Having usable amounts of helium trapped in one place so you can collect it efficiently is quite rare though. There's a reason that > 90% of helium was taken out of the great plains, it's one of the few places where it occurs in large enough quantities to be feasible. There are, of course, other places (Algeria apparently is the new number 2 producer according to Wiki), and as the price increases it will become more economical to capture and refine from natural gas wells that ignore it today. That's one of the reasons there was a big push to stop government control of the price of Helium, it's important that we start collecting more of what's available before we vent a potentially precious resource into the atmosphere because its too expensive to capture.
Bad reporting is what happened. This story is not what the summary or article makes it out to be, see the links to cnet's take on the situation in one of the comments above.
How much do you have to drink to pass out so badly that you don't feel your dog eating your toe?
How much diabetic neuropathy (nerve damage caused by diabetes) do you need before you can have a severe bone infection without noticing it? It's entirely possible that his toes are completely numb, especially after a night of drinking (which further screws with your blood sugar).
Besides that, his wife brought him home (you'd think she would have noticed if he were bleeding profusely) and the only blood in the house was on the bed where he was sleeping. I've got to say, their theory doesn't sound as far fetched to me as so many others seem to think it is.
As for the being too afraid to go to the doctor because you're worried you might be seriously ill... yeah that's retarded. "If I don't put a label on what my bodies doing them I'm not really sick." Yep, brilliant logic.
Didn't Amazon just hand over its right to price many new releases to the publishers? I seem to remember Amazon wanting to charge $10 for a new (only in hardcover) release, but the publishers forcing them to increase the price or not carry the books. Of course, that doesn't say anything about cheaper books that are out in paperback...
As someone who games regularly with a laptop (I prefer at least sitting in the same room with my wife while we're both relaxing) I have to make the argument that it isn't a problem if you prepare for it. Get a cooling pad, or at least a hard lap pad so that the vents can breath, keep the vents clear, and blow it out regularly with compressed air. Be aware of when it's getting hot and if all else fails adjust the settings for the game accordingly.
Just add 'lol' 'omgwtfbbq' 'brb' 'afk' and 'QQ' to the dictionary. I highly doubt that they didn't realize that people would want to add words, names, and places that they don't know about. Same system to add those can be used to add all the annoying text speak you want.
With the auto correction on most touch phones these days typing out complete words and sentences isn't really a problem once you get used to it. Especially hard to get past for me was wanting to hit backspace to correct it when you see mistakes, if you just plow on through it will usually fix the errors as you go. The problem is trying to type things that aren't complete words; email addresses, URLs, abbreviations, uncommon names and punctuation are all still very difficult to type and I don't see how this keyboard can improve them.
That's why the majority of eReaders on the market use eInk as their primary display. It basically eliminates the problem of eyestrain from reading off a screen. The older ones don't have very high contrast though, which makes Amazon's recent announcement of 50% better contrast very intriguing to me.
I may be wrong, but going downwind faster than the wind is only possible because sailboats have a keel which transfers some of the sideways force into a forward force. Not possible in space I'm afraid so unless the light pressure is higher than the solar wind pressure I don't think you're gonna be able to do it.
That is false, ALS is a neurological disease that affects the motor neurons in the brain, it does not directly affect muscle tissue at all. The degeneration of motor neurons leads to paralysis of muscles controlled by the brain which eventually leads to atrophy of the muscles. Fortunately, the heart is not controlled by the motor neurons in the brain so the heart is almost completely unaffected except in situations like I mentioned where the patient is bed ridden for a long period of time in which case the heart will begin to weaken from under use.
I agree with the sentiment (though I disagree with trying to assign 'good' and 'bad' to climate) but I would make two points in addition.
First: At least this long term climate record refutes the idea of a runaway greenhouse effect. This was at one point a common subject brought up, and one that I never understood seen as we know that the planet has been significantly warmer than it currently is without a runaway effect occuring.
Second: It isn't that one temperature is better or worse than another, its the rate that the change is taking place. I'm sure that given time we could change our population centers, major farming areas, etc to take advantage of a hotter planet and perhaps even end up better off than we are now. The thing is that it seems like global warming is happening faster than we'll be able to do so. It's going to take decades to move the coastal populations or construct dykes to protect our cities, decades for farmers to adapt to changing climates and that's humans, the most readily adaptable species on the planet. Global warming, regardless of its causes, is going to cause a very difficult and rapid transition period and if we are the cause it will most likely be a transition period that never ends. Something that we and our grandchildren can adapt to probably, but the cost in terms of economics and ecology is going to be huge.
You don't need to cover the entire sky at once, every piece of debris you down is one less piece of debris in orbit. It might take large array of brooms several decades to significantly impact the problem but so what? Since they system is ground based maintenance, upgrades, and expansions are all much easier. The power requirements are high but not unrealistically so, 1W of tightly focused laser is powerful enough to ablate many materials so I can't imagine more than a Megawatt would be required to make a significant impact.
If he's dying that rapidly then what's the concern about harvesting the organs now? ALS doesn't affect the internal organs, the only way they could become damaged is as a result of a long, drawn out period of paralysis. If such a paralysis is on the table then his death isn't imminent. I'm not saying this guy shouldn't be allowed to choose for himself (I absolutely feel that it is his decision and that's coming from someone who had a suicide in my close family) I'm just saying that his altruistic reasons smell like BS to me. It's an excuse, either to himself or to his family, to make his desire to die more palatable for everyone involved. I suspect that even if donation was entirely off the table he would still want to die, but then he and his family would have to deal with all the very painful repercussions of that desire.
One big difference, someone here has to kill him. A doctor or surgeon (someone pledged to do no harm) must purposefully end this man's life for him to get what he wants.
ALS is a brain disease, the neurons that control muscle movement degrade over time, causing paralysis and eventually death by respiratory failure. The organs are unaffected because even the heart is not controlled by motor neurons in the brain. After he passed he'd be the perfect donor, one with too much brain damage to live but otherwise healthy organs. The stated concern is the year or more spent lying in bed after the paralysis hits could damage or degrade the organs (I suspect the real concern is that he just doesn't want to go through that but knows that assisted suicide is a no go these days).
Unless he's actually just suicidal and is looking for a way to do it that his family and friends will be able to accept. Not saying this is the case, just saying that he needs to be thoroughly evaluated before you can even say if he's the ultimate altruist or just wants off the ride.
His death isn't even that imminent, consider that Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with ALS 47 years ago. An extreme case certainly (the longest survivor of any ALS patient), and I doubt that many people would have adapted to and overcome the psychological problems of the disease as well as Hawking has. But to say that ALS is 100% death sentence is obviously wrong.
A ground based laser broom with adaptive optics is probably the only remotely cost effective way of mitigating the problem. From the ground you can't easily reduce an objects velocity but you can push it into a more elliptical orbit, if you can get it elliptical enough you put the perigee inside Earth's atmosphere and let that do the rest. It's the only way I've heard about that doesn't involve a ludicrous number of launches but at the same time will work only for relatively small pieces of debris in low orbit. Luckily, that's where the majority of the problem lies so it might be effective enough until we can deal with the rest.
There are legal requirements for the length of the yellow that are dependent upon the speed limit on the road. The city violating those requirements would significantly weaken their position that you could have avoided going through the red light. Taken to the logical extreme, imagine the city shortens the yellow light to 0 seconds and then fines everyone for going through on red.
Camera date is the weakest of his arguments, but it does point to general problems within the system and chain of evidence. If nothing else, if the camera says you were at intersection X at 1pm on Tuesday and you can prove that you and your car were somewhere else it weakens their case considerably.
Police departments have recently been using wiretap laws to argue that it is illegal to film them in public. This is simply turning that argument around on them, more in protest to their not wanting to be filmed than an argument to your innocence. Still a point worth mentioning since the argument has worked for others (the police) in the past.
Broken brakes would result in a fix-it ticket, generally little to no fine if you provide proof that the issue has been professionally repaired. Yes, this is absolutely a valid defense assuming that it is true.
Stolen plates, you let someone borrow the car, stolen car... all situations which would end up with you getting a ticket that for an action that you never performed. You might have to prove that one of these was the case, but it is a valid argument.
On the other hand if you just want to reduce all accidents you make the yellow light longer. Almost 0 cost, and actually effective. On the other hand it doesn't generate thousands of dollars in revenue for the police department so it's a no go.
Obviously he thought it was pretty important, hence going through the extra work of carving it into rock rather than writing it on papyrus. Besides, the reason that we think those artifacts are important are because they happen to be what survived. If the Egyptians had made a conscious and honest effort to preserve what they thought was important we'd undoubtedly have a clearer picture of their culture and history. In fact, just knowing what things they thought were important enough to preserve would probably tell us more than we know about their culture from the artifacts that we find relatively randomly today.
If a child is failing the teacher should be talking directly with the parents about what the problems are, preferably well before report card time. Anything else is a failure of the parent, the teacher, or both.
I think that's fair enough, if the soldiers in the field don't want it I would call that failing the final test. And besides that, it isn't really that great of a deterrence weapon, especially during a riot. Imagine you've got a thousand people, 20 rows deep moving in on an embassy and you shoot this off. Only the first row is going to get the full force of the weapon, people farther back might get little to none. Now you've got a bunch of people getting hit, probably trying to turn and run but can't because the people behind them keep pushing forward. If nothing else, the weapon has never been safety tested for such a scenario. It would be more useful to keep a small group of apparently unarmed people from approaching a location, but it seems overkill for that situation, especially because it doubtless takes time and effort to deploy. So you end up only using it in situations (rare situations to boot, when was the last time a mob attacked a US military base or embassy?) where it is practically guaranteed to be ineffective.
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Having usable amounts of helium trapped in one place so you can collect it efficiently is quite rare though. There's a reason that > 90% of helium was taken out of the great plains, it's one of the few places where it occurs in large enough quantities to be feasible. There are, of course, other places (Algeria apparently is the new number 2 producer according to Wiki), and as the price increases it will become more economical to capture and refine from natural gas wells that ignore it today. That's one of the reasons there was a big push to stop government control of the price of Helium, it's important that we start collecting more of what's available before we vent a potentially precious resource into the atmosphere because its too expensive to capture.
Bad reporting is what happened. This story is not what the summary or article makes it out to be, see the links to cnet's take on the situation in one of the comments above.
Technically we hit peak helium a long, long time ago. Most of what's used today is out of storage collected decades ago.
How much do you have to drink to pass out so badly that you don't feel your dog eating your toe?
How much diabetic neuropathy (nerve damage caused by diabetes) do you need before you can have a severe bone infection without noticing it? It's entirely possible that his toes are completely numb, especially after a night of drinking (which further screws with your blood sugar).
Besides that, his wife brought him home (you'd think she would have noticed if he were bleeding profusely) and the only blood in the house was on the bed where he was sleeping. I've got to say, their theory doesn't sound as far fetched to me as so many others seem to think it is.
As for the being too afraid to go to the doctor because you're worried you might be seriously ill... yeah that's retarded. "If I don't put a label on what my bodies doing them I'm not really sick." Yep, brilliant logic.
Didn't Amazon just hand over its right to price many new releases to the publishers? I seem to remember Amazon wanting to charge $10 for a new (only in hardcover) release, but the publishers forcing them to increase the price or not carry the books. Of course, that doesn't say anything about cheaper books that are out in paperback...
As someone who games regularly with a laptop (I prefer at least sitting in the same room with my wife while we're both relaxing) I have to make the argument that it isn't a problem if you prepare for it. Get a cooling pad, or at least a hard lap pad so that the vents can breath, keep the vents clear, and blow it out regularly with compressed air. Be aware of when it's getting hot and if all else fails adjust the settings for the game accordingly.
So tribalism == politics. Got it!
Just add 'lol' 'omgwtfbbq' 'brb' 'afk' and 'QQ' to the dictionary. I highly doubt that they didn't realize that people would want to add words, names, and places that they don't know about. Same system to add those can be used to add all the annoying text speak you want.
With the auto correction on most touch phones these days typing out complete words and sentences isn't really a problem once you get used to it. Especially hard to get past for me was wanting to hit backspace to correct it when you see mistakes, if you just plow on through it will usually fix the errors as you go. The problem is trying to type things that aren't complete words; email addresses, URLs, abbreviations, uncommon names and punctuation are all still very difficult to type and I don't see how this keyboard can improve them.
That's why the majority of eReaders on the market use eInk as their primary display. It basically eliminates the problem of eyestrain from reading off a screen. The older ones don't have very high contrast though, which makes Amazon's recent announcement of 50% better contrast very intriguing to me.
I may be wrong, but going downwind faster than the wind is only possible because sailboats have a keel which transfers some of the sideways force into a forward force. Not possible in space I'm afraid so unless the light pressure is higher than the solar wind pressure I don't think you're gonna be able to do it.
That is false, ALS is a neurological disease that affects the motor neurons in the brain, it does not directly affect muscle tissue at all. The degeneration of motor neurons leads to paralysis of muscles controlled by the brain which eventually leads to atrophy of the muscles. Fortunately, the heart is not controlled by the motor neurons in the brain so the heart is almost completely unaffected except in situations like I mentioned where the patient is bed ridden for a long period of time in which case the heart will begin to weaken from under use.
I agree with the sentiment (though I disagree with trying to assign 'good' and 'bad' to climate) but I would make two points in addition.
First: At least this long term climate record refutes the idea of a runaway greenhouse effect. This was at one point a common subject brought up, and one that I never understood seen as we know that the planet has been significantly warmer than it currently is without a runaway effect occuring.
Second: It isn't that one temperature is better or worse than another, its the rate that the change is taking place. I'm sure that given time we could change our population centers, major farming areas, etc to take advantage of a hotter planet and perhaps even end up better off than we are now. The thing is that it seems like global warming is happening faster than we'll be able to do so. It's going to take decades to move the coastal populations or construct dykes to protect our cities, decades for farmers to adapt to changing climates and that's humans, the most readily adaptable species on the planet. Global warming, regardless of its causes, is going to cause a very difficult and rapid transition period and if we are the cause it will most likely be a transition period that never ends. Something that we and our grandchildren can adapt to probably, but the cost in terms of economics and ecology is going to be huge.
You don't need to cover the entire sky at once, every piece of debris you down is one less piece of debris in orbit. It might take large array of brooms several decades to significantly impact the problem but so what? Since they system is ground based maintenance, upgrades, and expansions are all much easier. The power requirements are high but not unrealistically so, 1W of tightly focused laser is powerful enough to ablate many materials so I can't imagine more than a Megawatt would be required to make a significant impact.
If he's dying that rapidly then what's the concern about harvesting the organs now? ALS doesn't affect the internal organs, the only way they could become damaged is as a result of a long, drawn out period of paralysis. If such a paralysis is on the table then his death isn't imminent. I'm not saying this guy shouldn't be allowed to choose for himself (I absolutely feel that it is his decision and that's coming from someone who had a suicide in my close family) I'm just saying that his altruistic reasons smell like BS to me. It's an excuse, either to himself or to his family, to make his desire to die more palatable for everyone involved. I suspect that even if donation was entirely off the table he would still want to die, but then he and his family would have to deal with all the very painful repercussions of that desire.
One big difference, someone here has to kill him. A doctor or surgeon (someone pledged to do no harm) must purposefully end this man's life for him to get what he wants.
ALS is a brain disease, the neurons that control muscle movement degrade over time, causing paralysis and eventually death by respiratory failure. The organs are unaffected because even the heart is not controlled by motor neurons in the brain. After he passed he'd be the perfect donor, one with too much brain damage to live but otherwise healthy organs. The stated concern is the year or more spent lying in bed after the paralysis hits could damage or degrade the organs (I suspect the real concern is that he just doesn't want to go through that but knows that assisted suicide is a no go these days).
Unless he's actually just suicidal and is looking for a way to do it that his family and friends will be able to accept. Not saying this is the case, just saying that he needs to be thoroughly evaluated before you can even say if he's the ultimate altruist or just wants off the ride.
His death isn't even that imminent, consider that Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with ALS 47 years ago. An extreme case certainly (the longest survivor of any ALS patient), and I doubt that many people would have adapted to and overcome the psychological problems of the disease as well as Hawking has. But to say that ALS is 100% death sentence is obviously wrong.
A ground based laser broom with adaptive optics is probably the only remotely cost effective way of mitigating the problem. From the ground you can't easily reduce an objects velocity but you can push it into a more elliptical orbit, if you can get it elliptical enough you put the perigee inside Earth's atmosphere and let that do the rest. It's the only way I've heard about that doesn't involve a ludicrous number of launches but at the same time will work only for relatively small pieces of debris in low orbit. Luckily, that's where the majority of the problem lies so it might be effective enough until we can deal with the rest.
There are legal requirements for the length of the yellow that are dependent upon the speed limit on the road. The city violating those requirements would significantly weaken their position that you could have avoided going through the red light. Taken to the logical extreme, imagine the city shortens the yellow light to 0 seconds and then fines everyone for going through on red.
Camera date is the weakest of his arguments, but it does point to general problems within the system and chain of evidence. If nothing else, if the camera says you were at intersection X at 1pm on Tuesday and you can prove that you and your car were somewhere else it weakens their case considerably.
Police departments have recently been using wiretap laws to argue that it is illegal to film them in public. This is simply turning that argument around on them, more in protest to their not wanting to be filmed than an argument to your innocence. Still a point worth mentioning since the argument has worked for others (the police) in the past.
Broken brakes would result in a fix-it ticket, generally little to no fine if you provide proof that the issue has been professionally repaired. Yes, this is absolutely a valid defense assuming that it is true.
Stolen plates, you let someone borrow the car, stolen car... all situations which would end up with you getting a ticket that for an action that you never performed. You might have to prove that one of these was the case, but it is a valid argument.
On the other hand if you just want to reduce all accidents you make the yellow light longer. Almost 0 cost, and actually effective. On the other hand it doesn't generate thousands of dollars in revenue for the police department so it's a no go.
Obviously he thought it was pretty important, hence going through the extra work of carving it into rock rather than writing it on papyrus. Besides, the reason that we think those artifacts are important are because they happen to be what survived. If the Egyptians had made a conscious and honest effort to preserve what they thought was important we'd undoubtedly have a clearer picture of their culture and history. In fact, just knowing what things they thought were important enough to preserve would probably tell us more than we know about their culture from the artifacts that we find relatively randomly today.
If a child is failing the teacher should be talking directly with the parents about what the problems are, preferably well before report card time. Anything else is a failure of the parent, the teacher, or both.
I think that's fair enough, if the soldiers in the field don't want it I would call that failing the final test. And besides that, it isn't really that great of a deterrence weapon, especially during a riot. Imagine you've got a thousand people, 20 rows deep moving in on an embassy and you shoot this off. Only the first row is going to get the full force of the weapon, people farther back might get little to none. Now you've got a bunch of people getting hit, probably trying to turn and run but can't because the people behind them keep pushing forward. If nothing else, the weapon has never been safety tested for such a scenario. It would be more useful to keep a small group of apparently unarmed people from approaching a location, but it seems overkill for that situation, especially because it doubtless takes time and effort to deploy. So you end up only using it in situations (rare situations to boot, when was the last time a mob attacked a US military base or embassy?) where it is practically guaranteed to be ineffective.