Though you're most certainly correct about the LHC not forming a black hole, what you fail to mention, is that at high energies the character of all forces (gravity, electromagnetic etc.) probably becomes equal, like it was at the time of the Big Bang: light is gravity is magnetism etc. Therefore, your assumption that the weight of a proton in rest is a good argument against the LHC becoming a black hole, is wrong. At least, in theory it is.
The EU does indeed have some democratic aspects. So do Shell and General Motors. Its employees, for example, can democratically decide which brand of coffee comes out of the coffee machine. Does that make them democracies?
I think even you'd answer "no" to that question. So we can conclude from that that a bit more than some democratic aspects are needed to call something a democracy. In the EU the democratic part is formed by the European Parliament, which is elected by the citizens of the EU. However, this parliament doesn't have influence on all matters.
Which brings me to the Treaty formerly known as the European Constitution, the Lisbon treaty. Do you happen to know what happened to that after it was first refused by the Dutch and the French? The story is too long to tell here, besides it'd make me too pissed of to be able to work the rest of the day, so I'm not going to explain it here. I suggest you read up on the history of the Lisbon treaty of 2007. Once you understand what happened there, you wouldn't call the European Union a democracy anymore, you'd call it an oligarchy in which the oligarchs are mostly non-elected members of the governments of the states that form the EU.
I can come up with hundreds of examples like that, but the Lisbon Treaty story is by far the saddest and most visible one. The EU is not a democracy. It has just enough democratic aspects to keep the people of the EU satisfied, and that's about it.
Hey, I'm from the Netherlands as well and I think our system if not perfect either. I believe in the US, there's no requirement to be registered with any municipality at all. In the Netherlands, you will eventually get legal problems if you don't register. Effectively, the only ones that are not registered, are the homeless, and I'm afraid even our databases of the homeless are pretty much complete. So our system may be more convenient, but it is so at the expense of some freedom.
You're probably right, but the matter is much more complex than you make it sound. The problem is that turning a computer on and off causes thermal stress and other undesirable things that affect the lifespan of your computer. Therefore, on average, turning off a computer each night will shorten its lifespan. Since manufacturing, transporting and recycling a computer costs lots of energy, this should be taken into account when determining whether turning a computer off is really good for the environment.
Apart from that, computers really don't use that much power. Turning your computer off for a night will save about as much energy as your car uses while driving 200-300 meters. Since I'm so lazy that I drive about 1000 meter to work and back each day, it would be totally ridiculous for me to turn of my computer to protect the environment. Add to that that the average home-work distance in my country is 15 times what I travel each day and you probably get the picture.
Other comparison: turning your computer off each night of your live is completely undone by traveling 5000km by airplane ONCE.
It's simply the most logical thing to do. Launching stuff into space is so incredibly expensive that scrapping the stuff or even bringing it back to earth makes absolutely no sense financially. I've never understood why there has not been some prior planning to do this with just about any spacecraft. We'd have had a space city by now and if something broke, it could be ditched after all. Even stuff that's completely useless at the moment could still come in handy later on.
In space useless crap is worth billions, you just have to keep it around long enough to find a use for it. There's more than enough space up there to do that;-)
When I was young my bed always used to faced west (as in: my head pointed west when lying in it). Whenever we went on holiday I always woke up facing west as well. Even if the bed was in a totally different direction. I have no idea about the cause, I just stopped doing it when I got older. I'm pretty sure I don't have a built-in compass now though, so I'm a bit sceptical about cows having them;-)
So, here's an alternative explanation: cows have to keep cool. The hotter the sun is, the less surface they want to expose to it. For a cow, that generally means not to let their sides, which have the most surface, be exposed to the sun. And since there's the most sun at noon, when the sun is either in the south or in the north, depending on the hemisphere the cow lives on, cows tend to either point north or south a bit more than in other directions. Add to that that google maps, on which the research was based, actively selects sunny pictures, thereby boosting this effect, and we'd have an explanation for most cows pointing either north or south. Now add to that that the guys that did the research only selected countries on the northern hemisphere and we have a perfect explanation that does not involve magnets;-)
Ok, I might be entirely wrong, but at least my explanation is just as good as the explanation in the rather-short-on-details-article;-)
Are you actually aware that the Flash stuff you're talking about is making an active attempt to hide the underlying open standard video stream? If there's a single reason that we still don't have platform independent open source properly working video, it is Flash. Flash IS an unnecessary plugin. My browser has supported playing a huge amount of open standard video formats for ages by default. Flash is the only reason they're not used and I need to go download that horrible Flash plugin.
"Even if you have to use a coal power plant to produce the hydrogen, its extremely more efficient than using petroleum in terms of releasing CO2 in the atmosphere."
I don't think that's true due to the massive energy-losses in transporting the hydrogen. In reality, both approaches are about equal with regard to the amount of CO2 being released. Both are incredibly inefficient at about 25-30% efficiency.
Currently nearly all hydrogen is made from natural gas so you'll still be dependent on foreign fossile fuels. Add to that that even the most sophisticated hydrogen tanks (like those in the BMW Hydrogen car or on spacecraft) are leaky as hell. Leave your hydrogen-powered car in the garage for a week and half of the hydrogen will be gone. And that's with state of the art technology that we've been developing for decades. Hydrogen molecules are simply waaaayyy too small to ever become practical.
But you're right about one thing: ethanol definately isn't a solution. Filling the agricultural land on which the ethanol crops are grown now with solar panels would increase energy production at least tenfold since photosynthesis has an energy efficiency of about 1-2% while even the cheapest solar panels will go well over 10%.
I only see two serious energy solutions for the future. The most efficient one being electricity while for off-the-net use we need to find some sort of replacement for hydrogen that can easily be produced, is liquid at room-temperature, has molecules that don't leak through every material and works in a fuel cell. Methanol comes to mind, hopefully we find a way to produce it without wasting precious farmland.
If only you knew that just about all oil drill equipment and personell around the world has been 100% in use for years. Even the most outdated half rusted away drill towers have been continuously in use and we're producing new equiment at staggering rates. There just isn't enough and it's practically impossible to build enough new equipment quickly enough since the amount of oil coming from wells keeps falling and falling since we've chosen to use up the supergiant fields first and they're starting to run out.
This has nothing to do with environmentalist policies, this has to do with us running out of real cheap easy-to-get-to oil. Only if there were enough equiment and personell, would environmentalist policies make a difference, but there isn't.
Apart from all that, oil production in western countries has been falling steadily for years and the countries we've been relying on for our oil now are starting to get pretty rich by now, resulting in them using more and more of the oil they used to sell to us.
Look at the bottom for some links to studies of driving while under the influence of cannabis.
And with regard to cannabis being outlawed due to its' ability to replace not just paper but also cotton; this started in 1924 at the Opiates Conference in Geneva, where the Egyptians managed to get it on a list of dangerous drugs since it threatened its' cotton exports. In the USA this only got really going shortly after the machine described in this 1938 article in Popular Mechanics was invented:
It's all so very very sad. Due to this, cotton is still our major source of textile while hemp, which feels like silk, is so much better. 50% of all pesticides used worldwide are used in growing cotton while hemp needs none. And have you ever seen a bible from the middle ages? Ever wondered why the paper still looks so very nice? It's hemp paper. It lasts a zillion times longer than the woodpulp-paper we use nowadays.
The world has gone mad; we've outlawed a plant that could replace cotton for textile and woodpulp for paper at the same time and then we haven't even started using it's seeds yet; they make GREAT bread (at my local mill it's now possible to legally buy hempseed flour).
My thoughts exactly. This is an accident waiting to happen. Tools, crap, dust, old parts, probably even iron filings and plain old mud all over the place. Now that may be typical of such projects, but what should really freak the future passenger out is the simple fact that nobody prevented those pictures to get out of the building in the first place. While the pictures show that apparently some people on the factory floor don't care, the fact that those pics managed to get all the way through the company out onto the website shows that actually nobody in there cares.
Though I agree with you on 2 and 3, I'm not so sure about 1, but I might be wrong on that. As I understand it, you should look at variables in functional programming languages like Erlang more like those in a mathematical formula; such programs can be proven correct a lot easier, and since variables are effectively immutable, it facilitates forking the line of execution in a way that would not be possible without all kinds of semaphores and other concurrency stuff than if variables where not immutable. You should see this practice more like taking "pure functions" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming#Pure_functions) to another level, namely to within functions themselves.
It is supposed to make terms that are explicitly defined in the DHCP spec more clear, but obviously in your case I've failed miserably at that purpose.
DDOS is breaking the law by any means since it is always done with the intent to disturb something. Stalking, which annoying somebody through their windows is, is so too. And logging onto networks of which I don't know the owner is something that my phone does multiple times a day. Why would this be any different if it happens on a different radio frequency with a slightly different protocol?
The terminology of DHCP is even more clear than that of a simple login-form. It OFFERS you a LEASE. Next you REQUEST permission to use that LEASE after which the server ACKNOWLEDGES you REQUEST for a LEASE to use the network. Misunderstanding this is impossible if you speak english.
A door doesn't, it merely opens, after which you still haven't been offered, granted, requested or acknowledged permission to enter the house.
Apart from oxygen, carbon and hydrogen, plants require at least the following chemical elements to grow: nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, sulfur, boron, copper, iron, chloride, manganese, molybdenum and zinc. Recently is has been suggested many more, such as aluminium, tin and lithium, are required in very small amounts as well. If I recall correctly, phosphorus, potassium and chemically-bonded nitrogen (since most plants cannot absorb nitrogen from the air) are the ones that commonly deplete.
Cracks in sidewalks happen to be excellent collectors of such nutrients, of which there's more than enough in the dust that each city is engulfed in. Add some water and you have a germination-paradise. And don't forget that sidewalks themselves are basically made of nutrients that very slowly dissolve when in rains. However, most plants that grow on the sidewalk will have roots that extend far below the sidewalk.
And, indeed, there are some plants like moss and especially "lower" lifeforms such as fungi that can survive on a smaller diets, but I've never seen them grow large or fast enough to be of any use in oil-production.
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Though you're most certainly correct about the LHC not forming a black hole, what you fail to mention, is that at high energies the character of all forces (gravity, electromagnetic etc.) probably becomes equal, like it was at the time of the Big Bang: light is gravity is magnetism etc. Therefore, your assumption that the weight of a proton in rest is a good argument against the LHC becoming a black hole, is wrong. At least, in theory it is.
The EU does indeed have some democratic aspects. So do Shell and General Motors. Its employees, for example, can democratically decide which brand of coffee comes out of the coffee machine. Does that make them democracies?
I think even you'd answer "no" to that question. So we can conclude from that that a bit more than some democratic aspects are needed to call something a democracy. In the EU the democratic part is formed by the European Parliament, which is elected by the citizens of the EU. However, this parliament doesn't have influence on all matters.
Which brings me to the Treaty formerly known as the European Constitution, the Lisbon treaty. Do you happen to know what happened to that after it was first refused by the Dutch and the French? The story is too long to tell here, besides it'd make me too pissed of to be able to work the rest of the day, so I'm not going to explain it here. I suggest you read up on the history of the Lisbon treaty of 2007. Once you understand what happened there, you wouldn't call the European Union a democracy anymore, you'd call it an oligarchy in which the oligarchs are mostly non-elected members of the governments of the states that form the EU.
I can come up with hundreds of examples like that, but the Lisbon Treaty story is by far the saddest and most visible one. The EU is not a democracy. It has just enough democratic aspects to keep the people of the EU satisfied, and that's about it.
When in this position what do you folks usually do?
Leave. And find another job with a slightly more competent manager:-)
Hey, I'm from the Netherlands as well and I think our system if not perfect either. I believe in the US, there's no requirement to be registered with any municipality at all. In the Netherlands, you will eventually get legal problems if you don't register. Effectively, the only ones that are not registered, are the homeless, and I'm afraid even our databases of the homeless are pretty much complete. So our system may be more convenient, but it is so at the expense of some freedom.
You're probably right, but the matter is much more complex than you make it sound. The problem is that turning a computer on and off causes thermal stress and other undesirable things that affect the lifespan of your computer. Therefore, on average, turning off a computer each night will shorten its lifespan. Since manufacturing, transporting and recycling a computer costs lots of energy, this should be taken into account when determining whether turning a computer off is really good for the environment.
Apart from that, computers really don't use that much power. Turning your computer off for a night will save about as much energy as your car uses while driving 200-300 meters. Since I'm so lazy that I drive about 1000 meter to work and back each day, it would be totally ridiculous for me to turn of my computer to protect the environment. Add to that that the average home-work distance in my country is 15 times what I travel each day and you probably get the picture.
Other comparison: turning your computer off each night of your live is completely undone by traveling 5000km by airplane ONCE.
"A firewall will protect you just the same"
yeah... just like a locked wooden door will protect you just the same as having no door in the wall at all...
It's simply the most logical thing to do. Launching stuff into space is so incredibly expensive that scrapping the stuff or even bringing it back to earth makes absolutely no sense financially. I've never understood why there has not been some prior planning to do this with just about any spacecraft. We'd have had a space city by now and if something broke, it could be ditched after all. Even stuff that's completely useless at the moment could still come in handy later on.
In space useless crap is worth billions, you just have to keep it around long enough to find a use for it. There's more than enough space up there to do that;-)
"Iran's Foreign Minister soon attempted to clarify the statement, but the quote had a life of its own."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel#.22Wiped_off_the_map.22_or_.22Vanish_from_the_pages_of_time.22_translation
You're spreading F.U.D.
Please read this article:
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11650
Or at least take a look at this picture:
http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/600px-Temp-sunspot-co2.svg.png
One good reason Java isn't a scripting language: it's impossible to write a script in it:-)
When I was young my bed always used to faced west (as in: my head pointed west when lying in it). Whenever we went on holiday I always woke up facing west as well. Even if the bed was in a totally different direction. I have no idea about the cause, I just stopped doing it when I got older. I'm pretty sure I don't have a built-in compass now though, so I'm a bit sceptical about cows having them;-)
So, here's an alternative explanation: cows have to keep cool. The hotter the sun is, the less surface they want to expose to it. For a cow, that generally means not to let their sides, which have the most surface, be exposed to the sun. And since there's the most sun at noon, when the sun is either in the south or in the north, depending on the hemisphere the cow lives on, cows tend to either point north or south a bit more than in other directions. Add to that that google maps, on which the research was based, actively selects sunny pictures, thereby boosting this effect, and we'd have an explanation for most cows pointing either north or south. Now add to that that the guys that did the research only selected countries on the northern hemisphere and we have a perfect explanation that does not involve magnets;-)
Ok, I might be entirely wrong, but at least my explanation is just as good as the explanation in the rather-short-on-details-article;-)
Are you actually aware that the Flash stuff you're talking about is making an active attempt to hide the underlying open standard video stream? If there's a single reason that we still don't have platform independent open source properly working video, it is Flash. Flash IS an unnecessary plugin. My browser has supported playing a huge amount of open standard video formats for ages by default. Flash is the only reason they're not used and I need to go download that horrible Flash plugin.
"Even if you have to use a coal power plant to produce the hydrogen, its extremely more efficient than using petroleum in terms of releasing CO2 in the atmosphere."
I don't think that's true due to the massive energy-losses in transporting the hydrogen. In reality, both approaches are about equal with regard to the amount of CO2 being released. Both are incredibly inefficient at about 25-30% efficiency.
Currently nearly all hydrogen is made from natural gas so you'll still be dependent on foreign fossile fuels. Add to that that even the most sophisticated hydrogen tanks (like those in the BMW Hydrogen car or on spacecraft) are leaky as hell. Leave your hydrogen-powered car in the garage for a week and half of the hydrogen will be gone. And that's with state of the art technology that we've been developing for decades. Hydrogen molecules are simply waaaayyy too small to ever become practical.
But you're right about one thing: ethanol definately isn't a solution. Filling the agricultural land on which the ethanol crops are grown now with solar panels would increase energy production at least tenfold since photosynthesis has an energy efficiency of about 1-2% while even the cheapest solar panels will go well over 10%.
I only see two serious energy solutions for the future. The most efficient one being electricity while for off-the-net use we need to find some sort of replacement for hydrogen that can easily be produced, is liquid at room-temperature, has molecules that don't leak through every material and works in a fuel cell. Methanol comes to mind, hopefully we find a way to produce it without wasting precious farmland.
Yes, you are. I suggest smoking more weed and drinking less beer^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H. It helps.
We really aren't that affected at all
Did you know there's a word for that? It's called apathy.
If only you knew that just about all oil drill equipment and personell around the world has been 100% in use for years. Even the most outdated half rusted away drill towers have been continuously in use and we're producing new equiment at staggering rates. There just isn't enough and it's practically impossible to build enough new equipment quickly enough since the amount of oil coming from wells keeps falling and falling since we've chosen to use up the supergiant fields first and they're starting to run out.
This has nothing to do with environmentalist policies, this has to do with us running out of real cheap easy-to-get-to oil. Only if there were enough equiment and personell, would environmentalist policies make a difference, but there isn't.
http://www.exploreco.com/rigCountGraph.png
Apart from all that, oil production in western countries has been falling steadily for years and the countries we've been relying on for our oil now are starting to get pretty rich by now, resulting in them using more and more of the oil they used to sell to us.
Google "Peak Oil" and get educated (and rich;-)).
Some links to back up your claims:
http://www.cannabisculture.com/articles/1775.html
Look at the bottom for some links to studies of driving while under the influence of cannabis.
And with regard to cannabis being outlawed due to its' ability to replace not just paper but also cotton; this started in 1924 at the Opiates Conference in Geneva, where the Egyptians managed to get it on a list of dangerous drugs since it threatened its' cotton exports. In the USA this only got really going shortly after the machine described in this 1938 article in Popular Mechanics was invented:
http://www.jackherer.com/popmech.html
It's all so very very sad. Due to this, cotton is still our major source of textile while hemp, which feels like silk, is so much better. 50% of all pesticides used worldwide are used in growing cotton while hemp needs none. And have you ever seen a bible from the middle ages? Ever wondered why the paper still looks so very nice? It's hemp paper. It lasts a zillion times longer than the woodpulp-paper we use nowadays.
The world has gone mad; we've outlawed a plant that could replace cotton for textile and woodpulp for paper at the same time and then we haven't even started using it's seeds yet; they make GREAT bread (at my local mill it's now possible to legally buy hempseed flour).
In the Netherlands we've had something slightly related for years now: the "flu tracker". http://www.degrotegriepmeting.nl/
Currently there's no flu epidemic going on, but when there is, the maps shows really well how it spreads throughout the country.
My thoughts exactly. This is an accident waiting to happen. Tools, crap, dust, old parts, probably even iron filings and plain old mud all over the place. Now that may be typical of such projects, but what should really freak the future passenger out is the simple fact that nobody prevented those pictures to get out of the building in the first place. While the pictures show that apparently some people on the factory floor don't care, the fact that those pics managed to get all the way through the company out onto the website shows that actually nobody in there cares.
Though I agree with you on 2 and 3, I'm not so sure about 1, but I might be wrong on that. As I understand it, you should look at variables in functional programming languages like Erlang more like those in a mathematical formula; such programs can be proven correct a lot easier, and since variables are effectively immutable, it facilitates forking the line of execution in a way that would not be possible without all kinds of semaphores and other concurrency stuff than if variables where not immutable. You should see this practice more like taking "pure functions" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming#Pure_functions) to another level, namely to within functions themselves.
But I might be wrong, if so, please educate me:)
And this is where? North Korea?
It is supposed to make terms that are explicitly defined in the DHCP spec more clear, but obviously in your case I've failed miserably at that purpose.
DDOS is breaking the law by any means since it is always done with the intent to disturb something. Stalking, which annoying somebody through their windows is, is so too. And logging onto networks of which I don't know the owner is something that my phone does multiple times a day. Why would this be any different if it happens on a different radio frequency with a slightly different protocol?
The terminology of DHCP is even more clear than that of a simple login-form. It OFFERS you a LEASE. Next you REQUEST permission to use that LEASE after which the server ACKNOWLEDGES you REQUEST for a LEASE to use the network. Misunderstanding this is impossible if you speak english.
A door doesn't, it merely opens, after which you still haven't been offered, granted, requested or acknowledged permission to enter the house.
Apart from oxygen, carbon and hydrogen, plants require at least the following chemical elements to grow: nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, sulfur, boron, copper, iron, chloride, manganese, molybdenum and zinc. Recently is has been suggested many more, such as aluminium, tin and lithium, are required in very small amounts as well. If I recall correctly, phosphorus, potassium and chemically-bonded nitrogen (since most plants cannot absorb nitrogen from the air) are the ones that commonly deplete.
Cracks in sidewalks happen to be excellent collectors of such nutrients, of which there's more than enough in the dust that each city is engulfed in. Add some water and you have a germination-paradise. And don't forget that sidewalks themselves are basically made of nutrients that very slowly dissolve when in rains. However, most plants that grow on the sidewalk will have roots that extend far below the sidewalk.
And, indeed, there are some plants like moss and especially "lower" lifeforms such as fungi that can survive on a smaller diets, but I've never seen them grow large or fast enough to be of any use in oil-production.