What we need is the moderate middle ground between unlimited exponential growth of population, and catastrophically shrinkage of population. In the long term, we'll have to reach a level of birth rate equaling the replacement rate. The two questions are, what is that level, and how can we reach that rate without economic disruptions.
(remember that the rescue of the Byzantine Empire was the original motivation for the Crusades--the whole thing was ignited by the Byzantine disaster at Manzikert, after all.)
Uh, the crusaders didn't protect Constantinople-- they sacked it.
It was richer, and less well defended, than the Islamic lands that they were nominally aimed at, and they wanted the loot. The crusaders were not the good guys in this portion of history.
If you want to know, why did Constantinople fall to the Moslems? The answer is, it fell because it never really recovered from being sacked by the Fourth crusade.
Although there are a lot of total immigrants, the US also has a large population, so it is way down on the list of icountries in terms of the number of immigrants divided by population
Well, I was just assuming that it was only sending location (that was all the summary mentioned: "location updates"). If Uber is going to be sending more information, well, yes, that could add up.
I don't like Trump. I don't like Sanders. I'd take either of them in a heartbeat over "more of the same"! (Cruz looks less crazy than I'd figured - maybe it's just the contrast with Trump but I'm re-considering him).
Cruz looks pretty bad, when you actually pay attention. The reason his polls are good is that the evangelicals adore him.
In the real world, Trump doesn't actually have a chance of being the candidate: his 30% poll standing among Republicans only looks good because the 70% that doesn't like him haven't unified behind a candidate. But 30% isn't anywhere near enough to win the nomination against strong opposition from the party machinery.
And who is going to pay the network costs relating to the constant stream of data from car to uber.
Seems like a pretty good way to chew through your 2g/3G/4g download quota to me.
Hm-- if they link, say, a 24-bit location information package every 4 seconds-- call it 170 kB per 8 hour day, about 5 MB per month.
Probably won't blow away your data caps, but that will depend on how much other stuff is in the downlink other than location
He didn't say that weapons availability is "necessary and sufficient" for democracy to emerge. In fact, he didn't even postulate a causal relationship. What he is really saying is that if a society meets the pre-conditions necessary for democracy, then it will also trust its citizens with guns.
Yes, I know that's what he's saying.
He is wrong. The data doesn't show any correlation whatsoever between democracy and availability of guns. None.
Availability of weapons is an indicator of the state of society and politics, with free and democratic societies having more availability than non-free societies.
That is an assertion. There's no real support for it in the evidence, unless you go with the circular argument.
You go on to then assert that Somalia is a special case. OK. I'll accept that: Quigley's statement is correct except for those places in the world where it is not correct.
Ukraine never called itself "The Ukraine". The official name of the country is "Ukraine". One major hint is the fact that "the" is an English article.
Neither the Russian nor Ukrainian languages have definite articles. You can't answer the question of whether the "official" name for Ukraine includes the definite article, since that's not even a meaningful question in Ukranian. "Ukraine" and "The Ukraine" are both equally accurate translations of the Ukranian word for Ukraine.
He seems to be clueless. Guns are ubiquitous in Somalia, which has no functional government at all, much less a democratic one. While England seems to get by just fine with handguns banned.
This is ambigous. It could be read either as "(a backdoored version of a SSH server) (called Dropbear)" or "(a backdoored version of) (a SSH server called Dropbear)".
Without a comma before "called", it's not all that ambiguous.
A comma would have removed the ambiguity by inserting a grammatical break.
Without the comma, there is no grammatical break, and the reader has to decide where the break goes.
Could I gently point out that Dropbear is not, per se, a "trojaned ssh server". It is just a small opensource sshd implementation that is used for embedded applications, including things such as OpenWrt routers.
The sentence from the article was "Another recent addition to the group's arsenal is a backdoored version of a SSH server called Dropbear."
This is ambigous. It could be read either as "(a backdoored version of a SSH server) (called Dropbear)" or "(a backdoored version of) (a SSH server called Dropbear)".
That is, it's not clear whether the SSH server is called Dropbear, and it has been backdoored, or whether it is the backdoored version that is called Dropbear.
You are stating assumptions that are plausible... but you don't actually know any of those things. You are making figures up, based on some very non-technical press-release figures. What you are making up is plausible. But it is still guesswork.
As with most things, the devil is in the details... and you don't have the details.
You are right, however, that with different (but also plausible) assumptions, you can come up with very different results.
1) The first stage is 2/3 the total cost to launch. Which would be $40 million.
2) They can renovate the first stage for $5 million.
3) They can get five launches from a first stage (original plus four more).
So, $60 million for five launches, plus the $20 million for the second stage x5.
Which comes to $32 million per launch. A bit more than half the current price.
Now, I consider those pessimistic assumptions.
Interesting numbers.
Let's try a variant case. Suppose in addition:
You're assuming that the non-reusable launch vehicle cost per launch is $60M. OK, let's start out by assuming 1/3 of that is fixed costs and operations costs, and 2/3 the vehicle cost, which is split evenly between the two stages (first stage is larger, but not proportionately more expensive). So, of the $60 million, $40 million is spent even if the vehicle first stage was free.
Now assume that re-usability increases the launch cost by, say, $5 million (launch operations are expensive! and the cost is not entirely the vehicle).
Assume that all the stuff needed to make the first stage reusable increases the stage cost by 25%, from $20M to $25M.
And assume that the delta-V and the added mass to do the fly-back decreases payload by 10%, and that the price you sell the launch for decreases a similar percentage (some payloads won't care, but some will.)
economics are much less clear now. The first stage cost drops with refurbishment from $20M to $6M, but the total launch cost only drops from $60M to $51M, whereas the price you can sell the launch for drops from $60M to $54M.
Still an economic advantage... but only a few percent advantage.
Exactly.
The question of how much reusability will lower costs depends critically on how expensive it is to refurbish, as well as how much performance you trade off to save delta-V for landing the stage.
This is complicated somewhat by the fact that rocket engines have significant economy of scale in production: if you reuse each one, say, ten times, your production rate is ten times lower, so the engines are more expensive.
So it's not completely obvious how much savings you get. It seems pretty clear you get some. But how much?
We've all heard the old semi-joke: "Fusion power is 40 years away -- and always will be!"
Fusion was around the corner in the 1940s. It was ten years away in the 1950s, twenty years away in the 1960s, thirty years away in the 1970s, forty years away in the 1980s...
Nevertheless. The fact that muon-catalyzed fusion works at low temperatures is a counterexample that disproves the earlier statement "fusion can't be done at low temperatures."
It can be done at low temperatures. That doesn't mean, however, that this mechanism does it.
While cold fusion did get a huge black eye with Pons and Fleishman, that's not the primary reason people are skeptical. There is a really simple physical reason why cold fusion probably doesn't work: the Coulomb Barrier. Like charges (i.e. protons in nuclei) repel, and electromagnetic forces between nucleons are incredibly big. So big, in fact, you can calculate the kinetic energy required to overcome the Coulomb barrier
About 5000 electron volts or so. Which is well under a quadrillionth of a joule.
It's not the amount of energy. It's getting that energy focused to a single particle.
which gives you a minimum temperature at which you expect fusion to be possible.
Yes, one thing we can say for sure is that cold fusion has to have some mechanism other than thermal.
But that was already obvious, and hardly needs to be pointed out.
I think it's pretty unlikely, myself, and I think that the previous generation of researchers damn well made me want to see very extraordinary evidence before believing in such reactions. But you can't quite dismiss it from fundamental principles. Yes, we already know it can't be thermal.
The climate constantly changes, always has, always will; so say what you really mean.
OK. The best models we have of climate suggest that anthropogenic gasses emitted into the atmosphere (most importantly carbon dioxide) have the same effect as naturally occurring gasses, and the current best estimate for the warming effect of carbon dioxide is that is causes between 1.5 C and 4.5C average global temperature rise per doubling of concentration.
The effect has been known for over a hundred years. It explains why the Earth is not frozen.
There has been no warming for over 18 years in RSS data,
Dyson is a smart guy, and deserves to be listened to... but "listening to him" doesn't mean you have to agree with him. Being smart does not mean he's always right, and particularly not when he's not in his field.
When you dive into what he actually says, what he says is that he hasn't studied the science and doesn't follow the literature (that's the part where he says he's not an expert) but he simply doesn't trust any computer modelling because they're complicated.
So the outcome could in fact be much WORSE than the current IPCC projections?
Yep. That's what keeps climate scientists awake at night. Most particularly, the long-term feedback of methane released from permafrost and other cold traps as the temperature warms.
The emphasize-the-uncertainty community (previously called deniers) doesn't like to emphasize that aspect of the uncertainty.
Slashdot Mirror
What we need is the moderate middle ground between unlimited exponential growth of population, and catastrophically shrinkage of population. In the long term, we'll have to reach a level of birth rate equaling the replacement rate. The two questions are, what is that level, and how can we reach that rate without economic disruptions.
(remember that the rescue of the Byzantine Empire was the original motivation for the Crusades--the whole thing was ignited by the Byzantine disaster at Manzikert, after all.)
Uh, the crusaders didn't protect Constantinople-- they sacked it.
It was richer, and less well defended, than the Islamic lands that they were nominally aimed at, and they wanted the loot. The crusaders were not the good guys in this portion of history.
If you want to know, why did Constantinople fall to the Moslems? The answer is, it fell because it never really recovered from being sacked by the Fourth crusade.
http://www.historytoday.com/jo...
http://www.shsu.edu/~his_ncp/1204.html
http://www.historynet.com/fourth-crusade-conquest-of-constantinople.htm
that's what the US is doing
Not really.
Although there are a lot of total immigrants, the US also has a large population, so it is way down on the list of icountries in terms of the number of immigrants divided by population
I like the "asteroid versus asteroid" concept: to move one asteroid out of the way, just hit it with another (smaller) one.
Eventually, we'll also want to have capability to deal with them...
Well, I was just assuming that it was only sending location (that was all the summary mentioned: "location updates"). If Uber is going to be sending more information, well, yes, that could add up.
I don't like Trump. I don't like Sanders. I'd take either of them in a heartbeat over "more of the same"! (Cruz looks less crazy than I'd figured - maybe it's just the contrast with Trump but I'm re-considering him).
Cruz looks pretty bad, when you actually pay attention. The reason his polls are good is that the evangelicals adore him.
In the real world, Trump doesn't actually have a chance of being the candidate: his 30% poll standing among Republicans only looks good because the 70% that doesn't like him haven't unified behind a candidate. But 30% isn't anywhere near enough to win the nomination against strong opposition from the party machinery.
And who is going to pay the network costs relating to the constant stream of data from car to uber. Seems like a pretty good way to chew through your 2g/3G/4g download quota to me.
Hm-- if they link, say, a 24-bit location information package every 4 seconds-- call it 170 kB per 8 hour day, about 5 MB per month.
Probably won't blow away your data caps, but that will depend on how much other stuff is in the downlink other than location
Referring to Ukraine as the Ukraine (instead of Ukraine) is considered insulting by Ukrainians.
Well, it's only considered insulting by those Ukrainians who speak English.
He didn't say that weapons availability is "necessary and sufficient" for democracy to emerge. In fact, he didn't even postulate a causal relationship. What he is really saying is that if a society meets the pre-conditions necessary for democracy, then it will also trust its citizens with guns.
Yes, I know that's what he's saying. He is wrong. The data doesn't show any correlation whatsoever between democracy and availability of guns. None.
Availability of weapons is an indicator of the state of society and politics, with free and democratic societies having more availability than non-free societies.
That is an assertion. There's no real support for it in the evidence, unless you go with the circular argument.
You go on to then assert that Somalia is a special case. OK. I'll accept that: Quigley's statement is correct except for those places in the world where it is not correct.
Ukraine never called itself "The Ukraine". The official name of the country is "Ukraine". One major hint is the fact that "the" is an English article.
Neither the Russian nor Ukrainian languages have definite articles. You can't answer the question of whether the "official" name for Ukraine includes the definite article, since that's not even a meaningful question in Ukranian. "Ukraine" and "The Ukraine" are both equally accurate translations of the Ukranian word for Ukraine .
Of course it's a fucking option. To do NOTHING is exactly how I interpret the 2nd amendment. How the fuck do you interpret SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED?
I interpret it as meaning "the government can't forbid citizens from owning arms."
What it doesn't say is "the government can't look into whether is is possible buy safer guns for their own use."
Are you actually an idiot, or just pretending to be one?
He seems to be clueless. Guns are ubiquitous in Somalia, which has no functional government at all, much less a democratic one. While England seems to get by just fine with handguns banned.
This is ambigous. It could be read either as "(a backdoored version of a SSH server) (called Dropbear)" or "(a backdoored version of) (a SSH server called Dropbear)".
Without a comma before "called", it's not all that ambiguous.
A comma would have removed the ambiguity by inserting a grammatical break.
Without the comma, there is no grammatical break, and the reader has to decide where the break goes.
Could I gently point out that Dropbear is not, per se, a "trojaned ssh server". It is just a small opensource sshd implementation that is used for embedded applications, including things such as OpenWrt routers.
The sentence from the article was "Another recent addition to the group's arsenal is a backdoored version of a SSH server called Dropbear."
This is ambigous. It could be read either as "(a backdoored version of a SSH server) (called Dropbear)" or "(a backdoored version of) (a SSH server called Dropbear)".
That is, it's not clear whether the SSH server is called Dropbear, and it has been backdoored, or whether it is the backdoored version that is called Dropbear.
Don't forget they are cutting costs of the booster all the time by improving on manufacturing techniques and researching new materials.
The lower the cost of the booster, the less the financial incentive for re-use.
As with most things, the devil is in the details... and you don't have the details.
You are right, however, that with different (but also plausible) assumptions, you can come up with very different results.
1) The first stage is 2/3 the total cost to launch. Which would be $40 million.
2) They can renovate the first stage for $5 million.
3) They can get five launches from a first stage (original plus four more).
So, $60 million for five launches, plus the $20 million for the second stage x5.
Which comes to $32 million per launch. A bit more than half the current price.
Now, I consider those pessimistic assumptions.
Interesting numbers. Let's try a variant case. Suppose in addition:
You're assuming that the non-reusable launch vehicle cost per launch is $60M. OK, let's start out by assuming 1/3 of that is fixed costs and operations costs, and 2/3 the vehicle cost, which is split evenly between the two stages (first stage is larger, but not proportionately more expensive). So, of the $60 million, $40 million is spent even if the vehicle first stage was free.
Now assume that re-usability increases the launch cost by, say, $5 million (launch operations are expensive! and the cost is not entirely the vehicle).
Assume that all the stuff needed to make the first stage reusable increases the stage cost by 25%, from $20M to $25M.
And assume that the delta-V and the added mass to do the fly-back decreases payload by 10%, and that the price you sell the launch for decreases a similar percentage (some payloads won't care, but some will.)
economics are much less clear now. The first stage cost drops with refurbishment from $20M to $6M, but the total launch cost only drops from $60M to $51M, whereas the price you can sell the launch for drops from $60M to $54M.
Still an economic advantage... but only a few percent advantage.
This is complicated somewhat by the fact that rocket engines have significant economy of scale in production: if you reuse each one, say, ten times, your production rate is ten times lower, so the engines are more expensive.
So it's not completely obvious how much savings you get. It seems pretty clear you get some. But how much?
We've all heard the old semi-joke: "Fusion power is 40 years away -- and always will be!"
Fusion was around the corner in the 1940s. It was ten years away in the 1950s, twenty years away in the 1960s, thirty years away in the 1970s, forty years away in the 1980s...
It can be done at low temperatures. That doesn't mean, however, that this mechanism does it.
What a load of horseshit.
While cold fusion did get a huge black eye with Pons and Fleishman, that's not the primary reason people are skeptical. There is a really simple physical reason why cold fusion probably doesn't work: the Coulomb Barrier. Like charges (i.e. protons in nuclei) repel, and electromagnetic forces between nucleons are incredibly big. So big, in fact, you can calculate the kinetic energy required to overcome the Coulomb barrier
About 5000 electron volts or so. Which is well under a quadrillionth of a joule.
It's not the amount of energy. It's getting that energy focused to a single particle.
which gives you a minimum temperature at which you expect fusion to be possible.
Yes, one thing we can say for sure is that cold fusion has to have some mechanism other than thermal.
But that was already obvious, and hardly needs to be pointed out.
I think it's pretty unlikely, myself, and I think that the previous generation of researchers damn well made me want to see very extraordinary evidence before believing in such reactions. But you can't quite dismiss it from fundamental principles. Yes, we already know it can't be thermal.
The climate constantly changes, always has, always will; so say what you really mean.
OK. The best models we have of climate suggest that anthropogenic gasses emitted into the atmosphere (most importantly carbon dioxide) have the same effect as naturally occurring gasses, and the current best estimate for the warming effect of carbon dioxide is that is causes between 1.5 C and 4.5C average global temperature rise per doubling of concentration.
The effect has been known for over a hundred years. It explains why the Earth is not frozen.
There has been no warming for over 18 years in RSS data,
If you cherry pick the right data. Here you go: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/msu/time-series/global/lt/nov/1mo
The satellite measurements are somewhat inconsistent. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/mar/25/one-satellite-data-set-is-underestimating-global-warming
Dyson is a smart guy, and deserves to be listened to... but "listening to him" doesn't mean you have to agree with him. Being smart does not mean he's always right, and particularly not when he's not in his field.
When you dive into what he actually says, what he says is that he hasn't studied the science and doesn't follow the literature (that's the part where he says he's not an expert) but he simply doesn't trust any computer modelling because they're complicated.
So the outcome could in fact be much WORSE than the current IPCC projections?
Yep. That's what keeps climate scientists awake at night. Most particularly, the long-term feedback of methane released from permafrost and other cold traps as the temperature warms. The emphasize-the-uncertainty community (previously called deniers) doesn't like to emphasize that aspect of the uncertainty.