If we can identifying earth sized planets they can be cataloged until resolution improves enough for spectroscopy to be used to identify atmospheric composition.
Even a "small" atomic weapon will kill a city, little boy was approximately 15 KT and there wasn't a whole lot left of Hiroshima after it was used. To put the size of that weapon in context one warhead in a modern MIRV package is 100+ KT. The reason for eliminating megaton weapons was because missile accuracy became good enough that they were no longer necessary to compensate for being off target. The additional mass that went into a single large weapon became several smaller weapons with improved accuracy and addition fuel for increased range.
The reason our weapon arsenal is so large isn't target diversity, it's to insure it became impossible to win an atomic war with an overwhelming initial strike. with 10,000 warheads 99% of them could be destroyed in their silos, hangers or subs and there would still be enough atomic weapons left to still annihilate the aggressor nation. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is a frightening policy but it's the reason we ended up with this huge stockpile of weapons.
We do have a "Department of Defense" that's in charge of thousands of tanks, heavy bombers, aircraft carriers and atomic submarines so at least we're consistent.
I'm still waiting on the departments of truth and love.
It sorta makes me wonder how many doctors, engineers, and mathematicians get away with regular old-fashioned non-terroristical murder each year. I would not be surprised to learn that smart people commit murder at the same rate as anyone else, but simply have a much better shot at getting away with it.
The murder rate for technical minded humans is probably slightly lower than the rest of the population. Not because engineers, doctors and mathematicians are inherently more moral, they're just less likely to end up in a desperate situation where murder seems like an acceptable risk.
When I decided on civil engineering I wanted to make sure people had access to clean, affordable water and solve interesting problems. On the other hand TFA is sort of a backhanded compliment, I suppose I could just as easily use my fabrication skills and what I know to cause a lot of damage if I was that sort of person.
I know I'm risking what little karma I have as a new poster but this question seems bizarre. Throttled connection speed is primarily a US problem and has a lot to do with the telecoms not keeping their promise to Congress to create a fiber optic network across the nation. Now they're reaping what they've sown and are trying to create an excuse to pass the buck to their customers rather than fulfilling their obligations.
I could see a tiered system for connection speed that billed based on KB transfered being reasonable if the telecoms were doing everything in their power to meet increasing capacity demands but they're not.
Millions of paintings have been created, nobody needed a multinational corporation to filter those for us. Filtering isn't an either/or proposition regulated to what a giant company feeds us or an individual task sorting through 10^6 pages of Googled information. Most filtering operates out of our social circles; you get useful suggestions from your friends, family and various associates far more frequently than from an unknown third party. Branching out from your baseline music would be visiting live shows and specialized internet radio stations where you sort through the genre content or even algorithms run sites like Pandora that attempt to match your tastes against "similar sounding" music selections. I see the immediate future of music moving away from the big dinosaurs who act as gatekeepers and towards smaller groups/individuals who share their individual tastes. You can sort through information groupings of people you've found to have similar tastes to expedite the sorting process.
When I'm busy (running, driving, working ect) I listen to familiar content I've already sorted and when I've got time to listen carefully I explore other artists and genres. I know I'm not the only one who listens to music like this and I'd venture to guess that it's very common. The way we deal with information has changed, controlling distribution and advertising matters less than categorizing information in a useful manner. If big music labels want to stay relevant they need to figure out how to provide a useful service rather than using the courts to cling onto a model that doesn't work anymore.
The constraint isn't just making a software program that could automate all vehicle controls. That software program would have to operates flawlessly over a wireless transmission system that's immune to jamming and impossible to hack. Otherwise it would be possible to convert flying traffic into thousands of guided missiles. There's also the issues of energy consumption (for short distances aircraft aren't very efficient), maintenance (most people don't take good care of their vehicle) and cost.
We have plenty of room on our current road system, we just use it in a terrible manner. Right now 1 person driving a car occupies around 16 square meters of road, compare that with a bicycle that requires about 2 square meters or a bus which requires about 1 square meter per passenger at half capacity.
Even stable forms of Government don't last forever and bad forms of Government incite revolution. After a revolution a single form of Government replaces the old one and typically the new form of Government is more progressive than the old one.
When a society is in chaos a push towards order often takes the form of battling warlords, each attempting to overpower the other and the region lives in constant conflict than can stretch out for decades (think Africa). If one warlord finally seizes power the new nation typically becomes a dictatorship with the supreme ruler taking as he pleases. Looking at the last few thousand years of human history societies tends to progress in jumps from chaos into regimented order then relaxing into a more liberal society, falling into decadence then collapsing. In the chain of societal progress a chaotic society doesn't jump from chaos into a democracy, it moves from chaos to a dictatorship.
A $200 video card and a $50 stick of ram makes the computer you already own a very solid gaming platform; just because you can spend $1200 bucks doesn't mean you have to.
Al-Qaeda plans and executes attacks on civilians.
The Save Darfur Coalition is trying stop attacks on civilians.
Which one could be classified as an enemy of humanity? There's a lot of Western hypocrisy out there but moral relativism will only carry an argument so far.
but it's infuriating that I'm competing for academic scholarships against people who are majoring in liberal arts and do next to nothing to earn an A. Engineering must be difficult, if an engineer screws up people die so there's no room for incompetence. I'm working through my Junior year now and looking around at pay scale, graduate school admissions and academic rewards based on GPA and beginning to feel like I made a mistake by not going directly after an MBA.
We use lots of heavy equipment for road construction because energy is cheap and labor isn't. If fuel becomes more expensive you'll see more manual labor with grip hoists replacing some of the heavy equipment.
You went a bit off the deep end with that "life sustaining energy resources" bit. We're not running out of energy, we're running out of oil, there's a huge difference. Regarding roads most of our society is fed because of our road system. Remove them and you'd have to rebuild trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure to relocate our huge urban populations to rural communities. Roads are relatively cheap to construct and maintain; aqueducts, levee systems, water treatment plants, reservoirs, factories, fiber optic cables and housing are not cheap or easy to replace.
Costing more money to drive a gasoline powered vehicle somewhere isn't the apocalypse, it's just a form of market pressure pushing us into more sustainable energy sources. Life will get a little more expensive without cheap gasoline but society isn't going to break down.
We build roads out of cement as well as asphalt. We use asphalt because it's cheap, when oil quits being cheap you'll see more cement roads. Don't expect Mad max style vehicles any time soon, as "bad" as it'll ever get is electric bicycles, which cost next to nothing in operating costs.
A bullet can hit a Humvee and it'll continue to operate or can be repaired in a reasonable amount of time. I can't think of any animal that will continue to work or can be fixed in the same manner after it's been shot.
Even a cleptocracy is preferable to chaos. It's easier to deal with a specific group of greedy bastards who maintain a body of laws (however imperfect) than what Hobbes referred to as the state of nature.
...why rechargeable lithium batteries aren't OK in space but alkaline batteries are? I can't think of any way gravity would affect battery operation or why the electrode material would matter.
It doesn't take a gallon of diesel to produce a gallon of ethanol, that's why I said it was a net positive energy producer.
Don't take my word for it, here's a technology review article: http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19924/page1/
From the text:
"... 54 percent of the total energy represented by a gallon of ethanol is offset by the energy required to process the fuel; another 24 percent is offset by the energy required to grow the corn."
That's less that 100% energy consumption, so it's net positive. There are lots of other issues, food supply, cost, production unable to meet our current energy demands but it is a net positive producer meaning it does make sense to use it as a fuel.
I have a small correction to make: current ethanol production does produce a net energy gain if it's extracted from sugars like corn. The kind that's still operates at a loss is ethanol produced from cellulose and that's the breakthrough that we'd be waiting on since it can be produced from food byproducts like corn husks or the grass stems from wheat.
At our current energy level consumption ethanol isn't a miracle cure but it does have a place at the table along with hydroelectric, solar, wind and atomic power. Fossil fuels, whether or not you're concerned about global warming, simply cannot meet the world's growing energy demands forever and humans are going to have to diversify if we want to maintain our current standard of living.
...instead of lawyers to make statement. At the very least they should have someone with a background in science to proof read statements before they're released. It'd keep incorrect statements like this:
"At this point, there are no proliferation-proof reactors," Sokova says. "If a country develops a reprocessing program, they then have the ability to turn the fuel into the plutonium needed to make a nuclear bomb."
from being made. There are ways to create fuel (like pyroprocessing) that cannot be easily enriched into a weapon. The impurities it leaves in the fuel are nearly impossible to remove to get the concentration necessary to actually create a weapon. What I mean by "nearly impossible" is nobody, not Russia, the US, the UK, France or China has figured out how to do it, much less a way to make it cost effective. If any nation is sophisticated enough to develop a program capable of separating out the strong alpha emitters they'd already be capable of creating a weapons program without foreign aid.
I agree, everything is ultimately destined for the dump/recycling center. I just don't expect for there to be a sudden glut of electronic trash, a lot of it will end up in spare rooms, yard sales and pawn shops. Lots of people, myself included, have a hard time throwing away something that still works well. The old electronics will eventually go away but a lot of the devices will be living out their full lifespan, just like they would have if no upgrade had come out.
There are lots of people who kept their VCR and tape collection after they bought a DVD player. Why do so many "experts" assume that when a technology becomes outdated that it's immediately thrown away? I suspect that analog TVs and DVD players will hang around until they finally break, much like the current generation of HD platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
If we can identifying earth sized planets they can be cataloged until resolution improves enough for spectroscopy to be used to identify atmospheric composition.
I find a black background with white or green text easiest on my eyes.
Even a "small" atomic weapon will kill a city, little boy was approximately 15 KT and there wasn't a whole lot left of Hiroshima after it was used. To put the size of that weapon in context one warhead in a modern MIRV package is 100+ KT. The reason for eliminating megaton weapons was because missile accuracy became good enough that they were no longer necessary to compensate for being off target. The additional mass that went into a single large weapon became several smaller weapons with improved accuracy and addition fuel for increased range.
The reason our weapon arsenal is so large isn't target diversity, it's to insure it became impossible to win an atomic war with an overwhelming initial strike. with 10,000 warheads 99% of them could be destroyed in their silos, hangers or subs and there would still be enough atomic weapons left to still annihilate the aggressor nation. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is a frightening policy but it's the reason we ended up with this huge stockpile of weapons.
We do have a "Department of Defense" that's in charge of thousands of tanks, heavy bombers, aircraft carriers and atomic submarines so at least we're consistent. I'm still waiting on the departments of truth and love.
The murder rate for technical minded humans is probably slightly lower than the rest of the population. Not because engineers, doctors and mathematicians are inherently more moral, they're just less likely to end up in a desperate situation where murder seems like an acceptable risk.
When I decided on civil engineering I wanted to make sure people had access to clean, affordable water and solve interesting problems. On the other hand TFA is sort of a backhanded compliment, I suppose I could just as easily use my fabrication skills and what I know to cause a lot of damage if I was that sort of person.
I know I'm risking what little karma I have as a new poster but this question seems bizarre. Throttled connection speed is primarily a US problem and has a lot to do with the telecoms not keeping their promise to Congress to create a fiber optic network across the nation. Now they're reaping what they've sown and are trying to create an excuse to pass the buck to their customers rather than fulfilling their obligations.
I could see a tiered system for connection speed that billed based on KB transfered being reasonable if the telecoms were doing everything in their power to meet increasing capacity demands but they're not.
Millions of paintings have been created, nobody needed a multinational corporation to filter those for us. Filtering isn't an either/or proposition regulated to what a giant company feeds us or an individual task sorting through 10^6 pages of Googled information. Most filtering operates out of our social circles; you get useful suggestions from your friends, family and various associates far more frequently than from an unknown third party. Branching out from your baseline music would be visiting live shows and specialized internet radio stations where you sort through the genre content or even algorithms run sites like Pandora that attempt to match your tastes against "similar sounding" music selections. I see the immediate future of music moving away from the big dinosaurs who act as gatekeepers and towards smaller groups/individuals who share their individual tastes. You can sort through information groupings of people you've found to have similar tastes to expedite the sorting process.
When I'm busy (running, driving, working ect) I listen to familiar content I've already sorted and when I've got time to listen carefully I explore other artists and genres. I know I'm not the only one who listens to music like this and I'd venture to guess that it's very common. The way we deal with information has changed, controlling distribution and advertising matters less than categorizing information in a useful manner. If big music labels want to stay relevant they need to figure out how to provide a useful service rather than using the courts to cling onto a model that doesn't work anymore.
The constraint isn't just making a software program that could automate all vehicle controls. That software program would have to operates flawlessly over a wireless transmission system that's immune to jamming and impossible to hack. Otherwise it would be possible to convert flying traffic into thousands of guided missiles. There's also the issues of energy consumption (for short distances aircraft aren't very efficient), maintenance (most people don't take good care of their vehicle) and cost.
We have plenty of room on our current road system, we just use it in a terrible manner. Right now 1 person driving a car occupies around 16 square meters of road, compare that with a bicycle that requires about 2 square meters or a bus which requires about 1 square meter per passenger at half capacity.
Even stable forms of Government don't last forever and bad forms of Government incite revolution. After a revolution a single form of Government replaces the old one and typically the new form of Government is more progressive than the old one. When a society is in chaos a push towards order often takes the form of battling warlords, each attempting to overpower the other and the region lives in constant conflict than can stretch out for decades (think Africa). If one warlord finally seizes power the new nation typically becomes a dictatorship with the supreme ruler taking as he pleases. Looking at the last few thousand years of human history societies tends to progress in jumps from chaos into regimented order then relaxing into a more liberal society, falling into decadence then collapsing. In the chain of societal progress a chaotic society doesn't jump from chaos into a democracy, it moves from chaos to a dictatorship.
A $200 video card and a $50 stick of ram makes the computer you already own a very solid gaming platform; just because you can spend $1200 bucks doesn't mean you have to.
Al-Qaeda plans and executes attacks on civilians. The Save Darfur Coalition is trying stop attacks on civilians. Which one could be classified as an enemy of humanity? There's a lot of Western hypocrisy out there but moral relativism will only carry an argument so far.
but it's infuriating that I'm competing for academic scholarships against people who are majoring in liberal arts and do next to nothing to earn an A. Engineering must be difficult, if an engineer screws up people die so there's no room for incompetence. I'm working through my Junior year now and looking around at pay scale, graduate school admissions and academic rewards based on GPA and beginning to feel like I made a mistake by not going directly after an MBA.
...is to fine people who listen to music that their neighbor is playing, proceeds split with the RIAA of course.
We use lots of heavy equipment for road construction because energy is cheap and labor isn't. If fuel becomes more expensive you'll see more manual labor with grip hoists replacing some of the heavy equipment. You went a bit off the deep end with that "life sustaining energy resources" bit. We're not running out of energy, we're running out of oil, there's a huge difference. Regarding roads most of our society is fed because of our road system. Remove them and you'd have to rebuild trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure to relocate our huge urban populations to rural communities. Roads are relatively cheap to construct and maintain; aqueducts, levee systems, water treatment plants, reservoirs, factories, fiber optic cables and housing are not cheap or easy to replace. Costing more money to drive a gasoline powered vehicle somewhere isn't the apocalypse, it's just a form of market pressure pushing us into more sustainable energy sources. Life will get a little more expensive without cheap gasoline but society isn't going to break down.
We build roads out of cement as well as asphalt. We use asphalt because it's cheap, when oil quits being cheap you'll see more cement roads. Don't expect Mad max style vehicles any time soon, as "bad" as it'll ever get is electric bicycles, which cost next to nothing in operating costs.
A bullet can hit a Humvee and it'll continue to operate or can be repaired in a reasonable amount of time. I can't think of any animal that will continue to work or can be fixed in the same manner after it's been shot.
Even a cleptocracy is preferable to chaos. It's easier to deal with a specific group of greedy bastards who maintain a body of laws (however imperfect) than what Hobbes referred to as the state of nature.
...why rechargeable lithium batteries aren't OK in space but alkaline batteries are? I can't think of any way gravity would affect battery operation or why the electrode material would matter.
It doesn't take a gallon of diesel to produce a gallon of ethanol, that's why I said it was a net positive energy producer. Don't take my word for it, here's a technology review article: http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19924/page1/ From the text: "... 54 percent of the total energy represented by a gallon of ethanol is offset by the energy required to process the fuel; another 24 percent is offset by the energy required to grow the corn." That's less that 100% energy consumption, so it's net positive. There are lots of other issues, food supply, cost, production unable to meet our current energy demands but it is a net positive producer meaning it does make sense to use it as a fuel.
I have a small correction to make: current ethanol production does produce a net energy gain if it's extracted from sugars like corn. The kind that's still operates at a loss is ethanol produced from cellulose and that's the breakthrough that we'd be waiting on since it can be produced from food byproducts like corn husks or the grass stems from wheat. At our current energy level consumption ethanol isn't a miracle cure but it does have a place at the table along with hydroelectric, solar, wind and atomic power. Fossil fuels, whether or not you're concerned about global warming, simply cannot meet the world's growing energy demands forever and humans are going to have to diversify if we want to maintain our current standard of living.
...instead of lawyers to make statement. At the very least they should have someone with a background in science to proof read statements before they're released. It'd keep incorrect statements like this: "At this point, there are no proliferation-proof reactors," Sokova says. "If a country develops a reprocessing program, they then have the ability to turn the fuel into the plutonium needed to make a nuclear bomb." from being made. There are ways to create fuel (like pyroprocessing) that cannot be easily enriched into a weapon. The impurities it leaves in the fuel are nearly impossible to remove to get the concentration necessary to actually create a weapon. What I mean by "nearly impossible" is nobody, not Russia, the US, the UK, France or China has figured out how to do it, much less a way to make it cost effective. If any nation is sophisticated enough to develop a program capable of separating out the strong alpha emitters they'd already be capable of creating a weapons program without foreign aid.
I agree, everything is ultimately destined for the dump/recycling center. I just don't expect for there to be a sudden glut of electronic trash, a lot of it will end up in spare rooms, yard sales and pawn shops. Lots of people, myself included, have a hard time throwing away something that still works well. The old electronics will eventually go away but a lot of the devices will be living out their full lifespan, just like they would have if no upgrade had come out.
There are lots of people who kept their VCR and tape collection after they bought a DVD player. Why do so many "experts" assume that when a technology becomes outdated that it's immediately thrown away? I suspect that analog TVs and DVD players will hang around until they finally break, much like the current generation of HD platforms.