Unlike government programs, private efforts like Branson's are highly portable. If you people were to gain power and prevent them from spending their own money as they wish, they will just move the project to some country that needs their presence more than you do, such as Brazil.
When the New World was discovered and colonized, it did not mean that Europe had to die off as a result. It just meant that people like you were left behind in it.
Even more fun: drain the Sheik of Qatar's bank account by feeding his drones carefully concocted false information, say that a particular exploitable "access port" through the containment vessel exists. Applaud as the local ISIS sleeper cell strike team vainly slams into solid concrete.
Being clobbered by a rock is one of those low-probability-but-could-happen events, like suddenly having a new plague come at us from Africa. It behooves us to prepare for such things. Rock clobberings, on scales ranging from Chicxulub to Chelyabinsk, HAVE happened.
Water is one of a large class of substances that we would like to find in space for local use, rather than to send back. Any mining materials return operation will want to minimize human presence, but for maintainability that presence cannot be zero. Hence the need for life-maintaining consumables.
The important measure is not what the situation is, but where it's going. The easy surface minerals are gone, and as we dig deeper the minig gets exponentially more expensive at the same time as it runs into increasing environmental restrictions. When we consider how friendly space is to machines, a highly automated asteroidal mining operation could prove cheaper in the long run.
What we need to do next is assay a large sampling of asteroids for mineral content. Why not send out probes equipped with a single high-power laser: fly to a candidate asteroid and keep station near it for a few weeks while zapping as many places as possible with the laser. Spectral analysis of each zap point will tell us the surface composition. Repeat for as many asteroids as we can.
The problem is that by supportingCurrentC you're not opposing Apple, but locking out all NFC vendors. Since NFC is the world standard for touchless point-of-sale, this would be like shunning the metric system not in favor of imperial measure, but in favor of some system that you dreamed up yourself and operate by your own rules.
If antitrust action is taken on this squabble, it's most likely to be elimination of BOTH bans. Retailers with NFC terminals (which are a world standard, like those chipped credit cards) would have to re-enable NFC, and Apple/Google would have to carry CurrentC in their app stores.
And any technology that reduces the incidence of credit card fraud leads to reduced swipe fees in the long run, so long as there continues to be competition among card issuers.
I just used Apple Pay this afternoon at Walgreens. I could choose which credit card to apply, it was almost instantaneous and there were no extra fees.
So CurrentC is coming out sometime in 2015, they hope?
ACH is fine for those customer-initiated large payments and deposits that in the old days required shuffling paper checks around. It was never intended for small transactions made in places where breaches might occur.
That's been tried, but it just causes the other players to start holding up signs telling the world how many viruses are in play in this game. This goes on until you restart the game from the beginning.
Essentially, the municipal approach is treating broadband as a public utility. If there can only be one system of sewer pipes in a given city, it has to be run this way.
On a MacBook Pro, the first symptom of a failing battery is sometimes that the Q key stops working. Apparently it's right over the most common first place for the battery to start bulging.
The greatest danger from GMO technology is that it enables malice. If ISIS taps the House of Saud bank account deeply enough, it could come up with an Ebola-rabies-common cold doomsday virus much faster and more certainly than by hybridization.
Fortunately, the same technology allows us to develop treatments to diseases, malicious or natural, correspondingly faster than before: http://www.iflscience.com/heal... We can't put the toothpaste back into the tube. Our 'recusing' from GMO technology would do nothing to prevent misuse of the tech by anyone still using it. It would only prevent us from developing a response.
Because we're such a long way from AI being good enough to be an existential threat to humanity, this entire lone of fear is exceedingly speculative. But we might start thinking of ways we could convince an intelligent AI that biological life has features good enough that a partnership, not a takeover, would be the best outcome.
Ballmer also wouldn't be able to work on the problem the Clippers have been having lately: in the middle of a game, all the players suddenly stop right where they happen to be in action and freeze in place. Whenever this happens, you have to restart the game from the beginning. The team doctor says that a large load of viruses seems to be responsible.
That's why in the Communist era everyone loved the sparkly clean environment of East Germany and industrial Poland, not to mention that unique Ukrainian nuclear game preserve.
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Unlike government programs, private efforts like Branson's are highly portable. If you people were to gain power and prevent them from spending their own money as they wish, they will just move the project to some country that needs their presence more than you do, such as Brazil.
When the New World was discovered and colonized, it did not mean that Europe had to die off as a result. It just meant that people like you were left behind in it.
If one-percenters take the risks, and if some kill themselves doing it, isn't that what you liberal Greens call a good thing?
More importantly, the people who actually undertake the risk believe it's worth it.
This is because Earth's lawyers are powerful enough to have rejected all alien contracts.
Even more fun: drain the Sheik of Qatar's bank account by feeding his drones carefully concocted false information, say that a particular exploitable "access port" through the containment vessel exists. Applaud as the local ISIS sleeper cell strike team vainly slams into solid concrete.
Being clobbered by a rock is one of those low-probability-but-could-happen events, like suddenly having a new plague come at us from Africa. It behooves us to prepare for such things. Rock clobberings, on scales ranging from Chicxulub to Chelyabinsk, HAVE happened.
Water is one of a large class of substances that we would like to find in space for local use, rather than to send back. Any mining materials return operation will want to minimize human presence, but for maintainability that presence cannot be zero. Hence the need for life-maintaining consumables.
The important measure is not what the situation is, but where it's going. The easy surface minerals are gone, and as we dig deeper the minig gets exponentially more expensive at the same time as it runs into increasing environmental restrictions. When we consider how friendly space is to machines, a highly automated asteroidal mining operation could prove cheaper in the long run.
What we need to do next is assay a large sampling of asteroids for mineral content. Why not send out probes equipped with a single high-power laser: fly to a candidate asteroid and keep station near it for a few weeks while zapping as many places as possible with the laser. Spectral analysis of each zap point will tell us the surface composition. Repeat for as many asteroids as we can.
The problem is that by supportingCurrentC you're not opposing Apple, but locking out all NFC vendors. Since NFC is the world standard for touchless point-of-sale, this would be like shunning the metric system not in favor of imperial measure, but in favor of some system that you dreamed up yourself and operate by your own rules.
If antitrust action is taken on this squabble, it's most likely to be elimination of BOTH bans. Retailers with NFC terminals (which are a world standard, like those chipped credit cards) would have to re-enable NFC, and Apple/Google would have to carry CurrentC in their app stores.
And any technology that reduces the incidence of credit card fraud leads to reduced swipe fees in the long run, so long as there continues to be competition among card issuers.
I just used Apple Pay this afternoon at Walgreens. I could choose which credit card to apply, it was almost instantaneous and there were no extra fees.
So CurrentC is coming out sometime in 2015, they hope?
ACH is fine for those customer-initiated large payments and deposits that in the old days required shuffling paper checks around. It was never intended for small transactions made in places where breaches might occur.
That's been tried, but it just causes the other players to start holding up signs telling the world how many viruses are in play in this game. This goes on until you restart the game from the beginning.
Essentially, the municipal approach is treating broadband as a public utility. If there can only be one system of sewer pipes in a given city, it has to be run this way.
On a MacBook Pro, the first symptom of a failing battery is sometimes that the Q key stops working. Apparently it's right over the most common first place for the battery to start bulging.
Think I'll wait for a VMware iPad app that allows me to run Android in a window.
The greatest danger from GMO technology is that it enables malice. If ISIS taps the House of Saud bank account deeply enough, it could come up with an Ebola-rabies-common cold doomsday virus much faster and more certainly than by hybridization.
Fortunately, the same technology allows us to develop treatments to diseases, malicious or natural, correspondingly faster than before:
http://www.iflscience.com/heal...
We can't put the toothpaste back into the tube. Our 'recusing' from GMO technology would do nothing to prevent misuse of the tech by anyone still using it. It would only prevent us from developing a response.
Actually yes, because we now know that transgenic processes occur in nature too.
" Today, roughly 85 per cent of corn and 90 per cent of soybeans produced in the US are genetically modified. "
Yet we still exist. Why don't I have tentacles and nine eyes yet?
And furthermore, I recently had another vaccination, for shingles.
Because we're such a long way from AI being good enough to be an existential threat to humanity, this entire lone of fear is exceedingly speculative. But we might start thinking of ways we could convince an intelligent AI that biological life has features good enough that a partnership, not a takeover, would be the best outcome.
Ballmer also wouldn't be able to work on the problem the Clippers have been having lately: in the middle of a game, all the players suddenly stop right where they happen to be in action and freeze in place. Whenever this happens, you have to restart the game from the beginning. The team doctor says that a large load of viruses seems to be responsible.
Quick! Bring a bucket of phlogiston and burn this witch!
That's why in the Communist era everyone loved the sparkly clean environment of East Germany and industrial Poland, not to mention that unique Ukrainian nuclear game preserve.