I messed up, 10000 tons of lithium will cost roughly seventy million dollars. However, since you need "enriched" lithium with more Li-6 a price north of $100/kg is probably more realistic, which still puts you in the billion-dollar range on how much your lithium blanket is going to cost.
Yeah, and also "1000 cubic meters" is more accurately called "a cubic kilometer". Yeah.
I would suggest weighing the long range effects of a bactericidal compound versus the perceived benefits of some form of germ free existence.
The role(s) played by bacteria in the ecosystem that is a mammalian body are even now not completely understood...
and microorganisms show a valiant ability to evolve around attempts to exterminate them.
This is what I came to say. We have 10x as many bacterial cells in our bodies as human cells, as bacteria are far smaller. We absolutely need them. They help us digest our food. They live on our skin. Probably a part of the reason we don't get infected often is that our friendly bacteria are able to fight off bad ones.
Our mouth bacteria have evolved along with us. Yeah, they hurt our teeth if we leave food in there. But they have no evolutionary incentive to harm us. I don't want to kill the bacteria in my mouth as something far more sinister might be able to take up residence. Beyond that, I don't know what other advantages they might be giving me and I'd rather not find out the hard way.
I would also suspect that due to the increased use of our brains for more complex tasks puts more stress on that system. That could require more down time than a tribal hunter/gatherer.
I would imagine hunter/gather tribes solve more complex tasks in a day than the average citizen of a modern Western country--their survival depends on it whereas most of us can smoke weed and drink booze all day knowing we'll still be able to find our next meal easily enough. Reading about the Kardashians, posting on facebook, and watching reality TV isn't exactly intellectually stimulating.
As someone who's spent a huge amount of time outdoors I can easily say "nope". You might not think TV is intellectually stimulating but it quite well is, even stuff that we call "mindless". You're watching someone else's life in some other place and processing huge amounts of information. There's a reason that we go to the woods to unwind.
And, I know - hiking around in the woods and actually living by hunting there are two different things. However, studies show that hunter-gatherers have as much "free time" as we do. Most humans don't live in places where predation on humans is an issue, and those that do know how to live there, anyway. Without running the numbers I'm pretty sure that there are areas of Chicago, for instance, that are far more dangerous to humans than the typical jungle area.
The modern world is full of huge amounts of information. I can very much believe that we need more sleep because we process way more information.
Walmart is doing something like $300,000,000,000 per year in sales now, yet I can buy something at a Walmart store, immediately go to a different store for a return and when they scan my receipt the order comes up immediately. All the while about $9500/second in transactions is being dumped into their database.
Yes, they are a technology company.
Amazon isn't as big but they're still doing amazing stuff, also a technology company.
Firmware can be extremely messy, low-level code. It may not even be written in any sort of recognizable programming language. It is frequently the digital equivalent of a set of jumper switches, just a binary blob which is meaningless if you don't have deep knowledge of the hardware it is controlling. Firmware can directly control low-level electronics and an incorrect setting can lead to physical damage to the device and potential harm to nearby humans.
It is dangerously stupid to insist that firmware be open-sourced and to allow developers to modify the firmware on devices.
Prevents governments in TPP countries from demanding access to an enterprise’s software source code.
LOL. You conservatives crack me up.
We elected President Hope and Change - Obama. He works for *the people*, particularly those who are poor or minority (some exclusions may apply, specifically asians and pacific islanders are, for purposes of this paragraph, not a "minority"), not big corporations or Wall Street fat cats!
Wow, I can't wait to see the look on those corporation people's faces when Obama strikes down this cronyist giveaway! It'll be priceless. He'll send those Republicans back where they came from with nothing to show for it but some spanked bottoms.
Anyway, that's why we elected him. We were tired of big money making laws. See how smart we are?
What he's not is a climatologist, and one should be very cautious about any scientist speaking out of their area of expertise. That you rely on him as an authority suggests you've bought into a fallacious appeal to authority.
Martian, I generally like your contributions so I'm going to help you out. Note:
I trust Al Gore more.
See any "fallacious appeal to authority" there regarding someone who is not a climatologist?
Software engineers have little natural incentive to make the car perform differently for testing than for regular use. If the car is incapable of meeting emission standards without this sort of hack then that's an issue for the mechanical engineers, not the software guys. There's no reason to believe this was the result of anything but orders from on high.
It's tough to love the FAA when, for most of us, we associate the TSA with flying.
I agree with this, but they're not related. The FAA does a fabulous job of keeping air travel safe and it's because of rigorous enforcement of best practices combined with deep analysis of every fault or potential fault. As a libertarian I think I have the bona fides to say that this is a great example of what government should be doing and how it should do it.
That said, the drone industry moves way, way, way quicker than the airplane industry and the FAA simply hasn't been ready to handle it. I don't actually fault them for this as they've never really had to deal with anything like this and it's new territory. But we can't have drones getting in commercial air lanes because it will cause a major problem at some point.
I'm not sure how the FAA is going to handle it but it looks like this is a first step toward trying to find a way.
the flight takes you up to about 110 km, which is barely enough to see curvature of the earth.
I can see the curvature of the earth in an airplane at 10km up. Easily. There are plenty of videos of balloons going up to the 100km level and you can see space as well as a huge part of earth from there.
It's not really "space", but you can see it from there.
Actually, I have. It doesn't help. If I'm waiting on a taxi I don't have time to go to Yelp and see if anyone has complained on there about the specific driver who is picking me up.
It's amazing to me the contortions that the taxi cartels' looney supporters will come up with. There is nothing equivalent to Uber's simple rating of drivers for the taxi industry - and this is because the taxi cartels don't want it. It would be easy for them to implement.
There are many people that harvest wild game to eat. Cars don't work well for that.
I totally agree with you, but, well, funny story (kind of). I knew a poor family back in Indiana who lived way out in the boondocks. The father welded a formidable 2-inch pipe "bumper" on front of the old pickup that he drove just for "hunting". He averaged 3 deer/year with that thing. If a deer ran out in front of him - he swerved *toward* it.
Here's the short version. The taxi industry in San Francisco is $140M/year. Uber's business there is $500M/year. Note that Uber hasn't taken that much business from the taxi industry - that's on top of it.
So, right now we can see that the actual taxi industry in that one city was 1/4 of the potential. That is seriously damaging the economy, particularly when you multiply it out among every city in the US. Put another way, the taxi regulations (bought by the cartels) were causing $500M less money to change hands every year in one city. Just so that they could keep competition low.
There's a great rant on here earlier about what the taxi industry does that stupid (hiring non-English-speaking-just-off-the-boat foreigners, etc.) and it's really kind of amazing to me. Uber's model is simple to replicate, and would be pretty simple for the taxi industry to take on at least parts of it. Have an app so I'll know who my driver is and can rate him. I saw a loon on here a couple of weeks ago claiming that the traditional taxi industry is better because there's a centralized complaint process. Uh, yeah, right. How does that work? How about after my ride I just click a button on my phone? That's a true "centralized complaint process" that even my mother could figure out.
It's clear that the taxi industry doesn't want to change, but it'll be the death of them. They've been buying politicians for years, and with Uber bringing in 3X the revenue the whole "buy a politician" business model is about to get priced out of the taxi industry's league. That really sucks because I don't have any reason to believe Uber will be any nicer than the taxi industry was from a regulatory standpoint, but at least it'll likely allow more competition.
i haven't a single doubt that we have the technological means to maintain nuclear plants forever without a single accident
but what we don't have is the social and political means to do that
Actually, a lot of us are simply numerically literate and realize that *every* a) energy source suffers from the issues that you whine about and b) nuclear has a great history despite having accidents sometimes.
What he should be doing right now is loudly proclaiming the names and all other personal information (home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, etc.) of the specific agents who did this. Quit giving scum anonymity.
Note that in the case of Vorbis Stallman actually endorsed the BSD license because he understood that there was no other path to wider adoption. FLIF is the same - it'll remain nothing but a little-known oddity unless they decide to use a BSD license that will allow Microsoft, Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari to use the code.
They financed Cuba's cable? Doesn't sound like much of a win to me. Who better to set up the authoritarian Cuban network than the Chicoms?
We have a winner. My assumption was that China will get the deal by default since they know how to set up a censorious and more easily spied upon network.
They were also an invaluable electronic listening post, an embarrassing counter-example to American and western democracy's political claims against communism
You're kidding, right? The only embarrassment here is that somebody would suggest that Cubans have a good life. As has been noted elsewhere, you can read up on slaves' rations in the writings of Frederick Douglass (as I have) and you'll find that slaves in the antebellum American South ate better than modern day Cubans.
Well, except for the Castros. I'm sure they're eating well.
, and a critical exporter of communist ideology to all of Latin America.
Then they Soviet Empire went bankrupt, and the economy tanked.
In other words, the "economy" was simply a sham that was exposed when the Soviet Union quit pumping money into the island. The Soviet Union - with the Castros - spent as much money destroying Cuba as the US spent on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after WWII. Think about that.
But they've still managed to avoid the boom-bust and destructive mismanagement of Haiti, and the third class US protectorate status of Puerto Rico, and they've managed to survive the devastation to their most critical trade good, tobacco, as worldwide smoking habits shifted. They still have one of the highest literacy rates in the world and lowest lower infant mortality rates, both notably better than the USA or Canada. They're making do with an economy that is stretched very, very thin, but give credit where it's due. They've avoided the murderous puppet governments of other desperate Caribbean islands such as Haiti and Jamaica.
Yeah, they've avoided "murderous puppet governments" while maintaining what simply a "murderous government". Lovely. I'm sure the dead people are grateful that the word "puppet" wasn't in there.
Slashdot Mirror
I messed up, 10000 tons of lithium will cost roughly seventy million dollars. However, since you need "enriched" lithium with more Li-6 a price north of $100/kg is probably more realistic, which still puts you in the billion-dollar range on how much your lithium blanket is going to cost.
Yeah, and also "1000 cubic meters" is more accurately called "a cubic kilometer". Yeah.
I would suggest weighing the long range effects of a bactericidal compound versus the perceived benefits of some form of germ free existence.
The role(s) played by bacteria in the ecosystem that is a mammalian body are even now not completely understood...
and microorganisms show a valiant ability to evolve around attempts to exterminate them.
This is what I came to say. We have 10x as many bacterial cells in our bodies as human cells, as bacteria are far smaller. We absolutely need them. They help us digest our food. They live on our skin. Probably a part of the reason we don't get infected often is that our friendly bacteria are able to fight off bad ones.
Our mouth bacteria have evolved along with us. Yeah, they hurt our teeth if we leave food in there. But they have no evolutionary incentive to harm us. I don't want to kill the bacteria in my mouth as something far more sinister might be able to take up residence. Beyond that, I don't know what other advantages they might be giving me and I'd rather not find out the hard way.
FTA:
Another notable finding was that men were five times more likely than women to say that they knew a lot about computer programming.
Holy shit, really? Men are more likely to claim they know a lot about anything.
Yeah, ask men about their dick size and then ask their wives the same question.
The terrorists and criminals have won :(
I would also suspect that due to the increased use of our brains for more complex tasks puts more stress on that system. That could require more down time than a tribal hunter/gatherer.
I would imagine hunter/gather tribes solve more complex tasks in a day than the average citizen of a modern Western country--their survival depends on it whereas most of us can smoke weed and drink booze all day knowing we'll still be able to find our next meal easily enough. Reading about the Kardashians, posting on facebook, and watching reality TV isn't exactly intellectually stimulating.
As someone who's spent a huge amount of time outdoors I can easily say "nope". You might not think TV is intellectually stimulating but it quite well is, even stuff that we call "mindless". You're watching someone else's life in some other place and processing huge amounts of information. There's a reason that we go to the woods to unwind.
And, I know - hiking around in the woods and actually living by hunting there are two different things. However, studies show that hunter-gatherers have as much "free time" as we do. Most humans don't live in places where predation on humans is an issue, and those that do know how to live there, anyway. Without running the numbers I'm pretty sure that there are areas of Chicago, for instance, that are far more dangerous to humans than the typical jungle area.
The modern world is full of huge amounts of information. I can very much believe that we need more sleep because we process way more information.
Walmart is doing something like $300,000,000,000 per year in sales now, yet I can buy something at a Walmart store, immediately go to a different store for a return and when they scan my receipt the order comes up immediately. All the while about $9500/second in transactions is being dumped into their database.
Yes, they are a technology company.
Amazon isn't as big but they're still doing amazing stuff, also a technology company.
Firmware can be extremely messy, low-level code. It may not even be written in any sort of recognizable programming language. It is frequently the digital equivalent of a set of jumper switches, just a binary blob which is meaningless if you don't have deep knowledge of the hardware it is controlling. Firmware can directly control low-level electronics and an incorrect setting can lead to physical damage to the device and potential harm to nearby humans.
It is dangerously stupid to insist that firmware be open-sourced and to allow developers to modify the firmware on devices.
I wondered where Darl McBride went.
good luck!
check out this provision in the TPP:
http://www.international.gc.ca...
Prevents governments in TPP countries from demanding access to an enterprise’s software source code.
LOL. You conservatives crack me up.
We elected President Hope and Change - Obama. He works for *the people*, particularly those who are poor or minority (some exclusions may apply, specifically asians and pacific islanders are, for purposes of this paragraph, not a "minority"), not big corporations or Wall Street fat cats!
Wow, I can't wait to see the look on those corporation people's faces when Obama strikes down this cronyist giveaway! It'll be priceless. He'll send those Republicans back where they came from with nothing to show for it but some spanked bottoms.
Anyway, that's why we elected him. We were tired of big money making laws. See how smart we are?
Uh, you do understand that the statement "I trust Al Gore more" was sarcasm right?
How many fucking whoosh's are we gonna get out of this one?
Yeah, less guns means less gun violence. And more of other types of violence. Every. Single. Time.
The problem isn't guns, knives, clubs, cars, ladders, pools, buckets, or any of the other things that cause human death.
What he's not is a climatologist, and one should be very cautious about any scientist speaking out of their area of expertise. That you rely on him as an authority suggests you've bought into a fallacious appeal to authority.
Martian, I generally like your contributions so I'm going to help you out. Note:
I trust Al Gore more.
See any "fallacious appeal to authority" there regarding someone who is not a climatologist?
As someone else said: whoosh.
I'll just assume you didn't read either article, then.
On Slashdot, that's a given. Hell, it's a given with one article, how much more two of them?
Software engineers have little natural incentive to make the car perform differently for testing than for regular use. If the car is incapable of meeting emission standards without this sort of hack then that's an issue for the mechanical engineers, not the software guys. There's no reason to believe this was the result of anything but orders from on high.
Dude, it was inactive before we showed up.
It's tough to love the FAA when, for most of us, we associate the TSA with flying.
I agree with this, but they're not related. The FAA does a fabulous job of keeping air travel safe and it's because of rigorous enforcement of best practices combined with deep analysis of every fault or potential fault. As a libertarian I think I have the bona fides to say that this is a great example of what government should be doing and how it should do it.
That said, the drone industry moves way, way, way quicker than the airplane industry and the FAA simply hasn't been ready to handle it. I don't actually fault them for this as they've never really had to deal with anything like this and it's new territory. But we can't have drones getting in commercial air lanes because it will cause a major problem at some point.
I'm not sure how the FAA is going to handle it but it looks like this is a first step toward trying to find a way.
Poker isn't gambling - it's a game of skill. Put another way, if poker is gambling then so is capitalism.
Gambling requires a game of pure chance, which means that the player has no way to effect the outcome.
the flight takes you up to about 110 km, which is barely enough to see curvature of the earth.
I can see the curvature of the earth in an airplane at 10km up. Easily. There are plenty of videos of balloons going up to the 100km level and you can see space as well as a huge part of earth from there.
It's not really "space", but you can see it from there.
Actually, I have. It doesn't help. If I'm waiting on a taxi I don't have time to go to Yelp and see if anyone has complained on there about the specific driver who is picking me up.
It's amazing to me the contortions that the taxi cartels' looney supporters will come up with. There is nothing equivalent to Uber's simple rating of drivers for the taxi industry - and this is because the taxi cartels don't want it. It would be easy for them to implement.
There are many people that harvest wild game to eat. Cars don't work well for that.
I totally agree with you, but, well, funny story (kind of). I knew a poor family back in Indiana who lived way out in the boondocks. The father welded a formidable 2-inch pipe "bumper" on front of the old pickup that he drove just for "hunting". He averaged 3 deer/year with that thing. If a deer ran out in front of him - he swerved *toward* it.
And I'll tell you why - read this:
http://www.businessinsider.com...
Here's the short version. The taxi industry in San Francisco is $140M/year. Uber's business there is $500M/year. Note that Uber hasn't taken that much business from the taxi industry - that's on top of it.
So, right now we can see that the actual taxi industry in that one city was 1/4 of the potential. That is seriously damaging the economy, particularly when you multiply it out among every city in the US. Put another way, the taxi regulations (bought by the cartels) were causing $500M less money to change hands every year in one city. Just so that they could keep competition low.
There's a great rant on here earlier about what the taxi industry does that stupid (hiring non-English-speaking-just-off-the-boat foreigners, etc.) and it's really kind of amazing to me. Uber's model is simple to replicate, and would be pretty simple for the taxi industry to take on at least parts of it. Have an app so I'll know who my driver is and can rate him. I saw a loon on here a couple of weeks ago claiming that the traditional taxi industry is better because there's a centralized complaint process. Uh, yeah, right. How does that work? How about after my ride I just click a button on my phone? That's a true "centralized complaint process" that even my mother could figure out.
It's clear that the taxi industry doesn't want to change, but it'll be the death of them. They've been buying politicians for years, and with Uber bringing in 3X the revenue the whole "buy a politician" business model is about to get priced out of the taxi industry's league. That really sucks because I don't have any reason to believe Uber will be any nicer than the taxi industry was from a regulatory standpoint, but at least it'll likely allow more competition.
that's actually the problem with most technology
nuclear for example
i haven't a single doubt that we have the technological means to maintain nuclear plants forever without a single accident
but what we don't have is the social and political means to do that
Actually, a lot of us are simply numerically literate and realize that *every* a) energy source suffers from the issues that you whine about and b) nuclear has a great history despite having accidents sometimes.
What he should be doing right now is loudly proclaiming the names and all other personal information (home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, etc.) of the specific agents who did this. Quit giving scum anonymity.
Note that in the case of Vorbis Stallman actually endorsed the BSD license because he understood that there was no other path to wider adoption. FLIF is the same - it'll remain nothing but a little-known oddity unless they decide to use a BSD license that will allow Microsoft, Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari to use the code.
They financed Cuba's cable? Doesn't sound like much of a win to me. Who better to set up the authoritarian Cuban network than the Chicoms?
We have a winner. My assumption was that China will get the deal by default since they know how to set up a censorious and more easily spied upon network.
They were also an invaluable electronic listening post, an embarrassing counter-example to American and western democracy's political claims against communism
You're kidding, right? The only embarrassment here is that somebody would suggest that Cubans have a good life. As has been noted elsewhere, you can read up on slaves' rations in the writings of Frederick Douglass (as I have) and you'll find that slaves in the antebellum American South ate better than modern day Cubans.
Well, except for the Castros. I'm sure they're eating well.
, and a critical exporter of communist ideology to all of Latin America.
Then they Soviet Empire went bankrupt, and the economy tanked.
In other words, the "economy" was simply a sham that was exposed when the Soviet Union quit pumping money into the island. The Soviet Union - with the Castros - spent as much money destroying Cuba as the US spent on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after WWII. Think about that.
But they've still managed to avoid the boom-bust and destructive mismanagement of Haiti, and the third class US protectorate status of Puerto Rico, and they've managed to survive the devastation to their most critical trade good, tobacco, as worldwide smoking habits shifted. They still have one of the highest literacy rates in the world and lowest lower infant mortality rates, both notably better than the USA or Canada. They're making do with an economy that is stretched very, very thin, but give credit where it's due. They've avoided the murderous puppet governments of other desperate Caribbean islands such as Haiti and Jamaica.
Yeah, they've avoided "murderous puppet governments" while maintaining what simply a "murderous government". Lovely. I'm sure the dead people are grateful that the word "puppet" wasn't in there.