The problem is if you drop the temp to earth-normal, the dark side will get so cold that everything will freeze, including the atmosphere. You will get a layer of frozen CO2, O2, etc. slowly thickening as it rotates across the back of the planet, and a massive boil-off along the sunrise line. Should be interesting weather.
On Earth, the North and South poles still get a lot of heat leaking in from the daylit areas and much more even heaing due to the fast rotation, and you still get large temp differences between summer/winter.
Here's an interesting question, If you could wrap a superconductor all the way round Mars' equator, how much current would need to be flowing in it to give it a decent protective magnetic field?
I found a calculator that seems to say about 280 million amps would give you a.5 gauss field in a 3500km radius coil. Seems like a lot, but not impossible. Assume a thousand turns, then its only 280 thousamd amps.:) You'd probably want to do it with multiple coils at higher lattitudes though. Maybe two coils at 45 North and South?
Jerry Pournelle had a chapter in "A Step Farther Out" arguing that terraforming Venus would be a lot easier than terraforming Mars. Start with genetically modified airbourne algae to eat the CO2, import H2 from Jupiter's moons (or asteroids), and combine with the excess liberated O2 to make water. Far less mass transport than would be needed to terraform Mars, and much quicker overall. Major problem with Venus is the length of the day. Anybody know a way to speed up the rotation of a planet?
But to prove you have the power, you must inflict the suffering. The inner party (1 or 2% of the population) exercised this power over the outer party (about 15%). The proles were generally ignored, unless they became noticable, in which case they were inducted into the party, or disappeared.
The Party won't be overthrown or defeated. They are basically in collusion with the other power blocs to keep things balaced, as evidenced by the shifting alliances. "Picture a boot, stomping on a human face, forever".
You missed the whole point of the book.
It's explicit near the end when O'Brien is interogating Winston, and asks him "How do you know you have power over other people?", and Winston answers correctly "by making them suffer"
If you mean "why create diesel?" then it's because liquid hydrocarbon fuels have a very high enrgy density, are easily stored, are very easy to make use of, and there is a large amount of existing infrastructure that uses them.
If you mean "why use algae?" then it's just one of the competing paths to produce synthetic fuels. The most economical will win. It potentially has the advantages of low energy input and low maintainence. Disadvantages are the low efficiency and the risk of something eating it.
Easiest patent reform:
1/ Accept the fee and approve all patents immediately they are submitted.
2/ Require all patent lawsuits to notify the patent office that the patent is being used in a suit, and the parties to the suit, before the suit commences,
3/ Patent office does an immediate evaluation of the validity of the patent with regard to obviousness, prior art etc.
4/ If patent is found invalid it is immediately canceled.
5/ Patent office provides to the patent holder a written report on the outcome of steps 3 and 4. The report possibly also goes to the potential defendent.
6/ Any lawsuit filed without the report from step 5 is immediately tossed out by the court.
Benefits:
Reduces workload on the PO by only examining patents when necessary.
Discourages baseless lawsuits by revoking invalid patents.
If you have a valid case, the report from the PO is powerful evidence in your favour.
The police will NEVER de-escalate a situation. Their unalterable mindset is that they are the authority, and they MUST be in control.
If you were to follow through with posting their names and addresses, the most likely response is a no-knock raid, probably for "drugs", in which your pets will be shot, your home trashed, and you will be beaten and possibly killed if you resist.
I don't consider it to be the best future, but I do consider it to be far better than the future portrayed by 1984, which seems to be where society is heading.
Nope. Those are included in either the printing or the shipping/handling cost. Get me book you have the rights to, a run length of at least 5000, an address list, and I can get them printed and individually delivered for less than six dollars a book. Printing/logistics/shipping are mature commodity markets with razor thin margins. Most people don't realise just how cheap they are. (especially printing, for some reason people wildly overestimate its cost). I agree that ebooks are overpriced, but I think you underestimate the cost of publishing. Regarding the ebooks that are more expensive, I would guess they overestimated the print run and are selling the physical books for whatever they can get.
The the moving black dot trick was on goggles in a short story about an alien being kidnapped.
Just looked it up. Story was "Grendel" by Larry Niven.
Don't remember it being used on the spaceship hull, though.
I agree with most of your points, except the bit about ebooks.
Printing and binding a paperback costs less than the difference you quote.
Typically, between under a dollar for a large quantity of a small book, to three or four dollars for a short run (eg 5000) of a thick book. Add in another two dollars or so for postage and handling and you're pretty close.
While the $10 for writing, editing, proofing and formatting may be arguable, the difference is about right,
The easiest fix would be to stop the roll-backs when they fuck up. Let a few of them go broke instead of "oh I didn't really mean that, can I have a do-over?" and the rest might have a bit more caution. Or remove the ability to post a bid then remove it before it can be actioned. Make any bid stand for a minimum time before it can be withdrawn. 10 seconds would be long enough. On the downside, if you fix it, you don't get all the fancy new superfast internet links.
It's not just the model of printer or the driver installed. An office document will reflow if any of the print settings on the printer setup are changed. Margins are the main culprit, but even something like changing from metric to imperial units will do it.
Here in Aus, the A4 / US Letter resize screws up a lot of formatting.
You don't elect. If you have good karma you occasionally get allocated mod points. If you post in a thread you can't moderate it. If you post in a thread you have already moderated, all your allocated mod points are removed.
If you use your points wisely (mod up good comments, down bad) you will usually get allocated more fairly quickly. If you mod badly, (good down, bad up) you will get killed in meta-mod, and usually won''t get points again for a long time.
What you are talking about seems more like meta-moderation, where you judge how fairly other comments have been moderated. Participating in that gets you credit towards being allocated mod points.
It should not be easy. I think the 4th amendment to the US constitution has it pretty close to right. However, it also shouldn't take 600 pages. If you can't say what you want to intercept and why in a couple of pages, you shouldn't be doing it anyway.
I think anyone voting for the pirate party is either cynical enough, or idealistic enough, not to be put off by non-PC remarks like that.
It is only the posturing prats that would make a fuss.
Actually, once you have a typeset paper book, typically either in quark or indesign, the cost to convert it to an ebook would be trivial.
Ideally, the fixed costs should be spread all copies in any format, and the production cost across the copies in that format. This would mean that the average paper book should be one to two dollars dearer than the ebook.
Most people don't realize just how cheap mass printing is. For a black ink only paperback with a color cover, setup is probably under a couple of thousand, and the per unit run cost is less than a dollar. Hardbacks are only slightly more expensive, but cost more because of: A. shorter print runs, and B. because they can.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is if you drop the temp to earth-normal, the dark side will get so cold that everything will freeze, including the atmosphere. You will get a layer of frozen CO2, O2, etc. slowly thickening as it rotates across the back of the planet, and a massive boil-off along the sunrise line. Should be interesting weather.
On Earth, the North and South poles still get a lot of heat leaking in from the daylit areas and much more even heaing due to the fast rotation, and you still get large temp differences between summer/winter.
Here's an interesting question, If you could wrap a superconductor all the way round Mars' equator, how much current would need to be flowing in it to give it a decent protective magnetic field? .5 gauss field in a 3500km radius coil. Seems like a lot, but not impossible. Assume a thousand turns, then its only 280 thousamd amps. :)
I found a calculator that seems to say about 280 million amps would give you a
You'd probably want to do it with multiple coils at higher lattitudes though. Maybe two coils at 45 North and South?
Jerry Pournelle had a chapter in "A Step Farther Out" arguing that terraforming Venus would be a lot easier than terraforming Mars.
Start with genetically modified airbourne algae to eat the CO2, import H2 from Jupiter's moons (or asteroids), and combine with the excess liberated O2 to make water. Far less mass transport than would be needed to terraform Mars, and much quicker overall.
Major problem with Venus is the length of the day. Anybody know a way to speed up the rotation of a planet?
At the bottom end, probably so.
Minimum wage is $15.95/hour http://www.fairwork.gov.au/pay/national-minimum-wage/pages/default.aspx/
At the higher end they probably make less.
No, the autocorrect is a troll.
I used to work on a crappy database where null and zero were the same thing. I think they did it to save space. Idiots.
Yep. Towing it to the right.
But to prove you have the power, you must inflict the suffering. The inner party (1 or 2% of the population) exercised this power over the outer party (about 15%).
The proles were generally ignored, unless they became noticable, in which case they were inducted into the party, or disappeared.
The Party won't be overthrown or defeated. They are basically in collusion with the other power blocs to keep things balaced, as evidenced by the shifting alliances.
"Picture a boot, stomping on a human face, forever".
You missed the whole point of the book.
It's explicit near the end when O'Brien is interogating Winston, and asks him "How do you know you have power over other people?", and Winston answers correctly "by making them suffer"
If you mean "why create diesel?" then it's because liquid hydrocarbon fuels have a very high enrgy density, are easily stored, are very easy to make use of, and there is a large amount of existing infrastructure that uses them.
If you mean "why use algae?" then it's just one of the competing paths to produce synthetic fuels. The most economical will win. It potentially has the advantages of low energy input and low maintainence. Disadvantages are the low efficiency and the risk of something eating it.
That would be interesting. You could go invisible by covering yourself with ads.
Easiest patent reform :
1/ Accept the fee and approve all patents immediately they are submitted.
2/ Require all patent lawsuits to notify the patent office that the patent is being used in a suit, and the parties to the suit, before the suit commences,
3/ Patent office does an immediate evaluation of the validity of the patent with regard to obviousness, prior art etc.
4/ If patent is found invalid it is immediately canceled.
5/ Patent office provides to the patent holder a written report on the outcome of steps 3 and 4. The report possibly also goes to the potential defendent.
6/ Any lawsuit filed without the report from step 5 is immediately tossed out by the court.
Benefits:
Reduces workload on the PO by only examining patents when necessary.
Discourages baseless lawsuits by revoking invalid patents.
If you have a valid case, the report from the PO is powerful evidence in your favour.
Provided you maintain a torrent ratio of at least 1, you have indeed given it back.
The police will NEVER de-escalate a situation. Their unalterable mindset is that they are the authority, and they MUST be in control.
If you were to follow through with posting their names and addresses, the most likely response is a no-knock raid, probably for "drugs", in which your pets will be shot, your home trashed, and you will be beaten and possibly killed if you resist.
I don't consider it to be the best future, but I do consider it to be far better than the future portrayed by 1984, which seems to be where society is heading.
Nope. Those are included in either the printing or the shipping/handling cost. Get me book you have the rights to, a run length of at least 5000, an address list, and I can get them printed and individually delivered for less than six dollars a book.
Printing/logistics/shipping are mature commodity markets with razor thin margins. Most people don't realise just how cheap they are. (especially printing, for some reason people wildly overestimate its cost).
I agree that ebooks are overpriced, but I think you underestimate the cost of publishing.
Regarding the ebooks that are more expensive, I would guess they overestimated the print run and are selling the physical books for whatever they can get.
The the moving black dot trick was on goggles in a short story about an alien being kidnapped.
Just looked it up. Story was "Grendel" by Larry Niven.
Don't remember it being used on the spaceship hull, though.
I agree with most of your points, except the bit about ebooks.
Printing and binding a paperback costs less than the difference you quote.
Typically, between under a dollar for a large quantity of a small book, to three or four dollars for a short run (eg 5000) of a thick book. Add in another two dollars or so for postage and handling and you're pretty close.
While the $10 for writing, editing, proofing and formatting may be arguable, the difference is about right,
The easiest fix would be to stop the roll-backs when they fuck up. Let a few of them go broke instead of "oh I didn't really mean that, can I have a do-over?" and the rest might have a bit more caution.
Or remove the ability to post a bid then remove it before it can be actioned. Make any bid stand for a minimum time before it can be withdrawn. 10 seconds would be long enough.
On the downside, if you fix it, you don't get all the fancy new superfast internet links.
It's not just the model of printer or the driver installed. An office document will reflow if any of the print settings on the printer setup are changed. Margins are the main culprit, but even something like changing from metric to imperial units will do it.
Here in Aus, the A4 / US Letter resize screws up a lot of formatting.
Actually, that's geometry, not econ.
You don't elect. If you have good karma you occasionally get allocated mod points. If you post in a thread you can't moderate it. If you post in a thread you have already moderated, all your allocated mod points are removed.
If you use your points wisely (mod up good comments, down bad) you will usually get allocated more fairly quickly. If you mod badly, (good down, bad up) you will get killed in meta-mod, and usually won''t get points again for a long time.
What you are talking about seems more like meta-moderation, where you judge how fairly other comments have been moderated. Participating in that gets you credit towards being allocated mod points.
It should not be easy. I think the 4th amendment to the US constitution has it pretty close to right.
However, it also shouldn't take 600 pages. If you can't say what you want to intercept and why in a couple of pages, you shouldn't be doing it anyway.
I think anyone voting for the pirate party is either cynical enough, or idealistic enough, not to be put off by non-PC remarks like that.
It is only the posturing prats that would make a fuss.
Actually, once you have a typeset paper book, typically either in quark or indesign, the cost to convert it to an ebook would be trivial.
Ideally, the fixed costs should be spread all copies in any format, and the production cost across the copies in that format. This would mean that the average paper book should be one to two dollars dearer than the ebook.
Most people don't realize just how cheap mass printing is. For a black ink only paperback with a color cover, setup is probably under a couple of thousand, and the per unit run cost is less than a dollar.
Hardbacks are only slightly more expensive, but cost more because of:
A. shorter print runs, and
B. because they can.