So the value of the cell over its 25-year life span is $3.15/watt, with a cost of $1/watt... Solar cells ARE worthwhile TODAY and WITHOUT government subsidies. Efficiencies in solar cells are irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the $/Watt.
That's interesting. Please also compare:
* If you invested $1 in the stock market, and see how much it grew in 25 years, minus the cost of the energy you'd need to buy.
(I suspect that 315% over 25-years is much smaller return than what you'd get from stock market growth).
I think you're way off the mark! I remember reading St Augustine's "City of God Against The Pagans" written in the early 400s. I was struck that my thought processes as a computer scientist were much closer to him than to my peers. He had the pedantic logical mind of a computer scientist. My favorite example is his version of the Cogito - "I know I exist. The skeptics say I am mistaken in this, but by the same token they say I am".
I think people from older eras were every bit as mentally adept and flexible as we are now, and more than we generally credit.
Let's look through your list...
The finer points of how an IC work (such as the quantum nature of the bandgap, especially at nanoscopic scales) would be nearly incomprehensible to such a person.
Incomprehensible to someone today also. I tried explaining N and P gaps to my wife without any success.
"Fiberoptic communication, with such strange things as helical polarization would bake their noodles, not to mention such curious things as the GPS network. (Einstein didn't come along until much later. GPS wouldn't work without SR, due to earth's frame dragging.)"
It wouldn't work without SR, true, but sextants and celestial navigation have been around for thousands of years, and by the 19th century they had damned fine instruments to measure celestial bodies including the moon. The idea of basing it off other more nearby celestial bodies would be easily understood. As for calculating exact position due to the differences in signals -- well, not much different from interferometry and "Newton's Fringes" (named after Newton of course).
"In an age without computers, the math involved would be frightening! Something like 4096bit RSA ecryption would induce nightmares."
They had many computers for celestial-navigation tables in the 18th century. Computer at this stage meant "person who performs computation", and they'd have entire halls full of them. And they had computers for artillery tables going back to the middle ages, where it was the bright mathematician hired by the local nobleman. The idea of upping the scale was already widespread. Charles Babbage (died 1871) was far more ambitious about what could be computed. He wouldn't have been frightened, not one bit. Say what you will about the 18th century, but they weren't unambitious about what they could achieve (at least not in the British Empire).
imagine H.G. Wells dropping in for a sunset view from his time machine at a nude beach, asking politely for a newspaper and being laughed at, going to a delapidated paper book library, and told by a 10 year old that he could have all the books in the entire world litterally in the palm of his hand. Expose him to the radical idea of the internet, then expose him to 4chan (or worse, a site dedicated to 'rule 34'), and reveal the shocking truth that most people use the internet for pornographic entertainment instead of personal improvement. (Remember, 19th century sexual repressedness)"
Whatever reason do you have to think that? Nothing of H.G.Well's writing suggests he'd be shocked. I reckon from his book "A Modern Utopia" that he's far more progressive than our own society today.
Dear self proclaimed 'peaceful' Muslims, where the fuck were you during these episodes orchestrated by your co-religionists in the name of your wonderful religion? Where were the masses of allegedly moderate Muslims protesting at the gates of the embassies of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia for aiding and funding these terror groups?
What? The ENTIRE NATION OF PAKISTAN took a day of prayers in response to this episode. There were protests against it across Pakistan. Prayer leaders condemned the attacks. Schools were closed. Rallies against the attacks were held in all the major cities. I don't know how you missed that. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19913201
I hate advertising. I liked this quote from Banksy, a UK artist:
"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."
I've now been around long enough to have seen a few dozen projects like this pop up, vanish within five years, and be completely gone without a trace in ten.
Really? You've seen other board games built around the syntax of some computer language? Please tell me about them! I'd love to play them. I had thought this game was innovative and interesting, but if there's a whole collection of similar board games, I'd love to get into them. Didn't find anything on boardgamegeek.com.
You're being pretty misleading. I'm basing my reply solely on the facts outlined in your citation.
* What is a "right to lie"? -- it would be a patchwork of regulations saying things like (1) if you lie then this in itself isn't grounds for court action against you, (2) the government isn't allowed to pass laws that limit your lying, (3) if you lie and someone tries to report you for it, then they have no legal protection for making their report.
According purely to your citation, the Fox affiliate in question WTVT successfully argued point (3). In other words, they legally established one part of the right to lie on air. Akre lost her case because she thought there should be protection. WTVT successfully established that there wasn't protection.
It bothers me that overt $2000/person/year is spent on adertising in the US per inhabitant, i.e. including all babies, children, adults. That's a huge waste, a kind of regressive tax.
Also, ads to me are an unwanted intrusion into my personal space. They're forcing their way into my perception and consciousness. I'd rather keep those two things clear for what's more valuable to me.
Alternatively, [National] Rule 1: put it on the internet, with suitable security, if doing so will save money [Business] Rule 1: let media travel so long as it's encrypted
Hey presto, I get a country with lower expenses (lower tax rate), and a business where workers work more effectively at home. Up until the time I get attacked, then I've outcompeted you economically. Maybe you didn't even survive long enough to see the attack.
I found the exact opposite. Went on the "Boulder Outdoor Survival School" course in southern Utah - 2 weeks, 1100 calories a day, hiking 10-20miles through the desert and fashioning our own survival implements and shelters, and foraging/trapping food. (I'm 145lbs btw).
It felt great. Have rarely felt as alive as I did then, physically and mentally.
Steam is configured to report back to Valve about every app you download+install on it, and every time you launch an app, and there's NO way to opt out. (Well, you can switch it to offline mode, but that will prevent multiplayer and updates).
We moved our (50-person) family business over to Office365 and use MS Lync. The meeting organizer creates an "online meeting" in addition to the physical meeting, and runs Lync on his/her laptop. Click the Record button, and it saves all the powerpoints+IMs+audio that comes from the meeting. (this requires the microphones to be plugged in of course). There are options to have to save them on a central facility but I never figured that out -- we just save them locally, and upload to a sharepoint site when needed.
Incidentally, you can right-click on the bottom left corner of the screen (where you used to right-click to get the device manager in Win7), and the popup menu offers you the device-manager.
You can easily get back the start menu by installing third-party software, e.g. Start8 by Stardock Systems.
That's the problem with the copyright filters at Youtube and elsewhere: Copyright is based on the production of a work, not the work itself. So if NASA releases footage of something that is public domain (paid for by your tax dollars) then if, say, NBC, replays that footage and adds a logo in the lower right corner... NBC can then sue you if you save that footage to your harddrive. So the content might be "Curiousity rover team hugging", which can't be copyrighted, but the production of it is. Since NASA made it public domain, they have no rights to it whatsoever, so anyone can take the content, re-broadcast it, and then claim copyright on that broadcasted content.
That's completely wrong. Copyright gives the rights to the creator of an original work. If you rebroadcast, you're neither creator nor is it original. There's no way to twist this into giving you rights.
I remember an enigmatic billboard in Italy a few years ago. It showed just a red tomato on an outstretched hand and this caption: "For each European country, the tomato that it deserves."
Your second link says "Despite decades of study, the physical basis of the avian magnetic sense remains elusive". It goes on to say that one hypothesis is magnetite, and another hypothesis is the generation of radical pairs inside cryptochrome, but this wasn't confirmed since no atomic-resolution structure of cryptochrome has yet been produced.
The article says that individual cells have been isolated which operate on magnetite. So it looks like it (1) is the first time there's been an actual confirmed result, and (2) it contradicts the cryptochrome hypothesis.
But I know nothing about this field. I'm merely reading the linked articles.
Or do it like the Paris metro, where 1st and 2nd class carriages in the train are absolutely identical, but tickets for the 1st class carriages cost more.
It's an elegant self-adjusting mechanism to make the 1st class carriages less crowded and hence more desirable.
More old people. If the oldest in your team is just 30, then there's surely a huge amout of experience and expertise and wisdom that you're simply missing.
In general, a person may not export from the U.S. any goods, technology or services, if that person knows or has reason to know such items are intended specifically for supply, transshipment or reexportation to Iran.
I wonder what is the difference between "knows" and "has reason to know"? If you have reason to know something, then presumably you know it?
If you're a virus on the PC set up as the centrifuge's controller, then you send instructions telling it to vibrate at such a high speed for such a sustained time that its bearings fuse from the heat (and/or it shatters).
Funny how tourists aren't interested in any places or buildings that were built during the last 60 years.
I've just come back from Poland. Warsaw Old Town was completely destroyed in the second world war; rebuilding finished in 1984 (30 years ago) and it was made a UNESCO World Heritage site, and tourists flock to it.
(There's also Auschwitz, made a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1979 some 40 years after its construction. And the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia. But they have visitors flocking for all the wrong reasons).
The Bahai Temple in New Delhi, India (1986) has huge numbers of visitors. So does the London Eye (2000).
Dams have always had lots of tourism. Think of all the visits to the Hoover Dam when it was built. In India I saw huge numbers of tourists to dams as well.
Slashdot Mirror
So the value of the cell over its 25-year life span is $3.15/watt, with a cost of $1/watt... Solar cells ARE worthwhile TODAY and WITHOUT government subsidies. Efficiencies in solar cells are irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the $/Watt.
That's interesting. Please also compare:
* If you invested $1 in the stock market, and see how much it grew in 25 years, minus the cost of the energy you'd need to buy.
(I suspect that 315% over 25-years is much smaller return than what you'd get from stock market growth).
is going to be bad for the rest of us.
I guess that's ironic, in the sense that *THE WHOLE WORLD* is in the UN!
The UN is nothing more and nothing less than the collective wishes of the world's nations.
Wouldn't it only be ferrous rings that are a problem? Wedding rings would presumably be things like gold or paladium instead?
I think you're way off the mark! I remember reading St Augustine's "City of God Against The Pagans" written in the early 400s. I was struck that my thought processes as a computer scientist were much closer to him than to my peers. He had the pedantic logical mind of a computer scientist. My favorite example is his version of the Cogito - "I know I exist. The skeptics say I am mistaken in this, but by the same token they say I am".
I think people from older eras were every bit as mentally adept and flexible as we are now, and more than we generally credit.
Let's look through your list...
The finer points of how an IC work (such as the quantum nature of the bandgap, especially at nanoscopic scales) would be nearly incomprehensible to such a person.
Incomprehensible to someone today also. I tried explaining N and P gaps to my wife without any success.
"Fiberoptic communication, with such strange things as helical polarization would bake their noodles, not to mention such curious things as the GPS network. (Einstein didn't come along until much later. GPS wouldn't work without SR, due to earth's frame dragging.)"
It wouldn't work without SR, true, but sextants and celestial navigation have been around for thousands of years, and by the 19th century they had damned fine instruments to measure celestial bodies including the moon. The idea of basing it off other more nearby celestial bodies would be easily understood. As for calculating exact position due to the differences in signals -- well, not much different from interferometry and "Newton's Fringes" (named after Newton of course).
"In an age without computers, the math involved would be frightening! Something like 4096bit RSA ecryption would induce nightmares."
They had many computers for celestial-navigation tables in the 18th century. Computer at this stage meant "person who performs computation", and they'd have entire halls full of them. And they had computers for artillery tables going back to the middle ages, where it was the bright mathematician hired by the local nobleman. The idea of upping the scale was already widespread. Charles Babbage (died 1871) was far more ambitious about what could be computed. He wouldn't have been frightened, not one bit. Say what you will about the 18th century, but they weren't unambitious about what they could achieve (at least not in the British Empire).
imagine H.G. Wells dropping in for a sunset view from his time machine at a nude beach, asking politely for a newspaper and being laughed at, going to a delapidated paper book library, and told by a 10 year old that he could have all the books in the entire world litterally in the palm of his hand. Expose him to the radical idea of the internet, then expose him to 4chan (or worse, a site dedicated to 'rule 34'), and reveal the shocking truth that most people use the internet for pornographic entertainment instead of personal improvement. (Remember, 19th century sexual repressedness)"
Whatever reason do you have to think that? Nothing of H.G.Well's writing suggests he'd be shocked. I reckon from his book "A Modern Utopia" that he's far more progressive than our own society today.
And more recently, a 14 year old girl is shot in the head by the Taliban for daring to campaign for women's rights (where else, but in Pakistan).
Dear self proclaimed 'peaceful' Muslims, where the fuck were you during these episodes orchestrated by your co-religionists in the name of your wonderful religion? Where were the masses of allegedly moderate Muslims protesting at the gates of the embassies of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia for aiding and funding these terror groups?
What? The ENTIRE NATION OF PAKISTAN took a day of prayers in response to this episode. There were protests against it across Pakistan. Prayer leaders condemned the attacks. Schools were closed. Rallies against the attacks were held in all the major cities. I don't know how you missed that.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19913201
I hate advertising. I liked this quote from Banksy, a UK artist:
"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."
I've now been around long enough to have seen a few dozen projects like this pop up, vanish within five years, and be completely gone without a trace in ten.
Really? You've seen other board games built around the syntax of some computer language? Please tell me about them! I'd love to play them. I had thought this game was innovative and interesting, but if there's a whole collection of similar board games, I'd love to get into them. Didn't find anything on boardgamegeek.com.
You're being pretty misleading. I'm basing my reply solely on the facts outlined in your citation.
* What is a "right to lie"? -- it would be a patchwork of regulations saying things like (1) if you lie then this in itself isn't grounds for court action against you, (2) the government isn't allowed to pass laws that limit your lying, (3) if you lie and someone tries to report you for it, then they have no legal protection for making their report.
According purely to your citation, the Fox affiliate in question WTVT successfully argued point (3). In other words, they legally established one part of the right to lie on air. Akre lost her case because she thought there should be protection. WTVT successfully established that there wasn't protection.
It bothers me that overt $2000/person/year is spent on adertising in the US per inhabitant, i.e. including all babies, children, adults. That's a huge waste, a kind of regressive tax.
Also, ads to me are an unwanted intrusion into my personal space. They're forcing their way into my perception and consciousness. I'd rather keep those two things clear for what's more valuable to me.
Alternatively,
[National] Rule 1: put it on the internet, with suitable security, if doing so will save money
[Business] Rule 1: let media travel so long as it's encrypted
Hey presto, I get a country with lower expenses (lower tax rate), and a business where workers work more effectively at home. Up until the time I get attacked, then I've outcompeted you economically. Maybe you didn't even survive long enough to see the attack.
I found the exact opposite. Went on the "Boulder Outdoor Survival School" course in southern Utah - 2 weeks, 1100 calories a day, hiking 10-20miles through the desert and fashioning our own survival implements and shelters, and foraging/trapping food. (I'm 145lbs btw).
It felt great. Have rarely felt as alive as I did then, physically and mentally.
Steam is configured to report back to Valve about every app you download+install on it, and every time you launch an app, and there's NO way to opt out. (Well, you can switch it to offline mode, but that will prevent multiplayer and updates).
We moved our (50-person) family business over to Office365 and use MS Lync. The meeting organizer creates an "online meeting" in addition to the physical meeting, and runs Lync on his/her laptop. Click the Record button, and it saves all the powerpoints+IMs+audio that comes from the meeting. (this requires the microphones to be plugged in of course). There are options to have to save them on a central facility but I never figured that out -- we just save them locally, and upload to a sharepoint site when needed.
Incidentally, you can right-click on the bottom left corner of the screen (where you used to right-click to get the device manager in Win7), and the popup menu offers you the device-manager.
You can easily get back the start menu by installing third-party software, e.g. Start8 by Stardock Systems.
Start8 by Stardock Systems will take you directly to the desktop, without any fraction of a second in Metro. It too includes a Start orb.
That's the problem with the copyright filters at Youtube and elsewhere: Copyright is based on the production of a work, not the work itself. So if NASA releases footage of something that is public domain (paid for by your tax dollars) then if, say, NBC, replays that footage and adds a logo in the lower right corner... NBC can then sue you if you save that footage to your harddrive. So the content might be "Curiousity rover team hugging", which can't be copyrighted, but the production of it is. Since NASA made it public domain, they have no rights to it whatsoever, so anyone can take the content, re-broadcast it, and then claim copyright on that broadcasted content.
That's completely wrong. Copyright gives the rights to the creator of an original work. If you rebroadcast, you're neither creator nor is it original. There's no way to twist this into giving you rights.
I remember an enigmatic billboard in Italy a few years ago. It showed just a red tomato on an outstretched hand and this caption: "For each European country, the tomato that it deserves."
(tomatoes in Italy were generally flavorful...)
Your second link says "Despite decades of study, the physical basis of the avian magnetic sense remains elusive". It goes on to say that one hypothesis is magnetite, and another hypothesis is the generation of radical pairs inside cryptochrome, but this wasn't confirmed since no atomic-resolution structure of cryptochrome has yet been produced.
The article says that individual cells have been isolated which operate on magnetite. So it looks like it (1) is the first time there's been an actual confirmed result, and (2) it contradicts the cryptochrome hypothesis.
But I know nothing about this field. I'm merely reading the linked articles.
Or do it like the Paris metro, where 1st and 2nd class carriages in the train are absolutely identical, but tickets for the 1st class carriages cost more.
It's an elegant self-adjusting mechanism to make the 1st class carriages less crowded and hence more desirable.
More old people. If the oldest in your team is just 30, then there's surely a huge amout of experience and expertise and wisdom that you're simply missing.
[ the little box you can tick that says "Send anonymous usage data to Microsoft"]
Oh. The thing everyone and their brother is told to NEVER check!
Who tells people not to check that button?
I've never heard that advice.
In general, a person may not export from the U.S. any goods, technology or services, if that person knows or has reason to know such items are intended specifically for supply, transshipment or reexportation to Iran.
I wonder what is the difference between "knows" and "has reason to know"? If you have reason to know something, then presumably you know it?
How does one "meltdown" a centrifuge?
If you're a virus on the PC set up as the centrifuge's controller, then you send instructions telling it to vibrate at such a high speed for such a sustained time that its bearings fuse from the heat (and/or it shatters).
I think xbox360 is the top-selling console both in the US and worldwide:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/04/microsoft-xbox-now-top-selling-console-worldwide/
Funny how tourists aren't interested in any places or buildings that were built during the last 60 years.
I've just come back from Poland. Warsaw Old Town was completely destroyed in the second world war; rebuilding finished in 1984 (30 years ago) and it was made a UNESCO World Heritage site, and tourists flock to it.
(There's also Auschwitz, made a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1979 some 40 years after its construction. And the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia. But they have visitors flocking for all the wrong reasons).
The Bahai Temple in New Delhi, India (1986) has huge numbers of visitors. So does the London Eye (2000).
Dams have always had lots of tourism. Think of all the visits to the Hoover Dam when it was built. In India I saw huge numbers of tourists to dams as well.