Well, the thing is that oil from shale is economical only because the cheap oil has pretty much run out. We find new deposits but they are increasingly harder and more expensive to extract from with poorer energy-return-on-energy-invested ratios. The other issue is not quantity but *rate* - as an extreme example, imagine an infinite oil reserve was found but the fastest rate at which you could draw it was one barrel per second. It wouldn't matter that the capacity is good to keep our current consumption going forever if you can't actually extract it at a sufficient rate to satisfy demand. The "unconventional oils" as they are known are not just harder and more expensive to extract, but the rate of extraction is much slower than a conventional oil field of a similar size.
For instance, compare Canada's tar sands reserves with Mexico's Cantarell field. After decades of investment, Canada's tar sands, which are over 1000 times larger than Cantarell field, can only just match the rate of extraction that was obtained from Cantarell at its peak.
If you were doing that, then you'd develop a wheeled vehicle since in most civilian places where pizzas and groceries are available, there are roads and wheeled vehicles can go faster and more efficiently than ones with legs.
Technology is not causing us to reproduce at absurd levels. The most technologically advanced countries have by far the lowest birth rates. Compare a technologically advanced 1st world country, let's say Germany - and you'll see it doesn't have a population growth rate but a population shrinkage rate of 0.2%. Germans are having less children than needed to replace the population by a long way (if there were no immigration, the German population would be shrinking quicker than 0.2% per year). Germany's birth rate is 8.33 per 1000. Now let's compare a country that's technologically behind Germany, for instance Namibia. Namibia has a birth rate of 21.11 per 1000, 2.5 times greater than Germany, and a positive population growth rate of 0.8%. If we look at somewhere less technologically advanced still, let's say, Somalia, the birth rate is 42.12 per 1000, about five times the rate of Germany.
Therefore saying technology causes us to reproduce at absurd levels is patently wrong - in fact, technology may mean you no longer reproduce fast enough to stop your population from shrinking.
Or you pay for a bank account with physical presence back up. There have been banks at least in the UK that have *never* had a physical counter with tellers (First Direct I think has been around for 20 years). I bank with a traditional bank, but even so the last time I needed to pay some money to my Dad, I did it at home without writing a cheque and the money went into his account instantly. I just paid for a bill for car maintenance the same way, too.
But best selling means really not many numbers. The ZX Spectrum for instance was probably the best selling home computer in Europe (certainly in the UK and Spain, and all the clones in Eastern Europe and Russia). A few million sold, including clones behind the former iron curtain, over the production run of a little under 10 years.
Today just a single model of Dell PC will sell that many in under 6 months.
Museums will often still want working examples of the CPC, the Spectrum and the C64 etc. because they can use them in "hands on" exhibits, and will gladly want spares so they can swap them out when the exhibit inevitably dies and the computer needs to be repaired. Since they aren't awfully rare they don't have to be locked away in a glass box and visitors can get to play on them.
No, being denied a visa does not make you ineligible for the visa waiver program. You are however cautioned that if the immigration officer determines you're coming on a visa waiver to do whatever it was you needed a visa for, you can be denied entry.
I've been denied a visa in the past (and just like this German guy, my visa was ultimately issued after some extra paperwork round-trips) but I've never had any trouble entering the US under the visa waiver program.
Only *third party* insurance is mandated. Someone stealing your car or someone damaging it to get to the contents is not covered by *third party* insurance. If you want these things to be insured, you need to get theft coverage or comprehensive coverage (which covers damage you do to your car which was your fault). So no, you're not necessarily going to get more than the minimum insurance if you're trying to save money.
In any case car insurance (at least in Britain) is a ruthlessly competitive market. There are many insurers, and most people shop around every single renewal so companies have to work hard to get people to continue to insure with them.
The crash wasn't caused by a lack of a chart. The sort of information the crew had they'd know from their briefing, even if every handheld device failed in the flight deck. The crash was caused by basic airmanship (stick and rudder) skill problems.
We never had quotas, but in 1994 our entire university was on a 64k link, which quickly got saturated.
I also got most of the research papers I needed to read for my final year project via the internet, using the World Wide Web Worm search engine to find them. Most academic texts online were available for download as PostScript. Using the WWWW to find them was far quicker than spending hours in the library looking for similar stuff.
The problem with HFCS isn't that it is HFCS, it's that it is absurdly cheap. This means it's going into all sorts of stuff you wouldn't normally expect sugar to be in, to make cheap crap food palatable. It even shows up in things like beef burgers, for example - where no one expects to find sugar. Unless you go out of your way to only buy natural fresh foods from premium suppliers, it can be difficult to avoid food with too much sugar. Now that's fine if you're middle class and can afford both the time and the higher cost of only fresh natural foods - but if you're time starved or cash starved (or both) you may go for foods you don't think would contain sugar only to find that they do because it makes cheap unpalatable food vaguely edible.
Wut? Lol! Seriously, LOL. In the biggest centrally planned economy of them all (the Soviet Union) in the 1980s, market economies served the general population *far* far better. The typical working class person in western Europe could go to a shop and buy all the basic needs without queuing up for hours. Soviet citizens on the other hand had to stand in line for hours on end for a loaf of bread - and maybe find it wasn't available by the time they got to the head of the queue. In the 1980s, a working class person in western Europe could go to a shop and buy a home computer for an affordable price. In the Soviet Union, they simply couldn't. The only way you could have a home computer is scrounge the parts and build it yourself, and very very few people could get their hands on the basic components. The centrally planned economies put the majority of the people in Eastern Europe and the USSR in a state of abject poverty compared to Western Europe. Not just in terms of "luxury goods" like cars and computers, but just basic foodstuffs.
In a competitive market, no. For instance, car insurance (at least here) is brutally competitive. If the requirement for mandatory insurance was dropped tomorrow, I doubt premiums would go down. No one insurer can charge 'rip off prices' because someone would undercut them a minute later.
As a counter example, until recently light aircraft in Europe did not have to carry insurance. About 4 years ago, liability insurance became compulsory (with fairly high lower limits, too - in £millions). Our insurance premiums didn't go up when mandatory insurance came in, even though aviation insurance is a lot less competitive than car insurance.
The Mars atmosphere is (by order of magnitude) only 1% of Earth's sea level pressure.
If we look at aviation, we know how people do in situations where there is low atmospheric pressure. At 16km altitude, the partial pressure of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere is about what it would be on Mars if you could make it have a pure oxygen atmosphere. Your time of useful consciousness without a pressure oxygen mask at 16km is only about 9 seconds. (At those low partial pressures of oxygen, your lungs work in reverse - actually removing oxygen from your blood stream).
So no, a pure oxygen Mars atmosphere will still not support humans roaming on the surface without a space suit.
No, the information was not public at the time the trade was made. The information wasn't public in Chicago until 2pm + 7ms, since information cannot travel faster than the speed of light.
Maybe so or maybe not. A bit like the arguments "We shouldn't have both Gnome *and* KDE! Everyone should work on just one project so we get more done". The thing is maybe people working on HFT systems don't want to work on medical devices and wouldn't work on medical devices even if HFT didn't exist. I don't happen to work on HFT systems myself, but personally I wouldn't want to work with the stifling regulations there are for medical devices, I'd rather work on something that's rather more free in how you develop things.
Once you start saying things like this, you can also say "Well, no one should write video games. We shouldn't be wasting our time having people write Starcraft 2, they should all be working on medical devices".
When I lived in the US there was nothing I dreaded more than going to the car dealership.
There's no reason why buying a car should be any more complicated than buying a computer or a TV. It should have a sticker with the price on it and that's that. But instead you have to spend hours of unpleasantness haggling over price as if you were at some flea market in Marrakech or you get ripped off, and the embarrassing charade of the salesweasel having to go upstairs and ask the boss for "a better price" (i bet they just go up there, get a soda from the drinks machine, and then wander down a few minutes later as if they have been doing some hard bargaining). And the pricing dealers use is completely opaque.
And when you go in knowing exactly what you want, the salesweasel puts on a high pressure sales act to try and get you to buy something more expensive. "Oh you don't want a truck with manual transmission, they don't come with leather seats blah blah blah". I don't care about leather seats, it's a pickup truck, it goes dirty places, and the last thing I want in a vehicle that will be going in the dirt are expensive leather seats.
Midwesterners have a really strong accent. They have an American accent.
The only accent-free English is BBC English. English is called English because it was invented in England, so the only accent free people will be from England and not the colonies. Nor principalities like Scotland or Wales.
You're unusual though. Most people who use a tablet for work can make do without MS Word when tableting. MS Office isn't actually needed for taking notes, any text editor will do, and the tablets all have them. Very few people need to work on spreadsheets on a tablet. Our exec team actually likes the Surface Pro, and they all wanted one until they found out the high price and would rather just use the iPad/Android notes app than pay through the nose for a Surface Pro.
Apple phones are easier to replace if you have a broken screen? In that case why in virtually every high street (and there are TWO such shops in the main street of the tiny island I live in) has at least one shop that repairs iPhone/iPad screens for a pretty reasonable price?
Hold on - do charging cables not come supplied with the phone any more?
If you don't be careless and don't lose your cable, surely you're unlikely to need to buy a new cable? I still have my original iPhone 3G charging cable.
No it can't. Put 5 volts across normal skin and you will not get enough current to make 12 watts of power. At voltages that low, skin resistance is a few megohms. Applying I=V/R with megohm values, you'll find at 5v you won't get more current than a few hundred picoamps regardless of how many watts a 5v supply can potentially put out.
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Well, the thing is that oil from shale is economical only because the cheap oil has pretty much run out. We find new deposits but they are increasingly harder and more expensive to extract from with poorer energy-return-on-energy-invested ratios. The other issue is not quantity but *rate* - as an extreme example, imagine an infinite oil reserve was found but the fastest rate at which you could draw it was one barrel per second. It wouldn't matter that the capacity is good to keep our current consumption going forever if you can't actually extract it at a sufficient rate to satisfy demand. The "unconventional oils" as they are known are not just harder and more expensive to extract, but the rate of extraction is much slower than a conventional oil field of a similar size.
For instance, compare Canada's tar sands reserves with Mexico's Cantarell field. After decades of investment, Canada's tar sands, which are over 1000 times larger than Cantarell field, can only just match the rate of extraction that was obtained from Cantarell at its peak.
But on the other hand, if it breaks a leg you can't shoot it and eat it.
If you were doing that, then you'd develop a wheeled vehicle since in most civilian places where pizzas and groceries are available, there are roads and wheeled vehicles can go faster and more efficiently than ones with legs.
Technology is not causing us to reproduce at absurd levels. The most technologically advanced countries have by far the lowest birth rates. Compare a technologically advanced 1st world country, let's say Germany - and you'll see it doesn't have a population growth rate but a population shrinkage rate of 0.2%. Germans are having less children than needed to replace the population by a long way (if there were no immigration, the German population would be shrinking quicker than 0.2% per year). Germany's birth rate is 8.33 per 1000. Now let's compare a country that's technologically behind Germany, for instance Namibia. Namibia has a birth rate of 21.11 per 1000, 2.5 times greater than Germany, and a positive population growth rate of 0.8%. If we look at somewhere less technologically advanced still, let's say, Somalia, the birth rate is 42.12 per 1000, about five times the rate of Germany.
Therefore saying technology causes us to reproduce at absurd levels is patently wrong - in fact, technology may mean you no longer reproduce fast enough to stop your population from shrinking.
Or you pay for a bank account with physical presence back up. There have been banks at least in the UK that have *never* had a physical counter with tellers (First Direct I think has been around for 20 years). I bank with a traditional bank, but even so the last time I needed to pay some money to my Dad, I did it at home without writing a cheque and the money went into his account instantly. I just paid for a bill for car maintenance the same way, too.
But best selling means really not many numbers. The ZX Spectrum for instance was probably the best selling home computer in Europe (certainly in the UK and Spain, and all the clones in Eastern Europe and Russia). A few million sold, including clones behind the former iron curtain, over the production run of a little under 10 years.
Today just a single model of Dell PC will sell that many in under 6 months.
Museums will often still want working examples of the CPC, the Spectrum and the C64 etc. because they can use them in "hands on" exhibits, and will gladly want spares so they can swap them out when the exhibit inevitably dies and the computer needs to be repaired. Since they aren't awfully rare they don't have to be locked away in a glass box and visitors can get to play on them.
No, being denied a visa does not make you ineligible for the visa waiver program. You are however cautioned that if the immigration officer determines you're coming on a visa waiver to do whatever it was you needed a visa for, you can be denied entry.
I've been denied a visa in the past (and just like this German guy, my visa was ultimately issued after some extra paperwork round-trips) but I've never had any trouble entering the US under the visa waiver program.
Only *third party* insurance is mandated. Someone stealing your car or someone damaging it to get to the contents is not covered by *third party* insurance. If you want these things to be insured, you need to get theft coverage or comprehensive coverage (which covers damage you do to your car which was your fault). So no, you're not necessarily going to get more than the minimum insurance if you're trying to save money.
In any case car insurance (at least in Britain) is a ruthlessly competitive market. There are many insurers, and most people shop around every single renewal so companies have to work hard to get people to continue to insure with them.
The crash wasn't caused by a lack of a chart. The sort of information the crew had they'd know from their briefing, even if every handheld device failed in the flight deck. The crash was caused by basic airmanship (stick and rudder) skill problems.
We never had quotas, but in 1994 our entire university was on a 64k link, which quickly got saturated.
I also got most of the research papers I needed to read for my final year project via the internet, using the World Wide Web Worm search engine to find them. Most academic texts online were available for download as PostScript. Using the WWWW to find them was far quicker than spending hours in the library looking for similar stuff.
I used to run a FidoNet node. 2:252/204.
The NC of network 252 was still running his BBS until about 2006 or so (and was still NC of 252!)
The problem with HFCS isn't that it is HFCS, it's that it is absurdly cheap. This means it's going into all sorts of stuff you wouldn't normally expect sugar to be in, to make cheap crap food palatable. It even shows up in things like beef burgers, for example - where no one expects to find sugar. Unless you go out of your way to only buy natural fresh foods from premium suppliers, it can be difficult to avoid food with too much sugar. Now that's fine if you're middle class and can afford both the time and the higher cost of only fresh natural foods - but if you're time starved or cash starved (or both) you may go for foods you don't think would contain sugar only to find that they do because it makes cheap unpalatable food vaguely edible.
Wut? Lol! Seriously, LOL. In the biggest centrally planned economy of them all (the Soviet Union) in the 1980s, market economies served the general population *far* far better. The typical working class person in western Europe could go to a shop and buy all the basic needs without queuing up for hours. Soviet citizens on the other hand had to stand in line for hours on end for a loaf of bread - and maybe find it wasn't available by the time they got to the head of the queue. In the 1980s, a working class person in western Europe could go to a shop and buy a home computer for an affordable price. In the Soviet Union, they simply couldn't. The only way you could have a home computer is scrounge the parts and build it yourself, and very very few people could get their hands on the basic components. The centrally planned economies put the majority of the people in Eastern Europe and the USSR in a state of abject poverty compared to Western Europe. Not just in terms of "luxury goods" like cars and computers, but just basic foodstuffs.
In a competitive market, no. For instance, car insurance (at least here) is brutally competitive. If the requirement for mandatory insurance was dropped tomorrow, I doubt premiums would go down. No one insurer can charge 'rip off prices' because someone would undercut them a minute later.
As a counter example, until recently light aircraft in Europe did not have to carry insurance. About 4 years ago, liability insurance became compulsory (with fairly high lower limits, too - in £millions). Our insurance premiums didn't go up when mandatory insurance came in, even though aviation insurance is a lot less competitive than car insurance.
The Mars atmosphere is (by order of magnitude) only 1% of Earth's sea level pressure.
If we look at aviation, we know how people do in situations where there is low atmospheric pressure. At 16km altitude, the partial pressure of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere is about what it would be on Mars if you could make it have a pure oxygen atmosphere. Your time of useful consciousness without a pressure oxygen mask at 16km is only about 9 seconds. (At those low partial pressures of oxygen, your lungs work in reverse - actually removing oxygen from your blood stream).
So no, a pure oxygen Mars atmosphere will still not support humans roaming on the surface without a space suit.
No, the information was not public at the time the trade was made. The information wasn't public in Chicago until 2pm + 7ms, since information cannot travel faster than the speed of light.
Maybe so or maybe not. A bit like the arguments "We shouldn't have both Gnome *and* KDE! Everyone should work on just one project so we get more done". The thing is maybe people working on HFT systems don't want to work on medical devices and wouldn't work on medical devices even if HFT didn't exist. I don't happen to work on HFT systems myself, but personally I wouldn't want to work with the stifling regulations there are for medical devices, I'd rather work on something that's rather more free in how you develop things.
Once you start saying things like this, you can also say "Well, no one should write video games. We shouldn't be wasting our time having people write Starcraft 2, they should all be working on medical devices".
I never played the original Myst but I did play Riven. Also 7th Guest (which I think came free with a CD-ROM drive).
Riven struck me to be more of a technology demonstrator than a game, a sort of "My, look how much stuff we can get onto a DVD-ROM!" demonstrator.
Now I know the kind of game it was is fondly liked by some people, but to me it just seemed like how to fill a DVD-ROM first and a game second.
When I lived in the US there was nothing I dreaded more than going to the car dealership.
There's no reason why buying a car should be any more complicated than buying a computer or a TV. It should have a sticker with the price on it and that's that. But instead you have to spend hours of unpleasantness haggling over price as if you were at some flea market in Marrakech or you get ripped off, and the embarrassing charade of the salesweasel having to go upstairs and ask the boss for "a better price" (i bet they just go up there, get a soda from the drinks machine, and then wander down a few minutes later as if they have been doing some hard bargaining). And the pricing dealers use is completely opaque.
And when you go in knowing exactly what you want, the salesweasel puts on a high pressure sales act to try and get you to buy something more expensive. "Oh you don't want a truck with manual transmission, they don't come with leather seats blah blah blah". I don't care about leather seats, it's a pickup truck, it goes dirty places, and the last thing I want in a vehicle that will be going in the dirt are expensive leather seats.
Midwesterners have a really strong accent. They have an American accent.
The only accent-free English is BBC English. English is called English because it was invented in England, so the only accent free people will be from England and not the colonies. Nor principalities like Scotland or Wales.
You're unusual though. Most people who use a tablet for work can make do without MS Word when tableting. MS Office isn't actually needed for taking notes, any text editor will do, and the tablets all have them. Very few people need to work on spreadsheets on a tablet. Our exec team actually likes the Surface Pro, and they all wanted one until they found out the high price and would rather just use the iPad/Android notes app than pay through the nose for a Surface Pro.
Apple phones are easier to replace if you have a broken screen? In that case why in virtually every high street (and there are TWO such shops in the main street of the tiny island I live in) has at least one shop that repairs iPhone/iPad screens for a pretty reasonable price?
Hold on - do charging cables not come supplied with the phone any more?
If you don't be careless and don't lose your cable, surely you're unlikely to need to buy a new cable? I still have my original iPhone 3G charging cable.
That should have been nanoamps, but you get my point.
No it can't. Put 5 volts across normal skin and you will not get enough current to make 12 watts of power. At voltages that low, skin resistance is a few megohms. Applying I=V/R with megohm values, you'll find at 5v you won't get more current than a few hundred picoamps regardless of how many watts a 5v supply can potentially put out.