That, and it would be horrendously inefficient. He did manage to light up some bulbs from many miles away - but it took a power station to run the transmitter.
In modern terms, he would be using the earth and atmosphere as a transmission line.
Running it today would be a bad idea, too. The amount of energy he was using, it could easily interfere with and even damage the input stages of radio equipment.
Edison didn't invent a lot of his inventions. He hired others who had the ideas. He recognised the value of a brand, and made himself the brand - Edison, the genius inventor, pioneer of electricity, lighting, sound recording, moving photography, and many other fields. Taking credit for things wasn't just to fuel his ego, but for solid business reasons: Any product percieved to be the work of the great Edison would automatically be taken seriously.
Not a lot. It doesn't settle. It doesn't bioaccumulate. Even with the extra neutrons, it's still a light gas - it just floats up and disperses to the point of no concern. Though at $30,000 per gram, you'd still have to confront the irate man from the insurance company.
Not a lot. It's one of the advantages of fusion power. The worst-case scenario involves a lot less radiation than fission. The plasma is very hot, but its thermal mass isn't great - the reaction instantly self-limits. The reactor itsself will have some level of radioactivity from exposure to the extreme neutron flux, but that's all. You just replace the reactor, dump any radioactive material down a mine somewhere, and explain to the insurance company that you broke it. No nuclear explosion. No Chernobyl. No cloud of radioactive death spreading across the land. No land rendered uninhabitable for generations. Not even a Fukushima situation, where you have to actively cool material until it decays. There's a chance of conventional fire or explosion in any facility handling hydrogen (and in some designs, lithium) - but nothing worse than would be expected of a chemical accident. At worst it would trash the reactor completly, but even then the cost of repair is just that of a new reactor body and magnetic confinement system - you can keep all the other supporting equipment, turbines, pumps and such in place.
The x86 instruction set has BCD instructions too. I don't think they see much use now - processors are fast enough that you can do decimal math without them. But they were needed at the time.
But generally only single-precision. GPUs are made for speed, not accuracy - gamers want their frame rate high, and don't care if a few pixels are shifted one space to the right.
There's still some space for science up there. The properly analyzed samples come from only a small number of sites, and all from the surface - there's almost nothing known about what lies beneath. A lot could be learned by proper surveying. Drill for deeper samples, lay down seismic instruments. All of no practical benefit - the moon is unlikely to have any minerals rich enough in expensive elements to justify mining - but there is still science to be done. It'd also make a good observatory - it's not practical to haul the giant mirror of an optical telescope up there, but you could set up giant radio telescope arrays free from the interference and atmospheric absorption that limits observable frequency ranges on earth. A lunar science base would be very expensive, but it would still be of scientific use. It just wouldn't bring any immediate practical technologies - surveys of worthless dust and improved imaging of distant objects may be good for astronomers to refine their theories, but that's all.
Though with the way robotics is advancing, in another decade or two we wouldn't need humans to handle a mobile drill rig.
The problem with people who honestly believe that they are fighting for a just and vital cause is that they will go to any length of deception and legal trickery to achieve it. The ends justify the means. If the only way to save babies is to subvert the legal process, then it would be unethical not to do so.
But where are they in the organised pro-life movement? Absent. They have no role there. All of the prominent pressure groups - the FRC, FotF, Operation Rescue, the AFA, most if not all of the state-level 'family' groups, the Roman Catholic church - all of those oppose contraception as well. They make sure it stays this way by continuing to exclude anyone who does promote contraception. It's a political movement run by the hard-liners.
It's rare among Catholics, but it's also the official position of the Catholic church. The discrepancy is quite simple: Most of the lay church members ignore almost everything their church teaches. It's a serious problem that the priests are still struggling with every day. Most of the church ignores their teaching, but if they try to get stricter about compliance they would lose far more members than they are willing to accept.
The single most effective technique available to reduce the number of elective abortions would be to promote contraception, in both availability and education. It works - and works almost perfectly. It's the main reason that developed countries have such a low birth rate.
Yet if you look at very any organisation in the pro-life movement you'll find that, almost without exception, they are opposed to contraceptive education, and opposed to providing insurance coverage, and opposed to subsided provision. Many of them (Mostly the ones with Roman Catholic connections) go further than that, and openly consider the use of contraception to be inherently immoral and something that should be legally forbidden.
This contradiction indicates that for all of their rhetoric about the sanctity of life, they are far less concerned with opposing abortion than they are with reversing the sexual revolution and bringing back the natural consequence of pregnancy that once forced everyone to live by the code of their holy text.
Except in the case of tasty animals, in which case out desire for cheap meat and susceptibility to well-funded lobbying campaigns overrules the requirement for respect and makes it ok to cram them into cages scarcely bigger than they are for their entire life. So long as the end consumer doesn't have to think about it.
If the government wants to track a disabled person, they wouldn't need to bug the wheelchair. They'll just track the cellphone that everyone over the age of eight carries.
The heat generated by a stable fusion reaction is so great, there isn't a material around that wouldn't melt. That's why it has to be contained magnetically to keep from coming into contact with the walls of the container.
In the early days of fusion research, when it was thought to be just around the corner, it was a popular suggestion to use fusion reactors as a means of waste disposal. Just vent the plasma onto your waste, and it'll be broken down to constituent elements.
The freedom-vs-security tradeoff debate has been going on since before there was a written language. It's no surprise that so many figures of history would have had cause to comment upon it.
The US went through a lot of anti-communist propaganda during the cold war. Some of it stuck, to the point that a sizable part of the population believe that any government management is intrinsically evil.
Ebola isn't really that good. Too short a window between the contagious stage and showing symptoms. Too hard to transmit - it needs fluid contact. A few basic quarantine measures are enough to bring it under control.
If you're looking for something to really kill en mass, you need a virus that has a long contagious period, spreads easily, and resists treatment. Something like HIV, but airborne. HIV is a real bugger of a virus, mutates like crazy to the point it'll evolve drug resistance within a single patient. If it ever finds a way to be transmitted through a quicker vector than sex, then the population might collapse.
Eventually. You always get a period of population boom when sanitation, healthcare and reliable food are around, but the culture hasn't changed to reflect this and people are still popping out all the babies they can like their parents did. Eventually it settles.
I'd think it far too risky to store more than a little spending money on something so insecure as a cellphone. With bitcoin, it falls to the user to make sure their coins are secure against accident or theft - just like with cash. Lots of people lost their coins to dead hard drives because they didn't make proper backups.
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Because those who weren't interested in sexual relationships didn't go on to breed.
That, and it would be horrendously inefficient. He did manage to light up some bulbs from many miles away - but it took a power station to run the transmitter.
In modern terms, he would be using the earth and atmosphere as a transmission line.
Running it today would be a bad idea, too. The amount of energy he was using, it could easily interfere with and even damage the input stages of radio equipment.
Edison didn't invent a lot of his inventions. He hired others who had the ideas. He recognised the value of a brand, and made himself the brand - Edison, the genius inventor, pioneer of electricity, lighting, sound recording, moving photography, and many other fields. Taking credit for things wasn't just to fuel his ego, but for solid business reasons: Any product percieved to be the work of the great Edison would automatically be taken seriously.
Not a lot. It doesn't settle. It doesn't bioaccumulate. Even with the extra neutrons, it's still a light gas - it just floats up and disperses to the point of no concern. Though at $30,000 per gram, you'd still have to confront the irate man from the insurance company.
Not a lot. It's one of the advantages of fusion power. The worst-case scenario involves a lot less radiation than fission. The plasma is very hot, but its thermal mass isn't great - the reaction instantly self-limits. The reactor itsself will have some level of radioactivity from exposure to the extreme neutron flux, but that's all. You just replace the reactor, dump any radioactive material down a mine somewhere, and explain to the insurance company that you broke it. No nuclear explosion. No Chernobyl. No cloud of radioactive death spreading across the land. No land rendered uninhabitable for generations. Not even a Fukushima situation, where you have to actively cool material until it decays. There's a chance of conventional fire or explosion in any facility handling hydrogen (and in some designs, lithium) - but nothing worse than would be expected of a chemical accident. At worst it would trash the reactor completly, but even then the cost of repair is just that of a new reactor body and magnetic confinement system - you can keep all the other supporting equipment, turbines, pumps and such in place.
The x86 instruction set has BCD instructions too. I don't think they see much use now - processors are fast enough that you can do decimal math without them. But they were needed at the time.
But generally only single-precision. GPUs are made for speed, not accuracy - gamers want their frame rate high, and don't care if a few pixels are shifted one space to the right.
It melts the surface off a section of your reactor. No massive explosion results, but it'll be very expensive to repair.
There's still some space for science up there. The properly analyzed samples come from only a small number of sites, and all from the surface - there's almost nothing known about what lies beneath. A lot could be learned by proper surveying. Drill for deeper samples, lay down seismic instruments. All of no practical benefit - the moon is unlikely to have any minerals rich enough in expensive elements to justify mining - but there is still science to be done. It'd also make a good observatory - it's not practical to haul the giant mirror of an optical telescope up there, but you could set up giant radio telescope arrays free from the interference and atmospheric absorption that limits observable frequency ranges on earth. A lunar science base would be very expensive, but it would still be of scientific use. It just wouldn't bring any immediate practical technologies - surveys of worthless dust and improved imaging of distant objects may be good for astronomers to refine their theories, but that's all.
Though with the way robotics is advancing, in another decade or two we wouldn't need humans to handle a mobile drill rig.
I call it 'Dan Browning.'
The problem with people who honestly believe that they are fighting for a just and vital cause is that they will go to any length of deception and legal trickery to achieve it. The ends justify the means. If the only way to save babies is to subvert the legal process, then it would be unethical not to do so.
True.
But where are they in the organised pro-life movement? Absent. They have no role there. All of the prominent pressure groups - the FRC, FotF, Operation Rescue, the AFA, most if not all of the state-level 'family' groups, the Roman Catholic church - all of those oppose contraception as well. They make sure it stays this way by continuing to exclude anyone who does promote contraception. It's a political movement run by the hard-liners.
It's rare among Catholics, but it's also the official position of the Catholic church. The discrepancy is quite simple: Most of the lay church members ignore almost everything their church teaches. It's a serious problem that the priests are still struggling with every day. Most of the church ignores their teaching, but if they try to get stricter about compliance they would lose far more members than they are willing to accept.
The single most effective technique available to reduce the number of elective abortions would be to promote contraception, in both availability and education. It works - and works almost perfectly. It's the main reason that developed countries have such a low birth rate.
Yet if you look at very any organisation in the pro-life movement you'll find that, almost without exception, they are opposed to contraceptive education, and opposed to providing insurance coverage, and opposed to subsided provision. Many of them (Mostly the ones with Roman Catholic connections) go further than that, and openly consider the use of contraception to be inherently immoral and something that should be legally forbidden.
This contradiction indicates that for all of their rhetoric about the sanctity of life, they are far less concerned with opposing abortion than they are with reversing the sexual revolution and bringing back the natural consequence of pregnancy that once forced everyone to live by the code of their holy text.
Except in the case of tasty animals, in which case out desire for cheap meat and susceptibility to well-funded lobbying campaigns overrules the requirement for respect and makes it ok to cram them into cages scarcely bigger than they are for their entire life. So long as the end consumer doesn't have to think about it.
If the government wants to track a disabled person, they wouldn't need to bug the wheelchair. They'll just track the cellphone that everyone over the age of eight carries.
The heat generated by a stable fusion reaction is so great, there isn't a material around that wouldn't melt. That's why it has to be contained magnetically to keep from coming into contact with the walls of the container.
In the early days of fusion research, when it was thought to be just around the corner, it was a popular suggestion to use fusion reactors as a means of waste disposal. Just vent the plasma onto your waste, and it'll be broken down to constituent elements.
The freedom-vs-security tradeoff debate has been going on since before there was a written language. It's no surprise that so many figures of history would have had cause to comment upon it.
I thought the idea was upper-case for 10e+ and lower-case for 10e-.
The US went through a lot of anti-communist propaganda during the cold war. Some of it stuck, to the point that a sizable part of the population believe that any government management is intrinsically evil.
The energy industry uses KWh - one kilowatt over one hour. That's 1000*60*60 J. The only mistake made was inserting an errant / character.
KWh is just more convenient than J for billing purposes. It makes the financial side a lot easier to calculate.
Or, put in more soundbitey form: The free market is a game everyone must play, but no-one may be allowed to win.
Ebola isn't really that good. Too short a window between the contagious stage and showing symptoms. Too hard to transmit - it needs fluid contact. A few basic quarantine measures are enough to bring it under control.
If you're looking for something to really kill en mass, you need a virus that has a long contagious period, spreads easily, and resists treatment. Something like HIV, but airborne. HIV is a real bugger of a virus, mutates like crazy to the point it'll evolve drug resistance within a single patient. If it ever finds a way to be transmitted through a quicker vector than sex, then the population might collapse.
Eventually. You always get a period of population boom when sanitation, healthcare and reliable food are around, but the culture hasn't changed to reflect this and people are still popping out all the babies they can like their parents did. Eventually it settles.
I'd think it far too risky to store more than a little spending money on something so insecure as a cellphone. With bitcoin, it falls to the user to make sure their coins are secure against accident or theft - just like with cash. Lots of people lost their coins to dead hard drives because they didn't make proper backups.