Comment Re:How are they rocky? (Score 1) 67
That should actually be that Kepler-444 is of the same type as Alpha Centauri B, the smaller secondary star in that system. The primary star in Alpha Centauri is a G dwarf (yellow) like our sun.
That should actually be that Kepler-444 is of the same type as Alpha Centauri B, the smaller secondary star in that system. The primary star in Alpha Centauri is a G dwarf (yellow) like our sun.
What's interesting about this star though, is that according to the paper, Kepler-444 is not some primordial supergiant, but a K dwarf (orange, of the same type as Alpha Centauri) with a smaller companion red dwarf (or possibly two companion red dwarf stars which are closely bound to each other).
I'm sorry, you've reached an imaginary number at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Please rotate your dial 90 degrees and try your call again.
There were two main types: the drum printer and the chain printer. The drum printer was cheaper and therefore much more common. The drum, which contained all the characters in a given font, rotated once for each row printed. An entire row was printed simultaneously; a separate solenoid-driven hammer in each column fired at the right instant to print the desired character in that column. You could easily tell from across the room whether your program had failed to compile or if execution ended with a core (!) dump. The burst pages between jobs had their own highly characteristic sound.
A related sound is that of ripping fanfold line printer paper to separate jobs. Who uses any kind of fanfold paper these days? Or even paper...?
Oh, and let's not forget the sound of the Hollerith (IBM punch card) reader...
Have you read the entirety of the 21st Amendment? It completely breaks interstate commerce. Why can't I buy liquor on Sundays in some states and cannot cross a state line with some purchased in a neighboring state ever? Because the 21st Amendment makes alcohol special and allows each locality to have completely crazy laws prohibiting the TRANSPORTATION of alcohol through their jurisdiction.
Section 1. The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.
Section 2. The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.
Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by conventions in the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.
Great so you see that in the future your employees' jobs will be automated away (maybe not in your working lifetime but sometime) and are likely wealthy yourself. You are arguing that new jobs will appear for your employees', they are likely far poorer than yourself. What are you doing to create jobs for your employees once they lose their jobs? In the Great Depression the government stepped in and created jobs just to get people working and kick the economy out of the no-demand cycle it was in. Within the US most people arguing that automation won't lead to a doomsday scenario are also against the government solving these problems, yet they are not trying to solve them either. So who is? It will take a lot of capital to create a (or many) new job sectors, who is investing in that? Who is going to pay for the re/education of our workforce?
I don't mean to pick on you in particular nor do I really think that automation is the doomsday that some claim. However, I do think that we should be thinking about this now. Investing in education now. Investing in new industries now. But we, or rather the wealth holders, are not.
An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.