No, scientists aren't getting constantly "surprised" or even "baffled". These are words journalists are putting in their mouths as a way of making a story more interesting.
Fossil fuels are finite too. (Also "rare Earths" aren't particularly rare despite their name). There are battery technologies that don't use cobalt. There are technologies under development that use sodium which is enormously abundant.
There are other types of battery technology being developed for stationary storage - for mass power storage, you don't have quite the constraints you have for mobile power like an electric car so you can use materials that would not be optimal for use in a car or a mobile phone. Unconstrained by weight, you can use flow batteries (some of which have been developed with tremendous energy densities and very high numbers of charge cycles compared to conventional lithium ion type batteries).
Batteries are a *huge* part of our future of electrical generation. It might take a while before the grid is transformed, but it took a long time for the grid to develop in the first place anyway (how many years of engineering development did it take to arrive at the modern highly efficient combined cycle gas turbine power plant, something that would have been scoffed at in the 1970s?)
Obesity doesn't make your legs longer nor your body taller. Someone so obese that their stomach would touch the seat in front probably doesn't have the mobility to even get tot the airport, let alone in the plane.
The A321 isn't the A320's successor - they didn't stop selling the A320 then begin producing the A321. The A320 is a family of aircraft, all being made concurrently (so the current models being sold are the A318, A319, A320, A321 - numbers smaller than 320 are a shrink and numbers greater than 320 are a stretch of the base A320 model).
You must have people in much worse than average health, then. Around here there are plenty of over 50s, and there's hardly any sick days. We have no problem planning. Only being 75% certain that people will be well enough to work four days per cycle sounds like you have a catastrophically unhealthy workforce at any age.
However, wind generating capacity does tend to be the greatest when we need lots of electricity. We tend to need the most power during the wet and windy winter months...when the wind bit of the wet and windy means wind generation is at or nearly at peak production.
Google aren't merely offering their services, they are attaching exactly the same strings that Microsoft used to attach. Microsoft used to say: if you want to ship Windows, you may only ship Windows on all of the PCs you sell. If you ship one with OS/2 or Linux on, then the deal is off.
Google are doing the same thing. If you want to ship phones with Android and Google Play (which is increasingly necessary for many apps to just work), then *all* your phones must ship with this, and none with a competitive operating system or environment.
This is the monopoly abuse they are being punished for. They are not being punished for making good apps, they are being punished for using their dominant position (which on the lower end is 100% dominance) to prevent competition from even getting going.
What where they even thinking to launch a smear site like that? It's certain to backfire: the message such a site gives is that RISC-V is a serious challenger to ARM, if ARM has to go out and smear it, and people who've never even heard of RISC-V will now be checking it out because this kind of story gets picked up by the computing press and gives a huge amount of free publicity to RISC-V.
Because Apple isn't in a monopolistic position. Apple has quite a small marketshare, but Google have an effective monopoly (and an actual monopoly for non-premium devices). It's not about whether Apple is doing anything better or worse, it's about whether Google has an effective monopoly or not. If the situation were reversed (iOS being on 90% of devices), then the EU would be going after Apple.
No, investing isn't gambling, it's not black and white like that.
There's more of a scale. At one end you have "gambling" and at the other you have "investing". At the far gambling end of the spectrum you have games of chance (e.g. roulette), binary options (which is gambling dressed up to look like investing), slot machines etc - basically all the types of things where the house always win. At the other end you have things like bonds, traditional long term buy and hold in blue chip companies etc. There's still some risk but on that end of the spectrum, it's not a zero sum game nor "the house always wins".
If you say all investing is gambling because there's some risk and can never be a sure thing, then you get to the reductio ad absurdum argument that absolutely everything is gambling, e.g keeping your money in a savings account is also gambling because that's not a sure thing either.
The murder rate in the USA is around 5 times higher than what it is in Western Europe, so there is some justification to the "murderous pricks" reputation.
To be fair, there were 17250 murders alone in the US (not including suicides) in 2017, versus 723 murders (of all kinds) in the UK in 2017. Turning that into a percentage of population, the murder rate is almost 5 times higher in the US than in the UK, so the view that you're all just a bunch of murderous fucks does have at least some justification.
Having a human that can get bored babysitting automation is fundamentally the wrong way to do it anyway. Until the automation is reliable to not need human supervision, it should be the other way around: the automation monitoring the human to provide an extra safety net, so that the human has to be actively driving and alert rather than getting bored and not monitoring the automation properly.
Because the people with the skillsets to do these things want to live in California. Places that are nice tend to be expensive because there is high demand to live there, good old supply and demand at work. Places that are cheap tend to be cheap because they aren't all that desirable.
Engineers that can command good pay probably don't want to live in mosquito infested places full of religious fundies such as Alabama. They probably don't want to live in the flyover states where there's no coast and fewer fun things to do during your time off. So if you want to attract the talent, you have to locate where the talent wants to live. The talent wants to live in California, not some bug ridden swamp full of fundies.
GDPR should be a fairly healthy deterrent to anyone implementing anything like this (that is, if the UK doesn't throw it in the bonfire of EU regulation after 2019).
This is a non-starter before we even get to thinking about regulations. I doubt the Uber guy is thinking about typical light aircraft (and weather capability immediately makes doing that completely impractical outside of places with 350 VFR days per year), but probably on the lines of scaled-up quadcopters that can carry people, flying around cities - no doubt based on the recent prototype seen at CES.
It works fine for small RC drones, but the thing is: quad/hexcopters (etc) basically brute force themselves into the air. They are tremendously inefficient and scale badly. To keep the rotor inertia down low enough you can use simple fixed pitch propellers (rather than complex (expensive) collective pitch rotors like a helicopter) they are going to have to be small and high RPM.
The racket will be unbearable. If you think city noise is bad right now just with road traffic, it will be ten times worse if you had even just hundreds of quadcopters big enough to lift people flying around. There will be no refuge anywhere in a city from the unbelievable and annoying racket these things will make - due to the differeing rotor rpms on just one vehicle, there will be an annoying set of beat frequencies generated by the lift systems to add to the ungodly racket from the fundamental frequency.
Today you can go into a city park, even in a big noisy city, and get away from the noise. Walk a couple of minutes into any of the big London parks and it's pretty peaceful. This will be a distant history if there are hundreds of people-carrying quadcopters (or indeed any -copter type vehicle) flying around the city. People living and working in the city just won't stand for it. To add to that, most people don't like flying to start with and only do so because it's the only practical way of crossing an ocean or going somewhere 2000 miles away. In a city, given the choice, a lot of people would rather take a metro system than board some kind of absurdly noisy automated flying machine.
Well that's too bad. In the winter, it's dark when I go to work, and dark when I get home, and since I have no windows - if it's a busy time I could quite easily go from December to Feburary without seeing proper daylight.
The Nissan Leaf is doing quite well where I live - I've seen many Leaves driving around the place, the person I know who has one is pretty enthusiastic about it.
The Federal Reserve does not decide how much a dollar is worth. There isn't some committee collectively raising their pinkies and saying "Today, two Cox's apples will be worth one dollar". The government only has some fairly blunt tools to influence the value of currency (for example, interest rates and quantitative easing) but a dollar is worth whatever someone is willing to trade for it.
The problem with Bitcoin is not that it's value is set by what people are willing to trade for it, but virtually no one is willing to trade goods or services for bitcoin, and instead it has become merely an instrument of speculation.
Unfortunately the so called debunking of the nuclear winter was done by somebody with no knowledge of climate science.
US and USSR scientists, independently, calculated the effect of the nuclear winter in the 1980s and came to the same conclusion. More recently simulations have been run again, this time with better understanding of the climate and massively more powerful simulation tools - and has discovered that the 1980s predictions if anything were optimistic - the nuclear winter effect was actually likely to be much worse. A simulation was also run on a regional conflict between India and Pakistan with an exchange of just 50 weapons. The effects are worse when the conflict occurs in subtropical latitudes. Such a conflict would trigger a "nuclear autumn" that would shorten the growing season in the US midwest by 60 days in the couple of years following the conflict, and would have serious climate consequences lasting about a decade. This level of growing season shortening would cause food shortages and high food prices in the rich industrialised world, and simply result in famine in poorer countries and places where agriculture is already marginal.
A US-vs-Russia exchange with a significant fraction of the arsenal...nuclear winter doesn't even describe it - more like "nuclear six month long night" - the models forecast mid day light levels in the northern hemisphere about similar to a moonlit night. Six months without food growth would kill most of the survivors, before even considering the cold.
On point 4 - young people finding old music and finding it better than 2010s pop - this may just be a case of 'survivorship bias'. The dross will fade away and the good stuff will stick around, but for newer music from the 2010s, the dross still hasn't had a chance to fade away.
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No, scientists aren't getting constantly "surprised" or even "baffled". These are words journalists are putting in their mouths as a way of making a story more interesting.
Fossil fuels are finite too. (Also "rare Earths" aren't particularly rare despite their name). There are battery technologies that don't use cobalt. There are technologies under development that use sodium which is enormously abundant.
There are other types of battery technology being developed for stationary storage - for mass power storage, you don't have quite the constraints you have for mobile power like an electric car so you can use materials that would not be optimal for use in a car or a mobile phone. Unconstrained by weight, you can use flow batteries (some of which have been developed with tremendous energy densities and very high numbers of charge cycles compared to conventional lithium ion type batteries).
Batteries are a *huge* part of our future of electrical generation. It might take a while before the grid is transformed, but it took a long time for the grid to develop in the first place anyway (how many years of engineering development did it take to arrive at the modern highly efficient combined cycle gas turbine power plant, something that would have been scoffed at in the 1970s?)
Obesity doesn't make your legs longer nor your body taller. Someone so obese that their stomach would touch the seat in front probably doesn't have the mobility to even get tot the airport, let alone in the plane.
The airline easyJet has a load factor of 95% (so nearly all of their flights are totally full). Ryanair is probably similar.
The A321 isn't the A320's successor - they didn't stop selling the A320 then begin producing the A321. The A320 is a family of aircraft, all being made concurrently (so the current models being sold are the A318, A319, A320, A321 - numbers smaller than 320 are a shrink and numbers greater than 320 are a stretch of the base A320 model).
You must have people in much worse than average health, then. Around here there are plenty of over 50s, and there's hardly any sick days. We have no problem planning. Only being 75% certain that people will be well enough to work four days per cycle sounds like you have a catastrophically unhealthy workforce at any age.
The production countries will notice: undoubtedly demand for their products will fall with an increased price due to tarriffs.
However, wind generating capacity does tend to be the greatest when we need lots of electricity. We tend to need the most power during the wet and windy winter months...when the wind bit of the wet and windy means wind generation is at or nearly at peak production.
Google aren't merely offering their services, they are attaching exactly the same strings that Microsoft used to attach. Microsoft used to say: if you want to ship Windows, you may only ship Windows on all of the PCs you sell. If you ship one with OS/2 or Linux on, then the deal is off.
Google are doing the same thing. If you want to ship phones with Android and Google Play (which is increasingly necessary for many apps to just work), then *all* your phones must ship with this, and none with a competitive operating system or environment.
This is the monopoly abuse they are being punished for. They are not being punished for making good apps, they are being punished for using their dominant position (which on the lower end is 100% dominance) to prevent competition from even getting going.
What where they even thinking to launch a smear site like that? It's certain to backfire: the message such a site gives is that RISC-V is a serious challenger to ARM, if ARM has to go out and smear it, and people who've never even heard of RISC-V will now be checking it out because this kind of story gets picked up by the computing press and gives a huge amount of free publicity to RISC-V.
Because Apple isn't in a monopolistic position. Apple has quite a small marketshare, but Google have an effective monopoly (and an actual monopoly for non-premium devices). It's not about whether Apple is doing anything better or worse, it's about whether Google has an effective monopoly or not. If the situation were reversed (iOS being on 90% of devices), then the EU would be going after Apple.
No, investing isn't gambling, it's not black and white like that.
There's more of a scale. At one end you have "gambling" and at the other you have "investing". At the far gambling end of the spectrum you have games of chance (e.g. roulette), binary options (which is gambling dressed up to look like investing), slot machines etc - basically all the types of things where the house always win. At the other end you have things like bonds, traditional long term buy and hold in blue chip companies etc. There's still some risk but on that end of the spectrum, it's not a zero sum game nor "the house always wins".
If you say all investing is gambling because there's some risk and can never be a sure thing, then you get to the reductio ad absurdum argument that absolutely everything is gambling, e.g keeping your money in a savings account is also gambling because that's not a sure thing either.
The murder rate in the USA is around 5 times higher than what it is in Western Europe, so there is some justification to the "murderous pricks" reputation.
To be fair, there were 17250 murders alone in the US (not including suicides) in 2017, versus 723 murders (of all kinds) in the UK in 2017. Turning that into a percentage of population, the murder rate is almost 5 times higher in the US than in the UK, so the view that you're all just a bunch of murderous fucks does have at least some justification.
In other words, never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.
Having a human that can get bored babysitting automation is fundamentally the wrong way to do it anyway. Until the automation is reliable to not need human supervision, it should be the other way around: the automation monitoring the human to provide an extra safety net, so that the human has to be actively driving and alert rather than getting bored and not monitoring the automation properly.
Surely at 915MHz, it would be a milliwave oven?
Because the people with the skillsets to do these things want to live in California. Places that are nice tend to be expensive because there is high demand to live there, good old supply and demand at work. Places that are cheap tend to be cheap because they aren't all that desirable.
Engineers that can command good pay probably don't want to live in mosquito infested places full of religious fundies such as Alabama. They probably don't want to live in the flyover states where there's no coast and fewer fun things to do during your time off. So if you want to attract the talent, you have to locate where the talent wants to live. The talent wants to live in California, not some bug ridden swamp full of fundies.
GDPR should be a fairly healthy deterrent to anyone implementing anything like this (that is, if the UK doesn't throw it in the bonfire of EU regulation after 2019).
This is a non-starter before we even get to thinking about regulations. I doubt the Uber guy is thinking about typical light aircraft (and weather capability immediately makes doing that completely impractical outside of places with 350 VFR days per year), but probably on the lines of scaled-up quadcopters that can carry people, flying around cities - no doubt based on the recent prototype seen at CES.
It works fine for small RC drones, but the thing is: quad/hexcopters (etc) basically brute force themselves into the air. They are tremendously inefficient and scale badly. To keep the rotor inertia down low enough you can use simple fixed pitch propellers (rather than complex (expensive) collective pitch rotors like a helicopter) they are going to have to be small and high RPM.
The racket will be unbearable. If you think city noise is bad right now just with road traffic, it will be ten times worse if you had even just hundreds of quadcopters big enough to lift people flying around. There will be no refuge anywhere in a city from the unbelievable and annoying racket these things will make - due to the differeing rotor rpms on just one vehicle, there will be an annoying set of beat frequencies generated by the lift systems to add to the ungodly racket from the fundamental frequency.
Today you can go into a city park, even in a big noisy city, and get away from the noise. Walk a couple of minutes into any of the big London parks and it's pretty peaceful. This will be a distant history if there are hundreds of people-carrying quadcopters (or indeed any -copter type vehicle) flying around the city. People living and working in the city just won't stand for it. To add to that, most people don't like flying to start with and only do so because it's the only practical way of crossing an ocean or going somewhere 2000 miles away. In a city, given the choice, a lot of people would rather take a metro system than board some kind of absurdly noisy automated flying machine.
Well that's too bad. In the winter, it's dark when I go to work, and dark when I get home, and since I have no windows - if it's a busy time I could quite easily go from December to Feburary without seeing proper daylight.
The Nissan Leaf is doing quite well where I live - I've seen many Leaves driving around the place, the person I know who has one is pretty enthusiastic about it.
The Federal Reserve does not decide how much a dollar is worth. There isn't some committee collectively raising their pinkies and saying "Today, two Cox's apples will be worth one dollar". The government only has some fairly blunt tools to influence the value of currency (for example, interest rates and quantitative easing) but a dollar is worth whatever someone is willing to trade for it.
The problem with Bitcoin is not that it's value is set by what people are willing to trade for it, but virtually no one is willing to trade goods or services for bitcoin, and instead it has become merely an instrument of speculation.
Unfortunately the so called debunking of the nuclear winter was done by somebody with no knowledge of climate science.
US and USSR scientists, independently, calculated the effect of the nuclear winter in the 1980s and came to the same conclusion. More recently simulations have been run again, this time with better understanding of the climate and massively more powerful simulation tools - and has discovered that the 1980s predictions if anything were optimistic - the nuclear winter effect was actually likely to be much worse. A simulation was also run on a regional conflict between India and Pakistan with an exchange of just 50 weapons. The effects are worse when the conflict occurs in subtropical latitudes. Such a conflict would trigger a "nuclear autumn" that would shorten the growing season in the US midwest by 60 days in the couple of years following the conflict, and would have serious climate consequences lasting about a decade. This level of growing season shortening would cause food shortages and high food prices in the rich industrialised world, and simply result in famine in poorer countries and places where agriculture is already marginal.
A US-vs-Russia exchange with a significant fraction of the arsenal...nuclear winter doesn't even describe it - more like "nuclear six month long night" - the models forecast mid day light levels in the northern hemisphere about similar to a moonlit night. Six months without food growth would kill most of the survivors, before even considering the cold.
On point 4 - young people finding old music and finding it better than 2010s pop - this may just be a case of 'survivorship bias'. The dross will fade away and the good stuff will stick around, but for newer music from the 2010s, the dross still hasn't had a chance to fade away.