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User: ceoyoyo

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  1. It's not 50/50, but nicotine does seem to have detrimental health effects, and they're not trivial.

    Also, while the vapour is almost certainly better for you than cigarette smoke, it's health effects aren't really well understood. There's at least one researcher in the area who's said he at first assumed it was negligible, but has constantly increased his concern.

  2. We value being given money (or perceiving that we're being given money) more than we value money we already have. Consumer economies are basically founded on this quirk. The most blatant examples are rewards programs.

  3. Re:And not just any magnetic field... on German Test Reveals That Magnetic Fields Are Pushing the EM Drive (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    So do you think you'd do a better job cancelling out the Earth's magnetic field in a fully equipped lab, with cheap access to all of Earth's manufacturing and technical resources, or in a small box in Antarctica during the winter, at $20,000 / kg shipping costs?

    The magnetic field isn't appreciably different on the ground or 300 km up. About the only advantage the ISS has is lots of vacuum (lower quality than what we can make on the ground though) and microgravity. Which isn't really the absence of gravity but rather the absence of acceleration (mostly). That may seem like an unimportant consideration unless you realize that momentum is not conserved in curved space.

    By the way, you wouldn't cancel out the Earth's magnetic field using passive shielding. You'd design a series of coils to cancel it, with the exactness of cancellation depending on how complicated a coil system you want to design. This also has the advantage that you can easily turn it on and off.

  4. Re:And not just any magnetic field... on German Test Reveals That Magnetic Fields Are Pushing the EM Drive (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    There's a wee bit of magnetic field up there too. It's far easier to cancel out the field down here where you've got lots of space, power, and engineers.

  5. Re:Thrust is coming from interactions with the Ear on German Test Reveals That Magnetic Fields Are Pushing the EM Drive (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Thrusters that work against the Earth's magnetic field are incredibly useful for station keeping and orbit adjustments on satellites. Many satellites end their lives not because they wear out but because they run out of station keeping propellant.

    It's also not a new idea.

  6. Re:French and english on People Hate Canada's New 'Amber Alert' System (www.cbc.ca) · · Score: 1

    To be fair, they probably had trouble fitting the French version into the allowable message length. ;)

  7. Re:No opt-out is evil on People Hate Canada's New 'Amber Alert' System (www.cbc.ca) · · Score: 2

    On the bright side, it will probably save billions of autobody work per year.

  8. Re:Some context on People Hate Canada's New 'Amber Alert' System (www.cbc.ca) · · Score: 1

    Wha? I've driven Thunder Bay to Toronto in one go. Twice. It's about a 15 hour drive, no desperation required.

    If you're in Thunder Bay, which is really kind of a smallish town by most countries' standards and you want to get out, there's really only one highway and two ways to go: west to Winnipeg and south to Toronto. Of those options, south would be way better for losing yourself in the crowd. So if the kid had been missing for more than eight hours or so, an alert in southern Ontario wouldn't be completely stupid.

  9. Re:Not Intuition, better data on AI Can't Reason Why (wsj.com) · · Score: 1

    What you call common sense is really background knowledge. Despite the claim in the summary, humans are not "born" knowing about cause an effect. Hang out with a kid sometime and you'll realize that. They learn it. Our "common sense" is really a bunch of assumptions based on experience, and it can and does lead us astray.

    Machine learning algorithms are very naive. They have extremely limited, and extremely little experience. But that's very different than saying current algorithms are incapable of learning something like cause and effect.

  10. Re:Sounds like Charlie wasn't given all the data.. on AI Can't Reason Why (wsj.com) · · Score: 1

    You can program an AI that reasons. It was an experiment in interpretable AI: get the thing to explain it's decisions. It gave plausible answers, but there was a suspicion it was just making up stories to satisfy requirements. Kind of like people reason.

  11. Re:uh on Data Science is America's Hottest Job (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    Why? That seemed like the sanest line in the whole summary. That seems like pretty much what most data scientists do.

  12. Re:The key to Data Sience. on Data Science is America's Hottest Job (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 0

    From what I've seen, "data scientist" means someone who can run a prepackaged machine learning or simple stats program on some data without knowledge of or much regard for how it was collected or what it represents.

    I.e. "data scientist" is kind of like a regular scientist except without the deep domain knowledge, skills and scientific method.

  13. Re:Want us to have kids on US Births Dip To 30-Year Low (npr.org) · · Score: 1

    Absolutely. The more you have, the more reasons there are not to have kids. The answer to the OP's question is that the best way to get more kids is to keep people poor, uneducated and preferably hopeless.

    By the way, I wasn't thinking of toys and vacations for kids. I was thinking more along the lines of good education, health care, quality food, etc. Those things are expensive, and technically unnecessary. But we quite reasonably want our kids to have the things we do.

  14. Re:Are you not entertained? on US Births Dip To 30-Year Low (npr.org) · · Score: 1

    The modern nuclear family is just that: modern, and kind of a western affectation. It arose as an artifact of religious control in Europe around the industrial revolution.

    Kids certainly do benefit from having more than one adult care giver. More than two, as well. There's research that shows kids who are raised by a variety of adults (e.g. a village) are better off in every way measured.

  15. Re:Good on US Births Dip To 30-Year Low (npr.org) · · Score: 1

    The problem has never been where do you put the people. The problem has been how do you feed them.

    Also, people don't much like being packed into standing room only places. Unless someone is playing a guitar. And even then they tend to riot after a few hours.

  16. Re: Feminism at work on US Births Dip To 30-Year Low (npr.org) · · Score: 2

    What you probably consider growth IS exponential growth.

    How much do you think the economy should grow every year? 10%? 1%? 0.1%? Those are all exponential growth.

    Financial growth and population growth don't have to be linked, but they generally are in a modern economy. People make and buy more things as more products are produced, especially if you can play tricks like making things wear out faster, but the whole thing looks a lot better if you've got more people too. It's easy to find a historical GDP chart, or the year-over-year GDP growth numbers, but try finding the same thing per capita. It's possible, but it's harder to find. And you won't see it on the news or the president talking about it.

  17. Re:Want us to have kids on US Births Dip To 30-Year Low (npr.org) · · Score: 1

    Evidence suggests the proximal reason for decreasing reproduction is educated women. The best predictor for fertility rates, by a long shot, all over the world, is educational status of women. Bangladesh is a beautiful case study.

    Why does it happen? As in some cosmic existential WHY? There probably isn't one. Rich people and especially women who are educated and free to make their own choices find lots of things in life they'd rather do than having lots of kids. So they have two, one, or maybe don't get around to it at all.

  18. Re:Want us to have kids on US Births Dip To 30-Year Low (npr.org) · · Score: 1

    Kids aren't expensive. They're so cheap poor people have lots of them.

    The advantages you want to give your kids may very well be expensive. In fact, the richer you are, the more likely you are to give your kid lots of things, and that gets expensive. So rich people think kids are really expensive, and don't have as many.

  19. Re:Yes, exactly. on US Births Dip To 30-Year Low (npr.org) · · Score: 1

    Current societies already pay women to have children.

    In Quebec, there's a cash payment per baby, and it goes up for second and third kids. I think Italy has something similar.

    It's very rare to find a western nation that doesn't have tax breaks or some benefit for parents.

  20. Re:Feminism at work on US Births Dip To 30-Year Low (npr.org) · · Score: 2

    Modern economies are based on continual exponential growth. From the stock market to pension plans, they all depend on it.

    If your population doesn't grow, that's probably not going to happen. And yeah, it has to end sometime, but the western countries are all desperately trying to stave off the day of reckoning, mostly with very open immigration policies and paying people to have kids.

  21. So some kids download a bit of software, put up a website, make up some fake execs, and advertise an "ICO" and idiots give them millions of dollars?

    I am clearly in the wrong line of work.

  22. Re: Macroscopic concept? on First Measurement of Distribution of Pressure Inside a Proton (phys.org) · · Score: 2

    Pressure is force per unit area (as so many have pointed out). In a static(ish) system a force in one direction must be balanced by one opposing it. If youâ(TM)ve got a jar of air, the walls of the jar feel pressure from the air molecules hitting them, and oppose that pressure with forces generated from the electromagnetic force holding the glass molecules together.

    Protons must also experience balanced forces, or they would collapse or explode. The inward force is probably mostly the strong force. The outward force is probably a mixture of electromagnetic (the quarks are charged) and degeneracy pressure from Pauli exclusion. Since quarks (the three valence ones and the sea of virtual ones) in a proton are fermions, they canâ(TM)t occupy the same quantum states. Additional particles have to pile into higher energy states, and the result is an outward force thatâ(TM)s actually quite analogous to all those air molecules smashing into the walls of the jar.

  23. Re:Errr Okay on Why Are the NBA's Best Players Getting Better Younger? YouTube (wsj.com) · · Score: 1

    Slashdot: Political rantings for cranky old men. Plus a story that mentions a website now and then.

  24. Re:But how much energy is used by traditional fiat on Nobody Knows How Much Energy Bitcoin Is Using (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    The US government is a bit behind the curve. Most world governments have phased out smaller denomination bills and many have replaced larger bills with more durable materials.

    Even so, the vast majority of transactions are purely electronic, and those electronic transactions use an almost negligible fraction of what bitcoin does.

    Bitcoin's problem is that it replaces centralized trust with proof of awesomeness, and they chose "how many computers can you use to burn how much electricity to do something completely useless" as their definition of awesomeness.

  25. It's right there at the top:

    "by 110010001000 ( 697113 )"