The bigger the vehicle + cargo the more fuel you need to lift PLUS you need more fuel to lift the extra fuel.
If using conventional fuel then you are right. However unlike physical fuel electrical power can be transmitted wirelessly. Of course the technical challenges to do this would be immense for a moving vehicle but it does present a possible option not available to traditionally fuelled vehicles. However given all the challenges with current technology I would agree with your conclusion that Uber is very unlikely to crack this but it remains an intriguing possibility that at some point someone else might.
Not very many creationists deny that creatures change from one generation to the next....so I think it's dishonest to portray creationists as though they have their eyes and ears covered and deny all of that.
That is actually far less rational though so my apologies for giving creationists too much credit. So what you are saying is that they believe evolution happens but that despite the fact that this evolution could explain the entire fossil record they reject that idea and believe that the world was created by someone with a heck of a sense of humour because they went to all the trouble to create fossils consistent with evolution? I have a hard time believing that anyone really believes this: it seems far more probable that this is a rationalization they use to let them support measures against diseases without having to publicly admit they are wrong.
the argument is only "overwhelming" when you ignore thousands of scientists who disagree
I don't know *any* scientist who disagrees with the fact that the planet is warming. Where the disagreement lies is in the degree of the warming that is being caused by human activity. What we need to have a is a sensible debate about how we can start to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while the science figures out how much we need to reduce it by.
Instead we have an inflammatory debate with one side refusing to admit there is any problem at all (despite the overwhelming evidence that the planet is warming) and the other side responding with equally non-scientific doomsday-like scenarios. The result is deadlock and inaction when instead we need to start taking sensible, measured actions now to avoid a situation where we need to take very significant, rapid actions which could cause huge economic upheaval.
Not really it is simply people making dishonest arguments. The scientific evidence that the planet is warming is overwhelming the problem is that the proposed solution - reducing greenhouse gas emissions - carries with it a huge economic impact. Not surprisingly this means there are a large number of people who believe that the economic problems from reducing greenhouse gas emissions outweighs the problems of just warming the planet.
However they believe that this argument is not strong enough to prevent everyone deciding to cut greenhouse gas emissions so, although they really believe the science, their only option to prevent the economic problems they are worried about is to attack the science and try to pretend that it is wrong. So really this is simply a dishonest argument made be people who are so afraid of the impact of curbing greenhouse gases that they attack the arguments for this in the only way that has any chance of success even though they don't really believe the argument they are making themselves
When the chips are down so to speak it is amazing how overwhelmingly people will back science. One of the best examples of this which is often pointed out is despite all the arguments in US schools about whether to teach evolution vs. creationism (or whatever fancy name is the flavour of the day) everytime there is a concern about a new disease evolving an spreading e.g. SARS, bird flu, swine flu etc. no politician stands up and says that we should do nothing because viruses can't evolve. So when lives are on the line people really do believe in science to help and guide them but if they do not see an immediate threat to their well being then they'll happily undermine and ignore it to keep up their own standard of living.
Does it matter if the drone operator was in the wrong? That does not give the hillbilly permission to shoot it.
Why not? In most countries you are legally allowed to shoot game birds which are on your property provided that you do it safely. This even applies if the birds have been fed and raised and used to stock a piece of land for hunting e.g. pheasant woods in the UK. If the birds leave your land and fly over a neighbours that neighbour is allowed to shoot and keep the birds. If you fly a drone over someone else's private property why should the same rules not apply provided that it is shot in a safe manner?
1Tbs unless offered at a good price, would be useless for most homes....Perhaps if I had a 4k TV it may be more important
Try 40,000 4k TVs: Netflix 4k takes 25 Mbps. I don't expect to see this technology in the home anytime soon except perhaps in some selected test areas. There is no 'killer app' which needs this much bandwidth in the home at the moment. If it is cheap enough to act as a home link they would be better off marketing it as a replacement for 10Gb network links and switches. I could easily imagine using that sort of bandwidth for analysis of research data on a cluster in a data centre. Why would you aim it at homes to start with?
I think someone didn't understand his physics course very well. Being in a different frame of reference does not affect a clock's accuracy.
Actually since I'm now the one at the front giving the lectures I'm petty confident I do understand my own physics courses!;-) Being in a different frame does affect a clock's accuracy when I am making a measurement because time is local. The moment you are in a different frame the accuracy of the clock is limited at best by the accuracy with which you can determine the frame of the clock relative to your own.
In fact this is now the limiting factor in the accuracy of clocks since they can now make clocks which are accurate to 1s in 15 billion years at which point things the the floor of the building you are on start to matter. If they ever make these portable and cheap there are going to be some really interesting applications as well as some fun lecture demos.
And for pedants: Yes, technically nothing in the observable universe is theoretically "free" of Earth's gravitational influence
Actually if you want to be extra pedantic that may not be quite true. Parts of the universe which we can observe today (and so are in the observable universe) may by now be causally disconnected from us due to the accelerating expansion of the universe and so no longer feel the Earth's gravity. Of course we really don't know too much about what is driving the acceleration so perhaps this does not apply but it just goes to show that it is best not to make sweeping statements about the universe when we know so little about it: at least 95% of what it is made of is so far unknown to science.
It probably won't stay that accurate for that long either if it is in space because it is in a different frame of reference and so relativistic effects, including those from general relativity, will build up. This is why the GPS satellites have to have their clocks corrected to stay accurate within the tolerances required. The shift per day for GPS is around 38 microseconds per day which if it is the same for this satellite means that in 26,316 years the clock will be off by one second. This is still a long time but a lot, lot less than 1 billion years.
I'm sure for $59.99 they'll have something that you can use to bridge the technology gap.
Unfortunately walking around carrying a bag of dongles to allow you to connect your laptop to the variety of peripherals it needs to connect to is not exactly what you expect for a 'pro' machine. You would have thought they would have learnt that from the Macbook but Apple seem to be really losing the picture here and with MS developing things like Linux for Windows plus the huge improvement in PC-based laptop construction (primarily driven by the need to compete with Apple) they may soon start losing customers if they don't get back on track and start providing 'must-have' features that will let them get away with crap like this.
Sorry, how is that relevant to a review? When you review a game, you're not reviewing what "might become available later"....
You are missing the point of a review. The idea is to provide information that is useful to a potential purchaser of the game. Developers regularly promise that new features are in the pipeline or will be coming for a "small" additional fee as DLC because that information may encourage people to purchase the game. Hence it is useful if a 'review' includes information to help a purchaser evaluate the trustworthiness of such claims.
Having the review cover not just the game but those who made it is often very useful. The sad reality is that it is rare for a game today to be released as a finished product so knowing that the developers are trustworthy is important.
You are confusing actual piracy with what this actually refers to, copyright violations.
No I would never do that because you aren't even detained, let alone imprisoned for 10 years, for actual piracy under UK law because they are worried you might try to claim asylum.
Actually until 1998 piracy used to carry a mandatory death sentence in the UK under the 1837 piracy act. This was one of the few crimes which still had it after the (almost) abolition of the death sentence in 1965. Mind you it did have to be committed on the high seas so it only applied to those downloading content while on a ship at sea.
If there's life there, what are the chances that the microbes that we send there will be better at living on their world than the nativre stuff is?
Nobody knows...and that is precisely the point! We would be flying completely blind. However we would be introducing microbes, not mammals, and our history there is far more lethal e.g. evolution of the bubonic plague which wiped out a huge fraction of the human population at the time, current concerns about various flu viruses and ebola etc.
It is effectively playing Russian roulette with another planet's ecosystem using a gun with an unknown number of chambers. If there were some serious benefit to be hand then perhaps it is worth all the unknowns but, as far as I can see, there are no benefits at least for ~a billion years or so and even after that time only if we have some means of getting there...at which point we can probably do a far better and faster job of terraforming the place.
You've made an assumption that our species will be able to develop the technology prior to an ELE.
Why is this at all relevant? An extinction level event kills off some fraction of species not all life on the planet (e.g. mammals survived the dinosaur ELE). Seeding another planet with microbes does nothing to save the human race nor does it even save our ecology since the plan is that these microbe will evolve to form their own, unique ecology....although of course we will have no idea whether they are successful or not.
If the devs promised all of heaven and earth to kickstarter, but only deliver a decent game... original backers are going to slam it.
I'd argue that is information relevant to the review though because those same devs may be continuing to claim they will deliver amazing new features etc. in the future and so those contemplating a purchase should know that they have a history of not delivering.
The best solution is to come up with what you think is a better algorithm and then display BOTH results. This way people can judge for themselves which score is most useful in a particular circumstance. In fact this would give you some idea which games devs were manipulating their reviews which is very useful information if you are considering a purchase.
Actually I disagree. At the moment seeding remote worlds would involve firing off a probe blindly containing what, for the planet involved, could be a lethal virus which would wipe out life there. If there were intelligent life this would be effectively declaring war and if there is no intelligent life we have just wiped out what might have been our first chance to study extra-terrestrial life.
...and for what? The possibility to seed a planet so that in a few billion years time (on Earth it took 3 billion years before the first microbes evolved into multi-cellular lifeforms and 100's million for those lifeforms to populate the land) we might have a habitable planet which is too far away to reach with current technology? So on the one hand you are expecting us to develop the technology to be able to travel there while at the same time not developing any technology which can terra-form a planet in less than a few hundred million years at best?
The time to do this is when we develop the technology to travel there. Doing it beforehand is lots of risk with no reward.
A scientist can't objectively weigh the value of their own work to society as a while and neither can a politician.
This is why giving any one scientist's voice - even one with a Nobel prize - too much weight is a very bad idea. We all have biases. This is why funding decisions nee to be made by committees where biases average out and the decisions are hopefully made on scientific merit (although no human process is perfect).
Cost-benefit is an essential part of maximizing productive results in *any* endeavor in *any* industry, except perhaps, producing worthless luxury items.
The problem is that you can't really do this with fundamental research because we have no idea what we will discover. Even after discovery it often takes 50+ years before the applications come out. For example from the discovery of quantum mechanics to the transistor took 50 years and nobody at the time could have predicted that QM would lead to computers. Similarly early particle physics an their detectors are now used in medical applications.
It would be great if we could do a cost-benefit analysis because when fundamental research pays of the benefits are huge - our modern word is built on the results. However we cannot predict which fundamental research will give those results.
For larger buildings, the first thing they'll do is shut off the power.
Just wait until they start installing the Tesla battery packs designed for buildings. As batteries become more and more efficient and longer lived they are going to start appearing in more and more locations. Fire crews clearly need to have the training to deal with them otherwise they will not be able to do their job safely and effectively.
You would have to think about it??? Why wouldn't you do it, assuming no side effects?
Well one reason would be that if you have a copyrighted gene sequence in your DNA having kids may mean that you get prosecuted for copyright violation.
This wikipedia page indicates that the number of Brits living abroad is 13.1 million from FCO estimates in 2005-6. That's 10 years ago and in all likelihood is probably now higher. There is no estimate on how many of them are disenfranchised though. Clearly not all of them but with a number that large it would only have to be 20% to have been able to change the vote which is a low enough fraction to seem entirely likely. Hence, based on the evidence, the vote was indeed undemocratic and might well have had a difference result if all British citizens had been allowed to vote.
Since "disenfranchised" literally means deprived of the right to vote yes, everyone outside the UK for 15 years has been disenfranchised. Whether they care or not is the question you should be asking and for a vote like this which affects how easily British citizens can move across borders as well as consular support I bet a lot of them, and especially those living in the rest of the EU, really do care a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
The bigger the vehicle + cargo the more fuel you need to lift PLUS you need more fuel to lift the extra fuel.
If using conventional fuel then you are right. However unlike physical fuel electrical power can be transmitted wirelessly. Of course the technical challenges to do this would be immense for a moving vehicle but it does present a possible option not available to traditionally fuelled vehicles. However given all the challenges with current technology I would agree with your conclusion that Uber is very unlikely to crack this but it remains an intriguing possibility that at some point someone else might.
Not very many creationists deny that creatures change from one generation to the next....so I think it's dishonest to portray creationists as though they have their eyes and ears covered and deny all of that.
That is actually far less rational though so my apologies for giving creationists too much credit. So what you are saying is that they believe evolution happens but that despite the fact that this evolution could explain the entire fossil record they reject that idea and believe that the world was created by someone with a heck of a sense of humour because they went to all the trouble to create fossils consistent with evolution? I have a hard time believing that anyone really believes this: it seems far more probable that this is a rationalization they use to let them support measures against diseases without having to publicly admit they are wrong.
the argument is only "overwhelming" when you ignore thousands of scientists who disagree
I don't know *any* scientist who disagrees with the fact that the planet is warming. Where the disagreement lies is in the degree of the warming that is being caused by human activity. What we need to have a is a sensible debate about how we can start to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while the science figures out how much we need to reduce it by.
Instead we have an inflammatory debate with one side refusing to admit there is any problem at all (despite the overwhelming evidence that the planet is warming) and the other side responding with equally non-scientific doomsday-like scenarios. The result is deadlock and inaction when instead we need to start taking sensible, measured actions now to avoid a situation where we need to take very significant, rapid actions which could cause huge economic upheaval.
Not really it is simply people making dishonest arguments. The scientific evidence that the planet is warming is overwhelming the problem is that the proposed solution - reducing greenhouse gas emissions - carries with it a huge economic impact. Not surprisingly this means there are a large number of people who believe that the economic problems from reducing greenhouse gas emissions outweighs the problems of just warming the planet.
However they believe that this argument is not strong enough to prevent everyone deciding to cut greenhouse gas emissions so, although they really believe the science, their only option to prevent the economic problems they are worried about is to attack the science and try to pretend that it is wrong. So really this is simply a dishonest argument made be people who are so afraid of the impact of curbing greenhouse gases that they attack the arguments for this in the only way that has any chance of success even though they don't really believe the argument they are making themselves
When the chips are down so to speak it is amazing how overwhelmingly people will back science. One of the best examples of this which is often pointed out is despite all the arguments in US schools about whether to teach evolution vs. creationism (or whatever fancy name is the flavour of the day) everytime there is a concern about a new disease evolving an spreading e.g. SARS, bird flu, swine flu etc. no politician stands up and says that we should do nothing because viruses can't evolve. So when lives are on the line people really do believe in science to help and guide them but if they do not see an immediate threat to their well being then they'll happily undermine and ignore it to keep up their own standard of living.
Does it matter if the drone operator was in the wrong? That does not give the hillbilly permission to shoot it.
Why not? In most countries you are legally allowed to shoot game birds which are on your property provided that you do it safely. This even applies if the birds have been fed and raised and used to stock a piece of land for hunting e.g. pheasant woods in the UK. If the birds leave your land and fly over a neighbours that neighbour is allowed to shoot and keep the birds. If you fly a drone over someone else's private property why should the same rules not apply provided that it is shot in a safe manner?
maybe but when the batteries go bad it can jam up the line or maybe blowup if they cheap out on them.
If only there were some technology where we could have a train powered by electricity without the need for large batteries or hydrogen...
1Tbs unless offered at a good price, would be useless for most homes....Perhaps if I had a 4k TV it may be more important
Try 40,000 4k TVs: Netflix 4k takes 25 Mbps. I don't expect to see this technology in the home anytime soon except perhaps in some selected test areas. There is no 'killer app' which needs this much bandwidth in the home at the moment. If it is cheap enough to act as a home link they would be better off marketing it as a replacement for 10Gb network links and switches. I could easily imagine using that sort of bandwidth for analysis of research data on a cluster in a data centre. Why would you aim it at homes to start with?
I think someone didn't understand his physics course very well. Being in a different frame of reference does not affect a clock's accuracy.
Actually since I'm now the one at the front giving the lectures I'm petty confident I do understand my own physics courses! ;-) Being in a different frame does affect a clock's accuracy when I am making a measurement because time is local. The moment you are in a different frame the accuracy of the clock is limited at best by the accuracy with which you can determine the frame of the clock relative to your own.
In fact this is now the limiting factor in the accuracy of clocks since they can now make clocks which are accurate to 1s in 15 billion years at which point things the the floor of the building you are on start to matter. If they ever make these portable and cheap there are going to be some really interesting applications as well as some fun lecture demos.
So they're using their GPU to accelerate math processing?
Perhaps, or perhaps not. Given the usual submission to publication lead times on journals I suspect they have some debugging to do.
And for pedants: Yes, technically nothing in the observable universe is theoretically "free" of Earth's gravitational influence
Actually if you want to be extra pedantic that may not be quite true. Parts of the universe which we can observe today (and so are in the observable universe) may by now be causally disconnected from us due to the accelerating expansion of the universe and so no longer feel the Earth's gravity. Of course we really don't know too much about what is driving the acceleration so perhaps this does not apply but it just goes to show that it is best not to make sweeping statements about the universe when we know so little about it: at least 95% of what it is made of is so far unknown to science.
It probably won't stay that accurate for that long either if it is in space because it is in a different frame of reference and so relativistic effects, including those from general relativity, will build up. This is why the GPS satellites have to have their clocks corrected to stay accurate within the tolerances required. The shift per day for GPS is around 38 microseconds per day which if it is the same for this satellite means that in 26,316 years the clock will be off by one second. This is still a long time but a lot, lot less than 1 billion years.
I'm sure for $59.99 they'll have something that you can use to bridge the technology gap.
Unfortunately walking around carrying a bag of dongles to allow you to connect your laptop to the variety of peripherals it needs to connect to is not exactly what you expect for a 'pro' machine. You would have thought they would have learnt that from the Macbook but Apple seem to be really losing the picture here and with MS developing things like Linux for Windows plus the huge improvement in PC-based laptop construction (primarily driven by the need to compete with Apple) they may soon start losing customers if they don't get back on track and start providing 'must-have' features that will let them get away with crap like this.
Sorry, how is that relevant to a review? When you review a game, you're not reviewing what "might become available later"....
You are missing the point of a review. The idea is to provide information that is useful to a potential purchaser of the game. Developers regularly promise that new features are in the pipeline or will be coming for a "small" additional fee as DLC because that information may encourage people to purchase the game. Hence it is useful if a 'review' includes information to help a purchaser evaluate the trustworthiness of such claims.
Having the review cover not just the game but those who made it is often very useful. The sad reality is that it is rare for a game today to be released as a finished product so knowing that the developers are trustworthy is important.
You are confusing actual piracy with what this actually refers to, copyright violations.
No I would never do that because you aren't even detained, let alone imprisoned for 10 years, for actual piracy under UK law because they are worried you might try to claim asylum.
No, wait, blowing up the Parliament carries a lower sentence.
Not to mention that you'll get an annual holiday named after you - and that's even if the plan doesn't work!
10 years for piracy?
Actually until 1998 piracy used to carry a mandatory death sentence in the UK under the 1837 piracy act. This was one of the few crimes which still had it after the (almost) abolition of the death sentence in 1965. Mind you it did have to be committed on the high seas so it only applied to those downloading content while on a ship at sea.
If there's life there, what are the chances that the microbes that we send there will be better at living on their world than the nativre stuff is?
Nobody knows...and that is precisely the point! We would be flying completely blind. However we would be introducing microbes, not mammals, and our history there is far more lethal e.g. evolution of the bubonic plague which wiped out a huge fraction of the human population at the time, current concerns about various flu viruses and ebola etc.
It is effectively playing Russian roulette with another planet's ecosystem using a gun with an unknown number of chambers. If there were some serious benefit to be hand then perhaps it is worth all the unknowns but, as far as I can see, there are no benefits at least for ~a billion years or so and even after that time only if we have some means of getting there...at which point we can probably do a far better and faster job of terraforming the place.
You've made an assumption that our species will be able to develop the technology prior to an ELE.
Why is this at all relevant? An extinction level event kills off some fraction of species not all life on the planet (e.g. mammals survived the dinosaur ELE). Seeding another planet with microbes does nothing to save the human race nor does it even save our ecology since the plan is that these microbe will evolve to form their own, unique ecology....although of course we will have no idea whether they are successful or not.
If the devs promised all of heaven and earth to kickstarter, but only deliver a decent game ... original backers are going to slam it.
I'd argue that is information relevant to the review though because those same devs may be continuing to claim they will deliver amazing new features etc. in the future and so those contemplating a purchase should know that they have a history of not delivering.
The best solution is to come up with what you think is a better algorithm and then display BOTH results. This way people can judge for themselves which score is most useful in a particular circumstance. In fact this would give you some idea which games devs were manipulating their reviews which is very useful information if you are considering a purchase.
Actually I disagree. At the moment seeding remote worlds would involve firing off a probe blindly containing what, for the planet involved, could be a lethal virus which would wipe out life there. If there were intelligent life this would be effectively declaring war and if there is no intelligent life we have just wiped out what might have been our first chance to study extra-terrestrial life.
...and for what? The possibility to seed a planet so that in a few billion years time (on Earth it took 3 billion years before the first microbes evolved into multi-cellular lifeforms and 100's million for those lifeforms to populate the land) we might have a habitable planet which is too far away to reach with current technology? So on the one hand you are expecting us to develop the technology to be able to travel there while at the same time not developing any technology which can terra-form a planet in less than a few hundred million years at best?
The time to do this is when we develop the technology to travel there. Doing it beforehand is lots of risk with no reward.
A scientist can't objectively weigh the value of their own work to society as a while and neither can a politician.
This is why giving any one scientist's voice - even one with a Nobel prize - too much weight is a very bad idea. We all have biases. This is why funding decisions nee to be made by committees where biases average out and the decisions are hopefully made on scientific merit (although no human process is perfect).
Cost-benefit is an essential part of maximizing productive results in *any* endeavor in *any* industry, except perhaps, producing worthless luxury items.
The problem is that you can't really do this with fundamental research because we have no idea what we will discover. Even after discovery it often takes 50+ years before the applications come out. For example from the discovery of quantum mechanics to the transistor took 50 years and nobody at the time could have predicted that QM would lead to computers. Similarly early particle physics an their detectors are now used in medical applications.
It would be great if we could do a cost-benefit analysis because when fundamental research pays of the benefits are huge - our modern word is built on the results. However we cannot predict which fundamental research will give those results.
Canada has a lower overall population density than the US, but the urban density is about 40% higher than the US
Hmmm....I wonder if that has anything to do with having functional public transport.
For larger buildings, the first thing they'll do is shut off the power.
Just wait until they start installing the Tesla battery packs designed for buildings. As batteries become more and more efficient and longer lived they are going to start appearing in more and more locations. Fire crews clearly need to have the training to deal with them otherwise they will not be able to do their job safely and effectively.
You would have to think about it??? Why wouldn't you do it, assuming no side effects?
Well one reason would be that if you have a copyrighted gene sequence in your DNA having kids may mean that you get prosecuted for copyright violation.
Evidence?
This wikipedia page indicates that the number of Brits living abroad is 13.1 million from FCO estimates in 2005-6. That's 10 years ago and in all likelihood is probably now higher. There is no estimate on how many of them are disenfranchised though. Clearly not all of them but with a number that large it would only have to be 20% to have been able to change the vote which is a low enough fraction to seem entirely likely. Hence, based on the evidence, the vote was indeed undemocratic and might well have had a difference result if all British citizens had been allowed to vote.
Since "disenfranchised" literally means deprived of the right to vote yes, everyone outside the UK for 15 years has been disenfranchised. Whether they care or not is the question you should be asking and for a vote like this which affects how easily British citizens can move across borders as well as consular support I bet a lot of them, and especially those living in the rest of the EU, really do care a lot.