This is a great mental image.

True it's not miraculous. It's really pretty good stuff though. Cotton production uses something like 5% of agricultural land and huge amounts of pesticides (some of which are not used for edible plants, which I think is telling). Flax (linen) is good too, and can make nicer fabric, but hemp is stronger (because of longer fibers) and higher-yielding. Really, the fiber length of hemp is a great property. I think the main reason hemp would not displace cotton is the inertia of industry, not commerce or environmental considerations.

I think a better car analogy would be, "Look, freeways just came into existence, but you need a faster car than your model T."

I thought about this a lot while reading through old Russian novels (pre-revolution). It seemed to me that people actually had a lot of respect for civil servants and would have accepted medals or awards instead of money. Now leaders just walk the revolving door, and it's 100% about the $$$.

Even if it only made 0.0001% nitric oxide and some kind of catalytic converter caught 95% of that, it would still destroy the environment faster than fossil fuels. And that's if none of the ammonia ever escaped from vehicles, let alone the industrial production and transport.

I don't think that vehicles fueled by ammonia would be better for the environment than fossil fuels. This could be true if we didn't make mistakes or none of our vehicles ever leaked anything. But thousands of vehicles loaded with gallons of toxic gas cannot be safe, let alone the waste and by-products, both in manufacture and consumption. I'm not sure if huge increases in acid rain would be nicer than global warming. I'll grant it's not as bad as hydrazine.

How about we reuse all the fixed nitrogen we already made instead? Right now water in Toledo, Ohio is undrinkable because of algae blooms in Lake Eerie. I'm sure we use a lot of energy in the Haber process, but I think that's a trivial concern compared to the environmental problems we can cause if we keep pumping organic nitrogen into the environment. It could turn out to be a very very bad thing to do overall. I think we'd be way better off if we reduced ammonia production, rather than switching to a more efficient way to make ammonia. I'm all for innovation generally, but to me, this idea reeks.

Write an AI in Lisp.

These different patterns all exist for motors. 3-phase simplifies the design and deployment of induction motors used in industry. That is all. There's not a substantial difference between the efficiency or simplicity of various AC output formats. The various phases exist for historical reasons.

Haskell is hypothetically Turing complete, because of lazy evaluation.

I thought of the solution!
Just be a good person and work hard wherever you live. That way, you, your kids, and your friends won't want to move to a fuck-all overcrowded megapolis and scratch out a living in a hyper-competitve environment just to try to 'get ahead'. Simple. No more parking problems.

Sorry to reply to myself but I noticed I should be clear. When I said 'clip it at random points' I meant everywhere, so if we're encrypting ASCII then scramble it up into chunks no longer than say 10 bytes.

https://qrng.physik.hu-berlin.... for instance, or others. And to deal with the fact that a man-in-the-middle could intercept your pad, just download somewhat more than you need and clip it at random points (okay since we are talking crypto, pseudo-random). Then so long as the contents of the DVDs are never revealed, there will be no way for the man-in-the-middle to know what part of the pad to use to decrypt your data. Supposing it was text and they ran an algorithm to test every offset of the potential pad against your encrypted message, they would get about a bazillion false positives. Really I suspect dev/random would be good enough for most anything so long as the copy was physically delivered to the recipient. I hope someone could actually make a guess at how long it would take a computer to decrypt an ascii email padded with stored dev/random data so long as the interceptor could not access the stored pad (although maybe they could discover info about the system that produced it).

According to Dan Koeppel in his book linked here, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World there are scores of species and varieties of bananas. Many have annoying seeds, but many also have large amounts of vitamin A, and Koeppel discusses the fact that on some islands these are a major source of vitamin A for the populace. So, I'm not dead-set against GMOs, but why should anyone take the risks (even if they are low), when we could instead merely introduce more cultivars already bearing copious amounts of vitamin A, and let the best one win? This would not only avoid the whole GMO issue, but it would also introduce new flavors, and may reduce the chances of the plants from being wiped out by Panama disease or black sigatoka, which threaten bananas mainly because likely every banana you've ever eaten is genetically identical, which usually predisposes a population to diseases, if you didn't know.

I have not followed this topic very closely, but I think this is a sufficiently specific question with a sufficiently complicated answer to be worth asking: because people have to make large purchases I'm sure there's names involved, so will these transactions de-anonymize Bitcoin to a great extent? I understand agencies can already track specific blockchains if they really feel the need, but I wonder if this will make it much easier.