If interstellar travel is practical. If it isn't, then no; everyone stays around their own star.
We aren't too far from being able to build ships that can travel to our nearest stellar neighbors on human timescales (towards the upper end thereof... but anyway.)
If by "not too far" you mean "we've started to bang the rocks together"...
The real question is whether faster than light travel is possible, and if everyone eventually discovers it...
To the best of our knowledge, faster than light travel is literally impossible. As impossible as a canary-yellow shade of blue. Slower than light travel is possible (trivially true). The technology that we need to be working on is that of maintaining a closed ecology ; we have one experiment going on that, and it's not progressing well.
Huh? I live in Texas - my dog kills and eats a variety of wildlife.
That wasn't present in your posting ; from the characters on screen you could just as well have been living on the 17th floor of a tower block in the heart of a big conurbation - like Houston, for example - with your neighbour having a de-clawed cat who's never been out of the apartment.
But she prefers her meat roasted. Don't you??
NULL - no preference. It's food. It all comes out (of me) the same.
Another way to calculate with RNA is to construct a living creature. [SNIP]
I bet my dog could, if some roasted meat was involved.:-)
Why roasted... ah, your dog has never encountered raw meat. Or at least, never encountered it in the context of "food".
Which is sadly plausible. I remember being astonished the first time I encountered two kids (my sister's first two step kids) who didn't recognise a lump of coal. I wouldn't have been surprised that they didn't recognise it's significance (as part of the New Year first-footing pocketful, along with yourself, a poke of salt, a loaf of bread and a bottle of whiskey), but the astonishing thing was that by the ages of IIRC 6 and 8 they hadn't encountered a lump of coal before. Town kids in the age of central heating, but they'd never once been to a house with a Real Fire working, or seen a fire being laid.
When two neutron stars collide within our own galaxy, the resulting gamma burst can be a serious threat to life on Earth.
Colliding neutron stars was, for a long time, one of the real contenders for an explanation for GRBs (Gamma Ray Bursts), but I believe that it has faded over the last half-decade or so, as increasing numbers of GRB afterglows have been imaged, and the fine detail of the bursts have become better constrained. The leading (by far) hypothesis these days is a "hypernova" which goes directly from very large star to black hole as one event. The far smaller event horizon (w.r.t. a neutron star's surface) makes more energy available for the fireball, and allows higher pressures and temperatures to be generated in the accretion disc. before it blows the star apart.
How bad would it be if two galactic black holes collided? Would they emit gamma ray bursts as colliding neutron stars do?
Good question. Since the conditions in a pair of merging neutron stars do not (initially) include an event horizon, one would expect to get a longer tail of low-energy photons etc coming out of the merger. But since these ultra-high-energy particles get degraded deep in the fireball, whether we'd observe that is an open question. (To me. IANA A-P.) I think we'd just see a small amount more energy, and somewhat higher peak power levels. Which begs a question - there are two classes of GRB, soft and hard, with differing energy release profiles and differing peak power levels ; I don't remember if one of those is particularly associated with hypernovæ and one still mysterious.
Would the energy be released in particular directions?
Seems a safe bet ; most things (on an astronomical scale) rotate, which generates an axis where conditions are going to be different to the off-axis areas. So, there may be directions of concentration, or planes of concentration, or directions of reduction, or planes of reduction ; I'm not going to even suggest a preference amongst those options.
If suitably (and very unfavourably) directed, is there any minimum safe distance within the observable universe from such a collision?
Take the anthropic principle - we ain't dead or non-existent. So, the likelihood of being hit by a planet-sterilising beam over a period of billions of years is low. I'm more worried about not having cooked that haggis properly. "Not impossible" covers a lot of unimportant considerations.
the United States has had incredible success fostering overseas partnerships.
The actual meaning of "incredible" : beyond belief or understanding; wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
overused as a hyperbole for "good." It means "too improbable to believe": www.iolani.honolulu.hi.us/Keables/KeablesGuide/PartThree/Letters/I.htm
Too implausible to be credible; beyond belief; unbelievable; en.wiktionary.org/wiki/incredible
The Hawaii phrasing is particularly apt. So, by it's own words, the US Govt has had success "too improbable to believe" in fostering overseas partnerships. Since the tone of the article is of celebration that the US Govt has had a lot of success in fostering overseas partnerships, I deduce that this is coded speech by someone who knows how to use English and wants to say "the US Govt has had almost no success in fostering overseas partnerships". More specifically, the US govt has had far less success than it expects or hopes for.
Words have meanings ; people do, sometimes use those meanings.
except that unions don't get to dump boiling oil on CEOs.
I'm off into the trade union office to do some volunteer work at lunch time. I'll bring this idea up with the full-time staff. I think they'll like it. We used to have dealings with some Americans who were trying to repeat our success in building up a trade union in the oil industry, but we haven't heard anything from them for a while. Rumour has it that their legs were broken, but doesn't elaborate if it was by their managers or by other workers.
It is libel in the country that I'm reading this. So that's your dreams of innocence punctured. you don't have any extraterritoriality treaties here, so expect a call from the lawyers for the local M$ division Real Soon Now. Yes, extradition does apply, but don't worry too much about it - we don't have the death penalty for computer crime (unlike the recent reverse case, where your prosecuters want to see the extradited accused "fry").
Seriously, why do you think everyone talks about wireless security as if it was important?
The same question has occurred to me regularly too. Why do people think wireless security is important? I don't use wireless because I don't trust it. So it's security is unimportant. End of problem. My last laptop came with a removable wireless card. So I removed it. End of problem. My current laptop has a switch for switching off the wireless (and BlueTooth); switch that off. End of problem. My work's laptops... well, wireless doesn't work too well through steel-plate walls. And when we're handling explosives, all the radio transmitters go under lock and key anyway. End of problem.
Life chemistry proceeds most effectively between 32 to 42 degrees C. It is no accident that the internal temperature of warm blooded creatures lies in this range.
With the exception of the various extremophiles, which may be the closest remaining organisms to the last common ancestor. They're active up to the 60s, higher for some.
My question is: So does that mean that transit detection has won out over looking for the doppler effect?
Why would they stop using one technique when a different technique is developed which attacks a different question from a different perspective with different constraints to the original technique? More techniques will be developed for detecting and studying planets in orbit around other stars. But the current techniques will continue to be used until there is nothing more that can be wrung out of them. Which is not in the near future. For a start, there's not a lot of high quality telescopes in the southern hemisphere, so that's a significant chunk of sky which is under-represented in surveys.
Is the the fact that all humans are incurably religious also related to these questions?
ALL humans are INCURABLY religious? That's a big claim. For a start I know of at least one human who's been cured of the religious delusions inserted into his head in childhood. So that disposes of your "all" claim, and your incurable claim simultaneously. But more realistically, surely most humans have been and will be cured of their religious delusions in the few seconds between their heart stopping and their brain succumbing to hypoxia.
Really big stars are also disqualified because their output varies too much in order for intelligent life to develop or exist.
I agree that stability of energy output (on a moderate timescale - thousands of years or longer) is a desirable. But really big stars have a more serious limitation - duration. The evidence from fossils is that it took between a half billion and a billion years for the first lifeforms to evolve on Earth ; developing intelligent life took another several billions, though that might conceivably be shortened. A big star with a lifetime of less than a couple of billion years isn't a likely candidate for intelligent life. Wikipedia gives this relationship for stellar mass versus lifetime : Main sequence lifetime (Tms) ~= 10^10 * [M(sol)/M(star)]^2.5 So for a couple of billion year lifetime, (2*10^9), I make that stars of less than 1.9 times the mass of the sun. We can safely ignore the non-main sequence part of a star's lifetime ; things are going to be getting pretty difficult for any developing intelligences, and they've a few millennia to develop interstellar travel, or at least interplanetary travel.
No, shifting just isn't anymore physically demanding than pushing the pedal. I am talking about decreased physical capacity because trying to make the elderly retake their tests due to reduced mental capacity would incite the unrestrained fury of the gray panthers. They are a political organization that represents seniors.
What on earth has it got to do with being elderly or not? I'm not talking about regularly re-testing the elderly drivers. I'm talking about regularly re-testing EVERYONE with a driving license. No discrimination, no argument, a fixed duration for everyone's license.
Spending an hour a day in a car sounds a pretty hellish way to spend your life. OK, if you're a taxi driver or something, or if you actually enjoy driving. But for me, I'd rather do something interesting.
(Being pedantic, because I really am a geologist, for most values of "here" and most reasonable meanings of "new". If I were writing on the other coast of Scotland, then my here might be up to half the age of the Earth, which is stretching "new" a bit, but for over 95% of the country and far over 99% of the population, the rocks below are a lot less than a quarter of the age of the planet, which is "new" enough for me.)
Something went wrong when I was trying to reply to this earlier. Hopefully I've got my reply on the clipboard.:
Do you actually expect an answer to any of that?
Not really. But you did imply that it's impossible to live without a car, which is patently false. You might not like to do it, but it wouldn't kill you.
'One day, quite soon, within our lifetimes, hydrocarbon reserves are going to be economically exhausted, and the era of individual personal transportation machines for the masses is going to be ended.' Hydrocarbon reserves will be exhausted but personal transport will not be. Not in the United States. It would be more feasible to reverse to ride on horseback than to live without personal transport.
Horses are personal transport. And if they turn out to be more fuel efficient than cars (a long calculation- don't forget to add in all the hidden costs.), then horses will again be the preferred method of personal transport. Of course, the meaning of "near to" will change appropriately. When rail was the only mechanised form of transport, the first hour or two of your trip would be done on the back of a horse, and often the last hour as well. In between would be hours or days on a train. Or, in a decade or less, you'd send your "presence" through CCTV and audio to the other location at nearly the speed of light. And visiting Granny would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for both of you, unless you remain living near to where you were born.
Unlike Europe were almost the entire population is grouped together in the cities, in most of the U.S. things are spaced out. It is perhaps 20 miles to the nearest store and maybe 5 or 10 to your neighbor. Of course the bank in turn is 5 miles from the store. Etc.
This will change as the cost of transport rises. For me, if I had a car, it'd take me about 10 minute to drive into the town centre, then I'd have to spend 20 to 30 minutes finding a parking space, which would cost me between £2 and £3 an hour. By comparison, a day-ticket on the bus is £3 and parking is Someone Else's Problem. I may have to wait up to 10 minutes for a bus, then I can read or do the crossword for 20 minutes while the bus takes me where I want to go. Then I get off the bus and walk for a couple of minutes to my final destination. I use the same day-ticket for any other bus journeys that day. It's a no-brain decision really. (By the way, compared to Continental cities, the public transport in the UK is atrocious.)
'I don't think that you actually mentioned 65 as an age limit, but whatever. I take it that you live in an area of America where the blind and the congenitally retarded, the "legless, the armless, the blind and insane" (to quote a song about the returning war heroes of Gallipoli), are all carefully caged up, out of the sight, mind and consideration of the "Real People".' Actually I did mention 65, again because that is the standard retirement age. People over 65 generally do not need to drive back and forth to work every day.
Looking around the town each morning, I see about 1/3 of the people on the move being on the bus. A relatively small number of staff who are needed on-site (several different sites, perhaps) in a hurry have a real need to have a car - your computer technicianship would be an appropriate example. But for most people it's a nice-to-have, not a necessity. IF my #3 plan for the next several years career works out, I'll have to get a car, in order to get to the office within 20 minutes of receiving the "OhShit OhShit OhShit OhShit ThisTime We're Really Gonna Die" phone call. Be that call at 15:00 or 03:00. But the idea that having a car guarantees getting there fast only works during the night ; during the day there is zero chance of getting across town in less than an hour. That's with or without bonnet-mounted bazookas.
Apparently we live in entirely different worlds. It is not possible for someone of any age to function independently in the United States without driving outside a few metropolitan exceptions. Things are simply too far apart.
So, all those historical references I've seen to people living in the Americas in the times of the "Civil War", in the terrorist actions of the Revolutionary War, at the first Thanksgiving meal, and the whole Aztec, Indian and Clovis civilisations ; all of them were allegorical references to populations that could not exist in this continent which was only settled once Henry Ford got his plant going? Come to think of it, that would also imply that losing your driving license for drunk driving is actually a death penalty. Wow, how do your government manage to hide the figures on that?
One day, quite soon, within our lifetimes, hydrocarbon reserves are going to be economically exhausted, and the era of individual personal transportation machines for the masses is going to be ended. The state of electric-powered and/ or hydrogen-powered drive systems looks unlikely to achieve the necessary cost/ performance ratios so that the masses won't be economically available to drive everywhere. At which point, the "public transport" systems will have to expand. Live with it.
For them, its about their freedom and independence.
That's a problem that you're going to have to deal with.
Even if there is public transportation of some sort available where they are, the elderly can't typically walk the several miles between the destinations and the stops.
That's another problem that you're going to have to deal with.
I've never seen someone who was mentally or physically impaired below the age of 65 who couldn't manage to physically operate a motor vehicle.
I don't think that you actually mentioned 65 as an age limit, but whatever. I take it that you live in an area of America where the blind and the congenitally retarded, the "legless, the armless, the blind and insane" (to quote a song about the returning war heroes of Gallipoli), are all carefully caged up, out of the sight, mind and consideration of the "Real People". Now, I'd never intended to return to America, but I'd appreciate knowing approximately which area that is, so I can avoid it.
No I said, everyone who is of an age where their age is likely to have impaired their driving ability should be tested regularly.
I don't think anyone seriously disagrees with the general statement ; the disagreement is about the appropriate age for testing to start. I'd say that it's the age at which people become eligible to drive ; you'd say 65 ; someone, somewhere would probably argue that 150 is an appropriate age, and that dangerous drivers should be removed from the road by the bonnet-mounted bazookas fitted compulsorily to all vehicles with motors. But this detail is quite important.
In the same token everyone in a motor vehicle accident should be retested regardless of age.
I'm pretty sure that I covered this point in my proposition to the UK government. Actually, a month's driving ban while the tests are pending would be a pretty good idea too - after all, both (all) drivers involved have demonstrated an inability to avoid an accident, so it's reasonable to suspend both of their licenses. This, I take it, applies to all accidents, and particularly when one of the vehicles is stationary (my only new car ever had it's front end smashed up the first time I took it to the petrol station - the blind idiot pulled-up at the pump in front of me reversed without looking, straight into my car while I was standing beside it trying to figure out how to get the filler-cap off).
But regardless of how you want to paint the picture there comes an age where ag
'No, she doesn't drive, though she does have a license.' That is a scary thought. You can't manage to get the licenses out of the hands of the elderly and dangerous where you are either?
Well, we had to push her really hard to get a provisional license, take lessons, and eventually pass her test in her late 40's, but it was almost impossible to get her to drive. Then when her diabetes was diagnosed she lept on it like a drowning man on a straw and turned her licence in to the authorities. For reasons that aren't too clear, once her diabetes was stabilised and well-controlled, the license was sent back (some mix up at the doctors - someone thought that she wanted her driving license back) so she's now legally permitted to drive, and I'd expect she's perfectly capable. But still she refuses to drive. Maybe we should use a cattle prod to force her?
There really should be a driven requirement every couple years for anyone over 65. Discrimination be damned, your reflexes and reaction times diminish with age.
Oh definitely - I've long supported the requirement for people in their declining years to lose their licenses and re-sit their driving tests every [debatable number] years. In fact... yes, it's still on the government's website at http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/driving-retests/#detail along with a lot of other petitions suggesting a 10-year duration for a driving license.
Oh - by the way, what age does this decline in reflexes, reaction times etc set in? Looking at the ages of successful athletes, probably in the early 20s. So that would mean there simply isn't a question of discrimination - if you're old enough to drive a vehicle of any sort, then you're already at the peak or on the downward slope of your physical prowess, and so you must continually prove your competence. Oh, you intended to say "everyone BUT ME is a dangerous driver, and needs to be re-tested regularly" ? I think you need to check the meaning of the word "hubris". Unless you're actually Lewis Hamilton's love child out of Michael Schumacher's sister (who herself is the unacknowledged offspring of Snr. Fangio).
That is $14.15. The average Joe here makes less than half that. That wage would be excellent for a book keeper or average for a computer technician.
Now that IS scary. It must be terrible living under the grinding boot of undiluted capitalism. Well, it must have been terrible ; with the nationalisation of the banking system etc, you're on a path to more socially acceptable living standards for the masses. You might even start to get medical treatment for the majority of your population some day.
an invention that may have far-reaching benefits for the disabled and elderly' Not for $2200/month it won't.
Was that a reply to:
Dirty mind is a joy forever... I misread it as "$2,200/month Robotic Slut Overlords."
?
$2200/month translates to £1260/month. For a 150-hour working month, that's £8.38/hour. Minimum wage is just recently changed from £5.56/hour to £5.76/hour (I think, approximately), which makes it a not incredible wage for a home-care assistant. If my step daughter wasn't out at her weekend job, I'd ask her what she's getting waiting tables in a café. I think it's about the same. Looking at the economics of it, if such a product can reduce the number of days that an otherwise incapable elderly person needs human help, or it can extend a elder's period living in their own home, then it's probably pushing at an economic purchase already. Obviously you have to look closely at each individual set of circumstances. If the powered suit can reduce the risk of bad falls and broken hips (I haven't RTFA), then that moves the economic argument considerably in it's favour.
Actually, I may go and RTFA, then send it to Dad. He's a bit of a gadget freak, but he won't need it for years. Mum isn't likely to take to it, being pretty gadget-phobe (she's never made a call on her mobile, though after 4 years of effort we've got her to carry it and answer it. No, she doesn't drive, though she does have a license.)
well, I tried to get reliable numbers. In a BBC article from 2007 I found a mention of 14.2 million cameras. I don't know how many of these are government owned, I would be interested in knowing how many there are,
Sale of a CCTV camera is not a reportable event (unlike sale of a television, since use of TV receivers is (with caveats) an activity requiring an annual licence costing about £135. Which reminds me to renew mine in the next 3 months), so reliable statistics probably do not exist. Down the hill from me is a branch of a popular "technical electronics" store, probably vaguely equivalent to America's "Radio Shack". The sort of place that you could buy a motherboard, OR a 6-pack of replacement capacitors to repair your existing motherboard. Their shop is nearly square, with one wall being the windows, doors and tills ; of the remaining walls, approximately 1/4 to 1/5 of the wall space is devoted to CCTV equipment - cameras of various capabilities, monitors, multi-channel CCTV recording systems, mountings and housings of varying degrees of obtrusiveness, dummy mountings. That's not a precise metric, but it gives you a sense of the scale of sales. Looking at their sales effort (which presumably reflects their sales successes), their most common sale is a 4-camera system with a several-hundred-hour recording system that can output chunks of time from all cameras onto a DVD. The typical use of these is for a small shop - two cameras cover the tills and door from different angles and would be obtrusive to deter overt robberies ; two more cover the more obscure corners of the shop, where shop lifters try to hide their stolen goods on their persons. So, the equipment is probably intended for passive monitoring - AFTER the shop workers have called the police about an event (a robbery by direct assault or covert shoplifting), the management can store the camera records for use in prosecution and/ or sentence setting. No-one is permanently monitoring the cameras. The myth that "14 million cameras require 14 million custodies" is only a myth ; the vast majority of CCTV cameras are for deterrence and for after-the-event evidence presentation.
And wtf is garden vandalism
Errr, vandalism of a garden. Is it that obscure? On the same night the Nigerian couple over the road from us had their white concrete bird-bath and potted-flower "thing" (I have no better description) smashed while we had a 2-year-old row of box hedging ripped up, with it's bedding plants ("Lambs Lugs" http://www.flickr.com/photos/29771883@N06/2812431980/ ) and most of the plants being taken off site. Theft, burglary, or racism? You decide. The Scottish police investigated it as a racist incident, but couldn't come up with anything.
why are you leaving in the same house as a drug dealer?
I didn't say that ; I said "the drug dealer upstairs". I live in the same building as a drug dealer. I suspect that a notice on the front fence, where the drivers and foot customers can see it, to the effect that "If you can read this sign, then you're close enough for the CCTV to have recorded your face." would have an effect. Unfortunately, the effect would probably be firebombs through some windows and bricks through the rest. (Incidentally, I bumped into the guy I brought my dope from in university last week - we're still friends. If he's still dealing, his neighbours probably don't know about it and only think of him as the IT manager of an educational software company. Which he is.)
At the same time it is stimulating these problems by stimulating teen pregnancies (free flat for a teen mother, etc.),
Typical fear and hatred of press phantoms.
FYI, the (only just) teen mum who lives upstairs (next door to the drug dealer) is housed by the council (like the drug dealer and t
because you didn't visit argentina during late 70s or early 80s when our neighbors (well, we too, and ALL the rest of south america) were under a ruthless dictatorship that used to load anyone they didn't like into C-130s and drop them in the midle of the ocean. BTW, that regime ? sponsored by the US, with CIA's planning. as were all the dictatorships in the continent.
Ah, that would explain the black helicopters full of US troops that were brought in to support the regime in it's brinksmanship foreign relations policies. Hmmm, no. But perhaps does it explain the US's attempts to make La Chienne de Fer Thatcher kow tow to Galtieri and fellow generals.
Me ? I'm hoping to get some of the drilling work coming up in the South Falklands Basin, and the adjacent Malvinas Basin. I don't particularly care who I'm working for, as long as they don't kill me and they do pay me on time in a reasonably stable currency.
Evolution is, in a manner of speaking, random genetic mutations that result in having a better chance of surviving those environmental changes.
As is common, you're mixing up two things there. Most of what you're describing is disparity or genetic diversity, which results in some organisms from a population having different (not necessarily better) chances of surviving in any particular set of environmental circumstances compared to the remainder of the population. Evolution is the result of passing disparity through the filter of selection based on environmental circumstances. The environment may include natural circumstances (a new species of predator, a new parasite) or artificial circumstances (a new medical treatment, a new genocidal tyrant), and a host of less easily defined circumstances. As long as that selection removes genomes (people) from the gene pool, then the population's genetics will change.
Evolution = disparity + selection
Both elements are necessary to evolution. One of Darwin's strokes of genius was to realise that the well-known artificial selection used by plant and animal breeders (that's the significance of his fancy pigeons) was no different in it's effects to the less clearly-visible natural processes, leading to the term "natural selection", to emphasise the comparison.
Well, the UK seems to be doing just fine with their high CCTV coverage: last year they had 4.2 million cameras, and the number is increasing.
In the context of the conversation, you're implying that the UK government has 4.2 million (or any arbitrary, large number) CCTV cameras. This is almost certainly not the case - the large majority of these cameras are owned by private organisations, or individuals. Two cases in point :
I've long been considering installing CCTV around my apartment to try to cut down on garden vandalism, and to make the customers of the drug dealer upstairs less comfortable. That will require 3 or 4 cameras for an effective system, as well as Planning Permission to make the evidence admissible in court.
Last week, I took the train through Kirkaldy (a hotbed of radicalism - not.) Around the car park, I counted 24 cameras in plain sight. Not government-controlled. I think.
If it [South Atlantic Anomaly,] breaks through, we're in for a few very interesting thousand years or so.
You might be in for an interesting few thousand years (or so), but the way my knees are going (in my 40s ; too much cave crawling), I'm not sure I'd find anything very interesting for more than another century or so.
BTW, what's your trick for maintaining thousands of years of interest in the outside world? Extreme calorie restriction, or being disembowelled according to the Book of the Dead, dried, and stored in alabaster jars? (That's a joke by the way - when did the Egyptians ever put windows to the outside world into their tombs?)
criminal records check performed. Just to prove that you're not a kiddie-molesting prevert. You can't take a short cut across the school's playing fields (assuming they've not been sold yet, for a sports shop) these days without a criminal records check. That's for the UK ; what it's like in strict police states like America, I dread to think. Probably a 20 year investigation (with you detained "for safety's sake, will no-one think of the children?" as a suspected prevert) would be good enough, to put any of the children you were planning to molest out of the age group that preverts like you are interested in. (Your irony meter should be flashing "overload" by now ; if not, please take it for recalibration.)
Slashdot Mirror
If by "not too far" you mean "we've started to bang the rocks together" ...
To the best of our knowledge, faster than light travel is literally impossible. As impossible as a canary-yellow shade of blue. Slower than light travel is possible (trivially true).
The technology that we need to be working on is that of maintaining a closed ecology ; we have one experiment going on that, and it's not progressing well.
That wasn't present in your posting ; from the characters on screen you could just as well have been living on the 17th floor of a tower block in the heart of a big conurbation - like Houston, for example - with your neighbour having a de-clawed cat who's never been out of the apartment.
NULL - no preference. It's food. It all comes out (of me) the same.
Why roasted ... ah, your dog has never encountered raw meat. Or at least, never encountered it in the context of "food".
Which is sadly plausible.
I remember being astonished the first time I encountered two kids (my sister's first two step kids) who didn't recognise a lump of coal. I wouldn't have been surprised that they didn't recognise it's significance (as part of the New Year first-footing pocketful, along with yourself, a poke of salt, a loaf of bread and a bottle of whiskey), but the astonishing thing was that by the ages of IIRC 6 and 8 they hadn't encountered a lump of coal before. Town kids in the age of central heating, but they'd never once been to a house with a Real Fire working, or seen a fire being laid.
Colliding neutron stars was, for a long time, one of the real contenders for an explanation for GRBs (Gamma Ray Bursts), but I believe that it has faded over the last half-decade or so, as increasing numbers of GRB afterglows have been imaged, and the fine detail of the bursts have become better constrained. The leading (by far) hypothesis these days is a "hypernova" which goes directly from very large star to black hole as one event. The far smaller event horizon (w.r.t. a neutron star's surface) makes more energy available for the fireball, and allows higher pressures and temperatures to be generated in the accretion disc. before it blows the star apart.
Good question. Since the conditions in a pair of merging neutron stars do not (initially) include an event horizon, one would expect to get a longer tail of low-energy photons etc coming out of the merger. But since these ultra-high-energy particles get degraded deep in the fireball, whether we'd observe that is an open question. (To me. IANA A-P.) I think we'd just see a small amount more energy, and somewhat higher peak power levels.
Which begs a question - there are two classes of GRB, soft and hard, with differing energy release profiles and differing peak power levels ; I don't remember if one of those is particularly associated with hypernovæ and one still mysterious.
Seems a safe bet ; most things (on an astronomical scale) rotate, which generates an axis where conditions are going to be different to the off-axis areas. So, there may be directions of concentration, or planes of concentration, or directions of reduction, or planes of reduction ; I'm not going to even suggest a preference amongst those options.
Take the anthropic principle - we ain't dead or non-existent. So, the likelihood of being hit by a planet-sterilising beam over a period of billions of years is low.
I'm more worried about not having cooked that haggis properly.
"Not impossible" covers a lot of unimportant considerations.
The actual meaning of "incredible" :
beyond belief or understanding;
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
overused as a hyperbole for "good." It means "too improbable to believe":
www.iolani.honolulu.hi.us/Keables/KeablesGuide/PartThree/Letters/I.htm
Too implausible to be credible; beyond belief; unbelievable;
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/incredible
The Hawaii phrasing is particularly apt. So, by it's own words, the US Govt has had success "too improbable to believe" in fostering overseas partnerships. Since the tone of the article is of celebration that the US Govt has had a lot of success in fostering overseas partnerships, I deduce that this is coded speech by someone who knows how to use English and wants to say "the US Govt has had almost no success in fostering overseas partnerships". More specifically, the US govt has had far less success than it expects or hopes for.
Words have meanings ; people do, sometimes use those meanings.
I'm off into the trade union office to do some volunteer work at lunch time. I'll bring this idea up with the full-time staff. I think they'll like it.
We used to have dealings with some Americans who were trying to repeat our success in building up a trade union in the oil industry, but we haven't heard anything from them for a while. Rumour has it that their legs were broken, but doesn't elaborate if it was by their managers or by other workers.
It is libel in the country that I'm reading this. So that's your dreams of innocence punctured. you don't have any extraterritoriality treaties here, so expect a call from the lawyers for the local M$ division Real Soon Now. Yes, extradition does apply, but don't worry too much about it - we don't have the death penalty for computer crime (unlike the recent reverse case, where your prosecuters want to see the extradited accused "fry").
The same question has occurred to me regularly too. Why do people think wireless security is important? I don't use wireless because I don't trust it. So it's security is unimportant. End of problem. ... well, wireless doesn't work too well through steel-plate walls. And when we're handling explosives, all the radio transmitters go under lock and key anyway. End of problem.
My last laptop came with a removable wireless card. So I removed it. End of problem.
My current laptop has a switch for switching off the wireless (and BlueTooth); switch that off. End of problem.
My work's laptops
With the exception of the various extremophiles, which may be the closest remaining organisms to the last common ancestor. They're active up to the 60s, higher for some.
Why would they stop using one technique when a different technique is developed which attacks a different question from a different perspective with different constraints to the original technique?
More techniques will be developed for detecting and studying planets in orbit around other stars. But the current techniques will continue to be used until there is nothing more that can be wrung out of them. Which is not in the near future.
For a start, there's not a lot of high quality telescopes in the southern hemisphere, so that's a significant chunk of sky which is under-represented in surveys.
ALL humans are INCURABLY religious? That's a big claim. For a start I know of at least one human who's been cured of the religious delusions inserted into his head in childhood. So that disposes of your "all" claim, and your incurable claim simultaneously.
But more realistically, surely most humans have been and will be cured of their religious delusions in the few seconds between their heart stopping and their brain succumbing to hypoxia.
I agree that stability of energy output (on a moderate timescale - thousands of years or longer) is a desirable. But really big stars have a more serious limitation - duration.
The evidence from fossils is that it took between a half billion and a billion years for the first lifeforms to evolve on Earth ; developing intelligent life took another several billions, though that might conceivably be shortened.
A big star with a lifetime of less than a couple of billion years isn't a likely candidate for intelligent life.
Wikipedia gives this relationship for stellar mass versus lifetime :
Main sequence lifetime (Tms) ~= 10^10 * [M(sol)/M(star)]^2.5
So for a couple of billion year lifetime, (2*10^9), I make that stars of less than 1.9 times the mass of the sun. We can safely ignore the non-main sequence part of a star's lifetime ; things are going to be getting pretty difficult for any developing intelligences, and they've a few millennia to develop interstellar travel, or at least interplanetary travel.
What on earth has it got to do with being elderly or not? I'm not talking about regularly re-testing the elderly drivers. I'm talking about regularly re-testing EVERYONE with a driving license. No discrimination, no argument, a fixed duration for everyone's license.
Spending an hour a day in a car sounds a pretty hellish way to spend your life. OK, if you're a taxi driver or something, or if you actually enjoy driving. But for me, I'd rather do something interesting.
In geological terms, "here" is new.
(Being pedantic, because I really am a geologist, for most values of "here" and most reasonable meanings of "new". If I were writing on the other coast of Scotland, then my here might be up to half the age of the Earth, which is stretching "new" a bit, but for over 95% of the country and far over 99% of the population, the rocks below are a lot less than a quarter of the age of the planet, which is "new" enough for me.)
Something went wrong when I was trying to reply to this earlier. Hopefully I've got my reply on the clipboard. :
Not really. But you did imply that it's impossible to live without a car, which is patently false. You might not like to do it, but it wouldn't kill you.
Horses are personal transport. And if they turn out to be more fuel efficient than cars (a long calculation- don't forget to add in all the hidden costs.), then horses will again be the preferred method of personal transport. Of course, the meaning of "near to" will change appropriately. When rail was the only mechanised form of transport, the first hour or two of your trip would be done on the back of a horse, and often the last hour as well. In between would be hours or days on a train. Or, in a decade or less, you'd send your "presence" through CCTV and audio to the other location at nearly the speed of light. And visiting Granny would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for both of you, unless you remain living near to where you were born.
This will change as the cost of transport rises. For me, if I had a car, it'd take me about 10 minute to drive into the town centre, then I'd have to spend 20 to 30 minutes finding a parking space, which would cost me between £2 and £3 an hour. By comparison, a day-ticket on the bus is £3 and parking is Someone Else's Problem. I may have to wait up to 10 minutes for a bus, then I can read or do the crossword for 20 minutes while the bus takes me where I want to go. Then I get off the bus and walk for a couple of minutes to my final destination. I use the same day-ticket for any other bus journeys that day. It's a no-brain decision really.
(By the way, compared to Continental cities, the public transport in the UK is atrocious.)
Looking around the town each morning, I see about 1/3 of the people on the move being on the bus. A relatively small number of staff who are needed on-site (several different sites, perhaps) in a hurry have a real need to have a car - your computer technicianship would be an appropriate example. But for most people it's a nice-to-have, not a necessity.
IF my #3 plan for the next several years career works out, I'll have to get a car, in order to get to the office within 20 minutes of receiving the "OhShit OhShit OhShit OhShit ThisTime We're Really Gonna Die" phone call. Be that call at 15:00 or 03:00. But the idea that having a car guarantees getting there fast only works during the night ; during the day there is zero chance of getting across town in less than an hour. That's with or without bonnet-mounted bazookas.
So, all those historical references I've seen to people living in the Americas in the times of the "Civil War", in the terrorist actions of the Revolutionary War, at the first Thanksgiving meal, and the whole Aztec, Indian and Clovis civilisations ; all of them were allegorical references to populations that could not exist in this continent which was only settled once Henry Ford got his plant going?
Come to think of it, that would also imply that losing your driving license for drunk driving is actually a death penalty. Wow, how do your government manage to hide the figures on that?
One day, quite soon, within our lifetimes, hydrocarbon reserves are going to be economically exhausted, and the era of individual personal transportation machines for the masses is going to be ended. The state of electric-powered and/ or hydrogen-powered drive systems looks unlikely to achieve the necessary cost/ performance ratios so that the masses won't be economically available to drive everywhere. At which point, the "public transport" systems will have to expand.
Live with it.
That's a problem that you're going to have to deal with.
That's another problem that you're going to have to deal with.
I don't think that you actually mentioned 65 as an age limit, but whatever. I take it that you live in an area of America where the blind and the congenitally retarded, the "legless, the armless, the blind and insane" (to quote a song about the returning war heroes of Gallipoli), are all carefully caged up, out of the sight, mind and consideration of the "Real People".
Now, I'd never intended to return to America, but I'd appreciate knowing approximately which area that is, so I can avoid it.
I don't think anyone seriously disagrees with the general statement ; the disagreement is about the appropriate age for testing to start. I'd say that it's the age at which people become eligible to drive ; you'd say 65 ; someone, somewhere would probably argue that 150 is an appropriate age, and that dangerous drivers should be removed from the road by the bonnet-mounted bazookas fitted compulsorily to all vehicles with motors. But this detail is quite important.
I'm pretty sure that I covered this point in my proposition to the UK government. Actually, a month's driving ban while the tests are pending would be a pretty good idea too - after all, both (all) drivers involved have demonstrated an inability to avoid an accident, so it's reasonable to suspend both of their licenses. This, I take it, applies to all accidents, and particularly when one of the vehicles is stationary (my only new car ever had it's front end smashed up the first time I took it to the petrol station - the blind idiot pulled-up at the pump in front of me reversed without looking, straight into my car while I was standing beside it trying to figure out how to get the filler-cap off).
Well, we had to push her really hard to get a provisional license, take lessons, and eventually pass her test in her late 40's, but it was almost impossible to get her to drive. Then when her diabetes was diagnosed she lept on it like a drowning man on a straw and turned her licence in to the authorities. For reasons that aren't too clear, once her diabetes was stabilised and well-controlled, the license was sent back (some mix up at the doctors - someone thought that she wanted her driving license back) so she's now legally permitted to drive, and I'd expect she's perfectly capable. But still she refuses to drive. Maybe we should use a cattle prod to force her?
Oh definitely - I've long supported the requirement for people in their declining years to lose their licenses and re-sit their driving tests every [debatable number] years. In fact ... yes, it's still on the government's website at http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/driving-retests/#detail along with a lot of other petitions suggesting a 10-year duration for a driving license.
Oh - by the way, what age does this decline in reflexes, reaction times etc set in?
Looking at the ages of successful athletes, probably in the early 20s. So that would mean there simply isn't a question of discrimination - if you're old enough to drive a vehicle of any sort, then you're already at the peak or on the downward slope of your physical prowess, and so you must continually prove your competence.
Oh, you intended to say "everyone BUT ME is a dangerous driver, and needs to be re-tested regularly" ? I think you need to check the meaning of the word "hubris". Unless you're actually Lewis Hamilton's love child out of Michael Schumacher's sister (who herself is the unacknowledged offspring of Snr. Fangio).
Now that IS scary. It must be terrible living under the grinding boot of undiluted capitalism. Well, it must have been terrible ; with the nationalisation of the banking system etc, you're on a path to more socially acceptable living standards for the masses. You might even start to get medical treatment for the majority of your population some day.
Was that a reply to :
?
$2200/month translates to £1260/month. For a 150-hour working month, that's £8.38/hour. Minimum wage is just recently changed from £5.56/hour to £5.76/hour (I think, approximately), which makes it a not incredible wage for a home-care assistant. If my step daughter wasn't out at her weekend job, I'd ask her what she's getting waiting tables in a café. I think it's about the same.
Looking at the economics of it, if such a product can reduce the number of days that an otherwise incapable elderly person needs human help, or it can extend a elder's period living in their own home, then it's probably pushing at an economic purchase already. Obviously you have to look closely at each individual set of circumstances.
If the powered suit can reduce the risk of bad falls and broken hips (I haven't RTFA), then that moves the economic argument considerably in it's favour.
Actually, I may go and RTFA, then send it to Dad. He's a bit of a gadget freak, but he won't need it for years. Mum isn't likely to take to it, being pretty gadget-phobe (she's never made a call on her mobile, though after 4 years of effort we've got her to carry it and answer it. No, she doesn't drive, though she does have a license.)
Sale of a CCTV camera is not a reportable event (unlike sale of a television, since use of TV receivers is (with caveats) an activity requiring an annual licence costing about £135. Which reminds me to renew mine in the next 3 months), so reliable statistics probably do not exist.
Down the hill from me is a branch of a popular "technical electronics" store, probably vaguely equivalent to America's "Radio Shack". The sort of place that you could buy a motherboard, OR a 6-pack of replacement capacitors to repair your existing motherboard. Their shop is nearly square, with one wall being the windows, doors and tills ; of the remaining walls, approximately 1/4 to 1/5 of the wall space is devoted to CCTV equipment - cameras of various capabilities, monitors, multi-channel CCTV recording systems, mountings and housings of varying degrees of obtrusiveness, dummy mountings. That's not a precise metric, but it gives you a sense of the scale of sales. Looking at their sales effort (which presumably reflects their sales successes), their most common sale is a 4-camera system with a several-hundred-hour recording system that can output chunks of time from all cameras onto a DVD. The typical use of these is for a small shop - two cameras cover the tills and door from different angles and would be obtrusive to deter overt robberies ; two more cover the more obscure corners of the shop, where shop lifters try to hide their stolen goods on their persons. So, the equipment is probably intended for passive monitoring - AFTER the shop workers have called the police about an event (a robbery by direct assault or covert shoplifting), the management can store the camera records for use in prosecution and/ or sentence setting. No-one is permanently monitoring the cameras.
The myth that "14 million cameras require 14 million custodies" is only a myth ; the vast majority of CCTV cameras are for deterrence and for after-the-event evidence presentation.
Errr, vandalism of a garden. Is it that obscure? On the same night the Nigerian couple over the road from us had their white concrete bird-bath and potted-flower "thing" (I have no better description) smashed while we had a 2-year-old row of box hedging ripped up, with it's bedding plants ("Lambs Lugs" http://www.flickr.com/photos/29771883@N06/2812431980/ ) and most of the plants being taken off site. Theft, burglary, or racism? You decide. The Scottish police investigated it as a racist incident, but couldn't come up with anything.
I didn't say that ; I said "the drug dealer upstairs". I live in the same building as a drug dealer. I suspect that a notice on the front fence, where the drivers and foot customers can see it, to the effect that "If you can read this sign, then you're close enough for the CCTV to have recorded your face." would have an effect. Unfortunately, the effect would probably be firebombs through some windows and bricks through the rest.
(Incidentally, I bumped into the guy I brought my dope from in university last week - we're still friends. If he's still dealing, his neighbours probably don't know about it and only think of him as the IT manager of an educational software company. Which he is.)
Typical fear and hatred of press phantoms.
FYI, the (only just) teen mum who lives upstairs (next door to the drug dealer) is housed by the council (like the drug dealer and t
Ah, that would explain the black helicopters full of US troops that were brought in to support the regime in it's brinksmanship foreign relations policies. Hmmm, no. But perhaps does it explain the US's attempts to make La Chienne de Fer Thatcher kow tow to Galtieri and fellow generals.
Me ? I'm hoping to get some of the drilling work coming up in the South Falklands Basin, and the adjacent Malvinas Basin. I don't particularly care who I'm working for, as long as they don't kill me and they do pay me on time in a reasonably stable currency.
As is common, you're mixing up two things there. Most of what you're describing is disparity or genetic diversity, which results in some organisms from a population having different (not necessarily better) chances of surviving in any particular set of environmental circumstances compared to the remainder of the population. Evolution is the result of passing disparity through the filter of selection based on environmental circumstances. The environment may include natural circumstances (a new species of predator, a new parasite) or artificial circumstances (a new medical treatment, a new genocidal tyrant), and a host of less easily defined circumstances. As long as that selection removes genomes (people) from the gene pool, then the population's genetics will change.
Evolution = disparity + selection
Both elements are necessary to evolution. One of Darwin's strokes of genius was to realise that the well-known artificial selection used by plant and animal breeders (that's the significance of his fancy pigeons) was no different in it's effects to the less clearly-visible natural processes, leading to the term "natural selection", to emphasise the comparison.
In the context of the conversation, you're implying that the UK government has 4.2 million (or any arbitrary, large number) CCTV cameras. This is almost certainly not the case - the large majority of these cameras are owned by private organisations, or individuals. Two cases in point :
You might be in for an interesting few thousand years (or so), but the way my knees are going (in my 40s ; too much cave crawling), I'm not sure I'd find anything very interesting for more than another century or so.
BTW, what's your trick for maintaining thousands of years of interest in the outside world? Extreme calorie restriction, or being disembowelled according to the Book of the Dead, dried, and stored in alabaster jars? (That's a joke by the way - when did the Egyptians ever put windows to the outside world into their tombs?)
criminal records check performed. Just to prove that you're not a kiddie-molesting prevert.
You can't take a short cut across the school's playing fields (assuming they've not been sold yet, for a sports shop) these days without a criminal records check. That's for the UK ; what it's like in strict police states like America, I dread to think. Probably a 20 year investigation (with you detained "for safety's sake, will no-one think of the children?" as a suspected prevert) would be good enough, to put any of the children you were planning to molest out of the age group that preverts like you are interested in.
(Your irony meter should be flashing "overload" by now ; if not, please take it for recalibration.)
People in glass houses ... Have you spotted my deliberate mistakes in this topic? [Says I ,covering my ass.]