I would offer specific billing credit for bandwidth lent out for public access; that way, subscribers would be incentivized to actually improve public access to their routers.
All that will do is incentivize users to connect to the free public wifi instead of their own network when they do not need the bandwidth or even run simple scripts to generate public traffic while they use their own network for everything else.
Well if the only machine you have is the production server and it gets into trouble do you tell your users to stop running their programs and hope it does not crash or do you try to patch the system to try and fix the problem? If you only have one production server an no access to any machines unfortunately those are your choices.
If you stop users running their programs then nobody gets anything done and your server might crash anyway. However if you successfully patch the problem and then you might be able to use that knowledge to fix other servers if you ever get access to any.
How about we invest in getting off this planet and learning to live/survive in space? Bet it is cheaper, easier to accomplish, and better for everyone.
Think of this as primitive terraforming: adjusting our own climate should be a far easier thing to do than creating such a climate from scratch on a barren rock. If we are going to survive off-Earth then we will need to be able to do this since living in underground tin cans is not really going to attract many colonists and is extremely expensive and very hard to achieve with current technology.
Actually I think there is a very strong argument for developing the capability to geo-engineer the climate which goes beyond any man-made climate change. There is overwhelming evidence that the Earth's climate changes radically over time, and possibly quite short times. Ignoring the debate over how much of the current climate change is man-made vs. natural it seems a very good idea to develop technology which will let us control the Earth's climate either to undo any damage we have caused ourselves or, if nothing else, to prevent the next ice age...with 6+ billions mouths to feed any significant climate change regardless of type or cause will be bad.
two countries couldn't have closer economic, social and military ties than the US and Canada.
There are plenty of examples of countries with far closer ties: members of the EU; England, Scotland and Wales; the counties in the former Soviet Union etc. Indeed I would argue that Canada has closer ties with the UK than the US: we share a monarch, style of government and social morals the later of which is very different from the US in that we have national healthcare, functioning social welfare etc. Of those you list I'd say that only our economic ties are closer to the US than the UK.
Unfortunately I'm not at all sure that he actually got it right though because I think he has forgotten about General Relativity. He treats the entire universe as if it were a single object at rest in the CMB frame. However it isn't: it consists of many constituent components all with their own individual rest frames.
As we look further away from us galaxies are travelling closer and closer to the speed of light and so appear "slowed down" by time dilation due to the expansion of space itself which you need general relativity to account for. All that travelling close to the speed of light should do is shift which galaxies are slowed by time dilation and which are in almost the same frame and so not slowed. Hence you would see effectively exactly what we see now but it will be different galaxies which are in view because you are in a different inertial frame.
Hence I am not at all sure that he got it right. Certainly I'd like to hear it from a cosmologist before I believe it since GR is far more complex than SR and it is easy to get stung applying SR to a situation which requires GR and hence my cautiousness about whether he is wrong since I'm not a cosmologist. This would far from the first thing that he has got wrong...but it would be the first truly spectacular failure.
As of right now, the only confirmed neutrino sources we have that aren't artificial are the sun and SN 1987A
Don't forget atmospheric neutrinos. These are created in the showers produced when cosmic rays strike the upper atmosphere. Since they pass through the planet you detect them from all over the globe. The Earth itself is also a natural source of neutrinos from radioactive decay and there are some experiments, such as SNO+, that are looking for these 'geo-neutrinos'.
Scientific instruments and most optical applications require a lot more precision that the model in the video demonstrated. It's a neat technology but at the moment art is about the only viable use.
Given that the EU is stuck with it for the time being perhaps it's time to see if there are not some fringe benefits. Fed up hearing about every detail of some stupid celebrity's life? Apply to have every story about them disappear from the web! Alternatively if we try that for a few important, reasonably well-behaved politicians hoping to get re-elected I imagine we might see the laws changed rather quickly...
But which ETF do you choose? It's easy for you in hindsight...
The whole point of index investing is that it does not matter: you are aiming for the average market return and, to within a small margin or error, that's what any decent index based ETF will deliver whether it be from iShares, Vanguard or someone else. What differentiates these funds is just their management fee.
What you aim for is a diversified portfolio so the only real decision you need to make is what percentage goes on bonds, your local stock market and then foreign stock markets (often divided into developed and emerging markets). The choice made depends on the volatility which you can handle: generally the larger the fraction in stocks the more volatile but larger on average the returns will be.
There are plenty of sites which include model portfolios (if you are in Canada here is a good one) which give you the long term, average gains and volatility of different fund distributions. All you have to do it pick one and stick with it for a decade or two. It's boring but it works.
So you don't think moving funds to the right investments at the right time should pay a bonus?
No, I don't think that managers can accurately predict the right investments and the right time well enough to out perform the market on a consistent basis. There is considerable evidence to support this but perhaps the best indication is that I've never heard of any active fund which only charges solely based on its success in beating its benchmark. If the fund managers don't really believe that we benefit from their skills why should we?
The 2% amounted to $137M and 20% of the growth was $343M, which means that the managers' efforts increased the size of the endowment by $1.7B.
No that is not at all phenomenal and in fact is probably worse than simple index investing and almost certainly has little to do with their efforts. Using your numbers the fund grew by [(1.7-0.343)/(8-1.7)-1]=21.5%. Depending on the exact year in question putting the money in a simple broad US stock market ETF such as one offered by Vanguard would have generated a 33.51% increase in 2013 and 12.58% in 2014 and if this is the amount paid in 2014 it will likely include some or all of the 2013 gains because you cannot pay before you know what the gain is.
Doing this would have cost them a 0.05% expense. It's really easy to make "phenomenal" returns when the stock market is rising as much as it has in the past few years. What I do not understand is why they are paying such exorbitant expenses and, if they want to offer a bonus it should be based on performance above the market not just the total increase which has little to do with a manager's performance.
It's not just silly it completely inconsistent and contradictory:
...generating the power necessary to unbind a planet... is simply impossible on board an object only the size of a small moon.
and yet later the same person says:
But if, instead, you could house a 1-2 trillion ton asteroid (about 5-7 km across) made of antimatter and deliver it to the planet's core,...
Last I checked that was the size of a small moon so you can indeed shatter a planet with a small moon but it is a one shot device. However if you can make and store anti-neutronium this would would shrink the radius to ~0.5-0.7m (10,000 times less) and solve the problem of how to get it to the core. In fact this has already been the premise of a novel by Greg Bear.
So clearly the premise is wrong - you can store a device on a small moon which can destroy a plane and, what's worse, the author actually told us this later in the same article! Why does slashdot continue to post stories from this guy?
In terms of habitable areas of ocean it's conceivable that one day there may be nowhere left to swim away to.
True, it is possible to conceive of such a possibility. What is lacking is evidence that such a possibility is at all likely. If you want to make an extraordinary claim like that then you need extraordinary evidence to back it up. Previous climate changes have not caused the oceans to die so why is the recent climate change is so much different to past events some of which, like volcanic eruptions, have happened on very short time scales.
What you seem to not realize is that the mass extinction events of the past made extinct the most dominant species of the time (dinosaurs for example).
Only there are two flaws with that. First the dinosaurs did not go extinct and are still around today only smaller and with a different name: birds. Secondly we have one evolutionary advantage: intelligence. This lets us adapt far, far more rapidly to change than evolution and may even help reverse climate change: either by reducing our environmental impact or by geo-engineering.
Climate change is a concern but one that stops far short of the end of life on earth. It may cause massive disruption, a drop in the standard of living etc. but the extinction of all humans? That's an extraordinary claim without anything approaching extraordinary evidence to support it.
If the ocean dies, everything dies. That's not hyperbole, it's reality.
Yes but my point is that there is no evidence provided that this will happen. If you look at one region of the ocean, throw in your climate change model and come up with a prediction that none of the species living there now will survive then you do not have enough evidence to conclude that all life in the oceans will die.
To conclude that all life in the ocean will die you need to also check to make sure that the new conditions are not favourable to other species which might not be present in that region at the moment but which might move there if the conditions changed. Hence my point: conditions have changed in the past and life has adapted to them, not by evolution but by relocating, if you do not factor this in then you cannot conclude that the oceans will die.
If science is correct and climate change is real and is being caused by humans, then doing something about it means everybody gets to live. If the climate change deniers are wrong, then everything dies.
Sorry but while I absolutely agree that we should take climate change seriously and do what we can to minimize the effect what you say is clearly not even vaguely correct. The Earth has been through natural climate change cycles in the past and all the species now on the planet have survived such changes.
What none of these dire predictions seem to take into account is that climate change should open up new areas where plants, coral reefs etc. can grow. 10,000 years ago the planet was in the grip of an ice age. Much of northern Europe and North America was underneath a giant ice sheet which melted. As the climate warmed the regions favourable for plants moved and species started growing in different areas as the climate changed. The problem with man-made climate change is that it might happen a lot faster than most natural change (except for volcanic eruptions, meteor strikes etc. which are even faster). Life has survived all of these disasters and it will survive man-made climate change as will we (unless we do something really stupid like start a nuclear war) but it might be very unpleasant.
What I would love to see is some sort of balanced, objective look at climate change. Hyped up articles like this that are clearly interested in pushing one point of view regardless of evidence convince nobody and risk a "boy who cried wolf" effect where people will ignore real warnings of problems due to climate change.
Actually, since you clearly want to be pedantic, they don't generate energy at all they simply convert convert strong-force potential energy into heat/kinetic energy. The amount they convert into a useful form which can be extracted is less than the amount put in to get the required conditions and so we say that they "do not generate energy" meaning it in the sense of produce new useful work.
If you are going to be pedantic at least be correct.
It's only progress if it works. The field of fusion has a well established track record of reactor designs that do not work when built for one reason or another. I'll get excited when they have demonstrated that it works and not before.
With heat death the universe continues for ever more either continuing to expand and reaching a finite size. Nothing ever changes it just goes on forever as a dead, lifeless void empty of stars and life. With the Big Rip the expansion accelerates until space-time itself is ripped apart and the universe is replaced by something else but what we cannot say hence the ultimate fate remains unknown which seems a lot less depressing than just heat death.
If it takes you roughly 4 years to travel from Earth to Alpha Centaury you are traveling with the speed of light
That depends on who's clock you are using. If the person on Earth measures it as four years then yes you are correct. However if you are using the clock onboard the ship then a 4 year trip means that you are only at a fraction of light speed. The difference is that for you the distance between AC and Earth is less than 4 light years due to length contraction. Were you actually to travel at (almost) light speed the trip would take almost no time at all and, for you, AC and Earth would be almost no distance apart.
Special relativity is the most accurately tested scientific law that there has ever been. Every particle accelerator uses it - not just the LHC but the machines in the basement of hospitals to treat cancer and make medical isotopes. Cosmic rays would not exist in their observed form (muons would decay too fast) without time dilation and it has been seen using atomic clocks on Concorde. Time dilation might be an extraordinary claim but it is supported by extraordinary and overwhelming evidence.
At high speeds the distant observer sees you getting slower.
...and you see them getting slower too because they are moving fast relative to you. If the situation were not perfectly symmetric then you would immediately be able to tell who was moving and who was stationary and you'd have a way to define an absolute velocity. This would mean that relativity would not be relative!
Yes it is a bit weird but that far from the strangest thing to result from relativity!
Well it depends on how fast you are moving. Get up enough speed relative to the rest of the universe and for you the heat death of the universe could happen tomorrow...although that would require that every particle of your body to be accelerated to an energy about a trillion times higher than the LHC.
Slashdot Mirror
I would offer specific billing credit for bandwidth lent out for public access; that way, subscribers would be incentivized to actually improve public access to their routers.
All that will do is incentivize users to connect to the free public wifi instead of their own network when they do not need the bandwidth or even run simple scripts to generate public traffic while they use their own network for everything else.
Well if the only machine you have is the production server and it gets into trouble do you tell your users to stop running their programs and hope it does not crash or do you try to patch the system to try and fix the problem? If you only have one production server an no access to any machines unfortunately those are your choices.
If you stop users running their programs then nobody gets anything done and your server might crash anyway. However if you successfully patch the problem and then you might be able to use that knowledge to fix other servers if you ever get access to any.
How about we invest in getting off this planet and learning to live/survive in space? Bet it is cheaper, easier to accomplish, and better for everyone.
Think of this as primitive terraforming: adjusting our own climate should be a far easier thing to do than creating such a climate from scratch on a barren rock. If we are going to survive off-Earth then we will need to be able to do this since living in underground tin cans is not really going to attract many colonists and is extremely expensive and very hard to achieve with current technology.
Actually I think there is a very strong argument for developing the capability to geo-engineer the climate which goes beyond any man-made climate change. There is overwhelming evidence that the Earth's climate changes radically over time, and possibly quite short times. Ignoring the debate over how much of the current climate change is man-made vs. natural it seems a very good idea to develop technology which will let us control the Earth's climate either to undo any damage we have caused ourselves or, if nothing else, to prevent the next ice age...with 6+ billions mouths to feed any significant climate change regardless of type or cause will be bad.
two countries couldn't have closer economic, social and military ties than the US and Canada.
There are plenty of examples of countries with far closer ties: members of the EU; England, Scotland and Wales; the counties in the former Soviet Union etc. Indeed I would argue that Canada has closer ties with the UK than the US: we share a monarch, style of government and social morals the later of which is very different from the US in that we have national healthcare, functioning social welfare etc. Of those you list I'd say that only our economic ties are closer to the US than the UK.
Unfortunately I'm not at all sure that he actually got it right though because I think he has forgotten about General Relativity. He treats the entire universe as if it were a single object at rest in the CMB frame. However it isn't: it consists of many constituent components all with their own individual rest frames.
As we look further away from us galaxies are travelling closer and closer to the speed of light and so appear "slowed down" by time dilation due to the expansion of space itself which you need general relativity to account for. All that travelling close to the speed of light should do is shift which galaxies are slowed by time dilation and which are in almost the same frame and so not slowed. Hence you would see effectively exactly what we see now but it will be different galaxies which are in view because you are in a different inertial frame.
Hence I am not at all sure that he got it right. Certainly I'd like to hear it from a cosmologist before I believe it since GR is far more complex than SR and it is easy to get stung applying SR to a situation which requires GR and hence my cautiousness about whether he is wrong since I'm not a cosmologist. This would far from the first thing that he has got wrong...but it would be the first truly spectacular failure.
As of right now, the only confirmed neutrino sources we have that aren't artificial are the sun and SN 1987A
Don't forget atmospheric neutrinos. These are created in the showers produced when cosmic rays strike the upper atmosphere. Since they pass through the planet you detect them from all over the globe. The Earth itself is also a natural source of neutrinos from radioactive decay and there are some experiments, such as SNO+, that are looking for these 'geo-neutrinos'.
Scientific instruments and most optical applications require a lot more precision that the model in the video demonstrated. It's a neat technology but at the moment art is about the only viable use.
Given that the EU is stuck with it for the time being perhaps it's time to see if there are not some fringe benefits. Fed up hearing about every detail of some stupid celebrity's life? Apply to have every story about them disappear from the web! Alternatively if we try that for a few important, reasonably well-behaved politicians hoping to get re-elected I imagine we might see the laws changed rather quickly...
But which ETF do you choose? It's easy for you in hindsight...
The whole point of index investing is that it does not matter: you are aiming for the average market return and, to within a small margin or error, that's what any decent index based ETF will deliver whether it be from iShares, Vanguard or someone else. What differentiates these funds is just their management fee.
What you aim for is a diversified portfolio so the only real decision you need to make is what percentage goes on bonds, your local stock market and then foreign stock markets (often divided into developed and emerging markets). The choice made depends on the volatility which you can handle: generally the larger the fraction in stocks the more volatile but larger on average the returns will be.
There are plenty of sites which include model portfolios (if you are in Canada here is a good one) which give you the long term, average gains and volatility of different fund distributions. All you have to do it pick one and stick with it for a decade or two. It's boring but it works.
So you don't think moving funds to the right investments at the right time should pay a bonus?
No, I don't think that managers can accurately predict the right investments and the right time well enough to out perform the market on a consistent basis. There is considerable evidence to support this but perhaps the best indication is that I've never heard of any active fund which only charges solely based on its success in beating its benchmark. If the fund managers don't really believe that we benefit from their skills why should we?
The 2% amounted to $137M and 20% of the growth was $343M, which means that the managers' efforts increased the size of the endowment by $1.7B.
No that is not at all phenomenal and in fact is probably worse than simple index investing and almost certainly has little to do with their efforts. Using your numbers the fund grew by [(1.7-0.343)/(8-1.7)-1]=21.5%. Depending on the exact year in question putting the money in a simple broad US stock market ETF such as one offered by Vanguard would have generated a 33.51% increase in 2013 and 12.58% in 2014 and if this is the amount paid in 2014 it will likely include some or all of the 2013 gains because you cannot pay before you know what the gain is.
Doing this would have cost them a 0.05% expense. It's really easy to make "phenomenal" returns when the stock market is rising as much as it has in the past few years. What I do not understand is why they are paying such exorbitant expenses and, if they want to offer a bonus it should be based on performance above the market not just the total increase which has little to do with a manager's performance.
...generating the power necessary to unbind a planet ... is simply impossible on board an object only the size of a small moon.
and yet later the same person says:
But if, instead, you could house a 1-2 trillion ton asteroid (about 5-7 km across) made of antimatter and deliver it to the planet's core,...
Last I checked that was the size of a small moon so you can indeed shatter a planet with a small moon but it is a one shot device. However if you can make and store anti-neutronium this would would shrink the radius to ~0.5-0.7m (10,000 times less) and solve the problem of how to get it to the core. In fact this has already been the premise of a novel by Greg Bear.
So clearly the premise is wrong - you can store a device on a small moon which can destroy a plane and, what's worse, the author actually told us this later in the same article! Why does slashdot continue to post stories from this guy?
In terms of habitable areas of ocean it's conceivable that one day there may be nowhere left to swim away to.
True, it is possible to conceive of such a possibility. What is lacking is evidence that such a possibility is at all likely. If you want to make an extraordinary claim like that then you need extraordinary evidence to back it up. Previous climate changes have not caused the oceans to die so why is the recent climate change is so much different to past events some of which, like volcanic eruptions, have happened on very short time scales.
What you seem to not realize is that the mass extinction events of the past made extinct the most dominant species of the time (dinosaurs for example).
Only there are two flaws with that. First the dinosaurs did not go extinct and are still around today only smaller and with a different name: birds. Secondly we have one evolutionary advantage: intelligence. This lets us adapt far, far more rapidly to change than evolution and may even help reverse climate change: either by reducing our environmental impact or by geo-engineering.
Climate change is a concern but one that stops far short of the end of life on earth. It may cause massive disruption, a drop in the standard of living etc. but the extinction of all humans? That's an extraordinary claim without anything approaching extraordinary evidence to support it.
If the ocean dies, everything dies. That's not hyperbole, it's reality.
Yes but my point is that there is no evidence provided that this will happen. If you look at one region of the ocean, throw in your climate change model and come up with a prediction that none of the species living there now will survive then you do not have enough evidence to conclude that all life in the oceans will die.
To conclude that all life in the ocean will die you need to also check to make sure that the new conditions are not favourable to other species which might not be present in that region at the moment but which might move there if the conditions changed. Hence my point: conditions have changed in the past and life has adapted to them, not by evolution but by relocating, if you do not factor this in then you cannot conclude that the oceans will die.
If science is correct and climate change is real and is being caused by humans, then doing something about it means everybody gets to live. If the climate change deniers are wrong, then everything dies.
Sorry but while I absolutely agree that we should take climate change seriously and do what we can to minimize the effect what you say is clearly not even vaguely correct. The Earth has been through natural climate change cycles in the past and all the species now on the planet have survived such changes.
What none of these dire predictions seem to take into account is that climate change should open up new areas where plants, coral reefs etc. can grow. 10,000 years ago the planet was in the grip of an ice age. Much of northern Europe and North America was underneath a giant ice sheet which melted. As the climate warmed the regions favourable for plants moved and species started growing in different areas as the climate changed. The problem with man-made climate change is that it might happen a lot faster than most natural change (except for volcanic eruptions, meteor strikes etc. which are even faster). Life has survived all of these disasters and it will survive man-made climate change as will we (unless we do something really stupid like start a nuclear war) but it might be very unpleasant.
What I would love to see is some sort of balanced, objective look at climate change. Hyped up articles like this that are clearly interested in pushing one point of view regardless of evidence convince nobody and risk a "boy who cried wolf" effect where people will ignore real warnings of problems due to climate change.
All fusion reactors absolutely generate energy.
Actually, since you clearly want to be pedantic, they don't generate energy at all they simply convert convert strong-force potential energy into heat/kinetic energy. The amount they convert into a useful form which can be extracted is less than the amount put in to get the required conditions and so we say that they "do not generate energy" meaning it in the sense of produce new useful work.
If you are going to be pedantic at least be correct.
The goal of a fusion reactor is to generate energy. If it does not generate energy then it does not work.
It's only progress if it works. The field of fusion has a well established track record of reactor designs that do not work when built for one reason or another. I'll get excited when they have demonstrated that it works and not before.
That's just the Big Crunch with a guess as to what happens afterwards.
How is that different from heat death?
With heat death the universe continues for ever more either continuing to expand and reaching a finite size. Nothing ever changes it just goes on forever as a dead, lifeless void empty of stars and life. With the Big Rip the expansion accelerates until space-time itself is ripped apart and the universe is replaced by something else but what we cannot say hence the ultimate fate remains unknown which seems a lot less depressing than just heat death.
If it takes you roughly 4 years to travel from Earth to Alpha Centaury you are traveling with the speed of light
That depends on who's clock you are using. If the person on Earth measures it as four years then yes you are correct. However if you are using the clock onboard the ship then a 4 year trip means that you are only at a fraction of light speed. The difference is that for you the distance between AC and Earth is less than 4 light years due to length contraction. Were you actually to travel at (almost) light speed the trip would take almost no time at all and, for you, AC and Earth would be almost no distance apart.
Special relativity is the most accurately tested scientific law that there has ever been. Every particle accelerator uses it - not just the LHC but the machines in the basement of hospitals to treat cancer and make medical isotopes. Cosmic rays would not exist in their observed form (muons would decay too fast) without time dilation and it has been seen using atomic clocks on Concorde. Time dilation might be an extraordinary claim but it is supported by extraordinary and overwhelming evidence.
At high speeds the distant observer sees you getting slower.
Yes it is a bit weird but that far from the strangest thing to result from relativity!
Well it depends on how fast you are moving. Get up enough speed relative to the rest of the universe and for you the heat death of the universe could happen tomorrow...although that would require that every particle of your body to be accelerated to an energy about a trillion times higher than the LHC.