Thermostats and strain guages, sure, but why would one need their washing machine, refrigerator, or toaster on the internet?
The Internet? No, but a home-area network...
I'd love to be able to turn on my dishwasher and washing machine at the same time and have them negotiate usage of the hot-water supply, or have the microwave tell the refrigerator to hold off on starting the compressor for 30 seconds while it finishes up. Having my window box fan and air conditioner consult my home weather station to decide if a back-to-front airflow, a front-to-back airflow, or running the AC would be most effective at cooling is an interesting possibility. I'm sure there are other things a smart home network could do, as well.
You may want to read up a bit on how the anarchist militia organized in the spanish civil war. E.g. before going on a mission, squads would elect a squad member to be the leader for that particular mission.
Who made the decision that the mission needed to take place? Who decided on when, where, and with what squads? Who coordinated overall strategy -- or was the anarchist side uncoordinated above the squad level?
In the UK (this was about 8 years ago so values will have changed a bit) if there was a dangerous junction where there were a lot of road accidents, if the cost was greater than a three quarters of a million pounds to change the junction to something safer such as a roundabout, they would have to wait until somebody died before fixing it.
The actual methodology is more complicated than that. I don't know about the road system, but the rail industry uses a number called "FWI" (fatalities and weighted injuries, where one death = 10 major injuries = 1000 minor injuries). The threshold is (IIRC) 2 million pounds, so if a change is expected to eliminate 1 FWI, it will be done if it costs less than 2 million pounds. This scales both with severity and probability, so a change that will reduce the odds of a fatality by 10% is equivalent to a change that will eliminate one major injury, and both will be done if the cost is less than 200k pounds.
Holographic photography is not the same things as converting data into a hologram. Basically no one has figured out how to make a digital hologram.
Digital holographic displays do exist, but they're strictly for research purposes right now: the resolution is horrible (last time I checked, a top-of-the-line display was 30 lines of 250 pixels), the computational requirements were huge (that 30-line display was driven by a multi-core multi-GPU workstation, generating a few frames per second), and the bandwidth requirements were insane (the workstation was pushing 10GB/s to the display).
Why was he arrested for planning to have sex with her? Is that now illegal?
The concept of "criminal attempt" has been a part of common law for a very, very long time. Basically, to be found guilty of "attempted whatever", you need to form the intention to commit a crime, and then carry out an act towards carrying out the crime. In this case, the person is accused of having planned to have sex with someone under the age of consent (the intention), and then arranged a meeting with that person (the action).
Waay too many basic questions are being ignored. A big one is what to do about cosmic radiation. This is interplanetary space, not low Earth orbit. And this is months of exposure, not a few days as with the moon landings. Everyone could be dying of radiation poisoning by the time they reach Mars, and the problem doesn't end upon reaching the surface. Mars has no global magnetic field, no ozone layer, no thick atmosphere.
We've sent hundreds of probes into interstellar space, and many of them were equipped with radiation sensors (electronics are even more radiation-sensitive than humans). We know what the radiation levels are like, we know how much shielding is needed, and we know where we can get the shielding materials. Among the people who are planning this mission, the answers are well-known, and the questions are about as interesting as "where are we going to get the steel to build the launch vehicles?"
Fifty square meters of space is utterly insufficient to grow enough food for 4 people, regardless of whether you stack "some" plants four units high. Period, end of discussion.
50 square meters of greenhouse (or, more likely, 150-200 cubic meters of greenhouse volume) fed by 10,000 square meters of solar panels can produce an impressive amount of food, if done properly. You've got continuous daylight, no seasonal cycles, and the option to provide elevated CO2 levels, all of which can increase plant growth rates dramatically. Stack your plants four-high with individual lighting, and you should be able to get 10,000 square meters of productivity out of a 50-square-meter greenhouse.
(The reason this isn't done much on Earth is that farmland is cheap, while solar panels are expensive. At Martian prices, the opposite is true.)
Acceleration really isn't a problem. Assuming the train can manage an acceleration of 10 meters/second/second, it'll take about three minutes to get up to speed. Combined with the Earth's gravity, that give you a net acceleration of 1.4G at an angle of 45 degrees to vertical. If you can't survive that, you probably should be in a hospital rather than commuting cross-country.
Turning radius is a problem that's covered (briefly) in the article, but these trains are meant as long-distance point-to-point links, eg. to get from New York City to Tokyo, you'd take the New York to Los Angeles vactrain to Chicago, switch trains to the Chicago-to-Beijing link (probably passing through Calgary or Edmonton), then take a local flight or high-speed surface train to Japan.
Unfortunately yes. If you or I as an individual investor would have screwed up like that they wouldn't roll back our transaction.
Many of the trades were erroneous, because they were based on bad information. During the crash, the NYSE was quoting prices that were as much as five minutes out of date, which influenced people to take actions that they otherwise wouldn't have, which in turn caused other people to take action, and so on. Rather than try to figure out who was making trades based on good data, who was trading on bad data, and who was trading in response to trades made on bad data, the NYSE simply decided to roll back everything.
(Incidentally, it mostly wasn't the HFT companies who got screwed by the crash -- they'd pulled out of the market by the time prices really started plummeting. It was mostly individual and institutional long-term investors who'd placed stop-loss orders and wound up having those orders executed at fire-sale prices.)
Technically, he was right. My back-of-the-envelope calculation says that you'll need three 500-gigaton bombs, but there's no upper limit to the size of a fusion bomb...
So the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Dominican Republic wars, the Arab-Israeli and Yom Kippur wars, the Soviet and American invasions of Afghanistan, two Persian Gulf wars, the Falklands War, the Invasion of Grenada, the Serbia-Bosnia war, and too many more to list... those are just what, "police actions"?
Take a close look at that list. You'll notice something interesting: not one of those wars was between a pair of nuclear-armed states. The closest would be the Korean, Vietnam, and Soviet Afghanistan wars, where one nuclear-armed state had troops on the ground, and another was providing resources but not troops to the other side. That's the basis of this guy's thesis that nukes create peace.
I'd say that most conflicts of the past century have been more over ideas than resources (examples: communism vs. capitalism, dictatorship vs. democracy, religion vs secular).
Let's take your idea and look at the major wars of the past century in that light:
World War I: started as a war between Austria-Hungary and Russia over control of the Balkans. (resources) Russian Civil War: war between various groups over control of the Russian Empire. (resources) Chinese Civil War: war between various warlords and non-warlord groups over control of China. (resources) Second Sino-Japanese War: started with the Japanese conquest of Manchuria. (resources) Pacific theater of World War II: started with Japan grabbing various natural resources it needed, to compensate for an international blockade. (resources) European theater of World War II: started with German efforts to recover lands lost in World War I, followed by efforts to gain further territory (see "Lebensraum"), and with Italian efforts to take colonial territories in Africa. (resources) Korean War: Started as a war for control of liberated Korea, expanded into a proxy (and then direct) war between the United States and China over influence in Asia. (resources) Vietnam War: Started as an independence movement (the First Indochina War) and expanded into a proxy war between the United States and the Sino-Soviet alliance for influence in southeast Asia. (ideas, resources) Indo-Pakistani wars: Fought over control of the Kashmir area. (resources) Arab-Israeli wars: Fought over control of the former British Mandate of Palestine. (resources)
True, many of the belligerents in these wars can be identified with specific ideologies, but the goal of the war has usually been to gain access to resources (land, minerals, governmental control, influence, etc.).
If you remove the people who are HIV-positive and know it from the groups, the numbers shift: of the 240,000 people who are HIV-positive and don't know it, 20,000 will test negative. The positive predictive value drops from 94.7% to about 78%, while the negative predictive value rises from 99.97% to about 99.99%.
I'd feel better about this test if the false positive and false negative rates were reversed. Sending 1 out of 12 people to the doctor because they got a false positive (and missing just 1 out of 5000 actual HIV infections) sounds a lot better than the reverse.
This is a general screening test intended to be used by the population at large, rather than a diagnostic test. As-is, it's got good positive predictive value and a reasonable negative predictive value: if given to the entire US population (minus those who already know they're HIV-positive, so 300,000,000 people, 240,000 of whom are HIV-positive and unaware of it), it will generate about 60,000 false positives for a PPV of 78% (ie. if it says "yes", you've got a 78% chance of being HIV-positive) and 20,000 false negatives for an NPV of 99.99% (ie. if it says "no", there's a 99.99% chance of you being HIV-negative, but you knew that already).
If we go with your desired rates, the test will have a PPV of 0.95% with 25,000,000 false positives (ie. if it says you're HIV-positive, it's almost certainly wrong), and a NPV of 99.99998% with 48 false negatives. For comparison, a test that simply always says "you are HIV-positive" isn't much worse at identifying HIV-positive people, so you might as well not bother with the home test, and just send everyone to the doctor's office.
It's much like screening for terrorists at airports: if you're looking for a very small needle in a very large haystack, you want to be very, very good at identifying things that aren't needles. Otherwise, you're generating a lot of work for little benefit.
The main problem is that VM-to-VM traffic doesn't always head out over a physical network. It's easy to put a firewall between different sections of a physical LAN; it's a good deal harder to put it between different sections of a single physical computer.
There's a difference between cavitation and supercavitation. Supercavitation takes those noisy bubbles that are destroying your propeller and extends them to enclose the entire vessel. This reduces the amount of surface in contact with the water, which greatly reduces drag, and all of a sudden you're rocketing along at 200 miles per hour and don't particularly care if people hear you coming.
Frankly, I can't imagine WHAT the fuck you'd have on these servers that's so important you need to risk the lives and safety of staff evacuating them at a place like this - presentations? Financial stuff? Why isn't that stuff on off-site-backed-up and network-available storage already? Why are people saving this shit on their workstations? I mean really... you're worried about phones? Network gear? Sucks to have to reconfigure it, but why don't you have insurance to replace it?
If this is the typical Colorado wildfire, the situation is:
"There will be a fire coming through sometime between 24 and 36 hours from now, unless the firefighters can get a containment line up. How much of our stuff can we save?"
As the fire moves, the timeframe for evacuation will continue to be refined; the final evacuation order will typically give you at least an hour's safety margin. As long as everyone actually leaves when the order is given, there's no risk to safety, so there's no reason *not* to save things.
better yet, point out that 'adult porn' is generally always not rape, whereas CP always is.
Except it isn't. From talking to someone whose job is to investigate suspected CP, the vast majority of the stuff that crosses his desk is either "clothed children posing sexually" or "non-sexual nudity" -- in short, stuff that wouldn't even be considered pornographic if the subject were an adult.
...any more than taking away all CP will stop child sexual abuse but it does help discourage it.
Studies show that the opposite is true. Denmark and another European country (I think it was Czechoslovakia) both accidentally legalized possession of child pornography, and in both cases, the rate of child sexual abuse plummeted. Japan had a boom in the market for cartoon child pornography in the 1980s, and again, the rate of child sexual abuse plummeted.
(In case you're wondering how you can accidentally legalize child pornography, it's simple: First you have a law that outlaws all pornography. Then, you repeal it.)
Where fancy cooling devices are rare, but ones sending wireless cellphone signals aren't fancy I guess...
They aren't. Cell phone service is ubiquitous in most developing countries, and some third-world countries have better coverage than Europe or the US.
Turns out that when you don't need to deal with NIMBY issues, putting up a bunch of cell towers is cheaper, easier, and more theft-resistant than running a bunch of copper wire. As a result, cell service has better availability than either wired phone service or mains electricity.
The american school system is designed to DISCOURAGE this.
No, it just sounds like you got some crappy teachers. There are some reasons why there are more crappy teachers around than they should be, but it is not some scheme to hold back smart people. The administrators don't sit around saying, "Gee, we aren't doing enough to hamper smart kids,"
No, it's designed to discourage this. By testing out of a couple of math courses and then taking Algebra II and Geometry at the same time, my younger brother completed the school district's highest-level math course (Advanced Placement calculus) in 10th grade (thus forcing the school district to pay for two years of university math instruction). The next year, the school district changed the prerequisite structure in the math program to make it impossible to take AP calc before 12th grade.
I got a $250 digital camera for $100 through what I figure was some sort of miscommunication in the marketing department. My best guess is that they wanted a 20% discount to draw people into the stores, but the memo was sent to too many people. Net result? Advertised price of $200, minus a $50 in-store rebate, minus a $50 mail-in rebate.
A diesel engine uses adiabatic compression to raise the air temperature enough to ignite the fuel. If the engine block is too cold, it absorbs some of that heat from the air, and the engine won't start. In this situation, glow plugs are used to warm up the portions of the engine block around the cylinders.
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The Internet? No, but a home-area network...
I'd love to be able to turn on my dishwasher and washing machine at the same time and have them negotiate usage of the hot-water supply, or have the microwave tell the refrigerator to hold off on starting the compressor for 30 seconds while it finishes up. Having my window box fan and air conditioner consult my home weather station to decide if a back-to-front airflow, a front-to-back airflow, or running the AC would be most effective at cooling is an interesting possibility. I'm sure there are other things a smart home network could do, as well.
Who made the decision that the mission needed to take place? Who decided on when, where, and with what squads? Who coordinated overall strategy -- or was the anarchist side uncoordinated above the squad level?
The actual methodology is more complicated than that. I don't know about the road system, but the rail industry uses a number called "FWI" (fatalities and weighted injuries, where one death = 10 major injuries = 1000 minor injuries). The threshold is (IIRC) 2 million pounds, so if a change is expected to eliminate 1 FWI, it will be done if it costs less than 2 million pounds. This scales both with severity and probability, so a change that will reduce the odds of a fatality by 10% is equivalent to a change that will eliminate one major injury, and both will be done if the cost is less than 200k pounds.
Digital holographic displays do exist, but they're strictly for research purposes right now: the resolution is horrible (last time I checked, a top-of-the-line display was 30 lines of 250 pixels), the computational requirements were huge (that 30-line display was driven by a multi-core multi-GPU workstation, generating a few frames per second), and the bandwidth requirements were insane (the workstation was pushing 10GB/s to the display).
The concept of "criminal attempt" has been a part of common law for a very, very long time. Basically, to be found guilty of "attempted whatever", you need to form the intention to commit a crime, and then carry out an act towards carrying out the crime. In this case, the person is accused of having planned to have sex with someone under the age of consent (the intention), and then arranged a meeting with that person (the action).
We've sent hundreds of probes into interstellar space, and many of them were equipped with radiation sensors (electronics are even more radiation-sensitive than humans). We know what the radiation levels are like, we know how much shielding is needed, and we know where we can get the shielding materials. Among the people who are planning this mission, the answers are well-known, and the questions are about as interesting as "where are we going to get the steel to build the launch vehicles?"
50 square meters of greenhouse (or, more likely, 150-200 cubic meters of greenhouse volume) fed by 10,000 square meters of solar panels can produce an impressive amount of food, if done properly. You've got continuous daylight, no seasonal cycles, and the option to provide elevated CO2 levels, all of which can increase plant growth rates dramatically. Stack your plants four-high with individual lighting, and you should be able to get 10,000 square meters of productivity out of a 50-square-meter greenhouse.
(The reason this isn't done much on Earth is that farmland is cheap, while solar panels are expensive. At Martian prices, the opposite is true.)
Acceleration really isn't a problem. Assuming the train can manage an acceleration of 10 meters/second/second, it'll take about three minutes to get up to speed. Combined with the Earth's gravity, that give you a net acceleration of 1.4G at an angle of 45 degrees to vertical. If you can't survive that, you probably should be in a hospital rather than commuting cross-country.
Turning radius is a problem that's covered (briefly) in the article, but these trains are meant as long-distance point-to-point links, eg. to get from New York City to Tokyo, you'd take the New York to Los Angeles vactrain to Chicago, switch trains to the Chicago-to-Beijing link (probably passing through Calgary or Edmonton), then take a local flight or high-speed surface train to Japan.
Many of the trades were erroneous, because they were based on bad information. During the crash, the NYSE was quoting prices that were as much as five minutes out of date, which influenced people to take actions that they otherwise wouldn't have, which in turn caused other people to take action, and so on. Rather than try to figure out who was making trades based on good data, who was trading on bad data, and who was trading in response to trades made on bad data, the NYSE simply decided to roll back everything.
(Incidentally, it mostly wasn't the HFT companies who got screwed by the crash -- they'd pulled out of the market by the time prices really started plummeting. It was mostly individual and institutional long-term investors who'd placed stop-loss orders and wound up having those orders executed at fire-sale prices.)
Technically, he was right. My back-of-the-envelope calculation says that you'll need three 500-gigaton bombs, but there's no upper limit to the size of a fusion bomb...
The ideology doesn't drive it. The desire for resources drives it, and the ideology comes along for the ride.
Take a close look at that list. You'll notice something interesting: not one of those wars was between a pair of nuclear-armed states. The closest would be the Korean, Vietnam, and Soviet Afghanistan wars, where one nuclear-armed state had troops on the ground, and another was providing resources but not troops to the other side. That's the basis of this guy's thesis that nukes create peace.
Let's take your idea and look at the major wars of the past century in that light:
World War I: started as a war between Austria-Hungary and Russia over control of the Balkans. (resources)
Russian Civil War: war between various groups over control of the Russian Empire. (resources)
Chinese Civil War: war between various warlords and non-warlord groups over control of China. (resources)
Second Sino-Japanese War: started with the Japanese conquest of Manchuria. (resources)
Pacific theater of World War II: started with Japan grabbing various natural resources it needed, to compensate for an international blockade. (resources)
European theater of World War II: started with German efforts to recover lands lost in World War I, followed by efforts to gain further territory (see "Lebensraum"), and with Italian efforts to take colonial territories in Africa. (resources)
Korean War: Started as a war for control of liberated Korea, expanded into a proxy (and then direct) war between the United States and China over influence in Asia. (resources)
Vietnam War: Started as an independence movement (the First Indochina War) and expanded into a proxy war between the United States and the Sino-Soviet alliance for influence in southeast Asia. (ideas, resources)
Indo-Pakistani wars: Fought over control of the Kashmir area. (resources)
Arab-Israeli wars: Fought over control of the former British Mandate of Palestine. (resources)
True, many of the belligerents in these wars can be identified with specific ideologies, but the goal of the war has usually been to gain access to resources (land, minerals, governmental control, influence, etc.).
If you remove the people who are HIV-positive and know it from the groups, the numbers shift: of the 240,000 people who are HIV-positive and don't know it, 20,000 will test negative. The positive predictive value drops from 94.7% to about 78%, while the negative predictive value rises from 99.97% to about 99.99%.
This is a general screening test intended to be used by the population at large, rather than a diagnostic test. As-is, it's got good positive predictive value and a reasonable negative predictive value: if given to the entire US population (minus those who already know they're HIV-positive, so 300,000,000 people, 240,000 of whom are HIV-positive and unaware of it), it will generate about 60,000 false positives for a PPV of 78% (ie. if it says "yes", you've got a 78% chance of being HIV-positive) and 20,000 false negatives for an NPV of 99.99% (ie. if it says "no", there's a 99.99% chance of you being HIV-negative, but you knew that already).
If we go with your desired rates, the test will have a PPV of 0.95% with 25,000,000 false positives (ie. if it says you're HIV-positive, it's almost certainly wrong), and a NPV of 99.99998% with 48 false negatives. For comparison, a test that simply always says "you are HIV-positive" isn't much worse at identifying HIV-positive people, so you might as well not bother with the home test, and just send everyone to the doctor's office.
It's much like screening for terrorists at airports: if you're looking for a very small needle in a very large haystack, you want to be very, very good at identifying things that aren't needles. Otherwise, you're generating a lot of work for little benefit.
The main problem is that VM-to-VM traffic doesn't always head out over a physical network. It's easy to put a firewall between different sections of a physical LAN; it's a good deal harder to put it between different sections of a single physical computer.
There's a difference between cavitation and supercavitation. Supercavitation takes those noisy bubbles that are destroying your propeller and extends them to enclose the entire vessel. This reduces the amount of surface in contact with the water, which greatly reduces drag, and all of a sudden you're rocketing along at 200 miles per hour and don't particularly care if people hear you coming.
If this is the typical Colorado wildfire, the situation is:
"There will be a fire coming through sometime between 24 and 36 hours from now, unless the firefighters can get a containment line up. How much of our stuff can we save?"
As the fire moves, the timeframe for evacuation will continue to be refined; the final evacuation order will typically give you at least an hour's safety margin. As long as everyone actually leaves when the order is given, there's no risk to safety, so there's no reason *not* to save things.
Except it isn't. From talking to someone whose job is to investigate suspected CP, the vast majority of the stuff that crosses his desk is either "clothed children posing sexually" or "non-sexual nudity" -- in short, stuff that wouldn't even be considered pornographic if the subject were an adult.
Studies show that the opposite is true. Denmark and another European country (I think it was Czechoslovakia) both accidentally legalized possession of child pornography, and in both cases, the rate of child sexual abuse plummeted. Japan had a boom in the market for cartoon child pornography in the 1980s, and again, the rate of child sexual abuse plummeted.
(In case you're wondering how you can accidentally legalize child pornography, it's simple: First you have a law that outlaws all pornography. Then, you repeal it.)
They aren't. Cell phone service is ubiquitous in most developing countries, and some third-world countries have better coverage than Europe or the US.
Turns out that when you don't need to deal with NIMBY issues, putting up a bunch of cell towers is cheaper, easier, and more theft-resistant than running a bunch of copper wire. As a result, cell service has better availability than either wired phone service or mains electricity.
Try the article on pornography. I'm pretty sure it's illustrated.
No, it's designed to discourage this. By testing out of a couple of math courses and then taking Algebra II and Geometry at the same time, my younger brother completed the school district's highest-level math course (Advanced Placement calculus) in 10th grade (thus forcing the school district to pay for two years of university math instruction). The next year, the school district changed the prerequisite structure in the math program to make it impossible to take AP calc before 12th grade.
I got a $250 digital camera for $100 through what I figure was some sort of miscommunication in the marketing department. My best guess is that they wanted a 20% discount to draw people into the stores, but the memo was sent to too many people. Net result? Advertised price of $200, minus a $50 in-store rebate, minus a $50 mail-in rebate.
A diesel engine uses adiabatic compression to raise the air temperature enough to ignite the fuel. If the engine block is too cold, it absorbs some of that heat from the air, and the engine won't start. In this situation, glow plugs are used to warm up the portions of the engine block around the cylinders.