Although US != world, if the US economy is in the dumper because of a war, the modern world economies being tightly interlinked will certainly have effects. Heck, people were talking about the world economy going down because of the situation in Greece, what do you think would happen if an economy 50 times bigger*** hits the skids?
*** Assuming (usa.gdp=15000B) / (greece.gdp = 300B) is a suitable approximation for a/. discussion...
You do not need any human DNA (or modern human DNA) to produce a clone of
something extinct. This has already been proven.
[citation needed].
We are not yet at the point where nanomachines can build fertilized eggs from individual atoms. Correct me if I am wrong, but the technology we are talking about here is merely splicing some reconstucted sequences into existing human cells.
Sorry to tear down your strawman argument, but it is scarily nearly within current technology to both replace the nucleus of a egg with the nucleus of another egg and to create female sperm. No nanomachines manipulating individual atoms required.
The missing technology is to somehow have a complete set haploid chromosomes to create a gamete nucleus. If this can be accomplished, it seems feasible to create a clone by creating a egg an sperm with the above techniques with the same haploid chromosomes and bringing them together to fertilize and create a baby. Of course it will probably have human mitochondrial DNA (from the donor eg), but the nuclear DNA would be what you might expect it to be.
Not that this will be happening soon, but technilogically it probably isn't as far off as you might think it should be...
I don't mean to sound too flippant about this, but isn't this around the time in the movie that a Morgan Freeman type of character says "People were not meant to play at god!"?
Except Morgan Freeman of course! Remember those horrible Almightly movies?
I think you might be a bit confused about entanglement assisted teleporation. As I understand it, basically to do this you start with an entangled pair of qubits which you send to two disparate places. You also have two "bodies" consisting of many(!) corresponding particles one in each place. The thing you want to teleport is quantum *state* of one of the "bodies" of particles to the other body of particles in the other location using entanglement assisted teleportation.
The act of entanglement assisted teleporation requires measurement of the joint state of the entangled qubit you have with the state of the particle you want to transmit. This measurement will destroy the original quantum state of the "master" copy (kinda like schrodinger's cat). The results of these measurements will be classically transmitted to the other place and used to modify the state of the entangled qubit so that the "slave" particle will have the original quantum state of the master.
The trick is that when you do the joint measurement, you don't collapse everything with the measurment (you know the joint state of the qubit and the particle, but not them individually). By modifying the entangled qubit to match the classically transmitted measurement, you create a condition where the particle is influenced to replicate the original state of the master particle. Thus the original "master" body will be there, but the original quantum superposition state will not, but will be reproduced at the other location in the "slave" body meaning the slave becomes essentially the new master...
This mathematical breakthrough apparently gives a framework on how to reuse that one entangled qubit (rather than require one for every particle whose state you want to teleport).
You just can't clone a quantum state, though... See this discussion. Basically, this entanglement trick gets around this by destroying/collapsing the original (quantum/superposition) state avoiding your master/slave problem.
Oops... correction, you had to press RESET on the II+, the II went right into Integer BASIC, unless you had the Applesoft BASIC on a plug-in card I guess. We had it on diskette at my school.
As I recall, on the initial board revs of the ][, there was no power-on-reset meaning you had to hit RESET which dropped you into the monitor ROM, although later board revs added power-on-reset. Even with power-on-reset, on the ][ there wasn't autostart code in the rom so you had to get into BASIC and type PR#6 (assuming that almost every plugged their floppy controller into slot#6) to boot the floppy. Applesoft BASIC could be loaded from the floppy (or cassette) into main ram (assuming you had enough), or on to the "language-card" ram extension. I don't recall any Applesoft BASIC rom card.
On the ][+, no-reset key was required. The boards shipped with the power-on-reset circuit and the default ][+ rom had autostart code that looked for specific signatures in plug-in-card address space rom space and jumped to the intialization code which allowed the floppy drive controller rom (or other boot device) to load the bootsector from the floppy w/o user intervention. If no rom signatures were detected, or if the floppy rom didn't detect a bootsector, it would just drop you into (Applesoft) BASIC. In the ][+ rom, the old integer BASIC was replaced by Applesoft BASIC (sadly, this also meant the demise of the assembler and sweet16 interpreter to make space). Of course you could break-out of the autostart sequence by hitting the RESET key, and typing the PR#6 to boot the floppy, but it wasn't required.
To be an asshole and a pedant, one uses brackets with the normal Apple ][ computers and slashies with the//c:-D
-- BMO
Yes you do, but the Apple//e computer (which followed the Apple ][+ and Apple ][ computers) used slashies before the//c..
I guess as an off-topic dinosaur asshole pedant, my first computer was and Apple ][+ as I held out for the basic in rom and improved color graphics over the Apple ][ model, but all my friends got the Apple//e and I was the one that had to suffer 40 column w/o native lowercase, since I couldn't afford an 80-column card:^(
As a stopgap I "liberated" a 70-column HRG patch that understood the shift-key-mod from a popular word-processor at the time, so all was not totally lost:^P
All this superhydrophobic stuff is mostly just silicone.
The main difference is how it's applied and what type of structure it forms. As I understand it RainX is mostly just a simple silicone coating where the idea is to just smooth out the windshield (in the theory that on a completely smooth surface, water is more likely to bead than whet). NeverWet is a silicone nano-particles suspended in a spray/solvent. When the solvent evaporates, it makes a somewhat uniform coating of nano-particles of silicone.
Apparently in this technique, they apply silicone with electrospinning instead of run-of-the-mill spray-n-dry techniques. The main difference is that with electrospinning it is accomplished w/o w/o solvents and the result can be made into a very uniform nano-structure. There's also no solvent to ruin whatever you need to apply it to. Of course figuring out the right technique to create a specific nano-structure that works as you intend it isn't an accomplishment to be sneezed at (not that it would stick anyhow)...
Perhaps you mean "I imagine it's possible to do better someday." The empirical evidence seems to indicate that we cannot do better today. There's really nothing unnatural about savagery (your word) as it is practiced by pretty much all life forms on the planet.
It may be that so-called savagery is personaly unsavory to you (and others), but sometimes attempting to break natural order can cause unexpected side-effects as well. I'm sure those folks that planted the first seeds didn't forsee the future of monoculture plants, nor did those that started burning whale oil to see at night didn't forsee hunting whales to extinction. Often our proposed wisdom isn't as enlightened as we believe it to be since we don't have the insight of highsight nor the appreciation of scaling.
I think there is always potential for emergent phenomena, so in the abstract sense an infinity of alternatives haven't been tried, but to presuppose that we know even what they are is a huburis that we should attempt to avoid. Good ideas generally have a time and a place which mean ideas of utopia of the past times should remain in the past so that new ideas can take their place since the new ideas will have the benefit of the knowledge gained since those old idea were conceived.
Electrical service is much more reliable in the US compared to China/India. There is also an advantage of having your product manufacturing close to your marketplace... namely lower shipping costs.
I think it is a bit more that the headlines. One way to think about it is how on average how educated did going to school in your country make the population. Another way to think about it is how well our schools are serving the average person.
After reading the result of this "reanalysis" the conclusion is that our schools are probably serving the average person better than we thought because apparently our schools (in the US) are really serving the more priviledged people worse than other developed countries and "poor-people" (your words, not mine) better than we thought. This is not surprising since recently schools in the US have been concentrating on "no-child-left-behind" rather than preparing our most promising kids to compete against the world.
Of course different political views might view either way as a success or a failure. if you want to think about it with a game analogy, our bench players are getting better stats than the bench player on the other teams, but our super stars aren't performing very well relative to super stars on the other teams. The net result is that we aren't doing very well as measured by the number on the scoreboard. If your goal is simply win on the scoreboard, you will probably do what the other teams seem to do, leave some children behind and put your weight behind your stars...
I suppose in professional sports you'd fire the coach for this on the theory that you need new blood to turn things around but that is a political solution that I'm sure we won't exercise in this country (to follow this analogy, I'm sure the politically correct solution ends up where we'd end up paying the coach more and buy new equipment and find a better practice field).
The other professonal sports solution would probably be to fire the star players for not performing up to expectations and recruit some of those stars from other teams, but that sort of defeats the point of school wouldn't you say? (warning: that's a trick question as I think that is exactly what is happening in higher education in the US).
Of course you could just fill the interior with something slightly more dense than a vacuum and reduce the constraint as required. For instance balloons filled with helium float just fine in the air.
In both cases (vaccum and helium filled), you have to worry about outside air diffusing inside over time. I imagine this is much more difficult of an engineering problem that needs to be solved before this would even be remotely practical. My guess is that this forces the walls to be thicker than the minimum structurally required thickness which makes the weight go up and introduces the complication of pumping out the interior and the structural stresses that that would impose.
You assume that the price will be lower than copper. Since they are likely to price this as a premium product (lower-weight, more flexible), initially, the price per meter may well be higher than the copper wire it replaces...
Talk to a chemEng about the nightmare of aluminium refining.
The process of making this fiber is to dissolve CNTs in a super-acid and then wet-spinning them into threads. Apparently the key to this process is the same one use to make Twaron.
I'm not sure how this process has been adapted to make CNT fibres, but at least in the case of Twaron and Kevlar, dissolving the polymers in normal acids for powderization is a problem so they use a special patented process to do this which consists of NMP and some other stuff. Then they have to wet-spin it into threads from a solution that's pretty much 100% acid (according to the wikipedia, they dissolve the polymer powder by mixing it with frozen 100% sulfuric acid in powder form and gently heating it).
On the surface, it sounds to me that this is a similar level of PITA as refining aluminum...
Perhaps you should read this document from NIST about the history of weights and measures in the US.
According to this document... 1827 a troy pound was obtained from London. 1828 a brass artifact (which was compared to this troy pound) declared standard for the US mint, not the avoirdupois pound 1866 the metric system was made lawful for commerce in the US. Legally defines avoirdupois pound as (1/2.2046) kg 1875 17 governments (incl the US) established the international bureau of weights and measures 1890 The US receives standard kilogram artifacts #4 and #20 for use as the national prototype 1894 The US tweaks the definition of the pound relative to this kilogram artifact to make it closer to the UK pound
The US makes various other tweaks over the years in the pound's definition relative to the standard kilogram artifact that the US government maintains.
The "troy" pound artifact is only used for Mint operation in the US and is not related to the avoirdupois pound used in commerce.
Also all NIST calibrations are done in metric units (as of 1959).
Although I'm sure you're kidding, it's probably worth bringing up the following 2 bits of trivia
1. Sadly, the American "pound-weight" has mostly been defined in terms of the kilogram and has its most recent official relationship updated in 1959 (now exactly 0.45359237 kg, down from 0.4535924277 kg back 1901).
2. The kg artifact itself is soon to be rendered obsolete. In 2014, the kg is likely to be redefined in terms of the planck constant (well technically, planck constant will be fixed to a specific number and since it has the units kg*m^2/s, and the second and meter are defined in terms of oscilations of a Ce133 atom and the speed of light, these will now determine the kilogram).
That is until we discover a grand unifying theory where the Planck constant is not actually a constant. Then you can really see the world unravel...
Raises curiosity: how much work is done by this 15-old boy and how much is actually done by his father?
I imagine about the same ratio as famous professors and the grad-students working under them... Don't underestimate the ideas and work that can be done by underlings. Only in this case, the underling gets the credit, in the other case, usually not so much...
So the author of this article likes GWT? Is the future Java on the client side? We used to have java applet clients in the early web-days, but it didn't really go anywhere because it was a pretty much a separate environment which didn't interact with DOM. Right now GWT is really mostly yet another framework that cross-compiles into Javascript. Perhaps the best usage outside of the framework is simply enforcing a statically typed infrastructure on top of JavaScript, at worst it's usage is sort of "lint" for JavaScript.
Although there's some marginal benefit from a statically typed regime, if this is all that the future requires to be up to snuf for enterprise usage, that's a pretty low bar for the next ECMAScript. They could just add a few checking attributes to the ECMAScript Object prototype to lock-out the dynamic nature of the object and developers could just migrate their "important" code to use this style of object that if they wanted to be "enterprise". You could even decorate these "finalized" objects somehow to hint the ECMAScript JITs to get any performance advantage you might get with statically typed languages.
Sadly this would eliminate the dynamic type features that make dynamically typed languages more powerful than their statically typed counterparts (although Generics/Templates bridge some of that gap for static languages like Java/C++). Of course with great power comes great responsiblity, and it's possible to write unmaintainable code in nearly every language, but it seems everyone has thier golden bullet to solve the "enterprise" coding problem. I'm usually unimpressed by golden bullets.
If all they can come up with is using electric shocks to make muscle, this process is doomed.
First, it's ignorning the fact that muscle built that way is by stressing and damaging muscle fibres (now we have to invent superhard "tendon" like material to attach the muscle fiber to some solid framework to create stress and then take those fake inedible tendons out later) and allowing the muscle repair processes to make more muscles out of muscle satellite cells. Next, it takes alot a big contractions to create that kind of stress (that's why those silly electro-ab stimulators don't work). In contrast, you can make some perfectly tasty muscle w/o much stress. In a cow, the muscle from where you get the fillet (psoas major), is hardly stressed, yet tasty none-the-less.
If they are just growing muscle cells in a vat of chemicals, a repair processes must be created. W/o a repair process that all these muscle growth "techniques" that simply trigger the repair process in real animals simply don't do anything. If they design the repair process, they can probably just trigger it w/o electric shocks (kind of how like certain DNA mutations can cause huge muscle growth w/o working out).
Actually, it's not to hard to intuitively understand negative temperature if you think of it as something hotter than the hottest possible temperature. Classically, that isn't possible, but then you need a bit of quantum weirdness.
In a typical system of normal temperature particles of occupy various quantum energy levels available to them. In thermal equilibrium, statistically, lower energy levels tend to get occupied first and higher energy levels have fewer particles. If somehow you can create a stable system where higher energy states are occupied, but by some quirk (of quantum mechanics), lower ones are not, it turns out that is what a negative temperature system is.
As it turns temporarily creating a system where the higher energy levels are occupied before the lower ones is something that people do all the time to create a pumped laser. But lasers aren't designed to be a stable system (you eventually want the higher energy state to emit light/photons and fall to the lower energy state), so although the population of the energy states are inverted (more in the upper energy states), it's not stable, so it's generally not accurate to call this a negative temperature system.
The reason the "sign" of the temperature is negative is just a problem with the definition of temperature. For most defintions of temperature, if you add energy, you increase entropy, so temperature is a measure of how these relate to each other (the slope). If somehow when you add energy to your system, you decrease entropy of your system (e.g, you pack the upper energy states even tighter reducing entropy instead of just letting particles in all energy states into statistically higher energy states), the slope is negative.
Plant have evolved to produce a tremendous amount of pesticide and herbicide, fungicide chemicals to compete and survive. They have also evolved to be tolerant of herbicides produced by other plants and viruses. Thus even organic produce has large numbers of completely untested chemicals that are naturally produced by the plants themselves. I think many people somehow form a cognative dissonance if they think about this too much, so they basically do doublethink.
Some of these natural defensive chemicals in plants that we know are quite deadly to us (say glycoalkaloids like solanine in greenish potato skins which are nerve toxins). Although most foods that we eat today have gone through many informal "trials", I doubt anyone can tell you what the process was, nor what the acceptably safe levels is of the various toxins are. We simply have "grandfathered" these foods into or diets. For example, the potato isn't even that old, although cultivated for ~7000 years, it only made worldwide since the 16th century and is now one of the top 5 food crops in the world. A similar food is Cassava root which is outside of south america/africa/asia is only consumed as Tapioca. Cassava is much more poisonous to humans than potatos (via cyanide poisoning), yet widely consumed as a food-security crop in much of Africa and some of Asia.
Certainly testing should be done on all things sold for food (I'm not advocating no testing), but I doubt that any level of testing would be sufficient to avoid all risk, nor even if it could, it would not satisfy many of the folks opposed to GM.
I imagine the real fear that most folks have about GM crops is not about the technology at all, it is simply the unrealized angry feeling of helplessness that as a society that we have evolved to be completely dependent on others for our own survival. We do not grow our own crops, we do not hunt, we do not forge our own tools, we do not build our own homes, basically we are at the mercy of greater society to provide us with the means of survival and we are angry about anything that might upset the current status quo. Simultaneously we discount/ignore all the massive changes and risks we have taken just to get us to our current point in history as a sunk cost.
Certainly there is much to fear, but I think much of our fear is just a reflection of our hidden anger about our evolution into helplessness. Typically fears are conquered by knowledge, experience and (when conditions warrant it) conditioning, but since in many folks these fears don't appear to be quelled by these factors, it's likely not fear at all, but emergent anger. People are just angry about having to be dependent for their sustinance from someone else, but supress that anger until some proposes a change and that event sets them off. Only when people get over their anger, they can tackle the fear and use it constructively to make sure that the proper risk/reward/testing tradeoffs are being made.
Given some reports, I'd have to say that getting killed by virtual assassins might be better than getting sent to addiction camp...
On the other hand...
Unhappy with his son not finding a job, Feng decided to hire players in his son's favorite online games to hunt down Xiao Feng. It is unknown where or how Feng found the in-game assassins—every one of the players he hired were stronger and higher leveled than Xiao Feng.
You've got to wonder how addicted the so-called assassins were to the game to get to a higher level than his addicted son (or perhaps how inept the son was at playing the game) and what the father's contribution to the assassins' addiction. I guess if it isn't specifically your problem, you don't care. Welcome to the wonderful new virtual social media world...
They already have the mechanism to subsitute some amount of mileage taxes for some of the gas taxes. Most state already have a "smog-check" requirement where a licenced facility records the odometer reading so you can register your car. They could easily just add a mileage tax to your vehicle licencing fees as a requirement to register your car. If enough states do this, you could even just tie this to the reciprocal licence-plate identifcation toll agreements that states have with each other (to enable them to replace toll takers with electronic toll devices and licence plate readering software) to account for some out-of-state licence plates.
The current gas tax is probably highly regressive anyhow (poor folk driving older cars that get lower MPG on average pay more than rich folks that driver newer cars that get better MPG), so this seems like the progressive thing to do. You probably don't want to get rid of the gas tax entirely (as it has a small amount of incentive for getting cars that get better MPG), but say split the desired revenue collection about 50-50.
Slashdot Mirror
Since when does the US == the world?
Okay, I'll bite...
Although US != world, if the US economy is in the dumper because of a war, the modern world economies being tightly interlinked will certainly have effects. Heck, people were talking about the world economy going down because of the situation in Greece, what do you think would happen if an economy 50 times bigger*** hits the skids?
*** Assuming (usa.gdp=15000B) / (greece.gdp = 300B) is a suitable approximation for a /. discussion...
[citation needed].
We are not yet at the point where nanomachines can build fertilized eggs from individual atoms. Correct me if I am wrong, but the technology we are talking about here is merely splicing some reconstucted sequences into existing human cells.
Sorry to tear down your strawman argument, but it is scarily nearly within current technology to both replace the nucleus of a egg with the nucleus of another egg and to create female sperm. No nanomachines manipulating individual atoms required.
The missing technology is to somehow have a complete set haploid chromosomes to create a gamete nucleus. If this can be accomplished, it seems feasible to create a clone by creating a egg an sperm with the above techniques with the same haploid chromosomes and bringing them together to fertilize and create a baby. Of course it will probably have human mitochondrial DNA (from the donor eg), but the nuclear DNA would be what you might expect it to be.
Not that this will be happening soon, but technilogically it probably isn't as far off as you might think it should be...
I don't mean to sound too flippant about this, but isn't this around the time in the movie that a Morgan Freeman type of character says "People were not meant to play at god!"?
Except Morgan Freeman of course! Remember those horrible Almightly movies?
I think you might be a bit confused about entanglement assisted teleporation. As I understand it, basically to do this you start with an entangled pair of qubits which you send to two disparate places. You also have two "bodies" consisting of many(!) corresponding particles one in each place. The thing you want to teleport is quantum *state* of one of the "bodies" of particles to the other body of particles in the other location using entanglement assisted teleportation.
The act of entanglement assisted teleporation requires measurement of the joint state of the entangled qubit you have with the state of the particle you want to transmit. This measurement will destroy the original quantum state of the "master" copy (kinda like schrodinger's cat). The results of these measurements will be classically transmitted to the other place and used to modify the state of the entangled qubit so that the "slave" particle will have the original quantum state of the master.
The trick is that when you do the joint measurement, you don't collapse everything with the measurment (you know the joint state of the qubit and the particle, but not them individually). By modifying the entangled qubit to match the classically transmitted measurement, you create a condition where the particle is influenced to replicate the original state of the master particle. Thus the original "master" body will be there, but the original quantum superposition state will not, but will be reproduced at the other location in the "slave" body meaning the slave becomes essentially the new master...
This mathematical breakthrough apparently gives a framework on how to reuse that one entangled qubit (rather than require one for every particle whose state you want to teleport).
You just can't clone a quantum state, though... See this discussion. Basically, this entanglement trick gets around this by destroying/collapsing the original (quantum/superposition) state avoiding your master/slave problem.
Oops... correction, you had to press RESET on the II+, the II went right into Integer BASIC, unless you had the Applesoft BASIC on a plug-in card I guess. We had it on diskette at my school.
As I recall, on the initial board revs of the ][, there was no power-on-reset meaning you had to hit RESET which dropped you into the monitor ROM, although later board revs added power-on-reset. Even with power-on-reset, on the ][ there wasn't autostart code in the rom so you had to get into BASIC and type PR#6 (assuming that almost every plugged their floppy controller into slot#6) to boot the floppy. Applesoft BASIC could be loaded from the floppy (or cassette) into main ram (assuming you had enough), or on to the "language-card" ram extension. I don't recall any Applesoft BASIC rom card.
On the ][+, no-reset key was required. The boards shipped with the power-on-reset circuit and the default ][+ rom had autostart code that looked for specific signatures in plug-in-card address space rom space and jumped to the intialization code which allowed the floppy drive controller rom (or other boot device) to load the bootsector from the floppy w/o user intervention. If no rom signatures were detected, or if the floppy rom didn't detect a bootsector, it would just drop you into (Applesoft) BASIC. In the ][+ rom, the old integer BASIC was replaced by Applesoft BASIC (sadly, this also meant the demise of the assembler and sweet16 interpreter to make space). Of course you could break-out of the autostart sequence by hitting the RESET key, and typing the PR#6 to boot the floppy, but it wasn't required.
To be an asshole and a pedant, one uses brackets with the normal Apple ][ computers and slashies with the //c :-D
--
BMO
Yes you do, but the Apple //e computer (which followed the Apple ][+ and Apple ][ computers) used slashies before the //c..
I guess as an off-topic dinosaur asshole pedant, my first computer was and Apple ][+ as I held out for the basic in rom and improved color graphics over the Apple ][ model, but all my friends got the Apple //e and I was the one that had to suffer 40 column w/o native lowercase, since I couldn't afford an 80-column card :^(
As a stopgap I "liberated" a 70-column HRG patch that understood the shift-key-mod from a popular word-processor at the time, so all was not totally lost :^P
All this superhydrophobic stuff is mostly just silicone.
The main difference is how it's applied and what type of structure it forms. As I understand it RainX is mostly just a simple silicone coating where the idea is to just smooth out the windshield (in the theory that on a completely smooth surface, water is more likely to bead than whet). NeverWet is a silicone nano-particles suspended in a spray/solvent. When the solvent evaporates, it makes a somewhat uniform coating of nano-particles of silicone.
Apparently in this technique, they apply silicone with electrospinning instead of run-of-the-mill spray-n-dry techniques. The main difference is that with electrospinning it is accomplished w/o w/o solvents and the result can be made into a very uniform nano-structure. There's also no solvent to ruin whatever you need to apply it to. Of course figuring out the right technique to create a specific nano-structure that works as you intend it isn't an accomplishment to be sneezed at (not that it would stick anyhow)...
I think we can do better.
Perhaps you mean "I imagine it's possible to do better someday." The empirical evidence seems to indicate that we cannot do better today. There's really nothing unnatural about savagery (your word) as it is practiced by pretty much all life forms on the planet.
It may be that so-called savagery is personaly unsavory to you (and others), but sometimes attempting to break natural order can cause unexpected side-effects as well. I'm sure those folks that planted the first seeds didn't forsee the future of monoculture plants, nor did those that started burning whale oil to see at night didn't forsee hunting whales to extinction. Often our proposed wisdom isn't as enlightened as we believe it to be since we don't have the insight of highsight nor the appreciation of scaling.
I think there is always potential for emergent phenomena, so in the abstract sense an infinity of alternatives haven't been tried, but to presuppose that we know even what they are is a huburis that we should attempt to avoid. Good ideas generally have a time and a place which mean ideas of utopia of the past times should remain in the past so that new ideas can take their place since the new ideas will have the benefit of the knowledge gained since those old idea were conceived.
Electrical service is much more reliable in the US compared to China/India. There is also an advantage of having your product manufacturing close to your marketplace... namely lower shipping costs.
Isn't that what Mexico/Nafta was for?
I think it is a bit more that the headlines. One way to think about it is how on average how educated did going to school in your country make the population. Another way to think about it is how well our schools are serving the average person.
After reading the result of this "reanalysis" the conclusion is that our schools are probably serving the average person better than we thought because apparently our schools (in the US) are really serving the more priviledged people worse than other developed countries and "poor-people" (your words, not mine) better than we thought. This is not surprising since recently schools in the US have been concentrating on "no-child-left-behind" rather than preparing our most promising kids to compete against the world.
Of course different political views might view either way as a success or a failure. if you want to think about it with a game analogy, our bench players are getting better stats than the bench player on the other teams, but our super stars aren't performing very well relative to super stars on the other teams. The net result is that we aren't doing very well as measured by the number on the scoreboard. If your goal is simply win on the scoreboard, you will probably do what the other teams seem to do, leave some children behind and put your weight behind your stars...
I suppose in professional sports you'd fire the coach for this on the theory that you need new blood to turn things around but that is a political solution that I'm sure we won't exercise in this country (to follow this analogy, I'm sure the politically correct solution ends up where we'd end up paying the coach more and buy new equipment and find a better practice field).
The other professonal sports solution would probably be to fire the star players for not performing up to expectations and recruit some of those stars from other teams, but that sort of defeats the point of school wouldn't you say? (warning: that's a trick question as I think that is exactly what is happening in higher education in the US).
Of course you could just fill the interior with something slightly more dense than a vacuum and reduce the constraint as required. For instance balloons filled with helium float just fine in the air.
In both cases (vaccum and helium filled), you have to worry about outside air diffusing inside over time. I imagine this is much more difficult of an engineering problem that needs to be solved before this would even be remotely practical. My guess is that this forces the walls to be thicker than the minimum structurally required thickness which makes the weight go up and introduces the complication of pumping out the interior and the structural stresses that that would impose.
Now I can't buy any cables till they replace them with this. Damn you, technology.
Don't worry, I'm sure Monster will be selling gold-plated versions of these, at a reasonable price, soon.
Or perhaps they'll be selling gold cables with CNT fiber wrapped around it (depending on which material is cheaper)...
You assume that the price will be lower than copper. Since they are likely to price this as a premium product (lower-weight, more flexible), initially, the price per meter may well be higher than the copper wire it replaces...
Talk to a chemEng about the nightmare of aluminium refining.
The process of making this fiber is to dissolve CNTs in a super-acid and then wet-spinning them into threads. Apparently the key to this process is the same one use to make Twaron.
I'm not sure how this process has been adapted to make CNT fibres, but at least in the case of Twaron and Kevlar, dissolving the polymers in normal acids for powderization is a problem so they use a special patented process to do this which consists of NMP and some other stuff. Then they have to wet-spin it into threads from a solution that's pretty much 100% acid (according to the wikipedia, they dissolve the polymer powder by mixing it with frozen 100% sulfuric acid in powder form and gently heating it).
On the surface, it sounds to me that this is a similar level of PITA as refining aluminum...
Apparently, the placebo effect also works to cure percieved computer ailments...
Perhaps you should read this document from NIST about the history of weights and measures in the US.
According to this document...
1827 a troy pound was obtained from London.
1828 a brass artifact (which was compared to this troy pound) declared standard for the US mint, not the avoirdupois pound
1866 the metric system was made lawful for commerce in the US. Legally defines avoirdupois pound as (1/2.2046) kg
1875 17 governments (incl the US) established the international bureau of weights and measures
1890 The US receives standard kilogram artifacts #4 and #20 for use as the national prototype
1894 The US tweaks the definition of the pound relative to this kilogram artifact to make it closer to the UK pound
The US makes various other tweaks over the years in the pound's definition relative to the standard kilogram artifact that the US government maintains.
The "troy" pound artifact is only used for Mint operation in the US and is not related to the avoirdupois pound used in commerce.
Also all NIST calibrations are done in metric units (as of 1959).
You can read all about the new kg here...
Although I'm sure you're kidding, it's probably worth bringing up the following 2 bits of trivia
1. Sadly, the American "pound-weight" has mostly been defined in terms of the kilogram and has its most recent official relationship updated in 1959 (now exactly 0.45359237 kg, down from 0.4535924277 kg back 1901).
2. The kg artifact itself is soon to be rendered obsolete. In 2014, the kg is likely to be redefined in terms of the planck constant (well technically, planck constant will be fixed to a specific number and since it has the units kg*m^2/s, and the second and meter are defined in terms of oscilations of a Ce133 atom and the speed of light, these will now determine the kilogram).
That is until we discover a grand unifying theory where the Planck constant is not actually a constant. Then you can really see the world unravel...
Raises curiosity: how much work is done by this 15-old boy and how much is actually done by his father?
I imagine about the same ratio as famous professors and the grad-students working under them... Don't underestimate the ideas and work that can be done by underlings. Only in this case, the underling gets the credit, in the other case, usually not so much...
So the author of this article likes GWT? Is the future Java on the client side? We used to have java applet clients in the early web-days, but it didn't really go anywhere because it was a pretty much a separate environment which didn't interact with DOM. Right now GWT is really mostly yet another framework that cross-compiles into Javascript. Perhaps the best usage outside of the framework is simply enforcing a statically typed infrastructure on top of JavaScript, at worst it's usage is sort of "lint" for JavaScript.
Although there's some marginal benefit from a statically typed regime, if this is all that the future requires to be up to snuf for enterprise usage, that's a pretty low bar for the next ECMAScript. They could just add a few checking attributes to the ECMAScript Object prototype to lock-out the dynamic nature of the object and developers could just migrate their "important" code to use this style of object that if they wanted to be "enterprise". You could even decorate these "finalized" objects somehow to hint the ECMAScript JITs to get any performance advantage you might get with statically typed languages.
Sadly this would eliminate the dynamic type features that make dynamically typed languages more powerful than their statically typed counterparts (although Generics/Templates bridge some of that gap for static languages like Java/C++). Of course with great power comes great responsiblity, and it's possible to write unmaintainable code in nearly every language, but it seems everyone has thier golden bullet to solve the "enterprise" coding problem. I'm usually unimpressed by golden bullets.
If all they can come up with is using electric shocks to make muscle, this process is doomed.
First, it's ignorning the fact that muscle built that way is by stressing and damaging muscle fibres (now we have to invent superhard "tendon" like material to attach the muscle fiber to some solid framework to create stress and then take those fake inedible tendons out later) and allowing the muscle repair processes to make more muscles out of muscle satellite cells. Next, it takes alot a big contractions to create that kind of stress (that's why those silly electro-ab stimulators don't work). In contrast, you can make some perfectly tasty muscle w/o much stress. In a cow, the muscle from where you get the fillet (psoas major), is hardly stressed, yet tasty none-the-less.
If they are just growing muscle cells in a vat of chemicals, a repair processes must be created. W/o a repair process that all these muscle growth "techniques" that simply trigger the repair process in real animals simply don't do anything. If they design the repair process, they can probably just trigger it w/o electric shocks (kind of how like certain DNA mutations can cause huge muscle growth w/o working out).
Actually, it's not to hard to intuitively understand negative temperature if you think of it as something hotter than the hottest possible temperature. Classically, that isn't possible, but then you need a bit of quantum weirdness.
In a typical system of normal temperature particles of occupy various quantum energy levels available to them. In thermal equilibrium, statistically, lower energy levels tend to get occupied first and higher energy levels have fewer particles. If somehow you can create a stable system where higher energy states are occupied, but by some quirk (of quantum mechanics), lower ones are not, it turns out that is what a negative temperature system is.
As it turns temporarily creating a system where the higher energy levels are occupied before the lower ones is something that people do all the time to create a pumped laser. But lasers aren't designed to be a stable system (you eventually want the higher energy state to emit light/photons and fall to the lower energy state), so although the population of the energy states are inverted (more in the upper energy states), it's not stable, so it's generally not accurate to call this a negative temperature system.
The reason the "sign" of the temperature is negative is just a problem with the definition of temperature. For most defintions of temperature, if you add energy, you increase entropy, so temperature is a measure of how these relate to each other (the slope). If somehow when you add energy to your system, you decrease entropy of your system (e.g, you pack the upper energy states even tighter reducing entropy instead of just letting particles in all energy states into statistically higher energy states), the slope is negative.
Plant have evolved to produce a tremendous amount of pesticide and herbicide, fungicide chemicals to compete and survive. They have also evolved to be tolerant of herbicides produced by other plants and viruses. Thus even organic produce has large numbers of completely untested chemicals that are naturally produced by the plants themselves. I think many people somehow form a cognative dissonance if they think about this too much, so they basically do doublethink.
Some of these natural defensive chemicals in plants that we know are quite deadly to us (say glycoalkaloids like solanine in greenish potato skins which are nerve toxins). Although most foods that we eat today have gone through many informal "trials", I doubt anyone can tell you what the process was, nor what the acceptably safe levels is of the various toxins are. We simply have "grandfathered" these foods into or diets. For example, the potato isn't even that old, although cultivated for ~7000 years, it only made worldwide since the 16th century and is now one of the top 5 food crops in the world. A similar food is Cassava root which is outside of south america/africa/asia is only consumed as Tapioca. Cassava is much more poisonous to humans than potatos (via cyanide poisoning), yet widely consumed as a food-security crop in much of Africa and some of Asia.
Certainly testing should be done on all things sold for food (I'm not advocating no testing), but I doubt that any level of testing would be sufficient to avoid all risk, nor even if it could, it would not satisfy many of the folks opposed to GM.
I imagine the real fear that most folks have about GM crops is not about the technology at all, it is simply the unrealized angry feeling of helplessness that as a society that we have evolved to be completely dependent on others for our own survival. We do not grow our own crops, we do not hunt, we do not forge our own tools, we do not build our own homes, basically we are at the mercy of greater society to provide us with the means of survival and we are angry about anything that might upset the current status quo. Simultaneously we discount/ignore all the massive changes and risks we have taken just to get us to our current point in history as a sunk cost.
Certainly there is much to fear, but I think much of our fear is just a reflection of our hidden anger about our evolution into helplessness. Typically fears are conquered by knowledge, experience and (when conditions warrant it) conditioning, but since in many folks these fears don't appear to be quelled by these factors, it's likely not fear at all, but emergent anger. People are just angry about having to be dependent for their sustinance from someone else, but supress that anger until some proposes a change and that event sets them off. Only when people get over their anger, they can tackle the fear and use it constructively to make sure that the proper risk/reward/testing tradeoffs are being made.
Given some reports, I'd have to say that getting killed by virtual assassins might be better than getting sent to addiction camp...
On the other hand...
Unhappy with his son not finding a job, Feng decided to hire players in his son's favorite online games to hunt down Xiao Feng. It is unknown where or how Feng found the in-game assassins—every one of the players he hired were stronger and higher leveled than Xiao Feng.
You've got to wonder how addicted the so-called assassins were to the game to get to a higher level than his addicted son (or perhaps how inept the son was at playing the game) and what the father's contribution to the assassins' addiction. I guess if it isn't specifically your problem, you don't care. Welcome to the wonderful new virtual social media world...
They already have the mechanism to subsitute some amount of mileage taxes for some of the gas taxes. Most state already have a "smog-check" requirement where a licenced facility records the odometer reading so you can register your car. They could easily just add a mileage tax to your vehicle licencing fees as a requirement to register your car. If enough states do this, you could even just tie this to the reciprocal licence-plate identifcation toll agreements that states have with each other (to enable them to replace toll takers with electronic toll devices and licence plate readering software) to account for some out-of-state licence plates.
The current gas tax is probably highly regressive anyhow (poor folk driving older cars that get lower MPG on average pay more than rich folks that driver newer cars that get better MPG), so this seems like the progressive thing to do. You probably don't want to get rid of the gas tax entirely (as it has a small amount of incentive for getting cars that get better MPG), but say split the desired revenue collection about 50-50.