Then the angular momentum of the internet about the center of the Earth is (50 grams) / (24 hours) * R, where R is the mean radius of the internet from the axis of rotation of the Earth. Computing R is hard, since the parts of the internet in Europe (far northern latitudes) will contribute less than those near the equator. If we take R_earth cos 45 as an estimate for the radius (which is probably sensible, roughly splitting the difference between Europe and the US/Japan/Korea), we get that the angular momentum of the Earth is
still be cost-effective compared to business as usual.
If it were cost-effective, wouldn't businesses have already done it?
The problem is that power is artificially cheap; the price of the damage done by carbon emissions is not included in the price of burning coal. Seen this way, a carbon tax isn't an artificial meddling in the market; it's the removal of the subsidy that people burning carbon enjoy right now, in that they can cause environmental damage without bearing the cost (or, if you like, consume part of a limited resource without having to pay fair market value for it, where that limit is the sustainable level of emissions).
Remove that, and you won't have to impose efficiency from above; people will do it naturally, as a way of saving money.
Neutrinos have mass too; this was discovered by the fact that they oscillate from one flavor eigenstate to another.
This is sort of like the way Catholics have mass; they have a cracker that oscillates from bread to jesus, showing that the eigenstates of flavor aren't stationary states of the Hamiltonian...
Resources aren't all that finite. Right now, what's the problem with using power? Carbon emissions. But there are lots of ways to make power that don't involve carbon-based fuels; we just need to do them.
Suppose I stream a DRM'd movie from Netflix that's 4GB. I don't know how to measure it explicitly on my computer, but I know I can do the decode entirely in software, and that the TDP of my CPU is 35 watts. I doubt that the difference between playing the movie with and without encryption is that big of a fraction of that -- perhaps 5W?
How does that compare to the power used by the routers etc. that carried that data to me?
Hitler actually had the military to make good on his threats -- he wasn't all bluster. If Li'l Kim actually started a war he'd be smashed into powder by the South Koreans alone, and he knows it.
As someone who works in scientific high-performance computing:
1) N -- the most interesting thing from an engineering perspective is the number of MPI threads or whatever ("How many ways am I going to parallelize this thing"), and while you can sometimes get benefits from understanding that two threads running on different cores of the same CPU can communicate faster than two threads on different machines, it (at least in lattice gauge theory, what I do) is not that big of a deal. 2) Not usually, although there are some allocation-granting groups that have conversion factors ("We give you X million core-hours on this machine, here's a conversion table for our other machines.")
If you believe in software patents, then aren't Monsanto's patents just an extension of that? They're just sequences of code that, when compiled and run, does a particular thing...
But even if many languages do have such official bureaus, it is not right to think that these bureaus would have actual power to dictate what language people use in everyday communication (how silly would that be?). To the contrary, they are reactive rather than proactive: if a new word is documented (in press, literature, etc.), they investigate it and possibly add it to the lexicon.
This is a totally different thing (and IMO a natural and good thing) -- someone who just keeps tabs on the evolution of a language. English has no official body that does this, because nobody owns the English language, but there's the Oxford English Dictionary, etc...
I'm surprised people actually *listen* to them. Taking a language that's about as widely-spoken as English: is there some central authority who can add and remove words from Spanish? Would anyone care?
I use it as an everyday desktop OS. So did most of the people at the institution I used to work for. Granted, this is a university physics department, but all of the machines on professors' desks ran Linux (except for the die-hard Mac types), and they often used them not to do anything especially sciencey but just to do the ordinary things: read mail, watch cat videos, write mail, write documents, run spreadsheets...
I don't understand the technological issues with Linux as an "everyday desktop OS". It works just fine in that regard -- you have a file browser, a web browser, an office suite, a mail client, and so on. You have window-management features that are as advanced as you are willing to put up with (in KDE, at least), a search thingie, and so on. You can use Kubuntu/Mint/Unity/whatever without ever opening a terminal. But, if you *do* speak bash, you have the freedom to make use of it as another tool in your toolbox to get stuff done.
The idea of Bitcoin, I think, is to give up on the idea of asking the state nicely not to control something, and make something that the state, whether it wants to or not, can't control.
Classical music has a stupid wide dynamic range, more than any other genre I know of, and (in particular) soprano sections have a nasty talent for pegging meters that were supposed to be set with plenty of headroom.
Doesn't this perfectly sharp cutoff also require an infinite temporal extent (i.e. each sample in the output is a linear combination of an infinite number of samples in the input) to achieve?
Yes! Someday, instead of having real dog whistles, we'll just play back mp3's of dog whistles for our dogs, and those will only work if recorded in 24bit/96kHz!
I was riding DC's subway and came back up to the street level. It was heavily cloudy so I didn't know which way north was; I knew where I wanted to go, but not which way was which. A police officer was right there, so I asked him "Officer, which way's north? I just got off Metro and I'm disoriented."
He didn't know. A bloody *cop* didn't know which way north was in his own city. I then asked him "In which direction am I more likely to get shot, this way *points*, or that way *points*. He tells me, and then I know which way I'm going."
Not everyone -- actually, probably few people -- care about those things.
I don't bike, but I hike; the idea is close enough. When I go hiking I don't really care how far I go or how fast or what my heart rate was. I care about "What a pretty sunset!" and "That's a nifty cactus" and listening to the owls after dark. Exercise isn't always a MMORPG character sheet.
That was sort of what I was expecting (no rational purpose), although I wasn't aware the NFA was quite *that* silly. I can understand the ban on machine guns, but this whole "ban guns that look scary or have some combination of doodads on them" is ridiculous.
Still, though, why do we have these restrictions? Why is an 11-inch barrel legal in one instance and illegal in another? What possible public interest is served by making rifles legal, pistols legal, "short-barreled rifles" legal, but a Frankengun that's a rifle with a barrel less than 16 inches illegal?
American gun law seems sort of stupid... (as an American who has never really worried about it much because he doesn't own guns)
Actually, that's because the Android market is so fragmented. There are no iOS phones other than iPhones. There are very, very many Android devices, and the S3 has a fraction of the Android market.
Slashdot Mirror
Per the Daily Mail, that great bastion of scientific rigor, we find that the internet has a mass of about 50 grams, "the same as a strawberry":
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2057018/Internet-weighs-strawberry.html
Then the angular momentum of the internet about the center of the Earth is (50 grams) / (24 hours) * R, where R is the mean radius of the internet from the axis of rotation of the Earth. Computing R is hard, since the parts of the internet in Europe (far northern latitudes) will contribute less than those near the equator. If we take R_earth cos 45 as an estimate for the radius (which is probably sensible, roughly splitting the difference between Europe and the US/Japan/Korea), we get that the angular momentum of the Earth is
2.6 kilogram-meters per second.
(or vagina)
still be cost-effective compared to business as usual.
If it were cost-effective, wouldn't businesses have already done it?
The problem is that power is artificially cheap; the price of the damage done by carbon emissions is not included in the price of burning coal. Seen this way, a carbon tax isn't an artificial meddling in the market; it's the removal of the subsidy that people burning carbon enjoy right now, in that they can cause environmental damage without bearing the cost (or, if you like, consume part of a limited resource without having to pay fair market value for it, where that limit is the sustainable level of emissions).
Remove that, and you won't have to impose efficiency from above; people will do it naturally, as a way of saving money.
Neutrinos have mass too; this was discovered by the fact that they oscillate from one flavor eigenstate to another.
This is sort of like the way Catholics have mass; they have a cracker that oscillates from bread to jesus, showing that the eigenstates of flavor aren't stationary states of the Hamiltonian...
Funny, people seem to be buying the things just fine without artificial market distortions.
And hard drives don't take that much power...
Resources aren't all that finite. Right now, what's the problem with using power? Carbon emissions. But there are lots of ways to make power that don't involve carbon-based fuels; we just need to do them.
Is it CPU cycles that take the power?
Suppose I stream a DRM'd movie from Netflix that's 4GB. I don't know how to measure it explicitly on my computer, but I know I can do the decode entirely in software, and that the TDP of my CPU is 35 watts. I doubt that the difference between playing the movie with and without encryption is that big of a fraction of that -- perhaps 5W?
How does that compare to the power used by the routers etc. that carried that data to me?
Hitler actually had the military to make good on his threats -- he wasn't all bluster. If Li'l Kim actually started a war he'd be smashed into powder by the South Koreans alone, and he knows it.
As someone who works in scientific high-performance computing:
1) N -- the most interesting thing from an engineering perspective is the number of MPI threads or whatever ("How many ways am I going to parallelize this thing"), and while you can sometimes get benefits from understanding that two threads running on different cores of the same CPU can communicate faster than two threads on different machines, it (at least in lattice gauge theory, what I do) is not that big of a deal.
2) Not usually, although there are some allocation-granting groups that have conversion factors ("We give you X million core-hours on this machine, here's a conversion table for our other machines.")
If you believe in software patents, then aren't Monsanto's patents just an extension of that? They're just sequences of code that, when compiled and run, does a particular thing...
But even if many languages do have such official bureaus, it is not right to think that these bureaus would have actual power to dictate what language people use in everyday communication (how silly would that be?). To the contrary, they are reactive rather than proactive: if a new word is documented (in press, literature, etc.), they investigate it and possibly add it to the lexicon.
This is a totally different thing (and IMO a natural and good thing) -- someone who just keeps tabs on the evolution of a language. English has no official body that does this, because nobody owns the English language, but there's the Oxford English Dictionary, etc...
I'm surprised people actually *listen* to them. Taking a language that's about as widely-spoken as English: is there some central authority who can add and remove words from Spanish? Would anyone care?
I use it as an everyday desktop OS. So did most of the people at the institution I used to work for. Granted, this is a university physics department, but all of the machines on professors' desks ran Linux (except for the die-hard Mac types), and they often used them not to do anything especially sciencey but just to do the ordinary things: read mail, watch cat videos, write mail, write documents, run spreadsheets...
I don't understand the technological issues with Linux as an "everyday desktop OS". It works just fine in that regard -- you have a file browser, a web browser, an office suite, a mail client, and so on. You have window-management features that are as advanced as you are willing to put up with (in KDE, at least), a search thingie, and so on. You can use Kubuntu/Mint/Unity/whatever without ever opening a terminal. But, if you *do* speak bash, you have the freedom to make use of it as another tool in your toolbox to get stuff done.
Did we?
My Linux machine (KDE) seems very different than my Windows box.
We don't, and we did.
The idea of Bitcoin, I think, is to give up on the idea of asking the state nicely not to control something, and make something that the state, whether it wants to or not, can't control.
OT, as a choral performer:
Classical music has a stupid wide dynamic range, more than any other genre I know of, and (in particular) soprano sections have a nasty talent for pegging meters that were supposed to be set with plenty of headroom.
Doesn't this perfectly sharp cutoff also require an infinite temporal extent (i.e. each sample in the output is a linear combination of an infinite number of samples in the input) to achieve?
Yes! Someday, instead of having real dog whistles, we'll just play back mp3's of dog whistles for our dogs, and those will only work if recorded in 24bit/96kHz!
Also Monster Cable.
OT: Can anyone read maps any more?
I was riding DC's subway and came back up to the street level. It was heavily cloudy so I didn't know which way north was; I knew where I wanted to go, but not which way was which. A police officer was right there, so I asked him "Officer, which way's north? I just got off Metro and I'm disoriented."
He didn't know. A bloody *cop* didn't know which way north was in his own city. I then asked him "In which direction am I more likely to get shot, this way *points*, or that way *points*. He tells me, and then I know which way I'm going."
Not everyone -- actually, probably few people -- care about those things.
I don't bike, but I hike; the idea is close enough. When I go hiking I don't really care how far I go or how fast or what my heart rate was. I care about "What a pretty sunset!" and "That's a nifty cactus" and listening to the owls after dark. Exercise isn't always a MMORPG character sheet.
That was sort of what I was expecting (no rational purpose), although I wasn't aware the NFA was quite *that* silly. I can understand the ban on machine guns, but this whole "ban guns that look scary or have some combination of doodads on them" is ridiculous.
Still, though, why do we have these restrictions? Why is an 11-inch barrel legal in one instance and illegal in another? What possible public interest is served by making rifles legal, pistols legal, "short-barreled rifles" legal, but a Frankengun that's a rifle with a barrel less than 16 inches illegal?
American gun law seems sort of stupid... (as an American who has never really worried about it much because he doesn't own guns)
As a stupid question, why is it that pistols are legal and rifles are legal but putting a pistol barrel on a rifle isn't?
Actually, that's because the Android market is so fragmented. There are no iOS phones other than iPhones. There are very, very many Android devices, and the S3 has a fraction of the Android market.