That's why you'd use a USB stick instead. Seriously, who ever thought that a 3.5" floppy disk would be a good way to transfer data ? I haven't seen a floppy drive on a computer for at least a decade.
The amount of carbon you can sequester that way is pitifully small. In the meantime, these mixed materials can only be dumped in landfills, where they take up space.
Except that the customers will prefer a small delay, so they'd rather use an exchange where they can immediately withdraw their funds. This is especially true for people wanting to trade back and forth, or those seeking to do arbitrage for profit. Given that you have to put trust in the exchange anyway, you might as well extend the trust a little bit in return for immediate transactions.
Still, in order for MtGox to facilitate a trade they must have an account per user, that will hold a certain amount of btc and fiat. So, say I wanted to buy 1000 EUR worth of bitcoin, I arrange a bank transfer from my bank to MtGox. This may take a few days, and then they have my money in their account. Now, maybe during that time, the BTC/EUR exchange rate went up, and I decide to wait for the price to drop. In that case, the 1000 EUR will be sitting in their account until I decide to buy btc (or decide to cancel, and transfer it back). If there are enough people like that, they will have quite large sums of money in their account.
The problem is that in order for an exchange to work properly, transactions need to be cleared instantly. If the fiat money and/or the bitcoins are not stored in accounts on the exchange, how do you propose to quickly clear the exchange ? For example, MtGox was located in Japan, so if I'm in Europe, and I have 1000 EUR in my own bank account, and I wish to buy bitcoin from a seller in the US, when and how do you want to exchange the money and bitcoin for a price we all agree on, and with no risk of someone running away with some of the funds ?
You are making a common mistake of claiming that a diverse group of people all have exactly the same opinion and motives. But in reality, the bitcoin supporters are all different people with different opinions. Some may be completely opposed to rules and regulations, while others are not. At any time, you only hear the most vocal and opinionated members of the group express themselves.
Except that we currently have no use for Helium 3, and it's not even sure we will have such use in the future (there are other options for fusion fuel). And even if we have a need for Helium 3, it may be cheaper to produce it here on Earth.
Plus, it does not have a negative effect on the environment.
Of course, that depends on how it is used. If the bamboo can be separated from the other materials, it will decompose nicely. It's another matter if you take bamboo fibers and mix them with epoxy.
NASA can't even afford a decent space telescope, so why would anybody think they can afford to build a lunar colony that would require such as laser system ?
Ideally, the screen would cover your full angle of vision. Yes, this means that if you want to look at all the details, your eyes will have to move. The same thing happens in real life, so it's not a problem.
What needs to happen though, is that film makers adjust their camera focal lengths accordingly, so that the size of objects in the media correspond to their real life size so that your eyes and head don't need to make more movements than they would in real life if you were standing there in the scene.
In the case of suicide, people sometimes don't have access to the right materials, don't know the proper way to handle them, and may also have (subconscious) doubts about suicide. I'm sure if somebody is strapped down, the mask is applied properly, and you leave it on for a few minutes after the heart has stopped, nobody's going to survive.
Except that the sudden loss of blood pressure to the brain would normally cause immediate loss of consciousness. Of course, the fact that the decapitated people can't really tell what's happening makes it hard to tell exactly if/what they are experiencing.
There could still be a lot of plastic in the Arctic of course. Some currents are more likely to collect the plastic in one area, and it's plausible something like that is happening in the Arctic. But adding the "trapped in ice" doesn't really make sense, if there's a constant exchange between water and ice, and each having the same concentration of plastic.
Most of the current sea ice is less than 10 years old, as the ice regular melts in the summer, and is replaced by fresh ice in the winter. It's hard to imagine that there are significant amounts of plastic trapped in the ice compared to plastic that is free floating in the ocean.
You can model the effect of aerosols, but you can't predict when the next volcano erupts, or how much Chinese coal plants will generate in the next decade. I don't know if "negligible" is the right word. It is true that the influence of the sun is rather small, but it's still there. Of course, the output of the sun has diminished since the 80's, so you can't use it to explain the warming.
For starters, the models can't predict the influence of aerosols, the sun, or ENSO cycles. 1998 was a peak El-Nino year, with a record heat, so this skews the results for the interval starting at 1998. It is instructive to look at the temperature data, but compensate it for those three factors. The result shows an unmistakable trend, that has not paused at all: http://tamino.files.wordpress....
I found the following numbers: volume = 1.3 billion km^3, expansion coefficient = 250 ppm/K, heat capacity = 3.993 kJ/kg/K. Average depth = 3.68 km. So, to get a rise of 7 feet, a temperature rise of 2.32 K is required, which requires 1.3E21 * 3993 * 2.32 = 1.2E25 J total, or 1.4E23 per year. That's quite a bit less, but still a lot of heat. But of course, not all of the 7 feet rise will be due to thermal expansion. Over the last couple of years, about 75% of the rise in sea level was due to melting ice, and only 25% due to thermal expansion.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why you'd use a USB stick instead. Seriously, who ever thought that a 3.5" floppy disk would be a good way to transfer data ? I haven't seen a floppy drive on a computer for at least a decade.
A simple microcontroller could have done the job, so why introduce unnecessary complications and attack vectors by using DOS or Linux ?
The amount of carbon you can sequester that way is pitifully small. In the meantime, these mixed materials can only be dumped in landfills, where they take up space.
Yes, but you could use a local merchant to get bitcoins, and transfer those to the other side of the world.
Except that the customers will prefer a small delay, so they'd rather use an exchange where they can immediately withdraw their funds. This is especially true for people wanting to trade back and forth, or those seeking to do arbitrage for profit. Given that you have to put trust in the exchange anyway, you might as well extend the trust a little bit in return for immediate transactions.
Still, in order for MtGox to facilitate a trade they must have an account per user, that will hold a certain amount of btc and fiat. So, say I wanted to buy 1000 EUR worth of bitcoin, I arrange a bank transfer from my bank to MtGox. This may take a few days, and then they have my money in their account. Now, maybe during that time, the BTC/EUR exchange rate went up, and I decide to wait for the price to drop. In that case, the 1000 EUR will be sitting in their account until I decide to buy btc (or decide to cancel, and transfer it back). If there are enough people like that, they will have quite large sums of money in their account.
The problem is that in order for an exchange to work properly, transactions need to be cleared instantly. If the fiat money and/or the bitcoins are not stored in accounts on the exchange, how do you propose to quickly clear the exchange ? For example, MtGox was located in Japan, so if I'm in Europe, and I have 1000 EUR in my own bank account, and I wish to buy bitcoin from a seller in the US, when and how do you want to exchange the money and bitcoin for a price we all agree on, and with no risk of someone running away with some of the funds ?
The same applies to real gold, precious gems, and many works of art.
You are making a common mistake of claiming that a diverse group of people all have exactly the same opinion and motives. But in reality, the bitcoin supporters are all different people with different opinions. Some may be completely opposed to rules and regulations, while others are not. At any time, you only hear the most vocal and opinionated members of the group express themselves.
Except that we currently have no use for Helium 3, and it's not even sure we will have such use in the future (there are other options for fusion fuel). And even if we have a need for Helium 3, it may be cheaper to produce it here on Earth.
Plus, it does not have a negative effect on the environment.
Of course, that depends on how it is used. If the bamboo can be separated from the other materials, it will decompose nicely. It's another matter if you take bamboo fibers and mix them with epoxy.
Even if you don't consider bitcoin money, many people caught in the MtGox scam also lost regular money.
NASA can't even afford a decent space telescope, so why would anybody think they can afford to build a lunar colony that would require such as laser system ?
Ideally, the screen would cover your full angle of vision. Yes, this means that if you want to look at all the details, your eyes will have to move. The same thing happens in real life, so it's not a problem. What needs to happen though, is that film makers adjust their camera focal lengths accordingly, so that the size of objects in the media correspond to their real life size so that your eyes and head don't need to make more movements than they would in real life if you were standing there in the scene.
At recommended viewing distances, 4K resolution is difficult for most of the population to detect
The obvious solution is to reduce the recommended viewing distance, as the resolution of the screen improves.
In the case of suicide, people sometimes don't have access to the right materials, don't know the proper way to handle them, and may also have (subconscious) doubts about suicide. I'm sure if somebody is strapped down, the mask is applied properly, and you leave it on for a few minutes after the heart has stopped, nobody's going to survive.
If it's not painful enough, have somebody else punch them in the stomach at the same time.
Except that the sudden loss of blood pressure to the brain would normally cause immediate loss of consciousness. Of course, the fact that the decapitated people can't really tell what's happening makes it hard to tell exactly if/what they are experiencing.
Give them a small mouth/nose mask attached to a nitrogen supply. Quick, painless, and you don't have blood everywhere.
There could still be a lot of plastic in the Arctic of course. Some currents are more likely to collect the plastic in one area, and it's plausible something like that is happening in the Arctic. But adding the "trapped in ice" doesn't really make sense, if there's a constant exchange between water and ice, and each having the same concentration of plastic.
Most of the current sea ice is less than 10 years old, as the ice regular melts in the summer, and is replaced by fresh ice in the winter. It's hard to imagine that there are significant amounts of plastic trapped in the ice compared to plastic that is free floating in the ocean.
You can model the effect of aerosols, but you can't predict when the next volcano erupts, or how much Chinese coal plants will generate in the next decade. I don't know if "negligible" is the right word. It is true that the influence of the sun is rather small, but it's still there. Of course, the output of the sun has diminished since the 80's, so you can't use it to explain the warming.
For starters, the models can't predict the influence of aerosols, the sun, or ENSO cycles. 1998 was a peak El-Nino year, with a record heat, so this skews the results for the interval starting at 1998. It is instructive to look at the temperature data, but compensate it for those three factors. The result shows an unmistakable trend, that has not paused at all: http://tamino.files.wordpress....
How is this relevant for Antarctic ice loss ?
I found the following numbers: volume = 1.3 billion km^3, expansion coefficient = 250 ppm/K, heat capacity = 3.993 kJ/kg/K. Average depth = 3.68 km. So, to get a rise of 7 feet, a temperature rise of 2.32 K is required, which requires 1.3E21 * 3993 * 2.32 = 1.2E25 J total, or 1.4E23 per year. That's quite a bit less, but still a lot of heat. But of course, not all of the 7 feet rise will be due to thermal expansion. Over the last couple of years, about 75% of the rise in sea level was due to melting ice, and only 25% due to thermal expansion.