This is more of an addendum to the just-above msg, than a reply.
Fact One: Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. It is more transparent to frequencies of visible light than frequencies of infrared light.
Fact Two: The total content of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been increasing as a result of human activities. The two largest sources are the burning of fossil fuels, and the production of concrete.
Fact Three: The exact amount of greenhouse effect of existing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is unknown. We only know that it must be some magnitude greater than zero. See Fact One.
Fact Four: Adding still-more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere can only increase the existing greenhouse effect. See Fact One.
Question: On what basis could it be called a "good thing" to keep increasing the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?
The Preamble of the Constitution clearly specifies the purpose of the document. How can anyone who works at some cross-purpose be considered a defender of the Constitution?
Regarding evidence, Follow The Money. See who has been supporting the deniers of AGW --and note that the magnitude of the donations absolutely indicates rich donors, not poor donors.
Finally, I did not specify any "high cost mitigation approach" in my prior post. While it is supposedly widely known that while the first step to solving a problem is to recognize the problem exists, my other post only talked about denial and ignorance, regarding AGW. But here's how I would choose to deal with it: I'd promote nuclear fusion research. Knowledge is power, and the sooner we have that knowledge, the sooner we will have the associated power!
It may be possible to impeach a government official for violating the Oath of Office, which includes swearing to protect and defend the Constitution. Trump has made no secret of the violations he intends to commit, after taking office. For example, Constitution specifies that one of its purposes is to "promote the general Welfare" --which does not mean promoting only the welfare of the rich, and it is mostly the rich who desperately want all the data about Anthropogenic Global Warming to be ignored, so they can keep getting richer, while ocean levels rise and drown the home of millions of ordinary citizens.
Next, Trump claims to want to make America great again, but then he goes and starts appointing people who promote ignorance, not knowledge. Knowledge Is Power! --not ignorance. It is know-how that was one of the factors that made America great in the first place. To promote ignorance is to not-hardly be consistent with the Oath of Office, to defend the Constitution and consequently promote the general Welfare!
The last thing I'll mention is Trump's claim to oppose abortion --and that means enslaving pregnant women, when they don't want to stay pregnant, in violation of the 13th Amendment. Note that the Constitution requires a Census of ALL persons ("except Indians not taxed") every 10 years, and the Founding Fathers were right there in 1790 to specify the details of how the very first Census would be done. No unborn human has ever been counted in any Census! This means that the Founding Fathers did not consider the unborn to be persons, a Constitutional Precedent far predating the Roe v Wade decision. And modern scientific data about what we might call "generic personhood" indicates that dolphins are vastly more likely to qualify as persons, before any unborn human. Our unborn are mere-animal entities, nothing more than that, and to enslave women as life-support systems for mindless animals would be a heinous crime quite worthy of impeachment.
There is an alternative. The whole notion of UBI depends on the assumption that goods must be purchased. But if they are getting made for essentially free (after costs of capital investment have been recovered; also think in terms of renewable energy and resource-recycling), then why should there be any charge for those goods? Logically, if the goods can be made for free, and obtained for free, an income isn't really quite as important as the OP indicates.
How about RFID chips? Attached to speed limit signs, stop signs, mile-markers, road-number signs, street-name signs, reflectors embedded in road surfaces, etc., etc., etc., the passing cars could ping the chips and acquire relevant information, especially info relevant to where the car is located in terms of the RFID chips. We already know those chips are cheap enough to put in all those places at minimal cost, and considering new cars are already installing radar to detect possible collisions, an appropriate alternate frequency is all that needs to be enabled, to ping the chips.
The more that Americans perceive that Russia thinks that electing Trump will be good for Russia, the more likely Americans might also think that electing Trump might not be so good for America.
I don't know what Helfgott's algorithm is, either, but here's one that can do 40:1 data compression of prime numbers (can pack 200 million 32-bit primes in about 100 megabytes of space), and it is arbitrarily extendable to higher compression rates (per bigger data-compression table).
Human population has expanded tremendously in the last part of those 800,000 years, and all of us consume oxygen. It probably can't explain the first 700,000 years, though, since total global hominid population was probably fairly constant, with one species supplanting another.
But what about methane? We know it leaks from places like hydrate ices underwater, especially when there is an earthquake and landslide, and of course since it exists underground as natural gas, we know it can leak from there, too, if an earthquake happens to rupture the ground enough. Methane is a light gas that will rise toward the stratosphere, and likely react in the ozone layer. I'm talking about a long term slow thing, not fast enough to deplete ozone as fast as solar ultraviolet makes more from atmospheric oxygen. But the reaction produces water and CO2, and takes oxygen out of the air.
Perhaps the solution is as simple as letting all police departments operate Tor exit nodes. Then they can investigate each other when child porn is posted.
Regardless of what Captain Kirk might do, it is silly to think that potentially habitable planets are not already microbial hosting life-forms. All the data about early life on Earth indicates we got it almost as soon as the planetary crust cooled enough for life to be possible. It seems more likely that life arrived from elsewhere (panspermia) than thinking it evolved here --not enough time to evolve. Plus, we have data indicating that life may have existed even before the Earth existed. Therefore we should expect every planet that can possibly support life to already have it.
On Earth it appears that the oceans put enough water into the crust as to make plate tectonics possible (the water lubricates fault lines. If Venus ever had plate tectonics, it probably stopped when the water evaporated. And then there is the fact that Venus is tide-locked between the Sun and Earth (always has the save face toward Earth when the two planets are closest together). Earth's magnetic field exists partly because of its rotation, and that magnetic field helps protect its atmosphere. Venus hasn't got the necessary rotation rate.
I once speculated about a way to make Venus habitable. Like many good tricks, it can mostly be done with mirrors.:)
It seems to me that the article focused on Communism because it is simpler and easier to model than Capitalism. This does not mean that it cannot be done for Capitalism. It also does not automatically mean Communism is better than Capitalism. On the other hand, Capitalism does seem to have a problem, in that the evidence indicates it helps the rich get richer while everyone else gets poorer. If that "seem to have a problem" could be proved mathematically, then perhaps Capitalist economies might consider some sort of modification to be appropriate. Perhaps the ideal economic system has some Capitalist characteristics and some Communist characteristics. But we won't know until they all get mathematically modeled.
Thanks for the info. I was kind-of wondering why we needed to re-invent ideograms, when Chinese is right there ready to be learned by anyone who wants to represent various concepts with a single symbol.
Photons. Photons carry energy, as proved by solar cells. It is simply that you can't collect a lot of energy with low-frequency photons like those associated with RF. But "not a lot" of energy is not the same thing as "no" energy. Any device with an appropriately small energy need (the classic device is the crystal radio set), can be powered by RF photons. So, anyone promoting the powering of a modern device by RF photons merely has to show that the device needs an appropriately small energy supply. If it needs too much, it won't work. But if it can collect enough RF photons, then it should work just fine.
It is possible that one must eventually stop switching languages. A major reason to acquire knowledge is to use it. If you are constantly learning stuff, how much using are you accomplishing? About 1974 I had a FORTRAN class in college. There was a mainframe with keypunch machines and punch cards to feed into the computer. I never got to use FORTRAN for anything after college, but must have remembered some basics, because when home computers started being popular in the early 1980s, they all had BASIC and I learned that language very quickly, self-taught. A couple years after that, and there was more I wanted to do than the computer's memory could hold, so I got a book on 6809 Assembly Language and taught myself that. I happened to like that language it a lot, and did some fun projects like modifying the computer's ROM code (it could be EPROMmed) so that a full-screen editor replaced the wimpy line-editor that came with the computer, my new code fitting in the same space as the old code. That was all hobby-type stuff, and then a friend suggested I could help his small business if I learned a BASIC-like language called "CLIPPER", which was designed for database management in the days before SQL, and competed with languages like dBase III and FoxPro. That was interesting and fun; I figured out a way to put CLIPPER code inside a database, and get the program to pull blocks of its own code from the database as needed, and run them. We stopped worrying about the overall size of the program and memory limitations ("640K ought to be enough for anyone", hah!), after that. But the small business was too small and didn't survive, so when another friend mentioned a programming job if I learned C, I got the Kernighan and Ritchie book from the library and taught myself that. Since they say C has all of the advantages and all the disadvantages of Assembly, I liked that language a lot, too. I could reminisce more, but instead I'll just mention some more languages I've used to some degree or other, over the years: QBASIC, Delphi (aka Object Pascal), C++, C#, SQL, 8086 Assembly, GAP, HTML/CSS, PHP, and JavaScript. Sometimes I feel a bit like the character Rufo in Heinlein's "Glory Road", who said something like, "I've forgotten how many languages I know, but when I hear one, I speak it." Nowadays I'm back to hobbyist programming. If any nerds out there are interested in a few rather mental but free JavaScript games and puzzles, built into web pages so accessible by any Operating System on any device that has a modern standards-compliant browser, go here. I'll be adding more in due course, including some multiplayer games.
It occurs to me that such laws will only encourage sales of telephones and other equipment that directly communicate with satellites, which are in orbit and outside the laws that apply inside national boundaries.
Regardless of what the Federation is or isn't, politically speaking, Star Trek clearly claims to be about a future world. Meanwhile Star Wars, every episode, begins by saying, "A long time ago...." Why is not that the obvious answer to the question in the Original Post?
Distance matters. What if drones were combined with automated delivery trucks? The truck carries a lot of mail for many addresses in an area, and carries it to that area; drones carries mail from the trucks to the addresses. The drones can re-charge at the trucks, and each truck might have several drones making simultaneous deliveries. None of these drones need fly especially high or far, to make its delivery.
I wonder about that, too, because of data pointing to panspermia. If they are evolved enough to survive interstellar travel, then they might also be evolved enough to help stabilize a planetary ecosystem.
It's likely also a violation of First Amendment freedom-of-speech. Doesn't that encompass the notion that you can't force folks to say what you want them to say?
In other words, every form of electrochemical energy storage involves three things, which we can call "fuel" and "oxidizer" and "product". In a typical storage battery/cell, the fuel and oxidizer react to yield product and electricity until consumed, and then electricity must be fed into each cell to separate the accumulated product back into fuel and oxidizer. 100% of the total weight must always be carried around.
In a hydrogen fuel cell, the oxidizer is atmospheric oxygen and the product is water, which can be dumped as fast as it is produced. Only the fuel need be carried around, and its weight diminishes as the fuel tank empties. Conversion of product back into fuel and oxygen takes place outside the confines of the fuel cell, and so refilling a vehicle's fuel tank is equivalent to "recharging" it.
The original post has a point that hydrogen is bulky. However, that is now, and not necessarily going to be true in the future. One technology exists that could shrink the size of a hydrogen fuel tank enormously. Perhaps some day it can be mass-produced. See, the commonest type of an ordinary hydrogen molecule has two protons and two electrons and qualifies as a "boson". It is known that Bose-Einstein Condensates can put a lot of atoms into each-other's/same space...and the molecules remain gaseous the whole time.:)
I might point out that while the article mentions "cognition", it doesn't mention "creativity". It might be possible for humans to compete with AIs in that area, because there are so many ways in which to do something creative (infinite ways?).
Slashdot Mirror
This is more of an addendum to the just-above msg, than a reply.
Fact One: Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. It is more transparent to frequencies of visible light than frequencies of infrared light.
Fact Two: The total content of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been increasing as a result of human activities. The two largest sources are the burning of fossil fuels, and the production of concrete.
Fact Three: The exact amount of greenhouse effect of existing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is unknown. We only know that it must be some magnitude greater than zero. See Fact One.
Fact Four: Adding still-more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere can only increase the existing greenhouse effect. See Fact One.
Question: On what basis could it be called a "good thing" to keep increasing the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?
Diatoms aren't the only life-forms that use silica; ordinary grass does it, too.
The Preamble of the Constitution clearly specifies the purpose of the document. How can anyone who works at some cross-purpose be considered a defender of the Constitution?
Regarding evidence, Follow The Money. See who has been supporting the deniers of AGW --and note that the magnitude of the donations absolutely indicates rich donors, not poor donors.
Finally, I did not specify any "high cost mitigation approach" in my prior post. While it is supposedly widely known that while the first step to solving a problem is to recognize the problem exists, my other post only talked about denial and ignorance, regarding AGW. But here's how I would choose to deal with it: I'd promote nuclear fusion research. Knowledge is power, and the sooner we have that knowledge, the sooner we will have the associated power!
It may be possible to impeach a government official for violating the Oath of Office, which includes swearing to protect and defend the Constitution. Trump has made no secret of the violations he intends to commit, after taking office. For example, Constitution specifies that one of its purposes is to "promote the general Welfare" --which does not mean promoting only the welfare of the rich, and it is mostly the rich who desperately want all the data about Anthropogenic Global Warming to be ignored, so they can keep getting richer, while ocean levels rise and drown the home of millions of ordinary citizens.
Next, Trump claims to want to make America great again, but then he goes and starts appointing people who promote ignorance, not knowledge. Knowledge Is Power! --not ignorance. It is know-how that was one of the factors that made America great in the first place. To promote ignorance is to not-hardly be consistent with the Oath of Office, to defend the Constitution and consequently promote the general Welfare!
The last thing I'll mention is Trump's claim to oppose abortion --and that means enslaving pregnant women, when they don't want to stay pregnant, in violation of the 13th Amendment. Note that the Constitution requires a Census of ALL persons ("except Indians not taxed") every 10 years, and the Founding Fathers were right there in 1790 to specify the details of how the very first Census would be done. No unborn human has ever been counted in any Census! This means that the Founding Fathers did not consider the unborn to be persons, a Constitutional Precedent far predating the Roe v Wade decision. And modern scientific data about what we might call "generic personhood" indicates that dolphins are vastly more likely to qualify as persons, before any unborn human. Our unborn are mere-animal entities, nothing more than that, and to enslave women as life-support systems for mindless animals would be a heinous crime quite worthy of impeachment.
There is an alternative. The whole notion of UBI depends on the assumption that goods must be purchased. But if they are getting made for essentially free (after costs of capital investment have been recovered; also think in terms of renewable energy and resource-recycling), then why should there be any charge for those goods? Logically, if the goods can be made for free, and obtained for free, an income isn't really quite as important as the OP indicates.
How about RFID chips? Attached to speed limit signs, stop signs, mile-markers, road-number signs, street-name signs, reflectors embedded in road surfaces, etc., etc., etc., the passing cars could ping the chips and acquire relevant information, especially info relevant to where the car is located in terms of the RFID chips. We already know those chips are cheap enough to put in all those places at minimal cost, and considering new cars are already installing radar to detect possible collisions, an appropriate alternate frequency is all that needs to be enabled, to ping the chips.
The more that Americans perceive that Russia thinks that electing Trump will be good for Russia, the more likely Americans might also think that electing Trump might not be so good for America.
As soon as eidetic memory becomes popular, those same idiots will be suing everyone who simply listens and remembers a piece of new music.
I don't know what Helfgott's algorithm is, either, but here's one that can do 40:1 data compression of prime numbers (can pack 200 million 32-bit primes in about 100 megabytes of space), and it is arbitrarily extendable to higher compression rates (per bigger data-compression table).
Human population has expanded tremendously in the last part of those 800,000 years, and all of us consume oxygen. It probably can't explain the first 700,000 years, though, since total global hominid population was probably fairly constant, with one species supplanting another.
But what about methane? We know it leaks from places like hydrate ices underwater, especially when there is an earthquake and landslide, and of course since it exists underground as natural gas, we know it can leak from there, too, if an earthquake happens to rupture the ground enough. Methane is a light gas that will rise toward the stratosphere, and likely react in the ozone layer. I'm talking about a long term slow thing, not fast enough to deplete ozone as fast as solar ultraviolet makes more from atmospheric oxygen. But the reaction produces water and CO2, and takes oxygen out of the air.
Perhaps the solution is as simple as letting all police departments operate Tor exit nodes. Then they can investigate each other when child porn is posted.
Regardless of what Captain Kirk might do, it is silly to think that potentially habitable planets are not already microbial hosting life-forms. All the data about early life on Earth indicates we got it almost as soon as the planetary crust cooled enough for life to be possible. It seems more likely that life arrived from elsewhere (panspermia) than thinking it evolved here --not enough time to evolve. Plus, we have data indicating that life may have existed even before the Earth existed. Therefore we should expect every planet that can possibly support life to already have it.
On Earth it appears that the oceans put enough water into the crust as to make plate tectonics possible (the water lubricates fault lines. If Venus ever had plate tectonics, it probably stopped when the water evaporated. And then there is the fact that Venus is tide-locked between the Sun and Earth (always has the save face toward Earth when the two planets are closest together). Earth's magnetic field exists partly because of its rotation, and that magnetic field helps protect its atmosphere. Venus hasn't got the necessary rotation rate. :)
I once speculated about a way to make Venus habitable. Like many good tricks, it can mostly be done with mirrors.
It seems to me that the article focused on Communism because it is simpler and easier to model than Capitalism. This does not mean that it cannot be done for Capitalism. It also does not automatically mean Communism is better than Capitalism. On the other hand, Capitalism does seem to have a problem, in that the evidence indicates it helps the rich get richer while everyone else gets poorer. If that "seem to have a problem" could be proved mathematically, then perhaps Capitalist economies might consider some sort of modification to be appropriate. Perhaps the ideal economic system has some Capitalist characteristics and some Communist characteristics. But we won't know until they all get mathematically modeled.
Thanks for the info. I was kind-of wondering why we needed to re-invent ideograms, when Chinese is right there ready to be learned by anyone who wants to represent various concepts with a single symbol.
Photons. Photons carry energy, as proved by solar cells. It is simply that you can't collect a lot of energy with low-frequency photons like those associated with RF. But "not a lot" of energy is not the same thing as "no" energy. Any device with an appropriately small energy need (the classic device is the crystal radio set), can be powered by RF photons. So, anyone promoting the powering of a modern device by RF photons merely has to show that the device needs an appropriately small energy supply. If it needs too much, it won't work. But if it can collect enough RF photons, then it should work just fine.
It is possible that one must eventually stop switching languages. A major reason to acquire knowledge is to use it. If you are constantly learning stuff, how much using are you accomplishing? About 1974 I had a FORTRAN class in college. There was a mainframe with keypunch machines and punch cards to feed into the computer. I never got to use FORTRAN for anything after college, but must have remembered some basics, because when home computers started being popular in the early 1980s, they all had BASIC and I learned that language very quickly, self-taught. A couple years after that, and there was more I wanted to do than the computer's memory could hold, so I got a book on 6809 Assembly Language and taught myself that. I happened to like that language it a lot, and did some fun projects like modifying the computer's ROM code (it could be EPROMmed) so that a full-screen editor replaced the wimpy line-editor that came with the computer, my new code fitting in the same space as the old code. That was all hobby-type stuff, and then a friend suggested I could help his small business if I learned a BASIC-like language called "CLIPPER", which was designed for database management in the days before SQL, and competed with languages like dBase III and FoxPro. That was interesting and fun; I figured out a way to put CLIPPER code inside a database, and get the program to pull blocks of its own code from the database as needed, and run them. We stopped worrying about the overall size of the program and memory limitations ("640K ought to be enough for anyone", hah!), after that. But the small business was too small and didn't survive, so when another friend mentioned a programming job if I learned C, I got the Kernighan and Ritchie book from the library and taught myself that. Since they say C has all of the advantages and all the disadvantages of Assembly, I liked that language a lot, too. I could reminisce more, but instead I'll just mention some more languages I've used to some degree or other, over the years: QBASIC, Delphi (aka Object Pascal), C++, C#, SQL, 8086 Assembly, GAP, HTML/CSS, PHP, and JavaScript. Sometimes I feel a bit like the character Rufo in Heinlein's "Glory Road", who said something like, "I've forgotten how many languages I know, but when I hear one, I speak it." Nowadays I'm back to hobbyist programming. If any nerds out there are interested in a few rather mental but free JavaScript games and puzzles, built into web pages so accessible by any Operating System on any device that has a modern standards-compliant browser , go here. I'll be adding more in due course, including some multiplayer games.
It occurs to me that such laws will only encourage sales of telephones and other equipment that directly communicate with satellites, which are in orbit and outside the laws that apply inside national boundaries.
Regardless of what the Federation is or isn't, politically speaking, Star Trek clearly claims to be about a future world. Meanwhile Star Wars, every episode, begins by saying, "A long time ago...." Why is not that the obvious answer to the question in the Original Post?
Distance matters. What if drones were combined with automated delivery trucks? The truck carries a lot of mail for many addresses in an area, and carries it to that area; drones carries mail from the trucks to the addresses. The drones can re-charge at the trucks, and each truck might have several drones making simultaneous deliveries. None of these drones need fly especially high or far, to make its delivery.
I wonder about that, too, because of data pointing to panspermia. If they are evolved enough to survive interstellar travel, then they might also be evolved enough to help stabilize a planetary ecosystem.
It's likely also a violation of First Amendment freedom-of-speech. Doesn't that encompass the notion that you can't force folks to say what you want them to say?
In other words, every form of electrochemical energy storage involves three things, which we can call "fuel" and "oxidizer" and "product". In a typical storage battery/cell, the fuel and oxidizer react to yield product and electricity until consumed, and then electricity must be fed into each cell to separate the accumulated product back into fuel and oxidizer. 100% of the total weight must always be carried around. :)
In a hydrogen fuel cell, the oxidizer is atmospheric oxygen and the product is water, which can be dumped as fast as it is produced. Only the fuel need be carried around, and its weight diminishes as the fuel tank empties. Conversion of product back into fuel and oxygen takes place outside the confines of the fuel cell, and so refilling a vehicle's fuel tank is equivalent to "recharging" it.
The original post has a point that hydrogen is bulky. However, that is now, and not necessarily going to be true in the future. One technology exists that could shrink the size of a hydrogen fuel tank enormously. Perhaps some day it can be mass-produced. See, the commonest type of an ordinary hydrogen molecule has two protons and two electrons and qualifies as a "boson". It is known that Bose-Einstein Condensates can put a lot of atoms into each-other's/same space...and the molecules remain gaseous the whole time.
I might point out that while the article mentions "cognition", it doesn't mention "creativity". It might be possible for humans to compete with AIs in that area, because there are so many ways in which to do something creative (infinite ways?).
The problem is mostly about typing into text box, when mouse-clicking outside the box is sometimes useful. I personally complained about the problem roughly three years ago, and am glad someone finally is deciding to do something about it.