Sure, maybe it's competitive with a bottom-end office desktop, where the most intense thing it has to run is Youtube.
But it's competitive with a $500 desktop, while it costs $1000. It's not hard to get similar performance when you literally double your budget.
I vehemently disagree. I highly recommend taking the 16 minutes and 39 seconds to actually watch the most compelling part of the documentary before trying to wave it away as "gloomy documentaries." For you to say such a thing shows that, contrary to your statement, you are denying the presence of pollution--or at least the social responsibility we all have to improve our health, life spans, and quality of life by regulating pollution.
I live in Washington DC and spend a great deal of time worrying about my health and the health of my children because our air quality here can get so bad that we have Red Ozone Days where we are told to keep our children inside, especially if they have any respiratory conditions, which they are more likely to have thanks to the poor air quality. I think it a blessing that NASA and the EPA monitor our air quality and that the local papers light a fire of panic under everyone's feet about the need to improve it because childhood leukemia and other cancers aren't something we should just shrug at.
Awareness of pollution is why we have Catalytic converters in our cars to dramatically reduce the toxic nature of the exhaust coming out of them. It's why we banned Lead Gasoline and ended the crime wave having that chemical in our brains unleashed on our culture. It's why air quality has improved over the last 10 years as new technologies, improved MPG, and other environmental regulations, but we still have much more to do.
It's also a moral issue for us, because our Made-In-China marketplace is why they have so much pollution. We want cheap goods and they turn a blind eye to the pollution to keep the products cheap. But that pollution is making it's way back to us over the Pacific Ocean. I want to keep buying cheap stuff from China, but I am also willing to pay a little more if it allows the Chinese people to improve their health.
The Chinese government should let people understand the science and choose for themselves.
I am not the Sith you're looking for. You don't need to see my identification.
Well, there's one simple brute-force solution: create a world government. If one government runs everything, they get automatic jurisdiction over everything, and have one universal set of laws to apply everywhere.
Which, when you think about it, kinda makes sense. It's weird that laws change based on which arbitrary piece of dirt you happen to be standing on.
Peer-reviews on everything I write below are greatly appreciated. I want to make sure I understand this equation.
io9 has a pretty down-to-earth explanation of the equation:
FIT Treadmill Score = %MPHR + 12(METS) - 4(age) + 43(if female)
You can get your MPHR for your age here. I found a chart of METS here for various exercises.
So, if I'm understanding this correctly. If I reach a 160 heart rate out of 179.0 MPHR predicted for my 41 years of age while running 12 minute miles worth 8.5 METS. My score would be:
83.7 + 12(8.5) - 4(41) = 21.7
The same heart rate for my age running 8 minute miles:
83.7 + 12(8.5) - 4(41) = 69.7
If I am understanding this correctly, it really looks like you could easily improve your score with a few lifestyle choices (push yourself harder when you work out, eat healthier). This equation could be a great metric for people concerned about their health
The measures of how well an economy is working is not "how much money is in the system", but "how much money is moving", and "how much of the economic system does that money reach?". Money that does not move does not do work, and people that do not give and receive money are not part of the economic system.
Consider two hydraulic systems. One has a massive 200L of hydraulic fluid since it leaks so much, but most of it is in a reservoir, and it only produces 10N of work on a small 10cm^2 area. The other has only 1L of hydraulic fluid, but it reaches pressures of 10Pa, doing several kilonewtons of work.
Which one is working better? Obviously the second one.
Oil-based Middle-Eastern economies are like the first one. They may make a lot of money, but only a few people get that money or its benefits, and the money leaks out of the country almost immediately.
A good economy is like America's, or Germany's (and yes, these economies are relatively good - could be better, but good). The money does pool around the rich, but not nearly as much (most of the "wealth" of the ultra-rich is in assets, not cash), and the trade with foreign countries is mostly balanced. Mostly. And there are very few people who do not participate in the economy - even people on welfare get money, then spend it. They're idle parts in the machine, but still part of the machine.
ISIS thrives because they're getting money in from elsewhere (coughsaudiarabiacough), and getting the cheapest possible people you can.
I think someone in the Science Online community put it best, "Facebook is my private life; Google+ and Twitter are my public life." Facebook is where I go when I want to see my friends' family photos and get a list of small-talk conversation topics for when I hang out with them in real life. I have no interest in following celebrities, politics, or other topics on Facebook because the conversations there are too inane.
Google+ is where I go when I want to have political debates, read science news, or be exposed to fascinating ideas. The conversation on G+ is heavily nerdy because the community is heavily nerdy. I go there for the same reason I read
That said, I think it makes sense to break out Google Photos. That is an application I have come to really appreciate. It backs up all my phone's photos and videos, automatically creates scrapbooks and artwork out of them, and has created a timeline of my life. I highly recommend it for anyone using Android.
They aren't getting many recruits from Western countries. They're getting *prominent* recruits.
The problem is that ones of those rules we follow is "go in guns blazing".
You want to stop ISIS? Fix the Middle-East's economy. Give people stable, productive jobs. That alone will slash recruitment simply by giving most of their local recruits a better option, one they currently *do* *not* *have*. Most of the local ISIS recruits are in ISIS simply because it pays. Not well, but better than nothing. Same goes for al-Shabaab and al-Quaeda and Boko Haram and pretty much every terrorist group operating from a third-world country.
You want to make sure ISIS doesn't come back the next time a depression hits? Build schools, staff them - an educated populace won't fall for the simple rhetoric of the mob-leader. Build mosques, staff them with liberal imams, to dilute the message of the bad ones. Build infrastructure so they can actually communicate with the rest of the world. Bring them up to a modern level, just to give them something to lose, if they fall again - most of them see ISIS as a viable cause because they don't really have anything to lose.
A military solution - ANY military solution, up to and including "nuke the entire subcontinent into glass" - is at best temporary. In a good solution, the military will only be used as a stopgap to make it safe enough to implement the real solution.
Up until last Thursday night, I completely agreed with you. I thought that if an object had enough mass to pull itself into a sphere, it should be a planet. I thought the IAU's definition of planet was an offense to reason--well, I still think it is. Requiring an object to have "cleared its orbit" is a silly concept that would mean gas giants larger than Jupiter would be "Dwarf Planets" if they were found in a proto-planetary disc. The name, "Dwarf Planet," is completely stupid and offensive. How is a "Dwarf Planet" not a planet if it has "Planet" in the #$%^ing name???
Then, just this last Thursday night, I attended a lecture by the very engaging, highly-studied Neil deGrasse Tyson. The guy who declassified Pluto as a planet in the Hayden Planetarium exhibits long before the IAU did so officially. He explained to us that Pluto was mostly a dirty ball of ice... like a comet. In fact, if it were in orbit around the Earth, it would have a tail.
That took me aback. If Pluto is just a particularly large Kuiper Belt object--if Pluto is just a large comet that isn't close enough to the Sun to melt, then I must admit that it doesn't make sense to call it a planet.
This is a bit of an iconoclasm for me, so I'm still figuring out my position on the matter, but I'm leaning toward accepting that Pluto is not a planet, but that the IAU is a bunch of numbskulls who need to fix their illogical, nonsensical definition of "Planet" and take the word "Planet" out of their labels for things that aren't planets. This is the kind of political bullcrap that turns kids off to science.
Of course, all this could change when New Horizons reaches Pluto this July.
It's not Beta. It still works, more-or-less. Beta had a comment section that was completely impossible to browse or work with - considering the comments are the only real draw, it's no surprise it was dead on arrival.
This looks like just some styling to make Slashdot look less 2002. Still odd that they don't talk about it, but that's Dice for you. We're no longer the "community", we're the "audience"; we're supposed to just sit there and take it.
The problem, even with a spinal cord cut intentionally and carefully, is that the surgeon has no way to know what connections in the head go to what connections in the body. Our nervous system-brain interface isn't a blueprinted thing at birth, our brains are actually born with no knowledge of the nerves running through our bodies. Our brains and bodies learn to interface with one another via "neural pruning." The brain is born with a bazillion* neurons, far more than it needs, but this is to account for all the possible nerve connections. Then, as the body grows, the nerves send signals to the brain, and those neurons that don't receive signals die off, leaving the neurons that are properly wired into the body. In other words, our brains grow by natural selection.
So how is a surgeon supposed to wire up a body to a brain that hasn't grown into that body? How is a brain pruned in childhood to interface with a body of certain dimensions and nerve-wirings supposed to interface with a body of completely different dimensions? It's not just a problem of lining up the nerves in the donor body with the right connections in the patient's head (a seemingly impossible task in and of itself), its the fact that the nerves in one person's body are going to be a very different set of wires than those in the the head. Many of the major nerves will match, but the signals from those nerves will be very different.
I wish this researcher the best of luck, and I imagine we will benefit tremendously from the new information we get from this research, but I suspect the final result will simply discover what the next challenge is to performing a successful head transplant.
*Technical term.
"It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him." -Arthur C. Clarke
