It doesn't have to be one of those two, though that's what you usually end up with. Even if you start out based on pure altruism, once you get popular enough your expenses usually rise almost in proportion, and in the end the service must either die from congestion or you have to get money to expand it somehow.
What ties popularity of the service to increased costs is the centralized server model. More users means more bandwidth, processing and support is needed. If you're responsible for all (or any) of those, that will be expensive. However, it is possible to distribute these loads to the users themselves by using a peer-to-peer model. File-sharing networks are examples of this, but the same approach can work for chat, forums and similar (even youtube-like services as long as people aren't on too asymmetric internet connections). Even the support task can be distributed. A striking example of self-policing and self-supporting services are Stackoverflow and Wikipedia (though these are centralized in other respects).
By combining these different aspects of peer-to-peer architecture, you can make a service which scales to arbitrary numbers of users (because the available resources are proportional to the number of users), which is resilient to server failure, and which can survive even if the people who started it lose interest or sell out.
The disadvantage is that designing such systems is much harder than designing a centralized system, that performance will be more unpredictable, it's hard to achive very low latencies, and that the creator will have less control. It's not the sort of thing I would expect a big company to go for, but I think it has the most long-term promise if you don't need to make money directly off it.
Oops, I somehow used the wrong link twice there. I'll try again: The innocent-looking but really horrible Einstein equation, and how to solve it numerically on your friendly local supercomputer.
Yes, that's exactly what is being referred to here. The Einstein Equation is a horrible differential equation which can only be solved analytically for a few idealized cases. However, they can be solved numerically (taking several thousand CPU hours for a common case like two colliding black holes, I think). So it's not quite right to say that we can't solve them in complex circumstances - only that's it's quite slow.
While quantum mechanics is involved in setting up this analogy (e.g. to describe the atoms it uses as building blocks), the thing that is being simulated is classical general relativity. This has nothing to do with quantum gravity, be that string theory or other candidates. So the sibling poster is confused.
I haven't read the paper in detail, but I wonder about the accuracy of this analogy. Much like numerical simulations, this analogy approximates spacetime by using discrete elements, in this case a grid of atoms trapped by lasers. I'm not sure how large optical lattices are nowadays, but the few numbers I've found seem to have hundreds of lattice points. If that's representative, that's a very low number, far worse than numerical simulations. I therefore suspect that numerical simulations of comparable (i.e. very low) accuracy would be fast enough as to make the lattice approach pointless. But perhaps optical lattices will improve faster than our computers (or perhaps I'm wrong about lattice sizes).
Sadly, there are short-term incentives for keeping population growth up - every time you decrease the rate of population growth you must endure a period of high average age in the population, and the standard way of dealing with this seems to be to delay it indefinitely by encouraging (or at least not discouraging) more children.
When overpopulation is discussed, it is usually framed in terms of the population in developing countries, and indeed that's were the most dramatic growth is. But on a per-person basis, one less child in a rich country like the USA corresponds to more than ten children in a poor country like India when considering energy consumption (and probably similar figures for other resources).
Oddly, despite total resource use being the product of population and resource use per capita, it's become a bit of a taboo to talk about the former.
Of course, reducing the population has some large disadvantages too. If we only had 1/100 of the current population, science and technology would probably proceed much more slowly because there wouldn't be as many scientists. The same would apply to cultural production, and in general things would happen more slowly. But with a much lower population, each person could be a total environmental hog and the world would still be better off than it is now.
Well said. Not only does an ad-blocker protect you from having your attention diverted and your feelings manipulated to bias your future decisions, it also closes the largest channel for distribution of viruses and other exploits, improves your privacy and speeds up page load times. The only argument against is that it may reduce the income of the web-site operators. But in this case the grandparent wans that to happen by his own word! So it's win-win, really.
In fact, by continuing to use the site while using adblock the grandparent will be (in the absence of network effects) be hurting their wallet more than if he just boycots it, since people who boycott don't put any load on their infrastruture. (That conclusion may change if you take indirect effects into account though: By posting here you make slashdot more valuable to other users, which may increase the total traffic.)
What makes you think that? Is the USA military so inefficient that it can't deter attacks without spending several times more than its rivals? For example, the USA spends more than 7 times more on its military than Russia. Also, just before the second world war American military spending was only 0.8% of its GDP, showing that military spending can safely stay low in peace-time and still be rapidly ramped up if a major war appears. For comparison, it is currently about 3-4%.
The direcly linked fukushima article is very low on numbers (do journalists think people are allergic to them or something?), but it links to the actual scientific article. There we find this plot of the mortality rate as a function of ingested radioactivity for the pale green butterfly larvae. The changes in mortality are large, from 20% to 80%. The trend is positive, but noisy. The significance of a positive trend is about 3 sigma.
This is perhaps the textbook example of how science is misunderstood. Science cannot prove how something that was not directly observed happened. It can only disprove certain proposed mechanisms based on current observation and understanding.
That's still a bit misleading. It is right that science can't prove how something that was not directly observed happened. But it also can't prove how something that was directly observed happened either. The difference between direct and indirect observation is arbitrary and insubstantial.
Not only can you not how something happened. You can't prove if it happened either. In fact, you can't prove anyting in science. You also can't disprove anything. Proof and disproof are too strong words, and only apply to pure logic and math. As soon as the real world is involved, you can only make things seem more or less likely.
What we call an observation is really just a hypothesis: "I think this instrument works like this. I think I conducted the experiment correctly. I think my visual experience of seeing the instrument corresponds to the instrument actually being there. I think I read off the value 2.73. I think this should be interpreted as a decimal number. I think my memory is reliable. I think I wrote down the value correctly...." and so on. It's all a big network of hypotheses, with sensory impressions forming the outer surface of the network, and internal links being derived hypotheses such as the laws of physics etc.
Science is the process of critically examining that network, prodding it and looking for strain caused by hypotheses that contradict each other (hypothesis 1: "All apples fall up", hypotheses 2-100: "I saw an apple fall down"). When this happens, a scientist tries to come up with an alternative hypothesis that causes less contradiction ("Apples fall down"). And he then prods it to see if he can make new contradictions spring up. When a part of the network is low on contradiction, we are more confident in the hypotheses there, and vice versa. That is what we mean by scientific knowledge and scientific certainty. You are never 100% sure about anything. But some hypotheses are consistent with so many other hypotheses that we are pretty damn sure about them.
Just so it's completely clear (the parent is probably aware of this): The dust levels do not cast the Big Bang into doubt. We have enormous emounts of evidence for the Big Bang, with the most important ones being:
1. The cosmic microwave background 2. The fact that it follows a black-body spectrum 3. The pattern of wiggles in it 4. The apparent velocities of galaxies 5. The red-shift of distant objects 6. The relative abundance of light elements in the universe 7. The clumpiness in the distribution of galaxies 8. Distant objects look systematically younger than near ones 9. No stars older than 14 billion years, but lots of stars nearly that old
And that's just off the top of my head. And all the millions of data points that make up the of the above groups are consistent with each other and with a simple 6-parameter model. None of the points above are invalidated by the higher than expected levels of polarized dust, which are about measuring a very weak sub-pattern in the pattern of wiggles in the cosmic microwave background. Most of the wiggles are much stronger than the dust, and have been measured at multiple frequencies.
No, what the new results call into question is the amplitude of the gravitational wave background. If BICEP2 were right, it would have a pretty high value - so high that local experiments in our solar system might detect them directly in the near future (20 years or so). And such a high value would say a lot about extremely high energy physics in the very early universe. With the cosmic microwave background itself we can only see back to about 380000 years after the start of the Big Bang - what happens before then is something we have to infer indirectly because the microwave background is in the way and won't let us see further bakc than that.
But if we can measure the gravitational wave background (even indirectly through its imprint on the cosmic microwave background), then that lets us see back much further, to a tiny fraction of a second after the beginning of the big bang. That might tell us about a hypothetical but popular phase in the very early stages of the Big Bang called inflation (do not confuse this with the normal expansion of the universe - that's not in doubt), and woud at the same time probe physics at energies far higher than what we can reach in particle accelerators. That's what all the excitement was about. And that's what's called into doubt. The gravitational waves might be weaker after all. Perhaps they aren't even there (the primordial ones, that is. We already have very robust indirect measurements of gravitational wave emission from inspiraling neutron stars). That's significant. But it's not the same as saying the Big Bang was just dust. That would be like saying the Earth doesn't exist because we were wrong about the shape of its core.
There was little reason to be worried about those shells. And there still isn't. They are dominated by synchrotron radiation, which is only important at frequencies quite a bit lower than where BICEP2 observes. And while one might expect there to be a lot of dust in them too, they don't actually show up when you go and measure the dust. Even when you measure the dust polarization. Look at figure 2 in this recent Planck article, for example. The BICEP2 region itself is in the masked region, but the radio loop that passes through the BICEP2 patch should cover a large part of the sky and hence be visible outside the mask. It isn't really visible. If it is there, it is probably not important compared to the rest of the dust. It also isn't visible in the course-grained polarized dust maps published today that actually covers the BICEP2 region.
On the other hand, there are rumours that Planck is preparing an article about radio loops, so there might be something interesting after all. Or they might be writing to report the loops are unimportant. In a few months we will know much more. But it can't be as important an effect as you're making it out to be.
How does blocking them earlier save bandwidth? AdBlock makes your browser not even try to download the blocked element. I don't see how that results in any useless traffic.
There have been unusually many good answers here, but this is the best one so far. This is the most realistic way to make a useful contribution to astronomy for the original poster, and it does not involve 25 years of training before probably not getting there.
Well, if you only want to consider what is temporarily in the air
It's not that I only want to consider that. I'm just pointing it out because you were ignoring that part.
Coal ash has raw chemical edges and is less healthy than dust from the ground for that reason. But the radiation aspect is unimportant.
I know, and I said so in both my previous post and the one before it. The extra contribution of radioactivity from coal ash is tiny, and nothing to worry about. It just isn't zero, like you were saying.
Why did the maximum they can fleece people for in Germany go up
You pointed out that German electricity costs generally tracked European energy costs, and that they were all roughly 3x US electricity costs. Now you're saying it went up? Which point are you trying to make?
The point I'm trying to make, and which you seem to be implicitly agreeing with, is that the German reneable energy expenditures do not work as an explanation for why its prices increased, because it would predict that Germany's electricity prices would see a large increase relative to the rest of Europe, which hasn't paid nearly as much for renewables.
You then came with a second hypothesis, which instead explains the European and German price increases as being due to insufficient competition. I haven't investigated this possibility, but I note that if this is the dominant driving force behind the price increases, then you would expect to see the same price curve for Germany whether they installed lots of renewable energy or not. If your second hypothesis is true, then the first one must at most be a very weak effect, responsible for almost none of the price increase. So in that case one cannot say that renewable energy expenditure is the cause of that 3x price difference between the USA and Germany.
This isn't the situation I was talking about. I agree that once the fly ash has mixed with the soil, it doesn't add any radiation. But I was describing what happens before it ends up as a layer on the ground. It has to travel there from the exhaust pipes of the coal plant trough the air. During this phase, the ash isn't screening anything. It is simply adding on to whatever dust would be in the air otherwise.
Just because the ash adds no radiation during one phase of its life (the settled down on the ground phase) doesn't mean that it doesn't add radiation at all.
None of it, I presume, since the term "investment in renewable energy" is b.s.; investment implies an expected return, and people are never going to see a return.
I did not have that meaning in mind. I should have said "spending money on renewable energy". Sorry for being misleading.
"Investment in renewable energy" is just Germany's preferred fig leaf for crony capitalism involving energy companies and lobbyists. Denmark and other EU nations have other fig leafs. That explains the otherwise remarkable coincidence that energy prices are so similar: it's determined not by how much countries spend to produce energy, but by the maximum amount they can fleece consumers for.
So if I understand correctly, you are arguing that Germany's spending on renewable energy has made electricity there much more expensive. Meanwhile, most other countries in Europe have undertaken a series of other unrelated huge projects, resulting in each country's electricity price increasing at the same rate. These price increases are all of similar magnitude because power companies througout Europe don't compete properly, and just charge whatever the market can bear.
If I caught your meaning correctly, then doesn't that mean that the price increase in Germany actually had nothing to do with the renewable energy expenditure? Why did the maximum they can fleece people for in Germany go up, and what does that have to do with renewable energy? I would think that an increase in the "maximum fleecable amount" would be due to a general increase in average household income, not due to potentially tax-increasing expenditures. I think something is missing to make this argument work.
Actually, no. Fly ash has the same concentration of uranium as soil so it has no effect.
I don't follow your argument.
If you didn't have coal power, you would be exposed to a certain amount of radioactivity from soil, part of which would be through breathing in dust containing traces of uranium. If you have coal power, there would now be fly ash in the air in addition to the dust. It woud not replace the dust. So you would now be inhaling more uranium than before. Not that it would be much, in any case, though.
Radioactivity is not really what you should be worried about with fly ash. It causes lung damage just fine without radioactivity, in the form of silicosis, and is a significant cause of death in industrial countries, especially China.
How much of that comes from their invesment in renewable energy, though? Other neighboring European countries that have not invested in renewables have comparable prices, as shown on this map. Denmark is 13% more expensive and Italy is 15% less expensive and the UK is 36% less expensive. Germany is towards the top there, but it is not an outlier. There are a few countries with prices comparable to the USA in the EU, such as Estonia which is 2.4 times chepear than Germany. But it seems strange to claim that the main difference between Germany and Estonia is the amount of renewables. And as this image shows, the price of electricity in Germany has been following the average in the European Union for some time now, which again doesn't match with the hypothesis that power in Germany is more expensive than in the USA because of all the solar power.
When these drives were first announced it was speculated that they would use heat-assisted magnetic recording, which could store a bit into a single magnetic grain rather than a domain consisting of hundreds of them. But it turned out that they used shingled magnetic recording instead, which seems to have less long-term promise. What's the news on HAMR? Is it still being pursued?
An "atomic bomb unit" is a very loose concept, based on the yield of the obsolete Hiroshima bomb. this graph shows the yield of various atomic bombs of the USA. This meteor, with a yield of about 440 kt of TNT, would be smack in the middle of the distribution, with bombs ranging from 100 times less powerful to 100 times more powerful. So it was a very powerful explosion. It's good it happened so far up.
Thansk for the well-researched reply. The sources all back up your numbers (though the cnet one was very long). But one thing that isn't clear to me is what fraction of that licensing income that come as a result of a lawsuit or settlement, and what fraction was voluntary. As I said, I thought htat most people who paid licensing fees to Intellectual Ventures did so because they were sued.
I agree that much of the investment in their patent pool could count as licensing fees, since people join it for fear of being sued otherwise. But the original large investments that originally formed the company were different.
Do yuo have a source for that? I thought inellectual ventures got most of its income by suing (either directly or indirectly through another company) and scaring the other side into an expensive settlement followed by license payments from then on. It's not like a warehouse where people come looking for neat ideas.
How many of those who are paying license fees or settlements to intellectual ventures for your patent (and indirectly paying you) had read your patent before infringing on it? If they hadn't, how does you and intellectual ventures being paid help society or speed up innvoation in any way? If it were me receiving money from intellectual ventures, I would feel pretty bad about it.
At the same time as you're selling your patent to a patent troll, I'm in the process of starting up a company based on my own invention, "continuous transparent wipers". Soon the wipers are selling like hot butter, and we think we might just pull this off. But then, out of the blue, my small company is hit by a lawsuit from the same patent extortionist you dealt with. In fact, they are using the very patent you sold them to sue us. They threaten to take us to court, and though we never even heard of your invention before, it is not clear that there isn't some overlap between our inventions. Our lawyer tells us that we cannot be sure to win, and that the cost of fighting this in court would bankrupt us. So we settle with the patent troll. They only want slightly less than what would kill us.
At the same time, the patent extortionist is using the patent to sue several others who came up with similar-sounding ideas. It's not that the patent extortionist is trying to discourage innovation as such - that's just an unfortunate but acceptable side-effect of its business model. Only people who pay it can be allowed to implement, and thankfully many are willing to give it more ammunition for a quick buck.
So to summarize: People who have a good idea but can't be bothered to turn it into a physical product patent it and sell the patent to a patent troll. It then waits for somebody who actually does invest in their own invention, and then uses the patent to extort them. This is how patent trolls usually work. It is very uncommon for somebody to go looking for a patent that solves some problem, find it in a patent database, and then pay for the privilege of using it. Instead, they come up with a solution on their own, use it to start a successful business, and then are ambushed by a patent they never even heard about.
This de-incentivizes people from going further than the idea step with an invention. When most patent infringements are accidental, it says something about how trivial the patent was in the first place. They are too broad, are granted too easily, and it is too expensive to determine the merit of a patent, and what infringes. It is bad enough that normal companies have them, but at least they have scruples in using them. Patent extortionists have no such inhibitions.
As a closing note: There is, as far as I know, no evidence that patents increase innovation. When patent power is increasd, the rate of innovation does not go up. Similarly, when patents are introduced to a new field where patents were previously not allowed (such as software quite recently), the rate of innovation does not go up. Empirical evidence is not on the side of the patent system. It was well meant, but negative second-order effects turned out to be more important than the positive immediate effects.
Thank you for posting this. That quote really sounded like it was taken out of context, and indeed it was. The person asking the question is putting forth the thesis that it is destiny that Russia be involved in a large war every 100 years or so (a cyclic history hypothesis), and Putn's reply is basically that Russia doesn't want a large war, and that due to nuclear weapons, other nations won't want a large war either. That is "don't worry, you're safe". It seems to be a calming satement meant at his own population rather than an agressive nuclear threat. So far off from the situation during the cold war, when threats of nuclear annihilation were thrown around over official diplomatic channels.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't have to be one of those two, though that's what you usually end up with. Even if you start out based on pure altruism, once you get popular enough your expenses usually rise almost in proportion, and in the end the service must either die from congestion or you have to get money to expand it somehow.
What ties popularity of the service to increased costs is the centralized server model. More users means more bandwidth, processing and support is needed. If you're responsible for all (or any) of those, that will be expensive. However, it is possible to distribute these loads to the users themselves by using a peer-to-peer model. File-sharing networks are examples of this, but the same approach can work for chat, forums and similar (even youtube-like services as long as people aren't on too asymmetric internet connections). Even the support task can be distributed. A striking example of self-policing and self-supporting services are Stackoverflow and Wikipedia (though these are centralized in other respects).
By combining these different aspects of peer-to-peer architecture, you can make a service which scales to arbitrary numbers of users (because the available resources are proportional to the number of users), which is resilient to server failure, and which can survive even if the people who started it lose interest or sell out.
The disadvantage is that designing such systems is much harder than designing a centralized system, that performance will be more unpredictable, it's hard to achive very low latencies, and that the creator will have less control. It's not the sort of thing I would expect a big company to go for, but I think it has the most long-term promise if you don't need to make money directly off it.
Oops, I somehow used the wrong link twice there. I'll try again:
The innocent-looking but really horrible Einstein equation, and how to solve it numerically on your friendly local supercomputer.
Yes, that's exactly what is being referred to here. The Einstein Equation is a horrible differential equation which can only be solved analytically for a few idealized cases. However, they can be solved numerically (taking several thousand CPU hours for a common case like two colliding black holes, I think). So it's not quite right to say that we can't solve them in complex circumstances - only that's it's quite slow.
While quantum mechanics is involved in setting up this analogy (e.g. to describe the atoms it uses as building blocks), the thing that is being simulated is classical general relativity. This has nothing to do with quantum gravity, be that string theory or other candidates. So the sibling poster is confused.
I haven't read the paper in detail, but I wonder about the accuracy of this analogy. Much like numerical simulations, this analogy approximates spacetime by using discrete elements, in this case a grid of atoms trapped by lasers. I'm not sure how large optical lattices are nowadays, but the few numbers I've found seem to have hundreds of lattice points. If that's representative, that's a very low number, far worse than numerical simulations. I therefore suspect that numerical simulations of comparable (i.e. very low) accuracy would be fast enough as to make the lattice approach pointless. But perhaps optical lattices will improve faster than our computers (or perhaps I'm wrong about lattice sizes).
Well said!
Sadly, there are short-term incentives for keeping population growth up - every time you decrease the rate of population growth you must endure a period of high average age in the population, and the standard way of dealing with this seems to be to delay it indefinitely by encouraging (or at least not discouraging) more children.
When overpopulation is discussed, it is usually framed in terms of the population in developing countries, and indeed that's were the most dramatic growth is. But on a per-person basis, one less child in a rich country like the USA corresponds to more than ten children in a poor country like India when considering energy consumption (and probably similar figures for other resources).
Oddly, despite total resource use being the product of population and resource use per capita, it's become a bit of a taboo to talk about the former.
Of course, reducing the population has some large disadvantages too. If we only had 1/100 of the current population, science and technology would probably proceed much more slowly because there wouldn't be as many scientists. The same would apply to cultural production, and in general things would happen more slowly. But with a much lower population, each person could be a total environmental hog and the world would still be better off than it is now.
Well said. Not only does an ad-blocker protect you from having your attention diverted and your feelings manipulated to bias your future decisions, it also closes the largest channel for distribution of viruses and other exploits, improves your privacy and speeds up page load times. The only argument against is that it may reduce the income of the web-site operators. But in this case the grandparent wans that to happen by his own word! So it's win-win, really.
In fact, by continuing to use the site while using adblock the grandparent will be (in the absence of network effects) be hurting their wallet more than if he just boycots it, since people who boycott don't put any load on their infrastruture. (That conclusion may change if you take indirect effects into account though: By posting here you make slashdot more valuable to other users, which may increase the total traffic.)
What makes you think that? Is the USA military so inefficient that it can't deter attacks without spending several times more than its rivals? For example, the USA spends more than 7 times more on its military than Russia. Also, just before the second world war American military spending was only 0.8% of its GDP, showing that military spending can safely stay low in peace-time and still be rapidly ramped up if a major war appears. For comparison, it is currently about 3-4%.
The direcly linked fukushima article is very low on numbers (do journalists think people are allergic to them or something?), but it links to the actual scientific article. There we find this plot of the mortality rate as a function of ingested radioactivity for the pale green butterfly larvae. The changes in mortality are large, from 20% to 80%. The trend is positive, but noisy. The significance of a positive trend is about 3 sigma.
This is perhaps the textbook example of how science is misunderstood. Science cannot prove how something that was not directly observed happened. It can only disprove certain proposed mechanisms based on current observation and understanding.
That's still a bit misleading. It is right that science can't prove how something that was not directly observed happened. But it also can't prove how something that was directly observed happened either. The difference between direct and indirect observation is arbitrary and insubstantial.
Not only can you not how something happened. You can't prove if it happened either. In fact, you can't prove anyting in science. You also can't disprove anything. Proof and disproof are too strong words, and only apply to pure logic and math. As soon as the real world is involved, you can only make things seem more or less likely.
What we call an observation is really just a hypothesis: "I think this instrument works like this. I think I conducted the experiment correctly. I think my visual experience of seeing the instrument corresponds to the instrument actually being there. I think I read off the value 2.73. I think this should be interpreted as a decimal number. I think my memory is reliable. I think I wrote down the value correctly...." and so on. It's all a big network of hypotheses, with sensory impressions forming the outer surface of the network, and internal links being derived hypotheses such as the laws of physics etc.
Science is the process of critically examining that network, prodding it and looking for strain caused by hypotheses that contradict each other (hypothesis 1: "All apples fall up", hypotheses 2-100: "I saw an apple fall down"). When this happens, a scientist tries to come up with an alternative hypothesis that causes less contradiction ("Apples fall down"). And he then prods it to see if he can make new contradictions spring up. When a part of the network is low on contradiction, we are more confident in the hypotheses there, and vice versa. That is what we mean by scientific knowledge and scientific certainty. You are never 100% sure about anything. But some hypotheses are consistent with so many other hypotheses that we are pretty damn sure about them.
Just so it's completely clear (the parent is probably aware of this): The dust levels do not cast the Big Bang into doubt. We have enormous emounts of evidence for the Big Bang, with the most important ones being:
1. The cosmic microwave background
2. The fact that it follows a black-body spectrum
3. The pattern of wiggles in it
4. The apparent velocities of galaxies
5. The red-shift of distant objects
6. The relative abundance of light elements in the universe
7. The clumpiness in the distribution of galaxies
8. Distant objects look systematically younger than near ones
9. No stars older than 14 billion years, but lots of stars nearly that old
And that's just off the top of my head. And all the millions of data points that make up the of the above groups are consistent with each other and with a simple 6-parameter model. None of the points above are invalidated by the higher than expected levels of polarized dust, which are about measuring a very weak sub-pattern in the pattern of wiggles in the cosmic microwave background. Most of the wiggles are much stronger than the dust, and have been measured at multiple frequencies.
No, what the new results call into question is the amplitude of the gravitational wave background. If BICEP2 were right, it would have a pretty high value - so high that local experiments in our solar system might detect them directly in the near future (20 years or so). And such a high value would say a lot about extremely high energy physics in the very early universe. With the cosmic microwave background itself we can only see back to about 380000 years after the start of the Big Bang - what happens before then is something we have to infer indirectly because the microwave background is in the way and won't let us see further bakc than that.
But if we can measure the gravitational wave background (even indirectly through its imprint on the cosmic microwave background), then that lets us see back much further, to a tiny fraction of a second after the beginning of the big bang. That might tell us about a hypothetical but popular phase in the very early stages of the Big Bang called inflation (do not confuse this with the normal expansion of the universe - that's not in doubt), and woud at the same time probe physics at energies far higher than what we can reach in particle accelerators. That's what all the excitement was about. And that's what's called into doubt. The gravitational waves might be weaker after all. Perhaps they aren't even there (the primordial ones, that is. We already have very robust indirect measurements of gravitational wave emission from inspiraling neutron stars). That's significant. But it's not the same as saying the Big Bang was just dust. That would be like saying the Earth doesn't exist because we were wrong about the shape of its core.
There was little reason to be worried about those shells. And there still isn't. They are dominated by synchrotron radiation, which is only important at frequencies quite a bit lower than where BICEP2 observes. And while one might expect there to be a lot of dust in them too, they don't actually show up when you go and measure the dust. Even when you measure the dust polarization. Look at figure 2 in this recent Planck article, for example. The BICEP2 region itself is in the masked region, but the radio loop that passes through the BICEP2 patch should cover a large part of the sky and hence be visible outside the mask. It isn't really visible. If it is there, it is probably not important compared to the rest of the dust. It also isn't visible in the course-grained polarized dust maps published today that actually covers the BICEP2 region.
On the other hand, there are rumours that Planck is preparing an article about radio loops, so there might be something interesting after all. Or they might be writing to report the loops are unimportant. In a few months we will know much more. But it can't be as important an effect as you're making it out to be.
How does blocking them earlier save bandwidth? AdBlock makes your browser not even try to download the blocked element. I don't see how that results in any useless traffic.
There have been unusually many good answers here, but this is the best one so far. This is the most realistic way to make a useful contribution to astronomy for the original poster, and it does not involve 25 years of training before probably not getting there.
Well, if you only want to consider what is temporarily in the air
It's not that I only want to consider that. I'm just pointing it out because you were ignoring that part.
Coal ash has raw chemical edges and is less healthy than dust from the ground for that reason. But the radiation aspect is unimportant.
I know, and I said so in both my previous post and the one before it. The extra contribution of radioactivity from coal ash is tiny, and nothing to worry about. It just isn't zero, like you were saying.
Why did the maximum they can fleece people for in Germany go up
You pointed out that German electricity costs generally tracked European energy costs, and that they were all roughly 3x US electricity costs. Now you're saying it went up? Which point are you trying to make?
I showed you a graph in my original post that showed German electricity prices, American electricity prices and average European electricity prices as a function of time It shows both German and European electricity prices increasing, with American ones being stable. I don't see why you are surprised that I'm saying German prices went up after showing that figure.
The point I'm trying to make, and which you seem to be implicitly agreeing with, is that the German reneable energy expenditures do not work as an explanation for why its prices increased, because it would predict that Germany's electricity prices would see a large increase relative to the rest of Europe, which hasn't paid nearly as much for renewables.
You then came with a second hypothesis, which instead explains the European and German price increases as being due to insufficient competition. I haven't investigated this possibility, but I note that if this is the dominant driving force behind the price increases, then you would expect to see the same price curve for Germany whether they installed lots of renewable energy or not. If your second hypothesis is true, then the first one must at most be a very weak effect, responsible for almost none of the price increase. So in that case one cannot say that renewable energy expenditure is the cause of that 3x price difference between the USA and Germany.
Consider laying the ash as a layer on the ground.
This isn't the situation I was talking about. I agree that once the fly ash has mixed with the soil, it doesn't add any radiation. But I was describing what happens before it ends up as a layer on the ground. It has to travel there from the exhaust pipes of the coal plant trough the air. During this phase, the ash isn't screening anything. It is simply adding on to whatever dust would be in the air otherwise.
Just because the ash adds no radiation during one phase of its life (the settled down on the ground phase) doesn't mean that it doesn't add radiation at all.
None of it, I presume, since the term "investment in renewable energy" is b.s.; investment implies an expected return, and people are never going to see a return.
I did not have that meaning in mind. I should have said "spending money on renewable energy". Sorry for being misleading.
"Investment in renewable energy" is just Germany's preferred fig leaf for crony capitalism involving energy companies and lobbyists. Denmark and other EU nations have other fig leafs. That explains the otherwise remarkable coincidence that energy prices are so similar: it's determined not by how much countries spend to produce energy, but by the maximum amount they can fleece consumers for.
So if I understand correctly, you are arguing that Germany's spending on renewable energy has made electricity there much more expensive. Meanwhile, most other countries in Europe have undertaken a series of other unrelated huge projects, resulting in each country's electricity price increasing at the same rate. These price increases are all of similar magnitude because power companies througout Europe don't compete properly, and just charge whatever the market can bear.
If I caught your meaning correctly, then doesn't that mean that the price increase in Germany actually had nothing to do with the renewable energy expenditure? Why did the maximum they can fleece people for in Germany go up, and what does that have to do with renewable energy? I would think that an increase in the "maximum fleecable amount" would be due to a general increase in average household income, not due to potentially tax-increasing expenditures. I think something is missing to make this argument work.
Actually, no. Fly ash has the same concentration of uranium as soil so it has no effect.
I don't follow your argument.
If you didn't have coal power, you would be exposed to a certain amount of radioactivity from soil, part of which would be through breathing in dust containing traces of uranium. If you have coal power, there would now be fly ash in the air in addition to the dust. It woud not replace the dust. So you would now be inhaling more uranium than before. Not that it would be much, in any case, though.
Radioactivity is not really what you should be worried about with fly ash. It causes lung damage just fine without radioactivity, in the form of silicosis, and is a significant cause of death in industrial countries, especially China.
How much of that comes from their invesment in renewable energy, though? Other neighboring European countries that have not invested in renewables have comparable prices, as shown on this map. Denmark is 13% more expensive and Italy is 15% less expensive and the UK is 36% less expensive. Germany is towards the top there, but it is not an outlier. There are a few countries with prices comparable to the USA in the EU, such as Estonia which is 2.4 times chepear than Germany. But it seems strange to claim that the main difference between Germany and Estonia is the amount of renewables. And as this image shows, the price of electricity in Germany has been following the average in the European Union for some time now, which again doesn't match with the hypothesis that power in Germany is more expensive than in the USA because of all the solar power.
When these drives were first announced it was speculated that they would use heat-assisted magnetic recording, which could store a bit into a single magnetic grain rather than a domain consisting of hundreds of them. But it turned out that they used shingled magnetic recording instead, which seems to have less long-term promise. What's the news on HAMR? Is it still being pursued?
An "atomic bomb unit" is a very loose concept, based on the yield of the obsolete Hiroshima bomb. this graph shows the yield of various atomic bombs of the USA. This meteor, with a yield of about 440 kt of TNT, would be smack in the middle of the distribution, with bombs ranging from 100 times less powerful to 100 times more powerful. So it was a very powerful explosion. It's good it happened so far up.
Thansk for the well-researched reply. The sources all back up your numbers (though the cnet one was very long). But one thing that isn't clear to me is what fraction of that licensing income that come as a result of a lawsuit or settlement, and what fraction was voluntary. As I said, I thought htat most people who paid licensing fees to Intellectual Ventures did so because they were sued.
I agree that much of the investment in their patent pool could count as licensing fees, since people join it for fear of being sued otherwise. But the original large investments that originally formed the company were different.
Do yuo have a source for that? I thought inellectual ventures got most of its income by suing (either directly or indirectly through another company) and scaring the other side into an expensive settlement followed by license payments from then on. It's not like a warehouse where people come looking for neat ideas.
How many of those who are paying license fees or settlements to intellectual ventures for your patent (and indirectly paying you) had read your patent before infringing on it? If they hadn't, how does you and intellectual ventures being paid help society or speed up innvoation in any way? If it were me receiving money from intellectual ventures, I would feel pretty bad about it.
At the same time as you're selling your patent to a patent troll, I'm in the process of starting up a company based on my own invention, "continuous transparent wipers". Soon the wipers are selling like hot butter, and we think we might just pull this off. But then, out of the blue, my small company is hit by a lawsuit from the same patent extortionist you dealt with. In fact, they are using the very patent you sold them to sue us. They threaten to take us to court, and though we never even heard of your invention before, it is not clear that there isn't some overlap between our inventions. Our lawyer tells us that we cannot be sure to win, and that the cost of fighting this in court would bankrupt us. So we settle with the patent troll. They only want slightly less than what would kill us.
At the same time, the patent extortionist is using the patent to sue several others who came up with similar-sounding ideas. It's not that the patent extortionist is trying to discourage innovation as such - that's just an unfortunate but acceptable side-effect of its business model. Only people who pay it can be allowed to implement, and thankfully many are willing to give it more ammunition for a quick buck.
So to summarize: People who have a good idea but can't be bothered to turn it into a physical product patent it and sell the patent to a patent troll. It then waits for somebody who actually does invest in their own invention, and then uses the patent to extort them. This is how patent trolls usually work. It is very uncommon for somebody to go looking for a patent that solves some problem, find it in a patent database, and then pay for the privilege of using it. Instead, they come up with a solution on their own, use it to start a successful business, and then are ambushed by a patent they never even heard about.
This de-incentivizes people from going further than the idea step with an invention. When most patent infringements are accidental, it says something about how trivial the patent was in the first place. They are too broad, are granted too easily, and it is too expensive to determine the merit of a patent, and what infringes. It is bad enough that normal companies have them, but at least they have scruples in using them. Patent extortionists have no such inhibitions.
As a closing note: There is, as far as I know, no evidence that patents increase innovation. When patent power is increasd, the rate of innovation does not go up. Similarly, when patents are introduced to a new field where patents were previously not allowed (such as software quite recently), the rate of innovation does not go up. Empirical evidence is not on the side of the patent system. It was well meant, but negative second-order effects turned out to be more important than the positive immediate effects.
Thank you for posting this. That quote really sounded like it was taken out of context, and indeed it was. The person asking the question is putting forth the thesis that it is destiny that Russia be involved in a large war every 100 years or so (a cyclic history hypothesis), and Putn's reply is basically that Russia doesn't want a large war, and that due to nuclear weapons, other nations won't want a large war either. That is "don't worry, you're safe". It seems to be a calming satement meant at his own population rather than an agressive nuclear threat. So far off from the situation during the cold war, when threats of nuclear annihilation were thrown around over official diplomatic channels.