cmsmith

For a counterexample, check the history of satellite TV in countries with media access laws [1, 2]. There is a lot of political room between 'western media is illegal' and 'we have a network of informants and will put your family in a forced labor camp'.

[1] Iran : http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-iranian-police...

[2] China: http://www.pcworld.com/article/194755/article.html

It seems like there is an opportunity here for a mosquito net that won't work as a fishing net. Could a finer mesh be air-permeable enough but not water-permeable? Or a fabric which degrades in strength when saturated with water?

The same way that you can push a ball just to the top of a hill. Very carefully, because if you push it too hard it will roll down the other side.

It works exactly that way. Even in cases where you wait to tell the driver where you're going, it takes her only about 20 seconds to type the destination into their Uber app for directions, not the 'couple minutes' referenced above.

As I recall there was no expectation that the bombs themselves would cause any significant casualties. The intention was for them to start forest fires, which would hurt US civilian morale and require manpower to put out.

The Apollo program is a remarkably direct and relevant example of throwing money at a problem resulting in a quicker solution. There is of course a limit, but we're well below that point now. And with our current rate of experimental launches, many employees won't even remain in the job long enough to experience more than one of them. Speeding the rate up could have exponential increases in productivity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_%28spacecraft%29#Orion_Pr...

No, but they are designed to take a lateral load from a vehicle impacting them. In the US currently that load is about 4.5 tons at any one point. In a bridge like this where the parapet walls are an integral part of the structure, that would likely not be the limiting case and the walls would be even stronger than that.

Some more evidence that they had considered these things would have been nice, but civil structures are quite a bit stronger than people here seem to be giving them credit for. For example, the vertical design load from people walking on a bridge like this is something like 100 lb/ft^2. Meaning the bridge is designed to hold one jacuzzi every 10 or 15 feet, depending on how wide it is.

Except that in your scenario why would anyone mine at $20 and hold when they could just buy at $10 and hold, doubling their return? With super-low transaction and storage costs, there's nothing special about the BTC I mined relative to the BTC I bought.

This kind of isolation is very interesting to me. There is a lot of space out there, and there are probably a lot of acres that only get one human visitor every 5 years. I'd give myself a 1% chance of noticing the rifle if I walked past, based on this picture. So it's not at all surprising that the last time anyone looked at this tree was in the 19th century.

If the LN2 is still liquid, then it is boiling. If you had a pocket of LN2 trapped inside the ice cream, it would boil and you would notice your ice cream venting. If the LN2 was still liquid and dispersed throughout the ice cream, then the ice cream would be -196C and you would not be able to eat it.

As long as your food or drink are not spewing off large amounts of gaseous nitrogen, there should be no liquid nitrogen in them.

These are the same hospitals which charge markups of tens of thousands of dollars per patient. If the Medicare number of residents was really suboptimal, then more residents should allow them to treat more patients and make more money.

In reference to the 100W power carrying capacity:

That seems to me like a lot of power to be sending through a 0.5mm wide contact pin separated from the data pin by another 0.5mm. I see elsewhere that they have upped the voltage to 20V, which reduces the current required - is that all it takes?

Often university patent agreements are flexible, but agreements like 1/3 to research team, 1/3 to university (with some set aside for the hosting department), and 1/3 to the funding agency (depending on what's allowed by law) are not atypical.

That's the entire point of history classes, and makes a lot more sense than saying "in your first class you will learn every fact between the year 0 and 1000, in your second class between 1001 and 1500, ...". It's much more effective to start off with by providing context, then as minds get more educated to get into details.

The object of high school history wasn't to teach you the names of all the kings of England. It was to give you a context to understand the modern world. [1]

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html

The roomba achieves this through rather large contact pads on the base of the charger, which scaled up to car-size would be about 50cm across. What happens when my cat walks under my car and onto a large metal plate with a few kW of power flowing through it?

In the first place it's pretty hard to ignore the moral argument. If moral arguments are out, and we accept the thesis that population is bad, then it's hard to see why purposefully letting people suffer and die from TB is any better than using nuclear bombs to reduce the global population.

But anyways, if we want to get around to a sustainable post-scarcity futuristic utopia, we need a global population of economically developed and educated people with replacement-level fertility. And when childhood mortality goes down, parents have an incentive to concentrate their investments (both economic and educational) into fewer children. Those children will be more successful, have better access and education about contraception, and won't need to have plenty of children to provide manual labor on their farm.

Anyways, that's how it's supposed to work, and has worked many times in recent history. I put less stock than others in the extrapolated results from the recent UN Africa study.

This analysis and the xkcd one linked below both neglect the concept of staging - which could get you higher. As a first order try you could replace the human on the bed of guns with a smaller bed of guns supporting a squirrel - now you're twice as high! Of course at that point there is nothing stopping you from reaching the moon except for your gun budget and how much unobtanium you can get for the bed connecting structure.

>The Dead Sea was subject to drastic climate changes in the past. “It was once much lower than today,” Lazar said. Yet over the centuries, natural processes prevented the sea from drying up. “At some point, an equilibrium will be reached between natural evaporation and what little water enters the lake through groundwater springs, rain, and runoff,” he adds. “So I don’t know what people mean when they talk about saving the Dead Sea.”

I'm amused by the conservationist here adopting the arguments usually used by global warming skeptics. If you just replace the XX liters/hour of the Jordan River flow that they want restored with XX liters/hour of Red Sea water, it's hard to see how things are not made better.

It seems good to note that neighborhood power co-ops would smooth out demand fluctuations, but not necessarily supply fluctuations.

Except that apple doesn't want to sell computers for C$, because all it can buy with them is ditches.

I agree. We definitely need to get rid of this arcane base 60 unit of time and express our speeds in meters per microyear.

Interesting video, but the title is a complete fabrication - no myths were debunked.

It is sad that with all the would-be entrepreneurs flocking to Silicon Valley and looking for startup ideas, they all shy away from 'hard' problems like disrupting the current ISP model.

This attitude is exactly what they are counting on - 80% of the people being oblivious to their crimes and 20% being upset but convinced nothing can be done. There have certainly been times when populist outrage has led to change or consequences for those at the top (in the US, try the 1890s, 1930s, 1960s, late 1980s).

Having lived only in DC and SF bay area, I find HOV lanes to be much faster relative to traffic in DC. The data is less reliable, but I also observed HOV cheating to be much more common in CA, and enforcement to be stronger in DC.

This is important, but what would be interesting is whether they will pay open access fees on top of your grant, or let you pay open access fees with your grant. The first option would obviously be preferable, especially since you can easily be publishing work after using up your direct grant money.

The negotiation tactic isn't surprising, no. I was commenting on the fact that he was using the fact that he didn't win the concession in order to claim the moral high ground.

Musk has said that the incentives add up to 5% of the short term investments and 1% of the long term costs of actually running the factory. I could see relocating the factory from Texas to Nevada for that kind of savings, but moving it to China seems harder to imagine.

He leaves out the part about how they unsuccessfully tried to demand such a payment with the old "I'll just take my toys and leave" play.

>Then Musk talked to Sandoval about two weeks later, and the deal was suddenly off. Musk had changed his demands. He now wanted a staggering $500 million in cash upfront instead of some of the tax abatements. This was simply impossible for Nevada. The state didn’t have that kind of money—its entire budget is just $6.5 billion—and it wasn’t about to write a half-billion-dollar check.

>For a second time, Nevada’s team braced itself and said no. “The conversations got pretty darn tense,” says Hill. “Tesla was not happy.”

>The company made its pique apparent: On July 23 it shut down the grading work outside Reno, abruptly sending 240 construction workers home. O’Connell explains Tesla’s attitude this way: “Okay, fine, if it’s not going to work in Nevada, we’ll take our shovel and go somewhere else.”

The image here of all the states falling over themselves to impress the popular kid seems straight out middle school, and I don't see much for the supporters of Tesla or the state to be proud of. The fact is that if all of these states had just told Tesla to screw off and not offered anything, the factory would be built in the most economically efficient spot in the US, boost the national economy, and provide jobs. And if Nevada didn't win this factory, it would win the next one - without paying $1.4B to do it.

Instead, Tesla used their outsize market influence to shake down the state for as much cash as possible. In the absence of these payoffs, states would have to compete on 'business-friendliness' by changing their tax structure or building permit process - improvements which would be good for all businesses. Instead we have one set of rules for those at the top of the pyramid and one set for everyone else.