It's unclear how many will actually get built here, at $100 million per track mile.... "years of war in country X/Y/Z" per track mile ?
Geez. As if finding money to throw around was ever a problem for politicians. And building a coast-to-coast maglev line would be a much less dangerous waste of money than some other, er, projects.
Really? Both of those are incredibly strong selection pressures, although I would imagine the first is more common than the second.
Anyone not directly working with radioactive materials is more likely to have their reproductive organs destroyed physically than receiving a radiation dose large enough to render them permanently sterile.
Provided the radiation does render the entire population sterile, then only those with a higher "resistance" of some form (eg. better cellular repair pathways, higher fission rate of cells to gametes, natural lead codpiece, whatever) can possibly reproduce.
And here's the problem - gametes are haploid and have a harder time repairing DNA damage than diploid cells due to having only one set of chromosomes (that's also the reason why radiation damage is more of a problem for females - oocytogenesis takes place just once in a female's life and then all the egg cells are held in a state of division in which they are very vulnerable to radiation damage).
Having a higher rate of meiosis will actually make the reproductive system more susceptible to radiation damage (since cells are more susceptible during cell division - that's why you can treat cancer with radiation).
You might be on to something with the natural lead codpiece, but that would require some major changes in metabolical pathways and still wouldn't help one bit against radiation coming from sources inside the body.
Equally the sledgehammer to the 'nads (if it became common enough) would promote individuals with methods to mitigate the damage (say, bony plates over them or, more likely, behaviours that don't lead to angering mentalists with hammers:)).
Our best chance would be to be able to actually regrow any lost/destroyed body part (including the reproductive system). But unfortunately the stuff I stated above rears its ugly head here, too - doing so would require formation of new cells on a massive scale - lots of cell division taking place, making the organism _very_ vulnerable to further damage from radiation.
Non-universal catastrophic environmental damage to the reproduction mechanism is one of the fastest acting selectors in any form of natural selection. It can produce a rapid change in overall population fitness in a single generation.
Unfortunately, radiation presents a fairly catastrophic hazard to our reproductive system by the very nature of some basic principles of the latter. It's the price we pay for being complex organisms. If we were algae, lichen or fungi we'd shrug off the radiation, but then we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Furthermore, since this causes an electrical imbalance, I am not sure that antioxidants help much at all here.
Well, the most likely molecule the alpha particle is going to hit in a living organism is a water molecule. Ionizing water molecules forms radicals, which then turn into hydrogen peroxide, which is a strong oxidant and will go on to damage other molecules (including DNA). Antioxidants turn hydrogen peroxide back into water and oxygen, rendering it much less harmful.
Beta particles, gamma rays, etc work by transfer of energy to electrons, breaking covalent bonds.
Actually, that is a fairly rare mechanism compared to plain ionization. The main danger to cells from any kind of ionizing radiation comes from the reaction detailed above - ionization, radical- and hydrogen peroxide formation. This is why the harmful effects of radiation can be increased by making sure there's an adequate supply of oxygen - it increases the rate at which H2O2 can form from the radicals (this is fairly important in radiation treatment of tumors - tumors that don't have an adequate blood supply will be more resistant to radiation due to lack of oxygen in the tissue).
Sooner or later either we'd evolve a means of not being sterile after being subject to radiation or on one would take those jobs.
Um, with a generation of humans taking about 30 years, I'd bet on later, much, much later, rather than sooner - if it happens at all.
You probably can't "evolve" a means of not being sterile after being exposed to enough radiation. Just like you most likely cannot "evolve" a means of not being sterile after your reproductive organs have been smashed with a sledgehammer. Evolution is not magic and cannot work around some basic principles of physics.
I don't understand why everyone uses speed as a reference point. Hardware is always getting faster.
Yes, and that's the whole point: Hardware is getting faster and faster, and less and less of the improvement gets through to the user and his favorite programs because the operating system bogs the hardware down.
Simply put: If I buy hardware that's four times as fast as the old stuff, I want my system and my applications to be roughly four times as fast, and not only 5%-20% faster due to the shining new OS taking up more resources.
Shadowrun was Vista only and it sold so badly they had to close the game studio!
Since they made that game as un-appealing as possible for fans of the original Shadowrun, I doubt that making it run on XP, 95 and cellphones would have made it sell any better. Good riddance. Try making a _real_ Shadowrun game next time, and I just might think about buying it.
... for your next operating system, please use Windows XP as a benchmark and starting point. Create a product that beats Windows XP in relevant categories (note that "amount of eyecandy" doesn't count - usability, speed, resource usage and security do). I'm sure you will have no problem selling that.
Taubes points out that the current medical orthodoxy -- that consuming fat makes you fat and exercise makes you thin -- has no basis in research.
Huh ? I thought that current medical orthodoxy was "consuming more calories than you burn makes you fat". The above can probably found in tabloids, but not in actual medical literature.
it would fire the pneumatic brake to stop the car regardless of whether or not the computers were responding to commands.
Does it kill the engine, too ? I'm a control engineer, not a mechanical engineer, but I'd assume that either the transmission, the driveshaft or the engine wouldn't survive one system having the foot on the brake and the other system having the foot on the gas pedal for more than a few seconds (possibly longer than it takes someone to get there and shut it off manually).
usually with the gas pedal down, and would just drive off into the bush until we pulled the plug.
Yikes. So these guys have the smarts to make a computer drive a car on its own, but managed to forget some basic safety mechanisms such as a watchdog and other failsafe mechanisms ?
Geez guys - real world engineering 101: Do not let a computer control anything that might have a remote chance of harming someone without appropriate safety mechanisms.
Then it just draws EXTRA power while running, to charge the capacitors. Electricity can't be produced from nothing.
But you can avoid running a power supply at a load where it has an abysmal efficiency and draws 1 W just to supply a few milliwatts (or less) the the microcontroller responsible for getting the thing out of standby.
In the event of #3, if my understanding of Newton's Laws is accurate, the winning astronaut will still die of a massive injury to the back of the head as he careens backwards.
Your understanding might be accurate, but your numbers are not. While a bullet may be fast, it's also light (compared to, say, the mass of human body), and the astronaut will move in the opposite direction of the bullet at merely a few centimeters per second. (Conservation of impulse: m1 * v1 = m2 * v2)
However, I'm not sure how the station will deal with the sudden pressure spike as the bullets are fired.
i think its the acute hypothermia issues that will kill you, not the decompression in itself...
Um, no. It's lack of oxygen that you'll die from. You'll lose consciousness after about 15 to 20 seconds (due to deoxygenation of your blood on your lungs) and probably don't want to be resuscitated after more than 2 minutes unless you enjoy an existence at the mental level of a daisy.
The alleged libelous postings 'accuse Superintendent Lynne Cleveland, trustees and administrators of [...] using their positions for "personal gain," [...]
The suit, however, would be funded from the district's budget.'
Isn't truth an absolute defense to an accusation of libel ?
no human being will ever leave our current solar system to visit a distant planet.
I'd settle for a swarm of powerful telescopes all over the solar system. If we can't go there, then we might at least get some good pictures.
Also, the phrase above doesn't preclude generation ships. Sure, the original crew won't live to visit a distant planet, but their ((great-)grand-)children would.
~ Disable any and all integrated NICs because there may exist BIOS level 'rat code'.
How (apart from physically separating the NIC from the rest of the system, i.e. rip the chip off the board or cut the relevant PCB traces) would you go about that ?
~ Remove any devices in the card bus slots and identify. If such are NICs, dispose (MAC addresses are unique therefore traceable)
Actually... they're "kinda" unique, but not "really" unique (they do get reused after a couple of years or whatever the "design life" of NICs is). That should make for some interesting false accusation scenarios.
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Geez. As if finding money to throw around was ever a problem for politicians. And building a coast-to-coast maglev line would be a much less dangerous waste of money than some other, er, projects.
Anyone not directly working with radioactive materials is more likely to have their reproductive organs destroyed physically than receiving a radiation dose large enough to render them permanently sterile.
Provided the radiation does render the entire population sterile, then only those with a higher "resistance" of some form (eg. better cellular repair pathways, higher fission rate of cells to gametes, natural lead codpiece, whatever) can possibly reproduce.
And here's the problem - gametes are haploid and have a harder time repairing DNA damage than diploid cells due to having only one set of chromosomes (that's also the reason why radiation damage is more of a problem for females - oocytogenesis takes place just once in a female's life and then all the egg cells are held in a state of division in which they are very vulnerable to radiation damage).
Having a higher rate of meiosis will actually make the reproductive system more susceptible to radiation damage (since cells are more susceptible during cell division - that's why you can treat cancer with radiation).
You might be on to something with the natural lead codpiece, but that would require some major changes in metabolical pathways and still wouldn't help one bit against radiation coming from sources inside the body.
Equally the sledgehammer to the 'nads (if it became common enough) would promote individuals with methods to mitigate the damage (say, bony plates over them or, more likely, behaviours that don't lead to angering mentalists with hammers
Our best chance would be to be able to actually regrow any lost/destroyed body part (including the reproductive system). But unfortunately the stuff I stated above rears its ugly head here, too - doing so would require formation of new cells on a massive scale - lots of cell division taking place, making the organism _very_ vulnerable to further damage from radiation.
Non-universal catastrophic environmental damage to the reproduction mechanism is one of the fastest acting selectors in any form of natural selection. It can produce a rapid change in overall population fitness in a single generation.
Unfortunately, radiation presents a fairly catastrophic hazard to our reproductive system by the very nature of some basic principles of the latter. It's the price we pay for being complex organisms. If we were algae, lichen or fungi we'd shrug off the radiation, but then we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Try copying some files.
Well, the most likely molecule the alpha particle is going to hit in a living organism is a water molecule. Ionizing water molecules forms radicals, which then turn into hydrogen peroxide, which is a strong oxidant and will go on to damage other molecules (including DNA). Antioxidants turn hydrogen peroxide back into water and oxygen, rendering it much less harmful.
Beta particles, gamma rays, etc work by transfer of energy to electrons, breaking covalent bonds.
Actually, that is a fairly rare mechanism compared to plain ionization. The main danger to cells from any kind of ionizing radiation comes from the reaction detailed above - ionization, radical- and hydrogen peroxide formation. This is why the harmful effects of radiation can be increased by making sure there's an adequate supply of oxygen - it increases the rate at which H2O2 can form from the radicals (this is fairly important in radiation treatment of tumors - tumors that don't have an adequate blood supply will be more resistant to radiation due to lack of oxygen in the tissue).
Um, with a generation of humans taking about 30 years, I'd bet on later, much, much later, rather than sooner - if it happens at all.
You probably can't "evolve" a means of not being sterile after being exposed to enough radiation. Just like you most likely cannot "evolve" a means of not being sterile after your reproductive organs have been smashed with a sledgehammer. Evolution is not magic and cannot work around some basic principles of physics.
Yes, and that's the whole point: Hardware is getting faster and faster, and less and less of the improvement gets through to the user and his favorite programs because the operating system bogs the hardware down.
Simply put: If I buy hardware that's four times as fast as the old stuff, I want my system and my applications to be roughly four times as fast, and not only 5%-20% faster due to the shining new OS taking up more resources.
Since they made that game as un-appealing as possible for fans of the original Shadowrun, I doubt that making it run on XP, 95 and cellphones would have made it sell any better. Good riddance. Try making a _real_ Shadowrun game next time, and I just might think about buying it.
No thanks. If I buy a new PC, it'll run Windows XP
... for your next operating system, please use Windows XP as a benchmark and starting point. Create a product that beats Windows XP in relevant categories (note that "amount of eyecandy" doesn't count - usability, speed, resource usage and security do). I'm sure you will have no problem selling that.
Huh ? I thought that current medical orthodoxy was "consuming more calories than you burn makes you fat". The above can probably found in tabloids, but not in actual medical literature.
Does it kill the engine, too ? I'm a control engineer, not a mechanical engineer, but I'd assume that either the transmission, the driveshaft or the engine wouldn't survive one system having the foot on the brake and the other system having the foot on the gas pedal for more than a few seconds (possibly longer than it takes someone to get there and shut it off manually).
Yikes. So these guys have the smarts to make a computer drive a car on its own, but managed to forget some basic safety mechanisms such as a watchdog and other failsafe mechanisms ?
Geez guys - real world engineering 101: Do not let a computer control anything that might have a remote chance of harming someone without appropriate safety mechanisms.
But you can avoid running a power supply at a load where it has an abysmal efficiency and draws 1 W just to supply a few milliwatts (or less) the the microcontroller responsible for getting the thing out of standby.
Your understanding might be accurate, but your numbers are not. While a bullet may be fast, it's also light (compared to, say, the mass of human body), and the astronaut will move in the opposite direction of the bullet at merely a few centimeters per second. (Conservation of impulse: m1 * v1 = m2 * v2)
However, I'm not sure how the station will deal with the sudden pressure spike as the bullets are fired.
Currently not really economically feasible.
communications relaying,
Satellites are cheaper. And if you want to relay anything while in LEO, you're going to need lots of satellites.
timeshares for rich vacationers
That's probably the closest thing to being profitable.
A good start.
Um, no. It's lack of oxygen that you'll die from. You'll lose consciousness after about 15 to 20 seconds (due to deoxygenation of your blood on your lungs) and probably don't want to be resuscitated after more than 2 minutes unless you enjoy an existence at the mental level of a daisy.
The suit, however, would be funded from the district's budget.'
Isn't truth an absolute defense to an accusation of libel ?
"At least I do not think with things I do not have."
Dear Plaintif,
Apparently, misspelling "plaintiff" doesn't make them look bad.
Unless the treasury department has suddenly been put in charge of making civil law, their "views" aren't legally binding (i.e. meaningless).
I'd settle for a swarm of powerful telescopes all over the solar system. If we can't go there, then we might at least get some good pictures.
Also, the phrase above doesn't preclude generation ships. Sure, the original crew won't live to visit a distant planet, but their ((great-)grand-)children would.
That "something" goes by the brand name of "Gyrotwister". It's a lot of fun, too.
How (apart from physically separating the NIC from the rest of the system, i.e. rip the chip off the board or cut the relevant PCB traces) would you go about that ?
Actually