mohawk

The DNA analysis not only backs up the evidence, but it's is a different kind of evidence. Language or pottery styles could theoretically be transmitted without there being a trace in people's genomes. Memes vs genes if you will.

Sure, just insure your advanced fission reactors against desaster with a prudent insurer instead of relying on the government to bail you out in case anything happens. Proving something with long-tail risk is secure takes ages.

There are just too many ways to store energy to go through them here, and it doesn't make sense to take any single one and claim it cannot scale to the problem at hand.

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on the difficulty of storing energy vs. getting nuclear fusion working.

I think fusion would be great to have and research is important, but i'm also glad that we don't need to get it working real soon now.

A pretty big number if you do the math.

If you need more, sure, go for nuclear fusion.

Until then, just remember slow and steady usually wins the race.

Nobody needs can't-do engineers.

So he found out that lead-acid batteries aren't enough.

1) A fleet of electric/plug-in hybrid cars are a pretty big battery. Build more of those.

2) Power-to-gas seems like a good avenue, too. It also has an existing infrastructure.

http://www.eon.com/en/media/news/press-releases/2014/9/1/eon...

You can also generate methane instead of hydrogen. Not super-efficient at the moment, i know. But a solvable problem.

But this article originally stated we would need fusion to be able to survive without conventional fuels.

Solving the storage problem of renewables just seems so much easier than achieving nuclear fusion.

In the long run, the sky going dark is not such an unlikely scenario. Big asteroid impact or a large volcanic eruption would be enough. Or some big war, sadly we tend to have them quite frequently. I forgot that was the background story to The Matrix... :-)

I agree that fusion power would also be great for travelling into deep space. In the reeeally long run, there is no other choice for mankind.

We have a large and wonderful fusion reactor fully operational and running already, at a safe distance of 1.5e11 meters. All we have to do is harvest its energy output, with solar panels, windmills, or hydroelectric.

The price of panels has been going down by 15% a year for the last couple of years. What's more likely, incremental improvements to solar panels and batteries that make them the cheapest energy source, or a breakthrough in nuclear fusion? My bet is on the small but steady improvements...

I think fusion power is a useful thing to research though, in case the sky goes dark one day.

That seems like bad advice to me. A possible infinite loop is given as justification in case of wrongly implemented reverse iteration (counting down an unsigned loop variable). Well, i claim that an infinite loop is a much more noticeable bug than undefined overflow behaviour, negative view counts, etc. Unsigned ints will make bugs impossible that with signed ints will (hopefully, famous last words) trigger assertions, if they are enabled...

I don't like fear-mongering either. But nuclear only looks cheap because a lot of costs are externalised. Prudent calculation of costs of insurance against accidents and waste storage for centuries make it unprofitable. Improvements in reactor safety often leads to humans behaving more carelessly. It is a penny-wise, pound-foolish technology, especially in densely populated areas.

Probably. Decriminalization and being able to get hard drugs from a doctor would go a long way in reducing drug-related crime. I don't think society is ready for hard drugs in the supermarket aisle. At least i'm not ready for it.

It is the price. Not many people addicted to cheap legal drugs become criminals. To buy cigarettes or grog, it is enough to work a low-paying job or just beg for money. Personally, i don't believe you should be able to buy hard drugs in the supermarket, but there should be a cheap legal way to buy them from a doctor and get help at the same time.

Some property crimes are caused by people trying to fund their addiction to hard drugs.

The next sentence is

"The exact definition of the term commodity is specifically used to describe a class of goods for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market."

You cannot turn back the wheel of time.

Besides the speed aspect which most other people have mentioned, you can avoid running out of harddisk space.

I can tell you what my problem is with flash: the reference implementation by Adobe stinks.

I used to get upset about these things, but nowadays if a writeup of a paper bothers me or sounds weird, i just go to the original publication. This might be hard if you're not at a university or otherwise have access to the journals.

In this case i don't see anything particularly wrong. Just reading the abstract would tell you enough (linked from the article):

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/09/25/1313473110

The paper reports that the 28S RNA is split and that the ribosomes seem to be better at avoiding mistakes whilst keeping the same translation speed, and the authors speculate if these two things could be linked. And that's the gist from the Nat. Geo. article, too.

The statement is a little bit ambiguous, what is meant that he wrote the first phd thesis on the topic. I don't know if that is true, but at least that is what's claimed in the linked comment.

You can add 5% hydrogen to the natural gas in the german grid at the moment without changing much infrastructure, up to 15% in the medium term.

Here is a pilot project:

http://www.eon.com/en/media/news/press-releases/2013/6/13/po...

Convert energy to hydrogen, store and distribute via natural gas storage infrastructure, burn in gas plant when needed. Problem solved.

Passing the 500 mark means you have to hand in SEC filings, nothing more.

Hate to be a pedant, but the first people who reached North America were massacred by the ones who followed.

Exactly, and my point is that these homophobes, racists, etc. have much more in common with the Nazis than their passports make them believe. You could also argue that fighting against Hitler laid bare the hypocrisy of racial injustice in the United States of America, sparking the Civil Rights movement.

So unfortunately, in the end, the Nazis did manage to kill him.

This is not an 'experiment'. But please go on telling us that it is impossible, we'll get it done it even quicker. For an engineer, there is no better motivation.

First i wish to say good luck to your family, i hope you can find something.

Ok here's a guess:

Assuming missing deglycosylation and N-Glycanase's involvement in ERAD (endoplasmic-reticulum-associated protein degradation), perhaps there is amyloid fibril formation due to faulty protein degradation?

If yes, you may want to try out green tea or some kind of extract from it, in particular Epigallocatechin gallate sounds interesting. Besides antioxidant activity (which i guess could help with excessive glycosylation causing an oxidative environment), EGCG is thought to help in various diseases where protein aggregation plays a role. You can find lots of papers on this if you search for "epigallocatechin gallate amyloid" on Google scholar. I'm not a doctor, just a grad student (thanks for the guide!), so you should check with one first if that makes sense.

Printing money to service debt will most likely drive inflation higher, in turn driving up interest rates investors will demand from government bonds.

This escape route from a towering debt burden was tried by German post-WW1 governments, and lets just say it didn't go very well. It's the reason the Bundesbank is the way it is now.

Lets talk money.

I think it is only reasonable to ask that avoidable civilian technology be insured against harm done by it. So: how much would this insurance cost? Cleanup, health care costs, disability payments, loss of property?

Given just a slight increase in illness rate for the sheer number of people involved can give a hard to detect but significant cost. An insurer will have to set aside enough money for the expected amount of payout. What would Warren Buffett's premiums be? Some claims will be excluded by the insurer, and the rest of the population will probably be called to for economic assistance: how much will that be? What is the opportunity cost of having half a million people cleaning up the place instead of being productive?

Feel free to peruse the [IAEA report about Chernobyl](http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernoby...). What is the total economic cost? Maybe "hundreds of billions of dollars"? See the report for estimates.

So yes, we shouldn't run away from radiation. We should clean it up safely, then come to our senses and stop dispersing any more of it. This technology is a dead-end for normal energy production.

so i guess the solution is to only use https://www.facebook.com/ to login?

Sorry i completely misread your post, old content deleted.

Molecular dynamics, quantum chemistry?