These scooters likely get stripped down to parts, which are completely interchangeable, so there's no point in tracking individual parts that "go together". This leaves you with the Sacred Galley of Athens question -- is it the same boat after you've replaced every single part? If you completely disassemble a dozen schooters and reassemble a dozen scooters from randomly selected parts, what happens to the "identity" of the scooters that were taken apart? The answer is you don't need it anymore.
If it were firearms, we associate the identity of the firearm with the receiver -- the metal housing into which the barrel and moving parts of the firearm are assembled. But that's purely conventional; you could just as reasonably define the identity of the firearm by the barrel. But why even have a concept for the "identity" of a firearm? Really one only: to track ownership and custody of a firearm, you have to have some kind of database. Databases require identifiers. Seventeenth century gunsmiths didn't stamp serial numbers on their guns because nobody was tracking them.
You could take the same approach as firearms to scooters by declaring that the identity of a scooter sticks to, say, the scooter's deck. But what *function* would that serve? The function of a rental scooter's id is to track user custody of company property and determine when a scooter needs to be serviced. Once the scooter is brought in for repair the need to track that ID disappears. If you insisted on having an id that persists through the rebuild process it would do something that only bad database designs do: constrain physical operations to serve the record keeping system.
In my experience every database design can be invalidated by expanding the universe of questions it must answer (or equivalently, processes it must support). This is the problem with identity in the relational model; it's *implicitly* tied to the questions the designer anticipates. That's why UUIDs are such a robust solution to many identifying tasks: their uniqueness is not tied to any particular set of questions you might want to answer, or to any context (i.e., they are unique *between* databases).
But it wouldn't reverse all the effects of climate change, such as ocean acidification. You'd also continue to have increased solar forcing in places with fewer clouds, and a different amount of sunlight of all wavelengths in other places.
I would make sense to try something like this if we were demonstrably on the brink of some kind of runaway thermal effect, but it wouldn't maintain the status quo or return the status quo ante. You'd still see major and widespread ecological disruption.
An approach like this could keep the *average* temperature increase around the globe down, but in fact that average temperature increase is not that dramatic -- its only about 2 degrees. But that represents a vast amount of total energy, and the changes that energy will bring to air and moisture circulation is what is going to be dramatic. Doing something like this will introduce different, perhaps nearly as dramatic changes in global weather patterns.
That's more of a second career. Equals sign as assignment didn't feature in the very earliest computer languages. Typically they had syntax along the lines of "set x to 0" or "transfer 0 to X" or some kind of symbol carrying that sense, like this: "0 -> x" (note reverse of now conventional order).
But one language made an odd decision. In FORTRAN you'd say "n = 0" to mean "assign 0 to integer variable n", and instead used the text ".EQ." to represent the equality predicate. And it turned out FORTRAN was *very* influential.
The link reckons the Australian electricity costs from the peak rather than average costs, which determine what consumers actually pay. Furthermore, a decision by a judge to prevent the opening of a new coal mine could not possibly effect electricity prices two days later.
The other thing links to an unsourced powerpoint that combines just plain gobbledygook bullet points ("No pure electrons"), with dubious, unsourced figures, e.g. "return on investment" in solar being "$775/MWh" which of course is not an ROI figure at all. It's just the total subsidy figure divided by the amount of electricity generated, which of course is really low for coal because (a) the huge installed base of coal plants and (b) nobody in his right mind would pour money into coal.
Why?
The LCOE for wind has been lower than coal since around 2010. The LCOE for newly constructed photovoltaic plants has been dropping every year, and by some calculations the LCOE for new photovoltaic plants is already less than for new coal plants. So, yeah. Money isn't pouring into coal plant construction, either private or public.
That said, natural gas kicks the crap out of everything when it comes levelized cost.
The point isn't to have a supercomputer in space; it's to test the long term effects of space on modern computer hardware.
The ISS's *built-in* computers run on a late 80s 80386SX processors, which were produced with 1000 nanometer semiconductor technology. The processors on this computer have minimum feature sizes of 45 nm or less, and are thus more likely to be radiation sensitive. The processors for these computers were taken right off the Intel assembly line with no special hardening.
The effect of space operation is particularly of interest in specifying the mission computer for a manned Mars mission where the round-trip time precludes doing many things remotely.
I think this is a necessary part of the political process. In an ideal world we'd all dispassionately weigh our opinions, carefully ensuring that they're consistently applied to ourselves and others. But we don't, not most of us. We live in a world controlled by the snap judgments of millions of voters, snap judgments informed by voter preconceptions. So it's strategically important to shape those preconceptions.
This is why corporations hire public relations people to cover their tracks on things like privacy. That's why PR is a 17 *billion* dollar industry in the US. That's about 10% of the size of the agriculture industry, which is astonishing if you think about it. The PR industry produces more "value" than all the wheat farmers in the US combined (about 11 billion).
All the privacy advocacy groups in the country couldn't scratch the budget a company like Equifax has to cover its ass. So yes, an occasional public hiding is called for, although you're right we shouldn't consider the job *done* once a CEO has been publicly humiliated.
It's also not true that a CEO can simply ignore these things. Administered to a vulnerable CEO at the right time, it can end his career. John Stumpf had to resign as Wells Fargo after this Congressional PR flogging.
And actions don't come out of nowhere. They come from words, which have immense hold over the human mind. Words like "traitor", and "illegal"; "thug" and "animal". If words were so powerless, people wouldn't have slogans, or dog-whistle language. Propagandists wouldn't strive to put them in peoples' mouths.
The headline doesn't err by overestimating the power of *words*. He errs over what most people are paying attention to and how universal his feelings are. Projecting your own feelings onto other people is a pretty common mistake. I warned my fellow Democrats about that in the last primary.
It wouldn't be entirely bad if it really made people suitable for employment, but it strikes me more as a *vanity* project than as anything actually practical.
You can teach anyone with a decent education to code in a few weeks. Mastery takes longer, of course, but starting out young with only marginally competent teachers is a recipe for a lifetime of mediocrity.
Better to focus on analytical/inductive reasoning skills, effective writing, and a broad and sound understanding of science, math, and culture.
Which in a sound design would be controlled by a circuit that was disabled when the wheel is in motion, *thus preventing a software or malware mediated accident*.
Actually, you *have* to, the math you need is *exactly * the same. There is no way you can talk about the reliability of a test just using the statistical properties of the test itself
I had to pull numbers out of my arse -- but I *know* I'm doing this. They don't even realize that they're doing this implicitly.
I'll bet my eye teeth that everyone in the Northern California Intelligence Center thinks that "90% accurate" means that there's a 90% chance that anyone pulled over by this system is driving a car they're looking for. In fact, it means no such thing. Not even close. You need three things to make that determination: the false negative rate of the test, the false positive rate of the test, and the probability that any random car you sample is stolen (the "base rate" of stolen cars you're looking for).
The truth is that you can pull someone over with a "90% accurate test" and there might easily be less than a 1% chance that it's someone you're looking for if the base rate is sufficiently small and the false positive rate anything but vanishingly small.
Let's suppose that the test is 90% accurate on positives, and 99.9% accurate on negatives, and that you're looking for 1 in 10,000 cars. You sample a stream of a hundred cars and you get these results:
True positives: 10 true positives in the stream x 90% accuracy = 9 true positives found. False positives:99,990 true negatives in the stream x 0.1% = 100 false positives found. Probability of a car you pulled over being one you're looking for: about 8.2%.
No law enforcement agency should be allowed to use a gizmo like this -- or a drug test for that matter -- unless the person interpreting the results passes a test in basic probability. The same should go for any expert witness in court.
There is no sharp distinction between atmosphere and space. The fact that detectable traces of the Earth's atmosphere extend to the Moon doesn't mean you are not "in space" when you're orbiting the Moon. As technology improves traces of the Earth's atmosphere will be found even farther away.
But people need lines to govern things like jurisdiction. The usual line is the Karman Line at roughly 100km. That's where the minimum speed needed to maintain aerodynamic lift equals orbital velocity. Well below that line vehicles fly; well above the line they orbit. But there's no practical difference between traveling at 99 km of altitude and 101 km.
There are other places you could draw the line. One could make an argument for 150 km, which is the minimum altitude at which a craft can complete a single unboosted orbit without atmospheric drag causing it to crash. Alternatively, I like the Armstrong Line -- this is the maximum altitude a human could survive at without a pressure suit. That's about 19km, well below the altitudes routinely reached by U2 spy plane flights.
NASA used to use the Karman Line, but switched to 80km so that there wouldn't be a difference in astronaut status between civilians and military personnel on the same flight. The US military used 50 miles/80 km in awarding astronaut wings. This is both a nice round number, and it is roughly where the stratosphere ends and the thermosphere begins. The thermosphere extends well beyond any commonly accepted started point for "outer space".
More to the point, misunderstanding competition is how the US ended up lagging the rest of the developed world in mobile technology.
The first GSM specification was produced in 1987. Rather than get behind that the Reagan and later George HW Bush administration decided that government shouldn't be involved in standardization of telecom technology, that competition would select the best standard.
In fact what happened was that carriers selected a number of incompatible 2G technologies that were roughly equivalent in their capabilities: GSD, CDMA-200, D-AMPS, iDEN. Rather than focusing exclusively on building out their networks, carriers preferred to *lock in* customers, often charging exorbitant fees for things like getting pictures out of your phone's camera.
*Competing standards* helped shield carriers from *economic competition* based on price and quality of service.
I think the term "reactor" came from chemical engineering, meaning a vessel in which a *reaction* takes place. So in that sense, what was built was a "reactor".
In a nuclear fission context, it implies a device capable of supporting a sustained and controllable reaction, in which sense this is *not* a "reactor".
But by that criteria, there are no nuclear fusion reactors in the world. It's not unusual for fusion researchers to call fusion devices such as tokamaks or magnetic mirrors "reactors", even though they cannot sustain a reaction. So in that sense it *is* a "reactor".
It's less important what you call a thing as being clear what you mean, which of course in an age where most news sources have shed their science desks in favor of opinion journalism is a rare thing.
South Korea is definitely a rising pop culture global power.
In terms of films produced, the most prolific countries are (in order): India, Nigeria, the US, China, Japan, France, UK, then South Korea. Nigeria is a regional film superpower in Africa, but its cinema largely unknown by American audiences. Likewise while China is the second must *lucrative* film industry in the world after the US, not many of the films made there are seen internationally.
Bollywood by sheer numbers is bound to produce some content that would appeal to American audiences, but I think South Korea is the one to watch. They produce a variety of historical epics, modern drama and fantasy that would appeal to significant American audiences.
Slashdot Mirror
New Zealand just had it's third hottest January on record.
These scooters likely get stripped down to parts, which are completely interchangeable, so there's no point in tracking individual parts that "go together". This leaves you with the Sacred Galley of Athens question -- is it the same boat after you've replaced every single part? If you completely disassemble a dozen schooters and reassemble a dozen scooters from randomly selected parts, what happens to the "identity" of the scooters that were taken apart? The answer is you don't need it anymore.
If it were firearms, we associate the identity of the firearm with the receiver -- the metal housing into which the barrel and moving parts of the firearm are assembled. But that's purely conventional; you could just as reasonably define the identity of the firearm by the barrel. But why even have a concept for the "identity" of a firearm? Really one only: to track ownership and custody of a firearm, you have to have some kind of database. Databases require identifiers. Seventeenth century gunsmiths didn't stamp serial numbers on their guns because nobody was tracking them.
You could take the same approach as firearms to scooters by declaring that the identity of a scooter sticks to, say, the scooter's deck. But what *function* would that serve? The function of a rental scooter's id is to track user custody of company property and determine when a scooter needs to be serviced. Once the scooter is brought in for repair the need to track that ID disappears. If you insisted on having an id that persists through the rebuild process it would do something that only bad database designs do: constrain physical operations to serve the record keeping system.
In my experience every database design can be invalidated by expanding the universe of questions it must answer (or equivalently, processes it must support). This is the problem with identity in the relational model; it's *implicitly* tied to the questions the designer anticipates. That's why UUIDs are such a robust solution to many identifying tasks: their uniqueness is not tied to any particular set of questions you might want to answer, or to any context (i.e., they are unique *between* databases).
It's somewhere, we just don't know at precisely what point.
In oceanography a reduction of pH is called "acidfication".
But it wouldn't reverse all the effects of climate change, such as ocean acidification. You'd also continue to have increased solar forcing in places with fewer clouds, and a different amount of sunlight of all wavelengths in other places.
I would make sense to try something like this if we were demonstrably on the brink of some kind of runaway thermal effect, but it wouldn't maintain the status quo or return the status quo ante. You'd still see major and widespread ecological disruption.
An approach like this could keep the *average* temperature increase around the globe down, but in fact that average temperature increase is not that dramatic -- its only about 2 degrees. But that represents a vast amount of total energy, and the changes that energy will bring to air and moisture circulation is what is going to be dramatic. Doing something like this will introduce different, perhaps nearly as dramatic changes in global weather patterns.
That's more of a second career. Equals sign as assignment didn't feature in the very earliest computer languages. Typically they had syntax along the lines of "set x to 0" or "transfer 0 to X" or some kind of symbol carrying that sense, like this: "0 -> x" (note reverse of now conventional order).
But one language made an odd decision. In FORTRAN you'd say "n = 0" to mean "assign 0 to integer variable n", and instead used the text ".EQ." to represent the equality predicate. And it turned out FORTRAN was *very* influential.
I dunno. The equal sign ("=") was invented by the Welsh mathematician, Robert Recorde, from Tenby, Pembrokeshire.
The link reckons the Australian electricity costs from the peak rather than average costs, which determine what consumers actually pay. Furthermore, a decision by a judge to prevent the opening of a new coal mine could not possibly effect electricity prices two days later.
The other thing links to an unsourced powerpoint that combines just plain gobbledygook bullet points ("No pure electrons"), with dubious, unsourced figures, e.g. "return on investment" in solar being "$775/MWh" which of course is not an ROI figure at all. It's just the total subsidy figure divided by the amount of electricity generated, which of course is really low for coal because (a) the huge installed base of coal plants and (b) nobody in his right mind would pour money into coal.
Why?
The LCOE for wind has been lower than coal since around 2010. The LCOE for newly constructed photovoltaic plants has been dropping every year, and by some calculations the LCOE for new photovoltaic plants is already less than for new coal plants. So, yeah. Money isn't pouring into coal plant construction, either private or public.
That said, natural gas kicks the crap out of everything when it comes levelized cost.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.zeme... among other sources.
I don't think anyone is suggesting non-hardened COTS electronics is a good idea for a Mars mission.
The radiation in LEO is not the same as beyond the van Allen belts, sure, but it's not the same as at the Earth's surface either.
The point isn't to have a supercomputer in space; it's to test the long term effects of space on modern computer hardware.
The ISS's *built-in* computers run on a late 80s 80386SX processors, which were produced with 1000 nanometer semiconductor technology. The processors on this computer have minimum feature sizes of 45 nm or less, and are thus more likely to be radiation sensitive. The processors for these computers were taken right off the Intel assembly line with no special hardening.
The effect of space operation is particularly of interest in specifying the mission computer for a manned Mars mission where the round-trip time precludes doing many things remotely.
Dog whistles are like salt -- you don't want to use too much. The whole point is to *sound* reasonable.
I think this is a necessary part of the political process. In an ideal world we'd all dispassionately weigh our opinions, carefully ensuring that they're consistently applied to ourselves and others. But we don't, not most of us. We live in a world controlled by the snap judgments of millions of voters, snap judgments informed by voter preconceptions. So it's strategically important to shape those preconceptions.
This is why corporations hire public relations people to cover their tracks on things like privacy. That's why PR is a 17 *billion* dollar industry in the US. That's about 10% of the size of the agriculture industry, which is astonishing if you think about it. The PR industry produces more "value" than all the wheat farmers in the US combined (about 11 billion).
All the privacy advocacy groups in the country couldn't scratch the budget a company like Equifax has to cover its ass. So yes, an occasional public hiding is called for, although you're right we shouldn't consider the job *done* once a CEO has been publicly humiliated.
It's also not true that a CEO can simply ignore these things. Administered to a vulnerable CEO at the right time, it can end his career. John Stumpf had to resign as Wells Fargo after this Congressional PR flogging.
Words do not destroy, only actions do.
And actions don't come out of nowhere. They come from words, which have immense hold over the human mind. Words like "traitor", and "illegal"; "thug" and "animal". If words were so powerless, people wouldn't have slogans, or dog-whistle language. Propagandists wouldn't strive to put them in peoples' mouths.
The headline doesn't err by overestimating the power of *words*. He errs over what most people are paying attention to and how universal his feelings are. Projecting your own feelings onto other people is a pretty common mistake. I warned my fellow Democrats about that in the last primary.
It wouldn't be entirely bad if it really made people suitable for employment, but it strikes me more as a *vanity* project than as anything actually practical.
You can teach anyone with a decent education to code in a few weeks. Mastery takes longer, of course, but starting out young with only marginally competent teachers is a recipe for a lifetime of mediocrity.
Better to focus on analytical/inductive reasoning skills, effective writing, and a broad and sound understanding of science, math, and culture.
Which in a sound design would be controlled by a circuit that was disabled when the wheel is in motion, *thus preventing a software or malware mediated accident*.
Actually, you *have* to, the math you need is *exactly * the same. There is no way you can talk about the reliability of a test just using the statistical properties of the test itself
I had to pull numbers out of my arse -- but I *know* I'm doing this. They don't even realize that they're doing this implicitly.
I'll bet my eye teeth that everyone in the Northern California Intelligence Center thinks that "90% accurate" means that there's a 90% chance that anyone pulled over by this system is driving a car they're looking for. In fact, it means no such thing. Not even close. You need three things to make that determination: the false negative rate of the test, the false positive rate of the test, and the probability that any random car you sample is stolen (the "base rate" of stolen cars you're looking for).
The truth is that you can pull someone over with a "90% accurate test" and there might easily be less than a 1% chance that it's someone you're looking for if the base rate is sufficiently small and the false positive rate anything but vanishingly small.
Let's suppose that the test is 90% accurate on positives, and 99.9% accurate on negatives, and that you're looking for 1 in 10,000 cars. You sample a stream of a hundred cars and you get these results:
True positives: 10 true positives in the stream x 90% accuracy = 9 true positives found.
False positives:99,990 true negatives in the stream x 0.1% = 100 false positives found.
Probability of a car you pulled over being one you're looking for: about 8.2%.
No law enforcement agency should be allowed to use a gizmo like this -- or a drug test for that matter -- unless the person interpreting the results passes a test in basic probability. The same should go for any expert witness in court.
There is no sharp distinction between atmosphere and space. The fact that detectable traces of the Earth's atmosphere extend to the Moon doesn't mean you are not "in space" when you're orbiting the Moon. As technology improves traces of the Earth's atmosphere will be found even farther away.
But people need lines to govern things like jurisdiction. The usual line is the Karman Line at roughly 100km. That's where the minimum speed needed to maintain aerodynamic lift equals orbital velocity. Well below that line vehicles fly; well above the line they orbit. But there's no practical difference between traveling at 99 km of altitude and 101 km.
There are other places you could draw the line. One could make an argument for 150 km, which is the minimum altitude at which a craft can complete a single unboosted orbit without atmospheric drag causing it to crash. Alternatively, I like the Armstrong Line -- this is the maximum altitude a human could survive at without a pressure suit. That's about 19km, well below the altitudes routinely reached by U2 spy plane flights.
NASA used to use the Karman Line, but switched to 80km so that there wouldn't be a difference in astronaut status between civilians and military personnel on the same flight. The US military used 50 miles/80 km in awarding astronaut wings. This is both a nice round number, and it is roughly where the stratosphere ends and the thermosphere begins. The thermosphere extends well beyond any commonly accepted started point for "outer space".
More to the point, misunderstanding competition is how the US ended up lagging the rest of the developed world in mobile technology.
The first GSM specification was produced in 1987. Rather than get behind that the Reagan and later George HW Bush administration decided that government shouldn't be involved in standardization of telecom technology, that competition would select the best standard.
In fact what happened was that carriers selected a number of incompatible 2G technologies that were roughly equivalent in their capabilities: GSD, CDMA-200, D-AMPS, iDEN. Rather than focusing exclusively on building out their networks, carriers preferred to *lock in* customers, often charging exorbitant fees for things like getting pictures out of your phone's camera.
*Competing standards* helped shield carriers from *economic competition* based on price and quality of service.
Why not go to 7G or even 8G?
There's plenty positive integers left.
I think the term "reactor" came from chemical engineering, meaning a vessel in which a *reaction* takes place. So in that sense, what was built was a "reactor".
In a nuclear fission context, it implies a device capable of supporting a sustained and controllable reaction, in which sense this is *not* a "reactor".
But by that criteria, there are no nuclear fusion reactors in the world. It's not unusual for fusion researchers to call fusion devices such as tokamaks or magnetic mirrors "reactors", even though they cannot sustain a reaction. So in that sense it *is* a "reactor".
It's less important what you call a thing as being clear what you mean, which of course in an age where most news sources have shed their science desks in favor of opinion journalism is a rare thing.
South Korea is definitely a rising pop culture global power.
In terms of films produced, the most prolific countries are (in order): India, Nigeria, the US, China, Japan, France, UK, then South Korea. Nigeria is a regional film superpower in Africa, but its cinema largely unknown by American audiences. Likewise while China is the second must *lucrative* film industry in the world after the US, not many of the films made there are seen internationally.
Bollywood by sheer numbers is bound to produce some content that would appeal to American audiences, but I think South Korea is the one to watch. They produce a variety of historical epics, modern drama and fantasy that would appeal to significant American audiences.
I think it's more about protecting Google's revenue than it is about protecting kids.