If you're having to replace the brake pads, well, you've either been racing it or the car has a LOT of miles on it.
Any car with serious regenerative braking tends to be gentle on the brake pads - the regeneration pulls speed via the engine, not by turning the energy into heat via the pads.
And by all reports, the Roadster has serious regenerative braking.
And that 'big honking' AC motor is 70 pounds.;)
The batteries are likely to be the biggest expense, but you should be able to get a replacement for not too terribly much when it needs it, getting a good deal of core charge back with the old battery. By preference you'd be replacing the LiIon battery with a longer lasting, cheaper LiIron type.
I'm looking for a turbodiesel myself, having trouble finding anything other than trucks.
I'd argue that there's enough incentive to develop super-batteries even without EVs to add 'one more use'. Though the capacity of EV batteries is generally far higher than others, all the laptops, mp3 players, portable DVD players, cell phones and other gadgets creates a HUGE battery market.
I like to joke that batteries with twice the capacity at half the cost is the only thing needed to make EVs practical - and the times I've calculated it, it appears to be true.
LiFe cells don't have the 'double the capacity' part down, but they do promise lower cost, faster charging, and longer lifespan. We'll have to see.
I think it'd be impressive if we were able to develop an EV taxi that could last a standard shift without recharging. You'd have to double or triple the size of the taxi fleet, as most taxis operate 24/7 excluding downtime for maintenance, but it'd save a LOT of gas - and pollution in the cities that need to lower pollution levels the most.
Not on a scale of tens of thousands of years. Nor do very many "daily" use items have a tendency to destroy reproductive qualities immediately. Radiation attacks the fast growing cells first (or more rapidly) and therefore renders any biological exposure fatal to the blood line.
Hmmm... Then can you tell me, how long before arsenic degrades to be non-toxic? How about Mercury? Lead?
And reading up on Bikini Atoll indicates that there is still lots of life in the area - it's just somewhat too radioactive to be considered safe for humans. If radiation was so great at producing sterility, you wouldn't have that life there.
That doesn't mean that nuclear bombs don't produce toxic radiation, but I think you're overstating the problem. Compared to some contaminants, radioactive isotopes are short lived.
Nuking fault lines is unlikely to release radioactive materials into our environment, especially like ground nukes like Bravo. Heck, pure air bursts don't produce as much either.
And there's not much energy involved in a shout or explosion that sets off a avalanche, compared to the energy released during one. We already deliberately set off avalanches early in order to either limit the damage or to prevent loss of life by having it happen at a controlled time.
The general idea would be that having a 5.0 annually is better than a 6.0 once a decade.
Still, the science is nowhere developed enough. Problems I can think of off hand: 1. Need to identify the point under the 'most' strain, and how much extra energy is needed, where, to break that point. Or even find a lesser point that, once broken, will break more points, ending in an ultimately lower energy potential. 2. Need to ID just HOW strong the resulting earthquakes would be under this - we need to release enough energy to matter, but not so much we level the area. Preferably, the shocks would be minimal to no damage. 3. Along with 2, we need to ID where the new strain points are going to be, and the stress they'll be under, to verify that the chances of a dangerous earthquake will actually be reduced by our action. After all this, you'd resurvey, and start modeling again for the next shot.
All in all, it says to me that we need much improved maps of the earth in the area, and good supercomputer modeling programs.
We're a long way away from having to worry about where we'd get a nuke from to do this.
$80/month is less than what I spend on gas to get to work. Heck, annualize my computer purchases and I'd likely spend more on computer stuff than that. My telephone/internet costs more (cell phone, landline+DSL).
I assume you're talking about your copays?
That's the thing about insurance - when you're looking at costs to society, you need to include the whole cost, not just deductibles/copays. You generally end up paying the money eventually.
My thought is that, sure, it's more expensive, and it's pretty expensive right now, but if this treatment gains hold, would the costs of maintaining a sterile environment drop? I'd tend to think that a relatively large area could be set up for not much more than a small one. Go full bore with positive pressure and UV sterilization for incoming air, wash sheets/clothing with the nasty chemicals, etc...
Obama's spoke against torture, and ordering the closing of Gitmo. The latter will take some time. Dumping them in federal prisons might be worse than leaving them there. So instead of being rash just to please a handful of voters, he's taking time to be a bit more careful than his predecessor.
Bush wanted to close Gitmo. He was stuck in the hard spot that many there are true militants, it would be bad to release them, and the rock of that nobody else is willing to take them, and it wouldn't really be appropriate to put them in a standard US prison.
Oddly enough, Obama's timeframe for closing down Gitmo matches Bush's forcast.
We can't just leave, logistically, politically or militarily. It takes time to pull up the tent stakes, i think people have no idea how big of an operation we have over there. Iraq is unprepared to handle itself just yet.
Bingo. Iraq's doing better day by day, but they still have a long ways to go.
Don't forget the property damage saved with more resistant buildings. Still, many of the buildings are beyond antique, we can't just replace or even shore them up in some cases.
That's where the accuracy would help - stay out of the ancient buildings this week.
Like I said, unless he can get the false-positive rate below ~50%, it's not going to be worth it for most earthquakes.
Yeah, part of this is that I can promise whatever I want during my campaign, but once elected I get the good briefings, and suddenly some of my promises don't make sense anymore. Well, that's the charitable reason anyways.
Wire tapping, Gitmo, Afghanistan, Iraq, all of Obama's timelines are looking a lot more like Bush's now.
Well, he might of been a 'week' off, but yeah, a more in depth study of his accuracy needs to be done - damage and lives avoided if he's right, the expense if he's wrong, adjusted by his accuracy.
In order for it to be worth it, I'd say his false-positive rate needs to be less than 50%.
Re:Bad jobs? Maybe. But some people will take them
on
Even Dirtier IT Jobs
·
· Score: 1
Computer ate my first response...
So, when your choice is making a living wage as the night buy doing QC for a porn site, or working at McDonalds or the corner Gas Station... you say hell yeah Fast Food because it will keep you saner?
So, when it is a choice between your kids eating and not eating, not whether or not they get an XBox, how tasty does that porn based job look now?
Everything is a trade off, I think. I have to agree, personally I'd have put it in terms of healthcare and a non-leaking roof, not an X-Box or other toy. When you have kids, as many of those 'responsable' types on TV and writing advice columns, you do what you have to do to take care of your kids. If that means being QC for gay midget porn or a garbageman, so be it.
Still, where the line varies from individual to individual. There's a reason that clerking often pays less than fast food, despite the dress code requirements for the office job. Once the essentials are paid for (food, medical care, housing), then you have flex about taking a job you like over one that just pays more. For example, my mother took a lesser paying part time job so that she could get home about the same time as my brother and I when we were young. But we never lacked the basics.
Personally, I think that job pay depends on three factors, on average. Difficulty, Danger, and Nastiness. Note that while being a doctor is less difficult physically than being a logger, it's very difficult to meet the educational requirements, thus it's a very difficult job to get into, equaling more pay. Danger, well, loggers and fishermen get paid more than the skills would otherwise demand because the job is dangerous. Nasty? Well, garbagemen are paid a lot for just collecting trash, because it's unpleasant. Other than that, you get some modifications because sometimes it's more about perception than reality. Supply and demand, etc...
What's all this mean? It might be MORE difficult at first, but becoming knowledgable will likely allow you to get a job with sufficient compensation without the unpleasantness.
I would liken "bathing is bad" to "giving antibiotics to feedstock is a good idea" - at the time it was a sound idea based on then-current knowledge and observations; today we know that while on the surface true, in retrospect it was actually a fallacy.
Actually, again, the issue is more complicated. Overuse of antibiotics with livestock is a bad thing, but specifically targeted course when a problem rears it's head is still a good idea.
Bathing, well, I don't actually use that much soap anymore - I'll wash my hands with it, of course, but unless I'm actually dirty, just a water rinse. No need to disrupt the beneficial colonies too much. They help displace/keep the nasty bacterial colonies from gaining a hold.
It's a complicated issue. One shouldn't be causing unnecessary suffering, but much like surgury normally has unpleasant side effects and pain, so doesn't most methods of restraining somebody when they're truly being an ass/resisting arrest.
They have different applications, of course. Tasers are normally prefered when the number of police exceed the number needing restraining, the voltage is fairly constrained and the duration of effect limited. Pepper spray, well, you normally get splatter, which is unpleasant even for the police, but incapacitates for longer, on average. Tear gas normally lasts only a short time after you get out of it's area of effect.
Note, I put this all in the context of arresting people, and as a [i]replacement[/i] for beating or shooting the arrestee.
Once they're restrained and handcuffed, generally there would be no more tasering/pepper spraying. Doing it during the process of forcibly arresting somebody isn't torture. I'll make exceptions to that policy on a case by case basis. There are asses out there who'll STILL resist at that point. Trying to bite officers, for example. 'passive' resistance means your ass gets dragged on the ground, not tasered. Then again, there are people who don't resist who still get the taser treatment, and that needs to be curbed as well.
Calling hurting somebody who's actively resisting arrest 'torture' is, again, losing the meaning of the word, watering it down to the point of being worthless.
BTW, I wish slashdot allowed brackets instead of < > symbols, I tend to code manually, and keep forgetting which forum I'm on.;)
Personally, I think that comparing incapacitants like pepper spray to nerve, blood, and blister agents is to be missing the point.
And we're not using it in bulk - that would be 500 pound bombs loaded with the stuff. Did you mean peaceful protectors or protesters? Because the protests where I've seen tear gas deployed were rapidly turning unpeaceful. Besides, tear gas is the more useful stuff in mas operations, pepper spray needs to be more directly applied.
As for tasers, well, consider the old options - beating the crap out of you or shooting you until you were no longer able to resist. I do agree about reigning in the use by some officers/departments, though.
Oh, and the 'banning' is only in wartime against other militaries. Doesn't apply to the police tasering your butt when you get out of line, or deploying tear gas when you're in a riot.
Yes, leeches and maggots have perfectly good medical use in certain situations. Which is why I didn't list them as examples. Blood letting, well, donating is a different process, and I think I might of read about your father's condition once, but the actual historical process was used for all sorts of other crap.
The moon shouldn't actually need much in the way of mirrors/artificial lighting, more likely tons of insulation/carefully managed thermal mass to keep temperatures even during the night.
So, we are about to see a lot of divide-by-zero errors in economic equations as computing prices falling to zero drives almost every other price towards zero.
You make a good point. A lot of this is helped by increasing the quality of life; ensuring people stay employed, just producing MORE. Which is why if I was in charge, I'd be pushing for more investment in the future. You still have the problem that unskilled labor isn't in demand as much in the USA, and there's a surplus. And there are people unable/unwilling to learn the advanced skills to increase their worth.
Let's face it. Our society does not have the necessary follow through to manage nuclear power. We don't place enough value on public safety to properly train nuclear reactor operators, nor can we be relied upon to safely store nuclear waste for more than a human lifetime.
You know, I just finished going over crash statistics for Model-T cars. Based on that evidence cars are far too unsafe for the American public to be driving. They have to be banned immediately.
With the several HUNDRED nuclear power stations out there, we have [b]2[/b] major accidents. TMI resulted in major redesigns in US reactors. Since then, we haven't really had a problem. France and Japan have also managed to run successful nuclear power programs. Heck, even Russia cleaned up their act(a bit).
Meanwhile, well, look up the death rate due to coal power. That costs thousands of lives a year, from pollution, mining accidents, etc...
Statistically speaking, there will be a death rate with wind/solar, just you wait.
Nuclear, compared to the cost competitive solutions, is clean and safe. A bit more expensive than dirty coal, less expensive per annual kwh produced than solar or wind. Can be planted just about anywhere. Produces power on demand, etc...
No one recorded the observations of standing outside in 50mph winds? Or of someone in free fall from a great enough height?
Go back a couple hundred years and people believed all sorts of weird things. Baths were bad. Bloodletting was good. The moon's made of cheese, earth's flat, earth's the center of everything, We can reach the moon/planets with a giant cannon, etc...
It was never really a widespread belief, if I remember right, the educated knew we'd be fine, more or less, and the truly uneducated didn't know what 50mph was. You had a selection of semi-educated people who would come to weird conclusions.
Heh, think of it as early scientific theories. They were made to be proven wrong(or not).
ARM may end up building higher CPU power chips as well, but they won't abandon the existing market.
I'd almost guarantee it as well. They've as much stated that they're going for the most megahertz per watt. As technology advances, the processing speed will increase.
They'll probably end with with a selection - X performance for 1/10th watt, Y for 1/2, Z for 1. Probably have 1/4, 3/4 in there as well. Along with even more extreme power saving measures that are present in normal chips, like underclocking when demand isn't high.
I think the idea was that if you're using parity RAM that you were running an OS/application designed to handle said memory errors. The lockups would be caused by programmers not bothering to write proper error trapping protocols for parity errors. Probably because even then many weren't using parity RAM.
With proper error trapping, I suppose you'd reload the affe52cted module(if program), or roll back changes and redo the calculations if it's in data.
Given all this, I think I'll check out ECC RAM next time I'm building a system.
However, Hawkins was a genius even before his ALS got bad, and on average the benefits from avoiding ALS in the first place exceed any theoretical gains. For that matter, it's likely that we'll lose Hawking early, compared to if he was healthy. As for ATP production, does having it be more efficient at the cost of MD make it worth it? Looking at animal life - these are traits that get selected out quickly and efficiently by nature. By nature bad mutations pop up far more frequently than good ones, but the weeding of natural selection promptly removes the bad ones(on average).
I'm not saying that we don't do a thorough workup, it's just that there are any number of hereditary diseases that don't actually have a benefit. Heck - for sickle cell it might be a benefit to simply make sure that no new babies have the double recessive trait. There might be some other recessive diseases that one copy would actually provide some benefits, such as 'Wiedemann-Beckwith syndrome' aka 'double muscle'. A double copy turns average joe into an involuntary Mr. Universe, a single copy makes it possible. Overall the double copy is negative because it produces so much muscle it over strains the body - the heart and other organs remain normal sized. But with today's sedentary society, a mild case might actually help.
Still, on average I'd say that we actually already DO know, at some point we can say 'For disorder X, there are no discernible benefits, even for the latent/recessive gene'. There's a whole host of genetic defects that can be classed this way.
Then don't allow selection for 'designer' babies, allow selection for broken metabolic paths and such. There's not really an upside to MD, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, etc...
Sickle cell is a bit iffy - but by the time we get around to doing the selection for it, Malaria shouldn't be a problem, or we might have genetic engineering to the point that we can do a custom modification to provide immunity on our own.
As Red Flayer noted, medicine isn't on a 'getting cheaper' trend. Sure, some basic care is cheaper than ever, but we're still very much making more treatment options - this is good for our health, bad for our wallets.
By that token, I support any families that chose to eliminate inheritable diseases such as MS, MD, even diabetes. Even to the point of aborting fetuses with those traits. Yes, I know about various slippery slope arguements, but let's face it, under older conditions such babies would be chosen against anyways, dying early.
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If you're having to replace the brake pads, well, you've either been racing it or the car has a LOT of miles on it.
Any car with serious regenerative braking tends to be gentle on the brake pads - the regeneration pulls speed via the engine, not by turning the energy into heat via the pads.
And by all reports, the Roadster has serious regenerative braking.
And that 'big honking' AC motor is 70 pounds. ;)
The batteries are likely to be the biggest expense, but you should be able to get a replacement for not too terribly much when it needs it, getting a good deal of core charge back with the old battery. By preference you'd be replacing the LiIon battery with a longer lasting, cheaper LiIron type.
I'm looking for a turbodiesel myself, having trouble finding anything other than trucks.
I'd argue that there's enough incentive to develop super-batteries even without EVs to add 'one more use'. Though the capacity of EV batteries is generally far higher than others, all the laptops, mp3 players, portable DVD players, cell phones and other gadgets creates a HUGE battery market.
I like to joke that batteries with twice the capacity at half the cost is the only thing needed to make EVs practical - and the times I've calculated it, it appears to be true.
LiFe cells don't have the 'double the capacity' part down, but they do promise lower cost, faster charging, and longer lifespan. We'll have to see.
I think it'd be impressive if we were able to develop an EV taxi that could last a standard shift without recharging. You'd have to double or triple the size of the taxi fleet, as most taxis operate 24/7 excluding downtime for maintenance, but it'd save a LOT of gas - and pollution in the cities that need to lower pollution levels the most.
Not on a scale of tens of thousands of years. Nor do very many "daily" use items have a tendency to destroy reproductive qualities immediately. Radiation attacks the fast growing cells first (or more rapidly) and therefore renders any biological exposure fatal to the blood line.
Hmmm... Then can you tell me, how long before arsenic degrades to be non-toxic? How about Mercury? Lead?
And reading up on Bikini Atoll indicates that there is still lots of life in the area - it's just somewhat too radioactive to be considered safe for humans. If radiation was so great at producing sterility, you wouldn't have that life there.
That doesn't mean that nuclear bombs don't produce toxic radiation, but I think you're overstating the problem. Compared to some contaminants, radioactive isotopes are short lived.
Nuking fault lines is unlikely to release radioactive materials into our environment, especially like ground nukes like Bravo. Heck, pure air bursts don't produce as much either.
And there's not much energy involved in a shout or explosion that sets off a avalanche, compared to the energy released during one. We already deliberately set off avalanches early in order to either limit the damage or to prevent loss of life by having it happen at a controlled time.
The general idea would be that having a 5.0 annually is better than a 6.0 once a decade.
Still, the science is nowhere developed enough. Problems I can think of off hand:
1. Need to identify the point under the 'most' strain, and how much extra energy is needed, where, to break that point. Or even find a lesser point that, once broken, will break more points, ending in an ultimately lower energy potential.
2. Need to ID just HOW strong the resulting earthquakes would be under this - we need to release enough energy to matter, but not so much we level the area. Preferably, the shocks would be minimal to no damage.
3. Along with 2, we need to ID where the new strain points are going to be, and the stress they'll be under, to verify that the chances of a dangerous earthquake will actually be reduced by our action. After all this, you'd resurvey, and start modeling again for the next shot.
All in all, it says to me that we need much improved maps of the earth in the area, and good supercomputer modeling programs.
We're a long way away from having to worry about where we'd get a nuke from to do this.
$80/month is less than what I spend on gas to get to work. Heck, annualize my computer purchases and I'd likely spend more on computer stuff than that. My telephone/internet costs more (cell phone, landline+DSL).
I assume you're talking about your copays?
That's the thing about insurance - when you're looking at costs to society, you need to include the whole cost, not just deductibles/copays. You generally end up paying the money eventually.
My thought is that, sure, it's more expensive, and it's pretty expensive right now, but if this treatment gains hold, would the costs of maintaining a sterile environment drop? I'd tend to think that a relatively large area could be set up for not much more than a small one. Go full bore with positive pressure and UV sterilization for incoming air, wash sheets/clothing with the nasty chemicals, etc...
Obama's spoke against torture, and ordering the closing of Gitmo. The latter will take some time. Dumping them in federal prisons might be worse than leaving them there. So instead of being rash just to please a handful of voters, he's taking time to be a bit more careful than his predecessor.
Bush wanted to close Gitmo. He was stuck in the hard spot that many there are true militants, it would be bad to release them, and the rock of that nobody else is willing to take them, and it wouldn't really be appropriate to put them in a standard US prison.
Oddly enough, Obama's timeframe for closing down Gitmo matches Bush's forcast.
We can't just leave, logistically, politically or militarily. It takes time to pull up the tent stakes, i think people have no idea how big of an operation we have over there. Iraq is unprepared to handle itself just yet.
Bingo. Iraq's doing better day by day, but they still have a long ways to go.
Don't forget the property damage saved with more resistant buildings. Still, many of the buildings are beyond antique, we can't just replace or even shore them up in some cases.
That's where the accuracy would help - stay out of the ancient buildings this week.
Like I said, unless he can get the false-positive rate below ~50%, it's not going to be worth it for most earthquakes.
Yeah, part of this is that I can promise whatever I want during my campaign, but once elected I get the good briefings, and suddenly some of my promises don't make sense anymore. Well, that's the charitable reason anyways.
Wire tapping, Gitmo, Afghanistan, Iraq, all of Obama's timelines are looking a lot more like Bush's now.
I bathe all the time - I just save the soap for my hands, or when I'm actually dirty.
Well, he might of been a 'week' off, but yeah, a more in depth study of his accuracy needs to be done - damage and lives avoided if he's right, the expense if he's wrong, adjusted by his accuracy.
In order for it to be worth it, I'd say his false-positive rate needs to be less than 50%.
Computer ate my first response...
So, when your choice is making a living wage as the night buy doing QC for a porn site, or working at McDonalds or the corner Gas Station... you say hell yeah Fast Food because it will keep you saner?
So, when it is a choice between your kids eating and not eating, not whether or not they get an XBox, how tasty does that porn based job look now?
Everything is a trade off, I think. I have to agree, personally I'd have put it in terms of healthcare and a non-leaking roof, not an X-Box or other toy. When you have kids, as many of those 'responsable' types on TV and writing advice columns, you do what you have to do to take care of your kids. If that means being QC for gay midget porn or a garbageman, so be it.
Still, where the line varies from individual to individual. There's a reason that clerking often pays less than fast food, despite the dress code requirements for the office job. Once the essentials are paid for (food, medical care, housing), then you have flex about taking a job you like over one that just pays more. For example, my mother took a lesser paying part time job so that she could get home about the same time as my brother and I when we were young. But we never lacked the basics.
Personally, I think that job pay depends on three factors, on average. Difficulty, Danger, and Nastiness. Note that while being a doctor is less difficult physically than being a logger, it's very difficult to meet the educational requirements, thus it's a very difficult job to get into, equaling more pay. Danger, well, loggers and fishermen get paid more than the skills would otherwise demand because the job is dangerous. Nasty? Well, garbagemen are paid a lot for just collecting trash, because it's unpleasant. Other than that, you get some modifications because sometimes it's more about perception than reality. Supply and demand, etc...
What's all this mean? It might be MORE difficult at first, but becoming knowledgable will likely allow you to get a job with sufficient compensation without the unpleasantness.
I would liken "bathing is bad" to "giving antibiotics to feedstock is a good idea" - at the time it was a sound idea based on then-current knowledge and observations; today we know that while on the surface true, in retrospect it was actually a fallacy.
Actually, again, the issue is more complicated. Overuse of antibiotics with livestock is a bad thing, but specifically targeted course when a problem rears it's head is still a good idea.
Bathing, well, I don't actually use that much soap anymore - I'll wash my hands with it, of course, but unless I'm actually dirty, just a water rinse. No need to disrupt the beneficial colonies too much. They help displace/keep the nasty bacterial colonies from gaining a hold.
It's a complicated issue. One shouldn't be causing unnecessary suffering, but much like surgury normally has unpleasant side effects and pain, so doesn't most methods of restraining somebody when they're truly being an ass/resisting arrest.
They have different applications, of course. Tasers are normally prefered when the number of police exceed the number needing restraining, the voltage is fairly constrained and the duration of effect limited. Pepper spray, well, you normally get splatter, which is unpleasant even for the police, but incapacitates for longer, on average. Tear gas normally lasts only a short time after you get out of it's area of effect.
Note, I put this all in the context of arresting people, and as a [i]replacement[/i] for beating or shooting the arrestee.
Once they're restrained and handcuffed, generally there would be no more tasering/pepper spraying. Doing it during the process of forcibly arresting somebody isn't torture. I'll make exceptions to that policy on a case by case basis. There are asses out there who'll STILL resist at that point. Trying to bite officers, for example. 'passive' resistance means your ass gets dragged on the ground, not tasered. Then again, there are people who don't resist who still get the taser treatment, and that needs to be curbed as well.
Calling hurting somebody who's actively resisting arrest 'torture' is, again, losing the meaning of the word, watering it down to the point of being worthless.
BTW, I wish slashdot allowed brackets instead of < > symbols, I tend to code manually, and keep forgetting which forum I'm on. ;)
Oops, got your and Zsau's post mixed up. He's the father with a condition that blood draining is a treatment.
I might have to go look up that treatment.
Personally, I think that comparing incapacitants like pepper spray to nerve, blood, and blister agents is to be missing the point.
And we're not using it in bulk - that would be 500 pound bombs loaded with the stuff. Did you mean peaceful protectors or protesters? Because the protests where I've seen tear gas deployed were rapidly turning unpeaceful. Besides, tear gas is the more useful stuff in mas operations, pepper spray needs to be more directly applied.
As for tasers, well, consider the old options - beating the crap out of you or shooting you until you were no longer able to resist. I do agree about reigning in the use by some officers/departments, though.
Oh, and the 'banning' is only in wartime against other militaries. Doesn't apply to the police tasering your butt when you get out of line, or deploying tear gas when you're in a riot.
Heh, should have known this would come up...
Yes, leeches and maggots have perfectly good medical use in certain situations. Which is why I didn't list them as examples. Blood letting, well, donating is a different process, and I think I might of read about your father's condition once, but the actual historical process was used for all sorts of other crap.
The moon shouldn't actually need much in the way of mirrors/artificial lighting, more likely tons of insulation/carefully managed thermal mass to keep temperatures even during the night.
So, we are about to see a lot of divide-by-zero errors in economic equations as computing prices falling to zero drives almost every other price towards zero.
You make a good point. A lot of this is helped by increasing the quality of life; ensuring people stay employed, just producing MORE. Which is why if I was in charge, I'd be pushing for more investment in the future. You still have the problem that unskilled labor isn't in demand as much in the USA, and there's a surplus. And there are people unable/unwilling to learn the advanced skills to increase their worth.
Let's face it. Our society does not have the necessary follow through to manage nuclear power. We don't place enough value on public safety to properly train nuclear reactor operators, nor can we be relied upon to safely store nuclear waste for more than a human lifetime.
You know, I just finished going over crash statistics for Model-T cars. Based on that evidence cars are far too unsafe for the American public to be driving. They have to be banned immediately.
With the several HUNDRED nuclear power stations out there, we have [b]2[/b] major accidents. TMI resulted in major redesigns in US reactors. Since then, we haven't really had a problem. France and Japan have also managed to run successful nuclear power programs. Heck, even Russia cleaned up their act(a bit).
Meanwhile, well, look up the death rate due to coal power. That costs thousands of lives a year, from pollution, mining accidents, etc...
Statistically speaking, there will be a death rate with wind/solar, just you wait.
Nuclear, compared to the cost competitive solutions, is clean and safe. A bit more expensive than dirty coal, less expensive per annual kwh produced than solar or wind. Can be planted just about anywhere. Produces power on demand, etc...
No one recorded the observations of standing outside in 50mph winds? Or of someone in free fall from a great enough height?
Go back a couple hundred years and people believed all sorts of weird things. Baths were bad. Bloodletting was good. The moon's made of cheese, earth's flat, earth's the center of everything, We can reach the moon/planets with a giant cannon, etc...
It was never really a widespread belief, if I remember right, the educated knew we'd be fine, more or less, and the truly uneducated didn't know what 50mph was. You had a selection of semi-educated people who would come to weird conclusions.
Heh, think of it as early scientific theories. They were made to be proven wrong(or not).
ARM may end up building higher CPU power chips as well, but they won't abandon the existing market.
I'd almost guarantee it as well. They've as much stated that they're going for the most megahertz per watt. As technology advances, the processing speed will increase.
They'll probably end with with a selection - X performance for 1/10th watt, Y for 1/2, Z for 1. Probably have 1/4, 3/4 in there as well. Along with even more extreme power saving measures that are present in normal chips, like underclocking when demand isn't high.
I think the idea was that if you're using parity RAM that you were running an OS/application designed to handle said memory errors. The lockups would be caused by programmers not bothering to write proper error trapping protocols for parity errors. Probably because even then many weren't using parity RAM.
With proper error trapping, I suppose you'd reload the affe52cted module(if program), or roll back changes and redo the calculations if it's in data.
Given all this, I think I'll check out ECC RAM next time I'm building a system.
Still-
4GB(2x2) DDR2 800 ECC fully buffered - $100
4GB(2x2) DDR2 800 ECC unbuffered - $52
4GB(2x2) DDR2 800 non-ecc - $45
(prices combed from newegg&crucial).
I think I'd pay the extra $7 for ECC, but it's iffy for the buffered.
However, Hawkins was a genius even before his ALS got bad, and on average the benefits from avoiding ALS in the first place exceed any theoretical gains. For that matter, it's likely that we'll lose Hawking early, compared to if he was healthy. As for ATP production, does having it be more efficient at the cost of MD make it worth it? Looking at animal life - these are traits that get selected out quickly and efficiently by nature. By nature bad mutations pop up far more frequently than good ones, but the weeding of natural selection promptly removes the bad ones(on average).
I'm not saying that we don't do a thorough workup, it's just that there are any number of hereditary diseases that don't actually have a benefit. Heck - for sickle cell it might be a benefit to simply make sure that no new babies have the double recessive trait. There might be some other recessive diseases that one copy would actually provide some benefits, such as 'Wiedemann-Beckwith syndrome' aka 'double muscle'. A double copy turns average joe into an involuntary Mr. Universe, a single copy makes it possible. Overall the double copy is negative because it produces so much muscle it over strains the body - the heart and other organs remain normal sized. But with today's sedentary society, a mild case might actually help.
Still, on average I'd say that we actually already DO know, at some point we can say 'For disorder X, there are no discernible benefits, even for the latent/recessive gene'. There's a whole host of genetic defects that can be classed this way.
How about we take a step back and simply encourage such people to perform genetic screening, perhaps IVF to avoid passing the genes to their kids?
We're intelligent animals, actually capable of guiding the genetics of our offspring - why wouldn't we want to make sure they have the best?
Then don't allow selection for 'designer' babies, allow selection for broken metabolic paths and such. There's not really an upside to MD, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, etc...
Sickle cell is a bit iffy - but by the time we get around to doing the selection for it, Malaria shouldn't be a problem, or we might have genetic engineering to the point that we can do a custom modification to provide immunity on our own.
As Red Flayer noted, medicine isn't on a 'getting cheaper' trend. Sure, some basic care is cheaper than ever, but we're still very much making more treatment options - this is good for our health, bad for our wallets.
By that token, I support any families that chose to eliminate inheritable diseases such as MS, MD, even diabetes. Even to the point of aborting fetuses with those traits. Yes, I know about various slippery slope arguements, but let's face it, under older conditions such babies would be chosen against anyways, dying early.