This is the same Beal who founded Beal Aerospace. Also the same Beal who challenged the world's best professional poker players to the highest one-on-one Texas Hold'Em games ever played ($100,000/$200,000 IIRC). Also, this isn't an equation to be 'solved'. It's a conjecture to be proved (or disproved).

If you used wind power only at peak production, you could probably satisfy that criterion. It's not necessarily unlikely.

Precious metals were abandoned as currencies due to Gresham's Law, more or less. Gold circulated as coinage in the US until it was confiscated, thereafter silver circulated as coinage until further currency debasement resulted in the remaining silver coins being melted down or hoarded as their metal value became sufficiently greater than their face value. There was nothing intrinsic to precious metals that made them become obsolete as currency. Do you think that the central banks of the world hold their thousands of tons of gold just for fun?

Why anyone would switch their email provider *to* Yahoo I have no idea. At least I have an excuse, since I've had my email there for ten years and don't want to go to the trouble of changing it. But between the unexplained service outages (unable to retrieve emails, sometimes for hours at a time) and the security holes (get your contact list downloaded if you click on a bad link) I have no idea why anyone would choose it over other offerings, if they were starting fresh.

I think the technical difficulties are greater than you are making them out to be. You're talking about trying to automatically pwn some unknown box that just contacted yours. Unless the hacker is really stupid, he's not going to have the kinds of open ports, services, and other associated vulnerabilities that many internet machines would have. The utmost you could plausibly do is DDoS the attacker, if you happen to have your own botnet handy. Furthermore, the odds that the attacker is using some third party's platform as a launch pad is probably pretty high. If you did manage to trample all over such a device, they'd just chuckle and use some other zombie under their control.

I would expect the g forces on impact with the ground to be higher than those on parachute opening, even if they're transient. But overall I agree with your comment: parachute drop is not really the same as 'falling from the sky', and doesn't require much special preparation for the server. Maybe some packing peanuts.

No degree, here. And you're changing the terms of the discussion: you claimed 'I'd never see 80k at the position that should be paid at 80k.', i.e. you are saying that your salary is highly dependent on your previous salary history. I'm pointing out that this is a pretty short term effect in the vast majority of cases. It's true that it might take a few years to close the gap if you accept a position that pays less than you're worth, but it won't doom you forever. Or even for very long. And personally I think doubling my salary in nine years is quite respectable. No doubt there are real go-getters who have much bigger success stories, but I don't think it's anything to sniff at.

I don't agree. People can and do get very substantial raises if they do standout work. I went from $35K per year to $48K in two years at one job, and later from $45K to $75K in six years in an entirely different field. It's true that at the very high end, where you're trying to do something like make partner at a big law firm, the kind of path dependency you're talking about applies. But for 95+% of the work force your salary will ultimately come to match your performance.

For young people (those still looking for a mate, in particular), taking a factory job would be a big blow to their status, regardless of the level of pay. Better an unemployed white collar professional than an employed manufacturing worker, welder, or truck driver. It's similar in the US. Financially the median person is better off becoming a truck driver at 19 than pursuing a law degree (and racking up the associated debt), but being a trucker is really socially limiting. Likewise manufacturing in China, I expect.

Hotter and more dynamic might be great for evolving bacteria, but it might be problematic for things like civilizations or intelligent life. One of the improbable things about Earth IMO is not that life evolved in the first place, but that the surface remained kinda sorta stable for oh, two billion years - long enough for it to grow incredibly complex. A lot of heat and dynamism might get you life evolving over and over to the multi-celled organism stage - and then getting wiped out.

I think it's fascinating that one of the strategies employed by their bot was the use of non-standard bet sizes. It worked as a way of taking their opponents out of their library (of standard situations), so their play was worse. Thing is, the same thing works to an extent against human players: make weird bets and your opponents have to adjust their heuristics. Some of them may make mistakes.

But the problem is that *because* the use of jargon implies that the speaker has mastered some technical and difficult subject, there is an incentive to use (even invent) jargon when it is totally unnecessary, just for the extra cred. Your doctor examples kind of suggest this. Other good medical examples are 'cryptogenic' or 'of unknown etiology', fancy ways of saying we don't know what caused it. There's also jargon as a way of signaling group membership, but that's a whole other can of worms. Maybe that's not even technically jargon.

In fact rather the opposite - it says that the reliability of the machines is 'competitive' or 'rivals' the human curators. That's marketing speak for 'not quite as good just yet'.

Who's paying for this? I mean, it's really cool... but at the same time I don't think I could justify dropping $1 billion on something like this given our current deficit.

Maybe. In actuality I think it would be hard to create a fake Facebook account for a real person and make extended use of it (i.e. not get busted, quickly). First you'd want to verify that they didn't already *have* an account; then, after creating the account and presumably friending some of the actual friends of the person, you'd have to just lurk and passively gather information. Even then I expect that sooner or later someone would ask them about their facebook account IRL, and then it would be game over.