Indeed, animal behavior covers the whole gamut, from sexual free-for-alls to lifelong monogamy without repartnering after death. There've been some interesting studies of cheating behavior in duck species that are mostly monogamous but still sometimes cheat on their partners. It makes for an interesting read because they approach it in a similar manner to humans - waiting for their partner(s) to leave, meeting up, checking around to make sure they don't think they're going to get caught, having the tryst (usually in less time than it would take with their spouse), then hurrying "home" - and if they get caught by their "spouse", it can end their "relationship". But even ducks alone, depending on species, run the gamut from sexual free-for-alls to loyal, lifelong monogamy.
I find a weird assumption of many of the polyamory folk that most everyone would be polyamorous if not for "societal mores keeping them repressed". Don't get me wrong, I think greater acceptance of polyamorous folk is a good thing, and there probably are some polyamorous people in the closet for some reason or another. But it's simply not true that most people would be polyamorous if "given the chance", as a lot of polyamorous people think, any more than most people would be gay if "given the chance" or whatnot.
Look at human societies throughout history, and not just Judeo-Christian ones. How common is polyamory? I'm not talking about cheating, or leaving one's spouse and finding another, or anything of that nature - I'm talking a group of people who live together, love each other, and all F* together as desired. The reality is, it's been extremely rare. Many societies have normalized "playing the field" - having sex for fun without feelings getting involved - while others frown upon it. But that's not the same as polyamory, which implies a love and bonding relationship between multiple partners.
When feelings get involved, poly situations can get very complicated. "Why is he favoring her???" "Is she no longer interested in me???" "He keeps wanting to spend time with this new girl but I can't stand her". Etc. Don't get me wrong, some people do pull it off - and kudos to them. But let's not pretend that it's for everyone, or even the majority.
I live in a country (Iceland) where there's very little judgement about people for having sex or who they sleep with, in comparison to the US. It's pretty much just expected that if you're an adult, you're F*ing someone, at least one person, possibly multiple, of whatever gender. When our previous prime minister's party was elected, the fact that she's a lesbian was such a big deal that when a call went out for rat's asses, nobody gave one. When she was in office, it only came up in the context of "X country is causing inconveniences for Iceland because they don't like the fact that our PM is gay". Same-sex marriage passed parliament without a single vote in opposition. Reykjavík Pride is one of our country's largest annual festivals, with as much as a third of the population attending. The concept of "dating" without having sex is pretty much an alien concept here. When a couple has been together for a long time, their families generally don't start asking "when are you two going to get married", rather "when are you two going to have kids?" The typical order is meet->sex->get to know each other while having more sex->start dating->kids->optional marriage if you feel like it.
But people from overseas hear this and they misinterpret it, applying their own stereotypes about "how the world would be without holdups about sex" to Iceland. So for example, we get tourists (mainly guys) who come over here and think that this means that any girl he starts talking to in a bar is going to want to F* him. It's really annoying - they don't get the connection that "not being ashamed of sex" doesn't mean "interested in F*ing anyone who says hi". Likewise, polyamory isn't particularly common here. People sleep around aplenty, but if they start getting feelings toward someone, it usually stays toward one person. If things change, the result is usually the same sort of "cheating and/or breakup" situation that you're used to in the states. And people cheating on their spouse - aka, deceiving them - is still very frowned upon, because deceiving a person is a scummy activity no matter what country you're from. There's no shame in divorce here, but cheaters are still rightly seen as scumbags.
Regardless of where you're from: Either be open and honest with the person you're with, or accept that you're a total douchebag.
To put it another way: everything in the universe can be simulated.... given enough data and processing power. Of course, it's preposterously impractical to simulate an entire neuron from first principles, modeling every last subatomic particle, or to think that one could measure them all (even ignoring Heisenberg!). But of course, it's also preposterous to think that either of these things are requirements.
To pick a random example amount countless: What exactly would be the point to modeling a phospholipid membrane as countless individual molecules made up of even more numerous individual atoms made up of even more subatomic particles? It's just repeating phospholipid subunits. Of course it should be modeled in terms of its bulk properties, not individual particles.
But of course, does one even actually need to model the phospholipid membrane as some sort of physical object? Surely not - when looking at overall behavior, the particular details of the membrane's structure, apart from potentially a few adjustable parameters here and there, likely become statistically irrelevant compared to many reactions taking part in the neuron.
Modeling a neuron from physics first principles is technically possible (again, ignoring Heisenberg), even if practically impossible. But neither is anything close to that necessary. The neuron to simulate represents a system with inputs and outputs: X happens, Y results, the internal states Z are altered in manners A, B, and C. There exists some sort of mapping between the system's inputs, outputs, and states. The simpler one can encapsulate that into a model, the easier it is to simulate. The fewer the parameters that need to be measured, the easier it is to collect the data.
their task would be roughly the complexity of a RFID chip, but would have to be done at incredibly small scales and in a manner that will diffuse into neurons... Of course, we're still nowhere near either the hardware and software requirements of being able to pull off such a system.
Instead of whatever it was that you think that I wrote.
No, I never talked about literally planting RFID chips. I said a task of roughly the complexity of a RFID chip. RFID chips are not the smallest possible unit (by many orders of magnitude) of what humans can build to handle a task of their complexity even in the present day. Today's top end CPUs are made with transistors of only 14nm (not um, nm) in size,. Neurons themselves do tasks many orders of magnitude more complex than an RFID chip, with their basic "design" coded into their DNA. Nanostructure self-assembly, which is increasingly important in technologies such as solar power and batteries, has the potential to reach RFID-level complexity. Etc. There are many routes one can take to produce that level of complexity at those scales.
Are we there yet? Hmm, what did I say about that? Oh yeah:
Of course, we're still nowhere near either the hardware and software requirements of being able to pull off such a system.
What the neuron is doing electrically at any one given time is not the full scope of what it is doing, or can do.
Which would be a good point if I had written "only monitor electrical activity. But what I actually wrote was:
you need to also be able to gather enough data (neurotransmitter levels, structure, etc) from them to be able to accurately feed a digital model of each neuron
Something that I later described:
Of course, we're still nowhere near either the hardware and software requirements of being able to pull off such a system.
Furthermore:
It might make for a fun sci fi movie, but it wouldn't work.
Are you saying that given an arbitrary selection of data elements (implied by "etc" in the above - aka, "your choice as to what data to report"), and an arbitrary set of advancements in our knowledge of the behavior of neurons, that one will never be able to simulate a neuron? Are you saying that there are no physical measuable quantities that could allow neurons to be simulated? If so, you're moving into the realm of metaphysics, not science.
Additionally, subsidizing a ride from, say, the airport at 3 PM does little to fight drunk driving. Subsidizing a ride from a downtown party district at 2 AM certainly does. Drink driving is not at all a constant risk with respect to time or location.
Not only is Uber's "on duty" insurance not available when a person isn't "on duty", but the driver still needs personal auto insurance. Uber encourages its drivers to only pay for regular personal insurance, and the insurance companies say that this is a violation of their policy terms. Only recently have insurance companies started offering products to fill in the gaps. They, of course, come with extra premiums.
And of course, sometimes one wonders whether Uber should refer to their "insurance policy" in quotation marks.
Uber rates are of course cheaper because the drivers don't carry commercial insurance, paying regular insurance rates, and thus raising the rates for everyone else as consequence.
Now, if the argument is that public subsidized taxi services can reduce drunk driving rates, then by all means, create public subsidies for taxis operating in areas and times that people often would otherwise drive drunk. Don't just use this hidden, across-the-board, everywhere-at-all-times subsidy-by-insurance-miscategorization.
...key steps along the path that would allow seamless transition into becoming a digital mind.
Now, one needs a more advanced version that can (by pulse frequency / pulse patterns, light frequency, directionality, etc) communicate with many neurons at once at an individual level (the neurons having been "primed" to this behavior by means of selective photosensitive chemicals, inserted genes or nanostructures - their task would be roughly the complexity of a RFID chip, but would have to be done at incredibly small scales and in a manner that will diffuse into neurons). And it's not enough to be able to simply activate or deactivate neurons, you need to also be able to gather enough data (neurotransmitter levels, structure, etc) from them to be able to accurately feed a digital model of each neuron - that is, two way communication is required. And obviously a single implant wouldn't be enough (the optical signaling would quickly degrade into noise, even ignoring issues of optical attenuation - there's nearly 100 billion neurons in the human brain). There would have to be many such implants scattered all throughout the brain only monitoring / controlling their local area.
But once you have such a system, with enough bandwidth, and an external computing system with good enough neuron models and sufficient computing power, one could begin:
1) Pick an arbitrary neuron and start transmitting its data. 2) Begin simulating its' behavior based on that data. 3) Induce apoptosis in that neuron while feeding the result of the simulation into all of the neurons that it was in contact with. 4) Move onto anyone of the adjacent neurons and repeat steps 1-3. 5) Continue on until there are no neurons left and the entire brain is simulated.
Of course, we're still nowhere near either the hardware and software requirements of being able to pull off such a system. But if we had such a system, one could very slowly and gradually transition from a physical mind to a digital one, with there never being two separate consciousnesses (avoiding the moral issue of simply "copying" the mind into a digital form and then killing the version that was left behind).
Yeah, there are significant differences between different populations in terms of diets and how they hunt, and they teach their young what's food and how to hunt it. Another thing that's creepily like us. For example, the ones that hunt on beaches, the mothers will push their offspring into the shallows while remaining just behind it, ready to pull it out if it seems unable to extract itself. The ones that hunt seals and penguins on iceflows with waves that wash over the top (forgot to mention those ones) likewise train their young on how to make the best waves, playing "games" with them with the waves.
We really don't know how complicated their language is - it's only in recent years that we've even had affordable available devices that can record it in enough precision to get all of the high frequency data. But we know that they (and other dolphin species) make up and use "names" for each other. Also, they "point" to objects (with their echolocation pulses) in their communications to convey messages to others, something very rare in the animal kingdom.
Actually, his support in polls is down to 45%. His "strong economic record" was built on the back of high oil prices and hence is steadily falling apart in this new low price regime.
The estate tax is only one source of discontent. The natives really could care less about it, their biggest gripe is the continued destruction of their lands for oil extraction and power generation. The unions are mad at Correa's attempts to strip them of their power. Senior citizens groups are mad about cuts to pensions. And lots of people in general are mad at his attempts to repeal term limits and his actions against free speech, an independent press and an independent judiciary that have made Ecuador's global rankings in these regards plummet during his term.
On the other hand, keeping orcas (orca = latin for "hellspawn") is quite appropriate. The more you read about their behavior in the wild, the more you feel that they're way too far along that same combination of "smart" and "malicious" that humans are for comfort - killing for fun, using live animals to play catch, hunting animals only for their favorite cuts of meat and then letting the rest go, holding great whites upside down so that they go tonic and can't resist being leisurely eaten, belching up food to bait birds to come to the surface while lying in wait, learning how to freaking crawl on a beach to get at seals that think they're safe and teaching these sorts of skills to their young, etc. Some populations don't even seem to see fish as food, only having interest in killing mammals. Best to teach them who's in charge before they get uppity and evolve opposable thumbs;)
The funny thing is that there's probably not too many people to evacuate, given that indigenous groups (among others) are currently in Quito protesting "El Presidente" over the destruction of their lands;)
I was thinking that too. My first thought was "a piece of string", but that's a linguistic issue;)
Concerning the importance of internationalization: kind of, but programmers need to be careful about taking it too far. The most annoying ones are
1) When programs change the keyboard shortcuts from your standard set of shortcuts to something that matches the first letter in the chosen language. For example, if "save" changes to the word "vista", changing ctrl-s to ctrl-v. Stop doing this, people!. You merely ensure that every app has its own completely different shortcuts, which is a major annoyance.
2) When programs start insisting that you change your decimal point specifier to that for your language. For example, if I paste a number from almost any website on Earth into kcalc it interprets the "."s as thousands breaks and "," as decimal points, which of course means that it's virtually always a screwup (proper behavior: ignore thousand spacers since they're so rarely typed explicitly and interpret both "." and "," as a decimal point)
That still doesn't help when the wind isn't blowing sufficiently to generate enough power. They should add a treadmill backup. And they could put it in front of the wind turbine so it can keep you cool while you're jogging!
With what power output? The claim that one is going to get 750W from that tiny wind turbine is nonsense. Also, the smaller you make a RO system, the less efficient it gets - quoting industrial-scale figures is not applicable. It'd need something more like a marine watermaker for small boats, which usually use twice as much power. And they cost $5-10k.
Personal space heater, small air conditioner, mini-fridge, electric range or oven.... yeah, forget about it. Let's face it, this isn't a home, it's a hard-to-transport glamping shelter.
Conventional filtration does not remove salts, which is the main reason that drinking one's own urine isn't a recipe for wilderness survival in the real world (contrary to whatever a fake TV survivalist may have told you) and why you can't survive off of seawater. It takes reverse osmosis or electrodialysis or similar to do that - that is, power-hungry processes. Filters that involve pushing water through fine pores, like ceramic filters wouldn't even remove a significant amount of the urea (the body's way of getting rid of excess nitrogen from protein metabolism). Activated carbon is effective against urea to some extent but usually with only limited capacity. Filtering out bacteria is pointless for a healthy person's fresh urine, as in a healthy person urine is nearly sterile. Neither porous filters nor activated carbon have an effect on ammonia, nitrate or nitrite from old urine.
It's perfectly fine to shower with urine even without having run it through a filter, or with a simple "mechanical filter". The question of course is, why would you want to?
They should go through with making them, if only for the reason that a judge could sentence Jeremy Clarkson to have to live in one as punishment for punching his producer.;)
The oval shape would be better if the thing actually had wheels and was designed to be driven around regularly (optimal shape for reducing wind resistance while maximizing useful interior volume = teardrop or truncated teardrop, depending on the situation). But it's supposed to just sit in one spot. So what the heck? They could still have rounded off the edges to give it a smooth, iPod-y feel without much impact on the space and while still maximizing structural strength and minimizing wind resistance (more to the point, since sits flat on the ground, there's no point at all to curving the base - the only thing that curve does is eat up space in order to make them more likely to roll)
My first thought when I saw this was that it's the hipster form of glamping.
Not to mention that low turbines are more subject to turbulence, which shortens their lifespan - and in a "home" like this, would impart this force into shaking the occupants around. So you really have to limit yourself to a small, very low power turbine. This "750 watts" thing isn't going to be even close to the mark - maybe 750 watt-hours per day.
That said... fine, if all you're running is low power devices like LED lights, maybe a laptop, etc.
Collateral murder was released on April 5th, 4 1/2 months earlier. And was one in a line of releases. Among others, in February Wikileaks had leaked the Reykjavík 13 cable, the first of the leaks sourced from Manning, which caused a big uproar in the states dealing with the Icesave scandal. In November of the previous year it inserted itself into the Climategate scandal. In September they leaked documents from Icelandic banks showing a huge amount of illegal activity leading up to the financial crash. In July they had leaked the first evidence that led to the disclosure of the Stuxnet worm. And on and on.
Wikileaks profile steadily increased, one case after the next. But Cablegate was really their zenith.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, animal behavior covers the whole gamut, from sexual free-for-alls to lifelong monogamy without repartnering after death. There've been some interesting studies of cheating behavior in duck species that are mostly monogamous but still sometimes cheat on their partners. It makes for an interesting read because they approach it in a similar manner to humans - waiting for their partner(s) to leave, meeting up, checking around to make sure they don't think they're going to get caught, having the tryst (usually in less time than it would take with their spouse), then hurrying "home" - and if they get caught by their "spouse", it can end their "relationship". But even ducks alone, depending on species, run the gamut from sexual free-for-alls to loyal, lifelong monogamy.
I find a weird assumption of many of the polyamory folk that most everyone would be polyamorous if not for "societal mores keeping them repressed". Don't get me wrong, I think greater acceptance of polyamorous folk is a good thing, and there probably are some polyamorous people in the closet for some reason or another. But it's simply not true that most people would be polyamorous if "given the chance", as a lot of polyamorous people think, any more than most people would be gay if "given the chance" or whatnot.
Look at human societies throughout history, and not just Judeo-Christian ones. How common is polyamory? I'm not talking about cheating, or leaving one's spouse and finding another, or anything of that nature - I'm talking a group of people who live together, love each other, and all F* together as desired. The reality is, it's been extremely rare. Many societies have normalized "playing the field" - having sex for fun without feelings getting involved - while others frown upon it. But that's not the same as polyamory, which implies a love and bonding relationship between multiple partners.
When feelings get involved, poly situations can get very complicated. "Why is he favoring her???" "Is she no longer interested in me???" "He keeps wanting to spend time with this new girl but I can't stand her". Etc. Don't get me wrong, some people do pull it off - and kudos to them. But let's not pretend that it's for everyone, or even the majority.
I live in a country (Iceland) where there's very little judgement about people for having sex or who they sleep with, in comparison to the US. It's pretty much just expected that if you're an adult, you're F*ing someone, at least one person, possibly multiple, of whatever gender. When our previous prime minister's party was elected, the fact that she's a lesbian was such a big deal that when a call went out for rat's asses, nobody gave one. When she was in office, it only came up in the context of "X country is causing inconveniences for Iceland because they don't like the fact that our PM is gay". Same-sex marriage passed parliament without a single vote in opposition. Reykjavík Pride is one of our country's largest annual festivals, with as much as a third of the population attending. The concept of "dating" without having sex is pretty much an alien concept here. When a couple has been together for a long time, their families generally don't start asking "when are you two going to get married", rather "when are you two going to have kids?" The typical order is meet->sex->get to know each other while having more sex->start dating->kids->optional marriage if you feel like it.
But people from overseas hear this and they misinterpret it, applying their own stereotypes about "how the world would be without holdups about sex" to Iceland. So for example, we get tourists (mainly guys) who come over here and think that this means that any girl he starts talking to in a bar is going to want to F* him. It's really annoying - they don't get the connection that "not being ashamed of sex" doesn't mean "interested in F*ing anyone who says hi". Likewise, polyamory isn't particularly common here. People sleep around aplenty, but if they start getting feelings toward someone, it usually stays toward one person. If things change, the result is usually the same sort of "cheating and/or breakup" situation that you're used to in the states. And people cheating on their spouse - aka, deceiving them - is still very frowned upon, because deceiving a person is a scummy activity no matter what country you're from. There's no shame in divorce here, but cheaters are still rightly seen as scumbags.
Regardless of where you're from: Either be open and honest with the person you're with, or accept that you're a total douchebag.
To put it another way: everything in the universe can be simulated.... given enough data and processing power. Of course, it's preposterously impractical to simulate an entire neuron from first principles, modeling every last subatomic particle, or to think that one could measure them all (even ignoring Heisenberg!). But of course, it's also preposterous to think that either of these things are requirements.
To pick a random example amount countless: What exactly would be the point to modeling a phospholipid membrane as countless individual molecules made up of even more numerous individual atoms made up of even more subatomic particles? It's just repeating phospholipid subunits. Of course it should be modeled in terms of its bulk properties, not individual particles.
But of course, does one even actually need to model the phospholipid membrane as some sort of physical object? Surely not - when looking at overall behavior, the particular details of the membrane's structure, apart from potentially a few adjustable parameters here and there, likely become statistically irrelevant compared to many reactions taking part in the neuron.
Modeling a neuron from physics first principles is technically possible (again, ignoring Heisenberg), even if practically impossible. But neither is anything close to that necessary. The neuron to simulate represents a system with inputs and outputs: X happens, Y results, the internal states Z are altered in manners A, B, and C. There exists some sort of mapping between the system's inputs, outputs, and states. The simpler one can encapsulate that into a model, the easier it is to simulate. The fewer the parameters that need to be measured, the easier it is to collect the data.
Gee, I really wish I had written something like:
Instead of whatever it was that you think that I wrote.
No, I never talked about literally planting RFID chips. I said a task of roughly the complexity of a RFID chip. RFID chips are not the smallest possible unit (by many orders of magnitude) of what humans can build to handle a task of their complexity even in the present day. Today's top end CPUs are made with transistors of only 14nm (not um, nm) in size,. Neurons themselves do tasks many orders of magnitude more complex than an RFID chip, with their basic "design" coded into their DNA. Nanostructure self-assembly, which is increasingly important in technologies such as solar power and batteries, has the potential to reach RFID-level complexity. Etc. There are many routes one can take to produce that level of complexity at those scales.
Are we there yet? Hmm, what did I say about that? Oh yeah:
Which would be a good point if I had written "only monitor electrical activity. But what I actually wrote was:
Something that I later described:
Furthermore:
Are you saying that given an arbitrary selection of data elements (implied by "etc" in the above - aka, "your choice as to what data to report"), and an arbitrary set of advancements in our knowledge of the behavior of neurons, that one will never be able to simulate a neuron? Are you saying that there are no physical measuable quantities that could allow neurons to be simulated? If so, you're moving into the realm of metaphysics, not science.
Additionally, subsidizing a ride from, say, the airport at 3 PM does little to fight drunk driving. Subsidizing a ride from a downtown party district at 2 AM certainly does. Drink driving is not at all a constant risk with respect to time or location.
Not only is Uber's "on duty" insurance not available when a person isn't "on duty", but the driver still needs personal auto insurance. Uber encourages its drivers to only pay for regular personal insurance, and the insurance companies say that this is a violation of their policy terms. Only recently have insurance companies started offering products to fill in the gaps. They, of course, come with extra premiums.
And of course, sometimes one wonders whether Uber should refer to their "insurance policy" in quotation marks.
Uber rates are of course cheaper because the drivers don't carry commercial insurance, paying regular insurance rates, and thus raising the rates for everyone else as consequence.
Now, if the argument is that public subsidized taxi services can reduce drunk driving rates, then by all means, create public subsidies for taxis operating in areas and times that people often would otherwise drive drunk. Don't just use this hidden, across-the-board, everywhere-at-all-times subsidy-by-insurance-miscategorization.
...key steps along the path that would allow seamless transition into becoming a digital mind.
Now, one needs a more advanced version that can (by pulse frequency / pulse patterns, light frequency, directionality, etc) communicate with many neurons at once at an individual level (the neurons having been "primed" to this behavior by means of selective photosensitive chemicals, inserted genes or nanostructures - their task would be roughly the complexity of a RFID chip, but would have to be done at incredibly small scales and in a manner that will diffuse into neurons). And it's not enough to be able to simply activate or deactivate neurons, you need to also be able to gather enough data (neurotransmitter levels, structure, etc) from them to be able to accurately feed a digital model of each neuron - that is, two way communication is required. And obviously a single implant wouldn't be enough (the optical signaling would quickly degrade into noise, even ignoring issues of optical attenuation - there's nearly 100 billion neurons in the human brain). There would have to be many such implants scattered all throughout the brain only monitoring / controlling their local area.
But once you have such a system, with enough bandwidth, and an external computing system with good enough neuron models and sufficient computing power, one could begin:
1) Pick an arbitrary neuron and start transmitting its data.
2) Begin simulating its' behavior based on that data.
3) Induce apoptosis in that neuron while feeding the result of the simulation into all of the neurons that it was in contact with.
4) Move onto anyone of the adjacent neurons and repeat steps 1-3.
5) Continue on until there are no neurons left and the entire brain is simulated.
Of course, we're still nowhere near either the hardware and software requirements of being able to pull off such a system. But if we had such a system, one could very slowly and gradually transition from a physical mind to a digital one, with there never being two separate consciousnesses (avoiding the moral issue of simply "copying" the mind into a digital form and then killing the version that was left behind).
Yeah, there are significant differences between different populations in terms of diets and how they hunt, and they teach their young what's food and how to hunt it. Another thing that's creepily like us. For example, the ones that hunt on beaches, the mothers will push their offspring into the shallows while remaining just behind it, ready to pull it out if it seems unable to extract itself. The ones that hunt seals and penguins on iceflows with waves that wash over the top (forgot to mention those ones) likewise train their young on how to make the best waves, playing "games" with them with the waves.
We really don't know how complicated their language is - it's only in recent years that we've even had affordable available devices that can record it in enough precision to get all of the high frequency data. But we know that they (and other dolphin species) make up and use "names" for each other. Also, they "point" to objects (with their echolocation pulses) in their communications to convey messages to others, something very rare in the animal kingdom.
Actually, his support in polls is down to 45%. His "strong economic record" was built on the back of high oil prices and hence is steadily falling apart in this new low price regime.
The estate tax is only one source of discontent. The natives really could care less about it, their biggest gripe is the continued destruction of their lands for oil extraction and power generation. The unions are mad at Correa's attempts to strip them of their power. Senior citizens groups are mad about cuts to pensions. And lots of people in general are mad at his attempts to repeal term limits and his actions against free speech, an independent press and an independent judiciary that have made Ecuador's global rankings in these regards plummet during his term.
Apropos.
On the other hand, keeping orcas (orca = latin for "hellspawn") is quite appropriate. The more you read about their behavior in the wild, the more you feel that they're way too far along that same combination of "smart" and "malicious" that humans are for comfort - killing for fun, using live animals to play catch, hunting animals only for their favorite cuts of meat and then letting the rest go, holding great whites upside down so that they go tonic and can't resist being leisurely eaten, belching up food to bait birds to come to the surface while lying in wait, learning how to freaking crawl on a beach to get at seals that think they're safe and teaching these sorts of skills to their young, etc. Some populations don't even seem to see fish as food, only having interest in killing mammals. Best to teach them who's in charge before they get uppity and evolve opposable thumbs ;)
The funny thing is that there's probably not too many people to evacuate, given that indigenous groups (among others) are currently in Quito protesting "El Presidente" over the destruction of their lands ;)
I'm wondering how exactly I'm not supposed to live near a volcano (I live in Iceland). Am I supposed to move to Greenland and commute?
Anacondas?
I was thinking that too. My first thought was "a piece of string", but that's a linguistic issue ;)
Concerning the importance of internationalization: kind of, but programmers need to be careful about taking it too far. The most annoying ones are
1) When programs change the keyboard shortcuts from your standard set of shortcuts to something that matches the first letter in the chosen language. For example, if "save" changes to the word "vista", changing ctrl-s to ctrl-v. Stop doing this, people!. You merely ensure that every app has its own completely different shortcuts, which is a major annoyance.
2) When programs start insisting that you change your decimal point specifier to that for your language. For example, if I paste a number from almost any website on Earth into kcalc it interprets the "."s as thousands breaks and "," as decimal points, which of course means that it's virtually always a screwup (proper behavior: ignore thousand spacers since they're so rarely typed explicitly and interpret both "." and "," as a decimal point)
That still doesn't help when the wind isn't blowing sufficiently to generate enough power. They should add a treadmill backup. And they could put it in front of the wind turbine so it can keep you cool while you're jogging!
With what power output? The claim that one is going to get 750W from that tiny wind turbine is nonsense. Also, the smaller you make a RO system, the less efficient it gets - quoting industrial-scale figures is not applicable. It'd need something more like a marine watermaker for small boats, which usually use twice as much power. And they cost $5-10k.
Personal space heater, small air conditioner, mini-fridge, electric range or oven.... yeah, forget about it. Let's face it, this isn't a home, it's a hard-to-transport glamping shelter.
Conventional filtration does not remove salts, which is the main reason that drinking one's own urine isn't a recipe for wilderness survival in the real world (contrary to whatever a fake TV survivalist may have told you) and why you can't survive off of seawater. It takes reverse osmosis or electrodialysis or similar to do that - that is, power-hungry processes. Filters that involve pushing water through fine pores, like ceramic filters wouldn't even remove a significant amount of the urea (the body's way of getting rid of excess nitrogen from protein metabolism). Activated carbon is effective against urea to some extent but usually with only limited capacity. Filtering out bacteria is pointless for a healthy person's fresh urine, as in a healthy person urine is nearly sterile. Neither porous filters nor activated carbon have an effect on ammonia, nitrate or nitrite from old urine.
It's perfectly fine to shower with urine even without having run it through a filter, or with a simple "mechanical filter". The question of course is, why would you want to?
They should go through with making them, if only for the reason that a judge could sentence Jeremy Clarkson to have to live in one as punishment for punching his producer. ;)
The oval shape would be better if the thing actually had wheels and was designed to be driven around regularly (optimal shape for reducing wind resistance while maximizing useful interior volume = teardrop or truncated teardrop, depending on the situation). But it's supposed to just sit in one spot. So what the heck? They could still have rounded off the edges to give it a smooth, iPod-y feel without much impact on the space and while still maximizing structural strength and minimizing wind resistance (more to the point, since sits flat on the ground, there's no point at all to curving the base - the only thing that curve does is eat up space in order to make them more likely to roll)
My first thought when I saw this was that it's the hipster form of glamping.
This.
Not to mention that low turbines are more subject to turbulence, which shortens their lifespan - and in a "home" like this, would impart this force into shaking the occupants around. So you really have to limit yourself to a small, very low power turbine. This "750 watts" thing isn't going to be even close to the mark - maybe 750 watt-hours per day.
That said... fine, if all you're running is low power devices like LED lights, maybe a laptop, etc.
Collateral murder was released on April 5th, 4 1/2 months earlier. And was one in a line of releases. Among others, in February Wikileaks had leaked the Reykjavík 13 cable, the first of the leaks sourced from Manning, which caused a big uproar in the states dealing with the Icesave scandal. In November of the previous year it inserted itself into the Climategate scandal. In September they leaked documents from Icelandic banks showing a huge amount of illegal activity leading up to the financial crash. In July they had leaked the first evidence that led to the disclosure of the Stuxnet worm. And on and on.
Wikileaks profile steadily increased, one case after the next. But Cablegate was really their zenith.