What does it take for life to come about from non-life. Do we have an idea?
Not really, no. Aside from having the necessary ingredients, we don't know how abiogenesis happened, or even that it happened here on Earth. The first microbes might've formed or partially formed in comets that later impacted the Earth and "came to life" down here, or maybe it happened entirely in warm little puddles and tidepools. Regardless, the conditions in which it did happen, or even CAN happen are largely unknown. There very well may be a big difference between what life can adapt to over time versus come about in the first place. There may be extremophiles on Earth that could survive on Mars or Titan right now, but that doesn't mean proto-microbes could have arisen from scratch in those same environments. The Earth extremophiles had the advantage of a wide variety of habitats to evolve from and "move in" to their extreme habitats gradually.
Depends on how far away grandma and grampa's house is, and if they'll be using the same ISP. It's entirely possible all the traffic will be staying in the ISP's network.
A simulation is only as good as its input data and ability to map output data to meatspace. A computer simulation of anything in the real world, even if the simulation itself is perfect, will always be limited by its ability to acquire data from to real world to model, and the ability to implement the model physically in the real world. Going from analog to digital and back to analog always loses something in the translation.
Nature doesn't keep secrets. You can't uninvent anything, ever. You just have to learn to mitigate and live with it.
The basic principles behind a nuclear weapon and nuclear power are the same, but having a nuclear reactor won't get you much closer to a nuclear weapon all by itself. The bombs themselves are dead-easy. Really all you need to do is quickly bring two sub-critical lumps of weapons-grade fissile material together and BOOM.
Getting the fissile material and enriching (essentially, concentrating it down) it is the tricky part that takes government-level resources to accomplish. Fuel for a nuclear power plant and its wastes are useless for making a bomb without the critical enrichment step.
That being said, there are some very real concerns over existing nuclear power plants. No private company will insure them, the high risk and long payback period on the initial investment scares away most investors, and they can't be shut down and spun back up as needed for fluctuating power demands, so they're not suitable for everywhere. Blindly declaring "build more nukes!" isn't going to be very helpful. We need to give careful consideration to if, how and where we build more; and focus on promising new designs that mitigate many of the drawbacks (pebble bed, breeders, thorium, etc.)
And let's not forget that it would be forged by particle colisions at relativistic speeds, making it pretty likely to begin life with more than enough velocity to careen out into space, never to bother us again.
Hydrogen's fairly useless without a powerful compressor able to pressurize it and stuff it into tanks. Besides, we're not talking about lots and lots of hydrogen. Water is something like 89% oxygen by weight. It's actually a pretty convenient source of lots of breathable oxygen without fussing with compressed tanks as long as you have plenty of power to crack it with.
My statement was in the context of the DOS-based Windows line through ME. NT is a kernel. Moving the consumer line from DOS to the much saner NT kernel was a good move for Microsoft.
It was also a good move when Apple bought Next and used NextStep as the basis for OSX rather than the long-in-the-tooth MacOS "9 and under" codebase.
Actually weight training doesn't lead to more muscle cells. You end up with the same number you started with, they just get a lot bigger. They're multi-nucleated cells, and will add more nuclei, mitochondria and other organelles as needed.
The driver model was wretched in Win98. Plus it was still DOS under the hood. No, going NT-based with XP was a good move on Microsoft's part. Now if only they had gone ahead with Neptune instead of Windows ME, they would have saved themselves a major embarassment.
We're not so worried about spin, just trajectory. And whether it's mountain-sized or house-sized or even texas-sized in and of itself doesn't matter. Given enough advance warning, the more time we have, the gentler the thrust we can use and still manage to deflect the asteroid entirely.
^Even if improved thermoelectrics can't directly compete in a refrigerator-type application, any improvement in their efficiency will be useful in other applications (computer cooling, portable thermoelectric cooler/wamers, etc.)
While CFLs (and fluorescents in general) have improved greatly recently, there are still a few drawbacks vs incandescents. LEDs would fix some of these, but not all:
-They're not full spectrum like sunlight and incandescents. Each phosphor emits light in a fairly narrow spectrum, but by using three or four colors in the coating mix, warm white and daylight can be approximated, but it still ends up looking a little "weird" to me. LEDs have the same problem, unfortunately.
-While the overall mercury impact is lower in CFLs over their lifetimes, you still have a lot of fairly fragile glass tubes with mercury vapor in your house.
-All of today's CFLs are NOT created equally. Quality of manufacture has a huge impact on the quality of the light you get. You often need to try several different brands before you find a good one. LEDs will likely have this same problem too.
-Fluorescents only last long if they aren't power cycled often, otherwise they can die faster than a comparable incandescent.
I use CFLs throughout the house for most purposes, with incandescents in the bathrooms, closets and motion sensor driveway light due to frequent power cycles. I also keep incandescents in the kitchen for the full spectrum light which I feel makes a difference in the appearance of food when I cook.
Rig them up with some robotics or something (and some manner of power source . ..) so they periodically crawl around to stay above ground. The skeletons will be even scarier if they wiggle around on their own.
Your comment amuses me considering how much WALL-E relied on symbolism and "body" language over written and spoken English. Come to think of it, and I've only seen it once so I'm sure there are a few exceptions, it was pretty much just the backstory that relied on spoken lines. The film could be shown to an international audience untranslated without subtitles and they'd still get the core story.
This could be a factor of my faulty memory, but a quick bit of googling didn't turn up anything useful. Is it just me, or has the rate at which storage capacity increases been slowing in recent years? It seems like we had a very rapid run-up to the 300gig mark (in a 3.5inch drive) then a much slower crawl to a terabyte and beyond.
I find it unlikely that a converter couldn't be created to simply rip out the text and any basic formatting (bold, underlining, italics) and shunt it to a simpler format without all the layout stuff.
Oh! That reminds me. Anyone who has a contract with T-mobile will be able to cancel in August due to the rate increase without paying the fee. Increasing text rates is a "material change to your contract" and you can cancel without consequence.
You're right--Peak oil means old fields are drying up faster than we can find new ones. However I disagree with there being no incentive to invest in increasing supply. A bird in hand is worth two in the bush. Just because prices are likely to continue to rise in the near term, doesn't mean it won't be worth it to have excess production capacity later. They still want to develop the most economical ways to pull it out of the ground to minimize the costs of production.
*forgot my footnote: a teeeeeeny bit is in orbit, on the Moon, Mars, etc. but the sum total of everything we've ever launched beyond Earth orbit is negligible compared to world supply.
We're talking about depletion of elements here. Elements don't go away short of nuclear reactions and radioactive decay. Just about* all of the Zinc we've ever mined is still on the planet. And I'll bet a LOT of all the rare earth elements ever pulled out of the ground are sitting in landfills. Mine those. Recover the useful elements, continue. Just delayed recycling, really. It may not be cost effective to do so now, but it will be once the easier ways of acquiring needed materials dry up.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really, no. Aside from having the necessary ingredients, we don't know how abiogenesis happened, or even that it happened here on Earth. The first microbes might've formed or partially formed in comets that later impacted the Earth and "came to life" down here, or maybe it happened entirely in warm little puddles and tidepools. Regardless, the conditions in which it did happen, or even CAN happen are largely unknown. There very well may be a big difference between what life can adapt to over time versus come about in the first place. There may be extremophiles on Earth that could survive on Mars or Titan right now, but that doesn't mean proto-microbes could have arisen from scratch in those same environments. The Earth extremophiles had the advantage of a wide variety of habitats to evolve from and "move in" to their extreme habitats gradually.
Depends on how far away grandma and grampa's house is, and if they'll be using the same ISP. It's entirely possible all the traffic will be staying in the ISP's network.
Ever.
A simulation is only as good as its input data and ability to map output data to meatspace. A computer simulation of anything in the real world, even if the simulation itself is perfect, will always be limited by its ability to acquire data from to real world to model, and the ability to implement the model physically in the real world. Going from analog to digital and back to analog always loses something in the translation.
Nature doesn't keep secrets. You can't uninvent anything, ever. You just have to learn to mitigate and live with it.
The basic principles behind a nuclear weapon and nuclear power are the same, but having a nuclear reactor won't get you much closer to a nuclear weapon all by itself. The bombs themselves are dead-easy. Really all you need to do is quickly bring two sub-critical lumps of weapons-grade fissile material together and BOOM.
Getting the fissile material and enriching (essentially, concentrating it down) it is the tricky part that takes government-level resources to accomplish. Fuel for a nuclear power plant and its wastes are useless for making a bomb without the critical enrichment step.
That being said, there are some very real concerns over existing nuclear power plants. No private company will insure them, the high risk and long payback period on the initial investment scares away most investors, and they can't be shut down and spun back up as needed for fluctuating power demands, so they're not suitable for everywhere. Blindly declaring "build more nukes!" isn't going to be very helpful. We need to give careful consideration to if, how and where we build more; and focus on promising new designs that mitigate many of the drawbacks (pebble bed, breeders, thorium, etc.)
Actually, that would be "Boom De Yada."
And let's not forget that it would be forged by particle colisions at relativistic speeds, making it pretty likely to begin life with more than enough velocity to careen out into space, never to bother us again.
That too.
Hydrogen's fairly useless without a powerful compressor able to pressurize it and stuff it into tanks. Besides, we're not talking about lots and lots of hydrogen. Water is something like 89% oxygen by weight. It's actually a pretty convenient source of lots of breathable oxygen without fussing with compressed tanks as long as you have plenty of power to crack it with.
My statement was in the context of the DOS-based Windows line through ME. NT is a kernel. Moving the consumer line from DOS to the much saner NT kernel was a good move for Microsoft.
It was also a good move when Apple bought Next and used NextStep as the basis for OSX rather than the long-in-the-tooth MacOS "9 and under" codebase.
^I was referring to the consumer line, which didn't ditch DOS until XP.
Actually weight training doesn't lead to more muscle cells. You end up with the same number you started with, they just get a lot bigger. They're multi-nucleated cells, and will add more nuclei, mitochondria and other organelles as needed.
The driver model was wretched in Win98. Plus it was still DOS under the hood. No, going NT-based with XP was a good move on Microsoft's part. Now if only they had gone ahead with Neptune instead of Windows ME, they would have saved themselves a major embarassment.
We're not so worried about spin, just trajectory. And whether it's mountain-sized or house-sized or even texas-sized in and of itself doesn't matter. Given enough advance warning, the more time we have, the gentler the thrust we can use and still manage to deflect the asteroid entirely.
^Even if improved thermoelectrics can't directly compete in a refrigerator-type application, any improvement in their efficiency will be useful in other applications (computer cooling, portable thermoelectric cooler/wamers, etc.)
It's more than that. Merely having dollars is essentially investing in the US Government (and economy).
While CFLs (and fluorescents in general) have improved greatly recently, there are still a few drawbacks vs incandescents. LEDs would fix some of these, but not all:
-They're not full spectrum like sunlight and incandescents. Each phosphor emits light in a fairly narrow spectrum, but by using three or four colors in the coating mix, warm white and daylight can be approximated, but it still ends up looking a little "weird" to me. LEDs have the same problem, unfortunately.
-While the overall mercury impact is lower in CFLs over their lifetimes, you still have a lot of fairly fragile glass tubes with mercury vapor in your house.
-All of today's CFLs are NOT created equally. Quality of manufacture has a huge impact on the quality of the light you get. You often need to try several different brands before you find a good one. LEDs will likely have this same problem too.
-Fluorescents only last long if they aren't power cycled often, otherwise they can die faster than a comparable incandescent.
I use CFLs throughout the house for most purposes, with incandescents in the bathrooms, closets and motion sensor driveway light due to frequent power cycles. I also keep incandescents in the kitchen for the full spectrum light which I feel makes a difference in the appearance of food when I cook.
Rig them up with some robotics or something (and some manner of power source . . .) so they periodically crawl around to stay above ground. The skeletons will be even scarier if they wiggle around on their own.
Your comment amuses me considering how much WALL-E relied on symbolism and "body" language over written and spoken English. Come to think of it, and I've only seen it once so I'm sure there are a few exceptions, it was pretty much just the backstory that relied on spoken lines. The film could be shown to an international audience untranslated without subtitles and they'd still get the core story.
This could be a factor of my faulty memory, but a quick bit of googling didn't turn up anything useful. Is it just me, or has the rate at which storage capacity increases been slowing in recent years? It seems like we had a very rapid run-up to the 300gig mark (in a 3.5inch drive) then a much slower crawl to a terabyte and beyond.
I find it unlikely that a converter couldn't be created to simply rip out the text and any basic formatting (bold, underlining, italics) and shunt it to a simpler format without all the layout stuff.
And even if not, now all the Slashdotters who clicked the link, then felt guilty about harassing a poor C64 will try again!
Oh! That reminds me. Anyone who has a contract with T-mobile will be able to cancel in August due to the rate increase without paying the fee. Increasing text rates is a "material change to your contract" and you can cancel without consequence.
You're right--Peak oil means old fields are drying up faster than we can find new ones. However I disagree with there being no incentive to invest in increasing supply. A bird in hand is worth two in the bush. Just because prices are likely to continue to rise in the near term, doesn't mean it won't be worth it to have excess production capacity later. They still want to develop the most economical ways to pull it out of the ground to minimize the costs of production.
*forgot my footnote: a teeeeeeny bit is in orbit, on the Moon, Mars, etc. but the sum total of everything we've ever launched beyond Earth orbit is negligible compared to world supply.
We're talking about depletion of elements here. Elements don't go away short of nuclear reactions and radioactive decay. Just about* all of the Zinc we've ever mined is still on the planet. And I'll bet a LOT of all the rare earth elements ever pulled out of the ground are sitting in landfills. Mine those. Recover the useful elements, continue. Just delayed recycling, really. It may not be cost effective to do so now, but it will be once the easier ways of acquiring needed materials dry up.