Generally the sites where wasps (especially the exceptionally common paper wasp) build their nests are not attractive nesting sites for any kind of bee, so the collateral damage is generally pretty low.
Wish that were completely true.
The sites that are good for artificial homes for mason bees, leaf-cutter bees, and several other solitary (non-hive-living) bee types (under overhangs for rain shelter, east-side for quick wake-up/warm-up at dawn) are also the preferred sites for many kinds of wasps. (The bees also prefer natural holes in the same sort of location, for the same reason it's good for artificial homes.)
Also: Some of the small wasps that prey on these bees like the same sized hole, though whether this is for their own nest or because they know where to hunt is not clear to me.
Being able to process English would be a great thing for the fake news editors to handle first. MIT spinout, really?
That's perfectly normal American English Technobabble and has been since the mid 1960s. (I personally encountered it quite a lot, especially with respect to the substantial collection of laser and holographic spinouts from the University of Michigan.)
These days "startup" is more common. But "spinout" is both still valid and more specific, as it identifies implies a single institutional source of the founding technology and bulk of the founding personnel (usually identified in the sentence as a "from Foo" modifier). "Startups" may also be born by aggregation, while "spinouts" bud from an ongoing institution, typically when there's something to be commercialized that isn't a good fit with the parent institution's ongoing mission.
The city's expenditures should be much lower since most car haters suggest a huge portion of city revenue goes to funding cars. If you're correct, the city might be able to eliminate all forms of taxation except sales tax
ORLY? Near the end of the quoted part of TFA we find:
Lores became mayor after 12 years in opposition, and within a month had pedestrianized all 300,000 sq m of the medieval centre, paving the streets with granite flagstones.
That was in 1999. They granite-paved more than 17 square kilometers. Any bets on whether they're still paying it off a generation later? Or how many times they paid for it when you include interest?
If you think t[...] the members of the parliament/senate/population/... reads and understands the legislation they vote on, you are delusional. That's true for EU, USA or any other large body claiming to be a modern democracy.
That's one of the best arguments against both governments containing legislatures and those conducting popular referenda that I have ever seen.
The Anarchist Anti-defamation League, monarchists, theocrats, and dictators of the world all take a break from fighting each other send their thanks.
Also: Sounds like the electrons were far enough apart and unassociated enough with the nearby nuclei that the Pauli-exclusion effects weren't constraining them into particular states - or the states were close enough together to act more like a continuum.
All the known theories of physics predicted that the electrons would adhere to the six-fold underlying pattern, but instead, the electrons hovering above their atoms decided to march to their own drummer -- in a straight line, with two-fold symmetry. The decoupling between the electrons and the arrangement of atoms was surprising enough, but then the researchers applied a magnetic field and discovered that they could turn that one line in any direction they chose. Without moving the crystal lattice, [one] could rotate the line of electrons just by controlling the magnetic field around them.
Sounds classical to me:
- The layout of the substrate produced a planar potential well with no, or very little, difference of energy for electrons being in one position vs. another.
- Provided the average density of the electrons was right, they behaved like a gas of individual particles in a thin container, or marbles on a flat surface.
- The electrons repelled each other, so they tended to spread out evenly. (Spread out too far, though, and they leave some positive-charged substrate behind. So they don't just fly apart and go away.) - But electrons also have spin, which means they are little magnets. So, with their mutual repulsion largely defeated by forces holding them at a given average spacing, they tend to line up north-pole-to-south-pole in strings (but don't all pile up because coming more than a little closer together under the slight magnetic attraction is balanced by higher repulsion.) The strings are a bit more dense than the average gas, so most of the electrons join one and reduce their total energy.
- So now you have these long magnetic strings, with no preferred orientation driven by irregularities in the substrate. Bring a magnet nearby and they'll line up with its field while spacing out by mutual magnetic AND electrostatic repulsion, much like iron filing lines.
Whether its using the full 75kwh or software throttled to 60kwh, its still the same battery and Tesla's manufacturing cost is exactly the same.
But their manufacturing costs are a lot lower if they build a lot of one model than if they design two models, build less of both, and manage more inventory items and assembly combinations. This can be enough to make a big battery pack software-crippled to 4/5ths of its potential capacity be substantially cheaper than building a 4/5th sized one to start with.
It also means that the packs are not discharged as far, which can extend their life and reduce warranty costs.
Still better, it lets them unlock the extra capacity in emergencies and spend a little extra warranty risk to maybe save the lives, families, pets, and valuables of some customers. Even a psychopath can see the financial benefit of keeping some customers alive and happy enough with your product to buy more in the future, even if it costs a few warranty repairs later.
Owners should have complete control of their software/hardware even if it is a car.
Fine, but then they lose battery warranty.
Reminds me of a number of incidents of downselling crippled hardware in the 20th century computer industry. Mainframes that ran with different clock speeds (model differing only by a jumper), for instance. Multi-CPU mainframes where extras served as spares and you paid for a firmware unlock, which paid for their higher risk of running out of spares if something fired and having to actually tear it open and replace a much-of-a-megabuck board.
One was a pair of 1960s IBM low-end page printers that differed only in model markings and firmware-controlled print speed. The faster printer was the same hardware, but all those moving parts wore out a lot more and needed more maintenance.
Apparently, open packages of both Kool-Aid and Flavor Aid were found at the scene of the Jonestown Massacre, though more of the latter than the former.
(I once heard a couple minutes of a tape of one of Jim Jones' rants-on-the-Jonestown-PA-system. It sounded like a sermon straight out of Heinlein's _Stranger in a Strange Land_. Creepy.)
Seeding areas of open ocean with nutrients that promote the rapid growth of sutrface algae has been suggested as a way of sequestering atmospheric and ocean-dissolved CO2.... Suppose we seed with one of the algal species that forms surface mats while it grows,...
While you're at it, how about seeding it with some of the recently discovered bacteria that EAT PLASTIC?
Most plastics are quite a good energy source for anything that can digest them.
Or, better yet, how about transplanting the relevant genes into algae and/or microplankton that live where it accumulates?
Microscopic bits of plastic are a problem because they hang around? Make an appropriately-sized critter for which they're a main dish in a nutritious breakfast, that lives in the places where they end up.
People are pulling out of the market because Elon lies to manipulate shareholders and cost them billions and that has become even more obvious.
I don't have any reason to support Musk, but when flaming him let's at least get it right.
What he's being investigated for is not alleged lying to cost stockholders billions.
What he's being investigated for is alleged lying to cost stock traders - possibly stock manipulators, billions. Stock traders and hypothetical manipulators who DIDN'T own any stock, BORROWED and SOLD a bunch in the expectation that it would drop, some of whom apparently hired, through cutouts, a bunch of trolls to talk the stock down.
So when he said (unfortunately for him, without cutouts) that they might be going private and the stock shot up, the people who sold the borrowed stock were stuck having to buy some back at a HIGHER price than they sold it for (which is what you risk if you sell a stock short), but the people who actually owned it were just fine.
So the shorts closed out some short positions and took a big loss. Then, since Musk said that in a way that COULD be traced to him, they were able to sue him for the losses and complain to the SEC, getting it to start an investigation. THEN the stock DID start to tank, and the people who owned it DID take a loss.
But I wonder: Did the shorts actually close out all their short positions? Or are they still net short on Tesla - especially if you count, not just their direct holdings, but also all the investments of the web of companies and financial instruments in which they hold some interest?
Seems to me that, if they still have a short position, getting an SEC investigation going and/or announcing and filing a suit for billions would be just the sort of manipulation that they are claiming Musk was up to. Hold a short, file a suit, talk it up. Maybe switch to long and then settle and announce the settlement. And so on. (Always through cutouts, of course.)
IMHO anybody who sues over stock manipulation should have no net position (outside of a truly blind trust) in the stocks or other financial instruments whose performance might be affected by news of the suit and/or its progress.
A good move for Musk might be to investigate the plaintiffs, see if they might have had a net short position when they filed and/or announced their suit and/or complaint, whether they profited by it, and if so counter-sue, get it on record, and maybe not just get out from under but suck a few more billion out of them and into the company. (This would also establish the precedent of "gotta divest before you sue or you're manipulating", if it isn't there already. I am not a financial type or a lawyer.)
In the interest of full disclosure:
- I have no direct financial position, short, long, bond, etc. in Tesla (or other Musk enterprises).
- I don't know if any of the funds in my retirement plans might have a position ditto.
- As far as I know, neither my company nor any in which I have a financial interest (again, outside of any retirement plan funds), are currently engaged in any business or other relationship with Tesla, etc.
Watch the stock sink even quicker for Telsa and go bust by the end of this year?
Or watch the stock dive 'way down, watch Elon buy much of it up with the money he's already cashed out, and end up with a LOT less of the company owned by others.
... "deep-state" specifically refers to the idea that career civil and military folks who predate the administration are running a shadow government.
My understanding of the term is that it also includes entrenched career politicians and party functionaries - from which he had to make some picks in order to get enough support from the power structure of his party to get them confirmed and his legislation through.
That in includes elected officials who, in principle, could be bounced by the voters on the next cycle, but in practice have hacked the rules until that almost never happens. It also includes the power structure of the party, where the controlling factions hacked the rules (mainly in response to Ron Paul and the Tea Party - and quite publicly - on the R side, with "Superdelegates" and other macinations on the D) to block grass roots challenges and ouster. Then there's the permanent floating crowd of policy wonks and other power mongers, without permanent positions but with connections, leverage, and reputation as "go-to"s when something needs to be done.
But as you say we're discussing a difference in definition. I agree that by the version you're using your assertion is correct.
Trump was elected and governs by the constitutional rules in place but those rules are flawed and he got in via a loophole which allowed him to be elected while his generals election opponent got millions of more votes than he did.
The Electoral College is far from a "flawed" "loophole". It is the piece of the system that protects the little states from being completely overrun by a single-digit handful of giant ones. That was an issue at the founding - part of the deal that made it politically possible for the small states to join. And it is an issue now - without it "flyover country" would have no federal voice at all. It is working exactly as intended.
It is also the firewall that keeps a corrupt political machine in a large state from just cranking out enough fake votes to pick the president of its choice. With it in place, such a machine is limited to its state's share of the electors - which it would have had anyhow. (Imagine the Florida recount if the president was elected by popular vote. We'd have had to recount the ENTIRE COUNTRY.)... a system which produces massively differing policy outcomes based on the swing of a few thousand votes is unstable and flawed.
Not necessarily. it depends on the purpose of the system. You seem to think that the purpose of the electoral system in a republic is to be fair. It is not.
The purpose of a republic's electoral system is twofold: 1) To be decisive. 2) To predict the outcome of a war to reverse its results, with sufficient accuracy to convince the losers they would also lose the war, so they don't start it. In a close race you have a situation where a fight would be so even that it would be protracted and devastating to both sides. So even if it's wrong about the final outcome, it still lets the losers know that they'd be worse off fighting than organizing for the next election cycle.
As to whether Trump is a "minority president" - he won by the rules in place. If different rules were in place he'd have played differently. Feel free to speculate about whether he'd have won under those rules, too. But you won't convince anyone on either side about your hypothetical
I'm all for the "stuff that matters" part, but this is political minutiae.
A manifesto of a conspiracy of deep-state moles in the White House, allegedly composed of or including multiple Trump appointees, sabotaging the policies and decisions of the duly-elected President of the U.S., rather than implementing them? Reported by the New York Times, who claims to know the author and the work is genuine?
Sounds like "news for nerds, stuff that matters" to me. Because it matters to me, and my nerd credentials are some of the strongest here.
They might not like his decisions. But he IS the President. And a large part of what he was elected for was to clean out ("drain") the running-roughshod-over-the-citizens bureaucrats.
If the citizens can't bring the government to heel by electing their preferred executive and representatives, it's no longer a republic - it's an out-of-control tyranny. With the soapbox and the ballot box no longer functioning, you're on the verge of a civil war. If we go there, and our "democratic institutions" suffer or die, it will be the fault of the oh-so-self-righteous cabal claiming to be working to "preserve" them.
(I'm reminded of a Vietnam era quote: "We had to burn the village in order to save it.")
A little hint: To be effective at negotiation (especially when heading off a nuclear World War, but also down the scale to trade negotiations, promoting legislation, or exerting control over an entrenched bureaucracy), a President has to be competent at brinksmanship. That includes looking "crazy enough to do it" when he threatens something bad for his opposite number's interests.
I am too-often amazed at how so many VC firms don't really seem to understand the technologies at which they are throwing money.
They understand money.
The techies are (allegedly) doing cutting-edge tech, so it's not unreasonable for them to claim that only a handful of people, including them but not including the VCs, understand this hot new tech thing.
If a non-specialist DID understand it, so many specialists in the field would also understand it that, if it had suddenly become practical, it would be a many-horse race for the window that no more than three can get through before it closes. The VCs want to be in a one-horse or only-a-couple-horses race, so they have a good chance of getting a profit on their investment.
Or at least that's what the techies want the VCs to think. B-)
A couple of weeks later, the VC firm flew me to talk to the company executives in their presence. The company shut down the next day.
So how much did they pay you for the consult that let them salvage some of their $40M from the wreckage rather than throw more millions at it?
Which part of description makes you think its "tiny".
The part where the antenna element is an individual atom, rather than a quarter-wavelength of metal or other conductor, and you only need enough of them to measurably occlude - or scatter - a laser beam, which can be quite narrow. If you can get enough of them into the requisite set of states to perform your measurements in a path length substantially less than a quarter wavelength of the frequency in question, you've got your miniaturiation.
Granted the requisite state is Rydberg, so you're talking 3 micrometers for cesium. But there's still a few orders of magnitude to trade away for more atoms to modulate your laser light.
It can only receive signals. Good for broadcast, not so good for anything requiring two way communication,
Transmitting with a tiny antenna is easy. You use the same amount of energy as with a big antenna, but with a little antenna the energy density is much higher. As long as you make the impedance match properly, so all the energy is launched, you're fine, regardless of the area of the antenna.
One antenna I'm working with currently is for BLE - on the 2.4G band. The quarter-wavelength there is about 1 1/4 ". But the antenna is mostly a chip of ceramic, with some horrendously high permittivity. (Ceramics can get to 6k or so, though I haven't computed the scale of this thing to estimate its permittivity.) So the quarter-wavelength, in and immediately around the chip, is scaled down in proportion, making the antenna about the same length as a surface-mount capacitor, though substantially narrower. The energy density is also scaled up (in proportion squared), and by the time the wave has expanded to the size of a free-air quarter-wavelength antenna the energy density is down to just that of the larger antenna.
On the receiving side it still works - sort of. But the energy density of the incoming wave doesn't scale up at all when the antenna shrinks. So it intercepts only the tiny amount of energy that passes within a scaled-down quarter-wavelength around the scaled-down antenna, rather than that passing withing a free-air quarter wavelength of a free-air quarter wavelength metallic conductor.
So one of these for transmitting and one of the invention for receiving (if it also works at such a tiny size) and you have your ultraminiaturized two-way system.
Replace an antenna the size of your hand, your arm, rabbit ears, a tower,... with something you can mount on a chip in a tiny package on a PC board.
Get rid of the noise, intermodulation, and other pathologies in the high gain amplification and filtering of the tiny amount of energy picked up by that antenna, substituting a direct quantum-mechanical readout of the field, with high signal strength, only competing with noise from variations in the lasers' output as your starting point, feeding a strong signal to a more ordinary amplifier.
If it works out it could be a big deal in a tiny package.
Highly REactive: Add water and it burns. Not an issue when it's a trace of gas in, say, a "gassy vacuum tube" the size of a grain of rice.
The isotope you mine is the (only) stable one. You can get radioactive isotopes from reactor waste - but you can get radioactive isotopes of just about ANY element from reactor waste.
Lasers are often small diodes these days. Shining two through a glass capsule - then into an absorber in one case and a photodetector in the other - is no big deal.
Slashdot Mirror
Generally the sites where wasps (especially the exceptionally common paper wasp) build their nests are not attractive nesting sites for any kind of bee, so the collateral damage is generally pretty low.
Wish that were completely true.
The sites that are good for artificial homes for mason bees, leaf-cutter bees, and several other solitary (non-hive-living) bee types (under overhangs for rain shelter, east-side for quick wake-up/warm-up at dawn) are also the preferred sites for many kinds of wasps. (The bees also prefer natural holes in the same sort of location, for the same reason it's good for artificial homes.)
Also: Some of the small wasps that prey on these bees like the same sized hole, though whether this is for their own nest or because they know where to hunt is not clear to me.
Being able to process English would be a great thing for the fake news editors to handle first. MIT spinout, really?
That's perfectly normal American English Technobabble and has been since the mid 1960s. (I personally encountered it quite a lot, especially with respect to the substantial collection of laser and holographic spinouts from the University of Michigan.)
These days "startup" is more common. But "spinout" is both still valid and more specific, as it identifies implies a single institutional source of the founding technology and bulk of the founding personnel (usually identified in the sentence as a "from Foo" modifier). "Startups" may also be born by aggregation, while "spinouts" bud from an ongoing institution, typically when there's something to be commercialized that isn't a good fit with the parent institution's ongoing mission.
Oops. Slipped a decimal point - by more than one. (Should have used a calculator.) It's only a little over half a square kilometer., not 17+
Still,crash-programming a granite repaving of half a square kilometer isn't cheap, either.
Just how loud are cars in Spain?
Apparently their right-of-way arbitration involves use of the horns. Constantly.
The city's expenditures should be much lower since most car haters suggest a huge portion of city revenue goes to funding cars. If you're correct, the city might be able to eliminate all forms of taxation except sales tax
ORLY? Near the end of the quoted part of TFA we find:
That was in 1999. They granite-paved more than 17 square kilometers. Any bets on whether they're still paying it off a generation later? Or how many times they paid for it when you include interest?
Mentioned this to my wife. She immediately said "That's what they get for outsourcing their I.T. to India."
If you think t[...] the members of the parliament/senate/population/... reads and understands the legislation they vote on, you are delusional. That's true for EU, USA or any other large body claiming to be a modern democracy.
That's one of the best arguments against both governments containing legislatures and those conducting popular referenda that I have ever seen.
The Anarchist Anti-defamation League, monarchists, theocrats, and dictators of the world all take a break from fighting each other send their thanks.
You could have just said it was a compass.
Yep.
Or at least a bunch of charged-so-they-repell-each-other "compass needles" on a flat slippery surface.
Also: Sounds like the electrons were far enough apart and unassociated enough with the nearby nuclei that the Pauli-exclusion effects weren't constraining them into particular states - or the states were close enough together to act more like a continuum.
All the known theories of physics predicted that the electrons would adhere to the six-fold underlying pattern, but instead, the electrons hovering above their atoms decided to march to their own drummer -- in a straight line, with two-fold symmetry. The decoupling between the electrons and the arrangement of atoms was surprising enough, but then the researchers applied a magnetic field and discovered that they could turn that one line in any direction they chose. Without moving the crystal lattice, [one] could rotate the line of electrons just by controlling the magnetic field around them.
Sounds classical to me:
- The layout of the substrate produced a planar potential well with no, or very little, difference of energy for electrons being in one position vs. another.
- Provided the average density of the electrons was right, they behaved like a gas of individual particles in a thin container, or marbles on a flat surface.
- The electrons repelled each other, so they tended to spread out evenly. (Spread out too far, though, and they leave some positive-charged substrate behind. So they don't just fly apart and go away.)
- But electrons also have spin, which means they are little magnets. So, with their mutual repulsion largely defeated by forces holding them at a given average spacing, they tend to line up north-pole-to-south-pole in strings (but don't all pile up because coming more than a little closer together under the slight magnetic attraction is balanced by higher repulsion.) The strings are a bit more dense than the average gas, so most of the electrons join one and reduce their total energy.
- So now you have these long magnetic strings, with no preferred orientation driven by irregularities in the substrate. Bring a magnet nearby and they'll line up with its field while spacing out by mutual magnetic AND electrostatic repulsion, much like iron filing lines.
Whether its using the full 75kwh or software throttled to 60kwh, its still the same battery and Tesla's manufacturing cost is exactly the same.
But their manufacturing costs are a lot lower if they build a lot of one model than if they design two models, build less of both, and manage more inventory items and assembly combinations. This can be enough to make a big battery pack software-crippled to 4/5ths of its potential capacity be substantially cheaper than building a 4/5th sized one to start with.
It also means that the packs are not discharged as far, which can extend their life and reduce warranty costs.
Still better, it lets them unlock the extra capacity in emergencies and spend a little extra warranty risk to maybe save the lives, families, pets, and valuables of some customers. Even a psychopath can see the financial benefit of keeping some customers alive and happy enough with your product to buy more in the future, even if it costs a few warranty repairs later.
Reminds me of a number of incidents of downselling crippled hardware in the 20th century computer industry. Mainframes that ran with different clock speeds (model differing only by a jumper), for instance. Multi-CPU mainframes where extras served as spares and you paid for a firmware unlock, which paid for their higher risk of running out of spares if something fired and having to actually tear it open and replace a much-of-a-megabuck board.
One was a pair of 1960s IBM low-end page printers that differed only in model markings and firmware-controlled print speed. The faster printer was the same hardware, but all those moving parts wore out a lot more and needed more maintenance.
Stop drinking the Flavoraid*.
*Historically accurate if you look it up.
Apparently, open packages of both Kool-Aid and Flavor Aid were found at the scene of the Jonestown Massacre, though more of the latter than the former.
(I once heard a couple minutes of a tape of one of Jim Jones' rants-on-the-Jonestown-PA-system. It sounded like a sermon straight out of Heinlein's _Stranger in a Strange Land_. Creepy.)
Seeding areas of open ocean with nutrients that promote the rapid growth of sutrface algae has been suggested as a way of sequestering atmospheric and ocean-dissolved CO2. ... Suppose we seed with one of the algal species that forms surface mats while it grows, ...
While you're at it, how about seeding it with some of the recently discovered bacteria that EAT PLASTIC?
Most plastics are quite a good energy source for anything that can digest them.
Or, better yet, how about transplanting the relevant genes into algae and/or microplankton that live where it accumulates?
Microscopic bits of plastic are a problem because they hang around? Make an appropriately-sized critter for which they're a main dish in a nutritious breakfast, that lives in the places where they end up.
People are pulling out of the market because Elon lies to manipulate shareholders and cost them billions and that has become even more obvious.
I don't have any reason to support Musk, but when flaming him let's at least get it right.
What he's being investigated for is not alleged lying to cost stockholders billions.
What he's being investigated for is alleged lying to cost stock traders - possibly stock manipulators, billions. Stock traders and hypothetical manipulators who DIDN'T own any stock, BORROWED and SOLD a bunch in the expectation that it would drop, some of whom apparently hired, through cutouts, a bunch of trolls to talk the stock down.
So when he said (unfortunately for him, without cutouts) that they might be going private and the stock shot up, the people who sold the borrowed stock were stuck having to buy some back at a HIGHER price than they sold it for (which is what you risk if you sell a stock short), but the people who actually owned it were just fine.
So the shorts closed out some short positions and took a big loss. Then, since Musk said that in a way that COULD be traced to him, they were able to sue him for the losses and complain to the SEC, getting it to start an investigation. THEN the stock DID start to tank, and the people who owned it DID take a loss.
But I wonder: Did the shorts actually close out all their short positions? Or are they still net short on Tesla - especially if you count, not just their direct holdings, but also all the investments of the web of companies and financial instruments in which they hold some interest?
Seems to me that, if they still have a short position, getting an SEC investigation going and/or announcing and filing a suit for billions would be just the sort of manipulation that they are claiming Musk was up to. Hold a short, file a suit, talk it up. Maybe switch to long and then settle and announce the settlement. And so on. (Always through cutouts, of course.)
IMHO anybody who sues over stock manipulation should have no net position (outside of a truly blind trust) in the stocks or other financial instruments whose performance might be affected by news of the suit and/or its progress.
A good move for Musk might be to investigate the plaintiffs, see if they might have had a net short position when they filed and/or announced their suit and/or complaint, whether they profited by it, and if so counter-sue, get it on record, and maybe not just get out from under but suck a few more billion out of them and into the company. (This would also establish the precedent of "gotta divest before you sue or you're manipulating", if it isn't there already. I am not a financial type or a lawyer.)
In the interest of full disclosure:
- I have no direct financial position, short, long, bond, etc. in Tesla (or other Musk enterprises).
- I don't know if any of the funds in my retirement plans might have a position ditto.
- As far as I know, neither my company nor any in which I have a financial interest (again, outside of any retirement plan funds), are currently engaged in any business or other relationship with Tesla, etc.
Watch the stock sink even quicker for Telsa and go bust by the end of this year?
Or watch the stock dive 'way down, watch Elon buy much of it up with the money he's already cashed out, and end up with a LOT less of the company owned by others.
Is he crazy like The Mad Hatter, or like a fox?
... "deep-state" specifically refers to the idea that career civil and military folks who predate the administration are running a shadow government.
My understanding of the term is that it also includes entrenched career politicians and party functionaries - from which he had to make some picks in order to get enough support from the power structure of his party to get them confirmed and his legislation through.
That in includes elected officials who, in principle, could be bounced by the voters on the next cycle, but in practice have hacked the rules until that almost never happens. It also includes the power structure of the party, where the controlling factions hacked the rules (mainly in response to Ron Paul and the Tea Party - and quite publicly - on the R side, with "Superdelegates" and other macinations on the D) to block grass roots challenges and ouster. Then there's the permanent floating crowd of policy wonks and other power mongers, without permanent positions but with connections, leverage, and reputation as "go-to"s when something needs to be done.
But as you say we're discussing a difference in definition. I agree that by the version you're using your assertion is correct.
Trump was elected and governs by the constitutional rules in place but those rules are flawed and he got in via a loophole which allowed him to be elected while his generals election opponent got millions of more votes than he did.
The Electoral College is far from a "flawed" "loophole". It is the piece of the system that protects the little states from being completely overrun by a single-digit handful of giant ones. That was an issue at the founding - part of the deal that made it politically possible for the small states to join. And it is an issue now - without it "flyover country" would have no federal voice at all. It is working exactly as intended.
It is also the firewall that keeps a corrupt political machine in a large state from just cranking out enough fake votes to pick the president of its choice. With it in place, such a machine is limited to its state's share of the electors - which it would have had anyhow. (Imagine the Florida recount if the president was elected by popular vote. We'd have had to recount the ENTIRE COUNTRY.) ... a system which produces massively differing policy outcomes based on the swing of a few thousand votes is unstable and flawed.
Not necessarily. it depends on the purpose of the system. You seem to think that the purpose of the electoral system in a republic is to be fair. It is not.
The purpose of a republic's electoral system is twofold: 1) To be decisive. 2) To predict the outcome of a war to reverse its results, with sufficient accuracy to convince the losers they would also lose the war, so they don't start it. In a close race you have a situation where a fight would be so even that it would be protracted and devastating to both sides. So even if it's wrong about the final outcome, it still lets the losers know that they'd be worse off fighting than organizing for the next election cycle.
As to whether Trump is a "minority president" - he won by the rules in place. If different rules were in place he'd have played differently. Feel free to speculate about whether he'd have won under those rules, too. But you won't convince anyone on either side about your hypothetical
I'm all for the "stuff that matters" part, but this is political minutiae.
A manifesto of a conspiracy of deep-state moles in the White House, allegedly composed of or including multiple Trump appointees, sabotaging the policies and decisions of the duly-elected President of the U.S., rather than implementing them? Reported by the New York Times, who claims to know the author and the work is genuine?
Sounds like "news for nerds, stuff that matters" to me. Because it matters to me, and my nerd credentials are some of the strongest here.
They might not like his decisions. But he IS the President. And a large part of what he was elected for was to clean out ("drain") the running-roughshod-over-the-citizens bureaucrats.
If the citizens can't bring the government to heel by electing their preferred executive and representatives, it's no longer a republic - it's an out-of-control tyranny. With the soapbox and the ballot box no longer functioning, you're on the verge of a civil war. If we go there, and our "democratic institutions" suffer or die, it will be the fault of the oh-so-self-righteous cabal claiming to be working to "preserve" them.
(I'm reminded of a Vietnam era quote: "We had to burn the village in order to save it.")
A little hint: To be effective at negotiation (especially when heading off a nuclear World War, but also down the scale to trade negotiations, promoting legislation, or exerting control over an entrenched bureaucracy), a President has to be competent at brinksmanship. That includes looking "crazy enough to do it" when he threatens something bad for his opposite number's interests.
I am too-often amazed at how so many VC firms don't really seem to understand the technologies at which they are throwing money.
They understand money.
The techies are (allegedly) doing cutting-edge tech, so it's not unreasonable for them to claim that only a handful of people, including them but not including the VCs, understand this hot new tech thing.
If a non-specialist DID understand it, so many specialists in the field would also understand it that, if it had suddenly become practical, it would be a many-horse race for the window that no more than three can get through before it closes. The VCs want to be in a one-horse or only-a-couple-horses race, so they have a good chance of getting a profit on their investment.
Or at least that's what the techies want the VCs to think. B-)
A couple of weeks later, the VC firm flew me to talk to the company executives in their presence. The company shut down the next day.
So how much did they pay you for the consult that let them salvage some of their $40M from the wreckage rather than throw more millions at it?
Which part of description makes you think its "tiny".
The part where the antenna element is an individual atom, rather than a quarter-wavelength of metal or other conductor, and you only need enough of them to measurably occlude - or scatter - a laser beam, which can be quite narrow. If you can get enough of them into the requisite set of states to perform your measurements in a path length substantially less than a quarter wavelength of the frequency in question, you've got your miniaturiation.
Granted the requisite state is Rydberg, so you're talking 3 micrometers for cesium. But there's still a few orders of magnitude to trade away for more atoms to modulate your laser light.
It can only receive signals.
Good for broadcast, not so good for anything requiring two way communication,
Transmitting with a tiny antenna is easy. You use the same amount of energy as with a big antenna, but with a little antenna the energy density is much higher. As long as you make the impedance match properly, so all the energy is launched, you're fine, regardless of the area of the antenna.
One antenna I'm working with currently is for BLE - on the 2.4G band. The quarter-wavelength there is about 1 1/4 ". But the antenna is mostly a chip of ceramic, with some horrendously high permittivity. (Ceramics can get to 6k or so, though I haven't computed the scale of this thing to estimate its permittivity.) So the quarter-wavelength, in and immediately around the chip, is scaled down in proportion, making the antenna about the same length as a surface-mount capacitor, though substantially narrower. The energy density is also scaled up (in proportion squared), and by the time the wave has expanded to the size of a free-air quarter-wavelength antenna the energy density is down to just that of the larger antenna.
On the receiving side it still works - sort of. But the energy density of the incoming wave doesn't scale up at all when the antenna shrinks. So it intercepts only the tiny amount of energy that passes within a scaled-down quarter-wavelength around the scaled-down antenna, rather than that passing withing a free-air quarter wavelength of a free-air quarter wavelength metallic conductor.
So one of these for transmitting and one of the invention for receiving (if it also works at such a tiny size) and you have your ultraminiaturized two-way system.
Why is this better than current radio?
Replace an antenna the size of your hand, your arm, rabbit ears, a tower, ... with something you can mount on a chip in a tiny package on a PC board.
Get rid of the noise, intermodulation, and other pathologies in the high gain amplification and filtering of the tiny amount of energy picked up by that antenna, substituting a direct quantum-mechanical readout of the field, with high signal strength, only competing with noise from variations in the lasers' output as your starting point, feeding a strong signal to a more ordinary amplifier.
If it works out it could be a big deal in a tiny package.
highly radioactive
No.
Highly REactive: Add water and it burns. Not an issue when it's a trace of gas in, say, a "gassy vacuum tube" the size of a grain of rice.
The isotope you mine is the (only) stable one. You can get radioactive isotopes from reactor waste - but you can get radioactive isotopes of just about ANY element from reactor waste.
Lasers are often small diodes these days. Shining two through a glass capsule - then into an absorber in one case and a photodetector in the other - is no big deal.
But only if you've already asked the same thing before.
And only if you don't care for anything that happened since the LAST time you searched.