due one can then judge it. It also has a nice graph that allows one to then see how accurate one has been (most humans are overconfident). It isn't perfect since for example it doesn't have categories for predictions; it would be nice for example to be able to say look at just one's predictions related to politics, or to the space program or something similar. But overall, I strongly recommend it.
I should read the entire TFA before commenting. Later down, they have a diagram that goes back for the previous 15 years and they note explicitly this massive jump and discuss it. (Also, I have to say I really like the way they've presented the data here. It is a novel but highly readable way of organizing the data.)
We're in a golden age of robotic exploration. The diagram doesn't really show this quite as much because it only goes back to the year 2003, but you can see it a little bit in this diagram based on how few lines trail off the left-hand side of the diagram and how many more don't just start sometime in the last decade but have very long lines. Since 2003 there has been no point where we haven't had at least three Mars missions ongoing giving back actual data and often four or five. Mars currently has 7 different active missions, and that number is set to actually grow over the next few years. The situation for other bodies looks not as extreme, but very similar. At the start of the diagram, there are zero Venus missions or Mercury, either active or underway, and since 2005 for both planets there's been at least one each active or underway for each planet. Similar statements apply to the other categories in the diagram. The only one we are roughly holding steady is missions to the gas giants. Even there there's been an uptick but not as large.
That is an option, but each time you convert an energy type you lose some energy. Moreover, hydrogen storage has a lot of technical issues.