The first steam powered ploughs were introduced in the early 18th century. They were stationary steam engines with long steel ropes, and they were put on different sides of the field and pulling the ploughs along the steel rope between them. This is now roughly 200 years ago.
While silicon has four free valences like carbon, its reaction times are several magnitudes lower. Millions of years will pass until two silicon based lifeforms decide to mate, and till they bear children, the central star of their home planetary system burns out.
Even fruit farms (apple farms etc) genetically engineer their trees to be smaller and lower to the ground so they're easier to pick mechanically.
You don't genetically engineer apple trees for that. You just cut them at the desired height, and you bind the branches along steel struts or other structures. That's something farmers do since at least 2500 years.
Automating tasks in farming got us the agricultural revolution necessary for the industrialization to begin with. Without automatized farming, 90% of the population would still be needed to feed us all.
I can be certain that at least the glaciers nearby are receding. I can actually see them from my home. And I live in a region which has continuous weather data since the first half of the 18th century. So I know that the temperatures have already risen about 2 degrees Celsius here around on average. And I can tell that at least some glaciers are at their lowest level since 5200 years because of the discovery of the Oetzi, who was covered by ice for more than 5000 years until the glacier receded. Oetzi was discovered just 50 miles away from my home.
So that's how I know that the glaciers I know of are receding: By actually going there and looking at them.
Sh. Someone has a small scale solution for a small scale problem, and now you are attacking his belief to have solved all the big problems of the world too!
Never ever do some back-of-the-envelope calculations like the average rain fall of the whole of California being something like 500 mm rain per year, which means that the amount of water you have to desalinate to replace rain would be about 424,000 km times 1/2 meter, or about 212 cubic kilometers, which weigh about 212 billion metric tons. To evaporate 1 kg of water, you just need 2,26 Megajoule, and for 212 billion metric tons, it's just shy of 500 trillion Megajoule. Each year. Just to achieve that, you need 15 Terawatt of continuous power.
The largest nuclear power units ever being in use were the soviet RBMK-1500 reactors, which had 1500 MW output each (Tchernobyl used the smaller RBMK-1000). You would need 10,000 of the largest nuclear power plants ever built, just to replace the rain of California.
There has been another often overlooked aspect of the different Industrial Revolutions: the actual increase in productivity for the economy as a whole. When the the mechanic loom, the spinning machine and the steam engine powered the first industrial revolution, the amount of iron and fabrics put on the market increased hundredfold. Thinks made from iron and fabric suddenly were available at affordable prices for everyone. The second industrial revolution made world wide communication possible and transportation cheap, and suddenly you could get stuff from everywhere for cheap, and the amount of available goods increased hundredfold everywhere. You could use whatever good was best for your job, independent of origin, and you hadn't to wait ages for the good to arrive. And you could use the economies of scale, building hundreds and thousands and millions of the same thing, making the price of the single item going down, because in the end, the market of your product was the world and no less.
What the third industrial revolution increased hundredfold was the paperwork. Suddenly you could organise and analyse things that were out of reach before, and you could add a few percent to the productivity of actual goods. What you didn't got was a price drop of a factor of 100 like in the first industrial revolution, or an increase of available goods to a factor of 100 like in the second industrial revolution. You got a few percent of each. The third industrial revolution gives you information. But information is not edible, you can't wear information or shelter in it (except in a metaphorical way). Yes, you can optimize the design of a steel rod with IT, but the gain is not a factor of 100, it's more like 3 percent. That's nothing compared with the gain you got when suddenly one operator of a spinning machine replaced 100 spinners with spinwheels. Smart phones are nice gadgets, but they don't improve much in terms of world wide communiciation. You still can only follow one phone call at a time. That's something you could already in 1859, albeit as a telegram instead of a voice connection.
In terms of growth and productivity for actual goods, the third industrial revolution has been a disappointment so far. Many things have gradually improved, yes, but they haven't been revolutionized. The revolution was in sectors, which actually don't produce anything tangible. We now get better news from every point of the world. We have the maps of the whole earth available. We can predict the weather for seven days with good results. Our life span has increased (In the U.S., the increment seems to have stopped recently though, and life expectancy is slightly going down again). But how does that help in making better teapots? Or do we need more of them? The first industrial revolution got us the steel to make the teapot, the second got us the actual tea cheaply from China or India. What did the third industrial revolution add? Jean-Luc Picard asking a computer to brew a nice hot cup of Earl Grey.
Contrary to common belief, Germany is a net exporter of electrical energy, and the amount of coal going into generating electrical energy is declining. In 1990, Germany generated 311 TWh of electrical energy from coal, in 2015, it was 273 TWh. At the same time, the total output of electrical energy in Germany has grown from 550 TWh to 645 TWh.
Yes, lignite plays a major role, but the total electical energy from lignite hasn't changed much, it's between 145 and 170 TWh yearly, with 170 TWh in 1990 and 145 TWh in 2009, currently (2015) being 155 TWh. And also yes, if you just look at France and Germany, France is a net exporter of electrical energy to Germany. But Germany itself exports electrical energy to other neighboring countries like Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and Poland. In the end, Germany bought 33 TWh of electrical energy in 2015, but at the same time exported 85 TWh, making it a net exporter of more than 50 TWh in 2015.
Apparently not in Great Britain, where HInkley Point C seems to get more expensive every year without actually being running yet, and even with the current 25 billion pounds in subsidies, the operators coming from France and China want to get out as they fear to lose too much money on the project.
Birds in general raise mainly one chick and have the remaining offspring only in reserve if something happens to the first one. Thus the behaviour of the biggest chick is always to shoulder its siblings away and get the most of the feeding and care of its parents. Cuckoos lay their eggs into nests of birds that are smaller than the cuckoo itself, and thus cuckoo chicks will be the biggest and largest chick in their respective nests. And then they behave as the native chick would have too, maybe just a tad more extremely.
If they get caught doing it (e.g. if Facebook for instance suggests WhatsApp contacts as new friends to european users), they are in boiling hot water.
You could come and visit me. I live in the Alps, and I could show you the moraines the glaciers left in the 19th century, the ones from the mid-20th century and the current glaciers. We are currently at about 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels on average, which means that the glaciers have retracted and now end around 2000 feet higher than at the begin of the 20th century. Ah yes... there are old postcards from about 150 years ago, which we could use for comparision.
From the 6th century historian John Malalas. He accused the Vandals, arianist christians, to have blindly destroyed everything of value when they sacked Rome in 455 AD. Interestingly though, John Malalas was a catholic christian, lived 100 years later, was thus no eye witness and badmouthed everyone not of catholic faith.
Donald Trump has proved to be able to live of corporate welfare -- pardon, subsidies and tax rebates to promote business. So in general, he will just continue to do so.
In this case, probably people from Belarus or Ukraine, traveling via Poland to Berlin. Berlin is pretty close to the eastern border of Germany (just 50 mls), and there are many gangs of criminals specializing in this type of crime. In Austria, those type of attacks are often perpetrated by people from Southeast Europe, and I would bet that a considerable amount of criminals operating in France or the Netherlands are based in Germany and trying to get over the border as fast as possible after their heists.
Off-by-one errors are not solved by having the first item in a list indexed by 1. You still have the mathematical feature that all natural numbers have an ordinality and a cardinality. If you insist, that the ordinality of a number equals the cardinality, you have to start with 0 as the first index.
(For people not much into set theory: The cardinality is the answer to "how many elements are in a given set?", and the ordinality answers "how many predecessors does the number have?")
Slashdot Mirror
The first steam powered ploughs were introduced in the early 18th century. They were stationary steam engines with long steel ropes, and they were put on different sides of the field and pulling the ploughs along the steel rope between them. This is now roughly 200 years ago.
While silicon has four free valences like carbon, its reaction times are several magnitudes lower. Millions of years will pass until two silicon based lifeforms decide to mate, and till they bear children, the central star of their home planetary system burns out.
Quite improbable. He was living in Lycia, a historical region in Asia Minor, to a greek family.
And 200 years ago, some wisehead would have told you that plowing an acre with a steam plow is not "plowing".
You don't genetically engineer apple trees for that. You just cut them at the desired height, and you bind the branches along steel struts or other structures. That's something farmers do since at least 2500 years.
Automating tasks in farming got us the agricultural revolution necessary for the industrialization to begin with. Without automatized farming, 90% of the population would still be needed to feed us all.
It can. It does not make sense in some cases, or is contrafactual in others. But "no" is an answer.
So that's how I know that the glaciers I know of are receding: By actually going there and looking at them.
It's only the US Santa's problem. The finnish Santa lives in Rovaniemi. And the original Santa was living in what is now South Turkey.
The most recent case I know of of a person who was actually convicted of voting fraud and is serving time in prison was a conservative.
What ever technology you propose, this is the number you have to scale up to.
Never ever do some back-of-the-envelope calculations like the average rain fall of the whole of California being something like 500 mm rain per year, which means that the amount of water you have to desalinate to replace rain would be about 424,000 km times 1/2 meter, or about 212 cubic kilometers, which weigh about 212 billion metric tons. To evaporate 1 kg of water, you just need 2,26 Megajoule, and for 212 billion metric tons, it's just shy of 500 trillion Megajoule. Each year. Just to achieve that, you need 15 Terawatt of continuous power.
The largest nuclear power units ever being in use were the soviet RBMK-1500 reactors, which had 1500 MW output each (Tchernobyl used the smaller RBMK-1000). You would need 10,000 of the largest nuclear power plants ever built, just to replace the rain of California.
What the third industrial revolution increased hundredfold was the paperwork. Suddenly you could organise and analyse things that were out of reach before, and you could add a few percent to the productivity of actual goods. What you didn't got was a price drop of a factor of 100 like in the first industrial revolution, or an increase of available goods to a factor of 100 like in the second industrial revolution. You got a few percent of each. The third industrial revolution gives you information. But information is not edible, you can't wear information or shelter in it (except in a metaphorical way). Yes, you can optimize the design of a steel rod with IT, but the gain is not a factor of 100, it's more like 3 percent. That's nothing compared with the gain you got when suddenly one operator of a spinning machine replaced 100 spinners with spinwheels. Smart phones are nice gadgets, but they don't improve much in terms of world wide communiciation. You still can only follow one phone call at a time. That's something you could already in 1859, albeit as a telegram instead of a voice connection.
In terms of growth and productivity for actual goods, the third industrial revolution has been a disappointment so far. Many things have gradually improved, yes, but they haven't been revolutionized. The revolution was in sectors, which actually don't produce anything tangible. We now get better news from every point of the world. We have the maps of the whole earth available. We can predict the weather for seven days with good results. Our life span has increased (In the U.S., the increment seems to have stopped recently though, and life expectancy is slightly going down again). But how does that help in making better teapots? Or do we need more of them? The first industrial revolution got us the steel to make the teapot, the second got us the actual tea cheaply from China or India. What did the third industrial revolution add? Jean-Luc Picard asking a computer to brew a nice hot cup of Earl Grey.
Yes, lignite plays a major role, but the total electical energy from lignite hasn't changed much, it's between 145 and 170 TWh yearly, with 170 TWh in 1990 and 145 TWh in 2009, currently (2015) being 155 TWh. And also yes, if you just look at France and Germany, France is a net exporter of electrical energy to Germany. But Germany itself exports electrical energy to other neighboring countries like Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and Poland. In the end, Germany bought 33 TWh of electrical energy in 2015, but at the same time exported 85 TWh, making it a net exporter of more than 50 TWh in 2015.
Apparently not in Great Britain, where HInkley Point C seems to get more expensive every year without actually being running yet, and even with the current 25 billion pounds in subsidies, the operators coming from France and China want to get out as they fear to lose too much money on the project.
Actually, both GPS and GLONASS are not free. If you build equipment which can use GPS or GLONASS, you have to pay a license fee.
Birds in general raise mainly one chick and have the remaining offspring only in reserve if something happens to the first one. Thus the behaviour of the biggest chick is always to shoulder its siblings away and get the most of the feeding and care of its parents. Cuckoos lay their eggs into nests of birds that are smaller than the cuckoo itself, and thus cuckoo chicks will be the biggest and largest chick in their respective nests. And then they behave as the native chick would have too, maybe just a tad more extremely.
Yes. They will pay fines. Probably per user in the EU, which can go into the hundreds of millions.
If they get caught doing it (e.g. if Facebook for instance suggests WhatsApp contacts as new friends to european users), they are in boiling hot water.
You could come and visit me. I live in the Alps, and I could show you the moraines the glaciers left in the 19th century, the ones from the mid-20th century and the current glaciers. We are currently at about 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels on average, which means that the glaciers have retracted and now end around 2000 feet higher than at the begin of the 20th century. Ah yes... there are old postcards from about 150 years ago, which we could use for comparision.
From the 6th century historian John Malalas. He accused the Vandals, arianist christians, to have blindly destroyed everything of value when they sacked Rome in 455 AD. Interestingly though, John Malalas was a catholic christian, lived 100 years later, was thus no eye witness and badmouthed everyone not of catholic faith.
At least, Germany offers two Frankfurts to choose from, one in the West and one in the East.
Donald Trump has proved to be able to live of corporate welfare -- pardon, subsidies and tax rebates to promote business. So in general, he will just continue to do so.
In this case, probably people from Belarus or Ukraine, traveling via Poland to Berlin. Berlin is pretty close to the eastern border of Germany (just 50 mls), and there are many gangs of criminals specializing in this type of crime. In Austria, those type of attacks are often perpetrated by people from Southeast Europe, and I would bet that a considerable amount of criminals operating in France or the Netherlands are based in Germany and trying to get over the border as fast as possible after their heists.
(For people not much into set theory: The cardinality is the answer to "how many elements are in a given set?", and the ordinality answers "how many predecessors does the number have?")