Just correlating stuff without understanding does not work and can only succeed by chance. Understanding, however, remains firmly in the hands of humans, machines have not even demonstrated they may potentially one day far in the future have any say in that.
Well, in this case we're not really giving the robot a chance because it's denied access to the underlying data, all it gets is ingredients and recipes. All you can get is a "turn this summer photo into a winter photo" without any idea of the physical process behind it. If you gave it access to the chemical composition of the ingredients and the transformations caused by cooking, roasting etc. and it was eaten by sensors that could detect flavors like sweet, sour, salt, bitter and umami, smell, temperature and texture maybe it could design food that pleased our actual palate. As it is it's like sitting someone who's never had lobster down with a cookbook and ask them to figure out what lobster goes well with. Of course the answer will be nothing but a bad guess even with intelligence.
Conversely, if we managed to make AI work in a realistic simulation and avoid the problem of infinite degrees of freedom I think it could be a lot less guesswork than we believe. A bit like our vision boils down to rods and three types of cones (four for some) taste might eventually boil down to something pretty simple on the tongue too. That the creativity is more in the number of different ways we can reach roughly the same destination. In the beginning it wouldn't even have to be a dish, it could just learn what eating apples "taste" like compared to oranges. And then if apples and oranges go together...
Simply put, does having christmas content, make a movie a christmas movie?
You don't have to get so philosophical about it because for the most part this is a tautology, if it has comedic elements it's a comedy and if doesn't it's not. It could be a romantic comedy if it has romance elements too, but it's still a comedy. Ordinarily that would mean that Christmas content does actually imply a Christmas movie. It's more that some themes bludgeon others, for example is a horror movie with a Christmas theme actually a "Christmas movie" as most people define it? For a more obvious example, a creepy stalker movie is obviously not a romantic movie even though it involves a romance. And a mafia boss making a wisecrack doesn't make it a comedy unless it's for the audience to laugh at. So there's a general rule and there's exceptions. And probably exceptions to the exceptions.
The chances of survival of the human species are almost 100% outside of a two sided nuclear war or a extinction level asteroid impact.
Neither of those are likely to lead to the total annihilation of the human race, if we consider a few survivors in bunkers the equivalent of a few stragglers in space. They've studied the effects of the dino-killer:
Near the 180km crater = bye-bye Earthquakes, tidal waves and ejected material from the fireball scorching the world -28C tempature drop over land No photosynthesis for ~2 years, killing the plants then the herbivores then the predators Ozone layer would be wiped out, but recover
Would 99.9% of the human race die? Yes. But two years worth of supplies in canned goods and firewood, seed corn and seedlings to start over... it's within stretching distance of a prepper, once you go outside you might have to get more nocturnal and use UV protection but it doesn't take extreme civilization-level effort. Ideally though you'd want something bigger and organized to create a Noah's Ark so you could restart a farm with cows, pigs, chickens, sheep and work horses and then you'd pretty quick be back to 1800s level of technology. Unless the asteroid is so big it knocks the earth out of orbit we're still smack in the habitable zone. Wildlife thrives around Chernobyl and Fukushima, even an all out nuclear war wouldn't contaminate much of the world to actual kill zones.
Unless some completely currently unknown means of getting out of the earth's atmosphere is found this will not happen. The space shuttle had a failure rate of 1 per 67 missions with a 100% fatality rate. Until and unless getting to space does not require being on top of a burning pressurized bomb no sane person will risk a nearly 2% chance of death.
Unlike travelling 10000 meters up in the air at Mach 0.9, which is totally sane. People don't care what it does if it works reliably and they don't care about ancient history if it's safe now. In 3-4 years the F9 will have had more lifetime launches than the Shuttle, it ten years it'll have double at the current launch cadence and then nobody will care except as a bit of space trivia, just like nobody cares about the safety record of old airplane models retired years ago. Particularly not those designed in the 70s.
As long as you have enough supplies and doesnâ(TM)t mind spending 99% of your time inside the surface stay is the least problematic part. Even a shelter under sand bags is a good start, a proper cave and you could stay practically forever. Itâ(TM)s the trip thatâ(TM)s the hard part.
Well where I left experimental science in high school it was more like math, you either solved it right and got points or you did it wrong and at best got a partial score. At no point did "oh, that's funny" mean anything other than "oh my god, we'll have to do it again". Sometimes we just gave up finding the problem and invented the results we should have gotten instead. It's not until you hit the research stage that you go off the rails and start looking at questions where the answers aren't already preordained by a 100+ year old comprehensive theory with a mountain of proof. So if they don't know any actual scientists that might be their perception of it.
The other main reason people say it is because they have some kind of warped perception of where the burden of proof should be. Like it's totally okay to believe in aura therapy or your chakra or yin-yang etc. even though it doesn't show up on any scanners known to man. Screw randomized trials, if you believe in God then prayer helps. Well except that you live or die as often as the Muslim in the next bed. There's so many nutters who want to define their own reality and don't like it when facts get in the way.
Average . If the dog needs to visit a vet, that can easily triple. On the one hand, vets take care of beloved pets; on the other, they take advantage of that emotional bond and they gouge you like crazy. I can't see any reason why pet surgery should be more expensive than human surgery.
Try pricing out what a surgery really costs, and I don't mean just because US hospitals are overcharging... here in Norway we have universal healthcare but there's internal billing so hospitals get refunded per patient, it's not an accurate measure per patient but it says how much a typical surgery costs and it's easy to rack up both thousands and tens of thousands of dollars in costs. It's not the vet's fault that in the vast majority of cases you can put the old dog down and get a new one for far less. That their life span is much shorter than a human also means the benefit is more limited, this surgery could prolong your dog's life with 2 years but your life by 15 years even though it's of comparable complexity. I'm not sure if you got the cause and effect right, people become willing to pay irrationally much money to keep their pet a little longer. That vets do complex, expensive surgeries on dogs is mainly the effect not the cause. They're not done for less in poorer parts of the world, they're generally not done at all.
30% of paternity tests, not 30% of paternity tests done for a random selection of children...
Yes. They have done studies on "incidentally" taken genetic tests like looking for compatible donors and in the population as a whole it's probably somewhere between 0.5-3%. This is largely consistent with anonymous surveys indicating about 2% of women got pregnant at a time they had multiple sexual partners, some of which would have the "right" dad. It's not one in a million odds but that 30% figure is a myth that never dies.
Just because you work in the city does not mean you should live in it or would want to, you just need to solve the population transport method from satellite towns (residential communities) to the cities.
Well, it's a bit more complicated than that. The reason people move to the surrounding areas is that they can have more space to themselves, like a single family residence with a front and back yard. If you were going to live in an apartment building you might as well do that downtown. That often means a population density which is critically low for public transport. A lot of the solutions are thus hybrids where you drive to a commuter parking attached to public transport and take the bus/tram/rail from there. I've always wondered if this might be an early use for self-driving cars, it works in a limited area with low speed local roads and if you can make cost-efficient 0.2-2 mile rapid-fire pickups it could tip the balance for a lot of people.
About 2000 years ago, Euclid recorded a proof (which may or may not have been due to him) that every Mersenne prime allows you to construct an even perfect number.
I "rediscovered" that proof as a teenager, and thought I was breaking new ground. Then I found it was actually discovered 2000+ years ago. Mathematics has a special way of putting your hubris in perspective.
Maybe people don't like being lied to. It's not necessarily about the child. Having a child is a big step, and a responsibility that most men take seriously.
And in some cases, very begrudgingly. Like if you felt this was a colossal fuck-up, but it's your kid so suck it up and be a dad, completely rewrite your plan for life... only to learn you're not actually the dad. Yeah, I can see how that would send someone in a 11/10 rage. I mean it's different if you were totally okay with starting a family and it's the child you wanted but turned out not to be yours. I'd really like to know if there are some statistics on that, like in what percentage of pregnancies was the man expecting a child. Of course sometimes the woman is surprised too and if she doesn't want an abortion it can happen out of the blue, but usually it's just the man "stuck" with an unexpected child. Just because it's something of a surprise pregnancy is not reason to assume your girlfriend is cheating on you.
Almost everything like that ultimately come from the employer in the form of wages or benefits. Whether the consumer pays/saves out of pocket, they pay it through taxes, or they pay through employment in lieu of higher wages. The consumer has no other source of money for these expenses than their job.
While that's true, if there's a choice between hiring 3 people @ 40 hours/week or 2 people @ 60 hours/week and you're paying a big overhead per head the incentive is to have as few employees as possible and work them harder. Who you employ probably also has an effect on your insurance rates, independent of how their qualifications as employees. It's also one more hold employers have over their employees, lose your job and you lose your health plan too.
If it's financed as a flat tax on income which I know is fairly typical for universal healthcare then it's simply not a factor. It doesn't matter if Bob is a healthy 20yo or a 60yo that needs regular dialysis due to kidney failure doesn't matter as long as they both show up for work. You're not in any practical sense paying for Bob's healthcare or Bob's retirement, you're paying into the healthcare and pension system.
Not unlikely... if you look at a typical day's log of articles for deletion they're overwhelmingly bios and/or their creative works trying to make themselves "notable". But if you look at pages like deletionpedia you can find things like Main Belt asteroids with a subpage for each one that got mass wiped. For a wikipedia with room a page for every London tube station and a list of all the Pokemon characters, you may say these tiny little rocks aren't significant in any way. But they're factual, not self-promoting and somebody put a lot of effort into creating it. Then somebody said meh insignificant and *poof* it was gone. I have no problem in believing there's a lot of editors that legitimately got pissed and left.
I've had corrections auto-reverted by bots even though they were properly documented and cited. Some, if not many pages are effectively owned by a small number of edit Nazis who will revert anything you do making the "anyone can edit" into hollow words. There are ways to complain but 99% will just give up and walk away rather than become wiki-lawyers just to correct a damn web page. To be fair, they also have a big problem with vandalism so I understand why some are very possessive, but the practical effect for anyone not into that war is that you buy into the slogans, do something good and they piss on it.
Also you don't really get any positive feedback when you contribute, it's not obvious how many read anything you added and would like to give you a thumbs up. All you really get is the occasional frosty piss, it's for the most part very thankless work. Which may have its effect on who stay on and how they behave, this is their way to power trip and own their little snippet of Wikpedia... *insert Gollum meme here*. I did contribute a bit in the early days when there was a lot of obviously important stuff that wasn't on WP and it was more like "let's just expand and throw shit at the wall and see what sticks", once it became more like this I got out. I mean I understand the page on Hitler is controversial... but I don't want to be in wiki-court about main belt asteroids.
Open Source isn't as free as most people think it is. Free and Open Specifications have far more value then Source Code does. (...) For example a lot of old Legacy Applications will save data files by just dumping the memory structure into the file in raw binary format.
And how many of those applications do you think have specifications that are actually current, correct and complete? Specifications are vital if you're trying to establish a standard. If you're trying to decipher a one-of-a-kind format created by proprietary software, custom-developed code or anything like that the source code is in 99.9% of the cases the only answer to what is really happening. Then you start looking through version control systems (if you're lucky), design docs, bug reports, ask the business users etc. to reverse engineer why it's happening. Sometimes we figure it out, sometimes it's still valid but often it's a solution to a problem we don't have anymore. Other times it's simply a bug or it does things differently that the users thought it did. And sometimes nobody can figure it out and you're told to just replicate it, warts and all. So if there's ever a choice between an implementation and a spec, I'll take the implementation any day.
That aside, almost any proper specification today ought to have a reference implementation and a compliance test suite both of which is code. So in order from best to worst I'd say it's:
1. Spec + code 2. Code 3. Spec 4. Binary
Unless it's a very known spec with lots of implementations and you just happen to be the 3142th FTP client ever written. But in that case get your head out of your ass and use a library. One implementation is bad but there's very few standards that benefit from more than say ten, then they're writing to the spec because the encoder x decoder or server x client matrix is too unmanageable for anything else.
One of my more paranoid friends is convinced in a few years you'll be ostracized if you don't have these devices implanted in every room because if you don't, you clearly are trying to hide something and shouldn't associate with the "normal, decent god fearing" humans that want to be sure they are safe and secure at all times. I used to think he was babbling bullishit, but the way we're going I'm not so sure.
Nobody official cares if I turn off my cell phone and go "off the grid", nor will anyone care if you don't have any device listening. The primary goal is to establish who all the people you don't have to worry about because their lives are transparent. It doesn't matter if you can defeat facial recognition with a hoodie and sunglasses, they'll see 9 out of 10 going about their daily business, you can pay cash but they'll see 9 in 10 use plastic and so on. They want to know all the mundane things people do so they can concentrate their effort on the rest.
Just being the great-grandson of a Rockefeller is a pretty good start. Even if you're the black sheep of the family if they got a billion dollars you're not going to be left in the cold unless you are a total psycho. Those with skill go into the family business, the rest often go a bit freaky because they know they won't ever be flipping burgers or need to worry about job prospects so they can just be a playboy or create art or whatever.
I had implemented Flex Time at my previous job. Giving employees freedom, isn't taking your hands off the reigns. You need to be sure you have people covering every day that your business is open.
It's also nice to have some common time where you can schedule meetings etc. without people getting annoyed. Where I work the "core time" is 9 AM-2:30 PM where you're usually expected to be in attendance unless the boss has signed off on the whole day. Other than that you can work any time 6 AM-9 PM on weekdays (max 12 hours) or 7 AM-6 PM on Saturdays (max 5 hours) for the rest of the hours and you also have some flexibility to save them up. It's a nice system for development, who really cares when the code gets written? The limitations are there for statutory reasons, can't work nights or Sundays without extra overtime pay. Also if your boss requires you to work right now that's mandatory overtime and different from flex hours.
The US could cut its defense budget in half and nothing would change. The Russians would still have invaded and kept Crimea. The Chinese would still not have invaded Taiwan. Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq would be pretty much in the same state.
If there's any area dominated by realpolitik rather than principles it's war. You can not simply meddle about with the size of your forces, their technological superiority, the willingness to exert force or the stomach for losses and assume your enemies would have done exactly the same even if you have clearly superior forces and would win an all-out war. The US lost the war in Vietnam because despite inflicting great damage on the locals they constantly took losses. The US won the Gulf War II because they were so far out of Saddam's league the losses were bearable. The US could have done it with half the budget. Would they have done it with twice the losses? Ten times the losses? How many conflicts didn't happen because people knew the US would come down on them like a ton of bricks? There's no doubt that the US military is extremely powerful, it doesn't mean it's pointless.
Of course you can always go to the really grand picture and say for all the wars the US has fought, what has it actually achieved? If in an alternate timeline you hide a bunch of nuclear subs full of ICBMs in the Arctic, make a skeleton invasion defense and tell the rest of the world they're on their own where would the world be now? It's an interesting thought, but it's also so remote from the current state of affairs that it's guesswork. Like what would Russia be doing if there was no NATO alliance and no US troops that would get involved no matter what happens, would there be tanks rolling down the streets of Kiev? They did it in the Soviet times, all over Eastern Europe. That is if the Soviet Union would have fallen in the first place without the US as their archenemy. It's not like all the twists and turns of history can be put into a "what-if" machine, it makes for great fiction but it's just that - fiction.
It's called a log cabin. Literally TONS of carbon are locked away for the lifetime of the structure. The more carbon you lock away in the form of trees, the more insulation and thermal mass you have as a result.
I do live in Norway and we did have a simple log cabin, if you were living it in all year long the firewood would completely dwarf any materials in the walls. Making the walls thicker also means you have to sink a lot of energy into heating the walls before the cabin gets warm and it would still bleed out quite quick. The ideal insulating wall has a hot side and a cold side with as little as possible in between to transfer heat, ideally you'd have a vacuum but fiberglass or foam is practically as close as you get. Multi-layer windows with air gaps are also very efficient. The main problem dialing it up to infinity is moisture. If you make it too sealed you'll have condensation issues leading to mold, rot, fungus and all sorts of nasty business. Same obviously if water is leaking into the structure somehow.
The biggest problem with regard to efficiency here is really moving the goal posts, if it gets cold I don't put on a sweater - I turn up the heat. Through some combination of heating and ventilation I generally expect my whole apartment to be in my ideal comfort zone all year long. That is far from the standard my parents grew up with, but I doubt you can manage to eco-bully me into living like that again. Even if things as such get greener, we keep on consuming more to even it out. What's the energy efficiency of a 30" TV? Great, now give me a 60" TV.
Well as a reminder Elop took over in September 2010, the burning platform memo was leaked in February 2011, the N9 was announced in June and delivered in September so it wasn't done yet and Nokia was far from united behind it, they had many non-Meego phones in the plans and kept developing many systems in parallel. The most plausible non-malicious explanation is that Elop thought Nokia's OS development was so dysfunctional and unwilling to change the only solution was to nuke it from orbit. Too bad for him they finally delivered just as he kicked them to the curb, but when he first had picked his horse I can understand why he wouldn't backtrack. We're talking about it now because Windows Phone flopped miserably, if they'd succeeded the N9 would be a little footnote about what could have been.
Says who? I mean, seriously most of us don't work in the transport industry. It doesn't take a lot of disgruntled workers - because we want to get rid of them - to clog the wheels. The more you're trying to cut machines out of the loop, the more likely you're going to be seen as the problem not the solution. Granted, I think they've gone too far to the other side and is trying to steamroll everyone but that's where we're at right now.
One of my favourite code comments came from a French Canadian coder in a shutdown routine for a Unix daemon process that spawned a lot of child processes where he wrote: "And now we kill all the children...".
It's all well and fun until you hit the wrong person. I remember reading a story, it might have been on the daily WTF but I couldn't find it about a guy who called up a coworker about a "child killed" problem. There was just a *click* then no answer... a colleague filled him in, the other type of "child killed" just recently. Ouch.
Commercials will slowly make their way into these services because of simple greed.
Yes, but is it companies who want to double dip or customers who want their "free" TV? Both sides of the same coin, I think. The nice thing about streaming services though is that they can deliver a full selection of choices. There's nothing stopping Netflix from saying "We want to make our original content available to an even broader user base who can't afford our subscription fees, so now we're announcing Netflix Ads at $3.99 and Netflix Zero at $0 with a little and a lot of advertising, respectively." So if you're dirt poor but your kids absolutely want to watch Stranger Things they can do that legally without being left out - assuming you got broadband I guess, but with a heavy side order of commercials.
I don't really see a future where streaming services would not want to offer an actual top-tier, no ads service. Obviously you have to "outbid" the advertisers for your own eyeball time, but that's really what's happening today as well. Netflix got the business model they got because they think it makes them more money than the other one, YouTube is the other way around where the main service is free but they too offer an ad-free Premium service if you want to pay your way instead. It's a different market dynamic than cable where people had no "super-premium" alternative when premium started doing ads, it was extracting more money from a trapped user base who wouldn't accept higher prices. Today they leave for other services on a whim.
Why would it need to be scaled acainst the price of existing orbital rockets? If you restarted from the required fuel and stated a minimum baseline cost from that, That would be a lot more useful.
Well replace $62 million with $200k and you get $3k/seat in fuel, but not even a fuel tank to keep it in. Everything has to be manufactured, inspected, maintained and eventually refurbished or replaced even if you can spread the cost over many launches. A long haul flight uses about 0.75 gallons of fuel per seat per 100 km and it costs about $1.75, so a 10000 km flight is around $130 in fuel. Typical total cost to the airliner with labor costs, maintenance cost and deprecation is around $6-700, so already you're thousands behind in the comparison. And even if Musk can get from 3x to 10x launches per booster it's still vastly dominated by rocket cost, not fuel costs. Even the BFR in his most optimistic reuse scenarios had a price tag about 10x the fuel costs, so that puts the seat price more at $30k than $3k.
Rockets are really, really fast. But like most things that go very fast they're not energy efficient at all. Gliding through the air in an airplane might not be impressively efficient compared to ground based travel but compared to a rocket the lift is a huge help. Plus subsonic airplanes don't go through the extreme stresses a rocket does with sonic booms, max-q, re-entry and so on. It seems highly improbable that it'll ever need less maintenance and last longer than an airplane.
Virgin has already quietly announced plans for point to point suborbital flights, connecting cities in a fraction of the current travel time. As Virgin Galactic flight hardware is proven and deployed around the world we are opening up humanity to the biggest increase in travel speed since the advent of jet powered aircraft. Truly an exciting time to be alive!
Because....? If I had a private jet I'd get a lot faster to where I was going too. Despite all the talk of making space "affordable", compared to the airplanes they're still gold plated. A sub-orbital rocket going half way across the Earth will require about 7.9 km/s delta-v, going to orbit is 9.3-10 km/s. Putting that into the rocket equation says you can bring about twice as much payload to fuel compared to LEO. So what's the cost to orbit today? $62 million / 22800 kg = ~$2700/kg for an F9, if you take half that a 75 kg person is still looking at $100k for a ticket if we ignore seats, life support systems and so on. Of course to just reach space you just need to go 1.4 km/s straight up - but then you're coming straight down.
You can look at this graphic to see how a SpaceX first stage goes on a suborbital trajectory, it'll go 7-800 kilometers in a ballistic path. This capture maybe gives you a better sense of scale, you can see stage one returning to earth on the left right off the coast. To actually go places like Europe or Asia it'd have to make a much, much bigger and more expensive arc. And when you consider that you can get anywhere in the world in less than a day, is that one day saved worth tens of thousands of dollars? Travel by rocket is not for the common man nor the middle class, it's for the 0.01% who'd rather have an extra day on their yacht.
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Just correlating stuff without understanding does not work and can only succeed by chance. Understanding, however, remains firmly in the hands of humans, machines have not even demonstrated they may potentially one day far in the future have any say in that.
Well, in this case we're not really giving the robot a chance because it's denied access to the underlying data, all it gets is ingredients and recipes. All you can get is a "turn this summer photo into a winter photo" without any idea of the physical process behind it. If you gave it access to the chemical composition of the ingredients and the transformations caused by cooking, roasting etc. and it was eaten by sensors that could detect flavors like sweet, sour, salt, bitter and umami, smell, temperature and texture maybe it could design food that pleased our actual palate. As it is it's like sitting someone who's never had lobster down with a cookbook and ask them to figure out what lobster goes well with. Of course the answer will be nothing but a bad guess even with intelligence.
Conversely, if we managed to make AI work in a realistic simulation and avoid the problem of infinite degrees of freedom I think it could be a lot less guesswork than we believe. A bit like our vision boils down to rods and three types of cones (four for some) taste might eventually boil down to something pretty simple on the tongue too. That the creativity is more in the number of different ways we can reach roughly the same destination. In the beginning it wouldn't even have to be a dish, it could just learn what eating apples "taste" like compared to oranges. And then if apples and oranges go together...
Simply put, does having christmas content, make a movie a christmas movie?
You don't have to get so philosophical about it because for the most part this is a tautology, if it has comedic elements it's a comedy and if doesn't it's not. It could be a romantic comedy if it has romance elements too, but it's still a comedy. Ordinarily that would mean that Christmas content does actually imply a Christmas movie. It's more that some themes bludgeon others, for example is a horror movie with a Christmas theme actually a "Christmas movie" as most people define it? For a more obvious example, a creepy stalker movie is obviously not a romantic movie even though it involves a romance. And a mafia boss making a wisecrack doesn't make it a comedy unless it's for the audience to laugh at. So there's a general rule and there's exceptions. And probably exceptions to the exceptions.
The chances of survival of the human species are almost 100% outside of a two sided nuclear war or a extinction level asteroid impact.
Neither of those are likely to lead to the total annihilation of the human race, if we consider a few survivors in bunkers the equivalent of a few stragglers in space. They've studied the effects of the dino-killer:
Near the 180km crater = bye-bye
Earthquakes, tidal waves and ejected material from the fireball scorching the world
-28C tempature drop over land
No photosynthesis for ~2 years, killing the plants then the herbivores then the predators
Ozone layer would be wiped out, but recover
Would 99.9% of the human race die? Yes. But two years worth of supplies in canned goods and firewood, seed corn and seedlings to start over... it's within stretching distance of a prepper, once you go outside you might have to get more nocturnal and use UV protection but it doesn't take extreme civilization-level effort. Ideally though you'd want something bigger and organized to create a Noah's Ark so you could restart a farm with cows, pigs, chickens, sheep and work horses and then you'd pretty quick be back to 1800s level of technology. Unless the asteroid is so big it knocks the earth out of orbit we're still smack in the habitable zone. Wildlife thrives around Chernobyl and Fukushima, even an all out nuclear war wouldn't contaminate much of the world to actual kill zones.
Unless some completely currently unknown means of getting out of the earth's atmosphere is found this will not happen. The space shuttle had a failure rate of 1 per 67 missions with a 100% fatality rate. Until and unless getting to space does not require being on top of a burning pressurized bomb no sane person will risk a nearly 2% chance of death.
Unlike travelling 10000 meters up in the air at Mach 0.9, which is totally sane. People don't care what it does if it works reliably and they don't care about ancient history if it's safe now. In 3-4 years the F9 will have had more lifetime launches than the Shuttle, it ten years it'll have double at the current launch cadence and then nobody will care except as a bit of space trivia, just like nobody cares about the safety record of old airplane models retired years ago. Particularly not those designed in the 70s.
As long as you have enough supplies and doesnâ(TM)t mind spending 99% of your time inside the surface stay is the least problematic part. Even a shelter under sand bags is a good start, a proper cave and you could stay practically forever. Itâ(TM)s the trip thatâ(TM)s the hard part.
Well where I left experimental science in high school it was more like math, you either solved it right and got points or you did it wrong and at best got a partial score. At no point did "oh, that's funny" mean anything other than "oh my god, we'll have to do it again". Sometimes we just gave up finding the problem and invented the results we should have gotten instead. It's not until you hit the research stage that you go off the rails and start looking at questions where the answers aren't already preordained by a 100+ year old comprehensive theory with a mountain of proof. So if they don't know any actual scientists that might be their perception of it.
The other main reason people say it is because they have some kind of warped perception of where the burden of proof should be. Like it's totally okay to believe in aura therapy or your chakra or yin-yang etc. even though it doesn't show up on any scanners known to man. Screw randomized trials, if you believe in God then prayer helps. Well except that you live or die as often as the Muslim in the next bed. There's so many nutters who want to define their own reality and don't like it when facts get in the way.
Average . If the dog needs to visit a vet, that can easily triple. On the one hand, vets take care of beloved pets; on the other, they take advantage of that emotional bond and they gouge you like crazy. I can't see any reason why pet surgery should be more expensive than human surgery.
Try pricing out what a surgery really costs, and I don't mean just because US hospitals are overcharging... here in Norway we have universal healthcare but there's internal billing so hospitals get refunded per patient, it's not an accurate measure per patient but it says how much a typical surgery costs and it's easy to rack up both thousands and tens of thousands of dollars in costs. It's not the vet's fault that in the vast majority of cases you can put the old dog down and get a new one for far less. That their life span is much shorter than a human also means the benefit is more limited, this surgery could prolong your dog's life with 2 years but your life by 15 years even though it's of comparable complexity. I'm not sure if you got the cause and effect right, people become willing to pay irrationally much money to keep their pet a little longer. That vets do complex, expensive surgeries on dogs is mainly the effect not the cause. They're not done for less in poorer parts of the world, they're generally not done at all.
30% of paternity tests, not 30% of paternity tests done for a random selection of children ...
Yes. They have done studies on "incidentally" taken genetic tests like looking for compatible donors and in the population as a whole it's probably somewhere between 0.5-3%. This is largely consistent with anonymous surveys indicating about 2% of women got pregnant at a time they had multiple sexual partners, some of which would have the "right" dad. It's not one in a million odds but that 30% figure is a myth that never dies.
Just because you work in the city does not mean you should live in it or would want to, you just need to solve the population transport method from satellite towns (residential communities) to the cities.
Well, it's a bit more complicated than that. The reason people move to the surrounding areas is that they can have more space to themselves, like a single family residence with a front and back yard. If you were going to live in an apartment building you might as well do that downtown. That often means a population density which is critically low for public transport. A lot of the solutions are thus hybrids where you drive to a commuter parking attached to public transport and take the bus/tram/rail from there. I've always wondered if this might be an early use for self-driving cars, it works in a limited area with low speed local roads and if you can make cost-efficient 0.2-2 mile rapid-fire pickups it could tip the balance for a lot of people.
About 2000 years ago, Euclid recorded a proof (which may or may not have been due to him) that every Mersenne prime allows you to construct an even perfect number.
I "rediscovered" that proof as a teenager, and thought I was breaking new ground. Then I found it was actually discovered 2000+ years ago. Mathematics has a special way of putting your hubris in perspective.
Maybe people don't like being lied to. It's not necessarily about the child. Having a child is a big step, and a responsibility that most men take seriously.
And in some cases, very begrudgingly. Like if you felt this was a colossal fuck-up, but it's your kid so suck it up and be a dad, completely rewrite your plan for life... only to learn you're not actually the dad. Yeah, I can see how that would send someone in a 11/10 rage. I mean it's different if you were totally okay with starting a family and it's the child you wanted but turned out not to be yours. I'd really like to know if there are some statistics on that, like in what percentage of pregnancies was the man expecting a child. Of course sometimes the woman is surprised too and if she doesn't want an abortion it can happen out of the blue, but usually it's just the man "stuck" with an unexpected child. Just because it's something of a surprise pregnancy is not reason to assume your girlfriend is cheating on you.
are all the white supremacists finding out they're made up of 30-40% some kind of dark skinned folks they've decided to hate.
We're 99% chimp, more like 0.3-0.4% the "dark skinned folks".
Almost everything like that ultimately come from the employer in the form of wages or benefits. Whether the consumer pays/saves out of pocket, they pay it through taxes, or they pay through employment in lieu of higher wages. The consumer has no other source of money for these expenses than their job.
While that's true, if there's a choice between hiring 3 people @ 40 hours/week or 2 people @ 60 hours/week and you're paying a big overhead per head the incentive is to have as few employees as possible and work them harder. Who you employ probably also has an effect on your insurance rates, independent of how their qualifications as employees. It's also one more hold employers have over their employees, lose your job and you lose your health plan too.
If it's financed as a flat tax on income which I know is fairly typical for universal healthcare then it's simply not a factor. It doesn't matter if Bob is a healthy 20yo or a 60yo that needs regular dialysis due to kidney failure doesn't matter as long as they both show up for work. You're not in any practical sense paying for Bob's healthcare or Bob's retirement, you're paying into the healthcare and pension system.
Not unlikely... if you look at a typical day's log of articles for deletion they're overwhelmingly bios and/or their creative works trying to make themselves "notable". But if you look at pages like deletionpedia you can find things like Main Belt asteroids with a subpage for each one that got mass wiped. For a wikipedia with room a page for every London tube station and a list of all the Pokemon characters, you may say these tiny little rocks aren't significant in any way. But they're factual, not self-promoting and somebody put a lot of effort into creating it. Then somebody said meh insignificant and *poof* it was gone. I have no problem in believing there's a lot of editors that legitimately got pissed and left.
I've had corrections auto-reverted by bots even though they were properly documented and cited. Some, if not many pages are effectively owned by a small number of edit Nazis who will revert anything you do making the "anyone can edit" into hollow words. There are ways to complain but 99% will just give up and walk away rather than become wiki-lawyers just to correct a damn web page. To be fair, they also have a big problem with vandalism so I understand why some are very possessive, but the practical effect for anyone not into that war is that you buy into the slogans, do something good and they piss on it.
Also you don't really get any positive feedback when you contribute, it's not obvious how many read anything you added and would like to give you a thumbs up. All you really get is the occasional frosty piss, it's for the most part very thankless work. Which may have its effect on who stay on and how they behave, this is their way to power trip and own their little snippet of Wikpedia... *insert Gollum meme here*. I did contribute a bit in the early days when there was a lot of obviously important stuff that wasn't on WP and it was more like "let's just expand and throw shit at the wall and see what sticks", once it became more like this I got out. I mean I understand the page on Hitler is controversial... but I don't want to be in wiki-court about main belt asteroids.
P.S. No, that's wasn't mine if you think that...
Open Source isn't as free as most people think it is. Free and Open Specifications have far more value then Source Code does. (...) For example a lot of old Legacy Applications will save data files by just dumping the memory structure into the file in raw binary format.
And how many of those applications do you think have specifications that are actually current, correct and complete? Specifications are vital if you're trying to establish a standard. If you're trying to decipher a one-of-a-kind format created by proprietary software, custom-developed code or anything like that the source code is in 99.9% of the cases the only answer to what is really happening. Then you start looking through version control systems (if you're lucky), design docs, bug reports, ask the business users etc. to reverse engineer why it's happening. Sometimes we figure it out, sometimes it's still valid but often it's a solution to a problem we don't have anymore. Other times it's simply a bug or it does things differently that the users thought it did. And sometimes nobody can figure it out and you're told to just replicate it, warts and all. So if there's ever a choice between an implementation and a spec, I'll take the implementation any day.
That aside, almost any proper specification today ought to have a reference implementation and a compliance test suite both of which is code. So in order from best to worst I'd say it's:
1. Spec + code
2. Code
3. Spec
4. Binary
Unless it's a very known spec with lots of implementations and you just happen to be the 3142th FTP client ever written. But in that case get your head out of your ass and use a library. One implementation is bad but there's very few standards that benefit from more than say ten, then they're writing to the spec because the encoder x decoder or server x client matrix is too unmanageable for anything else.
One of my more paranoid friends is convinced in a few years you'll be ostracized if you don't have these devices implanted in every room because if you don't, you clearly are trying to hide something and shouldn't associate with the "normal, decent god fearing" humans that want to be sure they are safe and secure at all times. I used to think he was babbling bullishit, but the way we're going I'm not so sure.
Nobody official cares if I turn off my cell phone and go "off the grid", nor will anyone care if you don't have any device listening. The primary goal is to establish who all the people you don't have to worry about because their lives are transparent. It doesn't matter if you can defeat facial recognition with a hoodie and sunglasses, they'll see 9 out of 10 going about their daily business, you can pay cash but they'll see 9 in 10 use plastic and so on. They want to know all the mundane things people do so they can concentrate their effort on the rest.
Monarch/Emperor?
Just being the great-grandson of a Rockefeller is a pretty good start. Even if you're the black sheep of the family if they got a billion dollars you're not going to be left in the cold unless you are a total psycho. Those with skill go into the family business, the rest often go a bit freaky because they know they won't ever be flipping burgers or need to worry about job prospects so they can just be a playboy or create art or whatever.
I had implemented Flex Time at my previous job. Giving employees freedom, isn't taking your hands off the reigns. You need to be sure you have people covering every day that your business is open.
It's also nice to have some common time where you can schedule meetings etc. without people getting annoyed. Where I work the "core time" is 9 AM-2:30 PM where you're usually expected to be in attendance unless the boss has signed off on the whole day. Other than that you can work any time 6 AM-9 PM on weekdays (max 12 hours) or 7 AM-6 PM on Saturdays (max 5 hours) for the rest of the hours and you also have some flexibility to save them up. It's a nice system for development, who really cares when the code gets written? The limitations are there for statutory reasons, can't work nights or Sundays without extra overtime pay. Also if your boss requires you to work right now that's mandatory overtime and different from flex hours.
The US could cut its defense budget in half and nothing would change. The Russians would still have invaded and kept Crimea. The Chinese would still not have invaded Taiwan. Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq would be pretty much in the same state.
If there's any area dominated by realpolitik rather than principles it's war. You can not simply meddle about with the size of your forces, their technological superiority, the willingness to exert force or the stomach for losses and assume your enemies would have done exactly the same even if you have clearly superior forces and would win an all-out war. The US lost the war in Vietnam because despite inflicting great damage on the locals they constantly took losses. The US won the Gulf War II because they were so far out of Saddam's league the losses were bearable. The US could have done it with half the budget. Would they have done it with twice the losses? Ten times the losses? How many conflicts didn't happen because people knew the US would come down on them like a ton of bricks? There's no doubt that the US military is extremely powerful, it doesn't mean it's pointless.
Of course you can always go to the really grand picture and say for all the wars the US has fought, what has it actually achieved? If in an alternate timeline you hide a bunch of nuclear subs full of ICBMs in the Arctic, make a skeleton invasion defense and tell the rest of the world they're on their own where would the world be now? It's an interesting thought, but it's also so remote from the current state of affairs that it's guesswork. Like what would Russia be doing if there was no NATO alliance and no US troops that would get involved no matter what happens, would there be tanks rolling down the streets of Kiev? They did it in the Soviet times, all over Eastern Europe. That is if the Soviet Union would have fallen in the first place without the US as their archenemy. It's not like all the twists and turns of history can be put into a "what-if" machine, it makes for great fiction but it's just that - fiction.
It's called a log cabin. Literally TONS of carbon are locked away for the lifetime of the structure. The more carbon you lock away in the form of trees, the more insulation and thermal mass you have as a result.
I do live in Norway and we did have a simple log cabin, if you were living it in all year long the firewood would completely dwarf any materials in the walls. Making the walls thicker also means you have to sink a lot of energy into heating the walls before the cabin gets warm and it would still bleed out quite quick. The ideal insulating wall has a hot side and a cold side with as little as possible in between to transfer heat, ideally you'd have a vacuum but fiberglass or foam is practically as close as you get. Multi-layer windows with air gaps are also very efficient. The main problem dialing it up to infinity is moisture. If you make it too sealed you'll have condensation issues leading to mold, rot, fungus and all sorts of nasty business. Same obviously if water is leaking into the structure somehow.
The biggest problem with regard to efficiency here is really moving the goal posts, if it gets cold I don't put on a sweater - I turn up the heat. Through some combination of heating and ventilation I generally expect my whole apartment to be in my ideal comfort zone all year long. That is far from the standard my parents grew up with, but I doubt you can manage to eco-bully me into living like that again. Even if things as such get greener, we keep on consuming more to even it out. What's the energy efficiency of a 30" TV? Great, now give me a 60" TV.
Well as a reminder Elop took over in September 2010, the burning platform memo was leaked in February 2011, the N9 was announced in June and delivered in September so it wasn't done yet and Nokia was far from united behind it, they had many non-Meego phones in the plans and kept developing many systems in parallel. The most plausible non-malicious explanation is that Elop thought Nokia's OS development was so dysfunctional and unwilling to change the only solution was to nuke it from orbit. Too bad for him they finally delivered just as he kicked them to the curb, but when he first had picked his horse I can understand why he wouldn't backtrack. We're talking about it now because Windows Phone flopped miserably, if they'd succeeded the N9 would be a little footnote about what could have been.
Says who? I mean, seriously most of us don't work in the transport industry. It doesn't take a lot of disgruntled workers - because we want to get rid of them - to clog the wheels. The more you're trying to cut machines out of the loop, the more likely you're going to be seen as the problem not the solution. Granted, I think they've gone too far to the other side and is trying to steamroll everyone but that's where we're at right now.
One of my favourite code comments came from a French Canadian coder in a shutdown routine for a Unix daemon process that spawned a lot of child processes where he wrote: "And now we kill all the children...".
It's all well and fun until you hit the wrong person. I remember reading a story, it might have been on the daily WTF but I couldn't find it about a guy who called up a coworker about a "child killed" problem. There was just a *click* then no answer... a colleague filled him in, the other type of "child killed" just recently. Ouch.
Commercials will slowly make their way into these services because of simple greed.
Yes, but is it companies who want to double dip or customers who want their "free" TV? Both sides of the same coin, I think. The nice thing about streaming services though is that they can deliver a full selection of choices. There's nothing stopping Netflix from saying "We want to make our original content available to an even broader user base who can't afford our subscription fees, so now we're announcing Netflix Ads at $3.99 and Netflix Zero at $0 with a little and a lot of advertising, respectively." So if you're dirt poor but your kids absolutely want to watch Stranger Things they can do that legally without being left out - assuming you got broadband I guess, but with a heavy side order of commercials.
I don't really see a future where streaming services would not want to offer an actual top-tier, no ads service. Obviously you have to "outbid" the advertisers for your own eyeball time, but that's really what's happening today as well. Netflix got the business model they got because they think it makes them more money than the other one, YouTube is the other way around where the main service is free but they too offer an ad-free Premium service if you want to pay your way instead. It's a different market dynamic than cable where people had no "super-premium" alternative when premium started doing ads, it was extracting more money from a trapped user base who wouldn't accept higher prices. Today they leave for other services on a whim.
Why would it need to be scaled acainst the price of existing orbital rockets? If you restarted from the required fuel and stated a minimum baseline cost from that, That would be a lot more useful.
Well replace $62 million with $200k and you get $3k/seat in fuel, but not even a fuel tank to keep it in. Everything has to be manufactured, inspected, maintained and eventually refurbished or replaced even if you can spread the cost over many launches. A long haul flight uses about 0.75 gallons of fuel per seat per 100 km and it costs about $1.75, so a 10000 km flight is around $130 in fuel. Typical total cost to the airliner with labor costs, maintenance cost and deprecation is around $6-700, so already you're thousands behind in the comparison. And even if Musk can get from 3x to 10x launches per booster it's still vastly dominated by rocket cost, not fuel costs. Even the BFR in his most optimistic reuse scenarios had a price tag about 10x the fuel costs, so that puts the seat price more at $30k than $3k.
Rockets are really, really fast. But like most things that go very fast they're not energy efficient at all. Gliding through the air in an airplane might not be impressively efficient compared to ground based travel but compared to a rocket the lift is a huge help. Plus subsonic airplanes don't go through the extreme stresses a rocket does with sonic booms, max-q, re-entry and so on. It seems highly improbable that it'll ever need less maintenance and last longer than an airplane.
Virgin has already quietly announced plans for point to point suborbital flights, connecting cities in a fraction of the current travel time. As Virgin Galactic flight hardware is proven and deployed around the world we are opening up humanity to the biggest increase in travel speed since the advent of jet powered aircraft. Truly an exciting time to be alive!
Because....? If I had a private jet I'd get a lot faster to where I was going too. Despite all the talk of making space "affordable", compared to the airplanes they're still gold plated. A sub-orbital rocket going half way across the Earth will require about 7.9 km/s delta-v, going to orbit is 9.3-10 km/s. Putting that into the rocket equation says you can bring about twice as much payload to fuel compared to LEO. So what's the cost to orbit today? $62 million / 22800 kg = ~$2700/kg for an F9, if you take half that a 75 kg person is still looking at $100k for a ticket if we ignore seats, life support systems and so on. Of course to just reach space you just need to go 1.4 km/s straight up - but then you're coming straight down.
You can look at this graphic to see how a SpaceX first stage goes on a suborbital trajectory, it'll go 7-800 kilometers in a ballistic path. This capture maybe gives you a better sense of scale, you can see stage one returning to earth on the left right off the coast. To actually go places like Europe or Asia it'd have to make a much, much bigger and more expensive arc. And when you consider that you can get anywhere in the world in less than a day, is that one day saved worth tens of thousands of dollars? Travel by rocket is not for the common man nor the middle class, it's for the 0.01% who'd rather have an extra day on their yacht.