What's your point? Any transportation scheme will have the same limitations. Hyperloop is just a less efficient, more dangerous concept that doesn't have decades of proven engineering behind it.
Heh. There's no way an FTC with a chair nominated by a Republican president would think about splitting up Facebook (or most any corporation, for that matter).
It could be beneficial if some of Facebook's vertical integration could be split apart (e.g. messenger, Instagram), which might provide room for competing services to fill those tasks. But there's just zero chance the current FTC will be interested in bothering.
Yup, this is exactly it. Many employment regulations are waived for small employers. So if they just contract out to a lot of small employers, they think they can save money by avoiding those regulations. Thus, this is all about exploiting people to shave a little bit more money off the top.
This reads more like an employment NDA than a journalist NDA. This kind of NDA is pretty common when interviewing for or accepting a job at a tech company.
While true, computer chips today would likely be significantly higher-performing if Motorola had came ahead in the early microprocessor days, with its 68000 series processors. A good fraction of modern x86 designs is dedicated to instruction translation. The Motorola 68000's instruction set was much more forward-looking, and requires less translation. If the research and money that had been dumped into x86 had instead been dumped into improving the 68000, computing might be pretty different today.
But that's water under the bridge now. Hopefully as Windows and binary compatibility become less critical moving forward (with the rise of mobile), we'll be able to get away from the need to have backwards-compatible instruction sets, opening the way to much more performant designs.
A crash in fossil fuel prices will certainly be disruptive, but it takes more than just disruption to cause a major financial crash.
Certainly many specific areas will face some pretty severe consequences from such a crash. States where fossil fuel exports make up a large fraction of their economy, such as Alaska or North Dakota, will be hit pretty severely. Nations that are doing similar, such as Saudi Arabia, will get it even worse. But most countries and areas are likely to sail through without dire consequences.
What could cause such a crash to turn into something like the 2007-2008 crash is debt: debt magnifies crashes. That's the reason why the housing bubble had such severe consequences: houses are typically debt-financed. The question, then, is how much of fossil fuel investment is leveraged, and where is that debt held? The answer to that question will determine whether there are wider consequences beyond oil-exporting areas.
Granted, the consequences within oil-exporting areas could be extremely severe if it triggers wars. Which is definitely a possibility in some such areas.
Granted, Agent Orange was a long time ago, and Monsanto wasn't the only company producing the herbicide, but it was still a very, very nasty product that had severe consequences for the people of Vietnam and many US soldiers who fought there.
So what you're saying is you think it's reasonable to look very carefully at the fine print if all that I actually want to do is reserve a table at a restaurant? Why is that a good way of structuring an app ecosystem?
The entire point of having a mobile app ecosystem is to make it quick and easy for people to get things done. EULAs as a foundation of privacy controls are utterly hostile to the very concept of an app ecosystem.
In a lot of sci-fi, there's this idea that DNA is some sort of universal constant that all life shares. But there's no reason whatsoever to believe that this should be the case. At the very least, we would expect massive divergences in basic cellular functionality such as the relationship between DNA basis and amino acids and which specific proteins cause various things to happen.
Lots of DNA studies performed these days make use of PCR, which essentially causes a few DNA strands to replicate, resulting in a much larger signal that's easier to measure. The problem is: the way it causes those strands to replicate is to apply a specific protein to the DNA strand and perform some temperature cycling. But why should the protein which performs this task on terrestrial DNA do anything at all to an extra-terrestrial DNA-like molecule? It could easily not combine at all, or not do it very efficiently, or do something completely unexpected like cut up the DNA-like molecule, rendering it useless.
If a DNA study was successfully performed on the organism, it's from Earth.
You might be right if a proton was merely three quarks. But it turns out that this is not the case: protons are sort of a cloud of quarks, anti-quarks, and gluons. The "three quarks" are known as the valence quarks (they're the only ones that aren't paired with anti-quarks), but only make up a small fraction of the total mass (without looking it up, I think it's something like 5-10%). Nearly all of the rest of the energy is made up a dynamic swarm of particles. The sheer number of particles inside a proton is probably enough to make pressure a sensible concept.
It also makes sense that the pressure would be above that of a neutron star: if a neutron star's pressure were higher, then you'd expect the protons/neutrons near its core to no longer exist as protons/neutrons, but instead become some other form of matter.
I'm assuming by this term you mean a fission process which occurs within protons or neutrons, rather than within atomic nuclei. The answer to that is no, no matter how you slice it.
A short explanation for this is simply that quarks are stable particles, like electrons. It's not possible for there to be lower-mass versions of the up/down quarks which we haven't yet observed. There are certainly higher-energy versions of these same particles, but quarks themselves cannot exist except when bound to one another, either in mesons (two quarks) or baryons (three quarks, like protons and neutrons).
The reason why quarks can't exist alone is that if you take a meson and try to pull apart the two quarks that make it up, it takes so much energy that a quark/anti-quark pair is created, so instead of pulling a meson apart to get two quarks, you end up with two mesons. Similar things happen if you try to pull a quark out of a baryon (like a proton): you end up with a baryon and a meson instead of a meson and a free quark.
In the end, the proton is the lowest-energy stable state that a collection of three quarks can wind up in (mesons are all unstable, and rapidly decay into either electrons/positrons and neutrinos if they have charge, photons if they do not). But higher-mass baryons, of which there are a great many, will decay into other baryons and collections of particles. This process of more massive baryons decaying into protons/neutrons is probably the closest thing to "subnuclear fission" that exists.
"Cleared" doesn't mean no objects cross their orbit. It means there aren't any other objects of comparable size. Pluto is not close to comparable in size to Neptune.
Why do you think the IAU should have felt it reasonable to classify dozens of TNOs as planets, when those objects would have been far more similar in properties to other non-planet TNOs than to the objects currently defined as planets?
Per this presentation from DHS, any work-related e-mails are considered federal records, and thus subject to record keeping requirements.
It really isn't up to private companies to enforce laws, nor should it be. Granted, with the current US government dedicated to dismantling effective governance, I don't trust the government to do this job. But private companies can't really do anything to prevent it besides lobbying, and I don't trust any private company to be concerned enough to bother with it.
It is likely to be bullshit, but for a different reason:
It's a correlation study. Correlation studies are inherently weak, for the reason that it's all too easy for there to be a confounding factor which produces the observed effect.
If I were to guess, if there is a real correlation, it stems from lack of sleep. Not getting enough sleep over an extended period of time contributes to a tremendous variety of health problems. And exposure to blue light seems to impact sleep patterns. So basically: get good sleep, and you should be fine.
Melatonin is not likely to have any impact one way or another on breast or prostate cancer. This is not a proposed mechanism. It's fantasy. Now, if they had shown a link between these lights and skin cancer, that actually might make sense. But as it stands it's overwhelmingly likely that the correlation is due to some other environmental factor.
Also, the idea that smart phones or tablets might have any contribution to this is utterly absurd. Bright street lights are barely within the realm of plausibility in terms of having an impact on melanin production. Electronic devices are nowhere near there.
That said, lower color temperature lights at night are far more pleasant, and don't muck up night vision quite as much. So it would be nice to see lower color temperatures used more often. But not because of cancer fears.
It happens. There are quite a few people who vote with the Democratic party for reasons other than abortion rights. This is especially the case among populations with conservative religious views who have been turned off by the Republican party's racism (e.g. some Latinx voters). Sometimes these people end up siding with other views common in the Democratic party, but not always.
It's still a quibble that doesn't change the overall picture.
The USPS is being asked to fund all of the future payments for all of its current and former employees, assuming they'll live to the age of 75 on average. That's absurd. There's absolutely no justification for such a rule.
I know of no other situation where organizations are required to retain payments that will be made decades in the future. Why should the USPS be required to save money for a new, 20-year-old employee who won't start receiving any payments at all for decades? If there is any obligation here, it should simply be that the USPS has to have a savings amount proportional to the current year's retirement outlays. That's it.
Fiscally responsible? Congress is requiring that the USPS pre-pay its pension plan for employees who have not yet been born. A fiscally-responsible pension plan is one with a reasonable buffer and conservative accounting practices such that it isn't likely to ever lose so much that the USPS can't cover the loss. Given the size and stability of the USPS, a buffer of 30-50% of their yearly pension payouts should be more than sufficient. If they really wanted to be conservative, they could go for 2-3 years.
75 years makes zero sense under any reasonable accounting scheme. It's really a blatant attempt to kill the USPS. There's no other way to read it.
True randomness is there for sure, but making it unbiased is another matter. Real systems interact with their environments, and those environments can change the results in subtle ways. Small imperfections in the apparatus can create correlations between the photons, for example (simple example: magnetic fields cause photon polarizations to rotate). And correlations between random values are really nasty for random number generation. I'd be really reluctant to trust the output of such a random number generator directly.
Still, if this is used as a seed to a cryptographically-secure pseudo-random number generator, then it's probably fine. Expensive, though.
Right. Given that there's an explicit exception for journalism in the "Right to be Forgotten" law, I would think it to be completely reasonable for links to journalistic content to also not fall under this law. Apparently an EU court ruled that this wasn't the case some years prior, so we'll see. But I have no understanding why it makes sense for links to journalistic content to be considered different from the content itself.
There are a number of issues that make something like this really, really tough to accomplish in practice.
Perhaps the biggest issue is that the product names are selected by the people making the hardware, and we can't really trust them to produce product names which are accurate reflections of their performance, no matter the situation. The best bet would be some sort of independent rating which judged their performance.
Independent ratings are currently done, by a wide variety of organizations. Sites like anandtech.com and tomshardware.com (among others) have pages listing the results of a wide variety of benchmarks for various CPUs and GPUs. But these are often difficult for non-enthusiasts to access, and even harder to understand. I could imagine a "rating system" applied to the hardware which was required to be displayed on the box, so that buyers could see directly.
But then you have the problem (which already exists) that developers will optimize their software stacks specifically for these benchmarks, resulting in overly-optimistic results. GPUs are particularly notorious here, because there is a lot more proprietary software controlled by GPU designers between the hardware and the end-user performance.
Making things even worse, the actual performance of the hardware tends to change over time as software changes. This can be a result of software developers adding new code to make use of new hardware features, or of the hardware vendors updating their own proprietary software.
In the end, getting consistent performance comparisons printed right on the box is a really, really hard problem. It's not necessarily impossible, but it would require a massive investment by an entity dedicated to producing accurate data. It would also require having either the force of law or voluntary agreement by all hardware manufacturers to even get off the ground.
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What's your point? Any transportation scheme will have the same limitations. Hyperloop is just a less efficient, more dangerous concept that doesn't have decades of proven engineering behind it.
Heh. There's no way an FTC with a chair nominated by a Republican president would think about splitting up Facebook (or most any corporation, for that matter).
It could be beneficial if some of Facebook's vertical integration could be split apart (e.g. messenger, Instagram), which might provide room for competing services to fill those tasks. But there's just zero chance the current FTC will be interested in bothering.
Yup, this is exactly it. Many employment regulations are waived for small employers. So if they just contract out to a lot of small employers, they think they can save money by avoiding those regulations. Thus, this is all about exploiting people to shave a little bit more money off the top.
This reads more like an employment NDA than a journalist NDA. This kind of NDA is pretty common when interviewing for or accepting a job at a tech company.
While true, computer chips today would likely be significantly higher-performing if Motorola had came ahead in the early microprocessor days, with its 68000 series processors. A good fraction of modern x86 designs is dedicated to instruction translation. The Motorola 68000's instruction set was much more forward-looking, and requires less translation. If the research and money that had been dumped into x86 had instead been dumped into improving the 68000, computing might be pretty different today.
But that's water under the bridge now. Hopefully as Windows and binary compatibility become less critical moving forward (with the rise of mobile), we'll be able to get away from the need to have backwards-compatible instruction sets, opening the way to much more performant designs.
A crash in fossil fuel prices will certainly be disruptive, but it takes more than just disruption to cause a major financial crash.
Certainly many specific areas will face some pretty severe consequences from such a crash. States where fossil fuel exports make up a large fraction of their economy, such as Alaska or North Dakota, will be hit pretty severely. Nations that are doing similar, such as Saudi Arabia, will get it even worse. But most countries and areas are likely to sail through without dire consequences.
What could cause such a crash to turn into something like the 2007-2008 crash is debt: debt magnifies crashes. That's the reason why the housing bubble had such severe consequences: houses are typically debt-financed. The question, then, is how much of fossil fuel investment is leveraged, and where is that debt held? The answer to that question will determine whether there are wider consequences beyond oil-exporting areas.
Granted, the consequences within oil-exporting areas could be extremely severe if it triggers wars. Which is definitely a possibility in some such areas.
Granted, Agent Orange was a long time ago, and Monsanto wasn't the only company producing the herbicide, but it was still a very, very nasty product that had severe consequences for the people of Vietnam and many US soldiers who fought there.
So what you're saying is you think it's reasonable to look very carefully at the fine print if all that I actually want to do is reserve a table at a restaurant? Why is that a good way of structuring an app ecosystem?
The entire point of having a mobile app ecosystem is to make it quick and easy for people to get things done. EULAs as a foundation of privacy controls are utterly hostile to the very concept of an app ecosystem.
In a lot of sci-fi, there's this idea that DNA is some sort of universal constant that all life shares. But there's no reason whatsoever to believe that this should be the case. At the very least, we would expect massive divergences in basic cellular functionality such as the relationship between DNA basis and amino acids and which specific proteins cause various things to happen.
Lots of DNA studies performed these days make use of PCR, which essentially causes a few DNA strands to replicate, resulting in a much larger signal that's easier to measure. The problem is: the way it causes those strands to replicate is to apply a specific protein to the DNA strand and perform some temperature cycling. But why should the protein which performs this task on terrestrial DNA do anything at all to an extra-terrestrial DNA-like molecule? It could easily not combine at all, or not do it very efficiently, or do something completely unexpected like cut up the DNA-like molecule, rendering it useless.
If a DNA study was successfully performed on the organism, it's from Earth.
You might be right if a proton was merely three quarks. But it turns out that this is not the case: protons are sort of a cloud of quarks, anti-quarks, and gluons. The "three quarks" are known as the valence quarks (they're the only ones that aren't paired with anti-quarks), but only make up a small fraction of the total mass (without looking it up, I think it's something like 5-10%). Nearly all of the rest of the energy is made up a dynamic swarm of particles. The sheer number of particles inside a proton is probably enough to make pressure a sensible concept.
It also makes sense that the pressure would be above that of a neutron star: if a neutron star's pressure were higher, then you'd expect the protons/neutrons near its core to no longer exist as protons/neutrons, but instead become some other form of matter.
I'm assuming by this term you mean a fission process which occurs within protons or neutrons, rather than within atomic nuclei. The answer to that is no, no matter how you slice it.
A short explanation for this is simply that quarks are stable particles, like electrons. It's not possible for there to be lower-mass versions of the up/down quarks which we haven't yet observed. There are certainly higher-energy versions of these same particles, but quarks themselves cannot exist except when bound to one another, either in mesons (two quarks) or baryons (three quarks, like protons and neutrons).
The reason why quarks can't exist alone is that if you take a meson and try to pull apart the two quarks that make it up, it takes so much energy that a quark/anti-quark pair is created, so instead of pulling a meson apart to get two quarks, you end up with two mesons. Similar things happen if you try to pull a quark out of a baryon (like a proton): you end up with a baryon and a meson instead of a meson and a free quark.
In the end, the proton is the lowest-energy stable state that a collection of three quarks can wind up in (mesons are all unstable, and rapidly decay into either electrons/positrons and neutrinos if they have charge, photons if they do not). But higher-mass baryons, of which there are a great many, will decay into other baryons and collections of particles. This process of more massive baryons decaying into protons/neutrons is probably the closest thing to "subnuclear fission" that exists.
"Cleared" doesn't mean no objects cross their orbit. It means there aren't any other objects of comparable size. Pluto is not close to comparable in size to Neptune.
Why do you think the IAU should have felt it reasonable to classify dozens of TNOs as planets, when those objects would have been far more similar in properties to other non-planet TNOs than to the objects currently defined as planets?
Per this presentation from DHS, any work-related e-mails are considered federal records, and thus subject to record keeping requirements.
It really isn't up to private companies to enforce laws, nor should it be. Granted, with the current US government dedicated to dismantling effective governance, I don't trust the government to do this job. But private companies can't really do anything to prevent it besides lobbying, and I don't trust any private company to be concerned enough to bother with it.
It is likely to be bullshit, but for a different reason:
It's a correlation study. Correlation studies are inherently weak, for the reason that it's all too easy for there to be a confounding factor which produces the observed effect.
If I were to guess, if there is a real correlation, it stems from lack of sleep. Not getting enough sleep over an extended period of time contributes to a tremendous variety of health problems. And exposure to blue light seems to impact sleep patterns. So basically: get good sleep, and you should be fine.
Bah. And I misread the whole thing. This comment is worthless. Please disregard.
Typo in the above: I meant melanin, not melatonin.
Melatonin is not likely to have any impact one way or another on breast or prostate cancer. This is not a proposed mechanism. It's fantasy. Now, if they had shown a link between these lights and skin cancer, that actually might make sense. But as it stands it's overwhelmingly likely that the correlation is due to some other environmental factor.
Also, the idea that smart phones or tablets might have any contribution to this is utterly absurd. Bright street lights are barely within the realm of plausibility in terms of having an impact on melanin production. Electronic devices are nowhere near there.
That said, lower color temperature lights at night are far more pleasant, and don't muck up night vision quite as much. So it would be nice to see lower color temperatures used more often. But not because of cancer fears.
It happens. There are quite a few people who vote with the Democratic party for reasons other than abortion rights. This is especially the case among populations with conservative religious views who have been turned off by the Republican party's racism (e.g. some Latinx voters). Sometimes these people end up siding with other views common in the Democratic party, but not always.
It's still a quibble that doesn't change the overall picture.
The USPS is being asked to fund all of the future payments for all of its current and former employees, assuming they'll live to the age of 75 on average. That's absurd. There's absolutely no justification for such a rule.
I know of no other situation where organizations are required to retain payments that will be made decades in the future. Why should the USPS be required to save money for a new, 20-year-old employee who won't start receiving any payments at all for decades? If there is any obligation here, it should simply be that the USPS has to have a savings amount proportional to the current year's retirement outlays. That's it.
Fiscally responsible? Congress is requiring that the USPS pre-pay its pension plan for employees who have not yet been born. A fiscally-responsible pension plan is one with a reasonable buffer and conservative accounting practices such that it isn't likely to ever lose so much that the USPS can't cover the loss. Given the size and stability of the USPS, a buffer of 30-50% of their yearly pension payouts should be more than sufficient. If they really wanted to be conservative, they could go for 2-3 years.
75 years makes zero sense under any reasonable accounting scheme. It's really a blatant attempt to kill the USPS. There's no other way to read it.
True randomness is there for sure, but making it unbiased is another matter. Real systems interact with their environments, and those environments can change the results in subtle ways. Small imperfections in the apparatus can create correlations between the photons, for example (simple example: magnetic fields cause photon polarizations to rotate). And correlations between random values are really nasty for random number generation. I'd be really reluctant to trust the output of such a random number generator directly.
Still, if this is used as a seed to a cryptographically-secure pseudo-random number generator, then it's probably fine. Expensive, though.
Absolutely. The system actively encourages the driver to pay less attention by its very design.
Right. Given that there's an explicit exception for journalism in the "Right to be Forgotten" law, I would think it to be completely reasonable for links to journalistic content to also not fall under this law. Apparently an EU court ruled that this wasn't the case some years prior, so we'll see. But I have no understanding why it makes sense for links to journalistic content to be considered different from the content itself.
There are a number of issues that make something like this really, really tough to accomplish in practice.
Perhaps the biggest issue is that the product names are selected by the people making the hardware, and we can't really trust them to produce product names which are accurate reflections of their performance, no matter the situation. The best bet would be some sort of independent rating which judged their performance.
Independent ratings are currently done, by a wide variety of organizations. Sites like anandtech.com and tomshardware.com (among others) have pages listing the results of a wide variety of benchmarks for various CPUs and GPUs. But these are often difficult for non-enthusiasts to access, and even harder to understand. I could imagine a "rating system" applied to the hardware which was required to be displayed on the box, so that buyers could see directly.
But then you have the problem (which already exists) that developers will optimize their software stacks specifically for these benchmarks, resulting in overly-optimistic results. GPUs are particularly notorious here, because there is a lot more proprietary software controlled by GPU designers between the hardware and the end-user performance.
Making things even worse, the actual performance of the hardware tends to change over time as software changes. This can be a result of software developers adding new code to make use of new hardware features, or of the hardware vendors updating their own proprietary software.
In the end, getting consistent performance comparisons printed right on the box is a really, really hard problem. It's not necessarily impossible, but it would require a massive investment by an entity dedicated to producing accurate data. It would also require having either the force of law or voluntary agreement by all hardware manufacturers to even get off the ground.