And once you've got a radioactive diamond inside a layer of non-radioactive diamond acting as a semiconductor and collecting power, how about using that power to run semiconductor circuitry in the surrounding diamond?
Blinky-light diamond jewelry. Little computerized devices networking with a protocol like Bluetooth Low Energy (which gets by on miniscule amounts of power by mostly sleeping at microwatt levels until it's time to listen or talk.)
Coolerado has been around for like a decade and a half but they are barely more than experimental. Sounds great, but lets not get excited, their track record of commercial scale production is abysmal. Its going to be heat-pumps for at least the next decade.
But they got bought recently. So either their tech dies or gets developed by somebody with enough industry savvy to run with it.
That's better than aheat pump with the ambient air as the source/sink (which deviates from the desired temperature in the exactly wrong direction).
But it's' still a heat pump. You're pumping across a lower gradient but you're still burning substantial power, compared with the solutions I mentioned.
It DOES have the advantage that proven solutions at reasonable prices are available now.
(Judging by the summary) the authors of the report are projecting that added air conditioning in currently underserved areas will use energy-hungry heat pumps, like developed world city and suburbs currently do. This ignores recent (and any yet-to-come) technology breakthroughs.
One is M-cycle cooling systems like Coolerado's. In locations where a swamp cooler would work, and many where it would fail due to moderately-too-high humidity, an M-cycle cooler will deliver cool air using about twice the power needed to blow it around and a little water (less than the amount saved by some power plant not generating the added electricity to power a heat pump, so you're AHEAD on water use, too). The air delivered does not have added humidity (just the higher relative humidity from cooling it, which WON'T drop it below the dew point and get mold going indoors), nor does it have added bacteria (though the half exhausted outdoors still may).
The guts of the Coolerado version is a "mass-heat exchanger" - a stack of plastic sheets that gets water (with a trace of soap) injected on one port, outside air blown in another, cooled air coming out a third, wet air out a fourth, and an unevaporated fraction of the water with the minerals and such out a fifth. Cheap (or it can be if the patent holders chose). Already being used in, among other places, medical facilities in India.
Another is the "infrared window" approach. Think "solar panel" that dumps about 90 watts per square meter of heat energy into the sky 24/7, (slightly better at night than noon). Cheap version of a plastic film with a silvered backside and 10-ish micron glass beads embedded in it. Only reason you need any power at all is to control the transfer of heat from the room to the panels (say, by circulating a heat-transfer fluid and blowing air through a radiator), so you don't get more cooling at night (when you probably don't want any) than at noon or afternoon (when you want a lot).
Not only can these, and potentially other approaches, provide air conditioning for the developing world at a fraction of the energy cost (and perhaps the equipment cost) of a classic heat-pump system, but they can also reduce the energy cost of cooling in the developed world.
"Oracle representatives had suggested the customers strike the deals to avoid expensive audits of how they were using Oracle software, according to the employee. Instead, that approach to selling cloud is irritating customers,"
But are they irritated enough to bit the bullet, port their mission-critical processes to a non-Oracle database and kiss Oracle goodbye? (If not, they've knuckled under and are going to be locked in to Oracle's products and pricing forever - or at least until a later generation of their own management.)
If Oracle is already pressuring them to port to a different DB (their cloud product) they've got a golden opportunity. Yes it might be more effort to port to some other DB then Oracle's own "other DB". But much of the work to absorb any differences - the port, the testing, and the dual-DB cya period - will be the same in either case. So it's only an increment, rather than the whole price of a DB port, to go to a different DB.
Back when the original crash was news, I saw the video on YouTube.
It was apparently taken by a dashcam. The person walking a bike across the road was obscured until they were about in the lane directly ahead of the car. It wasn't clear until I looked closely, but the obscuring object seemed to be the (very out-of focus) driver's side windshield-wiper.
If the camera had been mounted somewhere else (like on the front side of the rear-view mirror) the pedestrian would have been clearly visible.
Which made me wonder: Is that camera just for recording a view from the driver's seat? Or is it what the auto-driving software is using for vision.
(If the latter, WTF? Why the HELL would anyone design a self-driving system based on a camera with an obscured view of the oncoming and cross traffic, pedestrian or otherwise? If the former, why the HELL would you log, for your engineering analysis, what a separate camera sees but not what the CAR sees?)
The twist method is not perfect and, at the Lilliputian scale the thrust is measured on, those imperfections are enough to produce the resulting torque.
Then use co-ax, which works just fine all the way down to DC. Both the electric and magnetic field are inside the shield (the mag field curled around in the space between the center and outer conductors, the electrc field radial between them).
Even the leakage, absent massive flaws, is just the E field, due to resistance in the outer conductor. So use copper or silver pipe (if you don't want to futz with high-temp superconductors).
The researchers used precision machining and polishing to obtain a microwave cavity that was much better than those previously published. If anything was going to work, this would be the one.
Now that reminds me of a story, back in my programming-for-the-auto-industry days.
Seems that Rolls Royce, after sticking with manual transmissions for a long time, decided to consider manufacturing a car with an automatic transmission. So they got hold of the best on the hoi polloi market - the GM 350 turbo-hydramatic - to use as a reference.
First they tested the heck out of it - and found it did exactly what an auto-tranny should. So how could they make something better? So they tore it down to see if there was anything they could improve. But everything was beautifully designed and machined. Except for one surface on one part, which was a little rough.
So they machined it smooth and reassembled the transmission. And it didn't work at all. That surface was SUPPOSED to be a little rough. B-)
- - - -
Now personally, as much as I'd like to see a working reactionless electronic thruster, I'm not holding my breath waiting for a violation of the law of conservation of momentum. But it would be nice if something DID show up that worked.
So, where does the force come from? The Earthâ(TM)s magnetic field, most likely. The cables that carry the current to the microwave amplifier run along the arm of the torsion bar. Although the cable is shielded, it is not perfect (because the researchers did not have enough mu metal).
Also: What's wrong with using twisted pair? The individual half-twists may interact with a DC magnetic field, but on the average across a twist they cancel out.
This has been used since at least the early days of telephony (where they used twisted pair - with the wires occasionally swapped as they go from pole to pole - not just to cancel out coupling to electrical noise from lots of sources (including power lines) but also - with different rates of twist on different pair and phantom-group - to cancel it out between different lines running along the same poles.
Just like the four pair in your cat-N Ethernet cable each have a different rate of twist, so their signals stay separate.
- - - -
(I DO like the idea of swapping in the dummy load and seeing whether the thrust disappears. B-) )
It's the field being created by the planetary body we call Earth. Surprise! No one has ever tested an EM Drive beyond the influence of Earth. If they had, its efficacy would have quickly been dis-proven.
Good grief.
If it's the Earth's field, put the device inside a pair of helmholtz coils (or the slightly more complex coil systems that can smooth out the residual ripples further). Give them enough current to cancel the Earth's field and, if the gadget is getting its thrust from this interaction, the thrust will stop. Give them twice that, reversing the field, and the thrust will be in the opposite direction.
I thought this test had already been done, by pretty much everybody including NASA.
In part due to the rapid reproduction cycle, and in part because viruses lack the DNA repair mechanisms that more advanced species have.
And in part because when a host is simultaneously infected with two related viruses, the processes called "reassortment" can produce a new virus with genetic material from both "parent" strains. If the combination is, say, a particularly virulent toxin or toxic effect from one parent and an infection protein or protein-network component(s) that enable(s) infection of human tissue from another, a nasty pathogen of non-humans begets a nasty pathogen of humans.
This is particularly true in the case of influenza, which already has its (RNA) genome divided into eight chromosome-like chunks, making the mix-and-match easy and commo when two strains of flu encounter each other.
Maybe it IS a good deal for the post office. But let's see that from someone without skin in the game.
You mean like the Post Master General?
Megan Brennan has skin in the game, too. She's also a party to the same deal.
Given that she's expected to have the Post Office's welfare at heart I'd be more impressed by her statements. But I'd prefer an analysis by someone who's not one of the players.
Though I have no indication that Megan has any conflict of interests or is in any way corrupt, a multi-billionaire is in a position to deliver a LOT of incentives. So I'd like to hear an analysis by a less interested party.
BUT
You're totally misconstruing my original statement. "The Postmaster General says..." is one thing. "Jeff Bezos' newspaper says the Postmater General says..." is very much another. It's the latter I'm addressing.
We have no idea how sentience arises, none whatsoever. The idiots who claim its from some complexity level are wrong.
Maybe not. But I recall hearing of an experiment, decades ago, that hinted at it:
The basic setup was a "Y" maze: The experimental subject was introduced into one of the three legs of the Y, and a food reward was present in another. Reset and repeat.
After the subject learned that it should turn right at the junction to obtain the food, the setup was switched so it had to turn left - a "reversal". Once it had learned the food was now on the left, it would be reversed again. Repeat.
1) Run the maze with a particular breed of fish. After the reversal it takes a number of tries before the fish unlearns "right" and learns "left". Reverse again, it takes about the same number of tries. Reverse over and over, and it keeps on taking about the same number of tries to unlearn/relearn the new state of the maze.
2) Run the maze with a particular breed of turtle, which has about twice the amount of brain as the fish. At first it unlearns/relearns like the fish. But after a number of reversals it "gets it" and it only takes a couple of trials to figure out that the maze had been switched again.
3) (Here's the kicker.) Take embryos of the fish. At an early stage of development, remove the tissue that would become the brain from one and transplant it into another, along with the tissue that's already there. The embryo grows up into an otherwise normal fish with a normally-organized but double-sized brain - i.e. a brain the size of the turtle's. Run this fish in the maze and it learns reversals, just like the turtle.
This suggests to me that "intelligence" - or at least this inferring-things aspect of it - may be the result of having enough of a repeating structure to process a problem, and adding more repeats of that structure increases the complexity of the problems that can be handled.
Kinda like folks who worship guns who think that owning guns lowers crime. Or that more guns mean less violence when the evidence available points to the opposite conclusion.
Except that the evidence was collected and analyzed, and it showed that more guns DOES mean drastically less violence (and even more so: Less violence perpetrated on innocent victims) and drastically lower crime rates.
And it wasn't just correlation, or a back-arrow of "gun control laws are passed where crime is high". Gun law changes were followed by the predicted changes in violence, injury, death, crime, and victimization.
The relevant field is criminology. (Not, for instance, medical research or political ideology.) Lots of data and analysis there, including the seminal works that detected things like:
- privately-owned guns being used to stop crimes more than six times as often as to commit them,
- armed citizens being MORE than six times as safe, and as law-abiding, as police, (If you wait for a CCW holder to commit a crime, on the average you'll wait over seven thousand years)
- defence-with-gun being the ONLY strategy that REDUCES risk of injury or death for a crime victim below that of knuckling under (which is one-in-three you get hurt bad), etc.
I, and others, could give LOTS of examples of where evidence shows this. But you made a gratuitous claim that the evidence shows otherwise, without bothering to provide any support. "Gratuitous claims can be gratuitously denied." So I won't bother, either.
As I understand it, since the Korean "police action" (a.k.a. "Korean War"), North Korea has had continuous WW II-style, nighttime blackouts (for fear of bombing and/or to keep the population propagandized about external threats.)
So, though they may actually have a low GDP, it may not be a horribly low as the "night lighing => GDP" measure would make it seem.
(I recall, a few years back, the publication of satellite imagery of the Korea-halves, with North Korea almost as dark as an uninhabited wasteland. The caption/story also suggested that this was a sign of how "benighted" the North Korean economy had become. So that was in the back of my mind when, recently, the newsies mentioned that the North was doing blackouts. "AHA!" sez I. "That light thing is probably a bogus overstatement." So here it comes around again.)
So:
- Trump says the Post Office is giving Amazon (owned by Jeff Bezos) a couple bucks of subsidies per package and orders the Post Office to readjust their special deal.
- The Washington Post (owned by Jeff Bezos) runs an article flaming Trump and making several claims - such as that the deal is good for the Post Office, Trump's underlings are fighting back, yadda yadda yadda.
I trust nobody will be surprised if I take the Post article's claims with a grain (or a 50-pound block) of salt at this point, at least until I see an analysis of Amazon's deal from something other than a newspaper owned byAmazon's founder and bought with part of the billions of dollars he made off Amazon.
Maybe it IS a good deal for the post office. But let's see that from someone without skin in the game.
You people know you can change trackpad settings so that clicking requires pushing, double tapping, etc., right?
I could rewrite the whole opsystem if I felt like it (and had several lifetimes in a no-time-passes-in-the-main-timeline siding to do it on.
If such configuration is already available it's not exported to the stock GUI configuration tool, When that happens I usually don't dig for some other configuration tuner - because that usually turns the stock tuner into "open it and the option it didsn't know about goes away" or "touch the config with the stock tool and the device breaks"
I'm assuming the spellchecker flagged it, but the poster assumed it was exactly the false positive they were complaining about?
Yep. ("fossilise". Egad, it got it right!)
(The keyboard and trackpad on this machine is why I plan never to buy another Lenovo. It keeps jumping the cursor on my while I'm typing and I don't always catch and fix the resulting havoc.)
Some spell checkers... suck worse at spelling than students, though.
Most of the awful spelling checker issues I've encountered is British Isles dictionary entries that still seem to be used despite configuring for American English.
But this was Scotland, on the British Isles, ruled by the British Monarch, a central part of the British Commonwealth / Empire. (I'm not sure how close its standard spellings are to those of England, but I bet if they're not virtually identical they're closer than either to American English, with over two centuries of divergence.
Yo. Dudes! We split from the British Empire before dictionaries and were invented and standardized spelling began to be promoted - with one of our revolutionaries (Daniel Webster) instrumental in both. Our "standard" (east-coast elite imposed or otherwise) spelling(s) is/are different from those on the other side of "the pond".
Over here it's "color", not "colour", "honor", not "honour", follilize, not fossilise (and lots of other -ize vs. -ise endings), and so on.
So why do the spelling checkers (for instance, in Firefox on Ubuntu) gripe about the American English spellings despite all the language settings being set to American, rather than British Empire, English?
The rest is wasted on an insane number of golf courses.
Actually, golf courses are going out of fashion and out of business (or just "closed" in the case of government-owned ones) in California.
Newer generations mostly aren't taking up golf and older ones are finding other things to do or just getting too old to enjoy it. Meanwhile the cost of water (for the horribly thirsty institutions) has skyrocketed and regulatory bodies are rejecting applications when misguided city councils or developers try to install one, rather than, say, parks with low-water landscaping) to fill their "open space" requirements.
We have a shortage of available energy. Desalinating seawater is proven technology.
But as the plume from Fukishima arrives on the west coast of North America, it will have to be RE proven - to show it can also adequately remove radioactive particles.
Especially long-lived isotopes and/or those that embed themselves in sensitive areas and processes (such as long-lived Strontium 90, which substitutes for calcium, embeds in bones, and irradiates the blood-making tissue that is normally protected by its surroundings, or short-lived radio iodine, which both produces birth defects and concentrates in the thyroid and provokes things like the auto-immune diseases Hashimoto's (where the gland is destroyed) or Graves (where the antibody triggers a receptor, turning thyroid hormone output full-on and provoking the thyroid to grow and produce still more).
Desalinazation probably can also remove such stuff. But it might require tweaks, and additional expense, to go to very low levels on these extra, problem, "salts".
They've got the grand total of 14 years data and they're drawing possible conclusions about "climate change"?
Humans prefer stories where things that happen have a cause, and where their own species is important.
(I saw a better worded version of that recently and would quote it exactly and credit it, rather than paraphrasing it, if I could find it just now.)
Sure people move water around. They've been doing that since the dawn of civilization - both to raise more food and to stabilize empires by creating drought in rebellious provinces.
But assuming the changes you see over the first few seasons of a new type of observation are all human caused (rather than, for instance, random, part of weather systems, caused by other animals {like beaver dams or the Elephant/Rhino/Hippo cycle}, etc.) smells of both hubris and alarmism. Exceptional claims require exceptional evidence.
The truck industry has *long* done stunts like this to 'prove' how much better than their ratings they are.
Towing enormous loads from a dead stop (on a level surface) is much easier with an electric motor drive vehicle than with one powered by a combustion engine.
An electric motor (absent some pathology in the power supply to it) produces maximum torque at stall. This is ideal for gradually accelerating enormous weights on low-friction level surfaces. (Also great for sprint races, and getting started from a dead stop in general.)
An internal combustion engine has no torque at its output shaft if it's not running. You need some mechanism for driving the stopped wheels from the must-keep-turning engine.
Clutches are a friction brake (with a SMALL length of of spring, so you can recycle most of the energy initially lost to pushing torque through a shaft-speed difference IF you get moving right away.) Try to tow an enormous weight from dead-stop and most of the energy goes to heat the clutch - which quickly fries unless you only engage it in pulses.
Transmissions with torque converters are better. But get moving quickly (in a very low gear, because much of that energy is still turning into heat in the transmission fluid.
Electric motors make heat, too. But only in proportion to the (square of) the torque they produce. So it's the same heat they'd make if they were accelerating the car with the same torque, which they're able to dump quite nicely. Also: They aren't stuck absorbing a LARGE amount of heat because of the minimum speed of the engine shaft. Their controller can apply enough current to get the torque, but this results in much lower voltage (and thus much less total energy) when they're not turning (no back-EMF from the moving motor also acting like a generator to oppose the incoming current). So max torque and only enough HP/watts to produce it.
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Considering how much of their work day their associates spend standing up or walking around? Quite a few. B-)
So as long as they're making synthetic diamonds, I wonder if they'll make Carbon 14 diamond batteries.
And once you've got a radioactive diamond inside a layer of non-radioactive diamond acting as a semiconductor and collecting power, how about using that power to run semiconductor circuitry in the surrounding diamond?
Blinky-light diamond jewelry. Little computerized devices networking with a protocol like Bluetooth Low Energy (which gets by on miniscule amounts of power by mostly sleeping at microwatt levels until it's time to listen or talk.)
The possibiliies are endless. Also tacky.
Coolerado has been around for like a decade and a half but they are barely more than experimental. Sounds great, but lets not get excited, their track record of commercial scale production is abysmal. Its going to be heat-pumps for at least the next decade.
But they got bought recently. So either their tech dies or gets developed by somebody with enough industry savvy to run with it.
That's better than aheat pump with the ambient air as the source/sink (which deviates from the desired temperature in the exactly wrong direction).
But it's' still a heat pump. You're pumping across a lower gradient but you're still burning substantial power, compared with the solutions I mentioned.
It DOES have the advantage that proven solutions at reasonable prices are available now.
(Judging by the summary) the authors of the report are projecting that added air conditioning in currently underserved areas will use energy-hungry heat pumps, like developed world city and suburbs currently do. This ignores recent (and any yet-to-come) technology breakthroughs.
One is M-cycle cooling systems like Coolerado's. In locations where a swamp cooler would work, and many where it would fail due to moderately-too-high humidity, an M-cycle cooler will deliver cool air using about twice the power needed to blow it around and a little water (less than the amount saved by some power plant not generating the added electricity to power a heat pump, so you're AHEAD on water use, too). The air delivered does not have added humidity (just the higher relative humidity from cooling it, which WON'T drop it below the dew point and get mold going indoors), nor does it have added bacteria (though the half exhausted outdoors still may).
The guts of the Coolerado version is a "mass-heat exchanger" - a stack of plastic sheets that gets water (with a trace of soap) injected on one port, outside air blown in another, cooled air coming out a third, wet air out a fourth, and an unevaporated fraction of the water with the minerals and such out a fifth. Cheap (or it can be if the patent holders chose). Already being used in, among other places, medical facilities in India.
Another is the "infrared window" approach. Think "solar panel" that dumps about 90 watts per square meter of heat energy into the sky 24/7, (slightly better at night than noon). Cheap version of a plastic film with a silvered backside and 10-ish micron glass beads embedded in it. Only reason you need any power at all is to control the transfer of heat from the room to the panels (say, by circulating a heat-transfer fluid and blowing air through a radiator), so you don't get more cooling at night (when you probably don't want any) than at noon or afternoon (when you want a lot).
Not only can these, and potentially other approaches, provide air conditioning for the developing world at a fraction of the energy cost (and perhaps the equipment cost) of a classic heat-pump system, but they can also reduce the energy cost of cooling in the developed world.
"Oracle representatives had suggested the customers strike the deals to avoid expensive audits of how they were using Oracle software, according to the employee. Instead, that approach to selling cloud is irritating customers,"
But are they irritated enough to bit the bullet, port their mission-critical processes to a non-Oracle database and kiss Oracle goodbye? (If not, they've knuckled under and are going to be locked in to Oracle's products and pricing forever - or at least until a later generation of their own management.)
If Oracle is already pressuring them to port to a different DB (their cloud product) they've got a golden opportunity. Yes it might be more effort to port to some other DB then Oracle's own "other DB". But much of the work to absorb any differences - the port, the testing, and the dual-DB cya period - will be the same in either case. So it's only an increment, rather than the whole price of a DB port, to go to a different DB.
Back when the original crash was news, I saw the video on YouTube.
It was apparently taken by a dashcam. The person walking a bike across the road was obscured until they were about in the lane directly ahead of the car. It wasn't clear until I looked closely, but the obscuring object seemed to be the (very out-of focus) driver's side windshield-wiper.
If the camera had been mounted somewhere else (like on the front side of the rear-view mirror) the pedestrian would have been clearly visible.
Which made me wonder: Is that camera just for recording a view from the driver's seat? Or is it what the auto-driving software is using for vision.
(If the latter, WTF? Why the HELL would anyone design a self-driving system based on a camera with an obscured view of the oncoming and cross traffic, pedestrian or otherwise? If the former, why the HELL would you log, for your engineering analysis, what a separate camera sees but not what the CAR sees?)
The twist method is not perfect and, at the Lilliputian scale the thrust is measured on, those imperfections are enough to produce the resulting torque.
Then use co-ax, which works just fine all the way down to DC. Both the electric and magnetic field are inside the shield (the mag field curled around in the space between the center and outer conductors, the electrc field radial between them).
Even the leakage, absent massive flaws, is just the E field, due to resistance in the outer conductor. So use copper or silver pipe (if you don't want to futz with high-temp superconductors).
Let's see THAT couple to an ambient B field.
The researchers used precision machining and polishing to obtain a microwave cavity that was much better than those previously published. If anything was going to work, this would be the one.
Now that reminds me of a story, back in my programming-for-the-auto-industry days.
Seems that Rolls Royce, after sticking with manual transmissions for a long time, decided to consider manufacturing a car with an automatic transmission. So they got hold of the best on the hoi polloi market - the GM 350 turbo-hydramatic - to use as a reference.
First they tested the heck out of it - and found it did exactly what an auto-tranny should. So how could they make something better? So they tore it down to see if there was anything they could improve. But everything was beautifully designed and machined. Except for one surface on one part, which was a little rough.
So they machined it smooth and reassembled the transmission. And it didn't work at all. That surface was SUPPOSED to be a little rough. B-)
- - - -
Now personally, as much as I'd like to see a working reactionless electronic thruster, I'm not holding my breath waiting for a violation of the law of conservation of momentum. But it would be nice if something DID show up that worked.
So, where does the force come from? The Earthâ(TM)s magnetic field, most likely. The cables that carry the current to the microwave amplifier run along the arm of the torsion bar. Although the cable is shielded, it is not perfect (because the researchers did not have enough mu metal).
Also: What's wrong with using twisted pair? The individual half-twists may interact with a DC magnetic field, but on the average across a twist they cancel out.
This has been used since at least the early days of telephony (where they used twisted pair - with the wires occasionally swapped as they go from pole to pole - not just to cancel out coupling to electrical noise from lots of sources (including power lines) but also - with different rates of twist on different pair and phantom-group - to cancel it out between different lines running along the same poles.
Just like the four pair in your cat-N Ethernet cable each have a different rate of twist, so their signals stay separate.
- - - -
(I DO like the idea of swapping in the dummy load and seeing whether the thrust disappears. B-) )
It's the field being created by the planetary body we call Earth. Surprise! No one has ever tested an EM Drive beyond the influence of Earth. If they had, its efficacy would have quickly been dis-proven.
Good grief.
If it's the Earth's field, put the device inside a pair of helmholtz coils (or the slightly more complex coil systems that can smooth out the residual ripples further). Give them enough current to cancel the Earth's field and, if the gadget is getting its thrust from this interaction, the thrust will stop. Give them twice that, reversing the field, and the thrust will be in the opposite direction.
I thought this test had already been done, by pretty much everybody including NASA.
In part due to the rapid reproduction cycle, and in part because viruses lack the DNA repair mechanisms that more advanced species have.
And in part because when a host is simultaneously infected with two related viruses, the processes called "reassortment" can produce a new virus with genetic material from both "parent" strains. If the combination is, say, a particularly virulent toxin or toxic effect from one parent and an infection protein or protein-network component(s) that enable(s) infection of human tissue from another, a nasty pathogen of non-humans begets a nasty pathogen of humans.
This is particularly true in the case of influenza, which already has its (RNA) genome divided into eight chromosome-like chunks, making the mix-and-match easy and commo when two strains of flu encounter each other.
Megan Brennan has skin in the game, too. She's also a party to the same deal.
Given that she's expected to have the Post Office's welfare at heart I'd be more impressed by her statements. But I'd prefer an analysis by someone who's not one of the players.
Though I have no indication that Megan has any conflict of interests or is in any way corrupt, a multi-billionaire is in a position to deliver a LOT of incentives. So I'd like to hear an analysis by a less interested party.
BUT
You're totally misconstruing my original statement. "The Postmaster General says ..." is one thing. "Jeff Bezos' newspaper says the Postmater General says ..." is very much another. It's the latter I'm addressing.
We have no idea how sentience arises, none whatsoever. The idiots who claim its from some complexity level are wrong.
Maybe not. But I recall hearing of an experiment, decades ago, that hinted at it:
The basic setup was a "Y" maze: The experimental subject was introduced into one of the three legs of the Y, and a food reward was present in another. Reset and repeat.
After the subject learned that it should turn right at the junction to obtain the food, the setup was switched so it had to turn left - a "reversal". Once it had learned the food was now on the left, it would be reversed again. Repeat.
1) Run the maze with a particular breed of fish. After the reversal it takes a number of tries before the fish unlearns "right" and learns "left". Reverse again, it takes about the same number of tries. Reverse over and over, and it keeps on taking about the same number of tries to unlearn/relearn the new state of the maze.
2) Run the maze with a particular breed of turtle, which has about twice the amount of brain as the fish. At first it unlearns/relearns like the fish. But after a number of reversals it "gets it" and it only takes a couple of trials to figure out that the maze had been switched again.
3) (Here's the kicker.) Take embryos of the fish. At an early stage of development, remove the tissue that would become the brain from one and transplant it into another, along with the tissue that's already there. The embryo grows up into an otherwise normal fish with a normally-organized but double-sized brain - i.e. a brain the size of the turtle's. Run this fish in the maze and it learns reversals, just like the turtle.
This suggests to me that "intelligence" - or at least this inferring-things aspect of it - may be the result of having enough of a repeating structure to process a problem, and adding more repeats of that structure increases the complexity of the problems that can be handled.
Kinda like folks who worship guns who think that owning guns lowers crime. Or that more guns mean less violence when the evidence available points to the opposite conclusion.
Except that the evidence was collected and analyzed, and it showed that more guns DOES mean drastically less violence (and even more so: Less violence perpetrated on innocent victims) and drastically lower crime rates.
And it wasn't just correlation, or a back-arrow of "gun control laws are passed where crime is high". Gun law changes were followed by the predicted changes in violence, injury, death, crime, and victimization.
The relevant field is criminology. (Not, for instance, medical research or political ideology.) Lots of data and analysis there, including the seminal works that detected things like:
- privately-owned guns being used to stop crimes more than six times as often as to commit them,
- armed citizens being MORE than six times as safe, and as law-abiding, as police, (If you wait for a CCW holder to commit a crime, on the average you'll wait over seven thousand years)
- defence-with-gun being the ONLY strategy that REDUCES risk of injury or death for a crime victim below that of knuckling under (which is one-in-three you get hurt bad), etc.
I, and others, could give LOTS of examples of where evidence shows this. But you made a gratuitous claim that the evidence shows otherwise, without bothering to provide any support. "Gratuitous claims can be gratuitously denied." So I won't bother, either.
North Korea is a special case.
As I understand it, since the Korean "police action" (a.k.a. "Korean War"), North Korea has had continuous WW II-style, nighttime blackouts (for fear of bombing and/or to keep the population propagandized about external threats.)
So, though they may actually have a low GDP, it may not be a horribly low as the "night lighing => GDP" measure would make it seem.
(I recall, a few years back, the publication of satellite imagery of the Korea-halves, with North Korea almost as dark as an uninhabited wasteland. The caption/story also suggested that this was a sign of how "benighted" the North Korean economy had become. So that was in the back of my mind when, recently, the newsies mentioned that the North was doing blackouts. "AHA!" sez I. "That light thing is probably a bogus overstatement." So here it comes around again.)
Still got SystemD ...
And that means support for the last non-systemd LTS will expire while all the remaining supported LTSes use systemd (or at least use it by default).
Which means I can't stay with Ubuntu, and have to migrate, to avoid systemd.
It's been a nice ride, guys. Thanks. But goodbye/
So:
- Trump says the Post Office is giving Amazon (owned by Jeff Bezos) a couple bucks of subsidies per package and orders the Post Office to readjust their special deal.
- The Washington Post (owned by Jeff Bezos) runs an article flaming Trump and making several claims - such as that the deal is good for the Post Office, Trump's underlings are fighting back, yadda yadda yadda.
I trust nobody will be surprised if I take the Post article's claims with a grain (or a 50-pound block) of salt at this point, at least until I see an analysis of Amazon's deal from something other than a newspaper owned byAmazon's founder and bought with part of the billions of dollars he made off Amazon.
Maybe it IS a good deal for the post office. But let's see that from someone without skin in the game.
You people know you can change trackpad settings so that clicking requires pushing, double tapping, etc., right?
I could rewrite the whole opsystem if I felt like it (and had several lifetimes in a no-time-passes-in-the-main-timeline siding to do it on.
If such configuration is already available it's not exported to the stock GUI configuration tool, When that happens I usually don't dig for some other configuration tuner - because that usually turns the stock tuner into "open it and the option it didsn't know about goes away" or "touch the config with the stock tool and the device breaks"
I'm assuming the spellchecker flagged it, but the poster assumed it was exactly the false positive they were complaining about?
Yep. ("fossilise". Egad, it got it right!)
(The keyboard and trackpad on this machine is why I plan never to buy another Lenovo. It keeps jumping the cursor on my while I'm typing and I don't always catch and fix the resulting havoc.)
Some spell checkers... suck worse at spelling than students, though.
Most of the awful spelling checker issues I've encountered is British Isles dictionary entries that still seem to be used despite configuring for American English.
But this was Scotland, on the British Isles, ruled by the British Monarch, a central part of the British Commonwealth / Empire. (I'm not sure how close its standard spellings are to those of England, but I bet if they're not virtually identical they're closer than either to American English, with over two centuries of divergence.
Yo. Dudes! We split from the British Empire before dictionaries and were invented and standardized spelling began to be promoted - with one of our revolutionaries (Daniel Webster) instrumental in both. Our "standard" (east-coast elite imposed or otherwise) spelling(s) is/are different from those on the other side of "the pond".
Over here it's "color", not "colour", "honor", not "honour", follilize, not fossilise (and lots of other -ize vs. -ise endings), and so on.
So why do the spelling checkers (for instance, in Firefox on Ubuntu) gripe about the American English spellings despite all the language settings being set to American, rather than British Empire, English?
The rest is wasted on an insane number of golf courses.
Actually, golf courses are going out of fashion and out of business (or just "closed" in the case of government-owned ones) in California.
Newer generations mostly aren't taking up golf and older ones are finding other things to do or just getting too old to enjoy it. Meanwhile the cost of water (for the horribly thirsty institutions) has skyrocketed and regulatory bodies are rejecting applications when misguided city councils or developers try to install one, rather than, say, parks with low-water landscaping) to fill their "open space" requirements.
We have a shortage of available energy. Desalinating seawater is proven technology.
But as the plume from Fukishima arrives on the west coast of North America, it will have to be RE proven - to show it can also adequately remove radioactive particles.
Especially long-lived isotopes and/or those that embed themselves in sensitive areas and processes (such as long-lived Strontium 90, which substitutes for calcium, embeds in bones, and irradiates the blood-making tissue that is normally protected by its surroundings, or short-lived radio iodine, which both produces birth defects and concentrates in the thyroid and provokes things like the auto-immune diseases Hashimoto's (where the gland is destroyed) or Graves (where the antibody triggers a receptor, turning thyroid hormone output full-on and provoking the thyroid to grow and produce still more).
Desalinazation probably can also remove such stuff. But it might require tweaks, and additional expense, to go to very low levels on these extra, problem, "salts".
They've got the grand total of 14 years data and they're drawing possible conclusions about "climate change"?
Humans prefer stories where things that happen have a cause, and where their own species is important.
(I saw a better worded version of that recently and would quote it exactly and credit it, rather than paraphrasing it, if I could find it just now.)
Sure people move water around. They've been doing that since the dawn of civilization - both to raise more food and to stabilize empires by creating drought in rebellious provinces.
But assuming the changes you see over the first few seasons of a new type of observation are all human caused (rather than, for instance, random, part of weather systems, caused by other animals {like beaver dams or the Elephant/Rhino/Hippo cycle}, etc.) smells of both hubris and alarmism. Exceptional claims require exceptional evidence.
The truck industry has *long* done stunts like this to 'prove' how much better than their ratings they are.
Towing enormous loads from a dead stop (on a level surface) is much easier with an electric motor drive vehicle than with one powered by a combustion engine.
An electric motor (absent some pathology in the power supply to it) produces maximum torque at stall. This is ideal for gradually accelerating enormous weights on low-friction level surfaces. (Also great for sprint races, and getting started from a dead stop in general.)
An internal combustion engine has no torque at its output shaft if it's not running. You need some mechanism for driving the stopped wheels from the must-keep-turning engine.
Clutches are a friction brake (with a SMALL length of of spring, so you can recycle most of the energy initially lost to pushing torque through a shaft-speed difference IF you get moving right away.) Try to tow an enormous weight from dead-stop and most of the energy goes to heat the clutch - which quickly fries unless you only engage it in pulses.
Transmissions with torque converters are better. But get moving quickly (in a very low gear, because much of that energy is still turning into heat in the transmission fluid.
Electric motors make heat, too. But only in proportion to the (square of) the torque they produce. So it's the same heat they'd make if they were accelerating the car with the same torque, which they're able to dump quite nicely. Also: They aren't stuck absorbing a LARGE amount of heat because of the minimum speed of the engine shaft. Their controller can apply enough current to get the torque, but this results in much lower voltage (and thus much less total energy) when they're not turning (no back-EMF from the moving motor also acting like a generator to oppose the incoming current). So max torque and only enough HP/watts to produce it.