Except "error" is really too vague a term; many bugs are the result of a program operating as specified, it's just that the people doing the specification didn't think through the implications. The exact same thing is true for manual systems.
So in cases like this a company will say it was a computer bug as a way of suggesting this wasn't the result of corporate culture. But some bugs are the result of corporate culture.
PayPal decided it would be a good idea to send ominous letters to people who couldn't pay their debt through some system -- it doesn't matter whether the system is manual or computer automated. What matters is that, as an economical measure, they decided it'd be more profitable to take human judgement out of the decision to threaten someone. So this is absolutely a reflection of who PayPal is as a company; the only thing that makes it a bug is that it doesn't reflect how they wish to be seen.
I think the difficulty is dealing with deep vc-funded pockets that can afford to change the status quo fast.
The traditional business approach would be to check with the city authorities and get permission to do something like this, but tech startups have developed essentially a sociopathic ethos: they don't worry about problems they create for other people, and they certainly don't ask permission. They just roll in one night with trucks full of junk and dump it all over the place. By the time you realize they exist, the problem exists.
The game is to get too big to stop too fast to react to. And they can do this because they've got backers with a big bucks and boners for disruption. They can buy on a scale where people will tire of chucking scooters into the trash faster than they'll run out of scooters.
You are putting me in the position of defending every claim of "hate speech", which of course is an intrinsically untenable one. My position is that not every ugly or unpleasant utterance is "hate speech", but by the same token not everything that isn't "hate speech" is acceptable, either socially or legally.
In this case the developer's speech is something we've almost lost the concept of: it was rude. In the absence of the concept of impoliteness, people struggle to put offensive behavior in some kind of useful category, and they end up mischaracterizing it as something more toxic than it is. People turn to laws because there are no social rules through which people gain and lose social capital by their behavior.
If we still had ways to express formality and familiarity, none of this would have happened. It's common on the Internet to assume people you're talking to don't know everything you want to talk about; if expressed in a formality register appropriate to speaking to a stranger, it wouldn't sound offensive. But we all speak as if we know each other, and the dev reacted emotionally as if someone who should have known better disrespected her expertise. And what's more having no means for expressing social displeasure other than outrage, she went nuclear, with all the collateral damage. In an earlier age she'd have made a chilly reply that would have left the offender chastened -- which is the whole point of politeness. It gives you a less damaging way to deal with these kinds of mishaps.
I don't think it's hate speech; hate speech attacks an entire group -- the problem with hate speech is that it undermines the ability of the target group to live in peace and security. This is speech which is uncivil towards men as a group, but it isn't threatening.
You have to be careful enough to avoid leaking enough information for your identity to be crowdsourced by doxxers, which if you want to blog about your profession is extremely difficult.
But I'm also talking about people who get fired from their work for spouting racist rants that are captured by cell phone cameras and are then identified by rando acquaintences. Now I think accosting someone with a hateful rant is an odious thing, but I'm not sure that it should be a firing offense for someone who is not in a public-facing position like a spokesman or C level executive.
The basic problem is that is that shame costs $0 to produce, and it rewards bandwagon-jumpers with that little hit of self-righteous pleasure. This makes drawing lines almost futile, because there's an endless supply of outrage and companies will make the simple economic decision that it's easier to get rid of the employee than get rid of the distraction. If you had to spend a little of your own social capital to take someone down, then maybe things would be different.
Well, I never automatically cheer someone losing their job, because it's so damn hard to apply "do something embarassing, lose your job" consistently. Oh, it's satisfying when somebody is fired for doing something outside work you see as odious, but that's an emotional reaction, not a principled one. For every firing that by your feelings is justly dismissed, there is another whom you feel is an injustice, and people will never agree on which case is which. Which tells you feelings are a lousy guide in this situation.
The fact is in the Age of Internet Shaming there is no such thing as "off-the-clock". I don't think this is a good thing. I think people should be allowed to have time when they aren't responsible to their employers, even if they use that time to be assholes.
The dev's reaction here wasn't criminal; it was uncivil; a childish overreaction which prompted an even more ridiculous overreaction. There's been a lot of talk about "civility" recently, but it all ignores why the civility of others is important to us: it is something people give to us voluntarily. When you start enforcing civility, it is no longer civility, it's conformity.
Well, Mark Twain would get blocked until the filters got smart enough to detect irony.
As for this being hate speech, it may trip the filters but that doesn't make it so. What it is, is ignorant and uncivil speech, which Facebook is entitled to block from its site. Characterizing it has "hate speech" is an outright error.
The distinguishing feature of hate speech is that it targets a group of people. Jefferson is only mentioning Indians in passing. His perspective, while forward-looking for the time, naturally lacks the benefit of a couple of centuries of painful experience. In any case is hardly the worst offense he committed against liberty.
I think the really important issue in situations like this is preventability. How possible is it to reduce some number that represents human suffering, and at what cost?
The numbers for the impact of industrial exposure to formaldehyde are in an interesting territory. The statistical risk is not so high that you would, say, rule out taking a good job that involved formaldehyde exposure. Your risk is roughly on the order of 7/10 of 1%, which is low, but something like 700x greater than the baseline. This makes taking steps to reduce worker exposure reasonable.
The car analogy is apt. Would you drive if cars didn't have safety belts, crumple zones, and anti-lock brakes? Sure you would. Is it a good thing that these are all standard on cars today? Yes it is. And cars remain a major source of risk do to our high exposure; the problem is that the next steps to make them marginally safer haven't been as cost productive, until recently. Electronic stability control, lane departure warnings and blind spot monitoring are all cheaper and more feasible today than they would have been when seatbelts were made mandatory in the US in 1968.
Formaldehyde occurs naturally in animal tissues as a result of amino acid digestion. That is why exposure at very low levels is not considered a concern. Exposure at higher levels are mainly a concern for the respiratory tract, e.g. nasopharyngeal cancer.
There's also evidence from both cohort and case control studies linking high chronic exposure to certain forms of leukemia. Although the exact mechanism isn't understood, the statistical evidence is quite strong -- strong enough to justify taking precautionary measures to protect exposed workers. Note this doesn't mean that if you are a worker exposed to formaldehyde you are likely to get leukemia. While your risk is greatly elevated it is on the order of a little less than 1%.
That's just the way the numbers work out. The rates are high enough that across the exposed population it's a serious concern that represents a large volume of human suffering; however for an individual the statistics don't warrant anything like panic.
The chance that a person will develop leukemia at some point in his life is 0.1%. Survival rates are about 2/3, higher for younger people. This means its virtually certain you've met someone who is a leukemia survivor, they just don't wear a sign around their neck announcing the fact.
The rate of new cases in the general population is about 12 per 100,000 population per year -- about 1.2 hundredths of a percent. If you live in a small town and have a job that doesn't involve dealing with a lot of people, it *is* possible you've never met anyone with active leukemia. However, even if you had you wouldn't necessarily know; the don't wear a sign around their neck announcing the fact either.
Initial leukemia symptoms are flu-like; so if you've ever met someone who is fatigued and achy they *might* have had leukemia. Once they are sick enough that they *obviously* have cancer, they're out and about a lot less, spending more time at home or sick in the hospital, where you're less likely to encounter them.
I trust this explains how leukemia could exist without your necessarily having had personal experience with it.
Because we don't really know what the reasoning was -- only the target organization's claims about what that reasoning must have been.
In Germany, as in the US, to execute a search you need a warrant issued by a magistrate, specifying the places to be searched and methods of search to be used. They have to convince a judge that there's evidence to be found, but they don't have to lay out their entire reasoning to the target of the investigation.
I'm not saying that the warrants couldn't be based on stupid reasoning, or that the cops didn't engage in stupid behavior, particularly in the search of the associated hackerspace. It's almost guaranteed that if you mix "cops", "technology" and "search" something stupid is going to happen at some point in the proceedings. However we won't know if the reasoning behind the warrants is stupid until charges are brought against someone.
We may disclose your information to third parties in order to comply with a legal obligation (including, but not limited to, subpoenas and warrants);
Shocked disbelief... what... a surprise... didn't see THAT coming...
Well, if a company doesn't tell you they're going to cooperate with a court order you can still take it for granted that they will. Look at it this way: suppose they explicitly said they won't ever share your position information with law enforcement. Would you really expect that a court would enforce that promise when it contradicted a court order?
Fhat's the reaction a lot of us had in the 70s when it first became fashionable to wear clothing with branding prominently displayed. What kind of fool turns himself into a billboard for a clothing manufacturer?
Ocean water is naturally slightly alkaline (pH about 8.2). The problem we're currently facing is misleadingly called "acidification", which is the oceans becoming more neutral when they should be more basic. Estimates are that ocean pH has dropped by 0.1 pH since the start of the industrial revolution, and that's already stressing sea life; it's expected to drop by a further 0.3 or more, even if we cut carbon emissions.
The reason so much acidification is in our future is that CO2 enters the ocean at a limited rate. It was Roger Revelle's discovery of this fact in 1957 that shifted the scientific consensus from global cooling to global warming; before that it'd been believed that atmospheric CO2 physically could not increase.
So this is what we've got to look forward to as the relatively high levels of atmospheric CO2 slowly make their way into the ocean:
CO2 + H20 --> H2CO3 --> HC03- + H+.
H2CO3 is carbonate, a weak base; H+ is the hydron, a powerful Lewis acid. The net result is acidification. Adding HCO3- and taking away the H+ to use as fuel would tend to offset acidification.
As for throwing the electrolytic composition of the ocean off, bicarbonate is one of the most common minerals in the ocean, with a typical concentration of 140 mg/L. It's where the bulk of CO2 is going anyway.
The oceans contain 1.35x 10^21 liters of seawater. That means there is currently 1.89x 10^17 kg of carbonate in the ocean -- 189,000 gigatonnes. Humans currently emit 37 gigatons of CO2, with a molar mass of 44. If that were entirely converted to bicarbonate with a molar mass of 61, that'd be 262 gigatons of bicarbonate.
Of course that's not likely to be remotely feasible, nor is it what you'd do if you if it were. At the very least cost would be prohibitive. Annually the oceans emit 332 gigatons of CO2 and absorb 338, for a net absorption of 6 gigatons/year. So it'd make sense to add just enough calcite to generate the bicarbonate you'd need to neutralize that much CO2.
No, if anything we need more punctuation marks -- for example different punctuation marks for list and clause delimiting. Clearly we need an irony mark too.
Most of all we need a "meh mark" that corresponds to the exclamation point, but carries the opposite sense.
Actual importance has never been a factor in valuation -- otherwise the most valuable thing on the planet would be air, which is proverbially free.
This is an argument against the attitude that income and wealth are somehow indicators of social contribution. A park ranger or trash collector contributes more to society than a senior engineer at Instagram, but doesn't make anything like the money. People who can fill the role are rarer, and therefore command a higher market price, even though they're creating a service that no consumer would pay money for.
You're attacking a kind of straw version of the Fermi Paradox.
People get hung up on the name "paradox", but that name tells you right off the bat that the Fermi Paradox is not meant to be approached as a theory or hypothesis, which by definition cannot be paradoxical. The Fermi Paradox doesn't organize what we know, it organizes what we don't know, which at this stage is more useful.
If you line up what little we do know and put it together with some reasonable extrapolations, the result isn't what you expect. It's not useful in the way a theory would be (e.g. in generating experimental null hypotheses), but it's useful at a much more preliminary stage of the scientific process -- selecting issues to investigate. Either (a) what we think we know is false or (b) what seems reasonable to us is false. These are both kinds of things worth looking into.
Well, I'd be open to at least hearing a rational argument in favor of pursuing more nationalist trade policies. But starting a trade war with everyone clearly isn't rational. It's the policy equivalent of a temper tantrum.
A trade war with China hurts US exports to 20% of the world's population. Starting a trade war with everyone but the US hurts US exports to 95% of the world's population.
Because (a) it sounds consequential for non-proliferation but (b) it is not particularly so.
Triuranium octooxide is the major component of yellowcake; the current market value of the uranium extracted in the experiment was about $0.25, which was extracted at a cost of $25 million. Of course uranium prices are volatile, so the market value of the uranium extracted in the experiment has, in recent years, been as high as a dollar. And a scaled up production plant would be more efficient too. Still, there's a long way to go before it's competitive with mining.
Now granted use-value and market-value are two different things. If a country (a) had no uranium reserves and (b) had a coastline, it could, given a very, very long time gather enough yellowcake to, say, make a bomb, because you'd need thousands of tons of the stuff to feed into your enrichment process to obtain the required fissile isotopes. If you were a landlocked regime with nuclear ambitions and no uranium reserves, you'd have to compare the time and cost to this process to the effort of finding a dodgy merchant who will sell you yellowcake under the table.all arsenal. And most countries with no uranium can obtain it on the open market by starting a civilian nuclear power program.
Proliferation should scare you, but his particular development has almost zero marginal effect. Uranium is fairly common in the Earth's crust, which is why you find it in seawater, and even countries with zero commercially viable uranium deposits, like Pakistan, can scrape together enough domestically mined uranium to build a small arsenal.
The missing ingredient in both the Agile and meditation case is the same: motivation.
I've always said that the biggest real difference between success and failure on a software project, other than technical acumen relative to difficulty, is commitment to the user. You've got to care about results. If you do Agile for the sake of being someone who does Agile, you're just wasting time and money fashionably.
People succeeded in software before Agile, and people fail even though they do the rigmarole parts Agile. But if you care about the users and stakeholders you find a way to succeed, and Agile gives you a framework for doing that. That framework is pointless if that's not what you're up to.
Right, so natural pathogens like influenza, polio, diptheria, tuberculosis and measles cold have never been a public health problem.
There are a number of problems with your reasoning. First, it assumes the most simple minded genetic engineering target: make this pathogen kill everyone as immediately and spectacularly fatal as possible. You would engineer your pathogen for the maximum political and economic impact in the target population. For example you could engineer something like tuberculosis, which before anti-TB drugs often caused recurring bouts of debilitating acute illness over a person's lifetime before ultimately killing him.
Ultimately a pathogen like polio which causes neurological damage inflicts a bigger burden on your enemy than a disease that causes death. Some encephalitis strains are fabulously expensive to survive, because they can require lifetime institutionalization. Or here's an idea: what about a diseases which disfigured people?
Second, your reasoning ignores the actual mechanisms of contagion. Some pathogenic diseases like the common cold or HIV are infectious in the incubation period, before symptoms emerge. Others, like Ebola or measles, aren't infectious until some symptoms emerge, but can spread while the symptoms are still too mild to cause alarm. Still other pathogens can be transported with no contact at all with an infected person, via contaminated objects, food or waste.
Third, you also ignore the ecology of human pathogens. Many epidemics are of "zoonotic" pathogens -- pathogens whose natural ecological focus are wild animals and livestock. Influenza is a zoonosis whose original focus was wild bird populations but spreads to humans via livestock. The pathogens' behavior in the "enzootic reservoir" runs the gamut from completely asymptomatic (hantavirus) to often fatal (West Nile Virus) -- they all can work to keep the pathogen alive until it can reach people. Human-only pathogens like the common cold also manage to maintain themselves in the human population indefinitely producing countless variant strains, many of which produce few or no symptoms, until the circumstances are right to explode, like a time bomb.
Engineering an effective bioweapon is a multidisciplinary exercise. There's genetics and medicine, of course, but to make the engineered pathogen effective as a weapon you need knowledge of public health and possibly ecology.
Slashdot Mirror
The supposed use will be as a less-than-lethal weapon for applications like crowd control.
Except "error" is really too vague a term; many bugs are the result of a program operating as specified, it's just that the people doing the specification didn't think through the implications. The exact same thing is true for manual systems.
So in cases like this a company will say it was a computer bug as a way of suggesting this wasn't the result of corporate culture. But some bugs are the result of corporate culture.
PayPal decided it would be a good idea to send ominous letters to people who couldn't pay their debt through some system -- it doesn't matter whether the system is manual or computer automated. What matters is that, as an economical measure, they decided it'd be more profitable to take human judgement out of the decision to threaten someone. So this is absolutely a reflection of who PayPal is as a company; the only thing that makes it a bug is that it doesn't reflect how they wish to be seen.
I think the difficulty is dealing with deep vc-funded pockets that can afford to change the status quo fast.
The traditional business approach would be to check with the city authorities and get permission to do something like this, but tech startups have developed essentially a sociopathic ethos: they don't worry about problems they create for other people, and they certainly don't ask permission. They just roll in one night with trucks full of junk and dump it all over the place. By the time you realize they exist, the problem exists.
The game is to get too big to stop too fast to react to. And they can do this because they've got backers with a big bucks and boners for disruption. They can buy on a scale where people will tire of chucking scooters into the trash faster than they'll run out of scooters.
You are putting me in the position of defending every claim of "hate speech", which of course is an intrinsically untenable one. My position is that not every ugly or unpleasant utterance is "hate speech", but by the same token not everything that isn't "hate speech" is acceptable, either socially or legally.
In this case the developer's speech is something we've almost lost the concept of: it was rude. In the absence of the concept of impoliteness, people struggle to put offensive behavior in some kind of useful category, and they end up mischaracterizing it as something more toxic than it is. People turn to laws because there are no social rules through which people gain and lose social capital by their behavior.
If we still had ways to express formality and familiarity, none of this would have happened. It's common on the Internet to assume people you're talking to don't know everything you want to talk about; if expressed in a formality register appropriate to speaking to a stranger, it wouldn't sound offensive. But we all speak as if we know each other, and the dev reacted emotionally as if someone who should have known better disrespected her expertise. And what's more having no means for expressing social displeasure other than outrage, she went nuclear, with all the collateral damage. In an earlier age she'd have made a chilly reply that would have left the offender chastened -- which is the whole point of politeness. It gives you a less damaging way to deal with these kinds of mishaps.
I don't think it's hate speech; hate speech attacks an entire group -- the problem with hate speech is that it undermines the ability of the target group to live in peace and security. This is speech which is uncivil towards men as a group, but it isn't threatening.
You have to be careful enough to avoid leaking enough information for your identity to be crowdsourced by doxxers, which if you want to blog about your profession is extremely difficult.
But I'm also talking about people who get fired from their work for spouting racist rants that are captured by cell phone cameras and are then identified by rando acquaintences. Now I think accosting someone with a hateful rant is an odious thing, but I'm not sure that it should be a firing offense for someone who is not in a public-facing position like a spokesman or C level executive.
The basic problem is that is that shame costs $0 to produce, and it rewards bandwagon-jumpers with that little hit of self-righteous pleasure. This makes drawing lines almost futile, because there's an endless supply of outrage and companies will make the simple economic decision that it's easier to get rid of the employee than get rid of the distraction. If you had to spend a little of your own social capital to take someone down, then maybe things would be different.
Well, I never automatically cheer someone losing their job, because it's so damn hard to apply "do something embarassing, lose your job" consistently. Oh, it's satisfying when somebody is fired for doing something outside work you see as odious, but that's an emotional reaction, not a principled one. For every firing that by your feelings is justly dismissed, there is another whom you feel is an injustice, and people will never agree on which case is which. Which tells you feelings are a lousy guide in this situation.
The fact is in the Age of Internet Shaming there is no such thing as "off-the-clock". I don't think this is a good thing. I think people should be allowed to have time when they aren't responsible to their employers, even if they use that time to be assholes.
The dev's reaction here wasn't criminal; it was uncivil; a childish overreaction which prompted an even more ridiculous overreaction. There's been a lot of talk about "civility" recently, but it all ignores why the civility of others is important to us: it is something people give to us voluntarily. When you start enforcing civility, it is no longer civility, it's conformity.
Well, Mark Twain would get blocked until the filters got smart enough to detect irony.
As for this being hate speech, it may trip the filters but that doesn't make it so. What it is, is ignorant and uncivil speech, which Facebook is entitled to block from its site. Characterizing it has "hate speech" is an outright error.
The distinguishing feature of hate speech is that it targets a group of people. Jefferson is only mentioning Indians in passing. His perspective, while forward-looking for the time, naturally lacks the benefit of a couple of centuries of painful experience. In any case is hardly the worst offense he committed against liberty.
I think the really important issue in situations like this is preventability. How possible is it to reduce some number that represents human suffering, and at what cost?
The numbers for the impact of industrial exposure to formaldehyde are in an interesting territory. The statistical risk is not so high that you would, say, rule out taking a good job that involved formaldehyde exposure. Your risk is roughly on the order of 7/10 of 1%, which is low, but something like 700x greater than the baseline. This makes taking steps to reduce worker exposure reasonable.
The car analogy is apt. Would you drive if cars didn't have safety belts, crumple zones, and anti-lock brakes? Sure you would. Is it a good thing that these are all standard on cars today? Yes it is. And cars remain a major source of risk do to our high exposure; the problem is that the next steps to make them marginally safer haven't been as cost productive, until recently. Electronic stability control, lane departure warnings and blind spot monitoring are all cheaper and more feasible today than they would have been when seatbelts were made mandatory in the US in 1968.
Formaldehyde occurs naturally in animal tissues as a result of amino acid digestion. That is why exposure at very low levels is not considered a concern. Exposure at higher levels are mainly a concern for the respiratory tract, e.g. nasopharyngeal cancer.
There's also evidence from both cohort and case control studies linking high chronic exposure to certain forms of leukemia. Although the exact mechanism isn't understood, the statistical evidence is quite strong -- strong enough to justify taking precautionary measures to protect exposed workers. Note this doesn't mean that if you are a worker exposed to formaldehyde you are likely to get leukemia. While your risk is greatly elevated it is on the order of a little less than 1%.
That's just the way the numbers work out. The rates are high enough that across the exposed population it's a serious concern that represents a large volume of human suffering; however for an individual the statistics don't warrant anything like panic.
The chance that a person will develop leukemia at some point in his life is 0.1%. Survival rates are about 2/3, higher for younger people. This means its virtually certain you've met someone who is a leukemia survivor, they just don't wear a sign around their neck announcing the fact.
The rate of new cases in the general population is about 12 per 100,000 population per year -- about 1.2 hundredths of a percent. If you live in a small town and have a job that doesn't involve dealing with a lot of people, it *is* possible you've never met anyone with active leukemia. However, even if you had you wouldn't necessarily know; the don't wear a sign around their neck announcing the fact either.
Initial leukemia symptoms are flu-like; so if you've ever met someone who is fatigued and achy they *might* have had leukemia. Once they are sick enough that they *obviously* have cancer, they're out and about a lot less, spending more time at home or sick in the hospital, where you're less likely to encounter them.
I trust this explains how leukemia could exist without your necessarily having had personal experience with it.
Because we don't really know what the reasoning was -- only the target organization's claims about what that reasoning must have been.
In Germany, as in the US, to execute a search you need a warrant issued by a magistrate, specifying the places to be searched and methods of search to be used. They have to convince a judge that there's evidence to be found, but they don't have to lay out their entire reasoning to the target of the investigation.
I'm not saying that the warrants couldn't be based on stupid reasoning, or that the cops didn't engage in stupid behavior, particularly in the search of the associated hackerspace. It's almost guaranteed that if you mix "cops", "technology" and "search" something stupid is going to happen at some point in the proceedings. However we won't know if the reasoning behind the warrants is stupid until charges are brought against someone.
at the dawn of the consumer digital age: a world in which combines unprecedented convenience with unprecedented complexity and unpredictability.
For every prior generation convenience, simplicity and predictability were effectively synonymous.
We may disclose your information to third parties in order to comply with a legal obligation (including, but not limited to, subpoenas and warrants);
Shocked disbelief... what ... a surprise... didn't see THAT coming...
Well, if a company doesn't tell you they're going to cooperate with a court order you can still take it for granted that they will. Look at it this way: suppose they explicitly said they won't ever share your position information with law enforcement. Would you really expect that a court would enforce that promise when it contradicted a court order?
I guess for the same reason people pay good money for "smart speakers".
Fhat's the reaction a lot of us had in the 70s when it first became fashionable to wear clothing with branding prominently displayed. What kind of fool turns himself into a billboard for a clothing manufacturer?
It turns out, the answer was a commonplace fool.
You should start drinking coffee; you'll piss it out as sugary soda.
Ocean water is naturally slightly alkaline (pH about 8.2). The problem we're currently facing is misleadingly called "acidification", which is the oceans becoming more neutral when they should be more basic. Estimates are that ocean pH has dropped by 0.1 pH since the start of the industrial revolution, and that's already stressing sea life; it's expected to drop by a further 0.3 or more, even if we cut carbon emissions.
The reason so much acidification is in our future is that CO2 enters the ocean at a limited rate. It was Roger Revelle's discovery of this fact in 1957 that shifted the scientific consensus from global cooling to global warming; before that it'd been believed that atmospheric CO2 physically could not increase.
So this is what we've got to look forward to as the relatively high levels of atmospheric CO2 slowly make their way into the ocean:
CO2 + H20 --> H2CO3 --> HC03- + H+.
H2CO3 is carbonate, a weak base; H+ is the hydron, a powerful Lewis acid. The net result is acidification. Adding HCO3- and taking away the H+ to use as fuel would tend to offset acidification.
As for throwing the electrolytic composition of the ocean off, bicarbonate is one of the most common minerals in the ocean, with a typical concentration of 140 mg/L. It's where the bulk of CO2 is going anyway.
The oceans contain 1.35x 10^21 liters of seawater. That means there is currently 1.89x 10^17 kg of carbonate in the ocean -- 189,000 gigatonnes. Humans currently emit 37 gigatons of CO2, with a molar mass of 44. If that were entirely converted to bicarbonate with a molar mass of 61, that'd be 262 gigatons of bicarbonate.
Of course that's not likely to be remotely feasible, nor is it what you'd do if you if it were. At the very least cost would be prohibitive. Annually the oceans emit 332 gigatons of CO2 and absorb 338, for a net absorption of 6 gigatons/year. So it'd make sense to add just enough calcite to generate the bicarbonate you'd need to neutralize that much CO2.
No, if anything we need more punctuation marks -- for example different punctuation marks for list and clause delimiting. Clearly we need an irony mark too.
Most of all we need a "meh mark" that corresponds to the exclamation point, but carries the opposite sense.
Actual importance has never been a factor in valuation -- otherwise the most valuable thing on the planet would be air, which is proverbially free.
This is an argument against the attitude that income and wealth are somehow indicators of social contribution. A park ranger or trash collector contributes more to society than a senior engineer at Instagram, but doesn't make anything like the money. People who can fill the role are rarer, and therefore command a higher market price, even though they're creating a service that no consumer would pay money for.
You're attacking a kind of straw version of the Fermi Paradox.
People get hung up on the name "paradox", but that name tells you right off the bat that the Fermi Paradox is not meant to be approached as a theory or hypothesis, which by definition cannot be paradoxical. The Fermi Paradox doesn't organize what we know, it organizes what we don't know, which at this stage is more useful.
If you line up what little we do know and put it together with some reasonable extrapolations, the result isn't what you expect. It's not useful in the way a theory would be (e.g. in generating experimental null hypotheses), but it's useful at a much more preliminary stage of the scientific process -- selecting issues to investigate. Either (a) what we think we know is false or (b) what seems reasonable to us is false. These are both kinds of things worth looking into.
Well, I'd be open to at least hearing a rational argument in favor of pursuing more nationalist trade policies. But starting a trade war with everyone clearly isn't rational. It's the policy equivalent of a temper tantrum.
A trade war with China hurts US exports to 20% of the world's population. Starting a trade war with everyone but the US hurts US exports to 95% of the world's population.
Why on Earth would this be made public?!
Because (a) it sounds consequential for non-proliferation but (b) it is not particularly so.
Triuranium octooxide is the major component of yellowcake; the current market value of the uranium extracted in the experiment was about $0.25, which was extracted at a cost of $25 million. Of course uranium prices are volatile, so the market value of the uranium extracted in the experiment has, in recent years, been as high as a dollar. And a scaled up production plant would be more efficient too. Still, there's a long way to go before it's competitive with mining.
Now granted use-value and market-value are two different things. If a country (a) had no uranium reserves and (b) had a coastline, it could, given a very, very long time gather enough yellowcake to, say, make a bomb, because you'd need thousands of tons of the stuff to feed into your enrichment process to obtain the required fissile isotopes. If you were a landlocked regime with nuclear ambitions and no uranium reserves, you'd have to compare the time and cost to this process to the effort of finding a dodgy merchant who will sell you yellowcake under the table.all arsenal. And most countries with no uranium can obtain it on the open market by starting a civilian nuclear power program.
Proliferation should scare you, but his particular development has almost zero marginal effect. Uranium is fairly common in the Earth's crust, which is why you find it in seawater, and even countries with zero commercially viable uranium deposits, like Pakistan, can scrape together enough domestically mined uranium to build a small arsenal.
The missing ingredient in both the Agile and meditation case is the same: motivation.
I've always said that the biggest real difference between success and failure on a software project, other than technical acumen relative to difficulty, is commitment to the user. You've got to care about results. If you do Agile for the sake of being someone who does Agile, you're just wasting time and money fashionably.
People succeeded in software before Agile, and people fail even though they do the rigmarole parts Agile. But if you care about the users and stakeholders you find a way to succeed, and Agile gives you a framework for doing that. That framework is pointless if that's not what you're up to.
Right, so natural pathogens like influenza, polio, diptheria, tuberculosis and measles cold have never been a public health problem.
There are a number of problems with your reasoning. First, it assumes the most simple minded genetic engineering target: make this pathogen kill everyone as immediately and spectacularly fatal as possible. You would engineer your pathogen for the maximum political and economic impact in the target population. For example you could engineer something like tuberculosis, which before anti-TB drugs often caused recurring bouts of debilitating acute illness over a person's lifetime before ultimately killing him.
Ultimately a pathogen like polio which causes neurological damage inflicts a bigger burden on your enemy than a disease that causes death. Some encephalitis strains are fabulously expensive to survive, because they can require lifetime institutionalization. Or here's an idea: what about a diseases which disfigured people?
Second, your reasoning ignores the actual mechanisms of contagion. Some pathogenic diseases like the common cold or HIV are infectious in the incubation period, before symptoms emerge. Others, like Ebola or measles, aren't infectious until some symptoms emerge, but can spread while the symptoms are still too mild to cause alarm. Still other pathogens can be transported with no contact at all with an infected person, via contaminated objects, food or waste.
Third, you also ignore the ecology of human pathogens. Many epidemics are of "zoonotic" pathogens -- pathogens whose natural ecological focus are wild animals and livestock. Influenza is a zoonosis whose original focus was wild bird populations but spreads to humans via livestock. The pathogens' behavior in the "enzootic reservoir" runs the gamut from completely asymptomatic (hantavirus) to often fatal (West Nile Virus) -- they all can work to keep the pathogen alive until it can reach people. Human-only pathogens like the common cold also manage to maintain themselves in the human population indefinitely producing countless variant strains, many of which produce few or no symptoms, until the circumstances are right to explode, like a time bomb.
Engineering an effective bioweapon is a multidisciplinary exercise. There's genetics and medicine, of course, but to make the engineered pathogen effective as a weapon you need knowledge of public health and possibly ecology.