Now if the Hydrogen is near one of the Islands on the mid atlantic ridge then it could be reachable.
Volcanic islands are above sea-level ("Doh!"), but are built up in layers by eruptions from a more-or less central vent. Try working out a way to do that which doesn't have, on average, beds of contrasting ages inclined to the vertical. The geometry doesn't allow for it.
So you're going to have a really severe problem accumulating large amounts of hydrogen in one place.
Finding a good natural example of a common rock type that is impervious to hydrogen on a time scale of a few tens or hundreds of thousands of years would be a necessary novelty too. Hydrogen is damned good at finding leaks in machined products, let alone natural products.
Regardless of the ultimate origin of the fluids, unless you've got an incredibly prolific point source, you also need the correct interplay of vertical (pressure-driven) and horizontal transport of your fluid into a trapping structure in order to get a commercially viable fuel reservoir. You also need the fuel generation, transport, deposition of the trapping formation and formation of the trap to happen in the correct time relationship. Which is why many seismic ("echo-sounding") structures which are identified from the surface turn out to be barren of fuel accumulations, though they may have evidence (bitumen, hydrocarbon trapped in fluid inclusions in authigenic mineral overgrowths) of having had fuels pass through them in the past... and dissipate.
Nobody with a financial clue spends today's private money exploring for stuff they won't be digging up and selling for decades.
Unless of course, your discovery/ appraisal/ construction/ exploitation cycle is decades long. Which inlcudes, for example, deepwater (*) hydrocarbon deposits in remote (**) regions. In which case, I've been watching around $800 million be spent before the oil industry's current tanking.
(*) 1.5km water depth and deeper
(**) no refining/ processing facilities within 750 km or 2 national boundaries.
Not really sure where you got that from. Dinosaurs are descended from fish. You could say "humansd are fish" too,
I do.
but descended from doesn't mean we are one by any common definition of "fish"
I do point out that the context that I am talking is the terminology of cladistics. Which, being logical, will eventually take over.
Osteichthyes (colloq. bony fish even though it includes things not called fish)
... such as elephants, titanosaur dinosaurs, whales, avian dinosaurs and Ken Ham.
We also have jaws, which crucially hagfish do not.
I did actually use the term "gnathostome" in one of my drafts of that sentence. The details of those less-derived parts of the vertebrate phylogeny are still a bit unsure in terms of what order things happened.
whereas colloquial classifications are unlikely ever to
That is a problem for colloquial classifications. Are whales fish because they have bone, or are they fish because they live in the sea? In which case, mud skippers are not fish, and the case of all fresh-water fish is very open. As you say, set operations are useful, but you then have to include in your description of an organism the list of which set operations you have considered useful to apply. The point of cladistics is to try to restrict that list of set operations to those which can be observed in the organism itself through it's morphology or genetics.
I disagree. Birds are no more dinosaurs than dinosaurs are fish.
I agree with your grounds for disagreement, but disagree with your conclusion. Birds are indeed no less dinosaurs than dinosaurs are fish, because, as you seem to forget, dinosaurs are fish.
So are we. (Assuming that you are a human, a mammal, etc ; I think the acceptance of my blood by the human medical authorities indicates that I too am human.)
What distinguishes fish from elasmobranchs (sharks, rays and other less-derived gnathostome craniate vertebrates) is the presence of bone (as opposed to cartilage). We have bone, trout have bone, birds have bone (and non--bird dinosaurs had bone - the histology where preserved is unarguable) ; elsamobranchs don't have bone. Also, elasmobranchs, humans, fish and chickens (with a little bit of persuasion, to suppress the developmental silencing of tooth-development genes) have teeth, which hagfish do not have. Welcome to the wonderful world of cladistics, the science of phylogeny. "Descent with modification," as Darwin put it. If evolution is true (which it is), then traditional classifications of animals will eventually need to reflect that. Which does happen, even in the irrationality of English - you might remember that we (our species) had been hunting whales for several centuries and classifying them as fish before anatomists received enough material to identify them as being mammals. Classifications do change. I'm just trying to get that change started in general language, since the argument (over cladistics as a way of classifying evolving organisms) is finished in the scientific community.
and Japanese cars by the laughable 10-15 cycle, where the highest speed involved in the whole cycle is 70 kph (under 45 mph), with an average speed 1/3rd of that.
What are actual driving conditions like in Japan? What are actual driving speeds?
The last time I saw anything about driving in Japan, it was a footnote to a programme that pointed out that before you could buy a car from any Tokyo dealership, you had to present them with your parking permit. No parking place? No car. One parking place, it displays the registration number of the car permitted to park there. Same for the second parking place, which had to be a different car. All tied into the tax and insurance system.
Meanwhile, for commuting to and from work, essentially everyone used the trains. Because there simply wasn't enough road space to move the population with buses, let alone cars.
So a top speed of 70kph and an average of 25kph isn't necessarily unreasonable.
Three nines would be wildly optimistic. Two nines... that's the point at which I'd have to actually write a script to check what my own link's up time is.
(Thinks : 1440 minute per day, so two nines would be 1426 minutes. Am I actually down for a quarter hour per day? Probably. Rarely more than 2-3 minutes at a time, but multiple times per day.
Going to uni in the UK, the lecturers recommended books, none were mandatory and the library usually stocked a bunch of copies.
... which were mostly kept in a separate area (at my uni) known as the "high demand area", from which you could only book a volume out for periods of one or two days. Not returned on time? Your ID would be rejected for any other books. Just to persuade you to return the volume to the "high demand area".
There are other ways of detecting radiation than Geiger counters (electrometers, for example), but I struggle to work out how or why the appropriate sensors would be included in a regular mobile phone. I could almost see the point of a USB-powered device, which you might communicate with through an application. But you still then need to look carefully at the calibration procedures and reference materials for it to be much use.
Amazon do such things for about $600, so I guess it's shoddy writing rather than someone successfully breaking the laws of physics.
It's not entirely unreasonable to think there will be life here until the sun swallows the earth up entirely
Actually, it is entirely unreasonable to assume that. For hundreds of millions of years before the Sun "swallows the Earth" (itself still only about a 50% probability ; predicting the exact degree of stellar swelling in the red giant phase is beyond current astrophysics), the Earth will be baked to the degree of Mercury, then Venus, then maybe to the point of a magma ocean then erosion by the plasma of the Solar atmosphere.
But hundreds of millions or billions of years before then, the slow increase in Solar output will increase terrestrial temperatures (research the "faint young sun paradox" for more info). Note - we're talking about changing Solar luminance, not changing the Sun's size. The size may change a little, but only a few %. The big growth of the red giant phase is still far in the future.
You may have noticed that to maintain our current approximately 15 K of global warming (from atmosphere-free equilibrium to our current temperatures, globally averaged), over the last couple of billion years the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere has gone down from multiple percent to multiple parts per million. Eventually the reduction in global warming achieved by that reduction in CO2 will stop - because there won't be any more CO2 to remove from the atmosphere. At that point, the increasing Solar flux will start to increase surface temperatures (regardless of what humans do about it, except geoengineering) and the next greenhouse gas will start to take over. That is water vapour. And as temperatures rise, the oceans will get hotter, leading to more atmospheric water, leading to increased greenhouse effect, leading to increased temperatures. The observant may spot the presence of a positive feedback loop there.
That is when it gets very hard to predict exactly what will happen. But an increasing trend (driven by the laws of nuclear fusion in the core of the Sun) driving a positive feedback loop is a recipe for runaway. Best current estimate is that it'll happen around a billion years from now (+/- 20% ?)
When that feedback takes over, the Solar system will have two baked-atmosphere planets in the inner system - Venus and the Earth.
Are you aware of life forms that can live in an atmosphere of super-critical steam and nitrogen?
==========
Actually, I'll revise slightly. I can conceive of genetically engineering organisms that could survive in the atmosphere by using gas bladders to balloon to a pressure level where the temperatures and pressures are manageable. Te bladde would probably make sex difficult. But if cephalopods can invent "copulation by guided missile", I don't see that as an insurmountable problem.
Can I conceive of such evolving naturally ? Hmmm, much harder. Portuguese Man o'War might be a workable model. Vertebrates that can give birth and nurture on the wing... that's a big ask. I'd hesitate to say it's completely impossible, but it's a big ask. I note that we don't see seasonal (in the sense of perihelion/ aphelion) colour changes in the clouds of Venus, suggesting that Venusians of 3 billion years ago failed to make the transition when the time came for them.
The billion years in the future date relies on the details of atmospheric modelling (much more complex than nuclear reactions) ; but that the seas will boil long before the Sun starts to grow appreciably is a robust result.
Actually we've only got around a billion years before the increasing solar temperature (due to accumulation of helium in the core) triggers a runaway greenhouse effect and... sayonara anything that depends on liquid water.
With "geoengineering, we might be able to extend it to a couple of billion years.
If memory serves, it was DR-DOS which added multitasking in a somewhat "GNU Screen" style.
As did DESQview. And there were several others. The need for multiple interacting modules and increased memory space over 640k were pushing at the limits.
They have to keep enough power flowing through the aluminum to keep it molten,
It's the cryolite (electrolytic medium) which they need to keep molten ; they can heat the aluminium any time because it'll conduct current even when it's cold. The cyrolite doesn't conduct electricity until it's near it's melting point, so you need resistive heaters to get it up there. MP of cryolite is 1285 K ; aluminium is 933 K ; keep the cryolite molten and the aluinium is taken care of automatically.
Probably they mix the cryolite with some other salt(s) to lower the MP to close to that of the aluminium, but their choice of cations would be small (need a higher electron affinity than aluminium, otherwise you put your cation into the aluminium, which you then have to refine again - waste of energy, literally), and the precise mixes used are probably trade secrets.
IANAL. Thankfully, I do have the prospect of having self respect.
The Wikipedia page on the Berne Convention makes no mention of plagiarism at all, only of copyright.
The Wikipedia page on Plagiarism makes several significant points : "Plagiarism is the "wrongful appropriation" and "stealing and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions" and the representation of them as one's own original work." (My emphasis.), adding that "Plagiarism is not in itself a crime, but can constitute copyright infringement. [...] Plagiarism and copyright infringement overlap to a considerable extent, but they are not equivalent concepts, and many types of plagiarism do not constitute copyright infringement,"
So, here is a scenario : Doctor Strangeglove publishes some work on the flange ratio of sprockets. At a conference, Professor Ripper presents a poster display using Dr Strangeglove's data, but re-draws the artwork with inverted axes and cites no source for it ; when people talk to him at the poster, they assume it is his data and congratulate him on it. Professor Ripper does not correct them.
The re-publishing of the data is no offence under any copyright laws I've heard of - it's plain vanilla "fair use." However the failure to reveal the true source of the data (even more, the suspicious trivial modifications to it) constitute an offence of plagiarism. Which might get Professor Ripper black-balled at the next "Future of Flange Sprockets" conference, but is unlikely to be considered by the courts. It's not even clear that the libel courts would accept that there was a case to answer (Ripper has done nothing to denigrate Strangeglove).
In a way, the absence of criminal sanctions is what makes an offence of plagiarism the more serious a social offence.
It may sound like I'm making a excessively big deal out of this, but I'll be doing my weekly bout of MOOC over the weekend, which will involve me typing out their anti-plagiarism pledge.
I tell them that I didn't give them permission to agree on my behalf, but they just laugh it off. Joke's on them....
If you can prove that you did say that before they clicked-through. Which shouldn't be hard.
I don't know how well it would fly though - since the vendor is acting as an agent hired by your company. There are days when I'm glad to say "IANALawyer", and this is one of those days.
Just been tinkering with that JitSi (Bulgarian for "wires", but I won't try spelling that out, this being Slashdot, and not in the 21st century). Looks very useful.
No, the worst case I can think of is having to install a different app for everyone with whom you wish to communicate, then a second app for everyone you wish to communicate with when they're on their desktop/ laptop/ other machine, and a third app for each one that you wish to communicate with in a social setting - say, 2.3 different applications per communicator?
But worst cases aside, your general point is good - and is why I have Skype 4.3.0.37 on my... what am I on, oh, Fedora 23... laptop.
What was that rule of thumb in the days of "walled garden" attempts by ISPs (AOL vs CompuServe vs various others) - the usefulness of the service was in the orer of the square of the number of users of the service (more strictly, O[n(n-1)], the number of connections between users). So, if you divide the userbase for IP-telephony+videoconferencing into 20 pools, then the net utility is 20*(n/20*((n/20)-1)), or about 1/20th of the utility if there were one common pool.
How much commonality there is between the users of App1 (let's pick Egikia out of the squad seen upthread) and the users of App2 (ummm, Pidgeon?), I honestly don't know. But it is probably the most important question in the subject. If my Skype addressbook - accumulated over a decade and a bit of work - isn't going to work with Appn, then Appn isn't going to get the slightest bit of consideration.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly you've not read Tom Gold's work. I have, which is why I've not wasted my time on the Wikipedia article.
... and devoid of effective traps.
Yes, people have looked. Seismic is cheap, particularly if academics pay to shoot it, and then release the results.
Volcanic islands are above sea-level ("Doh!"), but are built up in layers by eruptions from a more-or less central vent. Try working out a way to do that which doesn't have, on average, beds of contrasting ages inclined to the vertical. The geometry doesn't allow for it.
So you're going to have a really severe problem accumulating large amounts of hydrogen in one place.
Finding a good natural example of a common rock type that is impervious to hydrogen on a time scale of a few tens or hundreds of thousands of years would be a necessary novelty too. Hydrogen is damned good at finding leaks in machined products, let alone natural products.
Regardless of the ultimate origin of the fluids, unless you've got an incredibly prolific point source, you also need the correct interplay of vertical (pressure-driven) and horizontal transport of your fluid into a trapping structure in order to get a commercially viable fuel reservoir. You also need the fuel generation, transport, deposition of the trapping formation and formation of the trap to happen in the correct time relationship. Which is why many seismic ("echo-sounding") structures which are identified from the surface turn out to be barren of fuel accumulations, though they may have evidence (bitumen, hydrocarbon trapped in fluid inclusions in authigenic mineral overgrowths) of having had fuels pass through them in the past ... and dissipate.
Then you need to go back and demand repayment of your fees.
Unless of course, your discovery/ appraisal/ construction/ exploitation cycle is decades long. Which inlcudes, for example, deepwater (*) hydrocarbon deposits in remote (**) regions. In which case, I've been watching around $800 million be spent before the oil industry's current tanking.
(*) 1.5km water depth and deeper
(**) no refining/ processing facilities within 750 km or 2 national boundaries.
I do.
I do point out that the context that I am talking is the terminology of cladistics. Which, being logical, will eventually take over.
... such as elephants, titanosaur dinosaurs, whales, avian dinosaurs and Ken Ham.
I did actually use the term "gnathostome" in one of my drafts of that sentence. The details of those less-derived parts of the vertebrate phylogeny are still a bit unsure in terms of what order things happened.
That is a problem for colloquial classifications. Are whales fish because they have bone, or are they fish because they live in the sea? In which case, mud skippers are not fish, and the case of all fresh-water fish is very open. As you say, set operations are useful, but you then have to include in your description of an organism the list of which set operations you have considered useful to apply. The point of cladistics is to try to restrict that list of set operations to those which can be observed in the organism itself through it's morphology or genetics.
I agree with your grounds for disagreement, but disagree with your conclusion. Birds are indeed no less dinosaurs than dinosaurs are fish, because, as you seem to forget, dinosaurs are fish.
So are we. (Assuming that you are a human, a mammal, etc ; I think the acceptance of my blood by the human medical authorities indicates that I too am human.)
What distinguishes fish from elasmobranchs (sharks, rays and other less-derived gnathostome craniate vertebrates) is the presence of bone (as opposed to cartilage). We have bone, trout have bone, birds have bone (and non--bird dinosaurs had bone - the histology where preserved is unarguable) ; elsamobranchs don't have bone. Also, elasmobranchs, humans, fish and chickens (with a little bit of persuasion, to suppress the developmental silencing of tooth-development genes) have teeth, which hagfish do not have. Welcome to the wonderful world of cladistics, the science of phylogeny. "Descent with modification," as Darwin put it. If evolution is true (which it is), then traditional classifications of animals will eventually need to reflect that. Which does happen, even in the irrationality of English - you might remember that we (our species) had been hunting whales for several centuries and classifying them as fish before anatomists received enough material to identify them as being mammals. Classifications do change. I'm just trying to get that change started in general language, since the argument (over cladistics as a way of classifying evolving organisms) is finished in the scientific community.
Everyone complained about it, but no one complained much.
What are actual driving conditions like in Japan? What are actual driving speeds?
The last time I saw anything about driving in Japan, it was a footnote to a programme that pointed out that before you could buy a car from any Tokyo dealership, you had to present them with your parking permit. No parking place? No car. One parking place, it displays the registration number of the car permitted to park there. Same for the second parking place, which had to be a different car. All tied into the tax and insurance system.
Meanwhile, for commuting to and from work, essentially everyone used the trains. Because there simply wasn't enough road space to move the population with buses, let alone cars.
So a top speed of 70kph and an average of 25kph isn't necessarily unreasonable.
(Thinks : 1440 minute per day, so two nines would be 1426 minutes. Am I actually down for a quarter hour per day? Probably. Rarely more than 2-3 minutes at a time, but multiple times per day.
... which were mostly kept in a separate area (at my uni) known as the "high demand area", from which you could only book a volume out for periods of one or two days. Not returned on time? Your ID would be rejected for any other books. Just to persuade you to return the volume to the "high demand area".
There are other ways of detecting radiation than Geiger counters (electrometers, for example), but I struggle to work out how or why the appropriate sensors would be included in a regular mobile phone. I could almost see the point of a USB-powered device, which you might communicate with through an application. But you still then need to look carefully at the calibration procedures and reference materials for it to be much use.
Amazon do such things for about $600, so I guess it's shoddy writing rather than someone successfully breaking the laws of physics.
Actually, it is entirely unreasonable to assume that. For hundreds of millions of years before the Sun "swallows the Earth" (itself still only about a 50% probability ; predicting the exact degree of stellar swelling in the red giant phase is beyond current astrophysics), the Earth will be baked to the degree of Mercury, then Venus, then maybe to the point of a magma ocean then erosion by the plasma of the Solar atmosphere.
But hundreds of millions or billions of years before then, the slow increase in Solar output will increase terrestrial temperatures (research the "faint young sun paradox" for more info). Note - we're talking about changing Solar luminance, not changing the Sun's size. The size may change a little, but only a few %. The big growth of the red giant phase is still far in the future.
You may have noticed that to maintain our current approximately 15 K of global warming (from atmosphere-free equilibrium to our current temperatures, globally averaged), over the last couple of billion years the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere has gone down from multiple percent to multiple parts per million. Eventually the reduction in global warming achieved by that reduction in CO2 will stop - because there won't be any more CO2 to remove from the atmosphere. At that point, the increasing Solar flux will start to increase surface temperatures (regardless of what humans do about it, except geoengineering) and the next greenhouse gas will start to take over. That is water vapour. And as temperatures rise, the oceans will get hotter, leading to more atmospheric water, leading to increased greenhouse effect, leading to increased temperatures. The observant may spot the presence of a positive feedback loop there.
That is when it gets very hard to predict exactly what will happen. But an increasing trend (driven by the laws of nuclear fusion in the core of the Sun) driving a positive feedback loop is a recipe for runaway. Best current estimate is that it'll happen around a billion years from now (+/- 20% ?)
When that feedback takes over, the Solar system will have two baked-atmosphere planets in the inner system - Venus and the Earth.
Are you aware of life forms that can live in an atmosphere of super-critical steam and nitrogen?
========== ... that's a big ask. I'd hesitate to say it's completely impossible, but it's a big ask. I note that we don't see seasonal (in the sense of perihelion/ aphelion) colour changes in the clouds of Venus, suggesting that Venusians of 3 billion years ago failed to make the transition when the time came for them.
Actually, I'll revise slightly. I can conceive of genetically engineering organisms that could survive in the atmosphere by using gas bladders to balloon to a pressure level where the temperatures and pressures are manageable. Te bladde would probably make sex difficult. But if cephalopods can invent "copulation by guided missile", I don't see that as an insurmountable problem.
Can I conceive of such evolving naturally ? Hmmm, much harder. Portuguese Man o'War might be a workable model. Vertebrates that can give birth and nurture on the wing
The billion years in the future date relies on the details of atmospheric modelling (much more complex than nuclear reactions) ; but that the seas will boil long before the Sun starts to grow appreciably is a robust result.
With "geoengineering, we might be able to extend it to a couple of billion years.
You are aware that Afrikaans is southern-exported Swamp German? It's al lot closer to German than English or Norwegian are.
If you assume that, then I am sure that you have a good reason for making that assumption. What is your reason - or reasons?
I see no reason to make that assumption.
As did DESQview. And there were several others. The need for multiple interacting modules and increased memory space over 640k were pushing at the limits.
I loaned my Pink Shirt Book to a friend .. and never got it beck. [SOB, in both senses]
It's the cryolite (electrolytic medium) which they need to keep molten ; they can heat the aluminium any time because it'll conduct current even when it's cold. The cyrolite doesn't conduct electricity until it's near it's melting point, so you need resistive heaters to get it up there. MP of cryolite is 1285 K ; aluminium is 933 K ; keep the cryolite molten and the aluinium is taken care of automatically.
Probably they mix the cryolite with some other salt(s) to lower the MP to close to that of the aluminium, but their choice of cations would be small (need a higher electron affinity than aluminium, otherwise you put your cation into the aluminium, which you then have to refine again - waste of energy, literally), and the precise mixes used are probably trade secrets.
Of course not. Backing something up is a mark of wimpishness.
The Wikipedia page on the Berne Convention makes no mention of plagiarism at all, only of copyright.
The Wikipedia page on Plagiarism makes several significant points : "Plagiarism is the "wrongful appropriation" and "stealing and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions" and the representation of them as one's own original work." (My emphasis.), adding that "Plagiarism is not in itself a crime, but can constitute copyright infringement. [...] Plagiarism and copyright infringement overlap to a considerable extent, but they are not equivalent concepts, and many types of plagiarism do not constitute copyright infringement,"
So, here is a scenario : Doctor Strangeglove publishes some work on the flange ratio of sprockets. At a conference, Professor Ripper presents a poster display using Dr Strangeglove's data, but re-draws the artwork with inverted axes and cites no source for it ; when people talk to him at the poster, they assume it is his data and congratulate him on it. Professor Ripper does not correct them.
The re-publishing of the data is no offence under any copyright laws I've heard of - it's plain vanilla "fair use." However the failure to reveal the true source of the data (even more, the suspicious trivial modifications to it) constitute an offence of plagiarism. Which might get Professor Ripper black-balled at the next "Future of Flange Sprockets" conference, but is unlikely to be considered by the courts. It's not even clear that the libel courts would accept that there was a case to answer (Ripper has done nothing to denigrate Strangeglove).
In a way, the absence of criminal sanctions is what makes an offence of plagiarism the more serious a social offence.
It may sound like I'm making a excessively big deal out of this, but I'll be doing my weekly bout of MOOC over the weekend, which will involve me typing out their anti-plagiarism pledge.
Plagiarism may be a moral offense, but is it a legal offense? In your jurisdiction?
If you can prove that you did say that before they clicked-through. Which shouldn't be hard.
I don't know how well it would fly though - since the vendor is acting as an agent hired by your company. There are days when I'm glad to say "IANALawyer", and this is one of those days.
Just been tinkering with that JitSi (Bulgarian for "wires", but I won't try spelling that out, this being Slashdot, and not in the 21st century). Looks very useful.
No, the worst case I can think of is having to install a different app for everyone with whom you wish to communicate, then a second app for everyone you wish to communicate with when they're on their desktop/ laptop/ other machine, and a third app for each one that you wish to communicate with in a social setting - say, 2.3 different applications per communicator?
But worst cases aside, your general point is good - and is why I have Skype 4.3.0.37 on my ... what am I on, oh, Fedora 23 ... laptop.
What was that rule of thumb in the days of "walled garden" attempts by ISPs (AOL vs CompuServe vs various others) - the usefulness of the service was in the orer of the square of the number of users of the service (more strictly, O[n(n-1)], the number of connections between users). So, if you divide the userbase for IP-telephony+videoconferencing into 20 pools, then the net utility is 20*(n/20*((n/20)-1)), or about 1/20th of the utility if there were one common pool.
How much commonality there is between the users of App1 (let's pick Egikia out of the squad seen upthread) and the users of App2 (ummm, Pidgeon?), I honestly don't know. But it is probably the most important question in the subject. If my Skype addressbook - accumulated over a decade and a bit of work - isn't going to work with Appn, then Appn isn't going to get the slightest bit of consideration.