400ppm for an 80kg person is 32g of cyanide. Good luck! For the same 80kg human, the (oral) LD50 for cyanide is 230mg, or more than two orders of magnitude below 400ppm.
We can look forward to many, many wonderful academic paper. For example there's the sex life of castrated transexaul protofeminist mental cases. And how about intersectional anarco-feminism of color? How about the emotional stability of carrots and parsnips, their intersectionality with gender veganism. Thank God for Canada!
Given this informed contribution, maybe it's a win-win-situation. Canada acquires a heap of top academics to improve research and development, and to build a better, fairer, more able society, and the US loses an equal number of inconvenient Cassandras and Laocoöns who only speak inconvenient truths that nobody wants to hear. Ignorance is bliss indeed. At least until the Danaans come out of the gift horse....
Would anyone prefer to send their kids into a battlefield, rather than robots?
Probably not. So having an army of people who are someones kids makes a nation much more reluctant to engage in war. Seems like a good thing to me. The less painful war is, the bigger the temptation to play with all the shiny toys.
1. The post office runs a deficit of about $5 billion per year when you include their retirement funding requirements, so in a very strong sense they are undercharging for delivery or overpaying for retirement.
The question is, of course, if that 5 billion would be more or less without Amazon - delivery very much has an economy of scale. You cannot take the deficit and divide it by the number of parcels to come to the conclusion that each new parcel causes a loss of X dollars. The retirement costs would e.g. continue even if no-one ever sent anything again.
2. There is no federal government sales tax, of which Trump is the chief executive. From his department's point of view, Amazon pays little tax. Your local state/city/county government gets the sales taxes collected by Amazon during your purchases.
Quote Trump: "they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments" (emphasis mine).
Better check your own pipes, because apparently (and to my surprise as well), the US is the number 1 producer of oil, pumping nearly 15 MM barrels per day.
Yes, thanks to expensive and environmentally questionable fracking techniques used on shale oil deposits, with a lousy energy balance and oodles of extra CO2. Not something to be proud of...
How may solar panels and wind turbines would it require to generate that much electricity? I remember seeing someone talk about this and if I remember correctly, it would cover an area the size of a small to medium U S. State.
Musk claimed it needed 100 miles times 100 miles for solar alone (10000 square miles), which is about the size of Massachusetts. See this article and the accompanying image. Massachusetts is the 7th-smallest US-State. The average US state is about 7.5 times larger. Or, in other terms, it's 0.2% of the total US land area. With the US Interstate Highway System having about 50000 miles, it would be a 200 m strip to the left and right of every interstate highway.
It's not trivial, but a) it not going to be solar alone, and b) other energy forms also have significant land use, from mountaintop removal to roads for fuel shipment.
I don't read much sci-fi any more, but I like to think I at least know of the major authors. I've never heard of this person, or series,
Then you live under an SF rock. It was/is a major bestseller.
Or even that Chinese sci-fi was a thing.
There is about 2 times as many Chinese as Europeans and USians combined. They probably have a good dose of everything we know of;-). This was one of the rare cases of a breakout into the West.
Anyone can comment on what they thought of it, or what the basic premise is, given TFS doesn't say anything about that? I presume it takes place beyond Earth, given the title.
I only read the first part ("The Three-Body-Problem"). It basically has three main strands of action - one set during the Chinese cultural revolution, one in the here and now, and the third describing an alien civilisation in what is hinted to be the Alpha Centauri system. Since this is a ternary star system, movement of the alien's planet is chaotic, and they have to deal with alternating periods of (hard to predict) stability and wildly fluctuating climate, destroying all or most of their civilisation over and over again. The aliens are communicating with Earth, and most of their story is told via parables in a video game.
It is an impressive read, and certainly different from much western SF - in a good, or at least interesting way.
It's about 180 US$ out of your pocket - and your brothers, your sisters, your baby child's and your senile great-granduncle's. Or do you think this will magically not be passed on the the consumer?
You are totally wrong. Penthouse switched to full on hardcore porn showing penetration years ago. Tho I have not seen one in many years so they may have changed back. Regardless, for a long time Penthouse has been fully hardcore.
Well, I'm wrong en detail - didn't know about the switch (they switched in 1998, and apparently back in 2005, according to Wikipedia - man, I'm OLD!), but pre-internet would be pre-1982, or, if you assume the web, pre-1989. About 10 years of porn on the web before Penthouse went hardcore...
In the pre-internet days, Penthouse was considered hardcore porn, not softcore porn.
Maybe in Puritanville, USA, but not anywhere else. Hardcore porn has a reasonably formal definition - it basically shows people in the act of actually doing it (not just pretending to be doing it). Penthouse, on the other hand, essentially only ever showed pictures of nude and semi-nude women.
Everybody can buy a domain and publish whatever he or she wants there. In this case, the author seems to be one "Gary Novak, Independent Scientist". Google Scholar finds nothing relevant someone with that name has published in the scientific literature, and it is extremely inclusive. So why would you believe a random guy off the internet, but not well-known experts who have published books and peer-reviewed papers on this for more than 100 years?
I don't see any question in the AC's comment, just a lot of statements that make no scientific sense at all.
CO2 absorption of IR comes no where close to explaining global warming, as is well known.
Your statement is unspecific enough to have no clear semantics. No, the direct effect off the CO2 increase does not fully explain the observed global warming. But then nobody except maybe some builders of straw men claims that. Arrhenius had identified the major feedbacks more than a century ago. We do have good explanations for the temperature increase, and anthropogenic influences, primary CO2 emissions, are indeed the root cause of the observed warming, and our best estimate is that they explain all the warming.
Perhaps you don't know enough to answer his questions
Maybe I don't know enough. We can all fall prey to the Dunning–Kruger effect. But in this case, again, there were no questions.
[Scientific illiteracy] 1 molecule of CO2 [...] is somehow generating 2500c of heat [More scientific illiteracy]
Well, the CO2 is generating, to a very good approximation, no heat at all. The heat is coming from the sun (that hot ball of hydrogen doing nuclear fusion 150 million kilometres away). The CO2 is just slowing down the re-radiation of heat from the Earth surface into space.
What is "c"? Probably not the speed of light in this context?
What does this have to do with the EU? It's a decision from a German federal court on what municipal governments are allowed to do. The EU isn't involved in any way.
It's EU regulation for levels of air pollution that cities have to meet. You might think clean air is a common sense idea, but common sense and cars don't mix.
What makes diesel cars evil but petrol cars acceptable?
In cities? Particulate emissions.
You ever stood behind the tailpipe of a diesel? Yeech.
Well, modern diesel cars (in Europe) do have particle filters, and, in that respect, are cleaner than even conventional gasoline cars, much less cars with modern direct injection gasoline engines (which could also be fitted with filters, but aren't, because law-makers don't think about general solutions, but only about current problems).
The diesel problem making news in Germany is nitrous oxides. Diesel engines run at higher temperatures and pressures (which makes them efficient), and usually with a lean fuel/air ration (i.e. more air than needed to burn the fuel - good, because it leads to nearly complete combustion, which helps efficiency, and reduces unburned fuel and soot in the exhaust). Under that condition, some of the nitrogen in the air is oxidised - and these NOx emissions are harmful. There are ways to treat the exhaust - but doing it slightly cheaper than possible is what DieselGate is all about.
As a n example, look at aircraft - in the early days of flight there were many improvements constantly appearing and aircraft got better and better, until we reached the 747 and Concorde (2 planes that performed different tasks - one efficient, one fast) and that's pretty much where the state of the art stopped.
I'm sorry, but you know very little about modern aircraft. A modern 747 is no more similar to the 1970 model, than an iPhone X is similar to the original iPhone. Take a look at the 747 prototype vs. a semi-current 747-8F and check e.g. the size of the engine pods.
Well, Apple has been putting Python on all Macs since about forever, and I would maintain that Python is as easy as, and in many respects much better than, most versions of BASIC. Of course, to run it you need a terminal, and most Mac users don't even know they have Terminal.app, much less what to do with it. You also need an editor, and while vi/vim is also installed, it's not the most beginner-friendly editor around.
Actually, it's probably possible to really harshly punish people who use non government sanctioned encryption. See: North Korea.
I think this went out with the Bernstein cases and the first amendment (my favourite one). Freedom of speech includes the freedom to exchange crypto algorithms, and I bet it also includes the freedom to use them.
"Nowhere does it guarantee a right to privacy. The government needs to be able to keep people safe and they cannot do this unless they have to the correct tools."
Where in the enumerated powers does it say "Government shall have the right to force companies to build system with broken encryption"?
On the other hand, it does say the following:
[...] the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. How does that not apply to defensive crypto-arms?
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated [...]
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
When I moved to Munich (1995), I sold my car after it stood useless and rusting for 18 months. Going by subway, it took me about 10 minutes to get to work (and the subway ran every 10 minutes). Going by bicycle was 20 minutes.
Ok...maybe that works for your work. i'm guessing you don't live in a climate to where the walk between public transport and home/office isn't very far AND doesn't experience wild weather conditions (hot and humid as hell like here in New Orleans).
But my question is how do you shop, specifically groceries?
I cycle. As for the weather, Stuttgart has pretty diverse weather - from -10 in winter to +35 in summer, often sunny, but with occasional extreme downpour - and it is very hilly. I change when I come into my office (or 10 minutes later, when I have cooled down a bit). No problems. I do have mostly flexible hours, so I only need to go in a bad squall if a lecture or meeting comes up.
For shopping, I have a set of panniers. I get most fresh groceries at the farmers market downtown once a week, and fresh bread, milk products, and assorted stuff from one of several supermarkets not far of my commute, maybe 2 or 3 times a week. It's very rarely necessary, but if I need something big fast, I either order a cab, or I get a car from a car sharing organisation (this last happened 4 years ago;-).
Yes, exactly. And driving, I am not going to [experience various unpleasantries].
Well, public transport systems sure differ. Many around the world are clean, fast, and safe. I've never seen any body wastes in a subway or tram in Europe. As for going by car: do you ignore traffic accidents and the accompanying risks and costs?
Apart from this, even if parking is sparse, it will usually be much faster to drive. It depends on the city, but most people value less time spent commuting over all else.
The first claim is far from true for many European cities. When I moved to Munich (1995), I sold my car after it stood useless and rusting for 18 months. Going by subway, it took me about 10 minutes to get to work (and the subway ran every 10 minutes). Going by bicycle was 20 minutes. Going by car was unpredictable, but never less than 20 minutes, even with private parking at home (so no searching). Now I live in Stuttgart, and while going by car might be nominally a bit faster with no traffic, we cannot have any meetings at 9 in the morning, because during rush hour, my colleagues travel time goes up by an hour or so. The public transport system in most of the US is (intentionally or not) crippled. Try Singapore, Hong Kong, Munich or even Paris to see what it can be like.
Slashdot Mirror
400ppm for an 80kg person is 32g of cyanide. Good luck! For the same 80kg human, the (oral) LD50 for cyanide is 230mg, or more than two orders of magnitude below 400ppm.
We can look forward to many, many wonderful academic paper. For example there's the sex life of castrated transexaul protofeminist mental cases. And how about intersectional anarco-feminism of color? How about the emotional stability of carrots and parsnips, their intersectionality with gender veganism. Thank God for Canada!
Given this informed contribution, maybe it's a win-win-situation. Canada acquires a heap of top academics to improve research and development, and to build a better, fairer, more able society, and the US loses an equal number of inconvenient Cassandras and Laocoöns who only speak inconvenient truths that nobody wants to hear. Ignorance is bliss indeed. At least until the Danaans come out of the gift horse....
Christians believe that God can never commit evil.
Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi.
Would anyone prefer to send their kids into a battlefield, rather than robots?
Probably not. So having an army of people who are someones kids makes a nation much more reluctant to engage in war. Seems like a good thing to me. The less painful war is, the bigger the temptation to play with all the shiny toys.
1. The post office runs a deficit of about $5 billion per year when you include their retirement funding requirements, so in a very strong sense they are undercharging for delivery or overpaying for retirement.
The question is, of course, if that 5 billion would be more or less without Amazon - delivery very much has an economy of scale. You cannot take the deficit and divide it by the number of parcels to come to the conclusion that each new parcel causes a loss of X dollars. The retirement costs would e.g. continue even if no-one ever sent anything again.
2. There is no federal government sales tax, of which Trump is the chief executive. From his department's point of view, Amazon pays little tax. Your local state/city/county government gets the sales taxes collected by Amazon during your purchases.
Quote Trump: "they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments" (emphasis mine).
Better check your own pipes, because apparently (and to my surprise as well), the US is the number 1 producer of oil, pumping nearly 15 MM barrels per day.
Yes, thanks to expensive and environmentally questionable fracking techniques used on shale oil deposits, with a lousy energy balance and oodles of extra CO2. Not something to be proud of...
How may solar panels and wind turbines would it require to generate that much electricity? I remember seeing someone talk about this and if I remember correctly, it would cover an area the size of a small to medium U S. State.
Musk claimed it needed 100 miles times 100 miles for solar alone (10000 square miles), which is about the size of Massachusetts. See this article and the accompanying image. Massachusetts is the 7th-smallest US-State. The average US state is about 7.5 times larger. Or, in other terms, it's 0.2% of the total US land area. With the US Interstate Highway System having about 50000 miles, it would be a 200 m strip to the left and right of every interstate highway.
It's not trivial, but a) it not going to be solar alone, and b) other energy forms also have significant land use, from mountaintop removal to roads for fuel shipment.
I don't read much sci-fi any more, but I like to think I at least know of the major authors. I've never heard of this person, or series,
Then you live under an SF rock. It was/is a major bestseller.
Or even that Chinese sci-fi was a thing.
There is about 2 times as many Chinese as Europeans and USians combined. They probably have a good dose of everything we know of ;-). This was one of the rare cases of a breakout into the West.
Anyone can comment on what they thought of it, or what the basic premise is, given TFS doesn't say anything about that? I presume it takes place beyond Earth, given the title.
I only read the first part ("The Three-Body-Problem"). It basically has three main strands of action - one set during the Chinese cultural revolution, one in the here and now, and the third describing an alien civilisation in what is hinted to be the Alpha Centauri system. Since this is a ternary star system, movement of the alien's planet is chaotic, and they have to deal with alternating periods of (hard to predict) stability and wildly fluctuating climate, destroying all or most of their civilisation over and over again. The aliens are communicating with Earth, and most of their story is told via parables in a video game.
It is an impressive read, and certainly different from much western SF - in a good, or at least interesting way.
It's about 180 US$ out of your pocket - and your brothers, your sisters, your baby child's and your senile great-granduncle's. Or do you think this will magically not be passed on the the consumer?
You are totally wrong. Penthouse switched to full on hardcore porn showing penetration years ago. Tho I have not seen one in many years so they may have changed back. Regardless, for a long time Penthouse has been fully hardcore.
Well, I'm wrong en detail - didn't know about the switch (they switched in 1998, and apparently back in 2005, according to Wikipedia - man, I'm OLD!), but pre-internet would be pre-1982, or, if you assume the web, pre-1989. About 10 years of porn on the web before Penthouse went hardcore...
In the pre-internet days, Penthouse was considered hardcore porn, not softcore porn.
Maybe in Puritanville, USA, but not anywhere else. Hardcore porn has a reasonably formal definition - it basically shows people in the act of actually doing it (not just pretending to be doing it). Penthouse, on the other hand, essentially only ever showed pictures of nude and semi-nude women.
http://nov79.com/gbwm/ntyg.html
Everybody can buy a domain and publish whatever he or she wants there. In this case, the author seems to be one "Gary Novak, Independent Scientist". Google Scholar finds nothing relevant someone with that name has published in the scientific literature, and it is extremely inclusive. So why would you believe a random guy off the internet, but not well-known experts who have published books and peer-reviewed papers on this for more than 100 years?
His question is legitimate.
I don't see any question in the AC's comment, just a lot of statements that make no scientific sense at all.
CO2 absorption of IR comes no where close to explaining global warming, as is well known.
Your statement is unspecific enough to have no clear semantics. No, the direct effect off the CO2 increase does not fully explain the observed global warming. But then nobody except maybe some builders of straw men claims that. Arrhenius had identified the major feedbacks more than a century ago. We do have good explanations for the temperature increase, and anthropogenic influences, primary CO2 emissions, are indeed the root cause of the observed warming, and our best estimate is that they explain all the warming.
Perhaps you don't know enough to answer his questions
Maybe I don't know enough. We can all fall prey to the Dunning–Kruger effect. But in this case, again, there were no questions.
[Scientific illiteracy] 1 molecule of CO2 [...] is somehow generating 2500c of heat [More scientific illiteracy]
Well, the CO2 is generating, to a very good approximation, no heat at all. The heat is coming from the sun (that hot ball of hydrogen doing nuclear fusion 150 million kilometres away). The CO2 is just slowing down the re-radiation of heat from the Earth surface into space.
What is "c"? Probably not the speed of light in this context?
What does this have to do with the EU? It's a decision from a German federal court on what municipal governments are allowed to do. The EU isn't involved in any way.
It's EU regulation for levels of air pollution that cities have to meet. You might think clean air is a common sense idea, but common sense and cars don't mix.
What makes diesel cars evil but petrol cars acceptable?
In cities? Particulate emissions.
You ever stood behind the tailpipe of a diesel? Yeech.
Well, modern diesel cars (in Europe) do have particle filters, and, in that respect, are cleaner than even conventional gasoline cars, much less cars with modern direct injection gasoline engines (which could also be fitted with filters, but aren't, because law-makers don't think about general solutions, but only about current problems).
The diesel problem making news in Germany is nitrous oxides. Diesel engines run at higher temperatures and pressures (which makes them efficient), and usually with a lean fuel/air ration (i.e. more air than needed to burn the fuel - good, because it leads to nearly complete combustion, which helps efficiency, and reduces unburned fuel and soot in the exhaust). Under that condition, some of the nitrogen in the air is oxidised - and these NOx emissions are harmful. There are ways to treat the exhaust - but doing it slightly cheaper than possible is what DieselGate is all about.
As a n example, look at aircraft - in the early days of flight there were many improvements constantly appearing and aircraft got better and better, until we reached the 747 and Concorde (2 planes that performed different tasks - one efficient, one fast) and that's pretty much where the state of the art stopped.
I'm sorry, but you know very little about modern aircraft. A modern 747 is no more similar to the 1970 model, than an iPhone X is similar to the original iPhone. Take a look at the 747 prototype vs. a semi-current 747-8F and check e.g. the size of the engine pods.
Well, Apple has been putting Python on all Macs since about forever, and I would maintain that Python is as easy as, and in many respects much better than, most versions of BASIC. Of course, to run it you need a terminal, and most Mac users don't even know they have Terminal.app, much less what to do with it. You also need an editor, and while vi/vim is also installed, it's not the most beginner-friendly editor around.
Actually, it's probably possible to really harshly punish people who use non government sanctioned encryption. See: North Korea.
I think this went out with the Bernstein cases and the first amendment (my favourite one). Freedom of speech includes the freedom to exchange crypto algorithms, and I bet it also includes the freedom to use them.
Ok...maybe that works for your work. i'm guessing you don't live in a climate to where the walk between public transport and home/office isn't very far AND doesn't experience wild weather conditions (hot and humid as hell like here in New Orleans).
But my question is how do you shop, specifically groceries?
I cycle. As for the weather, Stuttgart has pretty diverse weather - from -10 in winter to +35 in summer, often sunny, but with occasional extreme downpour - and it is very hilly. I change when I come into my office (or 10 minutes later, when I have cooled down a bit). No problems. I do have mostly flexible hours, so I only need to go in a bad squall if a lecture or meeting comes up.
For shopping, I have a set of panniers. I get most fresh groceries at the farmers market downtown once a week, and fresh bread, milk products, and assorted stuff from one of several supermarkets not far of my commute, maybe 2 or 3 times a week. It's very rarely necessary, but if I need something big fast, I either order a cab, or I get a car from a car sharing organisation (this last happened 4 years ago ;-).
Yes, exactly. And driving, I am not going to [experience various unpleasantries].
Well, public transport systems sure differ. Many around the world are clean, fast, and safe. I've never seen any body wastes in a subway or tram in Europe. As for going by car: do you ignore traffic accidents and the accompanying risks and costs?
Apart from this, even if parking is sparse, it will usually be much faster to drive. It depends on the city, but most people value less time spent commuting over all else.
The first claim is far from true for many European cities. When I moved to Munich (1995), I sold my car after it stood useless and rusting for 18 months. Going by subway, it took me about 10 minutes to get to work (and the subway ran every 10 minutes). Going by bicycle was 20 minutes. Going by car was unpredictable, but never less than 20 minutes, even with private parking at home (so no searching). Now I live in Stuttgart, and while going by car might be nominally a bit faster with no traffic, we cannot have any meetings at 9 in the morning, because during rush hour, my colleagues travel time goes up by an hour or so. The public transport system in most of the US is (intentionally or not) crippled. Try Singapore, Hong Kong, Munich or even Paris to see what it can be like.
That's the ONLY reason? I'm also dissuaded by the fact that my car starts and stops closer to where I want to be.
In European cities, the distance from the next available parking spot often will be further than the distance from the next public transport stop.
I would assume it's on /. because it's interesting "stuff that matters"....