Killing your self is social harm because your reducing society's productive workforce. On the other hand sleeping on your right vs. left side at night is not social harm because it does not affect society. What does and does no harm society it's not an ethics issue and it's not relative.
Things are only relative when you talk about your rights to harm society by say staying up late watching TV. Your going to be less productive at work so do you have that right?
It's flame bait because you don't know if it's more or less promising research. If researchers want to try something then clearly they have a reason for doing so. So if thousands of well-educated people in their field say this shows promise and someone outside their field says no it's pointless then either they're clueless or they're trying to start a flame war.
Have you ever seen code written by a 13 year old working by themselves? It looks awfully similar to code written by anyone who has no formal training or team work experience. The 13 year old is also always trying to prove how good they are at coding... it's a pain to deal with kids like that.
Hmm, I started coding at age 8. By 13 I was using QBasic and writing some OK code. Looking back at some of that code I think I have gotten dumber over time. Other than using a few GOTO's it looks like what I code now but then I see stuff like this odd nested loop that draws simple clouds in the exhaust of a rocket simulation. It looks cool and I can see how it's rotating though several colors so it's looks like it's on fire but somehow it leaves a trail of while clouds on a blue background while the exhaust colors look red and orange.
It's been so long I don't recall my thought process but It's cool looking at how optimized some of those QBasic programs where. Granted I was using a 286 and an interpreted language so getting things done fast enough to keep a 13 year old interested must have been hard but a lot of that code is just insane.
Yea the code needs more comments, but god damm there is some cool stuff going on. I really wonder what I could have done with a modern PC and VC++.
The fact that 'works properly and meets customer requirements fully' is not your no 1 criteria would also lead to pretty abrupt interview termination with me.
Given sufficient recourses most groups can meet customer's requirements. Quality code goes beyond this. If someone says all queries need to take less than 2seconds and they say the database is going to have 2million records then a system that finishes in all query's in 1.9 seconds is just as correct as a system that completes all query's in 1 second or.001 seconds. However, things like cost, efficiency, and bugs are clearly are valid comparisons across projects.
I have seen an 8 man team work for 2 months creating a system that was so bug ridden that tossing it and recoding from scratch seemed the only real option. In two weeks I produced something that fit spec and was almost bug free. While some testers found 2 spelling mistakes and a resource leak these took all of 2 hours to fix. So I was 32x as effective as the average member of this 8 man team.
When I see something that looks like "grunt coding work" the first think I think of is "there is a better way to do this." My best example of this was my first assignment at my first job which was to crate documentation for a little over 3megs of Object Pascal source files. Now I could have done this by hand but after 6 weeks of coding I had a listing of all objects and what there variables are, what those object inherited from, which objects they used, a listing of every object's functions and which functions of which objects they called. Yes I could have done this by hand but now I have a script that instantly generates accurate documentation with a click.
An even better example of this comes from my father. He went from coding screens in VC++ to writing scripts to create VC++ code to writing code to read database format information to create scripts to write VC++ code. He then started to write scripts to do a lot of work grunts who where using those screens did. Over the past 10 years he has eliminated over 50 positions within his and related departments. This is the value of experience.
PS: Some people code to spec while others look at spec as a guide to what clueless people think they want and act accordingly.
You need spend more energy / fuel on placing something in orbit as using a ballistic missile so there is little advantage to a space based kinetic weapon vs. a ballistic rocket which can hit any target anywhere in the world in less tan 20min. (11min comes to mind but that might be a US to Russia trip.) Space based weapons are sitting targets that are hard to defend and they are not all that fast because they don't spend all there time at an optimal launch location. AKA there orbiting so you can't depend on them to be over the target when you want to use them.
Your 486 did not have a 10GB HDD chances are it had 200 MB Disk space which is still more than most cell phones.
As I said 10 years till you have the 10-40GB cellphone that's small and cheep. And 20 years till your talking about 10-40TB cell phones. Yea, I can get a TB on my PC right now but it's going to cost a little over a grand for 5 250GB disks in a raid 5.
You could build a cellpohone the size of a iPod with 40GB of storage today but it's not going to be cheep and it's not the size of my cellphone.
This is a classic case of efficiency vs. cost. The advantage of Ground contact heat pumps is heat pumps are less efferent the larger the heat gradients you're trying to produce. So using a fixed base of say 60degF let's you pump out air at 85degF for heating and 50degF for cooling a and be more efficient than trying to worm 20degF air to 85 degF for heating and cool 100degF air to 50degF for cooling. In most cases in the US this is plenty efficient to remove the value of going further than this.
You can do the same up north as going from -70degF > 85degF is much worse than 10degF > 85degF but as you keep sucking the heat out of the ground your system will become less efficient over time. Now if you use the "free" summer heat to worm up the ground to say 10degF then you should be able to use that "free" heat though much of the winter. Yea much of it's going to be lost to thermal spread as you said but if you pump enough energy into the ground you should be able to use a smaller system instead of trying to tap into huge sections of the ground to avoid this cooling effect.
I have seen a similar system used at altitude there tends to be a large drop in temperature from Day to Night so you can reduce your summer cooling bills by opening your windows at night and then closing them in the day until the house worms up to the outside temperature. This works best with a large stone house with few windows but a well insulated and shaded house can also benefit from this.
PS: Granted I have not looked all that much so I may be full of it but it seems to work out well.
Environmental factors do have the potential to have large effects on a person's intelligence, but for most people their environment is similar enough for this to make little difference.
NO!
A large number of people in the US suffer from heavy metal exposure. Huge portions of our society have an abysmal diet and little to no regular exercise. Most people are sleep deprived on a regular basis. Legal and illegal regularly affect people's thoughts and actions. And let's not forget those areas with a truly horrible educational system. These are all environmental factors that greatly effect functional intelligence.
When you look at two twins separated at birth they tend to have similar backgrounds so they often have similar IQ test scores but you will also find twins with significant differences in IQ, which is clearly an environmental impact. DNA is important but if you want to increase the standard functional intelligence of our society starting with environment is going to get you far quickly.
PS: IQ tests have had their baseline change over time clearly this has nothing to do with DNA.
Could not find the exact model but looking at the website it's basically a Samsung SCH-a670.
It's 99$ for the phone on a 1-year contract so it might cost a little more than that to replace but they do a buy one get one free deal so it's got to be fairly cheep.
I can't find total memory for the phone as they break it into sections. My year old phone can store 60 seconds of shitty video + 60 ok pictures + 2mb for games + 20 voice contacts + voice Memo's so I am guessing around 10 - 20+ MB total.
Talk time: 175 minutes
Standby time: 170 hours
Size: 3.3H x 1.8W x 1.0D inches
Weight: 3.8 oz
Now it could get thinner but dropping under 1 inches is hardly worth it and it could have a longer battery life but it's a week of standby or 2.5 hours talk time so it works well enough. I ended up getting a 40% larger battery which added 1/4 an inch to it's depth and it's still thinner than my wallet so what's the point. (I added more battery life because I keep forgetting to charge the thing. Now I charge it once a week and it keeps on ticking.)
Many devices are better at what they do than my cell phone but I can get by with out a calculator (the onboard one sucks but it works when I want to do simple math.), Memo pad, camera, and game station.
Granted a 200$ digital camera is much better than the cell phone at taking pictures but it works well enough and I have it on me all the time. I could buy a PSP and it would be better at keeping me entertained but my cell is good enough when your trying not to get bored at the DMV.
I hope to see a 256mb phone that you can use as an Ipod shuffle in 2 years that let's you use that memory for taking pictures. After that it's just going to be a question of how much CPU and memory the thing has because it's going to be more limited the interface than anything else. As it keeps getting better at all the things my phone does now there is going to be even less reason to keep a memo pad / appointment book, game station, camera for stills or video, walkman, PDA, portable DVD player, and with good voice to text it might take over email.
PS: Verizon might try and keep you from having a USB port to the phone so you need to use some sort of mobile web to get songs on it but if
anyone avoids doing that I will be happy.
Please use CR / LF and submit as "Plane Old Text" if you don't know HTML.
PS: Build a working prototype of any size and I can get you finding but you sound like your off your meds so I am going to leave the rest of that post alone.
Out of 28,410 houses in the inner city of Dresden, 24,866 were destroyed. An area of 15 square kilometers was totally destroyed, among that: 14,000 homes, 72 schools, 22 hospitals, 19 churches, 5 theaters, 50 bank and insurance companies, 31 department stores, 31 large hotels, and 62 administration buildings. In total there were 222,000 apartments in the city. 75,000 of them were totally destroyed, 11,000 severely damaged, 7,000 damaged, 81,000 slightly damaged. The city was around 300 square kilometres in area in those days. Although the main railway station was destroyed completely, the railway was working again within a few days.
The precise number of dead is difficult to ascertain and is not known. Estimates are made difficult by the fact that the city was crowded at that time with wounded soldiers and refugees. The fate of some of the refugees is not known as they may have been killed and incinerated beyond recognition in the fire-storm, or they may have left Dresden for other places without informing the authorities. Earlier reputable estimates varied from 25,000 to more than 60,000, but historians now view around 25,000-35,000 as the likely range[14](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_ Dresden_in_World_War_II#endnote_Bergander2)%5B15%5 D(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_ in_World_War_II#endnote_Evans2) with the latest (1994) research by the Dresden historian Friedrich Reichert pointing toward the lower part of this range.[16]
VS.
http://www.uic.com.au/nip29.htm
In Hiroshima, of a resident civilian population of 250 000 it was estimated that 45 000 died on the first day and a further 19 000 during the subsequent four months. In Nagasaki, out of a population of 174 000, 22 000 died on the first day and another 17 000 within four months. Unrecorded deaths of military personnel and foreign workers may have added considerably to these figures.
So Hiroshima was a big deal but less so when compared with the death totals from WWII.
storing heat for 5 months in a big tank of water would need tons of insulation.
It depends on the size of the tank / house. Anyway, 4+ feet underground should provide plenty of insulation check out the permafrost layer up north to see how well that much ground insulates over a few months. I don't know how large a tank you would need for storage capacity but I would go for 10 -20 heat conductive pilings in the ground or water pumped though a pipe the ground as you don't need to use water in a tank for storage capacity when the ground works just as well. As to the day / night cycle that greatly increases the efficiency of these systems but it's not that hard to go from 40deg over 1 day to 40 deg over 200 days as long as your spending less cash on capacity than you are on energy.
True to an extent but that will change. Anyway, your point is...?
You need to look at DNA as something that uses the environment that's it's placed in as apposed to DNA = IQ or some such nonsense.
In a large led study they found a strong correlation between having led exposure and incarceration, a decreased IQ and impulse control issues. (They're where more problems but those are off the top of my head.) So, assuming causality, actively removing led should is going to have a large impact on society. That is a fast and cheep method of increasing society's collective intelligence with a moderate direct cost and long term cost benefits. What bush calls actionable intelligence are useful bits of information. What makes actionable intelligence useful is you can do something with it. So while looking at DNA might help you design people 20 years from now with a higher IQ looking at environment factors is useful NOW.
When looking at twins and IQ your dealing with:
Tiny sample sizes.
Similar environments.
A shitty measuring tool (IQ)
And you still find a high degree of variability. Yes, it's a little less than among siblings but finding a few twins with extremely similar IQ's is less important than finding 1 set of twins with a large gap in IQ.
PS: Granted both are requirements if you take a man and stick him in solitary confinement from birth and a monkey raised like a human child and neither of them are going to learn to talk. But the monkey can still learn sign language where the human would be unable to communicate.
Or more basically the variety in the average DNA is much less important than interment(environment) when determining someone's intellect. - Pentagram a human spell checker wins again.
The above is based on the variability in the average persons DNA and the average environment there raised in the US.
How about a bypass node. Aka A small hole say below the sternum that let's you take a deep breath and use that air to force whatever is choking you out of your mouth. You would lose a lot of filtration capacity, but it might be useful when say running full tilt. As a form of circular breathing would increase the amount of O2 in the lungs when running granted at the cost of loss of moisture.
You're thinking short term. If a normal has 2.01 kids that have 2.01 kids, and a mutant has 2.0105 kids that on average that have 2.0105 kids then over time people with that mutation will tend to take over the gene pool. Yea, it's slow but with 6+ billion years to work with some "slow" things can be vary vary fast.
Note: By 2.01 kids I mean that on average they have 2.01 kids who grow up and have kids. Ditto for the 2.105 kids
Hmm, 100 people so 25 million people could be 10 dollars better off? AKA Is 100 people worth 250million$? Hmm hard to say. Now would I be willing to abort 100 unborn people to save society 2500 million$ Fuck yea.
So why is saving everyone in the US 10$ is worth killing off 100people at conception? Well let's say 100 people live 70 * 16 * 365 waking hours. Well If society makes 1$ an hour net profit (What you produce not what your paid.) supporting those people would cost 2500/3 = 833 million hours of work so people can live 40 million hours. Now I don't know about you, but if I was given a choice to give up 83 hours of my free time working so I could live another 4 hours I don't think I would do that.
PS: I don't think most people really produce anywhere near 3$ / hour of net worth but it makes my point better than trying to use less $. It is even more clear when you start talking about old people with poor quality of life. Take someone why can either die in 48 hours and cost 50,000 to do so or die now well if you ask them that question when there about to die they might say yea but if you ask them when there 20 I think most people would say give me the 50k now.
Lack of a single nutrient can cause a 15point drop in IQ.
Led can lead to severe mental retardation and other issues.
Both environment and genetics are required for a high intellect but most people are not given an environment to develop a high functional intellect. While several studies show the HUGE impact led has on people's development few studies have demonstrated any relationship with your DNA and intelligence.
Or more basically the variety in the average DNA is much less important than interment when determining someone's intellect.
PS: We can do something about environment but there is not much we can do about DNA.
That might be short sighted. I have all of mine and a mouth that's large enough to fit them. So I get to eat food faster while chewing it than most people do. The ability to chew food ~20% faster might not seem that important but over my lifetime I have saved a lot of time by being able to eat food quickly. There might be an advantage to giving the enzymes in my saliva more time to work but I can't think what the value in a wisdom tooth without a matching tooth to grind it agents.
In the end having fewer larger teeth might be more useful considering how much time I spend flossing those back teeth.
It's hard to call genetic engineering a form of evolution but I think people are going to start evolving the ability to survive in ever more diverse conditions. Ideally we should be able to transform a few base elements and a few energy sources into everything we need. The dependence on things like vitamin C should start to disappear over time as long as people are living in harsh environments.
As to mars I think we may be stuck living in enclosed averments for a long time. We might try a combination of terraforming and human modification to let people walk outside of habitats but I think such a terraforming effort is only a few orders of magnitude harder than changing it's orbit and adding enough mass to make it earthlike so we might end up doing that.
We are not devolving. We are accumulating mutations, which is the first step in evolution.
As to the smart mate with smart idea:
1. Dumb people may be smart enough that it's counter productive to be smarter than them.
2. The are 6 billion people in the world breaking them into two groups is not all that accurate.,
3. If you have two groups one of which has large numbers of kids and the other has few kids the group that has few kids is under more evolutionary pressure to get rid of "bad" traits so they may look "healthier" but the other group is going to be able to adapt to change more quickly.
Considering how important diet is to development it may be better to think of groups like rich, middle class, and poor. The most adaptable DNA is going to work well in any of these situations. Over 5 - 10 generations people will have ancestors from all of these groups so DNA is going to search for ways to make smart / tall people even if they have a poor diet to work with.
Sorry, I was talking about 10gb on a phone that does everything mine does. Aka It would be less than 1 inch thick, have 2 full color screans (so you can see status info without opening it up), a camra with flash, use solid state memory (no HDD), cost 100$ or less and have great battory life.
I could have said 1 year to 10GB+ and 11 years to 10's of TB but when you add in cost and size I don't think there going to be 10-40GB phones for that cheep for 5-10 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Therefore they have insufficient information to legally decide to allow the embryo to be deprived of life.
The default action when provided insufficient information is to do nothing.
If you buy a lottery ticket you might have won but you don't quit your job until you find out you did win.
I might land unharmed if I decide to jump out the 5th story window at my office complex vs. taking the elevator but I don't know so I don't do it.
God might decide to send you to hell for chewing gum on a Sunday so let's outlaw gum on Sundays.
PC's are not in the bible so computers must be evil.
IF YOU DON'T KNOW THAT EMBRYO'S ARE PEOPLE THEN SAY SO AND LEAVE EVERYONE ELSE ALONE.
Social harm = harms society.
Killing your self is social harm because your reducing society's productive workforce. On the other hand sleeping on your right vs. left side at night is not social harm because it does not affect society. What does and does no harm society it's not an ethics issue and it's not relative.
Things are only relative when you talk about your rights to harm society by say staying up late watching TV. Your going to be less productive at work so do you have that right?
It's flame bait because you don't know if it's more or less promising research. If researchers want to try something then clearly they have a reason for doing so. So if thousands of well-educated people in their field say this shows promise and someone outside their field says no it's pointless then either they're clueless or they're trying to start a flame war.
OPS: Both sperm and eggs are alive but that does not make them human anymore than a single cell is a human.
And what should the law do to protect a living being that could be a person?
Nothing. They have insufficient information to act.
Life starts at conception.
FALSE!
Twins can start from the same cell. So when did their life start?
Both sperm and eggs are alive but that does not make them human anymore than a single a human.
Have you ever seen code written by a 13 year old working by themselves? It looks awfully similar to code written by anyone who has no formal training or team work experience. The 13 year old is also always trying to prove how good they are at coding... it's a pain to deal with kids like that.
Hmm, I started coding at age 8. By 13 I was using QBasic and writing some OK code. Looking back at some of that code I think I have gotten dumber over time. Other than using a few GOTO's it looks like what I code now but then I see stuff like this odd nested loop that draws simple clouds in the exhaust of a rocket simulation. It looks cool and I can see how it's rotating though several colors so it's looks like it's on fire but somehow it leaves a trail of while clouds on a blue background while the exhaust colors look red and orange.
It's been so long I don't recall my thought process but It's cool looking at how optimized some of those QBasic programs where. Granted I was using a 286 and an interpreted language so getting things done fast enough to keep a 13 year old interested must have been hard but a lot of that code is just insane.
Yea the code needs more comments, but god damm there is some cool stuff going on. I really wonder what I could have done with a modern PC and VC++.
The fact that 'works properly and meets customer requirements fully' is not your no 1 criteria would also lead to pretty abrupt interview termination with me.
.001 seconds. However, things like cost, efficiency, and bugs are clearly are valid comparisons across projects.
Given sufficient recourses most groups can meet customer's requirements. Quality code goes beyond this. If someone says all queries need to take less than 2seconds and they say the database is going to have 2million records then a system that finishes in all query's in 1.9 seconds is just as correct as a system that completes all query's in 1 second or
I have seen an 8 man team work for 2 months creating a system that was so bug ridden that tossing it and recoding from scratch seemed the only real option. In two weeks I produced something that fit spec and was almost bug free. While some testers found 2 spelling mistakes and a resource leak these took all of 2 hours to fix. So I was 32x as effective as the average member of this 8 man team.
When I see something that looks like "grunt coding work" the first think I think of is "there is a better way to do this." My best example of this was my first assignment at my first job which was to crate documentation for a little over 3megs of Object Pascal source files. Now I could have done this by hand but after 6 weeks of coding I had a listing of all objects and what there variables are, what those object inherited from, which objects they used, a listing of every object's functions and which functions of which objects they called. Yes I could have done this by hand but now I have a script that instantly generates accurate documentation with a click.
An even better example of this comes from my father. He went from coding screens in VC++ to writing scripts to create VC++ code to writing code to read database format information to create scripts to write VC++ code. He then started to write scripts to do a lot of work grunts who where using those screens did. Over the past 10 years he has eliminated over 50 positions within his and related departments. This is the value of experience.
PS: Some people code to spec while others look at spec as a guide to what clueless people think they want and act accordingly.
You need spend more energy / fuel on placing something in orbit as using a ballistic missile so there is little advantage to a space based kinetic weapon vs. a ballistic rocket which can hit any target anywhere in the world in less tan 20min. (11min comes to mind but that might be a US to Russia trip.) Space based weapons are sitting targets that are hard to defend and they are not all that fast because they don't spend all there time at an optimal launch location. AKA there orbiting so you can't depend on them to be over the target when you want to use them.
Your 486 did not have a 10GB HDD chances are it had 200 MB Disk space which is still more than most cell phones.
As I said 10 years till you have the 10-40GB cellphone that's small and cheep. And 20 years till your talking about 10-40TB cell phones. Yea, I can get a TB on my PC right now but it's going to cost a little over a grand for 5 250GB disks in a raid 5.
You could build a cellpohone the size of a iPod with 40GB of storage today but it's not going to be cheep and it's not the size of my cellphone.
This is a classic case of efficiency vs. cost. The advantage of Ground contact heat pumps is heat pumps are less efferent the larger the heat gradients you're trying to produce. So using a fixed base of say 60degF let's you pump out air at 85degF for heating and 50degF for cooling a and be more efficient than trying to worm 20degF air to 85 degF for heating and cool 100degF air to 50degF for cooling. In most cases in the US this is plenty efficient to remove the value of going further than this.
You can do the same up north as going from -70degF > 85degF is much worse than 10degF > 85degF but as you keep sucking the heat out of the ground your system will become less efficient over time. Now if you use the "free" summer heat to worm up the ground to say 10degF then you should be able to use that "free" heat though much of the winter. Yea much of it's going to be lost to thermal spread as you said but if you pump enough energy into the ground you should be able to use a smaller system instead of trying to tap into huge sections of the ground to avoid this cooling effect.
I have seen a similar system used at altitude there tends to be a large drop in temperature from Day to Night so you can reduce your summer cooling bills by opening your windows at night and then closing them in the day until the house worms up to the outside temperature. This works best with a large stone house with few windows but a well insulated and shaded house can also benefit from this.
PS: Granted I have not looked all that much so I may be full of it but it seems to work out well.
Environmental factors do have the potential to have large effects on a person's intelligence, but for most people their environment is similar enough for this to make little difference.
NO!
A large number of people in the US suffer from heavy metal exposure. Huge portions of our society have an abysmal diet and little to no regular exercise. Most people are sleep deprived on a regular basis. Legal and illegal regularly affect people's thoughts and actions. And let's not forget those areas with a truly horrible educational system. These are all environmental factors that greatly effect functional intelligence.
When you look at two twins separated at birth they tend to have similar backgrounds so they often have similar IQ test scores but you will also find twins with significant differences in IQ, which is clearly an environmental impact. DNA is important but if you want to increase the standard functional intelligence of our society starting with environment is going to get you far quickly.
PS: IQ tests have had their baseline change over time clearly this has nothing to do with DNA.
Could not find the exact model but looking at the website it's basically a Samsung SCH-a670.
It's 99$ for the phone on a 1-year contract so it might cost a little more than that to replace but they do a buy one get one free deal so it's got to be fairly cheep.
I can't find total memory for the phone as they break it into sections. My year old phone can store 60 seconds of shitty video + 60 ok pictures + 2mb for games + 20 voice contacts + voice Memo's so I am guessing around 10 - 20+ MB total.
Talk time: 175 minutes
Standby time: 170 hours
Size: 3.3H x 1.8W x 1.0D inches
Weight: 3.8 oz
Now it could get thinner but dropping under 1 inches is hardly worth it and it could have a longer battery life but it's a week of standby or 2.5 hours talk time so it works well enough. I ended up getting a 40% larger battery which added 1/4 an inch to it's depth and it's still thinner than my wallet so what's the point. (I added more battery life because I keep forgetting to charge the thing. Now I charge it once a week and it keeps on ticking.)
Many devices are better at what they do than my cell phone but I can get by with out a calculator (the onboard one sucks but it works when I want to do simple math.), Memo pad, camera, and game station.
Granted a 200$ digital camera is much better than the cell phone at taking pictures but it works well enough and I have it on me all the time. I could buy a PSP and it would be better at keeping me entertained but my cell is good enough when your trying not to get bored at the DMV.
I hope to see a 256mb phone that you can use as an Ipod shuffle in 2 years that let's you use that memory for taking pictures. After that it's just going to be a question of how much CPU and memory the thing has because it's going to be more limited the interface than anything else. As it keeps getting better at all the things my phone does now there is going to be even less reason to keep a memo pad / appointment book, game station, camera for stills or video, walkman, PDA, portable DVD player, and with good voice to text it might take over email.
PS: Verizon might try and keep you from having a USB port to the phone so you need to use some sort of mobile web to get songs on it but if anyone avoids doing that I will be happy.
Please use CR / LF and submit as "Plane Old Text" if you don't know HTML.
PS: Build a working prototype of any size and I can get you finding but you sound like your off your meds so I am going to leave the rest of that post alone.
~40,000,000 - 70,000,000 people died in WWII now there where many causes but on this scale wiping out to minor city's is not that huge.(http://www.faqfarm.com/Q/How_many_soldiers_
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_i
Out of 28,410 houses in the inner city of Dresden, 24,866 were destroyed. An area of 15 square kilometers was totally destroyed, among that: 14,000 homes, 72 schools, 22 hospitals, 19 churches, 5 theaters, 50 bank and insurance companies, 31 department stores, 31 large hotels, and 62 administration buildings. In total there were 222,000 apartments in the city. 75,000 of them were totally destroyed, 11,000 severely damaged, 7,000 damaged, 81,000 slightly damaged. The city was around 300 square kilometres in area in those days. Although the main railway station was destroyed completely, the railway was working again within a few days. The precise number of dead is difficult to ascertain and is not known. Estimates are made difficult by the fact that the city was crowded at that time with wounded soldiers and refugees. The fate of some of the refugees is not known as they may have been killed and incinerated beyond recognition in the fire-storm, or they may have left Dresden for other places without informing the authorities. Earlier reputable estimates varied from 25,000 to more than 60,000, but historians now view around 25,000-35,000 as the likely range[14](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of
VS.
http://www.uic.com.au/nip29.htm
In Hiroshima, of a resident civilian population of 250 000 it was estimated that 45 000 died on the first day and a further 19 000 during the subsequent four months. In Nagasaki, out of a population of 174 000, 22 000 died on the first day and another 17 000 within four months. Unrecorded deaths of military personnel and foreign workers may have added considerably to these figures.
So Hiroshima was a big deal but less so when compared with the death totals from WWII.
storing heat for 5 months in a big tank of water would need tons of insulation.
It depends on the size of the tank / house. Anyway, 4+ feet underground should provide plenty of insulation check out the permafrost layer up north to see how well that much ground insulates over a few months. I don't know how large a tank you would need for storage capacity but I would go for 10 -20 heat conductive pilings in the ground or water pumped though a pipe the ground as you don't need to use water in a tank for storage capacity when the ground works just as well. As to the day / night cycle that greatly increases the efficiency of these systems but it's not that hard to go from 40deg over 1 day to 40 deg over 200 days as long as your spending less cash on capacity than you are on energy.
True to an extent but that will change. Anyway, your point is...?
You need to look at DNA as something that uses the environment that's it's placed in as apposed to DNA = IQ or some such nonsense.
In a large led study they found a strong correlation between having led exposure and incarceration, a decreased IQ and impulse control issues. (They're where more problems but those are off the top of my head.) So, assuming causality, actively removing led should is going to have a large impact on society. That is a fast and cheep method of increasing society's collective intelligence with a moderate direct cost and long term cost benefits. What bush calls actionable intelligence are useful bits of information. What makes actionable intelligence useful is you can do something with it. So while looking at DNA might help you design people 20 years from now with a higher IQ looking at environment factors is useful NOW.
When looking at twins and IQ your dealing with:
Tiny sample sizes.
Similar environments.
A shitty measuring tool (IQ)
And you still find a high degree of variability. Yes, it's a little less than among siblings but finding a few twins with extremely similar IQ's is less important than finding 1 set of twins with a large gap in IQ.
PS: Granted both are requirements if you take a man and stick him in solitary confinement from birth and a monkey raised like a human child and neither of them are going to learn to talk. But the monkey can still learn sign language where the human would be unable to communicate.
Or more basically the variety in the average DNA is much less important than interment(environment) when determining someone's intellect. - Pentagram a human spell checker wins again.
The above is based on the variability in the average persons DNA and the average environment there raised in the US.
How about a bypass node. Aka A small hole say below the sternum that let's you take a deep breath and use that air to force whatever is choking you out of your mouth. You would lose a lot of filtration capacity, but it might be useful when say running full tilt. As a form of circular breathing would increase the amount of O2 in the lungs when running granted at the cost of loss of moisture.
You're thinking short term. If a normal has 2.01 kids that have 2.01 kids, and a mutant has 2.0105 kids that on average that have 2.0105 kids then over time people with that mutation will tend to take over the gene pool. Yea, it's slow but with 6+ billion years to work with some "slow" things can be vary vary fast.
Note: By 2.01 kids I mean that on average they have 2.01 kids who grow up and have kids. Ditto for the 2.105 kids
Hmm, 100 people so 25 million people could be 10 dollars better off? AKA Is 100 people worth 250million$?
/3 = 833 million hours of work so people can live 40 million hours. Now I don't know about you, but if I was given a choice to give up 83 hours of my free time working so I could live another 4 hours I don't think I would do that.
Hmm hard to say.
Now would I be willing to abort 100 unborn people to save society 2500 million$ Fuck yea.
So why is saving everyone in the US 10$ is worth killing off 100people at conception? Well let's say 100 people live 70 * 16 * 365 waking hours. Well If society makes 1$ an hour net profit (What you produce not what your paid.) supporting those people would cost 2500
PS: I don't think most people really produce anywhere near 3$ / hour of net worth but it makes my point better than trying to use less $. It is even more clear when you start talking about old people with poor quality of life. Take someone why can either die in 48 hours and cost 50,000 to do so or die now well if you ask them that question when there about to die they might say yea but if you ask them when there 20 I think most people would say give me the 50k now.
Lack of a single nutrient can cause a 15point drop in IQ.
Led can lead to severe mental retardation and other issues.
Both environment and genetics are required for a high intellect but most people are not given an environment to develop a high functional intellect. While several studies show the HUGE impact led has on people's development few studies have demonstrated any relationship with your DNA and intelligence.
Or more basically the variety in the average DNA is much less important than interment when determining someone's intellect.
PS: We can do something about environment but there is not much we can do about DNA.
That might be short sighted. I have all of mine and a mouth that's large enough to fit them. So I get to eat food faster while chewing it than most people do. The ability to chew food ~20% faster might not seem that important but over my lifetime I have saved a lot of time by being able to eat food quickly. There might be an advantage to giving the enzymes in my saliva more time to work but I can't think what the value in a wisdom tooth without a matching tooth to grind it agents.
In the end having fewer larger teeth might be more useful considering how much time I spend flossing those back teeth.
It's hard to call genetic engineering a form of evolution but I think people are going to start evolving the ability to survive in ever more diverse conditions. Ideally we should be able to transform a few base elements and a few energy sources into everything we need. The dependence on things like vitamin C should start to disappear over time as long as people are living in harsh environments.
As to mars I think we may be stuck living in enclosed averments for a long time. We might try a combination of terraforming and human modification to let people walk outside of habitats but I think such a terraforming effort is only a few orders of magnitude harder than changing it's orbit and adding enough mass to make it earthlike so we might end up doing that.
We are not devolving. We are accumulating mutations, which is the first step in evolution.
As to the smart mate with smart idea:
1. Dumb people may be smart enough that it's counter productive to be smarter than them.
2. The are 6 billion people in the world breaking them into two groups is not all that accurate.,
3. If you have two groups one of which has large numbers of kids and the other has few kids the group that has few kids is under more evolutionary pressure to get rid of "bad" traits so they may look "healthier" but the other group is going to be able to adapt to change more quickly.
Considering how important diet is to development it may be better to think of groups like rich, middle class, and poor. The most adaptable DNA is going to work well in any of these situations. Over 5 - 10 generations people will have ancestors from all of these groups so DNA is going to search for ways to make smart / tall people even if they have a poor diet to work with.
Sorry, I was talking about 10gb on a phone that does everything mine does. Aka It would be less than 1 inch thick, have 2 full color screans (so you can see status info without opening it up), a camra with flash, use solid state memory (no HDD), cost 100$ or less and have great battory life.
I could have said 1 year to 10GB+ and 11 years to 10's of TB but when you add in cost and size I don't think there going to be 10-40GB phones for that cheep for 5-10 years.