come up with an efficient method to convert carbon dioxide into glucose,
The Gibbs free energy defines the energy state of a molecule. Think of it as the potential eneregy of a molecule on a ladder. The higher the Gibbs free energy of a molecule, the more potential energy it has, so the more energy you can extract from it in chemical reactions. On the other hand, if it's low, then you actually have to put energy into it to change its chemical formulation.
The Gibbs free energy of CO2 is -394.39 KJ/mole. This is very low on the ladder - that's why CO2 is frequently an end product in chemical reactions.
For hydrogen gas and oxygen gas, it's zero. The most common elemental form is used to define the zero point.
For glucose (C6H12O6) it's -910.56 KJ/mole. This is actually pretty high, the raw number is just low because it contains a lot of individual atoms.
To form one glucose requires:
6 CO2 + 6 H2 => 1 C6H12O6 + 3 O2
The H2 and O2 drop out. So you end up with 6*(-394.39 KJ/mol) => -910.56 KJ/mol, which results in a deficit of 1455.78 KJ/mole. That is, the complete chemical reaction is:
For every mole of glucose you make from CO2, you must add at least 1455.78 KJ of energy to make the reaction happen. A mole of glucose is about 180 grams, so this works out to a little over 8 MJ per kg (this is less than its its energy density of 15.5 MJ/kg because we assumed the hydrogen gas was free - on Earth you'd have to use energy to
break apart water to create hydrogen).
That's a huge amount of energy. The 85 kWh battery pack in most Tesla S cars is only 306 MJ. So to create 1 kg of glucose from CO2 requires at least as much energy as moving 2500 kg car 10 km. The efficiency of your process is probably going to be 50% at best, so realistically you can double the energy needed. And if you don't have H2 available and need to create it, then it's going to take even more energy (since H2 sits very high on the ladder, it likes to react and form other chemical compounds, meaning you have to put energy in to release the H2).
The only real hope is using some other molecule with a high Gibbs free energy as your hydrogen source. That molecule then gives up some of its Gibbs free energy while releasing hydrogen (what's done in methanol-powered fuel cells). Unfortunately, the most common high-energy hydrogen source is hydrocarbons - petroleum, alcohol, etc. They have a similar ratio of carbon and hydrogen as glucose, so trying to extract hydrogen from them will result in your process using no CO2 - it'll get the requisite carbon from the hydrocarbon instead.
The lone exception is methane - CH4. It contains 4x as much hydrogen as carbon, vs 2x for most hydrocarbons. So it could conceivably be used to create glucose while absorbing CO2. In fact its Gibbs free energy is -50.8 KJ/mol. Resulting in a possible chemical reaction of:
It's still a huge amount of energy, but less (making 1 kg of glucose would require only as much energy as pushing your 2500 kg car 3 km). Unfortunately, I suspect the point of this project is the potential to terraform Mars by converting its atmospheric CO2 into something else, while releasing oxygen in the process. Our methane equation uses half the CO2 as the previous equation, so in terms of scrubbing CO2 it's only 67% more effective per MJ. And it doesn't release any O2 so would be useless for terraforming.
The problem is there are three ways to tweak the DPI. Compatibility Mode, which can be set on a per-app basis. Display scaling, which is set via the Windows desktop and affects everything. And Advanced Scaling which Microsoft introduced with the Spring Creators Update, which I haven't figured out exactly how it's different from the regular Display Scaling.
Under the hood, there's also ClearType which runs on top of DPI scaling, and does subpixel rendering (using the individual red, green, and blue subpixels to sharpen fonts). So there's a lot of places other than Compatibility Mode where something could go wrong to cause blurry fonts. My bet would actually be on the new Advanced Scaling options which were added - they're probably doing something which couldn't happen before with Display Scaling was your only option, and which only crops up if you have those two tweaked a certain way.
The origin of the hexagon is no real mystery. It was recreated in a laboratory tank 8 years ago. (Link includes a video showing a hexagon forming in the tank). It forms when the spin rates between the inner and outer fluid hit a certain ratio. Normally the speed differential creates a chaotic interface at the boundary layer. But at certain ratios it creates a standing wave which forms a hexagon (well, not really standing since it moves, but in a certain rotational frame it's a standing wave).
It's impressive that the hexagon is that tall, since that implies the wind speeds are consistent through that height.
I'd like to think that the destruction of everything below the upper-class is somehow related to the top 1% of americans controlling 40% of the wealth
That's mostly a self-created problem. The top 1% only makes about 19% of the income. That they're able to leverage that to attain 40% of the wealth (integral of income minus expenses over time) tells you that (1) the 1% are more likely to spend their income on things that retain or grow in value, rather than disposable or transitory things like entertainment, and (2) the 99% are willing to pay exorbitant interest rates to borrow money from the 1% (that interest becomes income for the 1%). I call it self-created because this is something the 99% can solve on their own. They don't have to spend as much of their income on things which quickly or immediately lose value. And they can put off major purchases for some years while they save up money, rather than take out a loan to buy it right now.
The bigger concern should probably be that the bottom 60% also makes about 19% of total income. That is, the income of the top 1% just about equals the income of the bottom 60%. That is, for those income valuations to be correct, an individual in the top 1% has to be 60x as producitve as someone in the bottom 60%. I'm a fiscal conservative, and that sounds pretty hard to believe. Unlike spending, the bottom 60% aren't really in control of their income. Making it much more likely that the problem as that they're simply being underpaid.
People seem to think unemployment payments are a government-funded service. They're not. Unemployment is pre-paid by your employer. Every employer pre-pays a percentage of each employee's wages into the state/federal unempoyment funds (it is not deducted from the employee's wages). The percentage scales based on how how many of and how much your ex-employees have collected in unemployment.
The government tries to keep the amount an employer has paid in line with current and future expected unemployment payments. If the percentage of your employees filing for unemployment suddenly spikes causing the employer to exceed the unemployment funds in their account (e.g. you have a bunch of layoffs), the government will jack up the percentage the employer has to pay in unemployment taxes until the employer's account is in balance again. If you've held multiple jobs in a short while, the government will go through a complicated calculation where some of your unemployment comes from your most recent employer's fund, some of it from the employer before, some of it from the employer before that, etc. Scaled based on how long you worked at each employer and how long it's been since you worked there.
So the net effect is that your employer pre-pays your unemployment payments into an escrow fund held by the government.
As long as you don't give the paywalled journal an exclusive copyright to your work (i.e. you're allowed to publish the work elsewhere, or release it on your website for free).
So this really should be a ban on journal exclusivity, not a ban on paywalled journals. That is, full control of copyright should remain with the authors.
that telecoms which have regional monopoly power are not using that power to extend their monopolies or colluding to restrain trad
The states already have an agency which does exactly this. When the government awards a monopoly contract for some type of service, its operation and rates are monitored by a public utilities commission. The PUC makes sure the monopoly company cannot abuse the monopoly by providing subpar services or charging excessive rates.
Because cable ISPs are awarded government monopolies, they are for all intents and purposes a utility. But because they're not called a utility, they're not regulated by the PUCs.
If you wanna know why the modern H1-B visa was born, this is why. Research in the 1980s turned up the exact same thing happening at U.S. colleges and universities. A large portion of the American students were graduating, then leaving the U.S. to work in other countries. The H1-B was created to help stem this brain drain. Changes to student visas encouraged foreign students to stay in the U.S. and get a job after graduating. While the H1-B encouraged graduates from foreign universities to come work in the U.S. It later ended up being abused to hell by companies set up specifically to shepherd foreign workers into the U.S., but it had legitimate beginnings.
In-humanness of the response aside, the risk is quite low, ships are replaceable, and crews are typically from poor countries where life is cheap. These aren't your western well paid sailors who are mourned and whose companies get sued into oblivion for providing unsafe work locations.
The vast majority of people aboard a cargo ship which sinks are rescued. Life rafts are required by all shipping regulators. And satellite locator beacons have become so cheap that I suggest you get one if you do things like boating or hiking.. Their cost (a few hundred dollars, though a commercial model will run a few thousand) is much less than the liability and bad publicity of someone dying because your ship sank. When someone dies, it's usually because they were unable to reach the life raft in time (injured or blocked in due to the accident which sank the ship).
In fact, the fatality rate works out to (100 deaths) * (100,000) / (1.25 million) = 8 per 100,000. That makes it safer than a variety of jobs as mundane as taxi driver or landscaper. The fatality rate is right around the average for all jobs if you account for those people being aboard the ship 24/7, while people are at the other occupationss on average for less than 6 hours a day.
But a ship sinking is a relatively rare occurrence. Whereas baffles are going to complicate every loading and unloading operation.
Actually, there's no reason for the baffles to extend all the way to the bottom of the hold. The bottom could still be open to allow material at the bottom to shift around. If your unloading mechanism is built into the bottom of the ship (as they are on newer bulk carriers), then the baffles will barely affect unloading operations. Fuel tanks are built this way
If you're too small an investor to afford a $2k share, then the broker commissions on buying shares are going to kill your percentage return anyway. Not to mention the enormous risk you expose yourself to investing in just one stock.
At that level of investing, you're much better off investing in mutual funds - partial ownership of a big collection of stocks. Especially index funds. The price to buy into a fund is typically much lower (with a floor of a few hundred dollars). And the fact that they bundle a bunch of stocks together mitigates the risk (if one stock tanks, the entire fund still survives mostly intact).
Wouldn't that be easier solved by just making default browser setting to prohibit all.CORN domains? And if the user types one in directly (or more likely copy-pasts) it throws up an "Are you sure?" dialog box which explains that the domain name ends in CORN not COM. The first time the user starts a browser, it should ask which top level domains to allow, with.com,.net,.org, and the user's country code being the only ones enabled by default. ICANN has proven it's unwilling to pass up making a quick buck, but there's no reason for the browser to make their cash grab easy.
Same for all the foreign language characters which are now allowed. Just make the browser default to the ASCII character set for domain names. If a user needs foreign language characters in a domain name, they can enable those on a language-by-language basis. None of this crazy "allow everything by default" that seems to be the norm.
If you have bezels, 16:9 to 16:10 ends up being the best ratio. If you look at a page of a paperback book, the area of the printed text is about 16:9 (portrait) or even 2:1. The surrounding margins bump it up to about a 3:2 ratio. Same for a printed page. The printed area of A4 ends up about 16:10, while the printed area of a letter-sized page is about 3:2. These are the aspect ratios the publishing industry has settled on as optimal for reading and viewing after hundreds of years of trial and error. It's only after you add in the margins that you get a 4:3 aspect ratio. Books and magazines whose text area is close to a 4:3 aspect ratio is typically broken up into two columns, because that aspect ratio is not optimal for displaying text (it's too broad or too squat).
So on devices like tablets and phones, the bezels substitute as a margin, and the best aspect ratio for the screen ends up being around 16:10. The 4:3 aspect ratio on the iPad is only best if you waste valuable screen space displaying blank margins on the screen. Why do that when you can just use the bezels to substitute as your margins? (Incidentally, margins are useful for holding pages in a book. But they were really invented so the page edges deteriorating over time and being eaten by bookworms wouldn't result in the loss of printed material.)
But as you move towards smaller bezels, suddenly you're forced to display margins on the screen so text and images don't get covered up by the hand holding the device. And the 3:2 and 4:3 aspect ratios become better.
My apologies to you young'uns who have no idea what a broken record sounds like (the needle skips a groove so the same section of music plays over and over again).
Cassette tapes were the biggest piracy threat since they allowed people to make their own copies of music.
Combination radios with cassette recorders were the biggest piracy threat since they allowed people to record music playing on the radio.
Videotape rental stores were the biggest piracy threat to the movie industry, since people could just watch any movie they wanted.
MP3s were the biggest piracy threat since they allowed music to be freely traded without any media.
The Internet was the biggest piracy threat since it allowed music and movies to be distributed without needing physical media.
YouTube is the biggest piracy threat since it makes it easy for people to capture a copy of a song they're listening to.
Everyone else understands that new technology comes with advantages and disadvantages. But the new technology is preferred because the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Only the music and movie industries don't seem to get this, and focus only on the disadvantages while ignoring the advantages. Their piracy claims have been wrong every single time. Cassette tapes led to increased music sales, since it freed music from a record needle sitting in a groove, meaning you could now listen to music in your car or while jogging. Radio/cassette recorders allowed people to listen to music two different ways with a single device, so led to people listening to more music since the playback devices now cost less them less. VCRs spawned the movie sale industry, allowing movie studios to make more money than they ever could through theater releases alone. Sales to video rental stores eventually eclipsed videotape sales as the biggest revenue source for movie studios. MP3s became the ubiquitous method to store and distribute music in the 21st century. Internet-based music and movie sales and rentals have now eclipsed disc-based sales and rentals. And YouTube remains the easiest way to quickly check out new releases and new genres of music, and view movie trailers on demand without having to hope to catch it during a commercial break on TV
In every single case, their prophecies of doom by piracy have not only been proven wrong, but the new technology has led to increased sales of music and movies. Yet these two industries cannot seem to break their habit of demanding the new technology be shut down before it "destroys" them. Life isn't perfect. You're never going to get rid of piracy. As long as the benefits of a service like YouTube outweigh the piracy drawbacks, it's a net win. Just like retail stores don't shut down just because they lose some inventory to shoplifting. The benefits of increased sales from allowing customers to see, feel, and browse the merchandise in person outweighs the drawback of loss due to shoplifting.
No, OP is right. Netbooks were already on the way out by 2010, when tablets began showing up.
Netbooks leveraged two things. The cost of low-end laptop components had gotten so low that the most expensive items in the bill of materials was the CPU and the Windows license. The original Asus EEE PC 700 (2007) used a little-known Celeron M processor and Linux to minimize these two major cost items. When netbook sales began taking off, Intel and Microsoft moved to protect their duopoly. Intel kicked off the Atom processor line. Microsoft released special lower-cost versions of Windows for these low-end devices. And by 2008 netbooks were based on Atom and Windows.
I've been helping people buy laptops since since the 1990s Through the 1990s, the price for the low-end laptop market dropped steadily from about $1500 to about $700. Then it got stuck at the $500-$700 range for over a decade. Netbooks were the first laptop-like device to crack that price barrier ($300-$400 MSRP). It wasn't until last year, a decade after the first netbooks, that prices for low-end laptops finally moved below $500 MSRP. I'd say $400 is the new floor now.
There's some force at play here trying to keep the prices for low-end laptop above $400-$500. The Chromebooks I'm seeing are mostly priced at $100-$200, which is about where I'd expect low-end laptop prices to be today if they hadn't stalled at $500 in the late 2000s. The most likely candidates remain Intel (Atom processors are in the $30-$60 range, while ARM SoCs are as low as $5 for roughly the same number of transistors) and Microsoft (OEM Windows licenses are about $50-$70, though it's rumored that some larger brands are able to get volume licenses as low as $20). Add just those two up and you're already at the full price of a low-end Chromebook. Those two companies have the most to lose if people get used to the idea that a portable computer should only cost $100-$200.
Klein also suggests OSS foundations start providing fellowships to key maintainers,
That's not gonna fix it. If anything it's going to make it worse.
People keep viewing pay software as the software authors demanding money from users. It's actually the other way around. Users paying software authors is how they signal what features they like or want. That's how users influence the direction of future software development - the software authors want to be paid more, so they make changes or implement features and fix bugs that the users want.
Without payment, open source is basically a dictatorship. The software authors dictate what features to add, what bugs get priority, what new direction the software should take. The users are powerless. This gives contributors and especially maintainers an inflated ego, which makes them even more resistant to accept user feedback and suggestions. Paying maintainers from a foundation would just exacerbate this behavior by inflating their egos even more, and further insulating them from user feedback.. (The VLC developer eventually relented after a couple years, after much ass-kissing by users, and changed VLC so you could assign the mouse wheel to something other than volume.)
If you want to fix it without having users pay for open source software, then I can think of two ways. Either you need to eliminate the egos of the programmers and maintainers, which realistically is never going to happen. Or you need to set up a system where users can pledge a bounty payment for when the project implements a feature or fixes a bug the user wants. The payment should be held in escrow (refunded after a certain time to encourage timely action), to be awarded to the open source project only if the user-requested feature is added or bug fixed. That would fix open source by giving users a say in the course of software development again (other than ass-kissing), without the stigma of requiring all users to pay to use the software.
That'll turn open source software from whatever the hell the programmers and maintainers want it to be. To something which the users actually want, and which addresses their needs and requirements. The way things are right now, open source is frequently throwing free food at users when what the users really want is water. With the project maintainers and contributors ignoring user pleas for water because making food is more fun or fulfilling.
I never understood why basic financial management wasn't a required high school course. I suspect a lot of these kids taking on $20k per semester loans (assume they manage to pay $10k themselves via part-time work) are figuring ($20k)*(2 semesters)*(4 years) = $160k. And they figure if the college degree means they'll earn $10k more per year, then it will have paid for itself in ($160k) / ($10k per year) = 16 years. They figure they can scrimp and save for 16 years and pay off the loan.
Which is completely wrong.
First if the loan has a 5% interest rate, then total interest over 16 years works out to just shy of $73k. meaning the payback amount is $233k, not $160k.
Second, while the loan interest is tax deductible, the principal payments are not. So your expected $10k per year payment is mostly after-tax income. Which means if you're in the 24% tax bracket (income $82k+ per year), then only 31% of that ($73k / $233k) is tax-deductible. Basically ever $1 pre-tax income you put aside for loan repayment becomes only 85.5 cents after taxes that you can apply to principle..
So the $10k you thought would go to pay for your loan is actually only $8550 after taxes. And (on average) only $5900 of it goes to pay back the loan principal. Which works out to a 27 year payback. Except extending the length of the loan by that much increases the expected interest from $73k to $132k. Which makes it take even longer to pay back the loan.
At $10k per year pre-tax income set aside for oan repayment and 5% interest, it actually takes more than 30 years to pay off a $160,000 loan. If we taught our kids this stuff in high school, they wouldn't get a $160k loan to pay for college. They'd tell the school asking for $30k per semester in tuition to go take a hike. During the housing crisis, people complained that lenders were preying on naive homebuyers, getting them to sign on to loans which they had no realistic hope of ever repaying. Well, the exact same thing is happening to students with student loans.
I'm a perfectionist. As an example, in high school during wood shop, we were supposed to make a sanding block - a simple rectangular piece of wood within a certain size range. I cut down my block of wood to size on the band saw. I then measured it and noticed the edges weren't exactly perpendicular. So I cut it again. I noticed that cut wasn't exactly perpendicular either, so I cut it again. I repeated this until I'd fallen below the minimum size specified for the block. And I had to get a new block of wood and start over again.
Same thing happens if I start a project early. I finish it, then go back and tweak it. Then tweak it some more. Over and over until the deadline prevents me from tweaking it further. The subsequent tweaks add very little to the completed work (or as in the case of the sanding block, make it worse). It's just my OCD perfectionism making me waste time trying to make it better. (e.g. I've hit Preview about a dozen times composing and editing this post.)
Procrastination is a self-defense mechanism. I artificially reduce the amount of time I have to complete a project, to a little more time than I estimate it will take, That prevents my perfectionist urges from wasting time by over-tweaking. When it comes to tasks which can't be tweaked (e.g. buying plane tickets, making reservations, etc), I don't procrastinate. And in fact I usually do those tasks long before other people (non-procrastinators) typically get around to doing them. And I get annoyed that they won't hurry up andt tell me if that date works for them so I can go ahead and place the reservation.
The underlying fundamental premise behind open source is that since software has zero cost of duplication and distribution, its benefit to society is maximized by making it free to copy and distribute. Thus maximizing the number of people who can benefit from using it.
If you then start stipulating reasons (other than self-preservation) for why you should be able to restrict people's ability to copy and distribute open source software, you're saying that software's benefit to society can be increased by restricting how it's copied and distributed. You're basically saying the closed source, for-profit software distribution model is superior to open source. At which point, why even bother working on an open source project?
Gametes = sperm and egg cells. If you're not fixing the genetic defect in those, then this will actually make the situation worse. Previously, people with MD were less likely to reproduce because of the disease (it usually manifests between age 2-15, with most afflicted persons dying by their 20s). That kept the damaged gene sequence relatively rare in the population's gene pool. If we now use gene therapy to remove the negative symptoms of the disease, but without repairing the damaged gene sequence in the gametes, parents with MD will end up passing the disease on to their children. And eventually that sequence will end up spreading throughout the entire population. And we'll end up with a world where the a large percentage of people need this therapy just to have a normal life. According to TFA, this treatment has only been applied to muscle tissue (where the bad gene sequence is needed by the muscles).
People equate death = bad. But if the death results from bad genes, the death is actually good (for the species) because it's functioning to reduce the prevalence of the bad genes from the population's gene pool. What's bad for the individual may be good for the species.
An alternative is to require people receiving this treatment to consent to forced sterilization (there are plenty of kids who need adopting anyway). But sterilization is a touchy subject which encroaches on the abortion debate (you're saying society can override an individual's right to control their own body).
or if the speaker intended to offend with a statement.
Both are subjective, and in many cases highly dependent on context. If you created an AI which could detect it, then the AI by definition would no longer objective, which would defeat the purpose of trying to invent an AI which can detect it.
At best, you can create an AI which can flag speech would might be considered hate speech. Then leave it up to people (ideally a group of people representing a diverse cross-section of cultural and ideological beliefs), and have them debate over each flagged statement to decide if it's really hate speech. But I suspect the motivation to create the AI in the first place is to eliminate this group of people from the process.
: speech expressing hatred of a particular group of people - Hate speech is not allowed at school.
By that definition, isn't speech expressing hatred of people spouting hate speech, also hate speech? So if you call white supremacists a bunch of racist Nazi sympathizers who aren't fit to breathe the same air you do, that's hate speech.
What's scary is that all of this already happened over 100 years ago. And nothing was done to fix the system. A patent troll crippled the fledgling auto industry for decades, before Ford finally won a ruling on a technicality that exempted it from the Seldon patent (its car engines used a different combustion cycle than the one described in the Seldon patent).
If you move out of the U.S. but your last state of residence was California, the CA FTB will try to argue that since you did not move to another state, your "state of residence" is still California even if you don't live in the country anymore. And that you owe California taxes on income you're making in Canada or the UK or wherever. When I began working in Vancouver, Canada, I got lucky and happened to consult with a tax attorney first. He strongly recommended I first rent an apartment in Washington for a few months and get a WA driver's license, and commute cross-border to work. That would establish with no uncertainty that I was a Washington resident. Then I could move to Canada, free of the clutches of the California FTB.
(The U.S. Federal government does this too - demands U.S. income tax on money you earn while living abroad. No getting around it if you're a U.S. citizen, which is why some wealthy people have worked to give up their U.S. citizenship. Most outher countries tax based on residency. If you live in the country, they expect you to pay income tax. If you live outside, they don't tax you. This is especially fun for dual-citizens who hold U.S. citizenship by birth (one of their parents was a U.S. citizen). They may have never set foot in the U.S. their entire lives, but Uncle Sam still demands they pay taxes.)
Slashdot Mirror
The Gibbs free energy defines the energy state of a molecule. Think of it as the potential eneregy of a molecule on a ladder. The higher the Gibbs free energy of a molecule, the more potential energy it has, so the more energy you can extract from it in chemical reactions. On the other hand, if it's low, then you actually have to put energy into it to change its chemical formulation.
To form one glucose requires:
The H2 and O2 drop out. So you end up with 6*(-394.39 KJ/mol) => -910.56 KJ/mol, which results in a deficit of 1455.78 KJ/mole. That is, the complete chemical reaction is:
For every mole of glucose you make from CO2, you must add at least 1455.78 KJ of energy to make the reaction happen. A mole of glucose is about 180 grams, so this works out to a little over 8 MJ per kg (this is less than its its energy density of 15.5 MJ/kg because we assumed the hydrogen gas was free - on Earth you'd have to use energy to break apart water to create hydrogen).
That's a huge amount of energy. The 85 kWh battery pack in most Tesla S cars is only 306 MJ. So to create 1 kg of glucose from CO2 requires at least as much energy as moving 2500 kg car 10 km. The efficiency of your process is probably going to be 50% at best, so realistically you can double the energy needed. And if you don't have H2 available and need to create it, then it's going to take even more energy (since H2 sits very high on the ladder, it likes to react and form other chemical compounds, meaning you have to put energy in to release the H2).
The only real hope is using some other molecule with a high Gibbs free energy as your hydrogen source. That molecule then gives up some of its Gibbs free energy while releasing hydrogen (what's done in methanol-powered fuel cells). Unfortunately, the most common high-energy hydrogen source is hydrocarbons - petroleum, alcohol, etc. They have a similar ratio of carbon and hydrogen as glucose, so trying to extract hydrogen from them will result in your process using no CO2 - it'll get the requisite carbon from the hydrocarbon instead.
The lone exception is methane - CH4. It contains 4x as much hydrogen as carbon, vs 2x for most hydrocarbons. So it could conceivably be used to create glucose while absorbing CO2. In fact its Gibbs free energy is -50.8 KJ/mol. Resulting in a possible chemical reaction of:
It's still a huge amount of energy, but less (making 1 kg of glucose would require only as much energy as pushing your 2500 kg car 3 km). Unfortunately, I suspect the point of this project is the potential to terraform Mars by converting its atmospheric CO2 into something else, while releasing oxygen in the process. Our methane equation uses half the CO2 as the previous equation, so in terms of scrubbing CO2 it's only 67% more effective per MJ. And it doesn't release any O2 so would be useless for terraforming.
Site with pictures of the vessels.
The problem is there are three ways to tweak the DPI. Compatibility Mode, which can be set on a per-app basis. Display scaling, which is set via the Windows desktop and affects everything. And Advanced Scaling which Microsoft introduced with the Spring Creators Update, which I haven't figured out exactly how it's different from the regular Display Scaling.
Under the hood, there's also ClearType which runs on top of DPI scaling, and does subpixel rendering (using the individual red, green, and blue subpixels to sharpen fonts). So there's a lot of places other than Compatibility Mode where something could go wrong to cause blurry fonts. My bet would actually be on the new Advanced Scaling options which were added - they're probably doing something which couldn't happen before with Display Scaling was your only option, and which only crops up if you have those two tweaked a certain way.
The origin of the hexagon is no real mystery. It was recreated in a laboratory tank 8 years ago. (Link includes a video showing a hexagon forming in the tank). It forms when the spin rates between the inner and outer fluid hit a certain ratio. Normally the speed differential creates a chaotic interface at the boundary layer. But at certain ratios it creates a standing wave which forms a hexagon (well, not really standing since it moves, but in a certain rotational frame it's a standing wave).
It's impressive that the hexagon is that tall, since that implies the wind speeds are consistent through that height.
That's mostly a self-created problem. The top 1% only makes about 19% of the income. That they're able to leverage that to attain 40% of the wealth (integral of income minus expenses over time) tells you that (1) the 1% are more likely to spend their income on things that retain or grow in value, rather than disposable or transitory things like entertainment, and (2) the 99% are willing to pay exorbitant interest rates to borrow money from the 1% (that interest becomes income for the 1%). I call it self-created because this is something the 99% can solve on their own. They don't have to spend as much of their income on things which quickly or immediately lose value. And they can put off major purchases for some years while they save up money, rather than take out a loan to buy it right now.
The bigger concern should probably be that the bottom 60% also makes about 19% of total income. That is, the income of the top 1% just about equals the income of the bottom 60%. That is, for those income valuations to be correct, an individual in the top 1% has to be 60x as producitve as someone in the bottom 60%. I'm a fiscal conservative, and that sounds pretty hard to believe. Unlike spending, the bottom 60% aren't really in control of their income. Making it much more likely that the problem as that they're simply being underpaid.
People seem to think unemployment payments are a government-funded service. They're not. Unemployment is pre-paid by your employer. Every employer pre-pays a percentage of each employee's wages into the state/federal unempoyment funds (it is not deducted from the employee's wages). The percentage scales based on how how many of and how much your ex-employees have collected in unemployment.
The government tries to keep the amount an employer has paid in line with current and future expected unemployment payments. If the percentage of your employees filing for unemployment suddenly spikes causing the employer to exceed the unemployment funds in their account (e.g. you have a bunch of layoffs), the government will jack up the percentage the employer has to pay in unemployment taxes until the employer's account is in balance again. If you've held multiple jobs in a short while, the government will go through a complicated calculation where some of your unemployment comes from your most recent employer's fund, some of it from the employer before, some of it from the employer before that, etc. Scaled based on how long you worked at each employer and how long it's been since you worked there.
So the net effect is that your employer pre-pays your unemployment payments into an escrow fund held by the government.
As long as you don't give the paywalled journal an exclusive copyright to your work (i.e. you're allowed to publish the work elsewhere, or release it on your website for free).
So this really should be a ban on journal exclusivity, not a ban on paywalled journals. That is, full control of copyright should remain with the authors.
The states already have an agency which does exactly this. When the government awards a monopoly contract for some type of service, its operation and rates are monitored by a public utilities commission. The PUC makes sure the monopoly company cannot abuse the monopoly by providing subpar services or charging excessive rates.
Because cable ISPs are awarded government monopolies, they are for all intents and purposes a utility. But because they're not called a utility, they're not regulated by the PUCs.
If you wanna know why the modern H1-B visa was born, this is why. Research in the 1980s turned up the exact same thing happening at U.S. colleges and universities. A large portion of the American students were graduating, then leaving the U.S. to work in other countries. The H1-B was created to help stem this brain drain. Changes to student visas encouraged foreign students to stay in the U.S. and get a job after graduating. While the H1-B encouraged graduates from foreign universities to come work in the U.S. It later ended up being abused to hell by companies set up specifically to shepherd foreign workers into the U.S., but it had legitimate beginnings.
This is a common trope, but it's simply not true. The number of cargo ships lost at sea about equals the number of lives lost aboard those ships. That is, on average about 1 person dies for each ship that sinks.
The vast majority of people aboard a cargo ship which sinks are rescued. Life rafts are required by all shipping regulators. And satellite locator beacons have become so cheap that I suggest you get one if you do things like boating or hiking.. Their cost (a few hundred dollars, though a commercial model will run a few thousand) is much less than the liability and bad publicity of someone dying because your ship sank. When someone dies, it's usually because they were unable to reach the life raft in time (injured or blocked in due to the accident which sank the ship).
In fact, the fatality rate works out to (100 deaths) * (100,000) / (1.25 million) = 8 per 100,000. That makes it safer than a variety of jobs as mundane as taxi driver or landscaper. The fatality rate is right around the average for all jobs if you account for those people being aboard the ship 24/7, while people are at the other occupationss on average for less than 6 hours a day.
But a ship sinking is a relatively rare occurrence. Whereas baffles are going to complicate every loading and unloading operation.
Actually, there's no reason for the baffles to extend all the way to the bottom of the hold. The bottom could still be open to allow material at the bottom to shift around. If your unloading mechanism is built into the bottom of the ship (as they are on newer bulk carriers), then the baffles will barely affect unloading operations. Fuel tanks are built this way
If you're too small an investor to afford a $2k share, then the broker commissions on buying shares are going to kill your percentage return anyway. Not to mention the enormous risk you expose yourself to investing in just one stock.
At that level of investing, you're much better off investing in mutual funds - partial ownership of a big collection of stocks. Especially index funds. The price to buy into a fund is typically much lower (with a floor of a few hundred dollars). And the fact that they bundle a bunch of stocks together mitigates the risk (if one stock tanks, the entire fund still survives mostly intact).
Wouldn't that be easier solved by just making default browser setting to prohibit all .CORN domains? And if the user types one in directly (or more likely copy-pasts) it throws up an "Are you sure?" dialog box which explains that the domain name ends in CORN not COM. The first time the user starts a browser, it should ask which top level domains to allow, with .com, .net, .org, and the user's country code being the only ones enabled by default. ICANN has proven it's unwilling to pass up making a quick buck, but there's no reason for the browser to make their cash grab easy.
Same for all the foreign language characters which are now allowed. Just make the browser default to the ASCII character set for domain names. If a user needs foreign language characters in a domain name, they can enable those on a language-by-language basis. None of this crazy "allow everything by default" that seems to be the norm.
If you have bezels, 16:9 to 16:10 ends up being the best ratio. If you look at a page of a paperback book, the area of the printed text is about 16:9 (portrait) or even 2:1. The surrounding margins bump it up to about a 3:2 ratio. Same for a printed page. The printed area of A4 ends up about 16:10, while the printed area of a letter-sized page is about 3:2. These are the aspect ratios the publishing industry has settled on as optimal for reading and viewing after hundreds of years of trial and error. It's only after you add in the margins that you get a 4:3 aspect ratio. Books and magazines whose text area is close to a 4:3 aspect ratio is typically broken up into two columns, because that aspect ratio is not optimal for displaying text (it's too broad or too squat).
So on devices like tablets and phones, the bezels substitute as a margin, and the best aspect ratio for the screen ends up being around 16:10. The 4:3 aspect ratio on the iPad is only best if you waste valuable screen space displaying blank margins on the screen. Why do that when you can just use the bezels to substitute as your margins? (Incidentally, margins are useful for holding pages in a book. But they were really invented so the page edges deteriorating over time and being eaten by bookworms wouldn't result in the loss of printed material.)
But as you move towards smaller bezels, suddenly you're forced to display margins on the screen so text and images don't get covered up by the hand holding the device. And the 3:2 and 4:3 aspect ratios become better.
Everyone else understands that new technology comes with advantages and disadvantages. But the new technology is preferred because the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Only the music and movie industries don't seem to get this, and focus only on the disadvantages while ignoring the advantages. Their piracy claims have been wrong every single time. Cassette tapes led to increased music sales, since it freed music from a record needle sitting in a groove, meaning you could now listen to music in your car or while jogging. Radio/cassette recorders allowed people to listen to music two different ways with a single device, so led to people listening to more music since the playback devices now cost less them less. VCRs spawned the movie sale industry, allowing movie studios to make more money than they ever could through theater releases alone. Sales to video rental stores eventually eclipsed videotape sales as the biggest revenue source for movie studios. MP3s became the ubiquitous method to store and distribute music in the 21st century. Internet-based music and movie sales and rentals have now eclipsed disc-based sales and rentals. And YouTube remains the easiest way to quickly check out new releases and new genres of music, and view movie trailers on demand without having to hope to catch it during a commercial break on TV
In every single case, their prophecies of doom by piracy have not only been proven wrong, but the new technology has led to increased sales of music and movies. Yet these two industries cannot seem to break their habit of demanding the new technology be shut down before it "destroys" them. Life isn't perfect. You're never going to get rid of piracy. As long as the benefits of a service like YouTube outweigh the piracy drawbacks, it's a net win. Just like retail stores don't shut down just because they lose some inventory to shoplifting. The benefits of increased sales from allowing customers to see, feel, and browse the merchandise in person outweighs the drawback of loss due to shoplifting.
No, OP is right. Netbooks were already on the way out by 2010, when tablets began showing up.
Netbooks leveraged two things. The cost of low-end laptop components had gotten so low that the most expensive items in the bill of materials was the CPU and the Windows license. The original Asus EEE PC 700 (2007) used a little-known Celeron M processor and Linux to minimize these two major cost items. When netbook sales began taking off, Intel and Microsoft moved to protect their duopoly. Intel kicked off the Atom processor line. Microsoft released special lower-cost versions of Windows for these low-end devices. And by 2008 netbooks were based on Atom and Windows.
I've been helping people buy laptops since since the 1990s Through the 1990s, the price for the low-end laptop market dropped steadily from about $1500 to about $700. Then it got stuck at the $500-$700 range for over a decade. Netbooks were the first laptop-like device to crack that price barrier ($300-$400 MSRP). It wasn't until last year, a decade after the first netbooks, that prices for low-end laptops finally moved below $500 MSRP. I'd say $400 is the new floor now.
There's some force at play here trying to keep the prices for low-end laptop above $400-$500. The Chromebooks I'm seeing are mostly priced at $100-$200, which is about where I'd expect low-end laptop prices to be today if they hadn't stalled at $500 in the late 2000s. The most likely candidates remain Intel (Atom processors are in the $30-$60 range, while ARM SoCs are as low as $5 for roughly the same number of transistors) and Microsoft (OEM Windows licenses are about $50-$70, though it's rumored that some larger brands are able to get volume licenses as low as $20). Add just those two up and you're already at the full price of a low-end Chromebook. Those two companies have the most to lose if people get used to the idea that a portable computer should only cost $100-$200.
That's not gonna fix it. If anything it's going to make it worse.
People keep viewing pay software as the software authors demanding money from users. It's actually the other way around. Users paying software authors is how they signal what features they like or want. That's how users influence the direction of future software development - the software authors want to be paid more, so they make changes or implement features and fix bugs that the users want.
Without payment, open source is basically a dictatorship. The software authors dictate what features to add, what bugs get priority, what new direction the software should take. The users are powerless. This gives contributors and especially maintainers an inflated ego, which makes them even more resistant to accept user feedback and suggestions. Paying maintainers from a foundation would just exacerbate this behavior by inflating their egos even more, and further insulating them from user feedback.. (The VLC developer eventually relented after a couple years, after much ass-kissing by users, and changed VLC so you could assign the mouse wheel to something other than volume.)
If you want to fix it without having users pay for open source software, then I can think of two ways. Either you need to eliminate the egos of the programmers and maintainers, which realistically is never going to happen. Or you need to set up a system where users can pledge a bounty payment for when the project implements a feature or fixes a bug the user wants. The payment should be held in escrow (refunded after a certain time to encourage timely action), to be awarded to the open source project only if the user-requested feature is added or bug fixed. That would fix open source by giving users a say in the course of software development again (other than ass-kissing), without the stigma of requiring all users to pay to use the software.
That'll turn open source software from whatever the hell the programmers and maintainers want it to be. To something which the users actually want, and which addresses their needs and requirements. The way things are right now, open source is frequently throwing free food at users when what the users really want is water. With the project maintainers and contributors ignoring user pleas for water because making food is more fun or fulfilling.
Which is completely wrong.
So the $10k you thought would go to pay for your loan is actually only $8550 after taxes. And (on average) only $5900 of it goes to pay back the loan principal. Which works out to a 27 year payback. Except extending the length of the loan by that much increases the expected interest from $73k to $132k. Which makes it take even longer to pay back the loan.
At $10k per year pre-tax income set aside for oan repayment and 5% interest, it actually takes more than 30 years to pay off a $160,000 loan. If we taught our kids this stuff in high school, they wouldn't get a $160k loan to pay for college. They'd tell the school asking for $30k per semester in tuition to go take a hike. During the housing crisis, people complained that lenders were preying on naive homebuyers, getting them to sign on to loans which they had no realistic hope of ever repaying. Well, the exact same thing is happening to students with student loans.
I'm a perfectionist. As an example, in high school during wood shop, we were supposed to make a sanding block - a simple rectangular piece of wood within a certain size range. I cut down my block of wood to size on the band saw. I then measured it and noticed the edges weren't exactly perpendicular. So I cut it again. I noticed that cut wasn't exactly perpendicular either, so I cut it again. I repeated this until I'd fallen below the minimum size specified for the block. And I had to get a new block of wood and start over again.
Same thing happens if I start a project early. I finish it, then go back and tweak it. Then tweak it some more. Over and over until the deadline prevents me from tweaking it further. The subsequent tweaks add very little to the completed work (or as in the case of the sanding block, make it worse). It's just my OCD perfectionism making me waste time trying to make it better. (e.g. I've hit Preview about a dozen times composing and editing this post.)
Procrastination is a self-defense mechanism. I artificially reduce the amount of time I have to complete a project, to a little more time than I estimate it will take, That prevents my perfectionist urges from wasting time by over-tweaking. When it comes to tasks which can't be tweaked (e.g. buying plane tickets, making reservations, etc), I don't procrastinate. And in fact I usually do those tasks long before other people (non-procrastinators) typically get around to doing them. And I get annoyed that they won't hurry up andt tell me if that date works for them so I can go ahead and place the reservation.
The underlying fundamental premise behind open source is that since software has zero cost of duplication and distribution, its benefit to society is maximized by making it free to copy and distribute. Thus maximizing the number of people who can benefit from using it.
If you then start stipulating reasons (other than self-preservation) for why you should be able to restrict people's ability to copy and distribute open source software, you're saying that software's benefit to society can be increased by restricting how it's copied and distributed. You're basically saying the closed source, for-profit software distribution model is superior to open source. At which point, why even bother working on an open source project?
Gametes = sperm and egg cells. If you're not fixing the genetic defect in those, then this will actually make the situation worse. Previously, people with MD were less likely to reproduce because of the disease (it usually manifests between age 2-15, with most afflicted persons dying by their 20s). That kept the damaged gene sequence relatively rare in the population's gene pool. If we now use gene therapy to remove the negative symptoms of the disease, but without repairing the damaged gene sequence in the gametes, parents with MD will end up passing the disease on to their children. And eventually that sequence will end up spreading throughout the entire population. And we'll end up with a world where the a large percentage of people need this therapy just to have a normal life. According to TFA, this treatment has only been applied to muscle tissue (where the bad gene sequence is needed by the muscles).
People equate death = bad. But if the death results from bad genes, the death is actually good (for the species) because it's functioning to reduce the prevalence of the bad genes from the population's gene pool. What's bad for the individual may be good for the species.
An alternative is to require people receiving this treatment to consent to forced sterilization (there are plenty of kids who need adopting anyway). But sterilization is a touchy subject which encroaches on the abortion debate (you're saying society can override an individual's right to control their own body).
Both are subjective, and in many cases highly dependent on context. If you created an AI which could detect it, then the AI by definition would no longer objective, which would defeat the purpose of trying to invent an AI which can detect it.
At best, you can create an AI which can flag speech would might be considered hate speech. Then leave it up to people (ideally a group of people representing a diverse cross-section of cultural and ideological beliefs), and have them debate over each flagged statement to decide if it's really hate speech. But I suspect the motivation to create the AI in the first place is to eliminate this group of people from the process.
By that definition, isn't speech expressing hatred of people spouting hate speech, also hate speech? So if you call white supremacists a bunch of racist Nazi sympathizers who aren't fit to breathe the same air you do, that's hate speech.
What's scary is that all of this already happened over 100 years ago. And nothing was done to fix the system. A patent troll crippled the fledgling auto industry for decades, before Ford finally won a ruling on a technicality that exempted it from the Seldon patent (its car engines used a different combustion cycle than the one described in the Seldon patent).
If you move out of the U.S. but your last state of residence was California, the CA FTB will try to argue that since you did not move to another state, your "state of residence" is still California even if you don't live in the country anymore. And that you owe California taxes on income you're making in Canada or the UK or wherever. When I began working in Vancouver, Canada, I got lucky and happened to consult with a tax attorney first. He strongly recommended I first rent an apartment in Washington for a few months and get a WA driver's license, and commute cross-border to work. That would establish with no uncertainty that I was a Washington resident. Then I could move to Canada, free of the clutches of the California FTB.
(The U.S. Federal government does this too - demands U.S. income tax on money you earn while living abroad. No getting around it if you're a U.S. citizen, which is why some wealthy people have worked to give up their U.S. citizenship. Most outher countries tax based on residency. If you live in the country, they expect you to pay income tax. If you live outside, they don't tax you. This is especially fun for dual-citizens who hold U.S. citizenship by birth (one of their parents was a U.S. citizen). They may have never set foot in the U.S. their entire lives, but Uncle Sam still demands they pay taxes.)