"Radiation is good for you" That's what Ann Coulter says and I believe her. I rilly do.
Actually (presuming your genetics is typical of the population and you don't already live on a high mountain, in an otherwise high radiation area, or spend much of your time on airliners in flight), a low level of additional ionizing radiation IS good for you.
(Not pulses, like chest X-rays or radiation therapy, though. And not high levels of bio-binding or concentrated particulate radioactive material, like radio-iodine from being downwind of the Hanford experiment, generalized nuclear fallout from atmospheric tests, battles, or reactor accidents, strontium-90 from dirty bombs, etc. Low, constant, somewhat-raised background is the ticket.)
This was discovered in the early atomic era: The medicos were looking for an increased cancer risk among the people living in Denver and other places with higher background radiation (from altitude and cosmic radiation, or local low-level radiation from minerals like granite). But they found lower risk instead. WTF?
Turns out that ionizing radiation creates free radicals in your cells. These aren't the ONLY way it damages DNA, but it's a major one. And your cell's metabolism puts out a LOT MORE free radicals than the background radiation does.
Your cells also make free radical detoxifying compounds (and DNA repair cellular gadgetry). But it's expensive in nutritional energy and components. So over evolutionary time cells made a tradeoff, buiding a feed-forward mechanism to adjust the amount of block-it/fix-it molecule production according to the level of nastiness, to save the valuable resources for other aspects of staying alive.
People in the first and second world generally don't have any problem getting enough food energy and nutritional components. (Quite the opposite, in fact, as the fad diet industry will attest.) But they still have this conservative "thermostat" adjusting the "air condidtioner".
But it happens that (until the level is high enough to start saturating the mechanism at the high end), raising the background radiation from what's typical raises the protective-molecule production by MORE than the amount needed to compensate for the added radiation. Like turning on a heater under the air-conditioner thermostat leading to the apartment getting colder, the extra background radiation provokes extra protection that blocks MORE damage from other sources than the radiation itself adds. There's a net improvement.
... things become obvious in hindsight, and we tend to forget they really weren't so obvious before the fact. If the idea / process / procedure hadn't been implemented yet, in spite of the tech required having been available for quite some time, then was it really obvious?
Story told me by a patent attorney when I was applying for one. (I say this because I didn't look it up myself.):
He said the classic case of inventions only being obvious in hidnsight was a challenge to the patent on the Ray-o-Vac "leakproof" "sealed-in-steel" battery (a classic carbon-zinc dry cell).
Such cells consists of some variant of this: a zinc cup (the negative electrode), containing a corrosive paste (which either IS the positive electrode or contains it (i.e. manganese dioxide) at its center) and a carbon electrode to contact the electrode to provide the positive terminal. Early "dry cells" were capped with things such as asphalt and wrapped with a printed carbon label.
The corrosive pastet eating the zinc cup was what powered the cell. So before it was actually dead the corrosive would have eaten a hole in it, wetted the cardboard, and started eating the flashlight or whatever. (Assuming swelling of the internal components didn't rupture the zinc cup first, with the same result.)
Needless to say this didn't make users happy. So the various battery companies did a bunch of research to try to design a variant that didn't do this. For years.
Story goes that one of the researchers came home really depressed one day and his wife asked what was the problem. So he explained it. Says she (while opening a can of soup, as the story goes): "Why don't you seal it in a steel can?"
Thus (with the addition of composition changes to avoid swelling enough to burst the can) was born the sealed in steel leakproof dry cell.
Of course Union Carbide (Everready) challenged the patent as obvious. "Oh?" says the judge. Turning to the Ray-o-Vac folk he asks: "How long did you work on this problem before you though of the can? How many engineers worked on it? How much did you spend?" Turning back to the Union Carbide guys he asks them the same thing. Answers: Years of work, lots of guys, lots of bux. "It's only obvious in hindsight. Rule for the defendant."
why is it someone invents a miracle drug... and then you never hear about it again
Because you hear about it when it's discovered, which is years before it's approved and goes into use - IF it looks good enough that somebody is going to drop tens of millions on getting it approved and IF it passes all the hurdles, like really doing what it looked like in the lab, and not giving you cancer, making your nose fall off, or your kids be born with no arms or legs.
They're going to basically spend all this money paying for power from "renewable" sources. Yet, in all likelihood, they're going to be delivered locally generated power from nuclear sources.
When the energy from renewable sources and nuclear reactors go into the same grid, how do you identify which energy was pulled out?
The Sierra Club, these days, seems to be an agent of land developers. (Whether wittingly or unwittingly, and whatever they might have been long ago, is immaterial.)
As of a few years back, when my wife checked their government-mandated public records, more than half their donations came from developers.
The algorithm seemd to be:
1. Developers contribute to the Sierra Club
2. The Sierra Club harasses and sues a farmer. The farmer adjusts the drainage on a spot that puddles in the rainy season, ending an infestation of disease-carrying mosquitoes? Sue him for "destroying wetlands". Some rare animal happens to nest on his property (typically on some area he doesn't disturb, such as the strip around a field boundary or a drainage ditch), sue him to "protect the endangered species". Block him from building a new shed, using the middle of his land or crossing it with farm equipment, etc. 3. The farmer's operation becomes unprofitable. 4. Now that the farmer's been driven out of business, he sells his land to a developer. 5. The developer builds a subdivision of pricey houses on the site. Goodbye intermittent swamp. Goodbye large areas congenial to the endangered critter. (The developer may make a show of leaving an inadequate patch as critter habitat, but the critter won't be there next year.) 6. The Sierra Club DOESN'T sue their donor. 7. PROFIT!
according to the first global scientific review... More than 40% of insect species are declining
If the populations were static, there was nonzero sampling error in the data (so you almost never get EXACTLY the same numbers twice in a row), and you define "decline" as lower this measurement than last, the expectation is that just under half the species would show a "decline". Similarly, just under half would be expected to show an "increase" the few species showing "stability" by jackpotting two identical population measurementes in a row account for the shortfall from 100% total.
"More than 40%" sounds enough less that 50% that there might be a real problem: An insect population explosion.... and a third are endangered,
I thought "endangered" was a legal designation, which required a declaration by a bureaucracy after considerable data collection deliberation. There are a HECK of a lot of insect species. I think the count far exceeds the number of bureaucrats in a position to rule a species "endangered". So how could a third of them have been designated? Or did these guys redefine the term for the purpose of their press release?
This has the smell of yet another chicken-little, panic-the-plebes boost-your-power propaganda operation.
One of the apps, Flikshop, has been affectionately dubbed the "Instagram for prisons."
Filk music, in the person of its writers, performers, and fans, says "Ouch!"
For those who aren't already aware of it, Filk Music is science-fiction/fantasy inspired folk music. "Folk songs for Folk who Ain't Even Been Yet", to quote the title of one album.
(I actually wrote a couple, and got paid for recording one. Little enough, though, that I kept the check as a souvenir rather than cashing it.)
I don't know how long it's been around, but it was already long-standing when I went to my first worldcon - Torcon II in 1973.
Naming a prison conferencing application "Filkshop" will likely make new generations of people think it has something to do with crime and convicts when they first encounter it. That's likely to be annoying.
Even if you DO think people who perpetrate such artistic abominations should be thrown in jail. B-)
Tesla Powerpack systems consisting of 'a 210 kW battery system with roughly 350 kWh of capacity' at over 100 charging stations
So the Powerpack system can be charged/discharged at an average of 0.6 C (Full to empty or vice versa in 1 hour 40 minutes.) Not too shabby.
Also means it's not going to lose much per cycle, either. Losing 10% would have it dissipating 21 kW as waste heat, so expect it to be far better than that.
... what people will pay for [bitcoin] is actually less than what people say other people are paying for it.
That's usually true of everything (presuming they're honest).
If they were willing to pay as much as or more than something is currently selling for, they wouldn't be talking - ESPECIALLY talking up the price. They'd be buying some more. They'd keep buying until they're out of loose cash or it's gone above what they're willing to pay for it again. Then they might answer some more questions. B-)
Everything is worth what someone will trade for it. Nothing more or less.
Some kinds of money-like commodities have some inherent desirability factor. For instance, gold is pretty and can be used to make lots of desirable stuff: Jewelry, electrical connectors that don't corrode,...
The only such factor for Bitcoin is that it's hard, progressively harder with time, and eventually impossible, to create more and thus dilute the perceived value of what is already being traded.
IMHO the cost of making more rising above the price where it's traded, without substantially increasing the transaction costs of trading it, is likely to make its price rise. Don't be surprised to see its price start tracking the cost of mining.
As my wife was instructed by a doc after several tries with patches: Following the instructions tapers you too fast - like by a factor of two to three. You get withdrawal and give up.
So she followed the doctor's instructions and went through more than one box of step one - until she wasn't feeling withdrawal symptoms - then went to step 2, etc. (There may have been a scheduling tweak in there, with partial overlap and staggered timing of two lower dose tabs to achieve an additional intermediate step.)
This particular app was explicitly created and marketed as "give us your information, we'll pay you for it". This app does NOT violate the user's rights at all.
Apple's terms expressly allow certain use of their Enterprise certificates by developers, everything else not stated in the T&Cs is forbidden. Facebook broke the conditions set out in the T&Cs by distributing the app outside of its employees (not covered by any of the exceptions).
Apple have every right to revoke the app and would be within their rights to terminate the developer full stop (but obviously that won't happen in this case).
The app was deliberately used to grossly violate user's rights. Seems to me that, if Apple does NOT terminate Facebook's license, and Facebook does it again, this could be used to argue that Apple is both civilly (user suits) and criminally (aiding and abetting violation of any of a number of anti-cracking laws) liable.
One problem with a concentrator is that raising the insolation also raises the heating. Solar panels get less efficient as it gets hotter. So doubling or tripling the light hitting it does NOT double or triple the power. But it DOES increase any degradation of the cells.
On the other hand, one of the degradations Arco panels had was a sun-induced darkening of the adhesive between the cells and the glass. The concentrators increased this, too - cutting the already short lifetime in half. This might have been the key driver for the no-concentrators decision. (A better adhesive that didn't discolor over decades was one of the first improvements in solar panels.)
Still, you can do the concentrator thing, at least with panels that track the seasons, with two slanted flat mirrors, and I haven't seen that for decades.
Back in the early days, when Arco was running the test farm for what I think were the first for-the-general-market solar panels (the famous "Arco Panels" of early Renewable Energy hobbiests of the day), one of the things they tried was concentrators.
I think the idea was to see of they could get away with half the area of (then very expensive) single-crystal cells - and was tested with the same prototype panels with the concentrator . The concentrator sat on the top of of the panel and focused the light that would have hit a whole cell into a square in the center of it, of about half the area.
The result convinced them that they were ahead to just use more then-very-expensive panels. With modern dirt-cheap high-efficiency panels, I'd expect the economics would be even more weighted toward the just-panels solution. So this guy has a steeper hill to climb.
One problem with a concentrator is that raising the insolation also raises the heating. Solar panels get less efficient as it gets hotter. So doubling or tripling the light hitting it does NOT double or triple the power. But it DOES increase any degradation of the cells.
They never believed it - neither the ones that claim to nor the ones that claim not to.
If those who claimed to believe it really did believe it, they'd be working to abort pro-natalist policies, which raise the world population (creating more users of fossil-fuel energy) and other policies that move people to places with higher standards of living (where each uses far more energy and fossil-fuels).
Instead they're encouraging the migration of masses of low-income voters from Mexico, and prefer to let part of the government be shut down for months to allowing a wall be built to slow them. And the biggest "educator"/propagandist for the global warming claim is a billionaire from an oil-rich family who made more on his own by starting a "carbon credit exchange", taking a percentage of the added costs to global businesses imposed by the new anti-carbon laws he helped pass.
Those who claim not to believe it say it's a massive power grab that hurts their constituents, donors, and own pocketbooks.
Meanwhile, among the general public, since scientific research has become attached to moral claims, power politics, and enormous economic gains and lossess, real believers and real skeptics will not believe any further research supporting the other's view. The skeptics have seen enough fudged data, peer-review capture, and selective funding of doom-finders by the powers-that-be with more power to be gained, that they don't believe any research or analysis suggesting ever-increasing doom scenarios. The believers reject any research or analysis suggesting the problem may not be as big as claimed, or exist at all, or even be headed in the opposite direction.
The issue has become a shibboleth - a group identifier and virtue signal. Nobody will be convinced by more science, because with the claims that it's "settled" they can't separate real science from fake science well enough to trust it to change their current ideas.
So we won't find out whether it's right until it happens.
A pity, really. If there IS an eco-catastrophe on its way, we'll just have to live through it and patch it after the fact (or die trying), when we MIGHT have done something useful in advance. (On the other hand, if there isn't one coming, maybe we won't impoverish and enslave ourselves making useless motions to solve a non-problem.)
You'll notice that, though broadcast AM and FM audio are still with us (though we're starting to convert FM), the big foghorn - television - has already switched from two big carriers (one giant AM with a subcarrier on the modulation, one FM just like an FM radio station) to a digital schemes based on OFDM 8VSB, or the like. Lower power and very noise-like.
So intelligent life might be detectable by radio, not from the rise of technology onward, but only during the century or so between the development of radio and its disappearance into the noise of efficent computation-intensive systems.
This would give the same result as the "intelligence tends to wipe itself out in a century or so" hypothesis, leaving detection dependent on actual space probe visits or deliberate attempts on their part to transmit an identifiable signal.
b) universal distances are vast, and warp drives aren't practical or even possible. As such, other intelligent aliens can't reach us, or even communicate with us.
They don't have to reach us to be detected. There's this thing called "radio" - kind of a low-frequency starlight - which spreads out just like it and is very easy to notice (if not always to decode correctly).
The fermi paradox is based on the idea that intelligent life achieving technology is almost certain to develop and use radio, and that said radio will leak out into the rest of the universe. At the time Fermi proposed it, I hear that our planet emitted more such energy into space in some bands than typical stars.
My personal explanation, if intelligent technological life is reasonably common, is this: As technology advances, modulation schemes such as spread-spectrum and OFDM are developed. These squeeze far more information through a given amount of bandwidth than the blaring foghorns of CW, AM, and FM. But the more bandwidth-efficient the modulation becomes, the closer it approximates pure noise.
You'll notice that, though broadcast AM and FM audio are still with us (though we're starting to convert FM), the big foghorn - television - has already switched from two big carr
The problem with the technology argument above is that if you believe science will advance then it seems likely that the very tools used to get to the stars may be the tools of your destruction.
2. Resolution. I still kinda wish I could have 3d printed something without all the "scan lines"
A couple years ago I saw a 3-D printed part post-treated to deal with that, along with strength issues from the filament passes not fully bounding.
Printer user had post-processed it by exposing it to acetone vapor for a while, then letting the solvent evaporate for a day or so. Used a cheap rice cooker. (OUTDOORS, because, in addition to toxicity issues, generating acetone vapor with a heating appliance indoors is a recipe for a BIG fire if there's a spark.)
If I understand what happened correctly:
- The vapor first penetrated the remaining spaces between the partially fused filaments.
- Then it dissolved into the surface, softening it.
- The filaments then pulled together by capillary attraction (and perhaps also vacuum).
- As this was happening, the remaining acetone dissolved into the filaments, leaving nothing to prevent the gaps from completely disappearing.
The part went from a fragile nest of partially-fused plastic strings to a gorgeous, rock-solid, shaped chunk of the basic plastic, with a mirror finish. Shrank very slightly and sharp edges were slightly rounded, but you can pre-distort to handle that.
Once done you have to let the solvent have plenty of time to diffuse out, or assembling the pieces may cause them to bond.
The material was black and I think it was ABS. I'm not doing 3-D printing so I don't have personal experience, but you should be able to find instructions and details (like timing and what material works) on the web.
Slashdot Mirror
"Radiation is good for you" That's what Ann Coulter says and I believe her. I rilly do.
Actually (presuming your genetics is typical of the population and you don't already live on a high mountain, in an otherwise high radiation area, or spend much of your time on airliners in flight), a low level of additional ionizing radiation IS good for you.
(Not pulses, like chest X-rays or radiation therapy, though. And not high levels of bio-binding or concentrated particulate radioactive material, like radio-iodine from being downwind of the Hanford experiment, generalized nuclear fallout from atmospheric tests, battles, or reactor accidents, strontium-90 from dirty bombs, etc. Low, constant, somewhat-raised background is the ticket.)
This was discovered in the early atomic era: The medicos were looking for an increased cancer risk among the people living in Denver and other places with higher background radiation (from altitude and cosmic radiation, or local low-level radiation from minerals like granite). But they found lower risk instead. WTF?
Turns out that ionizing radiation creates free radicals in your cells. These aren't the ONLY way it damages DNA, but it's a major one. And your cell's metabolism puts out a LOT MORE free radicals than the background radiation does.
Your cells also make free radical detoxifying compounds (and DNA repair cellular gadgetry). But it's expensive in nutritional energy and components. So over evolutionary time cells made a tradeoff, buiding a feed-forward mechanism to adjust the amount of block-it/fix-it molecule production according to the level of nastiness, to save the valuable resources for other aspects of staying alive.
People in the first and second world generally don't have any problem getting enough food energy and nutritional components. (Quite the opposite, in fact, as the fad diet industry will attest.) But they still have this conservative "thermostat" adjusting the "air condidtioner".
But it happens that (until the level is high enough to start saturating the mechanism at the high end), raising the background radiation from what's typical raises the protective-molecule production by MORE than the amount needed to compensate for the added radiation. Like turning on a heater under the air-conditioner thermostat leading to the apartment getting colder, the extra background radiation provokes extra protection that blocks MORE damage from other sources than the radiation itself adds. There's a net improvement.
... things become obvious in hindsight, and we tend to forget they really weren't so obvious before the fact. If the idea / process / procedure hadn't been implemented yet, in spite of the tech required having been available for quite some time, then was it really obvious?
Story told me by a patent attorney when I was applying for one. (I say this because I didn't look it up myself.):
He said the classic case of inventions only being obvious in hidnsight was a challenge to the patent on the
Ray-o-Vac "leakproof" "sealed-in-steel" battery (a classic carbon-zinc dry cell).
Such cells consists of some variant of this: a zinc cup (the negative electrode), containing a corrosive paste (which either IS the positive electrode or contains it (i.e. manganese dioxide) at its center) and a carbon electrode to contact the electrode to provide the positive terminal. Early "dry cells" were capped with things such as asphalt and wrapped with a printed carbon label.
The corrosive pastet eating the zinc cup was what powered the cell. So before it was actually dead the corrosive would have eaten a hole in it, wetted the cardboard, and started eating the flashlight or whatever. (Assuming swelling of the internal components didn't rupture the zinc cup first, with the same result.)
Needless to say this didn't make users happy. So the various battery companies did a bunch of research to try to design a variant that didn't do this. For years.
Story goes that one of the researchers came home really depressed one day and his wife asked what was the problem. So he explained it. Says she (while opening a can of soup, as the story goes): "Why don't you seal it in a steel can?"
Thus (with the addition of composition changes to avoid swelling enough to burst the can) was born the sealed in steel leakproof dry cell.
Of course Union Carbide (Everready) challenged the patent as obvious. "Oh?" says the judge. Turning to the Ray-o-Vac folk he asks: "How long did you work on this problem before you though of the can? How many engineers worked on it? How much did you spend?" Turning back to the Union Carbide guys he asks them the same thing. Answers: Years of work, lots of guys, lots of bux. "It's only obvious in hindsight. Rule for the defendant."
why is it someone invents a miracle drug ... and then you never hear about it again
Because you hear about it when it's discovered, which is years before it's approved and goes into use - IF it looks good enough that somebody is going to drop tens of millions on getting it approved and IF it passes all the hurdles, like really doing what it looked like in the lab, and not giving you cancer, making your nose fall off, or your kids be born with no arms or legs.
Wait. Cops are allowed to take steroids?
Who is going to bust them for it?
Looks like somebody at NASA has been reading "A Little Oil" by Eric Frank Russel.
Can you look inwards too? i.e. towards that inner solid earths core?
You can't NOT look inwards. B-)
They're going to basically spend all this money paying for power from "renewable" sources.
Yet, in all likelihood, they're going to be delivered locally generated power from nuclear sources.
When the energy from renewable sources and nuclear reactors go into the same grid, how do you identify which energy was pulled out?
The Sierra Club, these days, seems to be an agent of land developers. (Whether wittingly or unwittingly, and whatever they might have been long ago, is immaterial.)
As of a few years back, when my wife checked their government-mandated public records, more than half their donations came from developers.
The algorithm seemd to be:
1. Developers contribute to the Sierra Club
2. The Sierra Club harasses and sues a farmer. The farmer adjusts the drainage on a spot that puddles in the rainy season, ending an infestation of disease-carrying mosquitoes? Sue him for "destroying wetlands". Some rare animal happens to nest on his property (typically on some area he doesn't disturb, such as the strip around a field boundary or a drainage ditch), sue him to "protect the endangered species". Block him from building a new shed, using the middle of his land or crossing it with farm equipment, etc.
3. The farmer's operation becomes unprofitable.
4. Now that the farmer's been driven out of business, he sells his land to a developer.
5. The developer builds a subdivision of pricey houses on the site. Goodbye intermittent swamp. Goodbye large areas congenial to the endangered critter. (The developer may make a show of leaving an inadequate patch as critter habitat, but the critter won't be there next year.)
6. The Sierra Club DOESN'T sue their donor.
7. PROFIT!
according to the first global scientific review ... More than 40% of insect species are declining
If the populations were static, there was nonzero sampling error in the data (so you almost never get EXACTLY the same numbers twice in a row), and you define "decline" as lower this measurement than last, the expectation is that just under half the species would show a "decline". Similarly, just under half would be expected to show an "increase" the few species showing "stability" by jackpotting two identical population measurementes in a row account for the shortfall from 100% total.
"More than 40%" sounds enough less that 50% that there might be a real problem: An insect population explosion. ... and a third are endangered,
I thought "endangered" was a legal designation, which required a declaration by a bureaucracy after considerable data collection deliberation. There are a HECK of a lot of insect species. I think the count far exceeds the number of bureaucrats in a position to rule a species "endangered". So how could a third of them have been designated? Or did these guys redefine the term for the purpose of their press release?
This has the smell of yet another chicken-little, panic-the-plebes boost-your-power propaganda operation.
One of the apps, Flikshop, has been affectionately dubbed the "Instagram for prisons."
Filk music, in the person of its writers, performers, and fans, says "Ouch!"
For those who aren't already aware of it, Filk Music is science-fiction/fantasy inspired folk music. "Folk songs for Folk who Ain't Even Been Yet", to quote the title of one album.
(I actually wrote a couple, and got paid for recording one. Little enough, though, that I kept the check as a souvenir rather than cashing it.)
I don't know how long it's been around, but it was already long-standing when I went to my first worldcon - Torcon II in 1973.
Naming a prison conferencing application "Filkshop" will likely make new generations of people think it has something to do with crime and convicts when they first encounter it. That's likely to be annoying.
Even if you DO think people who perpetrate such artistic abominations should be thrown in jail. B-)
Law of thermo-dynamics applies to all ... Read any? Try it. It's fudruckers like you that shame the great times we live in.
You really don't understand what I was talking about, do you?
Tesla Powerpack systems consisting of 'a 210 kW battery system with roughly 350 kWh of capacity' at over 100 charging stations
So the Powerpack system can be charged/discharged at an average of 0.6 C (Full to empty or vice versa in 1 hour 40 minutes.) Not too shabby.
Also means it's not going to lose much per cycle, either. Losing 10% would have it dissipating 21 kW as waste heat, so expect it to be far better than that.
... what people will pay for [bitcoin] is actually less than what people say other people are paying for it.
That's usually true of everything (presuming they're honest).
If they were willing to pay as much as or more than something is currently selling for, they wouldn't be talking - ESPECIALLY talking up the price. They'd be buying some more. They'd keep buying until they're out of loose cash or it's gone above what they're willing to pay for it again. Then they might answer some more questions. B-)
"*Bitcoin Is Worthless "
Everything is worth what someone will trade for it. Nothing more or less.
Some kinds of money-like commodities have some inherent desirability factor. For instance, gold is pretty and can be used to make lots of desirable stuff: Jewelry, electrical connectors that don't corrode, ...
The only such factor for Bitcoin is that it's hard, progressively harder with time, and eventually impossible, to create more and thus dilute the perceived value of what is already being traded.
IMHO the cost of making more rising above the price where it's traded, without substantially increasing the transaction costs of trading it, is likely to make its price rise. Don't be surprised to see its price start tracking the cost of mining.
As my wife was instructed by a doc after several tries with patches: Following the instructions tapers you too fast - like by a factor of two to three. You get withdrawal and give up.
So she followed the doctor's instructions and went through more than one box of step one - until she wasn't feeling withdrawal symptoms - then went to step 2, etc. (There may have been a scheduling tweak in there, with partial overlap and staggered timing of two lower dose tabs to achieve an additional intermediate step.)
She's been smoke free now for several years.
This particular app was explicitly created and marketed as "give us your information, we'll pay you for it". This app does NOT violate the user's rights at all.
Agreed.
Apple's terms expressly allow certain use of their Enterprise certificates by developers, everything else not stated in the T&Cs is forbidden. Facebook broke the conditions set out in the T&Cs by distributing the app outside of its employees (not covered by any of the exceptions).
Apple have every right to revoke the app and would be within their rights to terminate the developer full stop (but obviously that won't happen in this case).
The app was deliberately used to grossly violate user's rights. Seems to me that, if Apple does NOT terminate Facebook's license, and Facebook does it again, this could be used to argue that Apple is both civilly (user suits) and criminally (aiding and abetting violation of any of a number of anti-cracking laws) liable.
One problem with a concentrator is that raising the insolation also raises the heating. Solar panels get less efficient as it gets hotter. So doubling or tripling the light hitting it does NOT double or triple the power. But it DOES increase any degradation of the cells.
On the other hand, one of the degradations Arco panels had was a sun-induced darkening of the adhesive between the cells and the glass. The concentrators increased this, too - cutting the already short lifetime in half. This might have been the key driver for the no-concentrators decision. (A better adhesive that didn't discolor over decades was one of the first improvements in solar panels.)
Still, you can do the concentrator thing, at least with panels that track the seasons, with two slanted flat mirrors, and I haven't seen that for decades.
Back in the early days, when Arco was running the test farm for what I think were the first for-the-general-market solar panels (the famous "Arco Panels" of early Renewable Energy hobbiests of the day), one of the things they tried was concentrators.
I think the idea was to see of they could get away with half the area of (then very expensive) single-crystal cells - and was tested with the same prototype panels with the concentrator . The concentrator sat on the top of of the panel and focused the light that would have hit a whole cell into a square in the center of it, of about half the area.
The result convinced them that they were ahead to just use more then-very-expensive panels. With modern dirt-cheap high-efficiency panels, I'd expect the economics would be even more weighted toward the just-panels solution. So this guy has a steeper hill to climb.
One problem with a concentrator is that raising the insolation also raises the heating. Solar panels get less efficient as it gets hotter. So doubling or tripling the light hitting it does NOT double or triple the power. But it DOES increase any degradation of the cells.
They never believed it - neither the ones that claim to nor the ones that claim not to.
If those who claimed to believe it really did believe it, they'd be working to abort pro-natalist policies, which raise the world population (creating more users of fossil-fuel energy) and other policies that move people to places with higher standards of living (where each uses far more energy and fossil-fuels).
Instead they're encouraging the migration of masses of low-income voters from Mexico, and prefer to let part of the government be shut down for months to allowing a wall be built to slow them. And the biggest "educator"/propagandist for the global warming claim is a billionaire from an oil-rich family who made more on his own by starting a "carbon credit exchange", taking a percentage of the added costs to global businesses imposed by the new anti-carbon laws he helped pass.
Those who claim not to believe it say it's a massive power grab that hurts their constituents, donors, and own pocketbooks.
Meanwhile, among the general public, since scientific research has become attached to moral claims, power politics, and enormous economic gains and lossess, real believers and real skeptics will not believe any further research supporting the other's view. The skeptics have seen enough fudged data, peer-review capture, and selective funding of doom-finders by the powers-that-be with more power to be gained, that they don't believe any research or analysis suggesting ever-increasing doom scenarios. The believers reject any research or analysis suggesting the problem may not be as big as claimed, or exist at all, or even be headed in the opposite direction.
The issue has become a shibboleth - a group identifier and virtue signal. Nobody will be convinced by more science, because with the claims that it's "settled" they can't separate real science from fake science well enough to trust it to change their current ideas.
So we won't find out whether it's right until it happens.
A pity, really. If there IS an eco-catastrophe on its way, we'll just have to live through it and patch it after the fact (or die trying), when we MIGHT have done something useful in advance. (On the other hand, if there isn't one coming, maybe we won't impoverish and enslave ourselves making useless motions to solve a non-problem.)
You'll notice that, though broadcast AM and FM audio are still with us (though we're starting to convert FM), the big foghorn - television - has already switched from two big carriers (one giant AM with a subcarrier on the modulation, one FM just like an FM radio station) to a digital schemes based on OFDM 8VSB, or the like. Lower power and very noise-like.
So intelligent life might be detectable by radio, not from the rise of technology onward, but only during the century or so between the development of radio and its disappearance into the noise of efficent computation-intensive systems.
This would give the same result as the "intelligence tends to wipe itself out in a century or so" hypothesis, leaving detection dependent on actual space probe visits or deliberate attempts on their part to transmit an identifiable signal.
b) universal distances are vast, and warp drives aren't practical or even possible. As such, other intelligent aliens can't reach us, or even communicate with us.
They don't have to reach us to be detected. There's this thing called "radio" - kind of a low-frequency starlight - which spreads out just like it and is very easy to notice (if not always to decode correctly).
The fermi paradox is based on the idea that intelligent life achieving technology is almost certain to develop and use radio, and that said radio will leak out into the rest of the universe. At the time Fermi proposed it, I hear that our planet emitted more such energy into space in some bands than typical stars.
My personal explanation, if intelligent technological life is reasonably common, is this: As technology advances, modulation schemes such as spread-spectrum and OFDM are developed. These squeeze far more information through a given amount of bandwidth than the blaring foghorns of CW, AM, and FM. But the more bandwidth-efficient the modulation becomes, the closer it approximates pure noise.
You'll notice that, though broadcast AM and FM audio are still with us (though we're starting to convert FM), the big foghorn - television - has already switched from two big carr
The problem with the technology argument above is that if you believe science will advance then it seems likely that the very tools used to get to the stars may be the tools of your destruction.
That's true of ALL tools.
If such collisions are rare, a possible explanation for the Fermi paradox is that life is so rare that we may be the firsrt.
No need for things like intelligence almost always self-destroys, etc.
2. Resolution. I still kinda wish I could have 3d printed something without all the "scan lines"
A couple years ago I saw a 3-D printed part post-treated to deal with that, along with strength issues from the filament passes not fully bounding.
Printer user had post-processed it by exposing it to acetone vapor for a while, then letting the solvent evaporate for a day or so. Used a cheap rice cooker. (OUTDOORS, because, in addition to toxicity issues, generating acetone vapor with a heating appliance indoors is a recipe for a BIG fire if there's a spark.)
If I understand what happened correctly:
- The vapor first penetrated the remaining spaces between the partially fused filaments.
- Then it dissolved into the surface, softening it.
- The filaments then pulled together by capillary attraction (and perhaps also vacuum).
- As this was happening, the remaining acetone dissolved into the filaments, leaving nothing to prevent the gaps from completely disappearing.
The part went from a fragile nest of partially-fused plastic strings to a gorgeous, rock-solid, shaped chunk of the basic plastic, with a mirror finish. Shrank very slightly and sharp edges were slightly rounded, but you can pre-distort to handle that.
Once done you have to let the solvent have plenty of time to diffuse out, or assembling the pieces may cause them to bond.
The material was black and I think it was ABS. I'm not doing 3-D printing so I don't have personal experience, but you should be able to find instructions and details (like timing and what material works) on the web.