And I am excited about this research, but I would be much more interested in IPS stem cells. You see, my mom is one of those "abortion is bad m'kay?" Types who would oppose getting this treatment on moral grounds if the transplant wasn't cultured from her own tissue.
She scientifically savvy enough to know the difference. (She does have a biology degree.)
I understand that this is a preliminary trial, but given the information we know about embryonic stem cells and the risks of developing teratomas, cancer and tissue rejection from them, in addition to the ethical concerns, shouldn't the limited supply of embryonic cell lines remain in research labs, and out of patients?
Using totipotent cells cultured from screend ips cells, guided in a petri dish to become macular precursor cells seems a more sensible solution, given that you reduce the risk of anomalous tissue growths (hair, etc...), reduce and or eliminate rejection, and the extended culture time let's you spot cancer precursor cells in the culture prior to transplant.
Indeed. But I question the intensity of cold needed to freeze a blubber insulated, and wooly adult mammoth solid, while it is actively grazing.
Even a dead mammoth, put in a commerical freezer, would take several hours to freeze to such a state.
The cold would have had to have been sufficient to kill said mammoth quite quickly. Mammoth species had evolved pretty clever biology to prevent such an outcome. (Mutant hemoglobin, thick blubber layer, excessive secretion of sebum and thick, wooly body hair, just to name a few.) Humans, by comparison, are simply "ready to freeze" meat popsicles.
Iirc, the incidence of the reports suggested whole herds preserved this way. This kinds rules out "omg, I has cngestive heart failure cuz iz so fat!" As the cause.
What happened in that movie was that the resulting super hurricane created an enormous low pressure cell which pulled extremely low temperature upper atmospheric air down to the surface.
This does not seem to contradict some observed "fossil" data, which shows mammoths frozen solid with food in their mouths. (Sorry, can't find a suitable citation. Most reports of this finding are from old field journals in the 1600s to 1800s.)
(Word 'fossil' in quotes, since subjects are not actually fossils, but chryopreserved corpses.)
I don't know if a reversal of the north atlantic current would do what was depicted in that movie, but there is evidence of previous cataclysmic and sudden climatological events in earth's history.
Personally, I prefer to think that if anthopogenic co2 is not responsible, it certainly can't be helping things any given what we do know. Eg, if you are genetically type 1 diabetic, eating super fatty foods and becoming obiese doesn't help you very much, and can compound the problem. (Because then you get type 2 on top of the type 1.)
We can control the amount of co2 that mankind releases, and not so much what nature releases with volcanism, etc. As such, if we are to try to mitigate the problem, anthropogenic sources are the first target of interest regardless of ideological position on the matter. (Unless you choose to ignore over a century's worth of scientific inquiry into the greenhouse gas nature of that particular compound.....) limiting and attempting marked reductions in such emissions would undeniably be a good thing, in terms of postponing a hypothetical carbon dioxide cascade scenario from occuring. (The arguments over source just limits how effective such measures might prove to be. If most of the problem is anthropogenic, such reduction could postpone indefinately, and if the bulk is natural, we might just stave if off a few decades. Something to consider when chosing to blame nature for this problem, as the implication is far more dire in the long term. Regardlss, limiting the rate using the variable we *can* control is simply a good idea, given the currently available information.)
I can't think of any other potential driving factor for such extreme climate changes without including major greenhouse gasses, such as co2, methane, and water vapor.
The cessation of the north atlantic current would deffinately change the weather in europe and north america, since warm, moisture rich air wouldn't get pushed to europe (europe would get much colder and drier) and cold, nutrient rich north ocean water wouldn't make its way into the caribbean, greatly impacting the food chain in that region, among other things.
The impact on climate, though, is dependant upon how long the current is suspended, the outcomes of snowfall in suddenly much chillier areas altering wind patterns, and the amount of water vapor staying in the atmosphere from equatorial regions taking over/enhancing the effects of co2 levels.
I don't know if the cessation of the NA Current would initiate a chain reaction or not, but it certainly would decimate many human industries, ranging from fishing to farming. That alone makes it a "bad thing" worth worrying about.
Assuming this is metalic silver being deposited (this process seems eerily similar to traditional silver mirroring processes with ammonia, dextrose, and silver nitrate) then it can be rapidly plated with gold using a solution bath. (Gold dissolved in nitric and hydrochloric acid mixture)
An interesting idea would be to print the two solutions (dextrose + ammonia) + (silver nitrate) with a dual head printer, then print dissolved gold after it has had time to deposit.
This would chemically replace/plate (depending on thickness) the silver traces with gold ones. A simple distilled water wash afterwards would clean up the piece.
Makes me wonder if I could repurpose a color print cartridge for this process. I strongly suspect that the nitrate and aqua regia solutions would be very very bad for the printheads though. (Dextrose + ammonia solution would probably just clog and nothing more.)
Re:The point of copyright is to expand public doma
on
A Copyright Nightmare
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem is that by doing that, some very rich people would have to find a new dive.
You see, these very rich people are also very lazy people. They are people who sit behind a desk doing absolutly nothing, but get paid in excess of 300$/hr to pretend they are george jetson.
Specifically, I am talking about media executives, and their deadweight, spoiled and pretentious offspring.
If copyright only lasted 5 years, these people would have a much more difficult time milking the talent of other people for their own personal profit. As such, and because they are so innately lazy and hate doing things themselves, they spend some of their money to sent professional doubletalkers (eg, lobbyists) to congress with suitcases full of money.
These lazy bastards like the current status quo, drool over getting paid even more for doing even less, find the idea of a healthy public domain "terrifying", and will stop at nothing until their empires of graft and sloth are unassailable.
If you want sensible copyright to return, you have to neuter these wealthy bastard's ability to influence law.
Start there. Otherwise you are simply spinning your wheels.
The peoblem is in the wavelength. We see visible light because the wavelenth is small.
We can see through the gaps in a faraday cage, for instance. Yet inside the cage, rf drops to near zero.
The reason is because the wavelength of radio waves is often measured in centimeters to meters. A diffuse cloud of cosmic dust (of sufficient volume, of which there are plenty just in our own galaxy...) would be capable of seriously attenuating these signals.
The problem is that unless said aliens are pulling the strings on a galactic core super massive black hole and manipulating the plasma jet to serve as a "fucking huge" high gain antenna, the attenuation of the rf signal by interaction with cosmic dust will turn even a real whopper of a broadcast into white noise before it reaches us.
Basically, they would have to be broadcasting a massively powerful signal capable of killing off lifeforms from the raw energy in the wave before we could detect it at our distance.
Or even some clever use of entangled particle pairs. (Simply because we haven't figured out how to use them for comm doesn't mean others haven't.)
Personally though, I think seti is looking for the wrong things.
Instead of trying to eavesdrop on the grey aliens ordering space pizza from planet foodcourtia, they should be looking for localized light displacements from known stellar markers, as caused by the huge gravitational eddies that several hypotherical FTL systems would make. Interstellar highways would show up on a sufficiently detailed map of the CBR because of the regular disruptions.
(This assumes something like an albucare (however you spell his name...) warp drive though, which create a wave of negative spacial curvature behind the vessel, and a synthetic gravity well in front.)
Our current CBR maps are pretty coarse, since we are dealing with single measurement devices with very wide frequency emmisions, so a highway search would require interferometry to be fruitful. We need to launch about 50 more COBE sats up.
It is in the account information page on the netflix website. There are hidden options to change the streaming rate.
Be aware that some devices autonegotiate the rate. I have seen some sony BD players with netflix support that do that.
My phone does not, and appears to obey the general rule set in the options.
To find the options, go to the "your account and help" page. Then scroll down to the section called "watching instantly on your tv or computer." Underneat that section, you will find a teeny tiny hyperlink called "manage video quality." You can set the stream rate there.
Strange.. it has always been my take that this is waht usually deters budding artists, and it isn't the issue of being paid.
First: many kids in school start learning to draw all on their own. They cover the insides of their binders and notebooks in cute, sometimes inventive gaphiti. Teachers get angry with them for "wasting their time", when in reality the teachers want them to do homework rather than draw.
This denouncement of the activity sends a destructive message that these activities are not worthwhile, at a particularly important point in neural development. Specifically, the creation of neurons for skills honed later in life happens during childhood, with aggressive pruning happening in teenage to young adult years. "Motor memory" and other intrinsic manipulation abilities develop at this time. By distracting from artistic development and interest in childhood, we literally program people to avoid becoming artists, and sabotage the ones that still persist, despite this message and even being penalised for their persistence.
Second: people believe nobody will want their art. Since art supplies are expensive, lessons to "properly" use those supplies are expensive, and the prospect of producing crap that they can't even give away, people avoid dabbling with artwork.
Third: if they produce art, how do they share it? (Art is impotent unless shared with others.) Recent trends with things like deviant art and other internet art communities have made this easier, but so far only a handful of artforms are able to be shared this way. For example, sculpture is particularly hard to share online, unless created in a purely digital form.
So, if you want people to make art, the better way to incentivize them is to stop telling kids that they need to stop seeking artistic output, show people that even horrible dross has aesthetic followings, and to help artists find those followings.
Notice that nowhere was any money involved.
The best thing that money does, is provide a tangible measure of demand for a genre of artwork. That's all.
Oops. Yeah. Scary what happens when you forget which unit you are dealing with.
Still, if you set netflix off the "bandwidth hobbled" settings that make it 500mb per title, you quickly find that it is between 2 and 3gb per title. At 1 movie a day with that stream rate, you are gonna plow through over 90gb a month.
Really though... I realize that I am strange in my avoidance of the TV, but do you really need to watch a movie every day of the week while on the go?
But is that really the smartest stream rate for a mobile cellular device? At that stream rate, you are gonna saturate your phone's data connection. It really is quite abusive to saturate your pipe.
When I expect to go on a trip, I set the stream rate to the lowest setting. This drops picture quality a whole lot, yes, but keeps the playback from constantly rebuffering from motel wifi being terrible with a shared pipe, or from bad cell coverage. When not expecting to go on a trip, I set it to use medium quality, and use the shitty DSL I have at home.
If you reread my GGP post, you will see that I said tethered internet devices for primary internet should be classed seperately, and priced seperately.
As for the other bits (GF or kids in car), streaming a whole movie everyday instead of talking or more normal play probably isn't healthy for the relationship or the child's development. Occasionally watching a movie in the car on a road trip or something I can see, but every day? That's pushing credulity.
If we learned more about how they detect the tor session, couldn't we obfuscate the data to combat detection?
I mean, encrypted data stands out from normal traffic like a sore thumb, and unless the user is a bank, transacting large amounts of it puts up a red flag. But, what if we obfuscated the data so that it looks like ordinary unencrypted/uncoded data?
Personally, I would call that excessive. Where exactly are you watching these movies?
If you are at work, don't you have something else you are supposed to be doing?
If at home, don't you have a more sensible internet service that you can use instead?
If on the road... shouldn't you be driving?
The 4 movies/mo figure is an extrapolation from watching a movie every weekend. This seems the very definition of "normal" to me.
Other than that quibble... I think it is quite fair to say that both of us agree that "200mb/month" being the line between "normal" and "excessive" is absurd. I can go over 200mb just posting on slashdot and doing google searches in a month.
this means "I don't watch netflix on my phone, or if I do, it is over public wifi, and not the cell network."
1 netflix movie is over 500mb transfer, even on a tiny device like a phone. If you watch even 1 movie on the phone per month over cellular, you are a "data hog".
When the carriers proclaim "you can get live sports coverage and watch movies online with our blzing fast $cellgeneration service!" I feel they lose the right to complain about people doing exactly what they advertise.
Now, if you are pulling over 10gb a month transfer, that is excessive, even for streaming media.
The exception would be cellular tethering devices used for primary internet. A special package should be set up for that.
Really, the problem here is overselling capacity in a batshit crazy fashion. You can oversell capacity, and do it sanely. Such as actually metering actual network utilization over time, and oversell by perahps 10 to 20%. Instead, these carriers are pathologically allergic to improving their infrastructures, and pathologically oversell their capacity, to the point where they think using more than 100mb in a month is "heavy use". News flash: if you have lots of apps installed on your phone, simply enabling the autoupdater will push you over that pathetically small limit.
Carriers need to establish what "heavy use" is, not compared against current system load, but against average intended use statistics. Eg, using 2gb a month for watching 3 netflix movies should be considered "high end" of "normal", and not "excessive." Excessive would be watching a movie every day. (30 days in a month x 500mb per movie == 1.5TB transfer.) They should then either restrict smartphones, total numbers of dataplans sold, or FUCKING IMPROVE THEIR NETWORKS, so that network instability doesn't occur from "normal use."
Theyneed to stop headplanting and redefining terms with self-referential metrics.
Perhaps their prediction was based on a model that ignores human involvement, and attempts to predict carbon declines from natural sequestration, such as tundra, peatbogs, and the like.
Eg, "if no human activities had occured, co2 levels would drop below 240ppm, due to natural sequestration. This would result in an iceage, until volcanic sources of c02 increases levels sufficiently to melt the glacial ice. Our model predicts that this event would occur 1500 years from now, under the above constraints."
This would still lend credibility to the notion that "human carbon emissions" (or rather, human activities) will prevent the next iceage."
That the proposed iceage requires a total absence of human activity to occur does not detract from the statement.
While industrialized nations do have a dropping population growth rate, they have an increasing energy consumption growth rate.
It is unlikely, bordering on impossible, that 100% of the planet can be sustained at a high enough standard of living to completely eliminate poverty and hunger worldwide, simply because we cannot safely generate that kind of energy output. At least, not in a sustainable manner.
The argument that the population will level off instead of crashing horribly does not seem to hold up in the face of more factors than just food supply. Socioeconomic factors, such as the availability of inexpensive goods, are heavily dependant upon either the exploitation of socioeconomic inequality (china, and pals), or the ubiquity of cheap energy and resources (the US, through onerous trade relations that maintain these features, again exploiting socioeconomic inequalities.)
Solving world hunger would imply either 1 of 2 things.
1) world populations plunge to locally sustainable levels following a global catastrophe, natural or otherwise. Traditonal energy and food sources become reasonable means to satisfy world hunger at these levels.
2) the world economy stops trying to exploit local disadvantages of disparate populations, and the human race produces a new, reliable, and abundant energy source that can safely sustain the inflated world population, and maintain the high standard of living which promotes the low growth rate on a global scale.
Occam's razor suggests the former will happen. It has happened before many times in human history, (fammine has decimated populations long before recorded history, as have wars, and even economic collapses) while the latter has yet to ever happen, and requires far more complications to occur.
The second option requires that growth rate reach exactly 0. Otherwise the world population will continue to grow, and outstrip its ability to be sustained. This is an unfortunate truth which comes from understanding what purpetual growth means. This fundementally goes against human nature. People will chafe under any imposed restraints to procreation. (Look at china.)
I conjecture that our species is fundementally incapable of sustained, zero growth utopian living, short of species wide sterilization and depdenance on assisted reproduction exclusively. At which point, many people would claim it is a distopia, and not a utopia.
For what it's worth, my money is on the first one happening. We see signs of a looming global economic collapse right now. We are hopelessly dependant on an energy source that degrades the habitability of our biosphere while simultaneously increasing rate of consumption for such energy per person, and also the total number of persons consuming at steady and alarming rates. At the current rate of progress for sustainable nuclear/fusion energy replacing fossil fuels, we will reach economic and biosphere collapse long before we reach the hypothetical utopia.
I don't delude myself by donning rose colored glasses when it comes to this issue. I don't look aside from what is going to happen, just because the overextended population is h. sapiens. The human race is ripe for radical decline from resource depletion.
Here's my prediction for how it will go down:
We reached peak oil sometime in the last decade. Peak oil means peak energy production; the maximum on the curve plot over time. We are riding the production slope down now. We are showing only token interest in getting off that sinking ship. Demand for energy continues to grow. As a result, energy production companies are becoming more and more desperate/wreckless to supply that energy. This is how deepwater horizon and the recent stint of induced earthquakes due to hydrofracturing came about.
The world economy is hopelssly tied to energy prices. As supply drops, and demand increases, the costs of transportation of goods between nations, and even major cities will become so high that the goods delivered must be priced accordingly.
Where in my post did you read anything about taxes?
My proposed guidelines draw the cashflow from the annual ticket sales.
The peering arrangement would be how inter-city fares are determined. If it costs significantly more to operate light rail in city A than it does in city B, the naturally the cost of a ticket for a commute from city B to city A will be greater than just a ticket going around the tracks in city B.
The arrangement needs to be iron clad, to prevent city A from scalping city B, and vise versa. Rate of peering costs needs to be driven and enforced at the "barely profitable" level. Otherwise you end up with the problems with caltrain in cali. I visited california just last year, and was interested in using caltrain, but the byzantine price structur to just about anywhere, coupled with paid parking made it an absurd option. It was cheaper to pay california gas prices and car pool with my hosts. This is exactly what needs to be avoided.
The problem with most city transit systems is that the city gov believes the transit system is a revinue stream to be exploited, rather than a barely profitable service provided to keep other costs low. (They don't bring in as many dollars for their budget, but the dollars they have go farther.) This is exactly the problem with the NYC subway system. The city learned that they can gouge the citizens through draconian taxation systems on the registered cab services, and make much more money that way than through properly managing effective public transit with busses and subways. The result is that the busses look like prison busses, and the subways smell like urine, feces, and have dead bodies turn up in them fairly regularly.
Again, the idea here is for peered city transit systems to reach an agreed price rate for intercity fare. Nothing more, nothing less. The necessity to avoid the city bleeding the system dry to pay for a city park or a new school is one of the reasons why the terminals need to be privately operated, but beholden to the franchise. Much like how McDonald's restaraunts are run. If the people running a hub fail to meet the QoS, they have their franchise revoked, and a new private operator is sought. That was the whole point. You can't do that with a purely city run operation.
The city collects a publicly disclosed (and challengable!) Gross sum from ticket sales based on commuter use per station, balanced against the costs to maintain the rails themselves. Rail stations and trains are the responsibility of the franchise operators. It needs to be challengable to keep the city honest.
Another perk of publicly disclosed maintenance costs is that it allows cities entering or negotiating a peering arrangement to immediately know if either party is pulling a fast one.
I explicitly said that the costs would be paid from the boarding pass sales revinue stream. Eg, it is to be run like a business franchise, and ***NOT*** like a government agency.
This means it is not a tax or bond issue, other than initial startup capitol and realestate investments. The system needs to pay for itself.
Since the basis of your retort revolved around this faulted premise, I think that about sums it up.
The united states has a very large distance between major commutities. For instance, the distance I drive every day is about comparable to the distance from wichita ks (the city I work in) and Hutchinson ks (a nearby major city). Kansas has strong, high winds, tornadoes, and animals that would stand on the tracks. Freight lines commonly must reduce velocity when traveling intercity to 40mph or less to avoid serious issues. This is with heavily loaded freight cars.
Light commuter rail would have greater trouble.
If the distance between the cities was very small (say, between cities on the east coast), rather than 300mi+ with inclement conditions being the norm, then yes, you might not need a dedicated emergency track. I might compromise, by having both tracks operated, but staggered in depatrure times so that a problem could be reported, and the train diverted to the other track without risk of collision with the next departure. You get some of the benefits, with less incurred lost carry capacity that way.
Toll roads only connect major cities, or major city districts. They are intended to direct freight trucks carrying cargo away from commuter lines, but commuters seeking to avoid other commuters (to get there faster/avoid redlights, etc) also make use of them for intercity travel.
Local city roads pick up where the toll roads leave off. The freight trucks leaving the toll roads still have to reach their destinations within the local cities, and for that they have to mix with the commuter trafic. Heavy trucks with multiple axles damage roads far worse than light consumer trafic.
The local city is responsible for maintaining the local commuter infrastructure. The federal and state tolls collectedd at toll roads pay for the interstate and intercity toll road highway systems. The fuel tax is meant to pay for the former.
The problem is the heavy delivery and freight trucks making deliveries to grocery stores, shopping malls, department stores, etc. These damage roadways greatly more than the collected fuel taxes they consume.
Slashdot Mirror
And I am excited about this research, but I would be much more interested in IPS stem cells. You see, my mom is one of those "abortion is bad m'kay?" Types who would oppose getting this treatment on moral grounds if the transplant wasn't cultured from her own tissue.
She scientifically savvy enough to know the difference.
(She does have a biology degree.)
I understand that this is a preliminary trial, but given the information we know about embryonic stem cells and the risks of developing teratomas, cancer and tissue rejection from them, in addition to the ethical concerns, shouldn't the limited supply of embryonic cell lines remain in research labs, and out of patients?
Using totipotent cells cultured from screend ips cells, guided in a petri dish to become macular precursor cells seems a more sensible solution, given that you reduce the risk of anomalous tissue growths (hair, etc...), reduce and or eliminate rejection, and the extended culture time let's you spot cancer precursor cells in the culture prior to transplant.
Or am I missing something here?
Indeed. But I question the intensity of cold needed to freeze a blubber insulated, and wooly adult mammoth solid, while it is actively grazing.
Even a dead mammoth, put in a commerical freezer, would take several hours to freeze to such a state.
The cold would have had to have been sufficient to kill said mammoth quite quickly. Mammoth species had evolved pretty clever biology to prevent such an outcome. (Mutant hemoglobin, thick blubber layer, excessive secretion of sebum and thick, wooly body hair, just to name a few.) Humans, by comparison, are simply "ready to freeze" meat popsicles.
Iirc, the incidence of the reports suggested whole herds preserved this way. This kinds rules out "omg, I has cngestive heart failure cuz iz so fat!" As the cause.
What happened in that movie was that the resulting super hurricane created an enormous low pressure cell which pulled extremely low temperature upper atmospheric air down to the surface.
This does not seem to contradict some observed "fossil" data, which shows mammoths frozen solid with food in their mouths. (Sorry, can't find a suitable citation. Most reports of this finding are from old field journals in the 1600s to 1800s.)
(Word 'fossil' in quotes, since subjects are not actually fossils, but chryopreserved corpses.)
I don't know if a reversal of the north atlantic current would do what was depicted in that movie, but there is evidence of previous cataclysmic and sudden climatological events in earth's history.
Personally, I prefer to think that if anthopogenic co2 is not responsible, it certainly can't be helping things any given what we do know. Eg, if you are genetically type 1 diabetic, eating super fatty foods and becoming obiese doesn't help you very much, and can compound the problem. (Because then you get type 2 on top of the type 1.)
We can control the amount of co2 that mankind releases, and not so much what nature releases with volcanism, etc. As such, if we are to try to mitigate the problem, anthropogenic sources are the first target of interest regardless of ideological position on the matter. (Unless you choose to ignore over a century's worth of scientific inquiry into the greenhouse gas nature of that particular compound.....) limiting and attempting marked reductions in such emissions would undeniably be a good thing, in terms of postponing a hypothetical carbon dioxide cascade scenario from occuring. (The arguments over source just limits how effective such measures might prove to be. If most of the problem is anthropogenic, such reduction could postpone indefinately, and if the bulk is natural, we might just stave if off a few decades. Something to consider when chosing to blame nature for this problem, as the implication is far more dire in the long term. Regardlss, limiting the rate using the variable we *can* control is simply a good idea, given the currently available information.)
I can't think of any other potential driving factor for such extreme climate changes without including major greenhouse gasses, such as co2, methane, and water vapor.
The cessation of the north atlantic current would deffinately change the weather in europe and north america, since warm, moisture rich air wouldn't get pushed to europe (europe would get much colder and drier) and cold, nutrient rich north ocean water wouldn't make its way into the caribbean, greatly impacting the food chain in that region, among other things.
The impact on climate, though, is dependant upon how long the current is suspended, the outcomes of snowfall in suddenly much chillier areas altering wind patterns, and the amount of water vapor staying in the atmosphere from equatorial regions taking over/enhancing the effects of co2 levels.
I don't know if the cessation of the NA Current would initiate a chain reaction or not, but it certainly would decimate many human industries, ranging from fishing to farming. That alone makes it a "bad thing" worth worrying about.
Assuming this is metalic silver being deposited (this process seems eerily similar to traditional silver mirroring processes with ammonia, dextrose, and silver nitrate) then it can be rapidly plated with gold using a solution bath. (Gold dissolved in nitric and hydrochloric acid mixture)
An interesting idea would be to print the two solutions (dextrose + ammonia) + (silver nitrate) with a dual head printer, then print dissolved gold after it has had time to deposit.
This would chemically replace/plate (depending on thickness) the silver traces with gold ones. A simple distilled water wash afterwards would clean up the piece.
Makes me wonder if I could repurpose a color print cartridge for this process. I strongly suspect that the nitrate and aqua regia solutions would be very very bad for the printheads though. (Dextrose + ammonia solution would probably just clog and nothing more.)
The problem is that by doing that, some very rich people would have to find a new dive.
You see, these very rich people are also very lazy people. They are people who sit behind a desk doing absolutly nothing, but get paid in excess of 300$/hr to pretend they are george jetson.
Specifically, I am talking about media executives, and their deadweight, spoiled and pretentious offspring.
If copyright only lasted 5 years, these people would have a much more difficult time milking the talent of other people for their own personal profit. As such, and because they are so innately lazy and hate doing things themselves, they spend some of their money to sent professional doubletalkers (eg, lobbyists) to congress with suitcases full of money.
These lazy bastards like the current status quo, drool over getting paid even more for doing even less, find the idea of a healthy public domain "terrifying", and will stop at nothing until their empires of graft and sloth are unassailable.
If you want sensible copyright to return, you have to neuter these wealthy bastard's ability to influence law.
Start there. Otherwise you are simply spinning your wheels.
The peoblem is in the wavelength. We see visible light because the wavelenth is small.
We can see through the gaps in a faraday cage, for instance. Yet inside the cage, rf drops to near zero.
The reason is because the wavelength of radio waves is often measured in centimeters to meters. A diffuse cloud of cosmic dust (of sufficient volume, of which there are plenty just in our own galaxy...) would be capable of seriously attenuating these signals.
The problem is that unless said aliens are pulling the strings on a galactic core super massive black hole and manipulating the plasma jet to serve as a "fucking huge" high gain antenna, the attenuation of the rf signal by interaction with cosmic dust will turn even a real whopper of a broadcast into white noise before it reaches us.
Basically, they would have to be broadcasting a massively powerful signal capable of killing off lifeforms from the raw energy in the wave before we could detect it at our distance.
Or even some clever use of entangled particle pairs. (Simply because we haven't figured out how to use them for comm doesn't mean others haven't.)
Personally though, I think seti is looking for the wrong things.
Instead of trying to eavesdrop on the grey aliens ordering space pizza from planet foodcourtia, they should be looking for localized light displacements from known stellar markers, as caused by the huge gravitational eddies that several hypotherical FTL systems would make. Interstellar highways would show up on a sufficiently detailed map of the CBR because of the regular disruptions.
(This assumes something like an albucare (however you spell his name...) warp drive though, which create a wave of negative spacial curvature behind the vessel, and a synthetic gravity well in front.)
Our current CBR maps are pretty coarse, since we are dealing with single measurement devices with very wide frequency emmisions, so a highway search would require interferometry to be fruitful. We need to launch about 50 more COBE sats up.
But with alien slave girls, amazons, and the like, wouldn't it be more aptly named "planet 'boobs'" instead?
It is in the account information page on the netflix website. There are hidden options to change the streaming rate.
Be aware that some devices autonegotiate the rate. I have seen some sony BD players with netflix support that do that.
My phone does not, and appears to obey the general rule set in the options.
To find the options, go to the "your account and help" page. Then scroll down to the section called "watching instantly on your tv or computer." Underneat that section, you will find a teeny tiny hyperlink called "manage video quality." You can set the stream rate there.
Strange.. it has always been my take that this is waht usually deters budding artists, and it isn't the issue of being paid.
First: many kids in school start learning to draw all on their own. They cover the insides of their binders and notebooks in cute, sometimes inventive gaphiti. Teachers get angry with them for "wasting their time", when in reality the teachers want them to do homework rather than draw.
This denouncement of the activity sends a destructive message that these activities are not worthwhile, at a particularly important point in neural development. Specifically, the creation of neurons for skills honed later in life happens during childhood, with aggressive pruning happening in teenage to young adult years. "Motor memory" and other intrinsic manipulation abilities develop at this time. By distracting from artistic development and interest in childhood, we literally program people to avoid becoming artists, and sabotage the ones that still persist, despite this message and even being penalised for their persistence.
Second: people believe nobody will want their art. Since art supplies are expensive, lessons to "properly" use those supplies are expensive, and the prospect of producing crap that they can't even give away, people avoid dabbling with artwork.
Third: if they produce art, how do they share it? (Art is impotent unless shared with others.) Recent trends with things like deviant art and other internet art communities have made this easier, but so far only a handful of artforms are able to be shared this way. For example, sculpture is particularly hard to share online, unless created in a purely digital form.
So, if you want people to make art, the better way to incentivize them is to stop telling kids that they need to stop seeking artistic output, show people that even horrible dross has aesthetic followings, and to help artists find those followings.
Notice that nowhere was any money involved.
The best thing that money does, is provide a tangible measure of demand for a genre of artwork. That's all.
Oops. Yeah. Scary what happens when you forget which unit you are dealing with.
Still, if you set netflix off the "bandwidth hobbled" settings that make it 500mb per title, you quickly find that it is between 2 and 3gb per title. At 1 movie a day with that stream rate, you are gonna plow through over 90gb a month.
Really though... I realize that I am strange in my avoidance of the TV, but do you really need to watch a movie every day of the week while on the go?
But is that really the smartest stream rate for a mobile cellular device? At that stream rate, you are gonna saturate your phone's data connection. It really is quite abusive to saturate your pipe.
When I expect to go on a trip, I set the stream rate to the lowest setting. This drops picture quality a whole lot, yes, but keeps the playback from constantly rebuffering from motel wifi being terrible with a shared pipe, or from bad cell coverage. When not expecting to go on a trip, I set it to use medium quality, and use the shitty DSL I have at home.
If you reread my GGP post, you will see that I said tethered internet devices for primary internet should be classed seperately, and priced seperately.
As for the other bits (GF or kids in car), streaming a whole movie everyday instead of talking or more normal play probably isn't healthy for the relationship or the child's development. Occasionally watching a movie in the car on a road trip or something I can see, but every day? That's pushing credulity.
If we learned more about how they detect the tor session, couldn't we obfuscate the data to combat detection?
I mean, encrypted data stands out from normal traffic like a sore thumb, and unless the user is a bank, transacting large amounts of it puts up a red flag. But, what if we obfuscated the data so that it looks like ordinary unencrypted/uncoded data?
Personally, I would call that excessive. Where exactly are you watching these movies?
If you are at work, don't you have something else you are supposed to be doing?
If at home, don't you have a more sensible internet service that you can use instead?
If on the road... shouldn't you be driving?
The 4 movies/mo figure is an extrapolation from watching a movie every weekend. This seems the very definition of "normal" to me.
Other than that quibble... I think it is quite fair to say that both of us agree that "200mb/month" being the line between "normal" and "excessive" is absurd. I can go over 200mb just posting on slashdot and doing google searches in a month.
this means "I don't watch netflix on my phone, or if I do, it is over public wifi, and not the cell network."
1 netflix movie is over 500mb transfer, even on a tiny device like a phone. If you watch even 1 movie on the phone per month over cellular, you are a "data hog".
When the carriers proclaim "you can get live sports coverage and watch movies online with our blzing fast $cellgeneration service!" I feel they lose the right to complain about people doing exactly what they advertise.
Now, if you are pulling over 10gb a month transfer, that is excessive, even for streaming media.
The exception would be cellular tethering devices used for primary internet. A special package should be set up for that.
Really, the problem here is overselling capacity in a batshit crazy fashion. You can oversell capacity, and do it sanely. Such as actually metering actual network utilization over time, and oversell by perahps 10 to 20%. Instead, these carriers are pathologically allergic to improving their infrastructures, and pathologically oversell their capacity, to the point where they think using more than 100mb in a month is "heavy use". News flash: if you have lots of apps installed on your phone, simply enabling the autoupdater will push you over that pathetically small limit.
Carriers need to establish what "heavy use" is, not compared against current system load, but against average intended use statistics. Eg, using 2gb a month for watching 3 netflix movies should be considered "high end" of "normal", and not "excessive." Excessive would be watching a movie every day. (30 days in a month x 500mb per movie == 1.5TB transfer.) They should then either restrict smartphones, total numbers of dataplans sold, or FUCKING IMPROVE THEIR NETWORKS, so that network instability doesn't occur from "normal use."
Theyneed to stop headplanting and redefining terms with self-referential metrics.
Perhaps their prediction was based on a model that ignores human involvement, and attempts to predict carbon declines from natural sequestration, such as tundra, peatbogs, and the like.
Eg, "if no human activities had occured, co2 levels would drop below 240ppm, due to natural sequestration. This would result in an iceage, until volcanic sources of c02 increases levels sufficiently to melt the glacial ice. Our model predicts that this event would occur 1500 years from now, under the above constraints."
This would still lend credibility to the notion that "human carbon emissions" (or rather, human activities) will prevent the next iceage."
That the proposed iceage requires a total absence of human activity to occur does not detract from the statement.
This is exactly what the summary says to me.
Human released co2 will prevent next ice age.
Co2 levels required to permit the iceage are preindustrial. This means that human produced co2 from industrial activity will prevent the next iceage.
How is that not exactly what the summary says?
I fail to understand the significance of pointing this out.
While industrialized nations do have a dropping population growth rate, they have an increasing energy consumption growth rate.
It is unlikely, bordering on impossible, that 100% of the planet can be sustained at a high enough standard of living to completely eliminate poverty and hunger worldwide, simply because we cannot safely generate that kind of energy output. At least, not in a sustainable manner.
The argument that the population will level off instead of crashing horribly does not seem to hold up in the face of more factors than just food supply. Socioeconomic factors, such as the availability of inexpensive goods, are heavily dependant upon either the exploitation of socioeconomic inequality (china, and pals), or the ubiquity of cheap energy and resources (the US, through onerous trade relations that maintain these features, again exploiting socioeconomic inequalities.)
Solving world hunger would imply either 1 of 2 things.
1) world populations plunge to locally sustainable levels following a global catastrophe, natural or otherwise. Traditonal energy and food sources become reasonable means to satisfy world hunger at these levels.
2) the world economy stops trying to exploit local disadvantages of disparate populations, and the human race produces a new, reliable, and abundant energy source that can safely sustain the inflated world population, and maintain the high standard of living which promotes the low growth rate on a global scale.
Occam's razor suggests the former will happen. It has happened before many times in human history, (fammine has decimated populations long before recorded history, as have wars, and even economic collapses) while the latter has yet to ever happen, and requires far more complications to occur.
The second option requires that growth rate reach exactly 0. Otherwise the world population will continue to grow, and outstrip its ability to be sustained. This is an unfortunate truth which comes from understanding what purpetual growth means. This fundementally goes against human nature. People will chafe under any imposed restraints to procreation. (Look at china.)
I conjecture that our species is fundementally incapable of sustained, zero growth utopian living, short of species wide sterilization and depdenance on assisted reproduction exclusively. At which point, many people would claim it is a distopia, and not a utopia.
For what it's worth, my money is on the first one happening. We see signs of a looming global economic collapse right now. We are hopelessly dependant on an energy source that degrades the habitability of our biosphere while simultaneously increasing rate of consumption for such energy per person, and also the total number of persons consuming at steady and alarming rates. At the current rate of progress for sustainable nuclear/fusion energy replacing fossil fuels, we will reach economic and biosphere collapse long before we reach the hypothetical utopia.
I don't delude myself by donning rose colored glasses when it comes to this issue. I don't look aside from what is going to happen, just because the overextended population is h. sapiens. The human race is ripe for radical decline from resource depletion.
Here's my prediction for how it will go down:
We reached peak oil sometime in the last decade. Peak oil means peak energy production; the maximum on the curve plot over time. We are riding the production slope down now. We are showing only token interest in getting off that sinking ship. Demand for energy continues to grow. As a result, energy production companies are becoming more and more desperate/wreckless to supply that energy. This is how deepwater horizon and the recent stint of induced earthquakes due to hydrofracturing came about.
The world economy is hopelssly tied to energy prices. As supply drops, and demand increases, the costs of transportation of goods between nations, and even major cities will become so high that the goods delivered must be priced accordingly.
Where in my post did you read anything about taxes?
My proposed guidelines draw the cashflow from the annual ticket sales.
The peering arrangement would be how inter-city fares are determined. If it costs significantly more to operate light rail in city A than it does in city B, the naturally the cost of a ticket for a commute from city B to city A will be greater than just a ticket going around the tracks in city B.
The arrangement needs to be iron clad, to prevent city A from scalping city B, and vise versa. Rate of peering costs needs to be driven and enforced at the "barely profitable" level. Otherwise you end up with the problems with caltrain in cali. I visited california just last year, and was interested in using caltrain, but the byzantine price structur to just about anywhere, coupled with paid parking made it an absurd option. It was cheaper to pay california gas prices and car pool with my hosts. This is exactly what needs to be avoided.
The problem with most city transit systems is that the city gov believes the transit system is a revinue stream to be exploited, rather than a barely profitable service provided to keep other costs low. (They don't bring in as many dollars for their budget, but the dollars they have go farther.) This is exactly the problem with the NYC subway system. The city learned that they can gouge the citizens through draconian taxation systems on the registered cab services, and make much more money that way than through properly managing effective public transit with busses and subways. The result is that the busses look like prison busses, and the subways smell like urine, feces, and have dead bodies turn up in them fairly regularly.
Again, the idea here is for peered city transit systems to reach an agreed price rate for intercity fare. Nothing more, nothing less. The necessity to avoid the city bleeding the system dry to pay for a city park or a new school is one of the reasons why the terminals need to be privately operated, but beholden to the franchise. Much like how McDonald's restaraunts are run. If the people running a hub fail to meet the QoS, they have their franchise revoked, and a new private operator is sought. That was the whole point. You can't do that with a purely city run operation.
The city collects a publicly disclosed (and challengable!) Gross sum from ticket sales based on commuter use per station, balanced against the costs to maintain the rails themselves. Rail stations and trains are the responsibility of the franchise operators. It needs to be challengable to keep the city honest.
Another perk of publicly disclosed maintenance costs is that it allows cities entering or negotiating a peering arrangement to immediately know if either party is pulling a fast one.
Pay attention next time.
I explicitly said that the costs would be paid from the boarding pass sales revinue stream. Eg, it is to be run like a business franchise, and ***NOT*** like a government agency.
This means it is not a tax or bond issue, other than initial startup capitol and realestate investments. The system needs to pay for itself.
Since the basis of your retort revolved around this faulted premise, I think that about sums it up.
Again, try reading instead of reacting next time.
The united states has a very large distance between major commutities. For instance, the distance I drive every day is about comparable to the distance from wichita ks (the city I work in) and Hutchinson ks (a nearby major city). Kansas has strong, high winds, tornadoes, and animals that would stand on the tracks. Freight lines commonly must reduce velocity when traveling intercity to 40mph or less to avoid serious issues. This is with heavily loaded freight cars.
Light commuter rail would have greater trouble.
If the distance between the cities was very small (say, between cities on the east coast), rather than 300mi+ with inclement conditions being the norm, then yes, you might not need a dedicated emergency track. I might compromise, by having both tracks operated, but staggered in depatrure times so that a problem could be reported, and the train diverted to the other track without risk of collision with the next departure. You get some of the benefits, with less incurred lost carry capacity that way.
Toll roads only connect major cities, or major city districts. They are intended to direct freight trucks carrying cargo away from commuter lines, but commuters seeking to avoid other commuters (to get there faster/avoid redlights, etc) also make use of them for intercity travel.
Local city roads pick up where the toll roads leave off. The freight trucks leaving the toll roads still have to reach their destinations within the local cities, and for that they have to mix with the commuter trafic. Heavy trucks with multiple axles damage roads far worse than light consumer trafic.
The local city is responsible for maintaining the local commuter infrastructure. The federal and state tolls collectedd at toll roads pay for the interstate and intercity toll road highway systems. The fuel tax is meant to pay for the former.
The problem is the heavy delivery and freight trucks making deliveries to grocery stores, shopping malls, department stores, etc. These damage roadways greatly more than the collected fuel taxes they consume.