If distributing meat becomes trivially easy
then butchers will go out of business. But
meat only benefits the person in physical
possession of it when it is consumed. Meat
producers can charge that person for meat
and hence derive a profit from producing
meat.
Not the case with songs. When a song is
released into the world it benefits
anyone who can get a copy and chooses to
play it. That's already anyone motivated
and in a western country, and it's just
going to get more universal. But a song
producer can't charge the whole world
for their song. So it's not clear how
they can make a profit. If they go out
of business we can expect a drying-up of
new song production.
There are a few ways out of this.
An alliance of governments could
charge the world for songs through taxes.
Unselfish donations from music lovers.
The most popular song producers may well
be able to stay in business even if they
aren't anything like as wealthy as they
are now.
That rule is moot for quite a number of reasons. See firebombing of Dresden.
IANAL but:
The Geneva convention has evolved. Lots of things that were legal in 1945 are illegal now. The US hasn't agreed to all the changes, so this applies less in the US than most places, but it still applies to some extent.
Such damage is not unlawful so long as it is not excessive in light of the overall military advantage anticipated from the attack. (Joint Publication 3-60)
IANAL but:
Assuming JP3-60 follows the Geneva principles then the test is a little harsher than that. We compare not only with the zero case (no attack) but with any other possible attack we might make instead. So if attack A and attack B are alternatives, and attack B causes more collateral damage, then attack B can be lawful only if it has sufficient military advantages over attack A to justify the difference in collateral damage.
Deliberately seeking to cause collateral damage, as an objective, is clearly unlawful. But the entire paragraph is so bizarre (What does he mean by "physics"?) that I suspect it's a misquote anyway. I'm waiting for air force public relations to clarify.
the Spaniards were only a small percentage of the force that laid siege to Tenochtitlan.
A fairly crucial percentage, though. The Tlaxacalans &c hadn't been doing very well without the Spaniards. The fact so few Spaniards could have such a large impact is partly due to their technology, particularly steel and horses.
The Inca's were smack in the middle of a civil war over succession [...] [Spanish] timing was fortuitous, to say the least.
Not entirely a coincidence: the old Inca probably died of smallpox, so it was linked to European arrival.
If I had to choose an historical analogue for the RIAA I'd look to cases of suppression of technology in the cause of saving an obsolescent political system. The Japanese giving up the gun, European bans on crossbows, Chinese abandonment of oceanic navigation, etc.. I'm not sure how good these analogies are, but I think they're better than the precolumbians.
In a fixed wing aircraft the engines develop enough thrust to overcome the drag. Typical Lift to drag ratio is between 10 and 12 for commercial jets. Some sail planes and gliders have achieved L/D ratio of 30 and 40. In any hovering aircraft, be it helicopter or vectored thrust machines like the Harrier, or the stupid plane V22, the engines must develop enough thrust to overcome the weight. (Weight = Lift). Thus they develop between 10 and 12 time more thrust and thus they consume that much more fuel. That can not be avoided.
This isn't quite true because the size of the rotor comes into it too. A large rotor is good for making lots of thrust at slow speed, in fact thrust in this regime goes up by the two-thirds power of the power (I hope that's clear) and the one-third power of the rotor area. But a large rotor can't push air through itself quickly. So an aeroplane is forced to use a smaller rotor ("propeller") which has less thrust for a given power. This cancels out some of the advantage the aeroplane gets from its lift to drag ratio. (In theory it might cancel all the advantage but this doesn't seem to happen in practice.)
A vehicle that wants to use the same rotor for lift and thrust has a problem. Hence the slowness of helicopters, the inefficiency of the V-22 and Harrier, the need for a separate fan in the STOVL JSF, etc..
Nobody seems to make aircraft with both rotors and propellers. Power would go to the rotor at takeoff and landing. In level flight the power is shared between propellers and rotors. Approaching the speed of sound the rotor gets no power and becomes a wing. Too complicated to be practical, I guess, despite theoretical advantages. Though the STOVL JSF has a jet and a fan, which is halfway to this idea.
Is that an American football field or an Australian Rules football field?
If it's in Sydney, probably neither. It's a common misconception that Australian Rules is the Australian football code. In fact it's dominant in only about half the country by population, with its main centre in Melbourne. Sydney cares more for Rugby, specifically Rugby League.
Mammal red blood cells don't have nuclei. IIUC that lets them be smaller and hence more efficient. If we're looking for a single key advantage mammals had then that's my theory. Unfortunately I imagine it's hard to know how long ago it evolved.
I think a lot of people are answering your question as though you're going for a month. If you're going for a year then I assume there'll be gaps in travels when your life becomes a little more like normal life and less like a holiday. So yes, bring the laptop. Anyway, if you leave it behind it'll be semi-obsolete by the time you get back, so there's a biblical parable of the talents thing here.
I can't imagine that doctors and lawyers and newspaper reporters don't occasionally vent their spleens about their patients, clients or readers. But if they do, they do it behind the scenes, away from the public eye. For them to do otherwise is to risk public censure (at best) or banishment (at worst).
The author assumes that transparency is undesirable. I think I'd rather be insulted in public. At least it gives me a chance to modify my behaviour.
The code of practice sounds like something out of a mediaeval guild. "Highest professional standards possible" is meaningless as soon as we impose a deadline. "Advance the [...] reputation of the profession" is us-against-themism.
It's all a bit dishonest and creepy. I think IT is better off without a lot of it.
The economic impact from something so simple as changing the default currency for trading commodities is so detrimental to US economics
How, exactly? I can't see any major impact at all.
At the moment the system works like this. Suppose someone from Florin has a commodity and someone from Guilder wants to buy. The Guilder guy buys some USD using Guilder guilders, and gives them to the guy from Florin, who uses the USD to buy Florin florins. The same number of USD are being bought as sold, and so the USD is the highway but not the destination.
Now suppose the trade was being done in Euros. The Florin guy buys Euros, gives them to the Guilder guy, who changes them into guilders. What's changed, from the US point of view? As far as I can tell, pretty much nothing. Why should they care?
Oh, there'll be some minor effects. It's a little easier to work in your own currency, so it's slightly more convenient for US firms to trade or arrange hedging. But it's not a big deal. Nothing worth losing sleep over.
Until recently, ultra zoom seemed incompatible with portability. Which takes away one of the key advantages of non-SLR over SLR. Certainly my Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ is a good deal chunkier than most non-SLRs. But recently I've had the impression that some of the new non-SLR ultra zoom cameras manage to be portable as well. Is this true?
Current prices are high enough to make Canadian tar sands profitable. [...] Coal liquifaction is borderline profitable at current prices.
One problem with this substitution is that the alternatives are less efficient, in net energy per unit carbon released, than petroleum. In fact, even regular coal is less efficient than oil in those terms. So the more substitution that we employ, the more carbon dioxide we emit for a given energy consumption, and the worse greenhouse effect we suffer.
Greenhouse is a really hard problem to fix: much harder than other forms of pollution have been because the quantities are so large and there's no possible chemical change that will make the pollutant harmless. Lomborg, for instance, argues that it's too expesive to be worth trying to fix very much and that we should mostly just put up with it. I think greenhouse is going to be a bigger issue than running out of hydrocarbons.
[...] the flight team, which is now down to only 10 people.
Not to put down the important job they are doing, but why does Voyager need a flight team of ten? Seems like the only real job is recording data off a few surviving instruments: it's not like when Voyager was near the outer planets and they had to make decisions about what to look at, etc.. So what do they do?
But what if it were Trollheim's government that had harboured terrorists? Would you want to bomb the homes and bridges of your relatives?
At least I assume Trollheim is where you're from, since you're obviously a troll. Unless you really believe what you're saying, in which case I have a bridge for you to live under at very reasonable rent.
OK, the theory takes no account of isolated populations, so it's stupid. In fact, the last common ancestor would be determined by the most isolated population, plus the time for the genes to spread through that population.
So which population is the most isolated, in this sense? Remember, to be isolated you need to have had no contact at all for quite some time.
Precolumbian America: gene flow across the Bering straight, through some pre-Inuit Arctic culture? Was this nearly continuous since the Clovis? If this is the most isolated culture then the LCA is driven by southern Amerind populations... the Tierra del Fuego aborigines are extinct, right?
Mainland Australian Aborigines: gene flow from Indonesia? The Macassars are relatively recent, but maybe it's been continuous anyway? When was the migration that brought the dingo, something like eight thousand years ago?
There's lots of places with minimal contact (highland New Guinea, Easter Island, the Canary islands before 1500 or so) but very few with none at all.
"Orangutang scientists report on the phenomenon of psychological neoteny. Certain apes (the Homo genus) are retaining childlike behaviours (curiosity, etc.) into adult life. In a real sense, these apes are failing to grow up."
Seriously, neoteny (physical and psychological) is one of the mechanisms by which evolution made us human. If the modern world is making us move further along that path, why should it bother us? Unless you think coming down from the trees was a mistake.
It's just called the Australian Army. Bits of the Army have Royal commissions and so get to call themselves Royal (e.g. "Royal Australian Regiment", basically what the US would call the infantry corps). But the army as a whole doesn't, whereas the navy and air force do. As the British Army might say, "I fought two world wars, do they call me the world war winner? No. But you cut off the head of one king..."
5) When CO2 dissolves in water the PH of the water goes down
6) When the PH of the water goes down, Calcium Carbonate concentrations go down
There isn't strictly such a thing as a calcium carbonate concentration. When calcium carbonate dissolves it breaks up into a calcium and a carbonate ion, which wander off separately. In general they needn't have the same concentration.
Adding carbon dioxide to the water will make extra hygrogen ions and extra carbonate ions, so while it will reduce the pH ("more hydrogen ions" is what "low pH" means) you wouldn't expect it to reduce the carbonate concentration. More likely we'd get an application of Le Chatelier's Principle. Some of the the extra carbonates would combine with calciums into calcium carbonate again and precipitate out. So there'd be more carbonate than there was before, but less calcium.
It's not obvious to me whether that's going to make life easier for plankton or harder, but if the experts say harder then I can't see any grounds to disagree. Of course, the plankton will evolve to try to cope with the new conditions. Coral is likely to have a much harder time adapting, though the BBC web site mentioned evidence it can change its algae to adapt to temperature change, at least.
Now maybe it's just me but we hear a lot of stories about cancer being connected to various signals from things like mobile phones or microwaves. The RFID technology is still rather young and we don't know if it will have any sort of effect like this on the human body.
Shouldn't be a worry. Power levels must be orders of magnitude less than a cell phone. It's true we haven't been using the particular application all that long. But the basic technology of radio communication has been around a long time.
Personally, I don't think there are benefits to implantation that are worth the hassle of surgery, but I guess if surgery keeps getting easier that will someday change. I'm not going to do this any time soon, but I'm glad someone is doing it, so they can be my minesweeper.
The privacy issues seem to me soluble. Of course, someone will have to solve them, which is easy, and someone will have to force the powers-that-be to accept the solution, which is harder. It's got some similarities to voting machines: for instance, open sourcing the software will be a crucial step in each case.
iPods had a big advantage over portable CD players - more portability. They were smaller than portable CD players, more convenient to use, much more portable than CD libraries. I don't think the video iPod has any similar advantage. It's not a portable viewer, as long as you're still taking it home to watch on your TV. If people start watching movies on VR glasses or something then that sounds like a much more promising paradigm.
iPods could also use songs downloaded from the internet. There's a marginal corresponding advantage here: by transferring songs from your computer to your TV through an iPod you avoid issues with noise in the TV room. But it's not the only, or probably best, solution to that problem.
Slashdot Mirror
If distributing meat becomes trivially easy then butchers will go out of business. But meat only benefits the person in physical possession of it when it is consumed. Meat producers can charge that person for meat and hence derive a profit from producing meat.
Not the case with songs. When a song is released into the world it benefits anyone who can get a copy and chooses to play it. That's already anyone motivated and in a western country, and it's just going to get more universal. But a song producer can't charge the whole world for their song. So it's not clear how they can make a profit. If they go out of business we can expect a drying-up of new song production.
There are a few ways out of this.
But none of these is an easy fix.
----- DavidIANAL but:
The Geneva convention has evolved. Lots of things that were legal in 1945 are illegal now. The US hasn't agreed to all the changes, so this applies less in the US than most places, but it still applies to some extent.
IANAL but:
Assuming JP3-60 follows the Geneva principles then the test is a little harsher than that. We compare not only with the zero case (no attack) but with any other possible attack we might make instead. So if attack A and attack B are alternatives, and attack B causes more collateral damage, then attack B can be lawful only if it has sufficient military advantages over attack A to justify the difference in collateral damage.
Deliberately seeking to cause collateral damage, as an objective, is clearly unlawful. But the entire paragraph is so bizarre (What does he mean by "physics"?) that I suspect it's a misquote anyway. I'm waiting for air force public relations to clarify.
A fairly crucial percentage, though. The Tlaxacalans &c hadn't been doing very well without the Spaniards. The fact so few Spaniards could have such a large impact is partly due to their technology, particularly steel and horses.
Not entirely a coincidence: the old Inca probably died of smallpox, so it was linked to European arrival.
If I had to choose an historical analogue for the RIAA I'd look to cases of suppression of technology in the cause of saving an obsolescent political system. The Japanese giving up the gun, European bans on crossbows, Chinese abandonment of oceanic navigation, etc.. I'm not sure how good these analogies are, but I think they're better than the precolumbians.
There's a story that Hewlett-Packard's first calculator was like this. Don't know if it's true.
This isn't quite true because the size of the rotor comes into it too. A large rotor is good for making lots of thrust at slow speed, in fact thrust in this regime goes up by the two-thirds power of the power (I hope that's clear) and the one-third power of the rotor area. But a large rotor can't push air through itself quickly. So an aeroplane is forced to use a smaller rotor ("propeller") which has less thrust for a given power. This cancels out some of the advantage the aeroplane gets from its lift to drag ratio. (In theory it might cancel all the advantage but this doesn't seem to happen in practice.)
A vehicle that wants to use the same rotor for lift and thrust has a problem. Hence the slowness of helicopters, the inefficiency of the V-22 and Harrier, the need for a separate fan in the STOVL JSF, etc..
Nobody seems to make aircraft with both rotors and propellers. Power would go to the rotor at takeoff and landing. In level flight the power is shared between propellers and rotors. Approaching the speed of sound the rotor gets no power and becomes a wing. Too complicated to be practical, I guess, despite theoretical advantages. Though the STOVL JSF has a jet and a fan, which is halfway to this idea.
I for one welcome our new spinplasmonic overlords.
(Sorry if someone had said that but it didn't show on search.)
I ate some dinosaur last night: Gallus Gallus, very tasty.
Wait.."co-existed", past tense? You're not going to tell me I ate the last one?
If it's in Sydney, probably neither. It's a common misconception that Australian Rules is the Australian football code. In fact it's dominant in only about half the country by population, with its main centre in Melbourne. Sydney cares more for Rugby, specifically Rugby League.
Mammal red blood cells don't have nuclei. IIUC that lets them be smaller and hence more efficient. If we're looking for a single key advantage mammals had then that's my theory. Unfortunately I imagine it's hard to know how long ago it evolved.
I think a lot of people are answering your question as though you're going for a month. If you're going for a year then I assume there'll be gaps in travels when your life becomes a little more like normal life and less like a holiday. So yes, bring the laptop. Anyway, if you leave it behind it'll be semi-obsolete by the time you get back, so there's a biblical parable of the talents thing here.
The author assumes that transparency is undesirable. I think I'd rather be insulted in public. At least it gives me a chance to modify my behaviour.
The code of practice sounds like something out of a mediaeval guild. "Highest professional standards possible" is meaningless as soon as we impose a deadline. "Advance the [...] reputation of the profession" is us-against-themism.
It's all a bit dishonest and creepy. I think IT is better off without a lot of it.
How, exactly? I can't see any major impact at all.
At the moment the system works like this. Suppose someone from Florin has a commodity and someone from Guilder wants to buy. The Guilder guy buys some USD using Guilder guilders, and gives them to the guy from Florin, who uses the USD to buy Florin florins. The same number of USD are being bought as sold, and so the USD is the highway but not the destination.
Now suppose the trade was being done in Euros. The Florin guy buys Euros, gives them to the Guilder guy, who changes them into guilders. What's changed, from the US point of view? As far as I can tell, pretty much nothing. Why should they care?
Oh, there'll be some minor effects. It's a little easier to work in your own currency, so it's slightly more convenient for US firms to trade or arrange hedging. But it's not a big deal. Nothing worth losing sleep over.
My distance vision sucks. I sometimes take shots on spec that I couldn't see clearly. I also use my 12x zoom camera as binoculars.
Until recently, ultra zoom seemed incompatible with portability. Which takes away one of the key advantages of non-SLR over SLR. Certainly my Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ is a good deal chunkier than most non-SLRs. But recently I've had the impression that some of the new non-SLR ultra zoom cameras manage to be portable as well. Is this true?
One problem with this substitution is that the alternatives are less efficient, in net energy per unit carbon released, than petroleum. In fact, even regular coal is less efficient than oil in those terms. So the more substitution that we employ, the more carbon dioxide we emit for a given energy consumption, and the worse greenhouse effect we suffer.
Greenhouse is a really hard problem to fix: much harder than other forms of pollution have been because the quantities are so large and there's no possible chemical change that will make the pollutant harmless. Lomborg, for instance, argues that it's too expesive to be worth trying to fix very much and that we should mostly just put up with it. I think greenhouse is going to be a bigger issue than running out of hydrocarbons.
Not to put down the important job they are doing, but why does Voyager need a flight team of ten? Seems like the only real job is recording data off a few surviving instruments: it's not like when Voyager was near the outer planets and they had to make decisions about what to look at, etc.. So what do they do?
But what if it were Trollheim's government that had harboured terrorists? Would you want to bomb the homes and bridges of your relatives?
At least I assume Trollheim is where you're from, since you're obviously a troll. Unless you really believe what you're saying, in which case I have a bridge for you to live under at very reasonable rent.
OK, the theory takes no account of isolated populations, so it's stupid. In fact, the last common ancestor would be determined by the most isolated population, plus the time for the genes to spread through that population.
So which population is the most isolated, in this sense? Remember, to be isolated you need to have had no contact at all for quite some time.
There's lots of places with minimal contact (highland New Guinea, Easter Island, the Canary islands before 1500 or so) but very few with none at all.
Any thoughts?
"Orangutang scientists report on the phenomenon of psychological neoteny. Certain apes (the Homo genus) are retaining childlike behaviours (curiosity, etc.) into adult life. In a real sense, these apes are failing to grow up."
Seriously, neoteny (physical and psychological) is one of the mechanisms by which evolution made us human. If the modern world is making us move further along that path, why should it bother us? Unless you think coming down from the trees was a mistake.
It's just called the Australian Army. Bits of the Army have Royal commissions and so get to call themselves Royal (e.g. "Royal Australian Regiment", basically what the US would call the infantry corps). But the army as a whole doesn't, whereas the navy and air force do. As the British Army might say, "I fought two world wars, do they call me the world war winner? No. But you cut off the head of one king..."
The light is on, so it seems to be working. And they took a photograph of it. No, I guess it can't have been working.
There isn't strictly such a thing as a calcium carbonate concentration. When calcium carbonate dissolves it breaks up into a calcium and a carbonate ion, which wander off separately. In general they needn't have the same concentration.
Adding carbon dioxide to the water will make extra hygrogen ions and extra carbonate ions, so while it will reduce the pH ("more hydrogen ions" is what "low pH" means) you wouldn't expect it to reduce the carbonate concentration. More likely we'd get an application of Le Chatelier's Principle. Some of the the extra carbonates would combine with calciums into calcium carbonate again and precipitate out. So there'd be more carbonate than there was before, but less calcium.
It's not obvious to me whether that's going to make life easier for plankton or harder, but if the experts say harder then I can't see any grounds to disagree. Of course, the plankton will evolve to try to cope with the new conditions. Coral is likely to have a much harder time adapting, though the BBC web site mentioned evidence it can change its algae to adapt to temperature change, at least.
Now maybe it's just me but we hear a lot of stories about cancer being connected to various signals from things like mobile phones or microwaves. The RFID technology is still rather young and we don't know if it will have any sort of effect like this on the human body.
Shouldn't be a worry. Power levels must be orders of magnitude less than a cell phone. It's true we haven't been using the particular application all that long. But the basic technology of radio communication has been around a long time.
Personally, I don't think there are benefits to implantation that are worth the hassle of surgery, but I guess if surgery keeps getting easier that will someday change. I'm not going to do this any time soon, but I'm glad someone is doing it, so they can be my minesweeper.
The privacy issues seem to me soluble. Of course, someone will have to solve them, which is easy, and someone will have to force the powers-that-be to accept the solution, which is harder. It's got some similarities to voting machines: for instance, open sourcing the software will be a crucial step in each case.
iPods had a big advantage over portable CD players - more portability. They were smaller than portable CD players, more convenient to use, much more portable than CD libraries. I don't think the video iPod has any similar advantage. It's not a portable viewer, as long as you're still taking it home to watch on your TV. If people start watching movies on VR glasses or something then that sounds like a much more promising paradigm.
iPods could also use songs downloaded from the internet. There's a marginal corresponding advantage here: by transferring songs from your computer to your TV through an iPod you avoid issues with noise in the TV room. But it's not the only, or probably best, solution to that problem.