I just hope those Martian tomatoes are cheaper than that crap they have in the produce department now.
Seriously though, on the one hand you are talking about genetically engineering plants from Earth to be able to survive on Mars. The plants wouldn't "learn" to grow on Mars, they would be built that way. On the other hand, Martian microbes brought here would have no way to prepare for their new environment. They would either fortuitously have the ability to survive in our atmosphere or they would quickly die.
Are you not willingly doing business with these companies?
I think it would be rather difficult to make it through life without ever getting a loan of any sort, credit card, or any of the other myriad of services that require a credit check. Heck, my last apartment even wanted to check my credit when I applied.
From working in a bank, I've heard that your score goes down a small amount every time you request a credit report, to discourage people from applying for loans to dozens of banks, or the same bank over and over.
I don't think this is quite true. I think that your credit rating is only affected by potential creditors looking at your credit report at your request. The reason it goes down is because most potential creditors will be concerned if you are looking to take on substantial debt in addition to the loan that they are offering you.
When a credit card company checks your report to "pre-approve" you or when you request one yourself that is categorized differently and should not affect your credit rating.
Why the regional roll-out? Californians can get their report now but folks in New York have to wait until September of next year.
Probably so that the credit report companies don't get slashdotted. As someone on the East Coast, I agree that it is annoying, however I can kind of see why they would want to try to spread the requests out. Spreading it out over a nine month perioed does seem to be a little much, though.
Just to follow up, I did some more reading on this and I don't think this would work. You would have to find a way to separate the hydrogen and oxygen at the elevated temperature.
If you gradually cooled the mixture the gas would eventually form water again (not necessarily explosively) due to equilibrium constraints. If you tried to quickly supercool it chances are you would end up with a big bang, as mixtures of oxygen and hydrogen will self-ignite at temperatures above 600C.
It could be useful not just for the blind and vision-impaired, but also for people who have to work in dark or opaque environments (off the top of my head, fire rescue in thick smoke, etc)
For people who still have their sense of sight, the more sensible approach (no pun intended) would probably be to use visual feedback instead.
This doesn't sound terribly efficient, heating water to >1000C and then cooling it to -200C. I also wonder how many plants a week we would hear about exploding. I would think that working with a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen at stoichiometric ratio could be tricky.
Isreal already used this strategy to assassinate Palestinian bombmaker Yahya Ayyash. Of course, in that case they used a cell phone intentionally rigged with explosives.
But where does even that barely livable wage come from, taxes on the people who are willing to work? Sounds like a welfare state that would collapse pretty quickly.
I agree that capitalism kind of sucks. Seems that there is only so much green to go around, so the only way for one person to get ahead is for another to fall behind. On the other hand, human nature in general does not lend itself to communal living. Sure it can work among small groups of the willing, but I can't see it ever working on a grander scale.
The proof that this sort of system _can_ work is the open source movement. Where the marginal cost of production is 0 enough people (especially the talented, gifted, self motivated people) seem to be willing to contribute for free to keep the whole system running perfectly well. Those that use and give nothing back... well they cost nothing to those who do contribute, so it doesn't bother them much.
I would hazard a guess that most of these contributors also have PAYING jobs, otherwise they might not feel so charitable.
Your utopian vision sounds nice, but it also sounds a bit far-fetched. While we might be able to find some people who like to write code or find the cure to a particular disease, it will be much tougher to find someone that enjoys working in a coal mine or cleaning the toilets at the bus station. Capitalism overcomes this problem with postive reinforcement, i.e. a wage. Communism tries to make it work through force. While the former does have its problems, it seems to work better, in practice, than the latter.
Hey lunch time. An hour break? Sure that's workable for me. The car gets filled up at the same time I do, I get a few more minutes to stretch my legs
What's this "filling" station going to look like if a large segment of the population goes this route? It won't be your typical 12 pump gas station, you would need a decent sized parking lot to accomodate the hundreds of customers a typical interstate gas station might serve in an hour.
I suppose it could eventually get to the point where charging stations become ubiquitous and you could even charge your car at your fast food restuarant. It would obviously require a bit of time and investment in infrastructure to get to that point though.
There is a P-T diagram of water here:
http://www.tpub.com/content/doe/h1012v1/css/h1012v 1_68.htm
The diagram describes how the phase of the water depends on the pressure and temperature. You can see that at pressure below the "triple point" of water that it can exist as only a solid or a gas. This diagram is actually a little off because the boundary between the liquid and solid phase should have a negative slope rather than being straight up and down.
Carbon dioxide is an example of a substance that exhibits solid to gas sublimation at atmospheric pressure because its triple point is somewhere above. A block of dry ice will simply evaporate without ever forming a liquid. However if you were to consider much higher pressures (say 700 psi) you can have liquid CO2, as well as solid and gas, depending on the temperature.
Liquids and gases are really not that different. They both consist of freely moving molecules. Liquids just happen to be denser and less compressible. By manuevering around the critical point shown in the diagram linked above by increasing the pressure and temperature one can even go from a liquid to a gas without ever boiling!
Is this solely due to air and crystalisation upon freezing or does put h2o do this in a vacuum?
I believe this is due to the directional hydrogen bonds formed by water when it is frozen. The crystalline structure that accomodates the angles of these hydrogen bonds is less dense than the randomly packed configuration that the water molecules can assume once they have significant kinetic energy to break the hydrogen bonds, i.e. the ice melts.
I would also like to point out that if you try to melt ice in a vacuum (or at a sufficiently low pressure) the ice will sublimate directly into a gas rather than form water.
So is the toxic radioactive mold in my air conditioning ducts going to combine with our towns arsenic laced water supply and come down and kill my family while our babies choke on small toys and our children dodge bullets spray from mailmen's assault rifles in the playground as they eat their poisonous school lunches, or not?
We'll have answers to all those questions, but first to our top story: a local woman thinks she spotted Clay Aiken at a local video store. Let's go now to our roving team reporter Joe Smith, who is standing in front of the now closed, darkened store...
I am also from North Carolina so I can explain. Here each voter is given a ballot and provided with a booth (the term booth might be generous here) in which to fill out their ballot. Each polling station then has one ballot box centrally located into which you must feed your ballot. If a number of people were waiting to insert their ballots it might be possible to take a peek at the person's in front of you. There are votes made on both sides as well so it would be difficult to completely obscure your decisions, though if you were really concerned you could find a way.
More distrubing to me is that no identification is required to vote, other than knowing your name and address. Both of these are available on the board of elections web site for my county (Wake) along with your history of participation in the elections. Seems like it would be VERY easy to commit voter fraud, although I am not sure I would want to risk jail time to give my candidate an extra vote.
I could just see the Linux car drivers out there trying to explain why its better that they can only use certain brands of tires and they have to brew their own fuel.
Even worse than Windows crashing would be the eventual exploits.
"I haven't been drinking officer. My car has been infected with the W32.Souser worm!"
You're not breaking any laws of thermodynamics because the algae (or whatever) would be drawing energy from the sun and metabolizing the CO2.
So what you really have is a solar power plant. I wonder how the efficiency of such a system would compare to other methods of harvesting the power of the sun? I am guessing probably not very well.
On the other hand, if you can store the fuel generated during the day for use during the overnight hours, you could overcome some of the problems with other technologies such as solar cells.
But with the RFID technology you would have to add RFID tags to all of the street signs which would probably add up quickly. With the proposed system the cost would only be shouldered by the owners of the cars using the new technology. That said your system probably would actually work better.
This sounds more like a dumb cop then a problem with the road signs. If the green arrow is lit and you turn, then you are not making a right on red because you have a green light, correct? If you turned right while that arrow was red (or rather not green or yellow) then you would be making a right on red and thus disobeying the sign. I have seen plenty of intersections like that and it makes sense to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously though, on the one hand you are talking about genetically engineering plants from Earth to be able to survive on Mars. The plants wouldn't "learn" to grow on Mars, they would be built that way. On the other hand, Martian microbes brought here would have no way to prepare for their new environment. They would either fortuitously have the ability to survive in our atmosphere or they would quickly die.
And if anyone has a spare Delta rocket sitting around that they can borrow they would be like SO grateful.
now that people go on the internets
Who would have have thought that "W" was on slashdot? And with such a low UID?
I think it would be rather difficult to make it through life without ever getting a loan of any sort, credit card, or any of the other myriad of services that require a credit check. Heck, my last apartment even wanted to check my credit when I applied.
I don't think this is quite true. I think that your credit rating is only affected by potential creditors looking at your credit report at your request. The reason it goes down is because most potential creditors will be concerned if you are looking to take on substantial debt in addition to the loan that they are offering you.
When a credit card company checks your report to "pre-approve" you or when you request one yourself that is categorized differently and should not affect your credit rating.
Probably so that the credit report companies don't get slashdotted. As someone on the East Coast, I agree that it is annoying, however I can kind of see why they would want to try to spread the requests out. Spreading it out over a nine month perioed does seem to be a little much, though.
Is there something hidden away in the US Constitution that says that all Bills laid before Congress must have names that are really crap acronyms?
No, but it is a good way to make "names" for bills that make them sound a lot more innocuous than they really are, i.e. the PATRIOT act.
If you gradually cooled the mixture the gas would eventually form water again (not necessarily explosively) due to equilibrium constraints. If you tried to quickly supercool it chances are you would end up with a big bang, as mixtures of oxygen and hydrogen will self-ignite at temperatures above 600C.
For people who still have their sense of sight, the more sensible approach (no pun intended) would probably be to use visual feedback instead.
This doesn't sound terribly efficient, heating water to >1000C and then cooling it to -200C. I also wonder how many plants a week we would hear about exploding. I would think that working with a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen at stoichiometric ratio could be tricky.
Isreal already used this strategy to assassinate Palestinian bombmaker Yahya Ayyash. Of course, in that case they used a cell phone intentionally rigged with explosives.
I agree that capitalism kind of sucks. Seems that there is only so much green to go around, so the only way for one person to get ahead is for another to fall behind. On the other hand, human nature in general does not lend itself to communal living. Sure it can work among small groups of the willing, but I can't see it ever working on a grander scale.
The proof that this sort of system _can_ work is the open source movement. Where the marginal cost of production is 0 enough people (especially the talented, gifted, self motivated people) seem to be willing to contribute for free to keep the whole system running perfectly well. Those that use and give nothing back... well they cost nothing to those who do contribute, so it doesn't bother them much.
I would hazard a guess that most of these contributors also have PAYING jobs, otherwise they might not feel so charitable.
Your utopian vision sounds nice, but it also sounds a bit far-fetched. While we might be able to find some people who like to write code or find the cure to a particular disease, it will be much tougher to find someone that enjoys working in a coal mine or cleaning the toilets at the bus station. Capitalism overcomes this problem with postive reinforcement, i.e. a wage. Communism tries to make it work through force. While the former does have its problems, it seems to work better, in practice, than the latter.
Hey lunch time. An hour break? Sure that's workable for me. The car gets filled up at the same time I do, I get a few more minutes to stretch my legs
What's this "filling" station going to look like if a large segment of the population goes this route? It won't be your typical 12 pump gas station, you would need a decent sized parking lot to accomodate the hundreds of customers a typical interstate gas station might serve in an hour.
I suppose it could eventually get to the point where charging stations become ubiquitous and you could even charge your car at your fast food restuarant. It would obviously require a bit of time and investment in infrastructure to get to that point though.
Carbon dioxide is an example of a substance that exhibits solid to gas sublimation at atmospheric pressure because its triple point is somewhere above. A block of dry ice will simply evaporate without ever forming a liquid. However if you were to consider much higher pressures (say 700 psi) you can have liquid CO2, as well as solid and gas, depending on the temperature.
Liquids and gases are really not that different. They both consist of freely moving molecules. Liquids just happen to be denser and less compressible. By manuevering around the critical point shown in the diagram linked above by increasing the pressure and temperature one can even go from a liquid to a gas without ever boiling!
Please try to keep up, despite nearly half the country voting against him, Bush clearly has a "mandate" and much political capital to spend.
I believe this is due to the directional hydrogen bonds formed by water when it is frozen. The crystalline structure that accomodates the angles of these hydrogen bonds is less dense than the randomly packed configuration that the water molecules can assume once they have significant kinetic energy to break the hydrogen bonds, i.e. the ice melts.
I would also like to point out that if you try to melt ice in a vacuum (or at a sufficiently low pressure) the ice will sublimate directly into a gas rather than form water.
You better watch out, I think that referring to your internet connection as "my internet" might get your slashdot membership revoked.
We'll have answers to all those questions, but first to our top story: a local woman thinks she spotted Clay Aiken at a local video store. Let's go now to our roving team reporter Joe Smith, who is standing in front of the now closed, darkened store...
More distrubing to me is that no identification is required to vote, other than knowing your name and address. Both of these are available on the board of elections web site for my county (Wake) along with your history of participation in the elections. Seems like it would be VERY easy to commit voter fraud, although I am not sure I would want to risk jail time to give my candidate an extra vote.
Even worse than Windows crashing would be the eventual exploits.
"I haven't been drinking officer. My car has been infected with the W32.Souser worm!"
So what you really have is a solar power plant. I wonder how the efficiency of such a system would compare to other methods of harvesting the power of the sun? I am guessing probably not very well.
On the other hand, if you can store the fuel generated during the day for use during the overnight hours, you could overcome some of the problems with other technologies such as solar cells.
Wait, what does AC stand for again?
But with the RFID technology you would have to add RFID tags to all of the street signs which would probably add up quickly. With the proposed system the cost would only be shouldered by the owners of the cars using the new technology. That said your system probably would actually work better.
This sounds more like a dumb cop then a problem with the road signs. If the green arrow is lit and you turn, then you are not making a right on red because you have a green light, correct? If you turned right while that arrow was red (or rather not green or yellow) then you would be making a right on red and thus disobeying the sign. I have seen plenty of intersections like that and it makes sense to me.