House Democrats Choose Political Grandstanding Over Legislating.
Yeah, sure, you've got the usual delusional people who blather about "on the record" political tactics. Who, exactly, winds up on the record here? In the House, nobody other than people in safe-enough seats that they survived the 2018 Democrat wave. In the Senate, nobody, because the unamended bill will never reach the floor.
The only purpose of this is cynical base-pandering in the quest for campaign donations. Which will work, because there are a lot of idiots in the market for empty symbolism.
Mars is too small to maintain a breathable atmosphere on a scale of millions of years, but it is large enough to hold a breathable atmosphere for tens of thousands of years, which is "good enough" for most human purposes. Nor is it "too far away"; it is very much close enough to the Sun that an atmosphere with sufficient greenhouse gasses could make the temperature comfortable, and the light intensity is sufficient to power photosynthesis.
Now, whether terraforming an appropriate atmosphere is practical is another question.
But even if you rule out terraforming, it's got distinct advantages over the Moon for indoor colonies. Substantially more gravity may well mean fewer negative health effects, for example. The appreciable atmosphere delivers usable volatiles for processing right to the colony's hatch, so you can be less perfect about avoiding losses. And the day-night cycle is appropriate for growing Earth crops in pressurized surface greenhouses rather than requiring massive amounts of artificially-generated light.
Actually, they did pure math with those simplifying assumptions first. Then they ran a simulation using the actual orbital characteristics (PyEphem uses the real orbits) to check.
That simulation then demonstrated that the assumptions in the pure math produced an error of under 1% for relations among the major planets.
There are a whole bunch of species of whale that are neither particularly smart nor anywhere near endangered, like the common minke whale. Anyone who isn't a vegetarian has no business pretending there's a moral issue here.
And the general IWC moratorium, now over three decades old, is in blatant defiance of the purpose stated in the convention that established the IWC -- to make the whaling industry orderly, in order to increase whale stocks, so that more whales can be hunted. A general ban on commercial whaling isn't what the Japanese signed up for, and it's ludicrous to claim they should be bound to keep going along with the abuse of a treaty that's been perverted against its explicit text.
And yet the fact is, the per-terawatt-hour death rate from nuclear is lower than for any power source -- lower than wind, lower than rooftop solar, lower than hydroelectric, lower than biomass, lower than natural gas, lower than oil, and lower than coal.
If people were rationally concerned about safety, they'd be holding massive protests demanding the replacement of other sources of electrical generation with nuclear. That it would massively reduce greenhouse gas emissions over fossil fuels and that it is far easier to integrate with the electrical grid than solar or wind would then just be the side benefits of saving lives.
Yes, this is about classifying similar objects in similar ways. As opposed to the IAU definition that says one of two physically identical bodies would be a "planet" if it is in orbit around the Sun directly in an orbit with no other bodies, but "not a planet" if it happens to orbit a gas giant, or has a lot of other bodies in its orbit, or orbits any star other than the Sun, or just is wandering in interstellar space.
Yes, there are idiots who want Pluto to be a planet because that's the way they learned it. But they're no more stupid than the people who invented rules entirely about where an object happens to be located to declare Pluto is not a planet because otherwise there would be "too many".
A sensible approach is easy to take. If it's big enough to go into hydrostatic equilibrium under its own gravity, and small enough it doesn't go into fusion, it's a planet. There are then between thirty and fifty known planets in the Solar System depending on where exactly you draw the line (does it count if it used to be in hydrostatic equilibrium and now isn't?). And a body physically identical to Mercury (or Luna, or Ceres, or Pluto) is always a planet regardless of where it currently is.
Yeah, and there are too many chemical elements (118) on the Periodic Table, so what we need is a new rule that limits the number of elements to a nice, easy-for-schoolkids-to-memorize list of between 8 and 12 "major elements". I don't care how you categorize it, we simply cannot have a never ending list of elements to include in our definition of reality.
"Corruption" is not binary but a sliding scale, a "government" is not an expression of a singular will but an activity of a wide number of people with a wide number of individual goals, and "authority" means many different things in many different shades.
Blockchains won't stop Mugabe from expropriating farms and distributing them to his supporters, but there are any number of cases of quietly-bribe-three-clerks scams in (for example) India that blockchain property records could potentially make impractical. And with the increasing numbers of smartphones even in the poorer places on Earth, a blockchain-based method is potentially far more practical, infrastructure-wise, than trying to make sufficient duplicates of paper records or maintain secure backups of centralized databases.
If you take written-in-1974 8080 assembly code program and run it through a circa 1978 Intel 8086 assembler, the object code produced by the assembler will execute on any AMD64 processor operating in real mode.
Further, if you have an operating system that allows it, you can take 16-bit protected-mode code compiled in 1982 for the then-new 80286 and execute it directly on an AMD64 processor even when using it in 64-bit protected mode.
So, whether you consider it the "same" ISA or not in some sense (certainly 8080 object code doesn't run on the 8086 or later except in the case of the NEC V20/30/40/50, while the 286, 386, and AMD64 transitions were all major ones instruction-set-wise), it's very much a single lineage.
Actually, "IBM" -- which is to say, the small skunkworks project that was given the job of making an IBM-brand PC, isolated from the rest of IBM corporate -- picked Intel's processor because it was backwards-compatible with existing personal computers. The 8088 could use the same cheap, widely-manufactured, well-known support chips as the common 8080/8085 (and to some extent Z80) machines, and it was easy to cross-assemble 8080/8085 and machine-translate Z80 code into 8088 code, particularly with PC-DOS's high level of compatibility with CP/M-80 calls.
We will particularly note that compatibility concerns with the rest of the personal computer market drove the PC's project's selection of Microsoft BASIC (when IBM had its own corporate BASIC, included on earlier 51x0 model number machines before the 5150 PC), and that Microsoft didn't have BASIC for any 16-bit processors at the time. MS BASIC on the 8088 was a performance dog because its core was old 8080 assembly code assembled for the 8088; Microsoft's programming efforts for the PC were extensions rather than a rewrite.
Had IBM picked a rival 16-bit processor, it would have required a whole bunch more expensive support chips and it would have had a lot less software on day one. Which would have affected the ability of the IBM PC to make sales. After all, the 5100/5110/5120/5130 with their 16-bit PALM processors didn't sell all that well, did they? The 5150, with a Microsoft BASIC dialect, a CP/M-80 clone OS, and popular CP/M-80 programs like WordStar and dBase available on day 1, on the other hand, did.
Ever since the MITS Altair debuted, the dominant "personal computer" architecture has been a direct lineal descendant of the Altair's 8080 processor. Every attempt to substitute a "better" architecture failed, even the three times Intel itself attempted it (iAPX 432, i860, Itanium). There's no reason at all to expect that had IBM picked a substantially-different chip, that would have made that chip successful; it's far more likely that a different chip would have simply made the IBM PC 5150 a failure.
Well, that's an interesting theory that has no resemblance to reality.
Over here in reality, South Africa's Telekom is over 50% owned by the Republic of South Africa (roughly 40% directly and 11% through the Public Investment Corporation), and no other shareholder holds more than 5%. And specifically, Thintana's minority stake was sold off back in 2011 and Vodafone's minority stake was sold off in 2016.
So, if the problem in South Africa is a telecom monopoly that exploits customers, the problem isn't foreign investors, it's the state-owned, state-controlled telecom monopoly.
(why the hell was a galaxy spanning empire hiring bounty hunters?)
Professional bounty hunters are, by definition, people who are sufficiently more successful at tracking and capturing wanted fugitives than government agents that they can make a living at it.
Now, one might ask, why does that situation exist? Why is there no efficient totalitarian Imperial police force able to track down fugitives well enough that something as chaotic and poorly-controlled as bounty-hunting could be outlawed? And the answer (even if we confine ourselves to the evidence of just the original Star Wars film alone) is that the Empire is not some long-established centralized state that was then totalitarianized, but a military dictatorship established in living memory over what was a loose federation. Competent institutions of centralized power take time to establish, and are sufficiently weak at the time of the first film that the Emperor didn't dare take the step of ending power-sharing with a Senate representing the individual systems until he had a planet-destroying superweapon to intimidate them into compliance.
It is accordingly entirely consistent with the background established at the time of the filming of The Empire Strikes Back that the usual means of dealing with criminal fugitives that skip systems in the Empire would be to post rewards for bounty hunters to collect. In which case, it would be foolish for Vader to allow Imperial pride to stop him from bringing in experts in tracking fugitives to hunt down experienced criminal Han Solo and his smuggling ship.
It is true that birds are not descended from ornithischian dinosaurs. But birds are descended from dinosaurs. The birds are descendants of the theropods, traditionally classed as one of the major divisions of saurischians.
(There is a recent suggestion that a reclassification is necessary, that most theropods are actually closer-related to the ornithischians than the rest of the saurischians. But either way, birds are descended from theropod dinosaurs while not being descended from the ornithischians.)
Um, yeah, there were plenty of other processor families. And none of them were ever dominant in personal computers except for the 8080 family and the x86 family. (The MOS 6502 possibly had a brief period of being #1 in volume thanks to the Commodore 64, but nobody actually cared.)
You know what's actually grossly simplifying history? Pretending it was just money. That was maybe a halfway-decent excuse starting in the late 1980s, but is obvious bullshit prior to then. It also fails to explain why Intel couldn't manage to beat x86 any of the times it tried (iAPX 432, i860, i960, Itanium). At the very height of Intel's dominance, with all Intel's money behind Itanium (IA-64), it still got beat by AMD selling a mere 64-bit version of x86 (x86-64, also known as AMD64). Beat so badly that Intel had to admit defeat and copy AMD's extensions to x86.
In the 'long run' old architectures won't compete, it's not a railroad gauge analogy.
People have been saying that for four decades. Yet, the only time from the announcement of the MITS Altair to the present that the dominant personal computer processor architecture was succeeded by one not machine-code compatible was the 8-to-16-bit transition, in a time period when nobody offered a 16-bit processor machine-code compatible with the 8080/8085/Z80. And in that transition, the victor was the only 16-bit architecture designed to be assembly-code compatible with the 8080/8085.
Nobody, no matter how well-financed, no matter how powerful, no matter how insistent, no matter how much their design was obviously "superior", has managed to divert that. Not even Intel itself, which failed to change the market's course with the iAPX 432, and then failed with the i860 and i960, and then failed with Itanium.
As far as comparative effectiveness of funding, as a society we do all sorts of stupid misprioritization of funding all the time anyway; at least species revival can result in new scientific knowledge along the way.
Serious satellite broadband with a handheld antenna?
I mean, I guess it's possible that they have a radical breakthrough up their sleeves, but the launching-right-now Iridium NEXT is looking at only 128 kbit/s to phones, the 1.5 Mbit service to moving ships using 22-inch diameter device and the 8 Mbit service limited to fixed stations.
BYTE Magazine ran a few reader surveys back in the late 1970s, and they reported that its readership was 98-99% male. This was at the time that, indeed, people working in CS/IT were a quarter female; but the people who made a hobby of computing were effectively all male from the very start of personal computers making it a viable hobby.
As personal computers became more common, more and more people were exposed to them early, so the number of (male) people taking up tech as a hobby increased, and the CS/IT intake pipeline got more and more dominated by hobbyists who decided to turn their interest into a career. People who decide that it might be a worthwhile career in college (or the workplace) wind up in classes with people who have years of experience with tech as a hobby and spend their free time getting better at it.
Which means that interventions at the college and employment levels are far too late, and even high school is probably not soon enough. Whatever filter is behind boys and not girls getting into computers as a hobby acts in early adolescence at the latest.
The Berne Convention established life-plus-50 in (among other countries) Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom in 1887. The US didn't match that term until the Copyright Act of 1976, just short of ninety years later.
Then? The EU (including, of course, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom) extended copyright to life+70 in 1993, and the US didn't match that until 1998, five years later. The EU extension, incidentally, didn't merely extend the copyright of still-active copyrights; it retroactively yanked material from the public domain.
Slashdot Mirror
There, fixed that headline for you.
House Democrats Choose Political Grandstanding Over Legislating.
Yeah, sure, you've got the usual delusional people who blather about "on the record" political tactics. Who, exactly, winds up on the record here? In the House, nobody other than people in safe-enough seats that they survived the 2018 Democrat wave. In the Senate, nobody, because the unamended bill will never reach the floor.
The only purpose of this is cynical base-pandering in the quest for campaign donations. Which will work, because there are a lot of idiots in the market for empty symbolism.
. . . now wants to fail to ban autonomous weapon systems?
Mars is too small to maintain a breathable atmosphere on a scale of millions of years, but it is large enough to hold a breathable atmosphere for tens of thousands of years, which is "good enough" for most human purposes. Nor is it "too far away"; it is very much close enough to the Sun that an atmosphere with sufficient greenhouse gasses could make the temperature comfortable, and the light intensity is sufficient to power photosynthesis.
Now, whether terraforming an appropriate atmosphere is practical is another question.
But even if you rule out terraforming, it's got distinct advantages over the Moon for indoor colonies. Substantially more gravity may well mean fewer negative health effects, for example. The appreciable atmosphere delivers usable volatiles for processing right to the colony's hatch, so you can be less perfect about avoiding losses. And the day-night cycle is appropriate for growing Earth crops in pressurized surface greenhouses rather than requiring massive amounts of artificially-generated light.
Actually, they did pure math with those simplifying assumptions first. Then they ran a simulation using the actual orbital characteristics (PyEphem uses the real orbits) to check.
That simulation then demonstrated that the assumptions in the pure math produced an error of under 1% for relations among the major planets.
There are a whole bunch of species of whale that are neither particularly smart nor anywhere near endangered, like the common minke whale. Anyone who isn't a vegetarian has no business pretending there's a moral issue here.
And the general IWC moratorium, now over three decades old, is in blatant defiance of the purpose stated in the convention that established the IWC -- to make the whaling industry orderly, in order to increase whale stocks, so that more whales can be hunted. A general ban on commercial whaling isn't what the Japanese signed up for, and it's ludicrous to claim they should be bound to keep going along with the abuse of a treaty that's been perverted against its explicit text.
Don't trust anyone over a four-digit ID.
the long history of nuclear safety issues
And yet the fact is, the per-terawatt-hour death rate from nuclear is lower than for any power source -- lower than wind, lower than rooftop solar, lower than hydroelectric, lower than biomass, lower than natural gas, lower than oil, and lower than coal.
If people were rationally concerned about safety, they'd be holding massive protests demanding the replacement of other sources of electrical generation with nuclear. That it would massively reduce greenhouse gas emissions over fossil fuels and that it is far easier to integrate with the electrical grid than solar or wind would then just be the side benefits of saving lives.
Expolanets? In the IAU definition, a planet must orbit the Sun. Which means any and all exoplanets, by IAU definition, aren't planets.
It is rank nonsense, and that after twelve years such an asinine definition still stands is to the clear discredit of the IAU.
Yes, this is about classifying similar objects in similar ways. As opposed to the IAU definition that says one of two physically identical bodies would be a "planet" if it is in orbit around the Sun directly in an orbit with no other bodies, but "not a planet" if it happens to orbit a gas giant, or has a lot of other bodies in its orbit, or orbits any star other than the Sun, or just is wandering in interstellar space.
Yes, there are idiots who want Pluto to be a planet because that's the way they learned it. But they're no more stupid than the people who invented rules entirely about where an object happens to be located to declare Pluto is not a planet because otherwise there would be "too many".
A sensible approach is easy to take. If it's big enough to go into hydrostatic equilibrium under its own gravity, and small enough it doesn't go into fusion, it's a planet. There are then between thirty and fifty known planets in the Solar System depending on where exactly you draw the line (does it count if it used to be in hydrostatic equilibrium and now isn't?). And a body physically identical to Mercury (or Luna, or Ceres, or Pluto) is always a planet regardless of where it currently is.
Yeah, and there are too many chemical elements (118) on the Periodic Table, so what we need is a new rule that limits the number of elements to a nice, easy-for-schoolkids-to-memorize list of between 8 and 12 "major elements". I don't care how you categorize it, we simply cannot have a never ending list of elements to include in our definition of reality.
Waterfox or Pale Moon are the real ESR releases.
Obviously they used this backdoor to retroactively insert documentation of the backdoor after our brave microcode fuzzer discovered it.
"Corruption" is not binary but a sliding scale, a "government" is not an expression of a singular will but an activity of a wide number of people with a wide number of individual goals, and "authority" means many different things in many different shades.
Blockchains won't stop Mugabe from expropriating farms and distributing them to his supporters, but there are any number of cases of quietly-bribe-three-clerks scams in (for example) India that blockchain property records could potentially make impractical. And with the increasing numbers of smartphones even in the poorer places on Earth, a blockchain-based method is potentially far more practical, infrastructure-wise, than trying to make sufficient duplicates of paper records or maintain secure backups of centralized databases.
If you take written-in-1974 8080 assembly code program and run it through a circa 1978 Intel 8086 assembler, the object code produced by the assembler will execute on any AMD64 processor operating in real mode.
Further, if you have an operating system that allows it, you can take 16-bit protected-mode code compiled in 1982 for the then-new 80286 and execute it directly on an AMD64 processor even when using it in 64-bit protected mode.
So, whether you consider it the "same" ISA or not in some sense (certainly 8080 object code doesn't run on the 8086 or later except in the case of the NEC V20/30/40/50, while the 286, 386, and AMD64 transitions were all major ones instruction-set-wise), it's very much a single lineage.
Actually, "IBM" -- which is to say, the small skunkworks project that was given the job of making an IBM-brand PC, isolated from the rest of IBM corporate -- picked Intel's processor because it was backwards-compatible with existing personal computers. The 8088 could use the same cheap, widely-manufactured, well-known support chips as the common 8080/8085 (and to some extent Z80) machines, and it was easy to cross-assemble 8080/8085 and machine-translate Z80 code into 8088 code, particularly with PC-DOS's high level of compatibility with CP/M-80 calls.
We will particularly note that compatibility concerns with the rest of the personal computer market drove the PC's project's selection of Microsoft BASIC (when IBM had its own corporate BASIC, included on earlier 51x0 model number machines before the 5150 PC), and that Microsoft didn't have BASIC for any 16-bit processors at the time. MS BASIC on the 8088 was a performance dog because its core was old 8080 assembly code assembled for the 8088; Microsoft's programming efforts for the PC were extensions rather than a rewrite.
Had IBM picked a rival 16-bit processor, it would have required a whole bunch more expensive support chips and it would have had a lot less software on day one. Which would have affected the ability of the IBM PC to make sales. After all, the 5100/5110/5120/5130 with their 16-bit PALM processors didn't sell all that well, did they? The 5150, with a Microsoft BASIC dialect, a CP/M-80 clone OS, and popular CP/M-80 programs like WordStar and dBase available on day 1, on the other hand, did.
Ever since the MITS Altair debuted, the dominant "personal computer" architecture has been a direct lineal descendant of the Altair's 8080 processor. Every attempt to substitute a "better" architecture failed, even the three times Intel itself attempted it (iAPX 432, i860, Itanium). There's no reason at all to expect that had IBM picked a substantially-different chip, that would have made that chip successful; it's far more likely that a different chip would have simply made the IBM PC 5150 a failure.
Well, that's an interesting theory that has no resemblance to reality.
Over here in reality, South Africa's Telekom is over 50% owned by the Republic of South Africa (roughly 40% directly and 11% through the Public Investment Corporation), and no other shareholder holds more than 5%. And specifically, Thintana's minority stake was sold off back in 2011 and Vodafone's minority stake was sold off in 2016.
So, if the problem in South Africa is a telecom monopoly that exploits customers, the problem isn't foreign investors, it's the state-owned, state-controlled telecom monopoly.
Professional bounty hunters are, by definition, people who are sufficiently more successful at tracking and capturing wanted fugitives than government agents that they can make a living at it.
Now, one might ask, why does that situation exist? Why is there no efficient totalitarian Imperial police force able to track down fugitives well enough that something as chaotic and poorly-controlled as bounty-hunting could be outlawed? And the answer (even if we confine ourselves to the evidence of just the original Star Wars film alone) is that the Empire is not some long-established centralized state that was then totalitarianized, but a military dictatorship established in living memory over what was a loose federation. Competent institutions of centralized power take time to establish, and are sufficiently weak at the time of the first film that the Emperor didn't dare take the step of ending power-sharing with a Senate representing the individual systems until he had a planet-destroying superweapon to intimidate them into compliance.
It is accordingly entirely consistent with the background established at the time of the filming of The Empire Strikes Back that the usual means of dealing with criminal fugitives that skip systems in the Empire would be to post rewards for bounty hunters to collect. In which case, it would be foolish for Vader to allow Imperial pride to stop him from bringing in experts in tracking fugitives to hunt down experienced criminal Han Solo and his smuggling ship.
You seem to have run into some confusion.
It is true that birds are not descended from ornithischian dinosaurs. But birds are descended from dinosaurs. The birds are descendants of the theropods, traditionally classed as one of the major divisions of saurischians.
(There is a recent suggestion that a reclassification is necessary, that most theropods are actually closer-related to the ornithischians than the rest of the saurischians. But either way, birds are descended from theropod dinosaurs while not being descended from the ornithischians.)
Um, yeah, there were plenty of other processor families. And none of them were ever dominant in personal computers except for the 8080 family and the x86 family. (The MOS 6502 possibly had a brief period of being #1 in volume thanks to the Commodore 64, but nobody actually cared.)
You know what's actually grossly simplifying history? Pretending it was just money. That was maybe a halfway-decent excuse starting in the late 1980s, but is obvious bullshit prior to then. It also fails to explain why Intel couldn't manage to beat x86 any of the times it tried (iAPX 432, i860, i960, Itanium). At the very height of Intel's dominance, with all Intel's money behind Itanium (IA-64), it still got beat by AMD selling a mere 64-bit version of x86 (x86-64, also known as AMD64). Beat so badly that Intel had to admit defeat and copy AMD's extensions to x86.
In the 'long run' old architectures won't compete, it's not a railroad gauge analogy.
People have been saying that for four decades. Yet, the only time from the announcement of the MITS Altair to the present that the dominant personal computer processor architecture was succeeded by one not machine-code compatible was the 8-to-16-bit transition, in a time period when nobody offered a 16-bit processor machine-code compatible with the 8080/8085/Z80. And in that transition, the victor was the only 16-bit architecture designed to be assembly-code compatible with the 8080/8085.
Nobody, no matter how well-financed, no matter how powerful, no matter how insistent, no matter how much their design was obviously "superior", has managed to divert that. Not even Intel itself, which failed to change the market's course with the iAPX 432, and then failed with the i860 and i960, and then failed with Itanium.
Really? Like, for example?
As far as comparative effectiveness of funding, as a society we do all sorts of stupid misprioritization of funding all the time anyway; at least species revival can result in new scientific knowledge along the way.
Serious satellite broadband with a handheld antenna?
I mean, I guess it's possible that they have a radical breakthrough up their sleeves, but the launching-right-now Iridium NEXT is looking at only 128 kbit/s to phones, the 1.5 Mbit service to moving ships using 22-inch diameter device and the 8 Mbit service limited to fixed stations.
What happened is the personal computer.
BYTE Magazine ran a few reader surveys back in the late 1970s, and they reported that its readership was 98-99% male. This was at the time that, indeed, people working in CS/IT were a quarter female; but the people who made a hobby of computing were effectively all male from the very start of personal computers making it a viable hobby.
As personal computers became more common, more and more people were exposed to them early, so the number of (male) people taking up tech as a hobby increased, and the CS/IT intake pipeline got more and more dominated by hobbyists who decided to turn their interest into a career. People who decide that it might be a worthwhile career in college (or the workplace) wind up in classes with people who have years of experience with tech as a hobby and spend their free time getting better at it.
Which means that interventions at the college and employment levels are far too late, and even high school is probably not soon enough. Whatever filter is behind boys and not girls getting into computers as a hobby acts in early adolescence at the latest.
You lying sack of shit.
The Berne Convention established life-plus-50 in (among other countries) Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom in 1887. The US didn't match that term until the Copyright Act of 1976, just short of ninety years later.
Then? The EU (including, of course, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom) extended copyright to life+70 in 1993, and the US didn't match that until 1998, five years later. The EU extension, incidentally, didn't merely extend the copyright of still-active copyrights; it retroactively yanked material from the public domain.