Why add lots of charging stations at airports? When people are leaving their cars for multiple days, they don't need a 240v charger or anything fancy.
There's a lot of short-term parking at airports, too. There is a surprising amount of one day travel- fly out in the morning and back in the evening- that would benefit. And a lot of people who are flying for longer times don't want to park their car at the airport and pay for multiple days of parking, so they have somebody drop them off and pick them up. Short-term parking may make more sense in that case than driving around the airport, especially for pickups when there's some time uncertainty. If I had an electric car with some range questions, I would certainly want to park and charge while waiting.
You don't even need a protective suit, just a gas mask.
The catch is that to live like this on Venus, you have to live in a giant dirigible or "floating city". The conditions on the surface are hellish, but several kilometers high in the atmosphere, it's actually quite nice.
Actually, you will need more protective gear than just a gas mask. The temperature and pressure may be tolerable, but the atmosphere is full of sulfuric acid, and there are constant hurricane-force winds. I guess you could live there in a floating city if you could build one that would survive the environment- better be very confident in your design if you plan on living there- and you never wanted to go outside. But why bother?
US corporations also pay some of the highest taxes in the world, which is why many of them are moving overseas.
More accurately, the US has one of the highest nominal corporate tax rates in the world, which is why US corporations work so hard to exploit (and lobby to create) the many loopholes in the system. The US corporate tax system is an excellent example of a case where it would be far better to lower the tax rate and broaden the tax base by eliminating loopholes.
The treatment was done 13 years ago, I didn't think they were gene editing back then so I assume they come from donors? Does that mean they require immunosuppressant drugs?
They do come from donors, and immunosuppressive drugs are not required. Transplants of tissue from living donors like bone marrow is very different from tissue from deceased donors like hearts and lungs. With transplants from deceased donors, the pool of donors is small and there's very little time to choose a recipient before the organ goes bad. In practice, that means it isn't always a very good tissue match, and it's usually necessary to give the recipient immunosuppressive drugs to avoid rejection.
With a transplant from a live donor, the pool of donors is larger- much larger in the case of hematopoetic stem cells or bone marrow, which grow back completely- and the tissue will keep indefinitely. That gives doctors plenty of time to search for the closest possible tissue type match, so the recipient and donor are generally perfect or nearly perfect matches. They won't even try to do the transplant unless there's a very close match.
All of the studies purporting to show cancer risk from cellphones are BS. How do we know? Because cellphone use has skyrocketed worldwide in the past 20-30 years with no corresponding increase in brain cancer in humans. It's not a perfectly designed study, but I'm going to trust the natural experiment that's been performed on billions of humans over decades of time rather than the lab experiment that's been carried out on a handful of rats for a much shorter time.
I don't think so. The normal standard for a mirror is 1/4 the wavelength of the light it's supposed to be reflecting, or around 100 nm. Even ultra-high precision mirrors like the ones on the Hubble Space Telescope are only ground to within about 10 nm. A 10 nm error on a mirror 100m in diameter- far larger than any mirror currently under construction- is still only 1 part in 10^10, far lower precision than what you're talking about. Unless you're building a mirror the size of a planet, you aren't going to need more than 15 digits of precision.
Battery usage depends on the chipset, with newer chipsets using less power. For example, I've had a misbehaving app leave on the GPS on my Nexus 5X, and I still got battery life of about 8 hours. That's not good battery life, but the power consumption was low enough that I didn't notice the phone heating up in my pocket, and I was able to get through a day at work before it went into power saving mode.
My impression is that the real killer with the map app is screen usage. If you leave the map in the foreground, it will leave the screen on, and that drains power like crazy. Even if you hit the power button to turn the screen off, it will keep updating what it's showing on the screen, and that will continue to eat a lot of power. You can save a lot of power by going back to the home screen or another app, which lets you get voice prompts but avoids the power drain from the screen rendering.
It shouldn't be that surprising to see water and methane everywhere. After all, hydrogen is by far the most common element in the universe, and oxygen and carbon are also relatively common. Simple compounds of heavier elements with hydrogen should be among the most common things to see on planets (and dwarf planets and moons) that don't have strong enough gravity to keep hydrogen in their atmosphere.
If you want an incandescent that lasts really long, you need one sealed with a noble or inert gas (pure nitrogen might work on the cheap)
Not necessarily! Halogen lamps work by enclosing the filament with a reactive gas rather than an inert one. The halogen in the lamp reacts to form tungsten compounds that are stable at the lower temperatures near the glass of the bulb but decompose to tungsten and halogen at the higher temperatures near the filament. That design scavenges tungsten that sublimes from the filament and deposits on the bulb, minimizing filament erosion.
Further 'efficiency' matters more if you are in a warm climate.
It matters a great deal if you're in a climate warm enough to require air conditioning. You pay once for the light to generate waste heat and again for the AC to get rid of the heat. Very inefficient.
The argument was making them last longer wasted electricity since they would produce more heat and less light, but the real purpose was basically to create planned obsolescence and sell more lightbulbs at an inflated price.
Which is technically correct for the easiest ways of making the lamps last longer, i.e. running them cooler. The main reason incandescent lights are so inefficient is because they put out most of their energy as IR rather than visible light. If you run them hotter, they become much more energy efficient because more of the light is at visible wavelengths, and at wavelengths our eyes are more sensitive to, but that makes the filament material sublime faster, reducing lifespan. The reason halogen lamps are more efficient than conventional incandescent lamps is because the halogen improves filament lifespan enough that it's practical to run them at hotter, more efficient temperatures.
It was up to me to make sure my own code was quality enough before releasing it, and that aspect terrified me enough that I did learn to write quality code (which basically means you are testing your own code thoroughly, doing your own QA).
The problem with testing your own code is that you're likely to miss entire classes of bugs. You can be very effective at catching the kinds of bugs you can think of, but those are always the easiest bugs to catch in the first place. The tests you write for yourself will never do a good job of catching errors in your assumptions about what the code should do, what kinds of inputs it needs to handle, etc. Catching those kinds of conceptual bugs really requires adversarial testing from somebody who isn't starting from the same set of assumptions.
Seriously, there need to be strict rules against spying
More realistically, there need to be strict rules restricting spying. The government does have a real, if limited, need to spy on people as part of enforcing the law. That's what the 4th Amendment is supposed to be about: keeping the spying within strict limits necessary to enforce the law. I assume what I assume the IRS means when they talk about "carrying out criminal investigations in accordance with all appropriate federal and state judicial procedures"- that they have been scrupulous in following those rules. I don't have a big problem with the IRS's actions, per se, so long as they are following the law. The real discussion, though, is what the law ought to be- what things should require warrants, how much evidence should be required to get one, and what to do to police who lie when asking for them.
I bet if you were allowed to do the same alignment and scaling for bird song you could average the now aligned audio to get something like birdsong.
I am not nearly so confident. Maybe if you averaged the song of many birds of the same species you could get some kind of recognizable song out. But what's going to happen when you average the song of a chickadee, a robin, a meadowlark, and a crow? There's simply no way of aligning them so they produce a coherent combination; they're just too different.
The problem with anonymizing the samples completely is that it makes it impossible to add new information about the donors' health since birth, which would make the samples much more useful for researchers. Totally anonymous samples could be used, for example, to look at gene frequencies, but not a lot more. The greatest value to researchers would be if they could associate the samples with subsequent health information so that they could look for genetic markers associated with specific diseases. That can only happen if it's possible to connect the samples to their donors' health records.
The ideal approach would be to have a completely trustworthy organization hold the samples, associate them with the health records, and then anonymize the samples before providing them to researchers. That would let you have the benefits of the research without the drawbacks of destroying people's privacy. The question is whether we trust our government to do that.
That's not entirely true, because the dealer's pricing isn't that simple, either. They're typically buying the cars from the dealer on credit and get a discount if they pay back faster than the terms of the credit agreement. Manufacturers will also offer incentives to the dealer, like a substantial bonus if they meet a challenging sales target. The net result is that the dealers may sometimes make deals on individual cars that don't appear to make sense given the "dealer price" but that do make sense when you look at all the discounts and incentives they're getting.
Except that running git blame is an extra step compared to looking at a comment that's right next to the code. The more effort involved in figuring out what's going on, the lower the chance of somebody actually doing it.
I feel the best comments can and should declare the intent of a block of code, rather than drilling down into the mechanics of the code.
Exactly. There's a lot of code that needs comments like "fixes bug XXX". If you had to fix a nasty bug and it took you a day to get the details right, let the next poor sap know what you were doing. Otherwise, he's likely to reintroduce the bug by tearing out this apparently useless code.
Another good use of comments is to summarize a large block of code so that people don't have to dig into it to figure out what it does. For example, it's good to document functions at the top with enough detail that somebody would know how and when to call them without having to read through the whole thing.
Criminals and terrorists are usually too smart to voluntarily give their DNA to anybody.
Terrorist and some professional criminals perhaps, but they make up a small fraction of the criminals out there. There are plenty of petty criminals who wind up in a life of crime because they can't hack regular employment. There are even more people who commit crimes because they're temporarily blinded by rage, greed, or drugs into doing something that they would never do if they were in complete control of their faculties.
Yeah, it would be great to be able to launch fuel from the moon, but how easy is it to get a fueling station there? My intuition is that it would take a lot more resources to build a moonbase capable of sending up the fuel for trips to Mars than it would to just ship everything for the trip to Mars directly from the Earth. This approach only makes any kind of sense if you plan on going to Mars a lot- or if you're just looking for a convenient excuse to build a moonbase.
There are plenty of things to do in the company. For one thing, they have to have a bunch of people trying to convince advertisers to buy space. I assume that's the main reason to have a bunch of scattered offices; they have to have the people selling the ads where the buyers are. They also have a bunch of developers working on new features, like their new "moments" thingy, and presumably on better ways of targeting their ads. Finally, they have to have customer service and support people to do things like responding to abuse complaints.
I'm willing to bet not much of that pollution comes from VW diesels, in America.
That depends on what you consider to be "not much". There were about 500,000 cars affected by this issue in the US, and they are producing as much as 40 times the legal limit. That would mean they produce as much pollution as 20 million cars that meet the emissions standards, which is a meaningful percentage of the 250 million or so cars on the road in the US. That doesn't make them the dominant source of pollution or anything, but it does mean they're contributing far out of proportion to their numbers. They're certainly not something we can afford to ignore.
That figure of up to 40x the legal limit also shows why it's so important to catch cheaters. Pollution controls can bring emissions down to far below the level they were before the controls were implemented, but that also means a comparatively small number of cheaters can have a disproportionate effect on total pollution.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a lot of short-term parking at airports, too. There is a surprising amount of one day travel- fly out in the morning and back in the evening- that would benefit. And a lot of people who are flying for longer times don't want to park their car at the airport and pay for multiple days of parking, so they have somebody drop them off and pick them up. Short-term parking may make more sense in that case than driving around the airport, especially for pickups when there's some time uncertainty. If I had an electric car with some range questions, I would certainly want to park and charge while waiting.
Actually, you will need more protective gear than just a gas mask. The temperature and pressure may be tolerable, but the atmosphere is full of sulfuric acid, and there are constant hurricane-force winds. I guess you could live there in a floating city if you could build one that would survive the environment- better be very confident in your design if you plan on living there- and you never wanted to go outside. But why bother?
More accurately, the US has one of the highest nominal corporate tax rates in the world, which is why US corporations work so hard to exploit (and lobby to create) the many loopholes in the system. The US corporate tax system is an excellent example of a case where it would be far better to lower the tax rate and broaden the tax base by eliminating loopholes.
They do come from donors, and immunosuppressive drugs are not required. Transplants of tissue from living donors like bone marrow is very different from tissue from deceased donors like hearts and lungs. With transplants from deceased donors, the pool of donors is small and there's very little time to choose a recipient before the organ goes bad. In practice, that means it isn't always a very good tissue match, and it's usually necessary to give the recipient immunosuppressive drugs to avoid rejection.
With a transplant from a live donor, the pool of donors is larger- much larger in the case of hematopoetic stem cells or bone marrow, which grow back completely- and the tissue will keep indefinitely. That gives doctors plenty of time to search for the closest possible tissue type match, so the recipient and donor are generally perfect or nearly perfect matches. They won't even try to do the transplant unless there's a very close match.
All of the studies purporting to show cancer risk from cellphones are BS. How do we know? Because cellphone use has skyrocketed worldwide in the past 20-30 years with no corresponding increase in brain cancer in humans. It's not a perfectly designed study, but I'm going to trust the natural experiment that's been performed on billions of humans over decades of time rather than the lab experiment that's been carried out on a handful of rats for a much shorter time.
This is a common enough event that it has a name: The Scunthorpe Problem. Naive spam blockers are a pox on the internet.
So now her milkshake brings all the boys to the yard?
I don't think so. The normal standard for a mirror is 1/4 the wavelength of the light it's supposed to be reflecting, or around 100 nm. Even ultra-high precision mirrors like the ones on the Hubble Space Telescope are only ground to within about 10 nm. A 10 nm error on a mirror 100m in diameter- far larger than any mirror currently under construction- is still only 1 part in 10^10, far lower precision than what you're talking about. Unless you're building a mirror the size of a planet, you aren't going to need more than 15 digits of precision.
Battery usage depends on the chipset, with newer chipsets using less power. For example, I've had a misbehaving app leave on the GPS on my Nexus 5X, and I still got battery life of about 8 hours. That's not good battery life, but the power consumption was low enough that I didn't notice the phone heating up in my pocket, and I was able to get through a day at work before it went into power saving mode.
My impression is that the real killer with the map app is screen usage. If you leave the map in the foreground, it will leave the screen on, and that drains power like crazy. Even if you hit the power button to turn the screen off, it will keep updating what it's showing on the screen, and that will continue to eat a lot of power. You can save a lot of power by going back to the home screen or another app, which lets you get voice prompts but avoids the power drain from the screen rendering.
It shouldn't be that surprising to see water and methane everywhere. After all, hydrogen is by far the most common element in the universe, and oxygen and carbon are also relatively common. Simple compounds of heavier elements with hydrogen should be among the most common things to see on planets (and dwarf planets and moons) that don't have strong enough gravity to keep hydrogen in their atmosphere.
Not necessarily! Halogen lamps work by enclosing the filament with a reactive gas rather than an inert one. The halogen in the lamp reacts to form tungsten compounds that are stable at the lower temperatures near the glass of the bulb but decompose to tungsten and halogen at the higher temperatures near the filament. That design scavenges tungsten that sublimes from the filament and deposits on the bulb, minimizing filament erosion.
It matters a great deal if you're in a climate warm enough to require air conditioning. You pay once for the light to generate waste heat and again for the AC to get rid of the heat. Very inefficient.
Which is technically correct for the easiest ways of making the lamps last longer, i.e. running them cooler. The main reason incandescent lights are so inefficient is because they put out most of their energy as IR rather than visible light. If you run them hotter, they become much more energy efficient because more of the light is at visible wavelengths, and at wavelengths our eyes are more sensitive to, but that makes the filament material sublime faster, reducing lifespan. The reason halogen lamps are more efficient than conventional incandescent lamps is because the halogen improves filament lifespan enough that it's practical to run them at hotter, more efficient temperatures.
The problem with testing your own code is that you're likely to miss entire classes of bugs. You can be very effective at catching the kinds of bugs you can think of, but those are always the easiest bugs to catch in the first place. The tests you write for yourself will never do a good job of catching errors in your assumptions about what the code should do, what kinds of inputs it needs to handle, etc. Catching those kinds of conceptual bugs really requires adversarial testing from somebody who isn't starting from the same set of assumptions.
More realistically, there need to be strict rules restricting spying. The government does have a real, if limited, need to spy on people as part of enforcing the law. That's what the 4th Amendment is supposed to be about: keeping the spying within strict limits necessary to enforce the law. I assume what I assume the IRS means when they talk about "carrying out criminal investigations in accordance with all appropriate federal and state judicial procedures"- that they have been scrupulous in following those rules. I don't have a big problem with the IRS's actions, per se, so long as they are following the law. The real discussion, though, is what the law ought to be- what things should require warrants, how much evidence should be required to get one, and what to do to police who lie when asking for them.
I am not nearly so confident. Maybe if you averaged the song of many birds of the same species you could get some kind of recognizable song out. But what's going to happen when you average the song of a chickadee, a robin, a meadowlark, and a crow? There's simply no way of aligning them so they produce a coherent combination; they're just too different.
The problem with anonymizing the samples completely is that it makes it impossible to add new information about the donors' health since birth, which would make the samples much more useful for researchers. Totally anonymous samples could be used, for example, to look at gene frequencies, but not a lot more. The greatest value to researchers would be if they could associate the samples with subsequent health information so that they could look for genetic markers associated with specific diseases. That can only happen if it's possible to connect the samples to their donors' health records.
The ideal approach would be to have a completely trustworthy organization hold the samples, associate them with the health records, and then anonymize the samples before providing them to researchers. That would let you have the benefits of the research without the drawbacks of destroying people's privacy. The question is whether we trust our government to do that.
That's not entirely true, because the dealer's pricing isn't that simple, either. They're typically buying the cars from the dealer on credit and get a discount if they pay back faster than the terms of the credit agreement. Manufacturers will also offer incentives to the dealer, like a substantial bonus if they meet a challenging sales target. The net result is that the dealers may sometimes make deals on individual cars that don't appear to make sense given the "dealer price" but that do make sense when you look at all the discounts and incentives they're getting.
Except that running git blame is an extra step compared to looking at a comment that's right next to the code. The more effort involved in figuring out what's going on, the lower the chance of somebody actually doing it.
Exactly. There's a lot of code that needs comments like "fixes bug XXX". If you had to fix a nasty bug and it took you a day to get the details right, let the next poor sap know what you were doing. Otherwise, he's likely to reintroduce the bug by tearing out this apparently useless code.
Another good use of comments is to summarize a large block of code so that people don't have to dig into it to figure out what it does. For example, it's good to document functions at the top with enough detail that somebody would know how and when to call them without having to read through the whole thing.
Terrorist and some professional criminals perhaps, but they make up a small fraction of the criminals out there. There are plenty of petty criminals who wind up in a life of crime because they can't hack regular employment. There are even more people who commit crimes because they're temporarily blinded by rage, greed, or drugs into doing something that they would never do if they were in complete control of their faculties.
Yeah, it would be great to be able to launch fuel from the moon, but how easy is it to get a fueling station there? My intuition is that it would take a lot more resources to build a moonbase capable of sending up the fuel for trips to Mars than it would to just ship everything for the trip to Mars directly from the Earth. This approach only makes any kind of sense if you plan on going to Mars a lot- or if you're just looking for a convenient excuse to build a moonbase.
There are plenty of things to do in the company. For one thing, they have to have a bunch of people trying to convince advertisers to buy space. I assume that's the main reason to have a bunch of scattered offices; they have to have the people selling the ads where the buyers are. They also have a bunch of developers working on new features, like their new "moments" thingy, and presumably on better ways of targeting their ads. Finally, they have to have customer service and support people to do things like responding to abuse complaints.
They'd have to get in line behind the estate of Philip K. Dick.
That depends on what you consider to be "not much". There were about 500,000 cars affected by this issue in the US, and they are producing as much as 40 times the legal limit. That would mean they produce as much pollution as 20 million cars that meet the emissions standards, which is a meaningful percentage of the 250 million or so cars on the road in the US. That doesn't make them the dominant source of pollution or anything, but it does mean they're contributing far out of proportion to their numbers. They're certainly not something we can afford to ignore.
That figure of up to 40x the legal limit also shows why it's so important to catch cheaters. Pollution controls can bring emissions down to far below the level they were before the controls were implemented, but that also means a comparatively small number of cheaters can have a disproportionate effect on total pollution.