Electric cars may work one day but the current Tesla is a horrible car. Most of the owners of the Tesla use it as a third car. They have an entire SUV parked in the garage for actual road trips. Tesla's range and recharging requirements are a joke.
IIRC electric cars have been around as long as those with ICEs (late 19th century). But the range of a modern electric car is no greater than those over a century old.
iMessage likes to "take over" your text messages. If Apple wants to fuck with the SMS system offered by another company (your service provider), they need to make DAMN sure they don't break it in the process.
e.g. have a mechanism such that if the SMS alternative is unavailable (for any reason) the sender switches back to SMS.
Comcast trialed this is the Charleston, NC area, or did for many years. You buy a core package for basic service and then you can addon additional packs by category, sports, news, family, movies etc.. Last I heard of it it wasn't popular enough to keep maintaining and is being phased out.
A "category", picked by the provider, is not the same as having the customer pick which specific channels they want.
Not to mention when Disney discovers someone on that server pirated "Steamboat Willie," the government grabs all the servers. Good luck ever seeing your data again.
More likely Disney would just have to make the accusation against any server with your "cloud provider". Not one you ever actually used. Possibly even one at a completly different site.
(AFAIK, this hasn't happened yet, but Disney loves their liars..er, sorry, lawyers.)
This is more or less what happened with Megaupload.
On top of that, you then require a much fatter pipe to the internet,
Also upstream bandwidth tends to be considerably more expensive than downstream. The cheapest internet connections are often asymetric with the downstream dwarfing the upstream.
as opposed to keeping your file servers and such in-house, where you can run 100BaseT or 1000BaseT and get high speed connection to your servers.
Several servers having multiple 1G connections to a LAN dosn't require anything especially difficult to buy off the shelf.
Africa generally doesn't have reliable internet connections, unless they're via satellite, but those are very expensive and therefore only used for the really important things.
There's also the little matter of the speed of light delay being significent:)
There are never backhoes digging where they shouldn't and drunk drivers never crash into the wrong pole.
You missed out ships dropping their anchors where they shouldn't. When can potentially be an issue even if you are hundreds of miles inland. It's possible for a link being broken to affect you even if you wen't even using it.
Whenever you see "in the CLOUD!", mentally replace it with "using someone else's server" -- all of a sudden it looks a whole lot less appealing.
With it also being rather unclear who else might have access to this server. There's also the issue that in order to use a server on a LAN generally the only requirement is the LAN. Use "the cloud" and in addition to the LAN you need connectivity between your LAN and where ever the server might actually be.
The tap-to-pay really is convenient for low value transactions (usually $50) because you don't need to enter a PIN.
Unless there is also a fairly low daily limit. Either in terms of money or transactions. A thief can still spend quite a bit of money with a stolen card. Not requring an actual physical button can also lead to all sorts of problem with "contactless" cards.
All the Starbucks around here have phone scanners on the counter, and the exchange is at least a few seconds quicker than handing over a credit card or dealing with cash (and change).
In a well designed chip and PIN system cards are never "handed over" anyway.
Thorium fuel reactors WILL require fuel reprocessing. This is a toxic, messy, and dangerous process.
This discribes most mining and refining of metalic elements anyway:)
All thorium proponents paint this issue as a trivial issue to be worked out but 50 years later all we have are a handful of research reactors facing the same problem.
It took considerably longer than 50 years to build the first "horseless carriage" or aircraft which was remotely practical. Both of which are considerably simpler than a thorium power station.
The problems had nothing to do with the use of thorium fuel. It had everything to do with a badly designed cooling system that used He instead of water.
I just not have time to shred it but it is just terrible FUD! Look up the Fort St. Vrain reactor yourself to see the reports on the problems with the He system. They used bad water seals that leaked into the cooling circuit that caused the problems.
It's rather harder to make a leak proof system with helium, an inert gas compared with water, a highly polar liquid. Even if you have the water in gas phase, steam, water molecules are considerably larger than helium atoms.
But errors aren't getting thrown everywhere when it comes to climate. There isn't even anything to apply band-aid fixes to. And even if we take IPCC predictions at face value, we have a century to adapt to warmer temperatures; futile attempts to stop carbon emissions are not the best engineering solution, adaptation is.
Where it gets even dafter is that generating electricity using wind or solar can actually end up with a higher "carbon footprint" than burning fossil fuels to boil water. This can also be the case with so called "biofuels", especially once politicians get involved... The real irony being that we have been able to generate "low carbon" electricity for more than 50 years. But it's often the same people saying "something must be done" who are opposed to using the best method, we have available, to do what they claim needs to happen...
Physicists hate the fucking Standard Model, they try to break it all the time. But so far reality has refused to behave otherwise.
In other words they try hard to "falsify" it and fail. This is how the process of "science" is intened to work.
Climatologists love AGW, and constantly try to shore it up in the face of apparently-contrary reality.
Whatever this is it's something other than "science".
That's why the Standard Model is a better theory; not in spite of its relative lack of support among scientists, but because of oit.
At best "consensus" means nothing in "science" at worst it's an excuse to avoid doing any:) Also I suspect that if anyone claimed to have found a problem with the Standard Model physicists would examine the claims rationally, rather than simply stating "not from a physicist". (Effectivly an "ad hominum dismissal".) Which tends to be the kind of respose from climatologists (and their supporters).
There are actually quite a few ways in which this idea is never going to work. First is that "calories" are only really meaningful when measured in a "calorimeter". Second "efficency" can be highly variable. Thirdly food is both "fuel" and "constriction materials". (Even sugars which perform virtually no role in the structure of animal cells can be converted to fats, which do. Though this process is endothermic.)
However counting calories in real life is difficult.
It's ever harder to measure "calories out" in any meaningful way
Also they are foods that are Calorie dense but also have nutrients and other stuff that makes us feel satisfied longer so we don't eat as much.
The biochemical processes which underpin things are considerably more complex. Eat fat and it will be transported through the bloodstream in structures called "lipoproteins" which are similar to cells, which can safely stay in the blood for some time. In contrast sugars are water soluable and their concentration in blood plasma needs to be closely regulated. Fructose and galactose are rapidly removed by the liver. The situation with glucose is more complex but the body typically will try very hard to get the blood glucose level down to normal within 2-3 hours. The complication here is that the hormone insulin which regulates glucose in the blood also tends to encouage "fat storage" and inhibit respiration of fats (beta oxidation). The practical aspect of this is that fat eaten with glucose will rapidly migrate to adipose(fat) cells and stay there. Any glucose your body cannot use within 2-3 hours is likely to be converted into fat (and stay in fat cells). The amount of glucose in a meal can easilty matter considerably more than the total "calories" when it comes to fat gain. It just so happens that the "healthy, low fat, low calorie diet" promoted for the last 30 odd years is mostly glucose. With there being a fairlr good correlation between the adoption of this kind of diet and increases in both obesity and T2 diabetes.
Europe does not subsidize corn production or corn sugar like the US does. Even coca cola here is made with real sugar. Some countries even have sugar taxes, but obesity rates are still going up. Something else is wrong too.
The greatest proportion of most people's sugar intake is likely to come from "grains" (wheat and rice probably more than maize) than soft drinks indeed anything with "sugar" on the label at all. Somewhere in the recent past the knowlage that everything called "carbohydrate" is made up of sugars appears to have vanished from the public conciousness. What makes things even worst is that a quirk of chemistry means that "complex carbohydrates" frequently pushed as "healthy" actually contain more sugars than so called "simple sugars". The terms monosaccharide, disaccharide, ogliosaccharide and polysaccharide really make things rather clearer than those the food industry prefers.
A good rule of thumb is to find out what the most respected nutritionists agree on and do the opposite.
At least until they go back to pre 1977, 1980 (or whenever "healthy eating" started being promoted in your part of the world.) It might make ore sense to look at earlier neutritional advice or what people actually ate in the past.
Cholesterol on the low end of normal.
Assuming that "normal" isn't actually "low". The drug companies have worked hard to promote numbers which mean that as many people as possible "need" their drugs.
My impression was that the fat people mostly died from cardiovascular problems aka old body can't take the strain while the thinner mostly died from cancer. Sure, you have somewhat more cells that could go cancerous but I've never heard obesity being a big risk factor for cancer.
Hyperglycemia (even at levels not considered "diabetic") is a risk factor for both obesity and cancer. Obesity because one of of the ways in which the human body removes excess glucose from the blood is via lipogenesis. (Glucose lipogenesis, at least in mammals, requires insulin which also encourages fat storage. Resulting in both dietary and liver produced fat rapidly migrating to adipose cells and staying there.) Cancer because cancer cells disable their mitochondria and are thus entirely dependant on glycolysis for respiration.
That's not the end of the story. Processed foods that either has large amounts of sugar or fat or both are also a big part of the problem.
The evidence appears to be more that it's sugars, including amylose and amylopectin, which are actually the issue. With fear of fat being a big part of the problem. Especially with processed foods where there as been a trend of replacing fats with sugars. A large amount of sugar because of faith in the calorie idea. If you actually look at what people are encouraged to eat the vast majority (up to 70%) is glucose. Ironically so called "junk food" can be less unbalanced than so called "healthy food".
It doesn't really take that much to fall into the "overweight" category on the BMI scale. As a matter of fact the start of the "overweight" scale is actually what I'd consider to be optimal weight.
IIRC there was some research that showed that slightly "overweight" people tend to live the longest. Thus implying that current definitions err on the low side.
Eating is a primal urge that the conscious mind has little control over in the long term, which is why virtually all diets fail, or the weight in put back on within a year or two. And it's not an illness, either, it's an evolutionary trait to cope with seasonal availability of foods. One that doesn't work so well in a world of year round abundance.
Rather than social pressure to be thin, what would help would be social pressure to make food from unprocessed ingredients, rather than eat convenience and processed food.
Possibly also cutting out things which our ancestors (even a couple of generations back) simply wouldn't have eaten. Though any form of "paleo diet" appears to really annoy most of the supposed "experts". Quite possibly a big part of the problem here is that things which are both highly processed and "new" may well be agressivly marketed as "healthy". Where as things people have been eating since prehistory can be demonised.
So it seems like DNA solves everything right? Wrong. The problem we have now is that it's still arbitrary as to where you decide the cut off, how different does a subject have to be to be a distinct species from another subject? If their DNA varies by 0.00000000001% we can probably agree they're closely related enough to be the same species, but what about a 0.1% difference? what about a 1% difference?
Or it may be exactly which DNA differs. Possibly also exactly where that DNA is. It would theoretically be possible to have 2 organisms with identical genes, but different chromosomes. The latter would mean that they couldn't interbreed.
Slashdot Mirror
Electric cars may work one day but the current Tesla is a horrible car. Most of the owners of the Tesla use it as a third car. They have an entire SUV parked in the garage for actual road trips. Tesla's range and recharging requirements are a joke.
IIRC electric cars have been around as long as those with ICEs (late 19th century). But the range of a modern electric car is no greater than those over a century old.
This is known as organized crime. Depends who's doing. It can also be known as a "business plan" or "good business sense", etc.
iMessage likes to "take over" your text messages. If Apple wants to fuck with the SMS system offered by another company (your service provider), they need to make DAMN sure they don't break it in the process.
e.g. have a mechanism such that if the SMS alternative is unavailable (for any reason) the sender switches back to SMS.
Comcast trialed this is the Charleston, NC area, or did for many years. You buy a core package for basic service and then you can addon additional packs by category, sports, news, family, movies etc.. Last I heard of it it wasn't popular enough to keep maintaining and is being phased out.
A "category", picked by the provider, is not the same as having the customer pick which specific channels they want.
Not to mention when Disney discovers someone on that server pirated "Steamboat Willie," the government grabs all the servers. Good luck ever seeing your data again.
More likely Disney would just have to make the accusation against any server with your "cloud provider". Not one you ever actually used. Possibly even one at a completly different site.
(AFAIK, this hasn't happened yet, but Disney loves their liars..er, sorry, lawyers.)
This is more or less what happened with Megaupload.
On top of that, you then require a much fatter pipe to the internet,
Also upstream bandwidth tends to be considerably more expensive than downstream. The cheapest internet connections are often asymetric with the downstream dwarfing the upstream.
as opposed to keeping your file servers and such in-house, where you can run 100BaseT or 1000BaseT and get high speed connection to your servers.
Several servers having multiple 1G connections to a LAN dosn't require anything especially difficult to buy off the shelf.
Africa generally doesn't have reliable internet connections, unless they're via satellite, but those are very expensive and therefore only used for the really important things.
:)
There's also the little matter of the speed of light delay being significent
There are never backhoes digging where they shouldn't and drunk drivers never crash into the wrong pole.
You missed out ships dropping their anchors where they shouldn't. When can potentially be an issue even if you are hundreds of miles inland. It's possible for a link being broken to affect you even if you wen't even using it.
I do not move to the "Cloud" because the price for the bandwidth negates any advantage.
Especially if you need "upstream" bandwidth.
Besides, I am still not sold on security. Letting a "third party" have all of our financials and records just makes me cringe.
In practice you would end up having to rely on many third parties. Since you need all of them to provide connectivity to the remote server.
Whenever you see "in the CLOUD!", mentally replace it with "using someone else's server" -- all of a sudden it looks a whole lot less appealing.
With it also being rather unclear who else might have access to this server.
There's also the issue that in order to use a server on a LAN generally the only requirement is the LAN. Use "the cloud" and in addition to the LAN you need connectivity between your LAN and where ever the server might actually be.
The tap-to-pay really is convenient for low value transactions (usually $50) because you don't need to enter a PIN.
Unless there is also a fairly low daily limit. Either in terms of money or transactions. A thief can still spend quite a bit of money with a stolen card.
Not requring an actual physical button can also lead to all sorts of problem with "contactless" cards.
All the Starbucks around here have phone scanners on the counter, and the exchange is at least a few seconds quicker than handing over a credit card or dealing with cash (and change).
In a well designed chip and PIN system cards are never "handed over" anyway.
Thorium fuel reactors WILL require fuel reprocessing. This is a toxic, messy, and dangerous process.
:)
This discribes most mining and refining of metalic elements anyway
All thorium proponents paint this issue as a trivial issue to be worked out but 50 years later all we have are a handful of research reactors facing the same problem.
It took considerably longer than 50 years to build the first "horseless carriage" or aircraft which was remotely practical. Both of which are considerably simpler than a thorium power station.
The problems had nothing to do with the use of thorium fuel. It had everything to do with a badly designed cooling system that used He instead of water.
I just not have time to shred it but it is just terrible FUD! Look up the Fort St. Vrain reactor yourself to see the reports on the problems with the He system. They used bad water seals that leaked into the cooling circuit that caused the problems.
It's rather harder to make a leak proof system with helium, an inert gas compared with water, a highly polar liquid. Even if you have the water in gas phase, steam, water molecules are considerably larger than helium atoms.
But errors aren't getting thrown everywhere when it comes to climate. There isn't even anything to apply band-aid fixes to. And even if we take IPCC predictions at face value, we have a century to adapt to warmer temperatures; futile attempts to stop carbon emissions are not the best engineering solution, adaptation is.
Where it gets even dafter is that generating electricity using wind or solar can actually end up with a higher "carbon footprint" than burning fossil fuels to boil water. This can also be the case with so called "biofuels", especially once politicians get involved...
The real irony being that we have been able to generate "low carbon" electricity for more than 50 years. But it's often the same people saying "something must be done" who are opposed to using the best method, we have available, to do what they claim needs to happen...
Physicists hate the fucking Standard Model, they try to break it all the time. But so far reality has refused to behave otherwise.
:)
In other words they try hard to "falsify" it and fail. This is how the process of "science" is intened to work.
Climatologists love AGW, and constantly try to shore it up in the face of apparently-contrary reality.
Whatever this is it's something other than "science".
That's why the Standard Model is a better theory; not in spite of its relative lack of support among scientists, but because of oit.
At best "consensus" means nothing in "science" at worst it's an excuse to avoid doing any
Also I suspect that if anyone claimed to have found a problem with the Standard Model physicists would examine the claims rationally, rather than simply stating "not from a physicist". (Effectivly an "ad hominum dismissal".) Which tends to be the kind of respose from climatologists (and their supporters).
A positive correlation does not imply cause. Period. It can only suggest, and often not even that.
Even where there is a causal relationship involved it can be difficult to work out if A causes B; B causes A or C causes both A and B.
Sure we know if Calories in > Calories out = fat.
There are actually quite a few ways in which this idea is never going to work. First is that "calories" are only really meaningful when measured in a "calorimeter". Second "efficency" can be highly variable. Thirdly food is both "fuel" and "constriction materials". (Even sugars which perform virtually no role in the structure of animal cells can be converted to fats, which do. Though this process is endothermic.)
However counting calories in real life is difficult.
It's ever harder to measure "calories out" in any meaningful way
Also they are foods that are Calorie dense but also have nutrients and other stuff that makes us feel satisfied longer so we don't eat as much.
The biochemical processes which underpin things are considerably more complex. Eat fat and it will be transported through the bloodstream in structures called "lipoproteins" which are similar to cells, which can safely stay in the blood for some time. In contrast sugars are water soluable and their concentration in blood plasma needs to be closely regulated. Fructose and galactose are rapidly removed by the liver. The situation with glucose is more complex but the body typically will try very hard to get the blood glucose level down to normal within 2-3 hours. The complication here is that the hormone insulin which regulates glucose in the blood also tends to encouage "fat storage" and inhibit respiration of fats (beta oxidation).
The practical aspect of this is that fat eaten with glucose will rapidly migrate to adipose(fat) cells and stay there. Any glucose your body cannot use within 2-3 hours is likely to be converted into fat (and stay in fat cells).
The amount of glucose in a meal can easilty matter considerably more than the total "calories" when it comes to fat gain. It just so happens that the "healthy, low fat, low calorie diet" promoted for the last 30 odd years is mostly glucose. With there being a fairlr good correlation between the adoption of this kind of diet and increases in both obesity and T2 diabetes.
Europe does not subsidize corn production or corn sugar like the US does. Even coca cola here is made with real sugar. Some countries even have sugar taxes, but obesity rates are still going up. Something else is wrong too.
The greatest proportion of most people's sugar intake is likely to come from "grains" (wheat and rice probably more than maize) than soft drinks indeed anything with "sugar" on the label at all.
Somewhere in the recent past the knowlage that everything called "carbohydrate" is made up of sugars appears to have vanished from the public conciousness.
What makes things even worst is that a quirk of chemistry means that "complex carbohydrates" frequently pushed as "healthy" actually contain more sugars than so called "simple sugars".
The terms monosaccharide, disaccharide, ogliosaccharide and polysaccharide really make things rather clearer than those the food industry prefers.
A good rule of thumb is to find out what the most respected nutritionists agree on and do the opposite.
At least until they go back to pre 1977, 1980 (or whenever "healthy eating" started being promoted in your part of the world.) It might make ore sense to look at earlier neutritional advice or what people actually ate in the past.
Cholesterol on the low end of normal.
Assuming that "normal" isn't actually "low". The drug companies have worked hard to promote numbers which mean that as many people as possible "need" their drugs.
My impression was that the fat people mostly died from cardiovascular problems aka old body can't take the strain while the thinner mostly died from cancer. Sure, you have somewhat more cells that could go cancerous but I've never heard obesity being a big risk factor for cancer.
Hyperglycemia (even at levels not considered "diabetic") is a risk factor for both obesity and cancer.
Obesity because one of of the ways in which the human body removes excess glucose from the blood is via lipogenesis. (Glucose lipogenesis, at least in mammals, requires insulin which also encourages fat storage. Resulting in both dietary and liver produced fat rapidly migrating to adipose cells and staying there.)
Cancer because cancer cells disable their mitochondria and are thus entirely dependant on glycolysis for respiration.
That's not the end of the story. Processed foods that either has large amounts of sugar or fat or both are also a big part of the problem.
The evidence appears to be more that it's sugars, including amylose and amylopectin, which are actually the issue. With fear of fat being a big part of the problem. Especially with processed foods where there as been a trend of replacing fats with sugars. A large amount of sugar because of faith in the calorie idea.
If you actually look at what people are encouraged to eat the vast majority (up to 70%) is glucose.
Ironically so called "junk food" can be less unbalanced than so called "healthy food".
It doesn't really take that much to fall into the "overweight" category on the BMI scale. As a matter of fact the start of the "overweight" scale is actually what I'd consider to be optimal weight.
IIRC there was some research that showed that slightly "overweight" people tend to live the longest. Thus implying that current definitions err on the low side.
Eating is a primal urge that the conscious mind has little control over in the long term, which is why virtually all diets fail, or the weight in put back on within a year or two. And it's not an illness, either, it's an evolutionary trait to cope with seasonal availability of foods. One that doesn't work so well in a world of year round abundance.
Rather than social pressure to be thin, what would help would be social pressure to make food from unprocessed ingredients, rather than eat convenience and processed food.
Possibly also cutting out things which our ancestors (even a couple of generations back) simply wouldn't have eaten.
Though any form of "paleo diet" appears to really annoy most of the supposed "experts".
Quite possibly a big part of the problem here is that things which are both highly processed and "new" may well be agressivly marketed as "healthy".
Where as things people have been eating since prehistory can be demonised.
So it seems like DNA solves everything right? Wrong. The problem we have now is that it's still arbitrary as to where you decide the cut off, how different does a subject have to be to be a distinct species from another subject? If their DNA varies by 0.00000000001% we can probably agree they're closely related enough to be the same species, but what about a 0.1% difference? what about a 1% difference?
Or it may be exactly which DNA differs. Possibly also exactly where that DNA is. It would theoretically be possible to have 2 organisms with identical genes, but different chromosomes. The latter would mean that they couldn't interbreed.