The guy was just afraid the evolution of the species would be screwed up if individuals were immortal.

I don't really like the arguments that a character drawn looking like a human child could be older according to the story, but I do think the opposite is a minefield. Loads of manga/cartoon porn features adult-looking characters that are underage in the original non-porn story and (I'd assume, lol) lots of people fap to these without knowing or caring that the original wasn't 18.

In addition there's a lot of hentai where many wouldn't think twice about the risk of someone being underage but looking more carefully at it one could make a fairly convincing argument someone is under 18.

A Swedish case had the entire court room laughing when the prosecutor claimed a manga character giving a blowjob was obviously underage because of the undeveloped boobs when it was actually gay porn.

I don't feel any attraction to underage women and have never to my knowledge seen actual child porn on the net (Samantha Fox's boobs and Scorpion's Virgin Killer album don't count) but fapping to completely normal manga could technically land me in jail. That's fucking scary. I'll have to fap to non-normal manga for now.

Getting even 2k in 50s would be annoying. Alko can usually give change on a 500 if you need to break it. (Alko = state booze monopoly for the non-Finns)

I can't see how using hundreds would really inconvenience criminals either. A quick search says a million would weigh 2kg in 500s, meaning 10kg in 100s. Smuggling huge sums across national borders might become harder but otherwise, who cares.

Funny to see a branch of the US government that actually has to deal with reality.

800 euro locally. A GTX 970 seems like overkill / waste of money for my purposes, so I guess I'll wait a month or two.

Thanks again for the help!

So upgrading to about 40" with 4k shouldn't be a problem

Ok, so it's a somewhat reasonable idea to get 60Hz on a TV without spending the cash for a 4k monitor.

Thanks, I'll have a look at these.

Good info, thanks

I'm thinking about upgrading my monitor to 4k but I'm a bit confused about the current situation with both connectors and screens. How is running 4k@30Hz for normal desktop purposes, with no 3d gaming? Are the cheap 4k 39-40" TVs completely fine for those purposes? What connector(s) do I need from my GPU? How long would I have to wait for GPUs and TVs/monitors to support 4k@60Hz (HDMI 2.0? Displayport x.y?). Can I connect more than one screen to a single GPU card if I want 4k?

This might be a candidate for Ask Slashdot, I guess

Obviously a battery factory will have some amount of batteries on site. The 2400 MWh/day figure from the article would be around 30 000 full Model S battery packs, so going completely off-grid using whatever batteries they have lying around is unfeasible. Anyway, no point in not using them, right?

The number of possible sites increases considerably when you add reversible pumps to the mix - many places in Europe use hydro dams with reversible pumps to help smooth out power from other sources: use the dams for extra power during peak hours and pump the water back up with excess production from other sources (including other dams which may have excess water level to ditch) during off-peak so the dam does not need to depend entirely on local rainfall and rivers.

This sort of dual-reservoir setup is one of few efficient ways of doing large-scale energy storage for semi-predictable energy sources like solar and wind where you otherwise have to use produced energy on-the-spot or lose it.

People. Bored, often too intelligent for their own good, people.

How long before trolls figure out they can drive their cars close enough and in such a manner that self driving cars execute lane changes to avoid accidents and pull off the freeway? Or until someone realizes they can jam the car's sensors and the poor passenger, with no access to a steering wheel, can't convince the car to pull out of the open parking spot it's convinced it's barricaded in?

How long before an Amazon delivery drone comes in to a house that's observed to regularly get deliveries and gets a blanket tossed over it before being purloined by nerds who just got a sweet free drone to try hacking?

Wind gusts happen. You can factor in for a typical wind gust, a severe wind gust, a once in a century wind gust. You can factor in for different types of hardware failure, for power loss, etc. You can factor in for trees, for tall buildings, for cables... They're finite problem sets.

But bored people? They're infinite.

Can't the wind farms just use gas turbines instead of batteries as long as those are cheaper? I'd assume batteries will be used if/when they become the cheapest way to handle the balancing.

Some day soon, in some areas, there will be enough solar to handle most power needs at peak insolation. When that happens, we'll have significantly cheaper grid power in the day than during the night. Then we'll see how much of the balancing water can do and if batteries can outcompete gas for the rest.

If you have a source of melting fresh water, water around it will be slightly higher as long as the melting continues, as it takes time for the meltoff to mix with the rest of the ocean. It's just a 2mm difference over maybe a thousand km of sea (which is why the intuitive "should immediately even out" idea doesn't work) so I doubt you could make the same effect visible in a bathtub.

10+ years ago, performance was more than doubling every two years through a combination of higher clocks, die shrinks, extra transistors, fundamental breakthroughs in logic circuit designs, etc. Right now, mainstream CPUs are only ~60% faster than mainstream CPUs from four years ago because clocks are stuck near the 4GHz mark, die shrinks are becoming much slower in coming, nearly all fundamental breakthroughs have been discovered and modern hardware is already more powerful than what most people can be bothered with so there is a general lack of demand for significantly faster low-mid-range CPUs to make things worse.

Progress is slowing down and I can only imagine it getting worse in the future.