Maybe you can get the FBI director to break the law again violating the Hatch Act, and have FBI agent operatives violating their oaths leaking information to influence the election again. Trump desperately needed that illegal assist.
More people voted for Clinton. Just like Gore. Republicans need corrupt government officials to win. And they say government is the problem. Ingrates!
Why would shipping the components of an iPhone be a more crippling cost than shipping the completed iPhone itself, which is what they do now? iPhones, and their components, are very small, light high value items. Shipping costs are trivial.
No we do not have to update the number of stars in the Universe, and no they did not "discover the Universe has 20 times as many galaxies as we thought".
This discovery is actually detecting young, numerous galaxies that we believed were there but could not see. In fact, it is simply confirming the accuracy of the existing Lambda-CDM model.
When galaxies first formed there were very numerous small galaxies that merged into fewer more massive galaxies that we can easily see (since they are brighter and closer, being more recent in time). We knew those ancient small galaxies were out there, waiting to be detected. A nice discovery, but no new revelation is involved at all.
Although the catch phrase "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is often repeated, it is fundamentally nonsense - unless elaborately qualified.
If you thoroughly search a room looking for a suspect, and do not find him or her, you know they are not in the space searched. Absence of evidence can obviously be extremely strong evidence of absence if you have effective tools to look for the evidence.
We now have the equivalent situation with respect to "Sasquatch".
With the advent of environmental DNA (eDNA) monitoring, a technology that has been available now for nearly 20 years, it is possible to survey the animals present in an environment, without ever seeing them, by detecting the traces of DNA they inevitably leave behind. When you consider forensic DNA analysis, analyzing the traces of DNA left on most any object you interact with, the technique is almost 30 years old. No one has ever detected the DNA of an unknown non-human primate in North America.
All of the Sasquatch "evidence" - footprints, disturbed areas, supposed feeding or gathering spots, claimed coprolites, etc. would be loaded with Sasquatch DNA if it was real. Nope, no Sasquatch DNA anywhere. At this point we can close the book on the theory that there is, or has ever been, a Sasquatch.
At what point do you suppose that that crazy, crazy idea of offering better value for the dollar, and a better pricing model, to actually compete for customers will dawn on these industry geniuses? Telling customers who are dropping your service "Your stupid. You aren't saving money but don't know it" when the customer can plainly see that they are saving money is not likely to ever help your business.
What we see though is the universal behavior of business accustomed to monopoly power, and to extracting profit though rents (no not the apartment kind). They abuse power to soak their customers, who then seek any relief available.* And the reaction to that is... never to cut back on the abuse, it is always something else - getting more monopoly supporting laws passed, whining at the customer, plain old denial of reality, etc.
*Unfortunately changing the laws is not a relief available to the individual, and it is extremely difficult to overcome industry influence on lawmakers for collective relief.
The summary should have included the next paragraph of the article to make any sense:
And yet, like Newcomen, their innovations are so much more useful to the people who actually have copious amounts of raw material to work from. And so Magic Pony is acquired by Twitter, SwiftKey is acquired by Microsoft – and Lawrence himself gets hired by Amazon from the University of Sheffield, where he was based until three weeks ago.
Or else the poster should have just written a terse summary and not just cut and paste paragraphs. Yeah I know, this is slash-dot...
About is profits, and about the latest music distribution technology - this goes back to the days when the music industry made money by selling sheet music, and faced the threat of wax cylinders, player piano rolls, then radio play, etc.
Back in the 1990s, when profits were at a (then) all time high, due to people replacing their LP and cassette collections with CDs, the industry was complaining about piracy and got a tax on blank CDs imposed, a straight up subsidy for a highly profitable industry based on zero evidence.
There has never been a new music distribution technology that was not claimed to be a threat to the industry's profits. Another eternal verity - every profit peak is taken to be the "natural" profit level that only despicable piracy could be responsible for eroding.
Actually it is worse than that. The growth rate ramping up to the peak is claimed to be the "natural" state of the industry and year-after-year perpetual profit growth is "normal" and any reduction is due to those nefarious pirates. (And now direct music sales! The horror! Musicians selling music direct to fans! This must not be allowed to grow!)
But an industry whose revenue is due entirely to controlling access to the creativity of other people is like that.
Googling "Sault's Law" turns up no obvious references to this "law". This actually sounds a lot like Creationist propaganda, which frequently claims that evolution cannot create greater complexity, when in fact evolution - including artificial genetic algorithms - have no problem doing this.
In that case, doesn't the CMB radiation represent a frame of reference, kind of like the (discredited) Ether idea?
Yes, it is called the Hubble flow comoving frame. Since we are moving relative to the comoving frame this creates a dipole pattern on the Cosmic Microwave Background due to Doppler shift. For the Solar System (moving within the Milky Way galaxy) it is 369 km/sec in the direction of the boundary between the constellations Leo and Crater.
I love the whole "it's only 20 years if you travel at 20% of the speed of light!" part. It makes it sound so close. But you're not going to snap your fingers and jump right to 20% of the speed of light from one second to the next. That's 6,114,064.6 standard Earth g-forces! You'd be much better off having a slow, steady acceleration all the way there and a slow, steady acceleration all the way back. Unless I did the math wrong, you'd need to maintain about 0.38 m/s^2 (yeah, I rounded - I'm not the one sending the craft) the entire trip....
The interstellar space probe concept mission they are referencing is this one by Philip Lubin. The scheme has the 70 gigawatt launching lasers accelerating a tiny wafer thin probe to 20% c in 10 minutes, which is about 10,000 gees. A tiny wafer thin structure can handle that. And no, there is no slowing down. These things fly through the target system at 0.20 c, and keep on going.
Those relativistic postage stamp sized probes are a dream at present. Long before we could develop the technology for this, or get funding, we will study this planet with the advanced space-based instruments with capabilities far beyond anything now existing. No probe will be sent until we reach the limit of what we can do within our own solar system - nothing is faster than analyzing the light that already gets here, and even the most extravagant telescopic system will be cheaper than the probe project and all its supporting infrastructure.
That leads us to consider the HABEX Mission a pretty cool project under development using the huge and really cool looking Starshade vehicle to provide a coronagraph for a telescope in a separate vehicle thousands of kilometers away. Having a nearby target like this gives leverage with Congress to appropriate the funds.
I for one would like an iPhone that's totally wa ter proof
headphone jack: bluetooth
lightning port : inductive charging
would be completely water proof with no external buttons -- how is that a bad thing exactly?
Because a lot of people dont want to keep getting adapters to make things work. Personally I prefer having the option to use BT or wired headphones.
Yes, keeping it waterproof would be nice. But I would prefer to have the 3.5 headphone jack.
Quite so. I have yet to drop any cell phone in the water, or to want to make a phone call while swimming. But I use the 3.5 mm constantly, every day.
Nobody is demanding Apple drop the headphone jack, and almost nobody is demanding a thinner phone (look at the cases people use that make it fatter).
I predict that with iPhone sales down, this will NOT goose a new surge in buying, and that the jack will back e'er long.
Quoting IEA EEMR 2014 "In 2011, energy savings from continued improvement in the energy efficiency of 11 IEA member countries equalled 1 337 million tonnes of oil-equivalent (Mtoe). This level exceeded the total final consumption (TFC) from any single fuel source in these countries, and was larger than the total 2011 TFC for the European Union from all energy sources combined. Energy efficiency savings in 11 IEA member countries were effectively displacing a continentâ(TM)s energy demand"
On clean energy it isn't production stupid it is storage an issue completely ignored by the author.
Regarding energy efficiency, you are +5 here. This is absolutely bang-on.
But you are off-base about storage. Storage has a role, but it is a minor one. The major solution for managing clean energy production is transport. On a continent-wide scale problems with regional variation largely disappear. Using a proven technology that has been in use for more than 80 years - high voltage DC transmission lines - electricity can be shipped from San Diego to Portland, Maine with only an 8% loss (800 KV line).
2. Clean Energy: Attempts to fight climate change by reducing the demand for energy haven't worked. Fortunately, scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs have been working hard on the supply side to make clean energy convenient and cost-effective.
The haven't worked enough perhaps, but they have absolutely been working. Energy intensity, the amount of energy required to produce a unit of GDP has been falling everywhere, and the best economies far out perform the lagging ones (like the United States) so even just implementing proven existing techniques would have great impact. And energy efficiency technologies are making rapid progress - automated control, LEDs, etc. The bang-for-the-buck in energy efficiency is almost always larger than in energy production (i.e. the cheapest energy is the energy that you didn't use). Going forward, emphasis on energy efficiency will be fully as important as changing modes of energy production.
1.) When the weather is hotter than normal, it's evidence of Global Warming (or climate change), but...
2.) When the weather is colder than normal, the AGW apologists immediately remind us that Weather is not Climate.
If indeed the Earth is getting warmer, the press sure aren't doing the AGW advocates any favors with stories like the above.
These stories about extreme weather events only reinforce the perception that it's all a scam for political control. It's not helping.
I'll explain under the assumption that this is an honest request for elucidation (but that this is an AC post is not promising).
The article is not stating that it is "hotter than normal". It is stating that is hotter than ever recorded, indeed hotter than any time in the last 100,000 years. July is typically the hottest month so one expect historic records to be broken in July, and the last time the record was broken was - last July. If we go by seasonal records (hottest January, hottest February, hottest March, etc.) the last time was such a record was broken was - last month. And the last time before that was - the month before, and so on and so on.
When was the last time that it was colder globally than ever before recorded? Based on a relatively recent 1961-1990 average the last time we had a cooler than average month was 31 years ago.
Well at least you aren't denying the steady trend of global temperatures marching higher and higher, year after year. Remember this is the warmest month ever recorded, which makes it the warmest month since the last Ice Age (we passed the historic peak since the last Ice Age a decade or more ago). And that makes it the warmest month in the last 100,000 years.
A bit like saying that a steadily sinking boat, as it bobs up and down, will be higher and lower, since natural wave variation has not stopped, it is simply shifting the trend downwards. You reach a point where the stop being complacent because you drown.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you can get the FBI director to break the law again violating the Hatch Act, and have FBI agent operatives violating their oaths leaking information to influence the election again. Trump desperately needed that illegal assist.
More people voted for Clinton. Just like Gore. Republicans need corrupt government officials to win. And they say government is the problem. Ingrates!
Why would shipping the components of an iPhone be a more crippling cost than shipping the completed iPhone itself, which is what they do now? iPhones, and their components, are very small, light high value items. Shipping costs are trivial.
I work in a paperless office right now. A couple of hundred people. Two printers, rarely used.
So, no. It is not a dream.
And, yes, the technology is here now.
I suspect that this is the rule, rather than the exception, for start-ups now, with a predominantly Millenial workforce.
Carlos Castaneda's (fictional) sage in Journey to Ixtlan.
No we do not have to update the number of stars in the Universe, and no they did not "discover the Universe has 20 times as many galaxies as we thought".
This discovery is actually detecting young, numerous galaxies that we believed were there but could not see. In fact, it is simply confirming the accuracy of the existing Lambda-CDM model.
When galaxies first formed there were very numerous small galaxies that merged into fewer more massive galaxies that we can easily see (since they are brighter and closer, being more recent in time). We knew those ancient small galaxies were out there, waiting to be detected. A nice discovery, but no new revelation is involved at all.
Although the catch phrase "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is often repeated, it is fundamentally nonsense - unless elaborately qualified.
If you thoroughly search a room looking for a suspect, and do not find him or her, you know they are not in the space searched. Absence of evidence can obviously be extremely strong evidence of absence if you have effective tools to look for the evidence.
We now have the equivalent situation with respect to "Sasquatch".
With the advent of environmental DNA (eDNA) monitoring, a technology that has been available now for nearly 20 years, it is possible to survey the animals present in an environment, without ever seeing them, by detecting the traces of DNA they inevitably leave behind. When you consider forensic DNA analysis, analyzing the traces of DNA left on most any object you interact with, the technique is almost 30 years old. No one has ever detected the DNA of an unknown non-human primate in North America.
All of the Sasquatch "evidence" - footprints, disturbed areas, supposed feeding or gathering spots, claimed coprolites, etc. would be loaded with Sasquatch DNA if it was real. Nope, no Sasquatch DNA anywhere. At this point we can close the book on the theory that there is, or has ever been, a Sasquatch.
At what point do you suppose that that crazy, crazy idea of offering better value for the dollar, and a better pricing model, to actually compete for customers will dawn on these industry geniuses? Telling customers who are dropping your service "Your stupid. You aren't saving money but don't know it" when the customer can plainly see that they are saving money is not likely to ever help your business.
What we see though is the universal behavior of business accustomed to monopoly power, and to extracting profit though rents (no not the apartment kind). They abuse power to soak their customers, who then seek any relief available.* And the reaction to that is... never to cut back on the abuse, it is always something else - getting more monopoly supporting laws passed, whining at the customer, plain old denial of reality, etc.
*Unfortunately changing the laws is not a relief available to the individual, and it is extremely difficult to overcome industry influence on lawmakers for collective relief.
The summary should have included the next paragraph of the article to make any sense:
And yet, like Newcomen, their innovations are so much more useful to the people who actually have copious amounts of raw material to work from. And so Magic Pony is acquired by Twitter, SwiftKey is acquired by Microsoft – and Lawrence himself gets hired by Amazon from the University of Sheffield, where he was based until three weeks ago.
Or else the poster should have just written a terse summary and not just cut and paste paragraphs. Yeah I know, this is slash-dot...
About is profits, and about the latest music distribution technology - this goes back to the days when the music industry made money by selling sheet music, and faced the threat of wax cylinders, player piano rolls, then radio play, etc.
Back in the 1990s, when profits were at a (then) all time high, due to people replacing their LP and cassette collections with CDs, the industry was complaining about piracy and got a tax on blank CDs imposed, a straight up subsidy for a highly profitable industry based on zero evidence.
There has never been a new music distribution technology that was not claimed to be a threat to the industry's profits. Another eternal verity - every profit peak is taken to be the "natural" profit level that only despicable piracy could be responsible for eroding.
Actually it is worse than that. The growth rate ramping up to the peak is claimed to be the "natural" state of the industry and year-after-year perpetual profit growth is "normal" and any reduction is due to those nefarious pirates. (And now direct music sales! The horror! Musicians selling music direct to fans! This must not be allowed to grow!)
But an industry whose revenue is due entirely to controlling access to the creativity of other people is like that.
Googling "Sault's Law" turns up no obvious references to this "law". This actually sounds a lot like Creationist propaganda, which frequently claims that evolution cannot create greater complexity, when in fact evolution - including artificial genetic algorithms - have no problem doing this.
No, there is a 50% of the cash in your checking and savings account is fictitious! All of your debt is all too real!
There is a 50% chance that the money that appears in your BOA account balance does not really exist...
In that case, doesn't the CMB radiation represent a frame of reference, kind of like the (discredited) Ether idea?
Yes, it is called the Hubble flow comoving frame. Since we are moving relative to the comoving frame this creates a dipole pattern on the Cosmic Microwave Background due to Doppler shift. For the Solar System (moving within the Milky Way galaxy) it is 369 km/sec in the direction of the boundary between the constellations Leo and Crater.
Ha! I am still running my 7 year old core i7 920 and have no reason to upgrade. It was fast then, and is fast now (of course I run Linux).
I love the whole "it's only 20 years if you travel at 20% of the speed of light!" part. It makes it sound so close. But you're not going to snap your fingers and jump right to 20% of the speed of light from one second to the next. That's 6,114,064.6 standard Earth g-forces! You'd be much better off having a slow, steady acceleration all the way there and a slow, steady acceleration all the way back. Unless I did the math wrong, you'd need to maintain about 0.38 m/s^2 (yeah, I rounded - I'm not the one sending the craft) the entire trip. ...
The interstellar space probe concept mission they are referencing is this one by Philip Lubin. The scheme has the 70 gigawatt launching lasers accelerating a tiny wafer thin probe to 20% c in 10 minutes, which is about 10,000 gees. A tiny wafer thin structure can handle that. And no, there is no slowing down. These things fly through the target system at 0.20 c, and keep on going.
Those relativistic postage stamp sized probes are a dream at present. Long before we could develop the technology for this, or get funding, we will study this planet with the advanced space-based instruments with capabilities far beyond anything now existing. No probe will be sent until we reach the limit of what we can do within our own solar system - nothing is faster than analyzing the light that already gets here, and even the most extravagant telescopic system will be cheaper than the probe project and all its supporting infrastructure.
That leads us to consider the HABEX Mission a pretty cool project under development using the huge and really cool looking Starshade vehicle to provide a coronagraph for a telescope in a separate vehicle thousands of kilometers away. Having a nearby target like this gives leverage with Congress to appropriate the funds.
I for one would like an iPhone that's totally wa ter proof headphone jack: bluetooth lightning port : inductive charging
would be completely water proof with no external buttons -- how is that a bad thing exactly?
Because a lot of people dont want to keep getting adapters to make things work. Personally I prefer having the option to use BT or wired headphones. Yes, keeping it waterproof would be nice. But I would prefer to have the 3.5 headphone jack.
Quite so. I have yet to drop any cell phone in the water, or to want to make a phone call while swimming. But I use the 3.5 mm constantly, every day.
Nobody is demanding Apple drop the headphone jack, and almost nobody is demanding a thinner phone (look at the cases people use that make it fatter).
I predict that with iPhone sales down, this will NOT goose a new surge in buying, and that the jack will back e'er long.
Teledildonics was covered in another Slashdot article today. Go forth and "amuse" yourself.
Quoting IEA EEMR 2014 "In 2011, energy savings from continued improvement in the energy efficiency of 11 IEA member countries equalled 1 337 million tonnes of oil-equivalent (Mtoe). This level exceeded the total final consumption (TFC) from any single fuel source in these countries, and was larger than the total 2011 TFC for the European Union from all energy sources combined. Energy efficiency savings in 11 IEA member countries were effectively displacing a continentâ(TM)s energy demand"
On clean energy it isn't production stupid it is storage an issue completely ignored by the author.
Regarding energy efficiency, you are +5 here. This is absolutely bang-on.
But you are off-base about storage. Storage has a role, but it is a minor one. The major solution for managing clean energy production is transport. On a continent-wide scale problems with regional variation largely disappear. Using a proven technology that has been in use for more than 80 years - high voltage DC transmission lines - electricity can be shipped from San Diego to Portland, Maine with only an 8% loss (800 KV line).
2. Clean Energy: Attempts to fight climate change by reducing the demand for energy haven't worked. Fortunately, scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs have been working hard on the supply side to make clean energy convenient and cost-effective.
The haven't worked enough perhaps, but they have absolutely been working. Energy intensity, the amount of energy required to produce a unit of GDP has been falling everywhere, and the best economies far out perform the lagging ones (like the United States) so even just implementing proven existing techniques would have great impact. And energy efficiency technologies are making rapid progress - automated control, LEDs, etc. The bang-for-the-buck in energy efficiency is almost always larger than in energy production (i.e. the cheapest energy is the energy that you didn't use). Going forward, emphasis on energy efficiency will be fully as important as changing modes of energy production.
Ah, the five stages of climate denial. You are on number 4.
Please explain the following:
1.) When the weather is hotter than normal, it's evidence of Global Warming (or climate change), but... 2.) When the weather is colder than normal, the AGW apologists immediately remind us that Weather is not Climate.
If indeed the Earth is getting warmer, the press sure aren't doing the AGW advocates any favors with stories like the above.
These stories about extreme weather events only reinforce the perception that it's all a scam for political control. It's not helping.
I'll explain under the assumption that this is an honest request for elucidation (but that this is an AC post is not promising).
The article is not stating that it is "hotter than normal". It is stating that is hotter than ever recorded, indeed hotter than any time in the last 100,000 years. July is typically the hottest month so one expect historic records to be broken in July, and the last time the record was broken was - last July. If we go by seasonal records (hottest January, hottest February, hottest March, etc.) the last time was such a record was broken was - last month. And the last time before that was - the month before, and so on and so on.
When was the last time that it was colder globally than ever before recorded? Based on a relatively recent 1961-1990 average the last time we had a cooler than average month was 31 years ago.
It's simply shifted the trend upwards.
Well at least you aren't denying the steady trend of global temperatures marching higher and higher, year after year. Remember this is the warmest month ever recorded, which makes it the warmest month since the last Ice Age (we passed the historic peak since the last Ice Age a decade or more ago). And that makes it the warmest month in the last 100,000 years.
A bit like saying that a steadily sinking boat, as it bobs up and down, will be higher and lower, since natural wave variation has not stopped, it is simply shifting the trend downwards. You reach a point where the stop being complacent because you drown.
Mercury thermometers accurate to less than 0.05 C have existed since the early 1800s. But go ahead and post some more nonsense.
Use big mirrors
Only in science fiction would "giant mirrors" be available for a purpose like this, but not a ready built habitat.
Bingo! Give the (anonymous) man a cigar.
Much of what gets posted here when it comes to space exploration are just science fiction plot gimmicks having little bearing on reality.