I wouldn't have thought there were any figures to update since most of the factors in the Drake Equation wouldn't have even galaxy-sized-ballpark estimates.
Hydro was once the darling of clean energy, but then someone started complaining about the poor fish not being able to spawn as good as before, and so it was tossed aside like some embarrassing stepchild--in favor of the current green stars-of-the-moment, wind and solar. This in spite of the fact that hydro has BY FAR the longest and most productive history of any of the green energy generators.
Yes, I'm rather embarrassed myself to admit that for a long time I completely ignored the rather huge amount of habitat destruction a hydro dam represents. Habitat destruction being the biggest, most immediate conservation problem. Are you really shocked that "Hey,let's block up the rest of our waterways!" isn't a rallying cry for environmentalists?
Makes me wonder how long it will be before someone finds fault with wind and solar and those get tossed aside for some new fad too.
They already are known to have faults. Wind's impact is pretty light, and bird fatalities that were a problem in some early farms have been largely eliminated (as in, made insignificant compared to building strikes and cats). Bats are still a problem, though, and it's not a very well understood problem as of yet either.
Still, wind and solar are two of the 'greenest' options at the moment.
"Do the best thing we know how to do today, and do something better if and when we discover it" is a fairly rational stance for anyone, is it not?
Let the oil companies drill on land. Open up the oil we have on land where it is safer, cleaner, and can be better monitored
To what purpose? Oil companies are already drilling on land. The untapped sources we have are not going to affect the price of gas at the pump or significantly prolong our ability to rely on oil.
Plus we can transport oil by pipeline (burning no fossil fuels).
That depends entirely on what is powering the pumps. Which in the case of the Alaskan pipeline's 11 pump stations is natural gas or liquid fuel. What, you didn't think the oil just flowed "downhill" all the way from Alaska did you?
Well the dispersant dispersed the oil and caused it to sink, which on its own could heavily damage ocean ecosystems like these corals. The ecological impact of the dispersant itself is largely unknown I think.
What the dispersant did do is keep large amounts of oil from hitting the gulf coast, which aside from being better for BP PR was also a good thing for sensitive coastline environments.
Which was ultimately the better choice I don't know. It's not like either choice is good. Maybe the worst part about the use of dispersants was it created an "out of sight, out of mind" reaction. "Since I can't visibly see the result of the spill, it must not be that bad."
My whole point in the previous post was that rather than building useless stuff from scratch, he should be taking advantage of existing tech to further his skills and knowledge.
I think you may be missing something fundamental about logic design if you think he's not.
If you mean designing an FPGA, then maybe that can wait until after college EE/device physics courses, and getting a good start on boolean logic and computer architecture is a enough for a high schooler.
If you mean designing for an FPGA then frankly this is much more impressive -- while designing for the fixed-size logic tables and routing patterns of an FPGA presents its own challenges it's practically utopia for someone who has worked within the limitations of Minecraft. I'm sure he'd have no problems adapting to the constraints of a specific FPGA.
I don't see why doing what would be mathematically equivalent on an FPGA is "actual worthwhile" while this is "bragging rights in a game".
When I started using e-mail (early 1990s), I and everyone I e-mailed with understood that e-mail is not a sealed letter, it is a post card,
Not exactly. It's more like a letter with a very thin envelope. It takes a minimal amount of effort to read, but it can't just land in front of you so you read it on accident. A mail server admin still has to intentionally read the email.
You have a legal expectation of privacy for a letter. This is separate from how easily your privacy could be illegally violated.
All digital communication is inherently recorded, so in some twisted sense it's more like dumpster diving and less like wiretapping to snoop in e-mail.
No, it's more like your mail carrier reading your snail-mail.
Which is also an illegal invasion of privacy.
The rules don't need to be re-written. The old ones work just fine as long as we don't throw out all reason as soon as "on a computer" is added.
Doubling the already substantial financial obstacle of hiring a lawyer for the average joe, and having an effect on the corporation indistinguishable from zero.
It's better than the naive implementation of 'loser pays', but this is damning with faint praise.
a person who drinks only sodas all day, everyday, is more dehydrated than someone who drinks the same volume of just plain water everyday
Then they'd still be thirsty, they'd drink more and so make up the difference. So "same volume" is a bad assumption. And "less hydrated than someone else" isn't the same as "insufficiently hydrated" which is what "dehydrated" means.
Personally when I used to drink soda I never found it to quench my thirst very well, so I drank quite a bit more of it than I would water.
And I drink a *lot* of water. Different people have different hydration needs. My throat starts to feel parched after an hour, often less, even when no diuretics like caffeine or alcohol have been consumed. I always take a water bottle with me on airplanes because I'm usually miserable well before the drink service comes around and a piddling little cup of OJ doesn't cut it. It ain't because I'm dehydrated before walking on the plane.
Yes, a strict interpretation of the Constitution is that Congress has the power to grant copyright monopolies for a limited time, and the law that was under review specified a limited time and so was Constitutional. The court was simply unwilling to say that the current specified time was "too long", or otherwise eliminate this effective power Congress had to make copyright indefinite by placing a real limit on the power when such was not supported by the Constitution.
It was an imminently conservative decision.
And while I certainly don't like the decision, I can't really say it's irrational.
"Of course" early exposure to germs reduces allergies and asthma?
And while humans managed not to go extinct without the benefits of modern medicine, we did suffer from extremely high infant mortality, mostly from disease. The primary reason our life expectancy is so much higher today is because infant mortality dominated the average in the past and dragged it way down. So maybe these results are not quite so obvious.
Tell you what, let's take money out of the picture. I have a barrel of oil 5 feet below the surface with a straw stuck in it, AND I have an equivalent amount of sulfur-laden tar 2000 feet below the surface of the earth and 2 miles of ocean. Fungible?
I have a bird in the hand and one in the bush. Fungible?
Yes! Because in the market for birds, nobody gives a shit that the one you have in the bush is going to be more expensive for you to acquire and sell. That's your problem. As far as the bird market is concerned, birds are interchangeable and so you can't demand more for your bush-sourced bird than the one that was in your hand. If you can't give them the bird at the market price then they'll just go to another bird supplier because they are fungible. That's what it means.
You are mistakenly thinking that if the cost to produce a fungible resource varies, then it is not fungible. This is wrong.
Think about something completely fungible: standard 1/4" wood screws. Nobody cares who exactly makes their wood screw. They are fungible. Does that cease to be true because Factory A is inefficient and has a cost structure twice as high as Factory B? No. It just means that Factory A will be making less profit on their screws, or taking a loss.
People often make this mistake in the other direction -- thinking that because crude oil is fungible, that it doesn't matter how much it costs to get some particular oil out of the ground. No, it does matter -- if the market price for crude goes up, but your well is still producing at the same rate at the same cost, then you make even more profit. If the market price is below what it would cost to get that oil out of the ground, then you shut down that well.
So yes, your crappy deep-ocean oil and your surface oil are still fungible. That just means it's obvious which one you will tap and which you won't.
The problem with electing him is that regardless of whether he's on the mark or bat-shit crazy he will stick to his principles and not compromise.
This is why he will never be elected president, and shouldn't be elected president. Being the President of a country is about politics. Politics requires compromising in the face of reality. I've already had enough of a leader who sticks to their ideology against reality.
I find it interesting that the argument wasn't made that it was effectively unlimited if it exceeded a normal lifespan, or that such an argument, if made, failed.
That argument wouldn't have flown because the court already agreed that "finite time with infinite potential for future retro-active extensions" was "effectively unlimited" in a much more real sense that merely exceeding the author's life span, but that because it wasn't literally unlimited at any given time it wasn't unconstitutional.
Well that's just a fuck-up then since the guy was obviously a terrorist. Listen to all his hate-speech about the blood of patriots and the benefits of revolution!
Don't put this all on the panthers unless you either somehow don't see us as sentient actors or just don't give a shit about the ecosystem disruption from apex predators going extinct. Both species need to figure out how to co-exist.
One important thing to do is not feed them irresponsibly, essentially guaranteeing they become a public safety issue and thus fail to co-exist.
If it doesn't then why is Obama giving speeches about how drilling is increased under him.
Because idiots who think the President can actually make gasoline cheaper in a sustainable way, think that opening up more wells in the U.S. will meaningfully affect the price of gas, and for some reason think the long-term trend in gasoline is anything but up-up-up, demand to know what the President has done to undo reality.
I'm so sick of hearing this crap. The same can be argued in opposition to preserving a waning species. Nature will take care of the impact, it has successfully done so for a long time now.
You could argue that only if you're as ignorant as the people who thought introducing the European Starling to North America was a good idea.
The waning species are generally waning because of human actions, particularly habitat destruction. They are natural parts of their ecosystems. Letting them die off damages those ecosystems of which they had evolved to be part of. Nature does not "take care" of the impact like that phrase implies when talking about human actions. Nature solves the problem by not caring if the ecosystem as it exists today collapses and must be replaced by a new one. It's the same way nature would "take care" of the impact of a large asteroid -- millions of years later there would still be a thriving biosphere, but that wouldn't matter to everything that went extinct.
Being careless about introducing species is stupid. Using the "nature will take care of it" excuse for being stupid about it is stupid. At best it's hippie Gaia bullshit. At worst it's just ignorance unintentionally leveraging the logic of hippies.
making it sound as if the nuclei have any significant variation in their own right (they do not as they are defined by the atom they inhabit.)
LOL the atom is defined by the nucleus not the other way around. And in a plasma these atoms will be ions completely stripped of electrons -- aka nuclei.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't have thought there were any figures to update since most of the factors in the Drake Equation wouldn't have even galaxy-sized-ballpark estimates.
When criticisms based on not reading the article get up-modded, I think that's fair.
Hydro was once the darling of clean energy, but then someone started complaining about the poor fish not being able to spawn as good as before, and so it was tossed aside like some embarrassing stepchild--in favor of the current green stars-of-the-moment, wind and solar. This in spite of the fact that hydro has BY FAR the longest and most productive history of any of the green energy generators.
Yes, I'm rather embarrassed myself to admit that for a long time I completely ignored the rather huge amount of habitat destruction a hydro dam represents. Habitat destruction being the biggest, most immediate conservation problem. Are you really shocked that "Hey,let's block up the rest of our waterways!" isn't a rallying cry for environmentalists?
Makes me wonder how long it will be before someone finds fault with wind and solar and those get tossed aside for some new fad too.
They already are known to have faults. Wind's impact is pretty light, and bird fatalities that were a problem in some early farms have been largely eliminated (as in, made insignificant compared to building strikes and cats). Bats are still a problem, though, and it's not a very well understood problem as of yet either.
Still, wind and solar are two of the 'greenest' options at the moment.
"Do the best thing we know how to do today, and do something better if and when we discover it" is a fairly rational stance for anyone, is it not?
Let the oil companies drill on land. Open up the oil we have on land where it is safer, cleaner, and can be better monitored
To what purpose? Oil companies are already drilling on land. The untapped sources we have are not going to affect the price of gas at the pump or significantly prolong our ability to rely on oil.
Plus we can transport oil by pipeline (burning no fossil fuels).
That depends entirely on what is powering the pumps. Which in the case of the Alaskan pipeline's 11 pump stations is natural gas or liquid fuel. What, you didn't think the oil just flowed "downhill" all the way from Alaska did you?
Well the dispersant dispersed the oil and caused it to sink, which on its own could heavily damage ocean ecosystems like these corals. The ecological impact of the dispersant itself is largely unknown I think.
What the dispersant did do is keep large amounts of oil from hitting the gulf coast, which aside from being better for BP PR was also a good thing for sensitive coastline environments.
Which was ultimately the better choice I don't know. It's not like either choice is good. Maybe the worst part about the use of dispersants was it created an "out of sight, out of mind" reaction. "Since I can't visibly see the result of the spill, it must not be that bad."
My whole point in the previous post was that rather than building useless stuff from scratch, he should be taking advantage of existing tech to further his skills and knowledge.
I think you may be missing something fundamental about logic design if you think he's not.
If you mean designing an FPGA, then maybe that can wait until after college EE/device physics courses, and getting a good start on boolean logic and computer architecture is a enough for a high schooler.
If you mean designing for an FPGA then frankly this is much more impressive -- while designing for the fixed-size logic tables and routing patterns of an FPGA presents its own challenges it's practically utopia for someone who has worked within the limitations of Minecraft. I'm sure he'd have no problems adapting to the constraints of a specific FPGA.
I don't see why doing what would be mathematically equivalent on an FPGA is "actual worthwhile" while this is "bragging rights in a game".
Fuck that noise, their joint is obviously laced with dust.
When I started using e-mail (early 1990s), I and everyone I e-mailed with understood that e-mail is not a sealed letter, it is a post card,
Not exactly. It's more like a letter with a very thin envelope. It takes a minimal amount of effort to read, but it can't just land in front of you so you read it on accident. A mail server admin still has to intentionally read the email.
You have a legal expectation of privacy for a letter. This is separate from how easily your privacy could be illegally violated.
All digital communication is inherently recorded, so in some twisted sense it's more like dumpster diving and less like wiretapping to snoop in e-mail.
No, it's more like your mail carrier reading your snail-mail.
Which is also an illegal invasion of privacy.
The rules don't need to be re-written. The old ones work just fine as long as we don't throw out all reason as soon as "on a computer" is added.
Doubling the already substantial financial obstacle of hiring a lawyer for the average joe, and having an effect on the corporation indistinguishable from zero.
It's better than the naive implementation of 'loser pays', but this is damning with faint praise.
a person who drinks only sodas all day, everyday, is more dehydrated than someone who drinks the same volume of just plain water everyday
Then they'd still be thirsty, they'd drink more and so make up the difference. So "same volume" is a bad assumption. And "less hydrated than someone else" isn't the same as "insufficiently hydrated" which is what "dehydrated" means.
Personally when I used to drink soda I never found it to quench my thirst very well, so I drank quite a bit more of it than I would water.
And I drink a *lot* of water. Different people have different hydration needs. My throat starts to feel parched after an hour, often less, even when no diuretics like caffeine or alcohol have been consumed. I always take a water bottle with me on airplanes because I'm usually miserable well before the drink service comes around and a piddling little cup of OJ doesn't cut it. It ain't because I'm dehydrated before walking on the plane.
Yes, a strict interpretation of the Constitution is that Congress has the power to grant copyright monopolies for a limited time, and the law that was under review specified a limited time and so was Constitutional. The court was simply unwilling to say that the current specified time was "too long", or otherwise eliminate this effective power Congress had to make copyright indefinite by placing a real limit on the power when such was not supported by the Constitution.
It was an imminently conservative decision.
And while I certainly don't like the decision, I can't really say it's irrational.
"Of course" early exposure to germs reduces allergies and asthma?
And while humans managed not to go extinct without the benefits of modern medicine, we did suffer from extremely high infant mortality, mostly from disease. The primary reason our life expectancy is so much higher today is because infant mortality dominated the average in the past and dragged it way down. So maybe these results are not quite so obvious.
Tell you what, let's take money out of the picture. I have a barrel of oil 5 feet below the surface with a straw stuck in it, AND I have an equivalent amount of sulfur-laden tar 2000 feet below the surface of the earth and 2 miles of ocean. Fungible?
I have a bird in the hand and one in the bush. Fungible?
Yes! Because in the market for birds, nobody gives a shit that the one you have in the bush is going to be more expensive for you to acquire and sell. That's your problem. As far as the bird market is concerned, birds are interchangeable and so you can't demand more for your bush-sourced bird than the one that was in your hand. If you can't give them the bird at the market price then they'll just go to another bird supplier because they are fungible. That's what it means.
You are mistakenly thinking that if the cost to produce a fungible resource varies, then it is not fungible. This is wrong.
Think about something completely fungible: standard 1/4" wood screws. Nobody cares who exactly makes their wood screw. They are fungible. Does that cease to be true because Factory A is inefficient and has a cost structure twice as high as Factory B? No. It just means that Factory A will be making less profit on their screws, or taking a loss.
People often make this mistake in the other direction -- thinking that because crude oil is fungible, that it doesn't matter how much it costs to get some particular oil out of the ground. No, it does matter -- if the market price for crude goes up, but your well is still producing at the same rate at the same cost, then you make even more profit. If the market price is below what it would cost to get that oil out of the ground, then you shut down that well.
So yes, your crappy deep-ocean oil and your surface oil are still fungible. That just means it's obvious which one you will tap and which you won't.
Sure, that's the problem with supporting him.
The problem with electing him is that regardless of whether he's on the mark or bat-shit crazy he will stick to his principles and not compromise.
This is why he will never be elected president, and shouldn't be elected president. Being the President of a country is about politics. Politics requires compromising in the face of reality. I've already had enough of a leader who sticks to their ideology against reality.
I find it interesting that the argument wasn't made that it was effectively unlimited if it exceeded a normal lifespan, or that such an argument, if made, failed.
That argument wouldn't have flown because the court already agreed that "finite time with infinite potential for future retro-active extensions" was "effectively unlimited" in a much more real sense that merely exceeding the author's life span, but that because it wasn't literally unlimited at any given time it wasn't unconstitutional.
Well that's just a fuck-up then since the guy was obviously a terrorist. Listen to all his hate-speech about the blood of patriots and the benefits of revolution!
Don't put this all on the panthers unless you either somehow don't see us as sentient actors or just don't give a shit about the ecosystem disruption from apex predators going extinct. Both species need to figure out how to co-exist.
One important thing to do is not feed them irresponsibly, essentially guaranteeing they become a public safety issue and thus fail to co-exist.
If it doesn't then why is Obama giving speeches about how drilling is increased under him.
Because idiots who think the President can actually make gasoline cheaper in a sustainable way, think that opening up more wells in the U.S. will meaningfully affect the price of gas, and for some reason think the long-term trend in gasoline is anything but up-up-up, demand to know what the President has done to undo reality.
I'm so sick of hearing this crap. The same can be argued in opposition to preserving a waning species. Nature will take care of the impact, it has successfully done so for a long time now.
You could argue that only if you're as ignorant as the people who thought introducing the European Starling to North America was a good idea.
The waning species are generally waning because of human actions, particularly habitat destruction. They are natural parts of their ecosystems. Letting them die off damages those ecosystems of which they had evolved to be part of. Nature does not "take care" of the impact like that phrase implies when talking about human actions. Nature solves the problem by not caring if the ecosystem as it exists today collapses and must be replaced by a new one. It's the same way nature would "take care" of the impact of a large asteroid -- millions of years later there would still be a thriving biosphere, but that wouldn't matter to everything that went extinct.
Being careless about introducing species is stupid. Using the "nature will take care of it" excuse for being stupid about it is stupid. At best it's hippie Gaia bullshit. At worst it's just ignorance unintentionally leveraging the logic of hippies.
If you're really afraid of bears and cougars, move to a city, there's plenty of urban areas to choose from.
I'm not afraid of bears and cougars.
I'm afraid of bears and cougars being shot because they're acclimated to humans and thus a public safety issue.
It all balances out in the end.
Heh. My problem is the opposite of your sig -- words I've only read and never heard. Then I try to say them and it is completely wrong.
making it sound as if the nuclei have any significant variation in their own right (they do not as they are defined by the atom they inhabit.)
LOL the atom is defined by the nucleus not the other way around. And in a plasma these atoms will be ions completely stripped of electrons -- aka nuclei.