Give a couple years and energy density of batteries will be on par with kerosene.

A: Has to be at least double. The mass of the fuel drops as you use it up, the mass of a battery does not. So for the fuel/battery power actually used (the bulk of it) you have twice the weight/distance load for batteries vs. fuel at the same energy density.

That's a scientific fact any science aware person is already aware of.

B: ORLY? Citation please.

Seems to me this will drive the state-of-the-art on GPS spoofing, to the point that it becomes accessible and inexpensive enough for individual developers to arrange a test cell for not much more than the price of a laptop.

This, of course, would have all sorts of problems, as it would also make it accessible to common criminals and self-funded terrorist cells.

I don't know, man. I've been using it for certain things until now, but seeing it listed alongside Gnome, PHP, and systemd, makes me question whether I should be using it at all. Is it possible that I have simply failed to *notice* that it's extremely terrible in some obvious way?

Cryptocurrency essentially *is* fiat. It's just... decentralized fiat. The reasons people believe it's worth something are different than with a traditional fiat currency, and rhetoric notwithstanding it's more of an investment asset than a currency, but fundamentally, it's only worth whatever people believe it's worth. It's not backed by any kind of tangible specie. That's pretty much the definition of fiat (in the context of financial assets).

There's money involved.

The ethereum itself isn't currency; but it's an asset that people purchase as an investment, which puts it into the same _general_ category as currencies, stocks, bonds, futures contracts, and so on and so forth. Cryptocurrency in general (not just ethereum specifically but also bitcoin and others) is a bit unusual as such assets go, in that it A) has no tangible value except "whatever people will pay for it", like a fiat currency, but B) is not backed by any of the usual sorts of trusted organizations (like central banks) that generally back fiat currencies. This is a somewhat odd combination, but it's not completely unprecedented. There are for example hedge funds that take a net-short position, so that in technical terms they aren't reliably backed by anything really tangible either. It's not advisable to keep your entire net worth tied up in that kind of investment, but as part of a larger portfolio, it can be manageable.

It's important, in contexts like this, to realize that even currency is not precisely the same thing as money. If it were, the government could easily make everyone rich by just printing more currency. That has occasionally been tried, by people who really didn't understand how money works. None of those experiments turned out very well, for reasons that ought to be obvious. Currency is principally important as a proxy for money, and in everyday life when you're going to the store and buying something mundane like a pack of gum, the difference can be largely ignored (provided the currency is reasonably stable). But when you start talking about macroeconomics and investments and stuff, it's important to know the difference.

It's really not sci-fi. It's fantasy in space, also sometimes called "space opera". The arguments that the fans have, consistently don't have anything to do with the physics of how the technology works, because that's not important to the series.

I don't think this is so much "Don't do that, bad things will happen" as "Don't use our facilities to do that, it makes our insurance company's lawyer nervous." It doesn't take very much to make an insurance company's lawyer nervous. Pretty much using any facility for any purpose that the facility wasn't specifically *intended* to be used for, is going to be a problem in this kind of context. If you have a gym, you can play basketball in it, and your insurance company will probably be cool with that; but if you start allowing teenagers to roller skate in the gym, and the insurance company gets wind of it, you're going to have a problem. Spraying saltwater into the atmosphere to see if it changes the clouds, is clearly not what the museum ship was meant to be used for, so yeah, the insurance company's not gonna like it. That's not what they agreed to insure.

> I wouldn't think salt would be classified as a chemical.

Dude, NaCl is one of the top five most famous and widely known chemical formulae among laypersons. *Gradeschool* children memorize it.

Eh, I don't think it's a _bad_ move as such, but I don't know that it'll necessarily accomplish a great deal either.

Among other things, the CCP can just exit-visa-block anyone they prefer to keep. I mean, they won't do that for mundane run-of-the-mill workers with no strategic significance (because those people can be easily replaced anyhow), but if you've got anybody over there who is perceived to be *important* to the business or to the development of the technology, you may not be able to get them out, or else they won't be able to get their _families_ out.

So yeah, in this situation, you're gonna have to replace some people. You don't have to like it, but it's what you're gonna have to do. There isn't really any getting around it.

DNA is expensive to maintain, from a biological stand point. Why would nature select for simple pairs chromosomes but fill them with 90%+ junk. Why not "spend" your DNA budget on tetra+ chromosome groups and less junk?

Because such clean-up requires a mechanism, which doesn't exist until it gets evolved. Carrying along some broken-and-disabled junk in long-term program storage doesn't cost enough to be a strong selection pressure, so under just mutate-and-select it can hang around for a long time.

Also, if it is the remnant of a functional subsystem, until it drifts too far it might again come in useful, randomly get turned on again, and provide an advantage. After it drifts into doing something somewhat different, it might get turned on again, prove adventitious, and become the basis of a new system.

Lifeforms don't have to be built to superb standards. They only have to be good enough to work, and to work well enough to not get squeezed out by something that works better.

So it's entirely plausible that a lot of DNA junk might be present.

Which is not to say that there ISN'T one or more DNA-cleanup mechanisms currently in place in some branches of life. (Probably evolved from old retroviruses, like several known mechanisms for DNA alteration.)

But it's a hard problem. (How does the mechanism know not to take out something necessary? If there's something it avoids chopping out, what's to keep junk DNA from masquerading as good DNA to hide from it? Junk DNA subsequences are still subject to evolution and hiding from a DNA cleanup mechanism is advantageous to the DNA.)

I remember hearing scientists saying most of DNA was junk left over from evolutionary processes.

I recall, back in the sixties, a co-worker speculating that, considering the genome as a program and presuming a creator (or creation engineering team), the non-coding DNA might be the program's comments.

And wondering whether, if so, they should be considered "holy writ".

The cytoplasm of the Ovum contains a LOT more RNA machinery than does that of the sperm. What does this imply about heritable traits?

My take: That they are in fine control of the allocation of precious resources.

The sperm is a messenger, trying to deliver its copy of the plans to an ovum (the only one, or one of a very few, within reach) in competition with hundreds of millions of others, not all necessarily from the same male (or to bias the race toward others that have versions of the plans more like its own). So it's stripped down like a greyhound, both so it can run faster/better and so the male can make more of them to improve it's own odds of getting one through.

The ovum is a factory for building a new being. It has a whole bunch of machinery set up and ready to go, so it can get on with the task as soon as the other half of the plans arrive. Only one or a very few are in operation at a time, so plenty of resources can be spent on each one, both on initial inventory of construction material and ready-to-run machinery, all of which will eventually be needed.

Tariff typos:
* Aluminum/steel: From 7.5% to 25% in 2924... 2024 of course.
* Lithium batteries and battery components... 206 for others (e.g. Solar system storage).... 2026

Meanwhile, as of last Tuesday, Biden has imposed or raised tariffs on solar panels, aluminum and steel for them, batteries, electronics, etc..

  * Solar cells and panels: Raised from 25% to 50% in 2024
  * Aluminum/steel: From 7.5% to 25% in 2924
  * Lithium batteries and battery components (e.g. Battery Management Systems.) From 7.5% to 25%: in 2024 for EV batteries, 206 for others (e.g. Solar system storage). Of course some cell types are dual-use so bare cells will be assumed to be "for EVs" and solar equipment manufacturing them will have to move to China to prove they're not really being used for cars.
  * "computer chips" - including semiconductors used in inverters, BMSes, solar charge controllers, etc.: From 25% to 50% by 2025.

I could go on.

So, wait, are farmers no longer capable of driving the tractor manually?

Seriously?