That's the thing with "eventually" - it covers a lot of territory influenced by many things beyond your ability to predict. Even if you're correct, the devil's in the details and you could be off by decades.
But, the time is certainly coming - I've met several people who've discarded their desktop or laptop for a tablet. If all you do is browse the web and send an occasional email, there's not really much reason to use anything more complex.
As for PC - it may theoretically stand for Personal Computer, but I'm not sure it's actually been used that generically since the "Wintel duopoly" dominated the market. PC became synonymous with Wintel machine - either a desktop or "luggable". Laptops/notebooks still counted - they were clearly still a PC, just in a different form factor. Macintoshes decidedly did not though, despite Apples being some of the early popular PCs when the term was still generic. Hence the Mac-PC "wars".
Agreed - computing power and memory are physically shrinking faster than the typical user can find a use for a comparable volume of them. Or perhaps more to the point - computational energy efficiency is improving fast enough that the required cooling systems are shrinking rapidly. CPUs themselves never got much bigger than a postage stamp.
There's much to be said for the desktop form factor, but communication buses have reached the point where you can plug your tablet/phone/whatever into a single Thunderbolt cable to connect to multiple 4k screens and all your desired peripherals to get virtually all of the benefits wherever you happen to be - I can readily see the day when instead of borrowing a friend's computer to do something you'll just borrow their "desktop" to plug in your own pocket computer.
We're not nearly there yet, though Microsoft and several others are busy working on their "convergent interface"... maybe they'll manage something that doesn't suck before the day arrives. Myself, I think the two form-factors are likely too different in how they're used for a single GUI to avoid being deeply disappointing for one or both. But two interfaces overlayed on the same OS have plenty of potential.
And of course if augmented reality catches on you have a third interface to deal with - but as a long-time glasses wearer, I'd have to say they need to come with something pretty frigging compelling to make always wearing/carrying glasses, or even contacts, broadly appealing. So my guess is that's not going to be a popular mobile interface until such time as neural interfaces become commonplace. (A prospect that disturbs me greatly, but does seem rather likely).
>Of course, there will come a time in the not-so-distant future when 64-Bit computers will get the cold shoulder.
You think? I'm not so sure. Or, at least it will take a lot longer than previous transitions.
The driving force behind bit-size increases seems to be RAM - vector processors (aka GPUs these days) and other SIMD techniques address performance issues quite sufficiently, and there's very little call for calculations to be performed more precisely than can be done in 32 bits, much less 64 (neglecting limited demand for exact calculations, which will always need to be implemented in software)
32 bit computers had been flirting with their limitations for a while - 32 bit addresses can only access 4 GB of RAM without all sorts of performance-killing jumping through hoops (pointer arithmetic is fundamental to almost everything). And unlike 16 bit computers (which can only natively address 64kB of RAM and required hoop-jumping from day one on PCs), 32 bit OSes were born in the time of the 386, when a couple MB of RAM was impressive, and 4GB was an unimaginably insane amount, so new OSes could get the performance benefit of assuming all RAM was directly addressable, with vast ranges of "this will never be used" address space that could be allocated to various non-RAM purposes (hence only being able to use ~3.5GB of your 4GB of RAM on Windows XP).
64-bit computers though are a far larger jump again. Going from the 286 (16 bit calculations, 24 bit addresses through "protected mode") to the 386 (32 bit native addresses) only introduced an extra 8 address bits - 256x times the space, from 16 MB to 4GB, or about 16 years by Moore's Law at the time. Going from 32 to 64 bits adds about 4 billion times the natively computable address space - or about 48 years by the modern accelerated Moore's Law. Meanwhile, actual uses for more memory seem to finally be slowing down - over a decade since Microsoft introduced a mainstream 64-bit OS, there's still not really much to be gained by most people having more than 8GB of RAM in a PC.
Having developed on both platforms (addmitedly only some on Apple), I have to say that Apple has a tendency to add a lot of little "programmer shinies" with every new update - handy new utilities, programming features, etc. that tempt developers to use them. Which then makes their software incompatible with older versions of the OS. So, if you want to keep running the latest versions of all your modern apps you pretty much need a fairly recent version of the OS.
Contrast that with Microsoft, whose "go suck it" attitude to developers, and tendency to try to replace old, reliable components with newer, more annoying ways of doing things, combined with their commitment to maintaining backwards compatibility, means that developers tend to stick with the old tried-and-true standbys, unless there's some compelling reason to move forward (e.g. powerful new features added in DirectX 10 and 11).
Apple's approach does a lot more to create a constantly improving programming environment (or at least the impression of one), but also keeps their users on a more vigorous upgrade treadmill.
That said - at this point I suspect most 32 bit-only Apple software can probably run in an "emulated" compatibility layer with plenty of performance, much as older XP apps can do on modern windows. But such compatibility is always imperfect, hence "will be the last macOS release to support 32-bit apps without compromise."
Agreed. This solution is nice if there's a few websites that you visit regularly that are so afflicted, but does nothing for random annoying embedded ads, etc. scattered across the net. Personally, any website that autoplays videos on a regular basis just stops getting visited.
Of course, it might be best to set that as a config option so Joe Average doesn't get confused by it.
Yeah, but that's a far less reliable rule, and this is life extension we're talking about - we probably won't survive to see version 5 unless we've already partaken of the fruits of earlier versions. With luck, and funding from the vast fortunes accumulated by the rich old men first able to cheat death, many of the later extensions will still work on those who already had earlier treatments.
I think we're a good ways away from understanding DNA well enough to do that - and even with a perfect transcoding there's no guarantee they'd actually grow the same organ as would be produced by human cells - an incredible amount of growth structure is governed by environmental conditions, rather than the DAN directly. Or alternately the DNA gives instructions on how to build structure in a given environment - change the environment, and the structure changes as well.
As a crude example, if researchers graft skin from opposite sides of a salamander's leg around a wound, it will grow a new leg at that location.
Plus, you'd still have the problem of tissue rejection - that "human" organ is still made out of pig cells.
On the other hand, we don't actually *need* to make human organs - just human-compatible ones. I suspect the modifications needed for that are relatively simple, at least if you could first manage some sort of "universal tissue donor" cellular changes first. Might be easier to start with a chimpanzee or bonobo though - nearly identical genetically and structurally. Tweak it to grow appropriately sized organs, but only a stub of a brain - minimizing ethical considerations while leaving it capable enough to be farmed rather than lab-grown. Of course, if you're doing that, you could always start with a human template - but that would probably make a lot of people a whole lot more uncomfortable, and could create some difficult social questions if interbreeding were possible. If phenominally stupid chimpanzee crossbreeds enter the wild, we can just let nature sort it out.
Hey, while we're at it maybe we can give the donor animal duplicate organs and the ability to regenerate - no need to kill it to get an organ, you just can't harvest the same organ again until the second one has had a chance to grow back. Much more efficient that way, and the donated organs would likely prove far more resilient than the originals.
Is GIMPshop still a thing? I recall it being a "reskinned" version of GIMP modified to look more like Photoshop.and use the same hotkeys. Of course I had already spent most of my time in normal GIMP, so a prettier interface wasn't worth relearning the hotkeys. Especially since you never know how long such side branches will be maintained.
I'd have to say that the biggest advantage of GIMP is that you can use the same program on every computer you use, with no worrying about licenses, costs, or (mostly) operating system support or differences. For 90+% of people who really only use Photoshop as an occasional glorified basic photo editor, that alone probably makes it the smarter skill investment. If you're a professional graphic artist, then maybe Photoshop caters to your needs enough to make it worth the trouble, GIMP certainly has some shortcomings in that realm, but that's a tiny minority of users.
Meanwhile, the biggest disadvantage is probably, as ever, the extremely unflattering name.
It mostly already is. I pay the full purchase price every month. Rather painful at $0,000.00 per year, but I'm pretty that if I miss a payment they'll reformat my computer after sharing the most embarrassing samples from my porn stash with everyone I know.
There's also support contracts from many different providers, which are typically sold in a subscription model as well - generally more expensive than Linux itself, but it's a strictly optional expenditure, and usually gets you much more responsive support than you'd get from most large software publishers.
An extra $20-$50 per seat per year is enough that you can't afford it? Must either not be very valuable to you - or you need to hire (and listen to) a decent budget manager. Not to mention, a Photoshop business account license is currently $30/month, or $360/year/seat - just *slightly* more than your supposed $20 each for 5 licenses. (5 *installs*, such as in MS Office home edition is not quite same thing, and in that case the license explicitly prohibits you from using it in a business environment. I don't see any such option mentioned on the Adobe site: https://www.adobe.com/creative...)
And frankly, if your profit margins really are that slim then I'd think the perpetual license would be far more attractive, since a bad year would just mean you put off the next upgrade for a year or two and make do using the exact same software that's been getting the job done fine for the last several years. With a subscription you no longer have that option, and are completely at the mercy of the publisher's to not to raise the price and drive you out of business tomorrow.
Bottom line - if a subscription model would actually save you money, then they'd have very little incentive to move to it.
Natural gene transfer with viruses is hardly unheard of - something like 8% of the human genome is viral in origin, and it can reasonably be expected that the reverse happens as well. After all, they do hijack our own DNA replication equipment in the course of their normal reproduction. It may be spectacularly unlikely that any given gene will be incorporated (much less have a related effect), but the sheer number of viruses involved in a single infection improve those odds considerably.
There's also the question of how the CRISPR molecules are introduced to the nucleus of the cells - a viral "carrier" is one technique, in which case you may now be infected with modified viruses with the potential to pass on the changes to other people as well. I recall one study where modified viruses were used to introduce photoreceptor-producing genes to specific kinds of brain cells - and the researchers were quick to point out that their chosen virus was harmless, rarely even causing noticeable symptoms. What they failed to address was that it WAS harmless, but now caused brain cells to grow photoreceptors - with unknown long term consequences, not to mention the potential developmental consequences if it infected a developing embryo.
Plus, there's environmental factors as well - alter the ecosystem (body), you alter its inhabitants. The bigger point is that we're just barely getting a grasp on the immediate consequences of gene editing (i.e., managing to make the functional changes we desire), and have yet to even seriously consider the second-order and further consequences that may ripple out from those changes. That would be fine so long as potential repercussions stopped with the patient, but become societies concern when we haven't even begun to ask the question of what can go wrong.
And before you dismiss that out of hand, consider that with all the years of Cas9/CRISPR research that has been done, as of last year there had been only *one* study done involving full gene-sequencing of the subjects to look for "off-target" modifications, and they found lots of them. Now, there were some serious shortcomings in the study that call it's results into question, but it still stands as the *only* serious study into immediate unintended modifications. In that kind of reckless environment, we need outside regulations to help limit the potential damage being done.
Humans have all the same urges - and other animals can choose to exert self control as well, otherwise training wouldn't be possible.
As for "rational" behavior - sure, complex logical thought is the one area where humans excel (though lots of other animals are capable of solving logic puzzles, so it's obviously a matter of degree, rather than a purely human trait). But for all it's potential it's very rarely used by humans to modify their own instinctual or trained behaviors, rational behavior is actually rather uncommon among humans. Hell, the entire field of marketing revolves around the fact that humans are quite easy to manipulate into behaving in predictably irrational fashions.
I see no reason to expect any such thing. What's the alternative? Doing all your business in cash and in person? It's not like there's a whole lot of businesses making a point of seriously protecting (much less not collecting) customer information - and in fact the few niche ones that *do* make those claims seem to as often as not do an especially bad job of delivering.
Hmm, you're right - though it did seem to start leaning over around the time it his max dynamic pressure.
I wonder... if their vacuum engine is notably more efficient than their atmospheric one, then it might make sense to just get out of the atmosphere as quickly/cheaply as possible, and then let a larger second stage worry about the acceleration. Especially if they're going with composite materials for the tanks so that the mass penalty of continuing to accelerate a larger, but mostly empty, tank is not so great. The square-cube law does favor larger tanks, and carbon-composite materials would move that "sweet spot" considerably.
I've got to agree - access to space it the natural point to mark the beginning of the Space Age. Historically, I think that will be seen as the beginning of our expansion, even if it started a little slowly. Whats a few decades to start in the face of history?
"Space Colonization Age" is just too wordy - and I doubt the distinction will really matter after the first generation of colonists have passed.
Sure, it's not that much harder to *get* to anywhere, assuming you're willing to wait years or decades to arrive. Actually *doing* anything there - mining, refining, manufacturing, colonizing etc... We currently don't have a lot of technology oriented towards those ends. And if we try to do it with accepted American/European levels of safety and refinement, it's liable to be a long, slow, expensive project.
On the other hand, while getting into orbit requires a lot of precision as every gram matters, actually *doing* things in space has a lot more room for "sloppiness", and may lend itself to a far more "rough and ready" approach, for those willing to simply spend as many lives as it takes. Granted air seals and other aspects of atmosphere management need a certain level of consideration - but while many are complex, they're not necessarily especially difficult or failure prone - we've been making viable long-term sealed terrariums for decades.
Meanwhile rockets, factories, etc. can be *sloppy* - early industrial age quality and precision would be far more than needed for such things. At least, if we assume that initially only bulk manufacturing is being done, with more "high tech" components being imported from Earth. Presumably paid for by the export of relatively useless rare metals found alongside the more immediately useful iron and water.
And of course if you *are* investing in advanced technology, all sorts of "experimental" technologies like 3D printing, humanoid robotics, and VR telepresence suddenly become far more immediately useful in space. I'd bet that quite often a VR controlled strong and nimble humanoid robot would be "hands on" enough to get most the benefit of direct human involvement. Not to mention making bathroom breaks far more convenient than a space suit.
Exactly what I came to say. Stock price (should) reflect the value of the company - the only way a breach affects the value is if it (A) causes the company to incur major financial penalties, or (B) causes the company to lose a lot of business
At present, neither is the case in the US, though in a better world both would be.
Well, I would assume that you could refuel at *any* moon base - making fuel being one of the primary reasons there is to create a moon base in the first place. The only exceptions I can think of are bases directly at the closest and/or furthest points on the moon, which would be the only points where a lunar space elevator could touch down, since the low rotational speed means they would have to extend through the Earth/Moon L1 or L2 points to be stable. But that presupposes that there's demand for a whole lot of high-efficiency moon-orbit transportation. Probably not too relevant to the first moon bases.
In fact, as I think on it, I can't think of a lot of reasons why a polar moon base would have any significant orbital (dis)advantages over equatorial one. Unlike the Earth, whose equatorial surface speed contributes ~460m/s towards orbital speed, the moon is barely spinning, with an equitorial speed of only 4.6m/s - barely a rounding error.
As for orbital mechanics themselves - I'm no expert, but at first glance it wouldn't seem to really matter what plane you're orbitting the moon since your entire orbit lies within a few degrees of the Moon's orbital plane. A polar orbit lacks the convenience of always having the same orbit have some point aligned/opposed to the Moon's orbital motion, but a polar orbit perpendicular to the Earth would, I would think, work almost as well. It wouldn't maintain that orientation as the moon orbitted, but if it's just a transitory orbit on the way to escape velocity, that doesn't really matter.
Obviously you've never attempted to explain quantum chromodynamics to a severely impaired person with an IQ of 50 or so. With sufficient effort maybe they can grasp the basic concepts - but they can't use them effectively, which means that as soon as you start discussing implications and applications they are completely incapable of having a useful opinion. And they're far more likely to prefer the leadership of the guy talking about snacks and video games, even if he's an idiot likely to kill everyone with food poisoning within the year.
That's an extreme example, but the point is the differences in IQ and what you're capable of understanding are very real. And if you don't actually *understand* the big picture, then it's just a picture you're taking completely on faith in the person painting it. In which case you follow whoever is painting the most appealing picture, even if it's a complete self-serving lie with no basis in reality.
As others have said, this is a tiny reactor where cooling is unlikely to be much of an issue. Even for something larger though, say they wanted a multi-megawatt reactor that could actually power a small colony - the answer is "yes"
There's massive quantities of water on Mars - the polar ice caps just for starters, but also lots of subsurface ice and potentially even briny liquid. But you don't need to consume water for cooling - that's just what we do here because boiling water and dumping the steam into the atmosphere is cheap and easy. On Mars you probably don't want to waste the water, or the heat, so you'd probably capture the steam and use it for radiant heating of the colony structures - steam heating is ancient technology at this point. If you're producing too much heat for just residential heating, you can also use it for melting and distilling ice, or just dump it into "geothermal" cooling loops, much as is done with borehole heating here. With an ambient temperature of around -67F dumping heat is unlikely to be an issue.
Everyone knows potatoes draw their power from the souls they devour, and there just aren't going to be enough people on Mars for that to work for quite some time.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the thing with "eventually" - it covers a lot of territory influenced by many things beyond your ability to predict. Even if you're correct, the devil's in the details and you could be off by decades.
But, the time is certainly coming - I've met several people who've discarded their desktop or laptop for a tablet. If all you do is browse the web and send an occasional email, there's not really much reason to use anything more complex.
As for PC - it may theoretically stand for Personal Computer, but I'm not sure it's actually been used that generically since the "Wintel duopoly" dominated the market. PC became synonymous with Wintel machine - either a desktop or "luggable". Laptops/notebooks still counted - they were clearly still a PC, just in a different form factor. Macintoshes decidedly did not though, despite Apples being some of the early popular PCs when the term was still generic. Hence the Mac-PC "wars".
Agreed - computing power and memory are physically shrinking faster than the typical user can find a use for a comparable volume of them. Or perhaps more to the point - computational energy efficiency is improving fast enough that the required cooling systems are shrinking rapidly. CPUs themselves never got much bigger than a postage stamp.
There's much to be said for the desktop form factor, but communication buses have reached the point where you can plug your tablet/phone/whatever into a single Thunderbolt cable to connect to multiple 4k screens and all your desired peripherals to get virtually all of the benefits wherever you happen to be - I can readily see the day when instead of borrowing a friend's computer to do something you'll just borrow their "desktop" to plug in your own pocket computer.
We're not nearly there yet, though Microsoft and several others are busy working on their "convergent interface"... maybe they'll manage something that doesn't suck before the day arrives. Myself, I think the two form-factors are likely too different in how they're used for a single GUI to avoid being deeply disappointing for one or both. But two interfaces overlayed on the same OS have plenty of potential.
And of course if augmented reality catches on you have a third interface to deal with - but as a long-time glasses wearer, I'd have to say they need to come with something pretty frigging compelling to make always wearing/carrying glasses, or even contacts, broadly appealing. So my guess is that's not going to be a popular mobile interface until such time as neural interfaces become commonplace. (A prospect that disturbs me greatly, but does seem rather likely).
And "beerly tolerate" is to deal with something annoying by consuming alcohol until they enter one of the previous two states.
Hey man, the new OS is 64 bit, not 33 - you can only use numbers greater than 9,223,372,036,854,775,807.
>Of course, there will come a time in the not-so-distant future when 64-Bit computers will get the cold shoulder.
You think? I'm not so sure. Or, at least it will take a lot longer than previous transitions.
The driving force behind bit-size increases seems to be RAM - vector processors (aka GPUs these days) and other SIMD techniques address performance issues quite sufficiently, and there's very little call for calculations to be performed more precisely than can be done in 32 bits, much less 64 (neglecting limited demand for exact calculations, which will always need to be implemented in software)
32 bit computers had been flirting with their limitations for a while - 32 bit addresses can only access 4 GB of RAM without all sorts of performance-killing jumping through hoops (pointer arithmetic is fundamental to almost everything). And unlike 16 bit computers (which can only natively address 64kB of RAM and required hoop-jumping from day one on PCs), 32 bit OSes were born in the time of the 386, when a couple MB of RAM was impressive, and 4GB was an unimaginably insane amount, so new OSes could get the performance benefit of assuming all RAM was directly addressable, with vast ranges of "this will never be used" address space that could be allocated to various non-RAM purposes (hence only being able to use ~3.5GB of your 4GB of RAM on Windows XP).
64-bit computers though are a far larger jump again. Going from the 286 (16 bit calculations, 24 bit addresses through "protected mode") to the 386 (32 bit native addresses) only introduced an extra 8 address bits - 256x times the space, from 16 MB to 4GB, or about 16 years by Moore's Law at the time. Going from 32 to 64 bits adds about 4 billion times the natively computable address space - or about 48 years by the modern accelerated Moore's Law. Meanwhile, actual uses for more memory seem to finally be slowing down - over a decade since Microsoft introduced a mainstream 64-bit OS, there's still not really much to be gained by most people having more than 8GB of RAM in a PC.
Having developed on both platforms (addmitedly only some on Apple), I have to say that Apple has a tendency to add a lot of little "programmer shinies" with every new update - handy new utilities, programming features, etc. that tempt developers to use them. Which then makes their software incompatible with older versions of the OS. So, if you want to keep running the latest versions of all your modern apps you pretty much need a fairly recent version of the OS.
Contrast that with Microsoft, whose "go suck it" attitude to developers, and tendency to try to replace old, reliable components with newer, more annoying ways of doing things, combined with their commitment to maintaining backwards compatibility, means that developers tend to stick with the old tried-and-true standbys, unless there's some compelling reason to move forward (e.g. powerful new features added in DirectX 10 and 11).
Apple's approach does a lot more to create a constantly improving programming environment (or at least the impression of one), but also keeps their users on a more vigorous upgrade treadmill.
That said - at this point I suspect most 32 bit-only Apple software can probably run in an "emulated" compatibility layer with plenty of performance, much as older XP apps can do on modern windows. But such compatibility is always imperfect, hence "will be the last macOS release to support 32-bit apps without compromise."
Agreed. This solution is nice if there's a few websites that you visit regularly that are so afflicted, but does nothing for random annoying embedded ads, etc. scattered across the net. Personally, any website that autoplays videos on a regular basis just stops getting visited.
Of course, it might be best to set that as a config option so Joe Average doesn't get confused by it.
Yeah, but that's a far less reliable rule, and this is life extension we're talking about - we probably won't survive to see version 5 unless we've already partaken of the fruits of earlier versions. With luck, and funding from the vast fortunes accumulated by the rich old men first able to cheat death, many of the later extensions will still work on those who already had earlier treatments.
I think we're a good ways away from understanding DNA well enough to do that - and even with a perfect transcoding there's no guarantee they'd actually grow the same organ as would be produced by human cells - an incredible amount of growth structure is governed by environmental conditions, rather than the DAN directly. Or alternately the DNA gives instructions on how to build structure in a given environment - change the environment, and the structure changes as well.
As a crude example, if researchers graft skin from opposite sides of a salamander's leg around a wound, it will grow a new leg at that location.
Plus, you'd still have the problem of tissue rejection - that "human" organ is still made out of pig cells.
On the other hand, we don't actually *need* to make human organs - just human-compatible ones. I suspect the modifications needed for that are relatively simple, at least if you could first manage some sort of "universal tissue donor" cellular changes first. Might be easier to start with a chimpanzee or bonobo though - nearly identical genetically and structurally. Tweak it to grow appropriately sized organs, but only a stub of a brain - minimizing ethical considerations while leaving it capable enough to be farmed rather than lab-grown. Of course, if you're doing that, you could always start with a human template - but that would probably make a lot of people a whole lot more uncomfortable, and could create some difficult social questions if interbreeding were possible. If phenominally stupid chimpanzee crossbreeds enter the wild, we can just let nature sort it out.
Hey, while we're at it maybe we can give the donor animal duplicate organs and the ability to regenerate - no need to kill it to get an organ, you just can't harvest the same organ again until the second one has had a chance to grow back. Much more efficient that way, and the donated organs would likely prove far more resilient than the originals.
2.1 for me. I never trust an x.0 version.
Is GIMPshop still a thing? I recall it being a "reskinned" version of GIMP modified to look more like Photoshop.and use the same hotkeys. Of course I had already spent most of my time in normal GIMP, so a prettier interface wasn't worth relearning the hotkeys. Especially since you never know how long such side branches will be maintained.
I'd have to say that the biggest advantage of GIMP is that you can use the same program on every computer you use, with no worrying about licenses, costs, or (mostly) operating system support or differences. For 90+% of people who really only use Photoshop as an occasional glorified basic photo editor, that alone probably makes it the smarter skill investment. If you're a professional graphic artist, then maybe Photoshop caters to your needs enough to make it worth the trouble, GIMP certainly has some shortcomings in that realm, but that's a tiny minority of users.
Meanwhile, the biggest disadvantage is probably, as ever, the extremely unflattering name.
It mostly already is. I pay the full purchase price every month. Rather painful at $0,000.00 per year, but I'm pretty that if I miss a payment they'll reformat my computer after sharing the most embarrassing samples from my porn stash with everyone I know.
There's also support contracts from many different providers, which are typically sold in a subscription model as well - generally more expensive than Linux itself, but it's a strictly optional expenditure, and usually gets you much more responsive support than you'd get from most large software publishers.
An extra $20-$50 per seat per year is enough that you can't afford it? Must either not be very valuable to you - or you need to hire (and listen to) a decent budget manager. Not to mention, a Photoshop business account license is currently $30/month, or $360/year/seat - just *slightly* more than your supposed $20 each for 5 licenses. (5 *installs*, such as in MS Office home edition is not quite same thing, and in that case the license explicitly prohibits you from using it in a business environment. I don't see any such option mentioned on the Adobe site: https://www.adobe.com/creative...)
And frankly, if your profit margins really are that slim then I'd think the perpetual license would be far more attractive, since a bad year would just mean you put off the next upgrade for a year or two and make do using the exact same software that's been getting the job done fine for the last several years. With a subscription you no longer have that option, and are completely at the mercy of the publisher's to not to raise the price and drive you out of business tomorrow.
Bottom line - if a subscription model would actually save you money, then they'd have very little incentive to move to it.
Natural gene transfer with viruses is hardly unheard of - something like 8% of the human genome is viral in origin, and it can reasonably be expected that the reverse happens as well. After all, they do hijack our own DNA replication equipment in the course of their normal reproduction. It may be spectacularly unlikely that any given gene will be incorporated (much less have a related effect), but the sheer number of viruses involved in a single infection improve those odds considerably.
There's also the question of how the CRISPR molecules are introduced to the nucleus of the cells - a viral "carrier" is one technique, in which case you may now be infected with modified viruses with the potential to pass on the changes to other people as well. I recall one study where modified viruses were used to introduce photoreceptor-producing genes to specific kinds of brain cells - and the researchers were quick to point out that their chosen virus was harmless, rarely even causing noticeable symptoms. What they failed to address was that it WAS harmless, but now caused brain cells to grow photoreceptors - with unknown long term consequences, not to mention the potential developmental consequences if it infected a developing embryo.
Plus, there's environmental factors as well - alter the ecosystem (body), you alter its inhabitants. The bigger point is that we're just barely getting a grasp on the immediate consequences of gene editing (i.e., managing to make the functional changes we desire), and have yet to even seriously consider the second-order and further consequences that may ripple out from those changes. That would be fine so long as potential repercussions stopped with the patient, but become societies concern when we haven't even begun to ask the question of what can go wrong.
And before you dismiss that out of hand, consider that with all the years of Cas9/CRISPR research that has been done, as of last year there had been only *one* study done involving full gene-sequencing of the subjects to look for "off-target" modifications, and they found lots of them. Now, there were some serious shortcomings in the study that call it's results into question, but it still stands as the *only* serious study into immediate unintended modifications. In that kind of reckless environment, we need outside regulations to help limit the potential damage being done.
Humans have all the same urges - and other animals can choose to exert self control as well, otherwise training wouldn't be possible.
As for "rational" behavior - sure, complex logical thought is the one area where humans excel (though lots of other animals are capable of solving logic puzzles, so it's obviously a matter of degree, rather than a purely human trait). But for all it's potential it's very rarely used by humans to modify their own instinctual or trained behaviors, rational behavior is actually rather uncommon among humans. Hell, the entire field of marketing revolves around the fact that humans are quite easy to manipulate into behaving in predictably irrational fashions.
Sure, why not. Now, do you have any objective evidence to support that, or is it just something you believe on faith?
I see no reason to expect any such thing. What's the alternative? Doing all your business in cash and in person? It's not like there's a whole lot of businesses making a point of seriously protecting (much less not collecting) customer information - and in fact the few niche ones that *do* make those claims seem to as often as not do an especially bad job of delivering.
Hmm, you're right - though it did seem to start leaning over around the time it his max dynamic pressure.
I wonder... if their vacuum engine is notably more efficient than their atmospheric one, then it might make sense to just get out of the atmosphere as quickly/cheaply as possible, and then let a larger second stage worry about the acceleration. Especially if they're going with composite materials for the tanks so that the mass penalty of continuing to accelerate a larger, but mostly empty, tank is not so great. The square-cube law does favor larger tanks, and carbon-composite materials would move that "sweet spot" considerably.
I've got to agree - access to space it the natural point to mark the beginning of the Space Age. Historically, I think that will be seen as the beginning of our expansion, even if it started a little slowly. Whats a few decades to start in the face of history?
"Space Colonization Age" is just too wordy - and I doubt the distinction will really matter after the first generation of colonists have passed.
Sure, it's not that much harder to *get* to anywhere, assuming you're willing to wait years or decades to arrive. Actually *doing* anything there - mining, refining, manufacturing, colonizing etc... We currently don't have a lot of technology oriented towards those ends. And if we try to do it with accepted American/European levels of safety and refinement, it's liable to be a long, slow, expensive project.
On the other hand, while getting into orbit requires a lot of precision as every gram matters, actually *doing* things in space has a lot more room for "sloppiness", and may lend itself to a far more "rough and ready" approach, for those willing to simply spend as many lives as it takes. Granted air seals and other aspects of atmosphere management need a certain level of consideration - but while many are complex, they're not necessarily especially difficult or failure prone - we've been making viable long-term sealed terrariums for decades.
Meanwhile rockets, factories, etc. can be *sloppy* - early industrial age quality and precision would be far more than needed for such things. At least, if we assume that initially only bulk manufacturing is being done, with more "high tech" components being imported from Earth. Presumably paid for by the export of relatively useless rare metals found alongside the more immediately useful iron and water.
And of course if you *are* investing in advanced technology, all sorts of "experimental" technologies like 3D printing, humanoid robotics, and VR telepresence suddenly become far more immediately useful in space. I'd bet that quite often a VR controlled strong and nimble humanoid robot would be "hands on" enough to get most the benefit of direct human involvement. Not to mention making bathroom breaks far more convenient than a space suit.
Exactly what I came to say. Stock price (should) reflect the value of the company - the only way a breach affects the value is if it
(A) causes the company to incur major financial penalties, or
(B) causes the company to lose a lot of business
At present, neither is the case in the US, though in a better world both would be.
Well, I would assume that you could refuel at *any* moon base - making fuel being one of the primary reasons there is to create a moon base in the first place. The only exceptions I can think of are bases directly at the closest and/or furthest points on the moon, which would be the only points where a lunar space elevator could touch down, since the low rotational speed means they would have to extend through the Earth/Moon L1 or L2 points to be stable. But that presupposes that there's demand for a whole lot of high-efficiency moon-orbit transportation. Probably not too relevant to the first moon bases.
In fact, as I think on it, I can't think of a lot of reasons why a polar moon base would have any significant orbital (dis)advantages over equatorial one. Unlike the Earth, whose equatorial surface speed contributes ~460m/s towards orbital speed, the moon is barely spinning, with an equitorial speed of only 4.6m/s - barely a rounding error.
As for orbital mechanics themselves - I'm no expert, but at first glance it wouldn't seem to really matter what plane you're orbitting the moon since your entire orbit lies within a few degrees of the Moon's orbital plane. A polar orbit lacks the convenience of always having the same orbit have some point aligned/opposed to the Moon's orbital motion, but a polar orbit perpendicular to the Earth would, I would think, work almost as well. It wouldn't maintain that orientation as the moon orbitted, but if it's just a transitory orbit on the way to escape velocity, that doesn't really matter.
Obviously you've never attempted to explain quantum chromodynamics to a severely impaired person with an IQ of 50 or so. With sufficient effort maybe they can grasp the basic concepts - but they can't use them effectively, which means that as soon as you start discussing implications and applications they are completely incapable of having a useful opinion. And they're far more likely to prefer the leadership of the guy talking about snacks and video games, even if he's an idiot likely to kill everyone with food poisoning within the year.
That's an extreme example, but the point is the differences in IQ and what you're capable of understanding are very real. And if you don't actually *understand* the big picture, then it's just a picture you're taking completely on faith in the person painting it. In which case you follow whoever is painting the most appealing picture, even if it's a complete self-serving lie with no basis in reality.
As others have said, this is a tiny reactor where cooling is unlikely to be much of an issue. Even for something larger though, say they wanted a multi-megawatt reactor that could actually power a small colony - the answer is "yes"
There's massive quantities of water on Mars - the polar ice caps just for starters, but also lots of subsurface ice and potentially even briny liquid. But you don't need to consume water for cooling - that's just what we do here because boiling water and dumping the steam into the atmosphere is cheap and easy. On Mars you probably don't want to waste the water, or the heat, so you'd probably capture the steam and use it for radiant heating of the colony structures - steam heating is ancient technology at this point. If you're producing too much heat for just residential heating, you can also use it for melting and distilling ice, or just dump it into "geothermal" cooling loops, much as is done with borehole heating here. With an ambient temperature of around -67F dumping heat is unlikely to be an issue.
Everyone knows potatoes draw their power from the souls they devour, and there just aren't going to be enough people on Mars for that to work for quite some time.