Missing from the summary, which would help explain why the bill failed, was the fact that the 55,000 greencards for STEM would be taken from the pool that is used for granting greencards (by lottery) to people in other countries that just want to come to the U.S. In other words, in trying to retain these students, the Republicans wanted to sharply reduce the number of just-plain-ordinary immigrants coming from, say, Ghana, Poland, and Brazil. Competing legislation would have left the greencard lottery pool intact, and simply allocated a new block of 55,000 greencards specifically for advanced degree recipients.
Picasso and Van Gogh doesn't need to be rewarded or encouraged to paint more (though, if they wanted to come out of a mortal retirement, I think the world would welcome them). However, the people and organizations that keep ownership of those works need some inducement, and the means, to protect those artworks, conserve them, and display them in a proper setting. The copyright for them may have expired ages ago, but that does not mean that they can just be given away to The People: they were expensive to acquire, and are surprisingly expensive to keep. Proper conservation of artwork requires climate controlled spaces, appropriate lighting, security and insurance, curators. For maximum impact and access, artworks need museums that have ample space to display large collections of related artworks, preferably in the middle of major cities where the most people can get to them. None of these things come cheap.
In other words, these artworks require some ongoing revenue stream. Without it, such artworks will eventually fall into disrepair, end up in private collections, and eventually be lost to the public in general. Consider it a tragedy of the commons, applied to Picasso and Van Gogh.
Count yourself lucky to be living in this day and age. Although you aren't yet able to access gigapixel renderings of every priceless work of art, for free, from your computing-device-of-choice, anywhere in the world, you are getting pretty damn close. No other generation in the whole history of humanity has ever had that chance. A century ago, if you wanted to have a good look at the Mona Lisa, you needed to travel to Paris and see it in person. While that is still mostly true (i.e., to see it yourself you have to travel to it, rather than the other way around), you can get close by visiting the Louvre's website. See also Google Art Project.
IEEE Spectrum reported last year on new RNG tech from Intel, called Bull Mountain, and implemented in Ivy Bridge processors. It uses a large array of cross-coupled inverters. Thermal noise (a semi-random process) causes them to each inverter pair to latch to 1 or 0 very quickly. The inverters are reset, then allowed to re-latch, many times per second. This isn't particularly new. But they also add circuitry that continuously checks the statistical randomness of the output, and combines multiple number streams to ensure maximum randomness. The result then becomes the seed for a more conventional PRNG. The upshot is the ability to produce billions of demonstrably random numbers per second, all in a low-power peripheral on the microprocessor.
The other major line of evidence that for the water bear evolving here on Earth is that it is structured in a way more or less identical to the rest of Terran life. That is: it has cells, DNA, RNA, all of which have the same chemical structure as the rest of life on Earth. One could hypothesize several things based on this observation:
1) that the structure and chemical mechanisms of life on Earth are the same elsewhere in the universe (or vice versa), including the water bear's extraterrestrial origin. I.e., maybe the way it's done on Earth is the only successful way to structure life.
2) the water bear, or its ancestral brethren not too dissimilar from today, were the source of all life on Earth (panspermia, but with the water bear as the initial seed), or
3) the water bear evolved on Earth, using Earth's template for how to structure and reproduce life. This hypothesis takes no stand one way or the other on extraterrestrial life.
Which of these three is the most plausible, explains the most natural phenomena, and is confounded by the least contradicting evidence? I would argue (3).
Yes, because the 5 -10 W the iPad uses when displaying PDFs is so much greater than the power it takes to keep 35 lbs of dead weight up at 35,000 ft and cruising at 500 knots.
For reference, it takes several million watts of engine power to keep a typical 737 in flight. Let's throw some numbers at it just to show how ignorant you are:
Let's assume that dropping 35 lbs results in a commensurate power requirement reduction. (This is, of course, an approximation. But this is such a small deviation from the original situation by such a small amount that this is certainly valid as a first approximation). Removing the weight would result in 35 / 1e5 * 5e6 = 1750 W of reduced power demand. If that sounds like a lot...it is; flying is incredibly expensive from an energy perspective.
No reason this should be restricted to apple products as an android tablet would work just as well to view pdf files, but still, very reasonable savings estimate.
Yes and no. I believe the holdup has been more on the hardware side - particularly electromagnetic compatibility - than on the software side. AA, Apple, and perhaps the aircraft mfgs have done the extra legwork in testing to demonstrate that 1) the iPad is reasonably immune to interference in an aircraft setting (because it is just a reader, and doesn't need WiFi or cellular to display charts makes this relatively easy) and 2) does not itself cause interference in the cockpit. The same cannot be said for just any old Android tablet, considering the wide variety of manufacturers out there.
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language, and it immediately becomes something entirely different.
Corollary: Any time a foreigner tries to speak to a Frenchman in his own language, the Frenchman immediately takes it as an insult and an invitation to heap scorn on the foreigner.
A problem with tracks is thermal expansion. Florida get HOT, but it isn't at the same temperature all the time. that makes it very difficult to keep them in exactly the right place. They have a tendency to bow and warp. If you have 20 tracks that all need to stay in close alignment, your job is more than 20 times harder than keeping standard gauge rail in place. The crawler drives on a gravel roadbed - much more accommodating to weather.
For what it is worth: Voyager 1 travels faster than Pioneer 10, and overtook it (in terms of distance from the sun) many years ago. Pioneer 10 is 16.8 billion km from the sun, traveling at 12.0 km/sec. Voyager 1 is 20 billion km away, traveling at 17.0 km/sec. New Horizons, currently en route to Pluto, will also head out from the solar system. It also went on a very fast trajectory (e.g., it achieved sun escape velocity directly from launch, rather than through gravity assists). However, New Horizons has already slowed to a velocity less than Voyager 1 (15.2 km/sec), and won't ever overtake it.
The beauty of Commercial Space is, it doesn't cost taxpayers anything
I understand the point you are trying to make, but have you forgotten the large development grants and contracts that NASA has been giving to these companies? SpaceX probably would have run out of operating capital it if hadn't landed the ISS supply contracts (starting with the demonstrator missions). SpaceX would also have been hard pressed to get anything off the ground if it didn't have access to Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg AFB. SpaceShipOne/Two/VirginGalactic and some of the other XPrize competitors had access to facilities at Edwards AFB and the (taxpayer subsidized) New Mexico Spaceport.
The companies are still due all credit for their technical success, and I look forward to what comes next. But you need to give props to the taxpayer, too, for fronting a lot of money, equipment, facilities, and experience.
Most importantly, though, is that both clauses do not actually contribute to a shared commons.
Yes, this is blindingly obvious. In all three examples above, the original author had no intention of contributing to a shared commons.
<sarcasm><stonervoice>But, but, but... information wants to be free, man! If you don't release every creative work freely to the world you must be some kind of selfish capitalist fascist!</sarcasm></stonervoice>
CC should craft a NC flavor that says you don't want it used commercially in general but are willing to license for free under alternate terms.
That would be an unnecessary complication. Remember that, even if you find some piece of work out there with CC:NC stamped on it, you are completely free to get in touch with the person who created it and negotiate a separate, commercial license. The content creator may or may not grant it at their discretion, but there's no harm in asking.
So, if an indie game company and Zynga both contacted the GP and said "We want to put this image in this game we want to sell," the rights holder if free to grant a commercial license to the indie game company and grant a resounding "Fuck You" to Zynga. In the meantime, the work the GP originally posted is still freely available to all under CC:NC. Best of all worlds, and does not require a change to the Creative Commons license.
The title and summary are misleading to the point of fraud. Here is a (not comprehensive) list of things that they didn't print:
The frame (welded tubular steel, just like every other car in the competition)
The wheels and tires
The suspension, linkages, and steering
The batteries
The electric motor
The cooling system
The electronics and controls
The driver
What they did use 3D printing for was for the body panels, and probably some complex-shaped internal parts they didn't bother to highlight. But Formula teams have been using 3D-printing for various components (yes, even body panels) for upwards of a decade. Hats off to the team itself - nice car! And a nice big "give me a fucking break" to the submitter, editors, and Materialise PR.
And global warming/climate change for the average person is *way way way way* down on the list. Other pressing things like job, family, housing, healthcare, etc., come first.
And in this economy, climate change isn't even anywhere on the radar. It's a rich people's problem.
Except that a number of the ways to mitigate climate change can also mitigate the everyday problems that preoccupy people. Worried about the cost of gas? Get a more efficient vehicle (you don't have to buy new to buy efficient). Worried about health, nutrition, and obesity? Change your diet (eat less meat, for instance). Change how you get around (ride a bike every now and then). Worried about high heating and electric bills? Improve your insulation, upgrade your furnace, change your lightbulbs, and turn things off when not using them (all have payback periods measured in months or a few years). Worried about political gridlock and partisan bickering in Washington - turn off the f@$#ing TV (saves electricity, don'tcha know) and read about the bickering (and compromise) among the founding fathers. Worried about finding a job? Job growth is very high in alternative energy, efficient manufacturing, residential and commercial building improvements.
These are cure-alls. Far from it. But doing these things do yield improvements on an individual and family level, and contribute to the solution rather than the problem.
I don't think that it's a matter of less-than-3mbps being unacceptable, just deficient. Like it or not, access to a high-speed connection to the larger world, for each home and community that wants it, is a requisite for economic development, just like telegraph and railroad access was in the late-19th century, and electricity and telephony was by the mid-20th century. Just having an internet connection is not sufficient; having a connection that can support bi-directional streaming video is what one should be aiming for,* and a connection rated for 3 mbps (peak) is about what it takes to do that. A connection rated at 768kbps might be able to handle it, but at low, varying, and unreliable quality.
* Why is bi-directional video (e.g., good quality Skype) such an important functional metric? It's not, in and of itself, although there are lots of good uses for that. But if your connection can do that, you can do any number of other useful things.
And to think that we actually have legislators who are actively trying to block UHC legislation! Man, that is messed up!
Oh well, many of those same legislators are actively blocking efforts at universal broadband access, too. Ever hear the story of the small rural community that formed a co-op, installed fiber, then got stomped on by the regional telco that never offered broadband to that community, all with the full backing of the "private enterprise can never do wrong" politicians?
So, what you're telling me is that there are more Americans with broadband access than with health insurance?
I think you are conflating "broadband access" with "actually being online at broadband speeds." There are huge numbers of people, tens of millions, who live in an area where broadband is a readily available service, but who choose not to have it. The 19 million figure is the population who live in an area where broadband simply isn't available, owing largely to geography and sparse infrastructure. I couldn't tell you how those numbers compare to the number of people who could have insurance but choose not to have it, or to the number of people who want to have health insurance but can't get it. What makes the statistics even more difficult is that "can't get it" can mean several things: (1) have a pre-existing condition that no insurance company will take on, (2) could get insurance but simply can't afford the price, (3) choose not to get it, because having it would disqualify them from some other, more valuable benefit.
And although I think the structure of the American health care system is crap, it isn't like broadband access and health insurnace are equivalent services whose numbers are worth comparison. Broadband costs tens of dollars a month in most areas; health insurance costs hundreds or thousands (either to the user, their employer, the state, or some combination of those). Broadband is a service that people utilize daily; health insurance is something you don't need at all...until the moment you do.
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Missing from the summary, which would help explain why the bill failed, was the fact that the 55,000 greencards for STEM would be taken from the pool that is used for granting greencards (by lottery) to people in other countries that just want to come to the U.S. In other words, in trying to retain these students, the Republicans wanted to sharply reduce the number of just-plain-ordinary immigrants coming from, say, Ghana, Poland, and Brazil. Competing legislation would have left the greencard lottery pool intact, and simply allocated a new block of 55,000 greencards specifically for advanced degree recipients.
Picasso and Van Gogh doesn't need to be rewarded or encouraged to paint more (though, if they wanted to come out of a mortal retirement, I think the world would welcome them). However, the people and organizations that keep ownership of those works need some inducement, and the means, to protect those artworks, conserve them, and display them in a proper setting. The copyright for them may have expired ages ago, but that does not mean that they can just be given away to The People: they were expensive to acquire, and are surprisingly expensive to keep. Proper conservation of artwork requires climate controlled spaces, appropriate lighting, security and insurance, curators. For maximum impact and access, artworks need museums that have ample space to display large collections of related artworks, preferably in the middle of major cities where the most people can get to them. None of these things come cheap.
In other words, these artworks require some ongoing revenue stream. Without it, such artworks will eventually fall into disrepair, end up in private collections, and eventually be lost to the public in general. Consider it a tragedy of the commons, applied to Picasso and Van Gogh.
Count yourself lucky to be living in this day and age. Although you aren't yet able to access gigapixel renderings of every priceless work of art, for free, from your computing-device-of-choice, anywhere in the world, you are getting pretty damn close. No other generation in the whole history of humanity has ever had that chance. A century ago, if you wanted to have a good look at the Mona Lisa, you needed to travel to Paris and see it in person. While that is still mostly true (i.e., to see it yourself you have to travel to it, rather than the other way around), you can get close by visiting the Louvre's website. See also Google Art Project.
More information on the strange taxonomy of the (former) British Empire can be found in this helpful Youtube video.
IEEE Spectrum reported last year on new RNG tech from Intel, called Bull Mountain, and implemented in Ivy Bridge processors. It uses a large array of cross-coupled inverters. Thermal noise (a semi-random process) causes them to each inverter pair to latch to 1 or 0 very quickly. The inverters are reset, then allowed to re-latch, many times per second. This isn't particularly new. But they also add circuitry that continuously checks the statistical randomness of the output, and combines multiple number streams to ensure maximum randomness. The result then becomes the seed for a more conventional PRNG. The upshot is the ability to produce billions of demonstrably random numbers per second, all in a low-power peripheral on the microprocessor.
Which of these three is the most plausible, explains the most natural phenomena, and is confounded by the least contradicting evidence? I would argue (3).
There are a whole lot more passengers on the plane than crew. Start with them...
Yes, because the 5 -10 W the iPad uses when displaying PDFs is so much greater than the power it takes to keep 35 lbs of dead weight up at 35,000 ft and cruising at 500 knots.
For reference, it takes several million watts of engine power to keep a typical 737 in flight. Let's throw some numbers at it just to show how ignorant you are:
Aircraft weight: 100,000 lbs
Aircraft cruising power: 5 MW
Let's assume that dropping 35 lbs results in a commensurate power requirement reduction. (This is, of course, an approximation. But this is such a small deviation from the original situation by such a small amount that this is certainly valid as a first approximation). Removing the weight would result in 35 / 1e5 * 5e6 = 1750 W of reduced power demand. If that sounds like a lot...it is; flying is incredibly expensive from an energy perspective.
Yes and no. I believe the holdup has been more on the hardware side - particularly electromagnetic compatibility - than on the software side. AA, Apple, and perhaps the aircraft mfgs have done the extra legwork in testing to demonstrate that 1) the iPad is reasonably immune to interference in an aircraft setting (because it is just a reader, and doesn't need WiFi or cellular to display charts makes this relatively easy) and 2) does not itself cause interference in the cockpit. The same cannot be said for just any old Android tablet, considering the wide variety of manufacturers out there.
While encouraging to see this becoming more mainstream, this is not the first instance of iPads replacing binders in the cockpit. Alaska Airlines has been doing this for years, and the FAA has allowed iPads for private aviators for a while, too.
Corollary: Any time a foreigner tries to speak to a Frenchman in his own language, the Frenchman immediately takes it as an insult and an invitation to heap scorn on the foreigner.
But then you are faced with the stark reality that, although all your hard work totals up to 1000 lines, it only amounts to 100 lines of code!
A problem with tracks is thermal expansion. Florida get HOT, but it isn't at the same temperature all the time. that makes it very difficult to keep them in exactly the right place. They have a tendency to bow and warp. If you have 20 tracks that all need to stay in close alignment, your job is more than 20 times harder than keeping standard gauge rail in place. The crawler drives on a gravel roadbed - much more accommodating to weather.
According to what passes for science and technology journalism in this day and age, yes.
For what it is worth: Voyager 1 travels faster than Pioneer 10, and overtook it (in terms of distance from the sun) many years ago. Pioneer 10 is 16.8 billion km from the sun, traveling at 12.0 km/sec. Voyager 1 is 20 billion km away, traveling at 17.0 km/sec. New Horizons, currently en route to Pluto, will also head out from the solar system. It also went on a very fast trajectory (e.g., it achieved sun escape velocity directly from launch, rather than through gravity assists). However, New Horizons has already slowed to a velocity less than Voyager 1 (15.2 km/sec), and won't ever overtake it.
I understand the point you are trying to make, but have you forgotten the large development grants and contracts that NASA has been giving to these companies? SpaceX probably would have run out of operating capital it if hadn't landed the ISS supply contracts (starting with the demonstrator missions). SpaceX would also have been hard pressed to get anything off the ground if it didn't have access to Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg AFB. SpaceShipOne/Two/VirginGalactic and some of the other XPrize competitors had access to facilities at Edwards AFB and the (taxpayer subsidized) New Mexico Spaceport.
The companies are still due all credit for their technical success, and I look forward to what comes next. But you need to give props to the taxpayer, too, for fronting a lot of money, equipment, facilities, and experience.
Were you all out of water?
It's the only way to be sure.
<sarcasm><stonervoice>But, but, but... information wants to be free, man! If you don't release every creative work freely to the world you must be some kind of selfish capitalist fascist!</sarcasm></stonervoice>
That would be an unnecessary complication. Remember that, even if you find some piece of work out there with CC:NC stamped on it, you are completely free to get in touch with the person who created it and negotiate a separate, commercial license. The content creator may or may not grant it at their discretion, but there's no harm in asking.
So, if an indie game company and Zynga both contacted the GP and said "We want to put this image in this game we want to sell," the rights holder if free to grant a commercial license to the indie game company and grant a resounding "Fuck You" to Zynga. In the meantime, the work the GP originally posted is still freely available to all under CC:NC. Best of all worlds, and does not require a change to the Creative Commons license.
The title and summary are misleading to the point of fraud. Here is a (not comprehensive) list of things that they didn't print:
The frame (welded tubular steel, just like every other car in the competition)
The wheels and tires
The suspension, linkages, and steering
The batteries
The electric motor
The cooling system
The electronics and controls
The driver
What they did use 3D printing for was for the body panels, and probably some complex-shaped internal parts they didn't bother to highlight. But Formula teams have been using 3D-printing for various components (yes, even body panels) for upwards of a decade. Hats off to the team itself - nice car! And a nice big "give me a fucking break" to the submitter, editors, and Materialise PR.
Except that a number of the ways to mitigate climate change can also mitigate the everyday problems that preoccupy people. Worried about the cost of gas? Get a more efficient vehicle (you don't have to buy new to buy efficient). Worried about health, nutrition, and obesity? Change your diet (eat less meat, for instance). Change how you get around (ride a bike every now and then). Worried about high heating and electric bills? Improve your insulation, upgrade your furnace, change your lightbulbs, and turn things off when not using them (all have payback periods measured in months or a few years). Worried about political gridlock and partisan bickering in Washington - turn off the f@$#ing TV (saves electricity, don'tcha know) and read about the bickering (and compromise) among the founding fathers. Worried about finding a job? Job growth is very high in alternative energy, efficient manufacturing, residential and commercial building improvements.
These are cure-alls. Far from it. But doing these things do yield improvements on an individual and family level, and contribute to the solution rather than the problem.
Speaking as a Canadian dollar, I find your remark offensive!
Bah - that's nothing. John Malkovitch beat you all to it, back in 1993.
I don't think that it's a matter of less-than-3mbps being unacceptable, just deficient. Like it or not, access to a high-speed connection to the larger world, for each home and community that wants it, is a requisite for economic development, just like telegraph and railroad access was in the late-19th century, and electricity and telephony was by the mid-20th century. Just having an internet connection is not sufficient; having a connection that can support bi-directional streaming video is what one should be aiming for,* and a connection rated for 3 mbps (peak) is about what it takes to do that. A connection rated at 768kbps might be able to handle it, but at low, varying, and unreliable quality.
* Why is bi-directional video (e.g., good quality Skype) such an important functional metric? It's not, in and of itself, although there are lots of good uses for that. But if your connection can do that, you can do any number of other useful things.
Oh well, many of those same legislators are actively blocking efforts at universal broadband access, too. Ever hear the story of the small rural community that formed a co-op, installed fiber, then got stomped on by the regional telco that never offered broadband to that community, all with the full backing of the "private enterprise can never do wrong" politicians?
I think you are conflating "broadband access" with "actually being online at broadband speeds." There are huge numbers of people, tens of millions, who live in an area where broadband is a readily available service, but who choose not to have it. The 19 million figure is the population who live in an area where broadband simply isn't available, owing largely to geography and sparse infrastructure. I couldn't tell you how those numbers compare to the number of people who could have insurance but choose not to have it, or to the number of people who want to have health insurance but can't get it. What makes the statistics even more difficult is that "can't get it" can mean several things: (1) have a pre-existing condition that no insurance company will take on, (2) could get insurance but simply can't afford the price, (3) choose not to get it, because having it would disqualify them from some other, more valuable benefit.
And although I think the structure of the American health care system is crap, it isn't like broadband access and health insurnace are equivalent services whose numbers are worth comparison. Broadband costs tens of dollars a month in most areas; health insurance costs hundreds or thousands (either to the user, their employer, the state, or some combination of those). Broadband is a service that people utilize daily; health insurance is something you don't need at all...until the moment you do.