Yes, we can build safe reactors, just not water-cooled reactors. Fission reactions are "just getting warmed up" by the time water starts boiling. That is a bad combination. This is why water-cooled reactors have to operate at 100+ atmospheres of pressure. Just taking water out of the equation makes fission several orders of magnitude simpler and safer to use.
That's why we should be working on new designs based on molten salt cooling
The fact that water vaporizes when overheated or depressurized is a safety mechanism too. When water vaporizes, it absorbs nearly 7x as much energy as it takes to heat water from room temperature to boiling (2260 kJ/kg vs 4.19 kJ/kg*C). Or nearly 2x the energy it takes to heat water from room temperature to the operating temp of a pressurized water reactor. So a leak or depressurization of the water automatically and instantly results in cooling.
The large volumetric change when water vaporizes is also ideal for driving a generator. Volume change = mechanical work, which is easily captured by a turbine. Without a volume change, you're left trying to capture energy via an inefficient and bulky Stirling engine.
So yeah molten salt reactors have a lot going for them. But the use of water for cooling isn't because of some grand conspiracy. Water is just an extremely good medium for cooling and converting thermal energy into mechanical work, and was the obvious choice when reactors were being designed ~50 years ago.
1) The Schmeiser case was a civil trial. The standard of evidence used by the judges was "on the balance" ("a preponderance of the evidence" in the U.S.). Basically, which side convinced the judges slightly more. The Canadian Supreme Court's ruling on it was split 5-4, so it's questionable to claim anything from the decision is "rather damning."
2) The Supreme Court put aside the award of Schmeiser's profits to Monsanto, and fined him just $1. Their reasoning was that while Schmeiser may have used Monsanto's GM seed and either deliberately or unwittingly helped it to spread to his fields, he did not benefit from it in any way for the simple reason that he did not spray Roundup on his crops. He sprayed it in the areas surrounding his fields to kill weeds, and he sprayed it in a small section of one field to determine if it had been contaminated. But he did not otherwise use it on his crop fields. In other words, Monsanto's seed did not benefit him in any way, and there was no motive for him to have acted with malicious intent as Monsanto claimed. Monsanto's hypothesized version of events (where Schmeiser attempted to create a Roundup-resistant canola strain without paying the licensing fees) is most likely baseless for this reason.
3) The court decision you cite took Monsanto's word that resistance to Roundup could not develop naturally. It thus found that Schmeiser "should have known" that the canola which survived Roundup in the ditches had Monsanto's patented gene, and he should have treated it as contraband. However, it's since been shown that Monsanto was wrong, and Roundup-resistance can arise naturally in plants. Schmeiser's behavior of testing and putting aside seed from the contaminated field can thus be explained as him believing that perhaps he had a new strain of naturally Roundup-resistant canola. It doesn't have to be Monsanto's explanation that he knew he had Roundup Ready seed and was secretly and deliberately trying to incorporate it into his crop.
4) The court accepted Monsanto's explanation that seed which fell off of trucks could not travel the distance from the roadway to the field. It cites testimony from a Monsanto engineer (paragraphs 117-118) that seed which fell from a truck couldn't have fallen and been blown that far. I find that extremely dubious for the simple reason that the roadway is not limited to one truck and the wind. Other cars travel on the same roads. I have seen debris blown for miles along a road as other cars pass by and stir it up over and over. The court also incorrectly pegged 1997 (when Schmeiser first noticed the canola which survived spraying with Roundup) as the year of the contamination, and thus found it difficult to believe so much of Schmeiser's property had been contaminated so quickly merely from seed blown by the wind. But Schmeiser didn't spray Roundup throughout the ditches. He sprayed it only where he saw weeds (mostly around utility poles where workers couldn't keep the vegetation cut). The contamination could have begun years earlier, and only came to his attention in 1997.
With the way things are now in the US, it might be a good idea to buy Canadian phone service and "roam" in the US.
I worked in Canada from 2007-2010. It was actually cheaper for me to add Canada roaming to my U.S. plan and pay $3/mo + 20 cents/min roaming, than to get a Canadian cell phone exclusively for use in Canada (i.e. no U.S. roaming). I would've had to have gotten a 1000 min/mo plan for the per-minute rate on the Canadian plan to be cheaper. Their wireless service was ridiculously expensive. No idea if it's improved in the last 3 years.
That's the policy in many areas of the U.S. as well. The final decision though rests on how easy it will be to track the fleeing vehicle. In a rural area or on a highway, it's pretty easy. In a city with lots of buildings and parking structures, not so much.
As you notice; all the way up to the very recent histories, these cities grew from ~65k people to over 6 million people; all without the help of cars. The jump from then to now (when cars were available) only pushed that up by a factor of 2.
You're comparing 4000 years of growth and 100 years of growth as if they're somehow equivalent?
So tldr; : No cars would mean even bigger cities. Not in terms of density, but sheer diameter and area filled with people.
That conclusion doesn't fit the data. Here's U.S. census data from 1800 to 1990 of the percentage of the population living in urban vs. rural areas. As you can see, the advent of widespread car ownership does not correlate with a slowdown in urbanization as you're hypothesizing.
What's going on is that in order to support a city, you need to be able to transport goods and resources in and out of the city. Improved transportation facilitated that, and allowed cities to grow bigger than before. If a city needs x amount of food every day, and transportation in the 1800s by horse and wagon can only bring food from a 25 mile radius into the city in a day, then the city's population is capped at whatever food you can grow in a 25 mile radius (this is a simplified explanation - I know some food can survive trips of greater than a day). In the 1900s transportation improved to where you can bring in food from a 250 mile radius, and thus the city's population cap was higher. Current trucking and speed limits pushes that radius out to about 500 miles (though modern refrigeration increases the timeframe to several days), and so our cities can be much larger. The start of the shift to an urban population in the U.S. actually correlates almost exactly with the advent of railroads (1830s-1850s).
8.5 inch reinforced concrete. "Reinforced" means it has steel bars embedded inside. Concrete is very strong in compression, but very weak in tension. The rebar gives it tensile strength. The plain concrete and brick construction (without rebar) common in parts of Europe and in developing nations is notoriously weak against lateral forces for this reason. In most regions it's not a problem because the only significant force they experience is gravity, and gravity always pulls in one direction - down. As long as gravity is pulling down, the wall is in compression and thus very strong. But any significant sideways force, like an earthquake, tornado, or hurricane puts it into tension and can easily break apart or topple the wall. That's why you hear about a magnitude 7 earthquake in developing countries killing tens of thousands, while California gets through with a few dozen fatalities. Mud huts typically do not have enough mass to kill people in an earthquake. It's the concrete and brick apartment buildings which collapse that cause the huge fatalities.
On a per-weight basis, steel, reinforced concrete, then wood are your strongest construction materials against omnidirectional forces. Due to the lack of tensile strength, plain concrete and brick are actually pretty low in their desirability outside of very stable areas, the story of the three little pigs notwithstanding. In California for example, the brick and concrete structures built before the 1970s earthquake code changes had to be retrofitted with steel bars to give them more lateral strength. (They're the red square plates you see at regular intervals between the windows. The plate serves as an anchor for a steel bar whose other end is anchored to an interior structural member, or passes through the building all the way to the other side where it's anchored to another plate. That helps give the wall some lateral strength to resist toppling during an earthquake's shaking.) Concrete built since the 1970s has to have rebar embedded, and brick has to be cinderblock with rebar running through the holes inside. This adds considerable expense, and so wood is the construction material of choice. Europe is very fortunate that most of it is a very stable environment, so they can build using unreinforced concrete and brick with abandon.
Unfortunately, none of this matters when the wind throws a pickup truck at your building. Still, as a structural engineer, I would never willingly live in a brick or unreinforced concrete building.
This is "tornado alley" we're talking about - the last time that Moore was flattened was just 15 years ago!
If you draw two random lines on a piece of paper, at some point they will likely cross. Moore just happens to be where those two lines crossed. So it should actually be discarded as an outlier if you're trying to gauge the statistical frequency of devastating tornadoes. I grew up in tornado alley, and despite dozens of drills and a few actual warnings where the sirens sounded and we evacuated to the center of the school, I never actually saw/heard a tornado. The closest was one about 25 miles away which destroyed a family friend's neighborhood. Curiously, his home suffered very little damage while the one next door was obliterated. Tornadoes are very capricious.
So the odds of actually being hit by a tornado are pretty low. Economically speaking, you're better off rebuilding after a tornado does hit, rather than trying to construct everything to be capable of surviving a hit. It's not like an earthquake or hurricane where an entire region gets hit with the same force.
They put the rule in place to stop people failing at one using other fairs as a chance to succeed at another. He failed at one then used another to succeed. The school uses the second fair for exactly that purpose. And then they're shocked when they discover there was a rule to prevent the loophole they thought they'd discovered.
This story is the round-robin vs. single elimination argument. From what I gather, the ISEF use a single elimination system. That means (to use an extreme example) even if your science experiment is the second best in the world, you can be eliminated in the first round if the eventual winner happens to also go to your school. The "you can only enter one science fair" rule enforces that possibility. That's what happened to me - my best friend in high school was #1 in math and the sciences and I was #2. He won all the awards, scholarships, accolades, and recognition. I got... nice pieces of paper congratulating me on my 2nd place finish. Until I moved and went to a different high school, and easily beat out all the other students in math and the sciences.
When practical, a round-robin system is much better as it allows you to appraise a wider range of competitors head-to-head. Then you can take the top 2^n candidates from the round-robin and put them into a single elimination "finals" if you wish. What you call a "loophole", others could legitimately see as a mechanism to bypass this inherent unfairness of the single elimination system.
All major sporting competitions use round-robins before the single elimination final rounds. Tennis appears to use purely single elimination, but they track each player's win/loss ratios against different opponents (equivalent to round-robin results) to give them a ranking, then use the ranking to seed the single elimination tournaments to make sure the top seeds do not meet each other early in the tournament. Another approach is to use single elimination, but have a loser's bracket for everyone who loses once. Then the final is between the person who goes through undefeated vs. the person who wins the loser's bracket.
All of these systems were designed to overcome this inherent major flaw of the single elimination system. So it's a bit naive to declare this story over and uninteresting simply because the student/school broke a rule apparently designed to enforce that flaw. Unless they have some mechanism to allow outstanding runner-ups to enter the next level of science fair competition, I'd say it's a bad rule.
You reap all the rewards, but you're also responsible for all the harm. So if you want to claim you own a virus, then you're also fiscally and criminally liable for any harm that virus does. It also takes care of the Monsanto case where farmers who unknowingly have GMO crop blown onto their fields are successfully sued for patent infringement, but when organic farms who don't want the GMO stuff try to sue Monsanto for the same thing, Monsanto claim they have no responsibility for Nature spreading their seed around.
Netmarketshare counts unique visitors every month. Someone who fires up their phone's browser once a month counts just as much as someone who spends 2 hours a day browsing on their phone. So Apple's share gets inflated by iPhone users who occasionally check out a web page, but otherwise don't really use their phone's browser.
Statcounter just counts traffic. So it shows that even though fewer Android users browse the web on their phones, the ones that do browse a lot more than iPhone users. Quite the opposite of the way Apple fans usually try to spin the stats - claiming that the bulk of Android's sales are low-end phones and most of the heavy users buy iPhones. In reality the heavy users and non-users are mostly on Android. The bulk of iPhone users are infrequent browsers (they only have to browse once a month to increment netmarketshare's stats). That matches the conventional wisdom that Android attracts both people wanting a cheap phone, and tech-savvy geeks. While iPhones mostly attract people who aren't very tech-saavy, and want a phone which is functional but easy to use.
Statcounter also samples a couple orders of magnitude more sites (~3 million vs. 40,000 for netmarketshare). Netmarketshare's sample is so small they massage their figures to try to correct for sampling bias by country.
My objection to the thing is the X-ray radiation. I am by no means convinced these things are safe.
That's a good argument against these for terrestrial applications, but not at the airport. Your increased ionizing radiation exposure from the flight is roughly two orders of magnitude higher than from the scanners. So complaining about radiation from the scanners makes you come across as either ignorant (didn't know about radiation from flying), or hypocritical (upset about a small dose from the scanners, while accepting of a much larger dose from the flight).
Stick with the privacy and unreasonable search arguments.
When rich people and corporations cheat on their taxes I have to pay more.
Agreed on the rich people part. Disagree on the corporation part. Corporations don't pay taxes. They just pass them through to their customers and employees.
Money is just a representation of productivity. People are the only source of productivity, whether they're acting individually or organized together into a company. Taxes are a diversion of part of that productivity into the government's coffers (not a big deal because the government spends that money just like a taxpayer would). So no matter how high you raise corporate tax rates, companies don't pay taxes because they cannot generate productivity - only their employees do. So corporate taxes are all paid by the company's employees or customers (and if a customer is another company, the taxes are paid by that company's employees and customers, etc).
For simplicity, say the economy consists of two individuals, two companies, and the government (ignore year-to-year growth). The individuals make $40k each and (for simplicity) save nothing. That means the total economy is 2*$40k = $80k circulating each year. The government takes 20% of GDP in taxes, or $16k/yr which is reinvested into the economy. The individuals spend $64k/yr. The companies take in $80k/yr in revenue.
Initially, there are no corporate taxes - the entirety of the tax burden falls upon the individuals, so each individual pays $8k in taxes and has $32k take-home pay. They get upset that they're paying taxes while the corporations are not, so they vote to abolish personal income taxes. All taxes will now be paid by corporations.
Do you think each company will magically be able to increase their expenses (taxes) by $8k/yr without changing anything else? Of course not. They have to keep revenue and expenses in balance. Either:
(A) They cut their employees' wages by $8k/yr. The government still gets $16k (20%), and each individual now makes $32k/yr tax-free. Exactly the same as their post-tax take-home pay before they decided to shift all taxes to corporations.
(B) Or they maintain their employee's wages at $40k/yr, but raise their prices by 25% to generate an additional $10k/yr. The economy is now $100k/yr. The government's 20% is $20k/yr. The companies now take in $100k/yr ($80k from the individuals, $20k from the government). And each individual spends $40k/yr. But wait, prices have increased 25%. So that $40k can only buy the equivalent of $40k/1.25 = $32k prior to the price increase. Exactly the same as before taxes were shifted to corporations.
(C) Some partial combination of the above two.
Ultimately, people are the only creators of productivity, and they're the only consumers of it. The only way to create more real (inflation-adjusted) money is to increase productivity. Shifting taxes from individuals to corporations doesn't magically create productivity, it just rearranges the accounting. So the people pay the same amount in taxes no matter what your corporate tax rate is.
That's not to say corporate taxes are useless. There are a few corporate taxes which are helpful to the economy (e.g. property taxes discourage people from letting land sit unused while they wait for it to appreciate, VATs reduce the viability of middlemen and flipping). But shifting taxes to corporations doesn't actually put more money (inflation-adjusted) into individuals' pockets. The main effect is just to hide how much of the economy's productivity is being diverted to the government.
And likewise corporations cheating on their taxes doesn't mean individuals (on average) have to pay more. It means that company's employees and customers pay less, while non-employees and non-customers pay more. But on average it doesn't change how much taxes individuals have to pay. Only the government's overall tax intake (as percentage of GDP) can change that.
Congratulations Microsoft. Two decades after the GUI vanquished the command line, you've created a GUI which drives people back to memorizing hotkeys like secretaries in the WordPerfect days.
How much of a penalty, relative to the penalties incurred for things like small size, subpar optics, etc. does putting up with the atmosphere impose?
Here's Saturn as seen by ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile (8.2m mirror, though it can combine 4 of them into an interferometer). The observatory is at 2635m above sea level, so is looking through about 70% of the air you'd be seeing through at sea level (air decreases in density with altitude, so there is diminishing returns for getting up high). The observatory's location was chosen for its perennial clear skies. The photo was taken with what was state of the art adaptive optics a decade ago (2002). I wasn't able to find a more recent photo of Saturn from a large, ground-based telescope in 15 minutes of googling.
I picked Saturn as an example instead of Jupiter because Jupiter is bigger and closer than Saturn. So even at low resolution you can still get some impressive shots. Here's one taken by an 11" (28cm) telescope.
I'm told, by people more closely involved with amateur astronomy than I, that a 200mm aperture is a pretty small instrument, especially for reflector-based designs.
200mm (about 8 inches) is about the size of your basic cheap but serious reflector for an amateur astronomer. It's pretty much the minimum you'd expect anyone doing astronomy as a serious hobby would own.
A quick calc of the Rayleigh criterion says a 200mm scope would have a maximum angular resolution of 0.6 arc-seconds (i.e. two stars closer than this separation would appear as a single dot). Hubble's Rayleigh criterion limit is 0.05 arc-seconds, so Hubble can resolve objects 12x smaller. The Hubble photo is 2150x1000 resolution. Reduce it by 12x to about 180x83 resolution, and that's about the amount of detail in you'd expect in a Saturn pic from a 200mm scope in orbit. IMHO it's not really worth it in the visible band. They'd better be planning to do a lot of UV work with it.
Patriot Missile: In service since 1981
Aegis: In development since the 1980s, first test 1999
F/A-18: Introduced in service in 1983
V-22:First flew in 1989, entered service 2007, was unreliable for several years after that. It took us over 20 years to fully develop it
Black Hawk: Introduced 1979
I am 26 years old, and most of these systems were in development or introduced before I was born. The 2 most recent technologies have been fraught with problems in development, production, and deployment. Maybe they should just go ahead and give the Chinese the F-22 plans as well
I'm 44 years old. I worked on a project for Lockheed my senior year of undergrad. That also happened to be the year Lockheed's YF-22 beat out Northrop-McDonnell Douglass' YF-23 and was selected by the DoD as the next generation fighter to replace the F-15. This was 1990-1991. So the F-22 is based on 1980s technology, and was also developed before you were born.
The aerospace industry is very slow to adopt new technologies. They do not grab the latest offerings from Intel or IBM and stick it aboard. Everything needs to be tested and vetted for years if not decades before it's deemed reliable enough to put aboard a plane or spacecraft. Consequently, on the early Space Shuttle missions, the most powerful computer aboard was an HP-41c calculator, because the built-in computers were from the 1960s or early 1970s.
That's actually been a factor before. The Soviets copied the B-29 to make the Tu-4. One of the enormous engineering difficulties they faced was that the specs were all in imperial units. They couldn't just substitute the closest metric equivalent. They had to test each and every part to see if a slightly smaller metric piece would be strong enough, or if they needed to use a slightly bigger metric part to achieve the necessary strength.
Allowing the students to create their own VM's implies that they'll be root on the hypervisor.
For most purposes (especially for teaching software), you can install a VM within a VM. You won't get the nifty virtualization features like direct hardware access (which means no 64-bit OSes). But several if not most virtualization software packages can do pure software emulation. Just for fun, I once used a Windows host to run a Linux guest, which ran an OS X guest, which ran a Windows guest.
Since submitter wishes to teach kids about setting up and running VMs, they're going to need root access. I don't see any problem with having them do it within a VM so they can both have root access yet not have control of the real physical host. Just be sure to inform them of the hardware virtualization features they'll be missing out on in a pure software virtualization environment.
Do you have homeowner's insurance? You realize that the odds of your house burning down or some other catastrophe striking is about 0.5%, right? So why bother with insurance?
The reason is that there's a second factor here that you're ignoring. Yes it's important to consider the actual small chance of Paypal freezing your account. But equally important is how big an impact such a freeze would have on your or your business' finances. If you're some rich guy with money spread across dozens of accounts (to stay under the $250k FDIC limit), then it's no big deal. Likewise, if a rich guy owns a dozen homes and can afford to buy another the next day if one burns down, he'll actually save money on average by foregoing homeowner's insurance.
But if you're a normal person, your home burning down would be an unrecoverable catastrophe. Likewise having your account frozen can be devastating to your finances, possibly even leading to your business going bankrupt. That's why you buy homeowner's insurance despite the small chance of disaster actually striking - it would be a financially unrecoverable event, so you buy insurance to protect yourself in case it happens. Likewise, you may want to avoid Paypal despite the small chance of having your account frozen, if the frozen account would or may be a financially unrecoverable event.
So Better Place is liquidating while Tesla is turning a profit. This shows that they were focusing on the wrong problem. Instead of creating a new infrastructure specifically for electric cars (all of which would have to standardize on battery packs, limiting design and innovation in an emerging technology), Tesla simply made sure they could be efficient enough and pack enough batteries in for about 300 miles.
I wouldn't jump to that conclusion so quickly. There's an unknown fraction of the population which is ok with a car with a 300 mile range. Tesla has done ok so far because they haven't shipped enough units to saturate that fraction of the market.
If that fraction turns out to be 80%, then Tesla will do fine, and the big three will become the big four.
If that fraction turns out to be 8%, then Tesla's sales will hit a ceiling relatively quickly, and their EV will not be The EV which changes commuting. Something like what Better Place was trying may be the better long-term solution.
Rather than count how many cars Tesla sells, perhaps we should be looking at what fraction of their buyers own a Tesla as their only car. If that number is high, then the 80% case is more likely. If that number is low, then the 8% case is more likely.
Tesla also figured out relatively fast charging (slower than filling up with gas, but not horrible)
An ICE car can refuel in about 2-3 minutes, Call it 5 min once you add in time to move the car in position, pop open the fuel cap, swipe your credit card, etc. It can go about 350 miles between refueling stops. At 65 mph, you can cover 350 miles in 5.4 hours. So you're spending 5 / (5+(5.38*60)) = 1.5% of your time refueling. Or put another way, your ratio of driving time to refueling time is 64.8 on a long trip.
Tesla's supercharge stations give you about a half charge in 30 minutes. If you're going 65 mph, you can cover 150 miles in 2.3 hours. So if you're making a long trip you're going to spend.5 / (2.3+.5) = 17.9% of your time charging. Your ratio of driving time to recharge time is 4.6. Yeah you can mitigate that somewhat by coordinating meals and bathroom breaks with supercharge stops, but there are only so many meals in a day. I wouldn't call it "not horrible" quite yet. It's better than needing hours to recharge, but being better than nonviable does not automatically make it not horrible.
I don't see the problem. Why shouldn't they be allowed to advertise in their own products? TV stations advertise shows they'll be broadcasting. Newspapers advertise a phone number you can call to subscribe. Magazines include those annoying little cards you can fill out to subscribe. Movies in the theater and DVD/Bluray include trailers for upcoming movies. The bike I just bought included a little brochure of accessories I can buy.
You could argue that they aren't really paying for their ads since they're just paying themselves to place the self-ad. But they do actually lose money from a self-ad since they're giving up the potential revenue from that advertising space. And all the other self-advertising I described above does the same thing - where's the FTC investigation of those practices?
The entertainment industry doesn't bother with this nansy pansy indirect stealing of money by pirating intellectual property. They cut straight to the chase and steal money outright from the people working for them.
Once some clever developer figures out he can slip in code to make millions of consoles command the cloud to mine bitcoins for him, the peak usage will be the average usage. Of course none of that will actually benefit the game...
The idea is to use the cleanest water possible. What is bad about trying to put the best ingredients into your product.
Why not use reverse osmosis filtered water like the soft drink industry uses then? Short of distillation that's the cleanest, purest water man has been able to create, and completely eliminates any purported contamination from fracking. Or is that "too" clean, and "natural" impurities are more important than cleanliness?
Water is water regardless of whether it comes from an aquifer or a filter. If some impurities are good and some are bad, list what they are so we can objectively measure their amounts and decide what levels are beneficial/harmful. Don't wave your hands with an ambiguous "cleanliness" argument designed to make it seem like the old way of doing things is the best.
MS should of bought all the Xbox* names they could of back when they released the original xbox. They didn't, tough shit, imo.
That's not the way it was supposed to work. Way back when the Internet was young and domain names was first thought up, the idea was that Microsoft just puts their site for the XBox on xbox.microsoft.com. If they wanted to simplify it, they could register xbox.com. But that's it; nothing else. Then when they released the XBox 360, they put it on the URL 360.xbox.com. When they release the XBox One, they put it on one.xbox.com. Same thing for e.g. Apple products. iphone.apple.com, 4gs.iphone.apple.com, air.macbook.apple.com, etc.
But because the folks who made domain names decided to make them little endian, the above URLs run counter to how you name things (in English at least). So instead it's become popular to try to register a domain for the product name as you'd write it, which is what makes everything vulnerable to domain squatting.
The folks who made USENET got it right when they made their hierarchy big endian (e.g. rec.arts.sf.starwars.games). You start from the biggest concept and narrow it down with each additional word. If domain names had been big endian, the above URLs would've been com.xbox.360, com.xbox.one, com.apple.iphone.4gs, com.apple.macbook.air, etc. And we probably could've avoided most of this domain squatting mess. Phishing would've been harder too since the non-spoofable part of the domain name would appear first.
Of course that would beg the question as to why ARM doesn't and the answer is they can't. The more features you blot on to a chip, the higher the clock speed, and so on, the more power it needs. So you want 64-bit? More power. Bigger memory controller? More power. Heavy hitting vector unit? More power. And so on.
Isn't this just RISC (ARM) vs CISC (x86/x64) all over again? While I won't rule out the possibility that RISC may win this time around, it's rather telling that CISC has won all previous rounds.
The modern (digital electronic) computer age began in WWII with Colossus, used by the British to break German codes.
The Apple I was early in the personal computer era. Computers prior were based on vacuum tubes or individual solid state transistors, and were the size of a room. Silicon transistors were experimental during the 1950s, and slowly commercialized in the 1960s allowing business computers to shrink to the size of a car and eventually a cabinet. Intel got started around then. Silicon microprocessors really took off during the early 1970s allowing computers to shrink to desktop size, spawning personal computing.
So no, the Apple I was not early in the computer era. It's bad enough people think Apple invented MP3 players, smartphones, touchscreens, and tablets. Don't add computers to the list of mis-attributed inventions. The original Apple I as a product was pretty much the same as what Apple does today - buy a bunch of readily available parts, do some modifications, assemble it, and sell it. They don't actually make (much less invent) the crucial technologies. Their biggest technical strength is that they're damn good at making a pleasant and easy-to-use user interface.
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Water is a popular cooling medium because its specific heat is higher than just about anything else. If you want to transport a large amount of heat energy from one place to another, heated water is about the best way to do it.
The fact that water vaporizes when overheated or depressurized is a safety mechanism too. When water vaporizes, it absorbs nearly 7x as much energy as it takes to heat water from room temperature to boiling (2260 kJ/kg vs 4.19 kJ/kg*C). Or nearly 2x the energy it takes to heat water from room temperature to the operating temp of a pressurized water reactor. So a leak or depressurization of the water automatically and instantly results in cooling.
The large volumetric change when water vaporizes is also ideal for driving a generator. Volume change = mechanical work, which is easily captured by a turbine. Without a volume change, you're left trying to capture energy via an inefficient and bulky Stirling engine.
So yeah molten salt reactors have a lot going for them. But the use of water for cooling isn't because of some grand conspiracy. Water is just an extremely good medium for cooling and converting thermal energy into mechanical work, and was the obvious choice when reactors were being designed ~50 years ago.
1) The Schmeiser case was a civil trial. The standard of evidence used by the judges was "on the balance" ("a preponderance of the evidence" in the U.S.). Basically, which side convinced the judges slightly more. The Canadian Supreme Court's ruling on it was split 5-4, so it's questionable to claim anything from the decision is "rather damning."
2) The Supreme Court put aside the award of Schmeiser's profits to Monsanto, and fined him just $1. Their reasoning was that while Schmeiser may have used Monsanto's GM seed and either deliberately or unwittingly helped it to spread to his fields, he did not benefit from it in any way for the simple reason that he did not spray Roundup on his crops. He sprayed it in the areas surrounding his fields to kill weeds, and he sprayed it in a small section of one field to determine if it had been contaminated. But he did not otherwise use it on his crop fields. In other words, Monsanto's seed did not benefit him in any way, and there was no motive for him to have acted with malicious intent as Monsanto claimed. Monsanto's hypothesized version of events (where Schmeiser attempted to create a Roundup-resistant canola strain without paying the licensing fees) is most likely baseless for this reason.
3) The court decision you cite took Monsanto's word that resistance to Roundup could not develop naturally. It thus found that Schmeiser "should have known" that the canola which survived Roundup in the ditches had Monsanto's patented gene, and he should have treated it as contraband. However, it's since been shown that Monsanto was wrong, and Roundup-resistance can arise naturally in plants. Schmeiser's behavior of testing and putting aside seed from the contaminated field can thus be explained as him believing that perhaps he had a new strain of naturally Roundup-resistant canola. It doesn't have to be Monsanto's explanation that he knew he had Roundup Ready seed and was secretly and deliberately trying to incorporate it into his crop.
4) The court accepted Monsanto's explanation that seed which fell off of trucks could not travel the distance from the roadway to the field. It cites testimony from a Monsanto engineer (paragraphs 117-118) that seed which fell from a truck couldn't have fallen and been blown that far. I find that extremely dubious for the simple reason that the roadway is not limited to one truck and the wind. Other cars travel on the same roads. I have seen debris blown for miles along a road as other cars pass by and stir it up over and over. The court also incorrectly pegged 1997 (when Schmeiser first noticed the canola which survived spraying with Roundup) as the year of the contamination, and thus found it difficult to believe so much of Schmeiser's property had been contaminated so quickly merely from seed blown by the wind. But Schmeiser didn't spray Roundup throughout the ditches. He sprayed it only where he saw weeds (mostly around utility poles where workers couldn't keep the vegetation cut). The contamination could have begun years earlier, and only came to his attention in 1997.
I worked in Canada from 2007-2010. It was actually cheaper for me to add Canada roaming to my U.S. plan and pay $3/mo + 20 cents/min roaming, than to get a Canadian cell phone exclusively for use in Canada (i.e. no U.S. roaming). I would've had to have gotten a 1000 min/mo plan for the per-minute rate on the Canadian plan to be cheaper. Their wireless service was ridiculously expensive. No idea if it's improved in the last 3 years.
That's the policy in many areas of the U.S. as well. The final decision though rests on how easy it will be to track the fleeing vehicle. In a rural area or on a highway, it's pretty easy. In a city with lots of buildings and parking structures, not so much.
You're comparing 4000 years of growth and 100 years of growth as if they're somehow equivalent?
That conclusion doesn't fit the data. Here's U.S. census data from 1800 to 1990 of the percentage of the population living in urban vs. rural areas. As you can see, the advent of widespread car ownership does not correlate with a slowdown in urbanization as you're hypothesizing.
What's going on is that in order to support a city, you need to be able to transport goods and resources in and out of the city. Improved transportation facilitated that, and allowed cities to grow bigger than before. If a city needs x amount of food every day, and transportation in the 1800s by horse and wagon can only bring food from a 25 mile radius into the city in a day, then the city's population is capped at whatever food you can grow in a 25 mile radius (this is a simplified explanation - I know some food can survive trips of greater than a day). In the 1900s transportation improved to where you can bring in food from a 250 mile radius, and thus the city's population cap was higher. Current trucking and speed limits pushes that radius out to about 500 miles (though modern refrigeration increases the timeframe to several days), and so our cities can be much larger. The start of the shift to an urban population in the U.S. actually correlates almost exactly with the advent of railroads (1830s-1850s).
On a per-weight basis, steel, reinforced concrete, then wood are your strongest construction materials against omnidirectional forces. Due to the lack of tensile strength, plain concrete and brick are actually pretty low in their desirability outside of very stable areas, the story of the three little pigs notwithstanding. In California for example, the brick and concrete structures built before the 1970s earthquake code changes had to be retrofitted with steel bars to give them more lateral strength. (They're the red square plates you see at regular intervals between the windows. The plate serves as an anchor for a steel bar whose other end is anchored to an interior structural member, or passes through the building all the way to the other side where it's anchored to another plate. That helps give the wall some lateral strength to resist toppling during an earthquake's shaking.) Concrete built since the 1970s has to have rebar embedded, and brick has to be cinderblock with rebar running through the holes inside. This adds considerable expense, and so wood is the construction material of choice. Europe is very fortunate that most of it is a very stable environment, so they can build using unreinforced concrete and brick with abandon.
Unfortunately, none of this matters when the wind throws a pickup truck at your building. Still, as a structural engineer, I would never willingly live in a brick or unreinforced concrete building.
If you draw two random lines on a piece of paper, at some point they will likely cross. Moore just happens to be where those two lines crossed. So it should actually be discarded as an outlier if you're trying to gauge the statistical frequency of devastating tornadoes. I grew up in tornado alley, and despite dozens of drills and a few actual warnings where the sirens sounded and we evacuated to the center of the school, I never actually saw/heard a tornado. The closest was one about 25 miles away which destroyed a family friend's neighborhood. Curiously, his home suffered very little damage while the one next door was obliterated. Tornadoes are very capricious.
So the odds of actually being hit by a tornado are pretty low. Economically speaking, you're better off rebuilding after a tornado does hit, rather than trying to construct everything to be capable of surviving a hit. It's not like an earthquake or hurricane where an entire region gets hit with the same force.
This story is the round-robin vs. single elimination argument. From what I gather, the ISEF use a single elimination system. That means (to use an extreme example) even if your science experiment is the second best in the world, you can be eliminated in the first round if the eventual winner happens to also go to your school. The "you can only enter one science fair" rule enforces that possibility. That's what happened to me - my best friend in high school was #1 in math and the sciences and I was #2. He won all the awards, scholarships, accolades, and recognition. I got... nice pieces of paper congratulating me on my 2nd place finish. Until I moved and went to a different high school, and easily beat out all the other students in math and the sciences.
When practical, a round-robin system is much better as it allows you to appraise a wider range of competitors head-to-head. Then you can take the top 2^n candidates from the round-robin and put them into a single elimination "finals" if you wish. What you call a "loophole", others could legitimately see as a mechanism to bypass this inherent unfairness of the single elimination system.
All major sporting competitions use round-robins before the single elimination final rounds. Tennis appears to use purely single elimination, but they track each player's win/loss ratios against different opponents (equivalent to round-robin results) to give them a ranking, then use the ranking to seed the single elimination tournaments to make sure the top seeds do not meet each other early in the tournament. Another approach is to use single elimination, but have a loser's bracket for everyone who loses once. Then the final is between the person who goes through undefeated vs. the person who wins the loser's bracket.
All of these systems were designed to overcome this inherent major flaw of the single elimination system. So it's a bit naive to declare this story over and uninteresting simply because the student/school broke a rule apparently designed to enforce that flaw. Unless they have some mechanism to allow outstanding runner-ups to enter the next level of science fair competition, I'd say it's a bad rule.
You reap all the rewards, but you're also responsible for all the harm. So if you want to claim you own a virus, then you're also fiscally and criminally liable for any harm that virus does. It also takes care of the Monsanto case where farmers who unknowingly have GMO crop blown onto their fields are successfully sued for patent infringement, but when organic farms who don't want the GMO stuff try to sue Monsanto for the same thing, Monsanto claim they have no responsibility for Nature spreading their seed around.
Netmarketshare counts unique visitors every month. Someone who fires up their phone's browser once a month counts just as much as someone who spends 2 hours a day browsing on their phone. So Apple's share gets inflated by iPhone users who occasionally check out a web page, but otherwise don't really use their phone's browser.
Statcounter just counts traffic. So it shows that even though fewer Android users browse the web on their phones, the ones that do browse a lot more than iPhone users. Quite the opposite of the way Apple fans usually try to spin the stats - claiming that the bulk of Android's sales are low-end phones and most of the heavy users buy iPhones. In reality the heavy users and non-users are mostly on Android. The bulk of iPhone users are infrequent browsers (they only have to browse once a month to increment netmarketshare's stats). That matches the conventional wisdom that Android attracts both people wanting a cheap phone, and tech-savvy geeks. While iPhones mostly attract people who aren't very tech-saavy, and want a phone which is functional but easy to use.
Statcounter also samples a couple orders of magnitude more sites (~3 million vs. 40,000 for netmarketshare). Netmarketshare's sample is so small they massage their figures to try to correct for sampling bias by country.
That's a good argument against these for terrestrial applications, but not at the airport. Your increased ionizing radiation exposure from the flight is roughly two orders of magnitude higher than from the scanners. So complaining about radiation from the scanners makes you come across as either ignorant (didn't know about radiation from flying), or hypocritical (upset about a small dose from the scanners, while accepting of a much larger dose from the flight).
Stick with the privacy and unreasonable search arguments.
Agreed on the rich people part. Disagree on the corporation part. Corporations don't pay taxes. They just pass them through to their customers and employees.
Money is just a representation of productivity. People are the only source of productivity, whether they're acting individually or organized together into a company. Taxes are a diversion of part of that productivity into the government's coffers (not a big deal because the government spends that money just like a taxpayer would). So no matter how high you raise corporate tax rates, companies don't pay taxes because they cannot generate productivity - only their employees do. So corporate taxes are all paid by the company's employees or customers (and if a customer is another company, the taxes are paid by that company's employees and customers, etc).
For simplicity, say the economy consists of two individuals, two companies, and the government (ignore year-to-year growth). The individuals make $40k each and (for simplicity) save nothing. That means the total economy is 2*$40k = $80k circulating each year. The government takes 20% of GDP in taxes, or $16k/yr which is reinvested into the economy. The individuals spend $64k/yr. The companies take in $80k/yr in revenue.
Initially, there are no corporate taxes - the entirety of the tax burden falls upon the individuals, so each individual pays $8k in taxes and has $32k take-home pay. They get upset that they're paying taxes while the corporations are not, so they vote to abolish personal income taxes. All taxes will now be paid by corporations.
Do you think each company will magically be able to increase their expenses (taxes) by $8k/yr without changing anything else? Of course not. They have to keep revenue and expenses in balance. Either:
Ultimately, people are the only creators of productivity, and they're the only consumers of it. The only way to create more real (inflation-adjusted) money is to increase productivity. Shifting taxes from individuals to corporations doesn't magically create productivity, it just rearranges the accounting. So the people pay the same amount in taxes no matter what your corporate tax rate is.
That's not to say corporate taxes are useless. There are a few corporate taxes which are helpful to the economy (e.g. property taxes discourage people from letting land sit unused while they wait for it to appreciate, VATs reduce the viability of middlemen and flipping). But shifting taxes to corporations doesn't actually put more money (inflation-adjusted) into individuals' pockets. The main effect is just to hide how much of the economy's productivity is being diverted to the government.
And likewise corporations cheating on their taxes doesn't mean individuals (on average) have to pay more. It means that company's employees and customers pay less, while non-employees and non-customers pay more. But on average it doesn't change how much taxes individuals have to pay. Only the government's overall tax intake (as percentage of GDP) can change that.
Congratulations Microsoft. Two decades after the GUI vanquished the command line, you've created a GUI which drives people back to memorizing hotkeys like secretaries in the WordPerfect days.
Here's Saturn as seen by ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile (8.2m mirror, though it can combine 4 of them into an interferometer). The observatory is at 2635m above sea level, so is looking through about 70% of the air you'd be seeing through at sea level (air decreases in density with altitude, so there is diminishing returns for getting up high). The observatory's location was chosen for its perennial clear skies. The photo was taken with what was state of the art adaptive optics a decade ago (2002). I wasn't able to find a more recent photo of Saturn from a large, ground-based telescope in 15 minutes of googling.
Here's Saturn as seen by Hubble (2.4m mirror). Not much of a contest.
I picked Saturn as an example instead of Jupiter because Jupiter is bigger and closer than Saturn. So even at low resolution you can still get some impressive shots. Here's one taken by an 11" (28cm) telescope.
200mm (about 8 inches) is about the size of your basic cheap but serious reflector for an amateur astronomer. It's pretty much the minimum you'd expect anyone doing astronomy as a serious hobby would own.
A quick calc of the Rayleigh criterion says a 200mm scope would have a maximum angular resolution of 0.6 arc-seconds (i.e. two stars closer than this separation would appear as a single dot). Hubble's Rayleigh criterion limit is 0.05 arc-seconds, so Hubble can resolve objects 12x smaller. The Hubble photo is 2150x1000 resolution. Reduce it by 12x to about 180x83 resolution, and that's about the amount of detail in you'd expect in a Saturn pic from a 200mm scope in orbit. IMHO it's not really worth it in the visible band. They'd better be planning to do a lot of UV work with it.
I'm 44 years old. I worked on a project for Lockheed my senior year of undergrad. That also happened to be the year Lockheed's YF-22 beat out Northrop-McDonnell Douglass' YF-23 and was selected by the DoD as the next generation fighter to replace the F-15. This was 1990-1991. So the F-22 is based on 1980s technology, and was also developed before you were born.
The aerospace industry is very slow to adopt new technologies. They do not grab the latest offerings from Intel or IBM and stick it aboard. Everything needs to be tested and vetted for years if not decades before it's deemed reliable enough to put aboard a plane or spacecraft. Consequently, on the early Space Shuttle missions, the most powerful computer aboard was an HP-41c calculator, because the built-in computers were from the 1960s or early 1970s.
That's actually been a factor before. The Soviets copied the B-29 to make the Tu-4. One of the enormous engineering difficulties they faced was that the specs were all in imperial units. They couldn't just substitute the closest metric equivalent. They had to test each and every part to see if a slightly smaller metric piece would be strong enough, or if they needed to use a slightly bigger metric part to achieve the necessary strength.
For most purposes (especially for teaching software), you can install a VM within a VM. You won't get the nifty virtualization features like direct hardware access (which means no 64-bit OSes). But several if not most virtualization software packages can do pure software emulation. Just for fun, I once used a Windows host to run a Linux guest, which ran an OS X guest, which ran a Windows guest.
Since submitter wishes to teach kids about setting up and running VMs, they're going to need root access. I don't see any problem with having them do it within a VM so they can both have root access yet not have control of the real physical host. Just be sure to inform them of the hardware virtualization features they'll be missing out on in a pure software virtualization environment.
Do you have homeowner's insurance? You realize that the odds of your house burning down or some other catastrophe striking is about 0.5%, right? So why bother with insurance?
The reason is that there's a second factor here that you're ignoring. Yes it's important to consider the actual small chance of Paypal freezing your account. But equally important is how big an impact such a freeze would have on your or your business' finances. If you're some rich guy with money spread across dozens of accounts (to stay under the $250k FDIC limit), then it's no big deal. Likewise, if a rich guy owns a dozen homes and can afford to buy another the next day if one burns down, he'll actually save money on average by foregoing homeowner's insurance.
But if you're a normal person, your home burning down would be an unrecoverable catastrophe. Likewise having your account frozen can be devastating to your finances, possibly even leading to your business going bankrupt. That's why you buy homeowner's insurance despite the small chance of disaster actually striking - it would be a financially unrecoverable event, so you buy insurance to protect yourself in case it happens. Likewise, you may want to avoid Paypal despite the small chance of having your account frozen, if the frozen account would or may be a financially unrecoverable event.
I wouldn't jump to that conclusion so quickly. There's an unknown fraction of the population which is ok with a car with a 300 mile range. Tesla has done ok so far because they haven't shipped enough units to saturate that fraction of the market.
If that fraction turns out to be 80%, then Tesla will do fine, and the big three will become the big four.
If that fraction turns out to be 8%, then Tesla's sales will hit a ceiling relatively quickly, and their EV will not be The EV which changes commuting. Something like what Better Place was trying may be the better long-term solution.
Rather than count how many cars Tesla sells, perhaps we should be looking at what fraction of their buyers own a Tesla as their only car. If that number is high, then the 80% case is more likely. If that number is low, then the 8% case is more likely.
An ICE car can refuel in about 2-3 minutes, Call it 5 min once you add in time to move the car in position, pop open the fuel cap, swipe your credit card, etc. It can go about 350 miles between refueling stops. At 65 mph, you can cover 350 miles in 5.4 hours. So you're spending 5 / (5+(5.38*60)) = 1.5% of your time refueling. Or put another way, your ratio of driving time to refueling time is 64.8 on a long trip.
.5 / (2.3+.5) = 17.9% of your time charging. Your ratio of driving time to recharge time is 4.6. Yeah you can mitigate that somewhat by coordinating meals and bathroom breaks with supercharge stops, but there are only so many meals in a day. I wouldn't call it "not horrible" quite yet. It's better than needing hours to recharge, but being better than nonviable does not automatically make it not horrible.
Tesla's supercharge stations give you about a half charge in 30 minutes. If you're going 65 mph, you can cover 150 miles in 2.3 hours. So if you're making a long trip you're going to spend
I don't see the problem. Why shouldn't they be allowed to advertise in their own products? TV stations advertise shows they'll be broadcasting. Newspapers advertise a phone number you can call to subscribe. Magazines include those annoying little cards you can fill out to subscribe. Movies in the theater and DVD/Bluray include trailers for upcoming movies. The bike I just bought included a little brochure of accessories I can buy.
You could argue that they aren't really paying for their ads since they're just paying themselves to place the self-ad. But they do actually lose money from a self-ad since they're giving up the potential revenue from that advertising space. And all the other self-advertising I described above does the same thing - where's the FTC investigation of those practices?
The entertainment industry doesn't bother with this nansy pansy indirect stealing of money by pirating intellectual property. They cut straight to the chase and steal money outright from the people working for them.
Once some clever developer figures out he can slip in code to make millions of consoles command the cloud to mine bitcoins for him, the peak usage will be the average usage. Of course none of that will actually benefit the game...
Why not use reverse osmosis filtered water like the soft drink industry uses then? Short of distillation that's the cleanest, purest water man has been able to create, and completely eliminates any purported contamination from fracking. Or is that "too" clean, and "natural" impurities are more important than cleanliness?
Water is water regardless of whether it comes from an aquifer or a filter. If some impurities are good and some are bad, list what they are so we can objectively measure their amounts and decide what levels are beneficial/harmful. Don't wave your hands with an ambiguous "cleanliness" argument designed to make it seem like the old way of doing things is the best.
That's not the way it was supposed to work. Way back when the Internet was young and domain names was first thought up, the idea was that Microsoft just puts their site for the XBox on xbox.microsoft.com. If they wanted to simplify it, they could register xbox.com. But that's it; nothing else. Then when they released the XBox 360, they put it on the URL 360.xbox.com. When they release the XBox One, they put it on one.xbox.com. Same thing for e.g. Apple products. iphone.apple.com, 4gs.iphone.apple.com, air.macbook.apple.com, etc.
But because the folks who made domain names decided to make them little endian, the above URLs run counter to how you name things (in English at least). So instead it's become popular to try to register a domain for the product name as you'd write it, which is what makes everything vulnerable to domain squatting.
The folks who made USENET got it right when they made their hierarchy big endian (e.g. rec.arts.sf.starwars.games). You start from the biggest concept and narrow it down with each additional word. If domain names had been big endian, the above URLs would've been com.xbox.360, com.xbox.one, com.apple.iphone.4gs, com.apple.macbook.air, etc. And we probably could've avoided most of this domain squatting mess. Phishing would've been harder too since the non-spoofable part of the domain name would appear first.
Oh well. Hindsight is 20/20.
Isn't this just RISC (ARM) vs CISC (x86/x64) all over again? While I won't rule out the possibility that RISC may win this time around, it's rather telling that CISC has won all previous rounds.
The modern (digital electronic) computer age began in WWII with Colossus, used by the British to break German codes.
The Apple I was early in the personal computer era. Computers prior were based on vacuum tubes or individual solid state transistors, and were the size of a room. Silicon transistors were experimental during the 1950s, and slowly commercialized in the 1960s allowing business computers to shrink to the size of a car and eventually a cabinet. Intel got started around then. Silicon microprocessors really took off during the early 1970s allowing computers to shrink to desktop size, spawning personal computing.
So no, the Apple I was not early in the computer era. It's bad enough people think Apple invented MP3 players, smartphones, touchscreens, and tablets. Don't add computers to the list of mis-attributed inventions. The original Apple I as a product was pretty much the same as what Apple does today - buy a bunch of readily available parts, do some modifications, assemble it, and sell it. They don't actually make (much less invent) the crucial technologies. Their biggest technical strength is that they're damn good at making a pleasant and easy-to-use user interface.