Actually, that was a step towards zero, but very much NOT what makes zero special or important.
Using zero as a placeholder in a positional numeric system is natural... once you have a zero. But many (like the Babylonians) used various positional placeholder strategies without having a formal concept of zero.
Zero in contrast stands on it's own. It's a formal, numerical symbol for nothing as a concrete concept, NOT just a placeholder. It's a necessary "pivot point" for much of higher mathematics. For example limits, and thus all of calculus, couldn't exist without zero and the infinitesimals that approach it. Heck, even just algebra - how may times did you see "0" in those laws? x - x = 0 is an extremely basic part of the groundwork, and you need a concept of zero to express it.
Not quite - the last glacial period ended a several thousand years ago, a bit before agriculture was invented, but we're still very much in an ice age that has gripped the planet for 2.6 million years (you can tell it's an ice age by the year-round polar ice-caps)
Leaving the ice age is what has climate scientists worried about global warming - our planet is a bistable system, toggling back and forth between ice age/ icehouse state and a greenhouse/hothouse state. Our species entire existence has been during a an icehouse phase, and the transitions between the two sates are far more dramatic than between the glacial and interglacial periods within an ice age. Generally mass-extinction grade rough on just about everything.
Hey, you're welcome to spend your own time and money creating a foundation to do the same thing - I'd certainly prefer a stable foundation to a business, and I'm sure there would be no shortage of people willing to jump on board, once it was up and running.
But that foundation (so far as I know) doesn't exist. Should we then ban businesses from offering such valuable services? Or require them to divest themselves of the services to a non-profit foundation when they become culturally significant? Neither of those sounds like an improvement - in fact they sound like a great way to make sure GitHub never existed in the first place.
But now we're at a point where a company widely reviled in the open source community has bought one of the most significant public code repositories. Time is ripe for the also-rans - where is the foundation looking to take its place as developers jump ship? It's not like GitHub is some iron fortress of patent-protected functionality - pretty much anyone could clone the functionality without credible legal difficulties. (though of course with Microsoft involved, baseless legal challenges could still be enough to drive you into the ground)
How is it corruption when a business profitably sells itself to another business? Making money, and even being acquired by anther company, is generally considered to be the primary purpose of most businesses. And for all it's community service, Github is still a business.
Do a little research on illegal logging in the rainforest - it's a major problem, with loggers coming in, "strip mining" the most valuable (economically and ecologically) old-growth trees first, and moving on before the authorities are informed.
Not to downplay the damage done by farmers and ranchers - but they're not the only villains.
Doesn't really matter whether it's burnt or allowed to rot (i.e. metabolically "burnt" by fungi) - either way the carbon is released as atmospheric CO2.
Now, if it was made into charcoal instead that would at least reduce the immediate impact - and if the charcoal was then mixed into the soil it would become extremely stable while making the soil richer (don't ask me how that works, but charcoal acts as a sort of "catalyst fertilizer" that doesn't get consumed.) Of course how much additional ecological damage would be done by the mixing?
3% energy savings, times 3.8 billion kWh of electricity used in the US last year, is still a 114 million kWh/year reduction - well worth it *if* it can be done cheaply enough.
Not that I'm ever one to think cost isn't a primary motivator in such decisions, but
>Maybe they also don't trust people to not do stupid shit if they have different phases available in different rooms.
Seems like a smart call - the one thing you can absolutely depend on from any human is that we will inevitably do stupid things. I'd be willing to bet that was true even before technology advanced to the point that most people can't hope to understand most of it.
Or maybe they (also) don't trust them to make any attempt to balance loading between the phases - if you're installing a new outlet, etc. you're far more likely to pull power from the nearest junction box than run new lines from the breaker to balance loads. Besides, even if the phases were load-balanced initially, as soon as someone new moves in the physical distribution of power consumption will likely change and cause load imbalances.
All in all, probably better to let the professionals with skin in the game and a whole-system perspective worry about load balancing, though there's something to be said for it if you can trust people to get three-phase power to their house, and use only their single designated "primary phase" for all wiring, while using three-phase for major appliance outlets that are expected to internally balance their draw.
You misread, what they suggested was one of the easier ways to turn 1 phase power into 3-phase power: 1-phase power -> 1 phase motor -> 3 phase generator -> 3 phase power
From a quick skim it sounds like when they say "double the efficiency" they actually mean "halve the losses". My first impulse is to blame the reporters for that confusion, but it's also possible marketing-weasels were involved.
> Loggers plant new trees Yep, and in a few decades or centuries those new trees will support an ecosystem to rival the one that collapsed with the original tree. Doesn't do us much good today though. Especially if the new trees are harvested before they ever rival the original. Not to mention places like Oregon, where aggressive logging is done in a "checkerboard" pattern which is actually devastating to the non-logged squares as well - with the devastated regions being massive incubators for fungi and microbes that then attack the surrounding multi-century old trees that are hard-pressed to fight off such an aggressive attack.
But yes, slash-and-burn is a problem - as is small time and illegal logging: there's a lot of logging that doesn't get done by respectable, professional loggers in it for the long term - especially in rainforests.
Maybe - there's an awful lot of illegal logging in rainforests though - and I really doubt those loggers replant.
Plus, much (most?) of the tree is routinely thrown away - only the trunk and possibly major limbs become logs.
And even if you do replant - it will take many decades for the new tree to sequester as much carbon as was released in the harvesting and micro-ecological aftermath.
There are already several multi-copter drones designed to carry multiple people - it's just a question of what demand and flight regulations allow for.
At first it'll probably be relatively small expensive items rather than bulk ones, simply because the profit-per-pound potential is so much greater. Later, who knows? It may complement with other technologies beautifully - far more efficient automated semis driving down the main corridors of a city, acting as the "mothership" for a fleet of delivery drones servicing the surrounding area as it passes through? Or even a dirigible mothership for less developed areas - anything that doesn't have to constantly spend enormous amounts of power just to not fall out of the sky (and hey, a dirigible with thin-film solar cells in its skin? Might have potential...)
Source? Most everything I've read suggests global biomass is decreasing. Logging, clear-cutting, desertification, etc. is outstripping gains elsewhere - we're doing a bang-up job of banging up the ecosystem.
Backup power doesn't do much good against lightning strikes. But I imagine there would still be a few windows in place - emergency exits, and maybe a few others for visual status checks. Really though, you can't see much of anything useful through most of the windows on a plane, and thus would lose nothing (safety-wise) from removing them.
As for "each camera" - why would you assume there's more than one (or rather two - one for each side)? Other than the wing, the view is pretty much identical from every passenger window on a plane.
And that is quite possibly the case - but it makes them look REALLY bad if they have to admit that the agency charged with protecting the environment has taken an official position in direct opposition to the scientific consensus, without having ANY evidence to back their position. Makes Pruitt look like a traitorous corporate whore, and the rest of the agency like his complicit bitch.
My understanding is that usually there's plenty of time for people to evacuate - the hard part is convincing them to actually do so. But hey, maybe more time considering the devastation being left in its wake would make a difference, especially if that devastation is far more severe than the historical average.
Maybe. At least part of it though is that weather is getting fundamentally more unpredictable. More heat in the atmosphere means more potential for variability, while the fact that the poles are warming much faster than the equator is allowing the jet streams to slow down and meander far more than they historically have - greatly undermining the ability for historical trends to predict future outcomes.
I was with you up to that last line. Your body is always full of dangerous pathogens being hunted down by your immune system. A foreign object within your body can easily provide a safe harbor for such pathogens if not carefully constructed - allowing them to replicate until they have sufficient numbers to overwhelm your immune system, or just fester locally.
Absolutely. If this is a new high water mark, then beta driven batteries would seem to currently only be useful in areas where the radiation or waste heat from an RTG would be unacceptable. Though using something with a 1-year half life instead should deliver 100x the power, which might be useful in some applications. I imagine it'd be harder to get grad students willing to work with the stuff though, so perhaps it's not surprising that exploratory work is being done with relatively useless materials.
Without a load, will it blow the diodes, or just offer reverse-conduction? Most diodes will conduct electricity if you subject them to enough reverse-polarity voltage - non-destructively so long as current is limited. I think the behavior is even used intentionally in many applications.
I'm sure plenty of more respectable names were suggested as well. In fact I seem to remember one of the others being used the first time it came up. Asking for suggestions is good. Just, by all that's holy, don't hold a binding public vote.
I wasn't actually talking about satellite cards, nor seemingly was the person who first mentioned them. We're talking about hardware exploits - which can't be easily defended against via software.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, that was a step towards zero, but very much NOT what makes zero special or important.
Using zero as a placeholder in a positional numeric system is natural... once you have a zero. But many (like the Babylonians) used various positional placeholder strategies without having a formal concept of zero.
Zero in contrast stands on it's own. It's a formal, numerical symbol for nothing as a concrete concept, NOT just a placeholder. It's a necessary "pivot point" for much of higher mathematics. For example limits, and thus all of calculus, couldn't exist without zero and the infinitesimals that approach it. Heck, even just algebra - how may times did you see "0" in those laws? x - x = 0 is an extremely basic part of the groundwork, and you need a concept of zero to express it.
Pretty sure you can buy almost anything at your local secondhand store on an "AS-IS, No Refunds" basis.
Not quite - the last glacial period ended a several thousand years ago, a bit before agriculture was invented, but we're still very much in an ice age that has gripped the planet for 2.6 million years (you can tell it's an ice age by the year-round polar ice-caps)
Leaving the ice age is what has climate scientists worried about global warming - our planet is a bistable system, toggling back and forth between ice age/ icehouse state and a greenhouse/hothouse state. Our species entire existence has been during a an icehouse phase, and the transitions between the two sates are far more dramatic than between the glacial and interglacial periods within an ice age. Generally mass-extinction grade rough on just about everything.
Hey, you're welcome to spend your own time and money creating a foundation to do the same thing - I'd certainly prefer a stable foundation to a business, and I'm sure there would be no shortage of people willing to jump on board, once it was up and running.
But that foundation (so far as I know) doesn't exist. Should we then ban businesses from offering such valuable services? Or require them to divest themselves of the services to a non-profit foundation when they become culturally significant? Neither of those sounds like an improvement - in fact they sound like a great way to make sure GitHub never existed in the first place.
But now we're at a point where a company widely reviled in the open source community has bought one of the most significant public code repositories. Time is ripe for the also-rans - where is the foundation looking to take its place as developers jump ship? It's not like GitHub is some iron fortress of patent-protected functionality - pretty much anyone could clone the functionality without credible legal difficulties. (though of course with Microsoft involved, baseless legal challenges could still be enough to drive you into the ground)
How is it corruption when a business profitably sells itself to another business? Making money, and even being acquired by anther company, is generally considered to be the primary purpose of most businesses. And for all it's community service, Github is still a business.
Hey, no argument. Farming and ranching are the gorillas in the ring. Don't know why they weren't the first on my list - just didn't spring to mind.
Do a little research on illegal logging in the rainforest - it's a major problem, with loggers coming in, "strip mining" the most valuable (economically and ecologically) old-growth trees first, and moving on before the authorities are informed.
Not to downplay the damage done by farmers and ranchers - but they're not the only villains.
Doesn't really matter whether it's burnt or allowed to rot (i.e. metabolically "burnt" by fungi) - either way the carbon is released as atmospheric CO2.
Now, if it was made into charcoal instead that would at least reduce the immediate impact - and if the charcoal was then mixed into the soil it would become extremely stable while making the soil richer (don't ask me how that works, but charcoal acts as a sort of "catalyst fertilizer" that doesn't get consumed.) Of course how much additional ecological damage would be done by the mixing?
3% energy savings, times 3.8 billion kWh of electricity used in the US last year, is still a 114 million kWh/year reduction - well worth it *if* it can be done cheaply enough.
Not that I'm ever one to think cost isn't a primary motivator in such decisions, but
>Maybe they also don't trust people to not do stupid shit if they have different phases available in different rooms.
Seems like a smart call - the one thing you can absolutely depend on from any human is that we will inevitably do stupid things. I'd be willing to bet that was true even before technology advanced to the point that most people can't hope to understand most of it.
Or maybe they (also) don't trust them to make any attempt to balance loading between the phases - if you're installing a new outlet, etc. you're far more likely to pull power from the nearest junction box than run new lines from the breaker to balance loads. Besides, even if the phases were load-balanced initially, as soon as someone new moves in the physical distribution of power consumption will likely change and cause load imbalances.
All in all, probably better to let the professionals with skin in the game and a whole-system perspective worry about load balancing, though there's something to be said for it if you can trust people to get three-phase power to their house, and use only their single designated "primary phase" for all wiring, while using three-phase for major appliance outlets that are expected to internally balance their draw.
You misread, what they suggested was one of the easier ways to turn 1 phase power into 3-phase power:
1-phase power -> 1 phase motor -> 3 phase generator -> 3 phase power
From a quick skim it sounds like when they say "double the efficiency" they actually mean "halve the losses". My first impulse is to blame the reporters for that confusion, but it's also possible marketing-weasels were involved.
> Loggers plant new trees
Yep, and in a few decades or centuries those new trees will support an ecosystem to rival the one that collapsed with the original tree. Doesn't do us much good today though. Especially if the new trees are harvested before they ever rival the original. Not to mention places like Oregon, where aggressive logging is done in a "checkerboard" pattern which is actually devastating to the non-logged squares as well - with the devastated regions being massive incubators for fungi and microbes that then attack the surrounding multi-century old trees that are hard-pressed to fight off such an aggressive attack.
But yes, slash-and-burn is a problem - as is small time and illegal logging: there's a lot of logging that doesn't get done by respectable, professional loggers in it for the long term - especially in rainforests.
Maybe - there's an awful lot of illegal logging in rainforests though - and I really doubt those loggers replant.
Plus, much (most?) of the tree is routinely thrown away - only the trunk and possibly major limbs become logs.
And even if you do replant - it will take many decades for the new tree to sequester as much carbon as was released in the harvesting and micro-ecological aftermath.
There are already several multi-copter drones designed to carry multiple people - it's just a question of what demand and flight regulations allow for.
At first it'll probably be relatively small expensive items rather than bulk ones, simply because the profit-per-pound potential is so much greater. Later, who knows? It may complement with other technologies beautifully - far more efficient automated semis driving down the main corridors of a city, acting as the "mothership" for a fleet of delivery drones servicing the surrounding area as it passes through? Or even a dirigible mothership for less developed areas - anything that doesn't have to constantly spend enormous amounts of power just to not fall out of the sky (and hey, a dirigible with thin-film solar cells in its skin? Might have potential...)
Not compared to a comparable cost worth of copper or fiber cable.
Source? Most everything I've read suggests global biomass is decreasing. Logging, clear-cutting, desertification, etc. is outstripping gains elsewhere - we're doing a bang-up job of banging up the ecosystem.
Backup power doesn't do much good against lightning strikes. But I imagine there would still be a few windows in place - emergency exits, and maybe a few others for visual status checks. Really though, you can't see much of anything useful through most of the windows on a plane, and thus would lose nothing (safety-wise) from removing them.
As for "each camera" - why would you assume there's more than one (or rather two - one for each side)? Other than the wing, the view is pretty much identical from every passenger window on a plane.
And that is quite possibly the case - but it makes them look REALLY bad if they have to admit that the agency charged with protecting the environment has taken an official position in direct opposition to the scientific consensus, without having ANY evidence to back their position. Makes Pruitt look like a traitorous corporate whore, and the rest of the agency like his complicit bitch.
My understanding is that usually there's plenty of time for people to evacuate - the hard part is convincing them to actually do so. But hey, maybe more time considering the devastation being left in its wake would make a difference, especially if that devastation is far more severe than the historical average.
Maybe. At least part of it though is that weather is getting fundamentally more unpredictable. More heat in the atmosphere means more potential for variability, while the fact that the poles are warming much faster than the equator is allowing the jet streams to slow down and meander far more than they historically have - greatly undermining the ability for historical trends to predict future outcomes.
I was with you up to that last line. Your body is always full of dangerous pathogens being hunted down by your immune system. A foreign object within your body can easily provide a safe harbor for such pathogens if not carefully constructed - allowing them to replicate until they have sufficient numbers to overwhelm your immune system, or just fester locally.
Absolutely. If this is a new high water mark, then beta driven batteries would seem to currently only be useful in areas where the radiation or waste heat from an RTG would be unacceptable. Though using something with a 1-year half life instead should deliver 100x the power, which might be useful in some applications. I imagine it'd be harder to get grad students willing to work with the stuff though, so perhaps it's not surprising that exploratory work is being done with relatively useless materials.
Without a load, will it blow the diodes, or just offer reverse-conduction? Most diodes will conduct electricity if you subject them to enough reverse-polarity voltage - non-destructively so long as current is limited. I think the behavior is even used intentionally in many applications.
I'm sure plenty of more respectable names were suggested as well. In fact I seem to remember one of the others being used the first time it came up. Asking for suggestions is good. Just, by all that's holy, don't hold a binding public vote.
I wasn't actually talking about satellite cards, nor seemingly was the person who first mentioned them. We're talking about hardware exploits - which can't be easily defended against via software.