It's always fun when someone forgets about the difference between the 'rule of law' vs 'rule of man'.
We live in a rule of law society, the kid you are likening things likely lives in a mixed mode household... where the parents can ground the child at any time and for any reason... but can't kill him for talking back.
It's a feedback system. The wind displaces the flat surface of the ocean into waves. Then those waves catch more wind, create turbulence. You can download or view any number of GPU based ocean wave simulators.
Look at what happens when an earthquakes occurs in one side of the Pacific, creating a tsunami which travels all the way across the ocean. With a storm over the ocean, the waves can reach 100 meters or more in height, and stretch for hundreds of meters (determined by a mathematical equation linking amplitude to wavelength and ocean floor depth). And the storm is 100 miles across.
I dunno. Has Obama come out in favor of it yet?
You could say the same about the difference between shopping malls and individual shop units. With housing, terraced homes are more energy efficient than detached homes since the common walls are usually at the same temperature compared to the outside.
Imagine you divided the space up into cubes, each the side of a shop. Each side of a cube can be outside air, insulated wall, uninsulated wall, open space. Suppose you have 1000 units. With individual stores, that's 5000 sides that need to be insulating. If you have one shopping mall, with shops side-by-side, there are only 500 sides that need insulating. Even with the extra floor space for plazas, staircases, that's still no more than a few hundred rooftops.
It's no different from an office block. Some modern designs actually have separate frameworks for the exterior walls and the floors, so you have a greenhouse architecture where each can be modified without affecting the other. It's just a dome but with flatter sides.
Ideally to power something like that, they'd really need to a giant massive solar power plant somewhere in the middle of a large desert, and maybe some energy storage based on pumped water.
Some companies only look for people with MSc's or a PhD, but then there are those companies which only consider those with higher qualifications for non-programming jobs. So it's something to think about if you consider doing a MSc as as "refresher" to learn new skills when the job market is tight.
Microsoft does a lot of its programming in India.
How much is 'a lot'? What %?
We all know that Indian programming is of poor quality, and the reason is not because Indian programmers are much less competent. It has more to do with the fact that in programming if two parties can't communicate completely unambiguously in one language then they have no hope of writing good software.
So that's a problem only with Indians? Not Chinese? Australians? Romanians? Turks? Russians? Nigerians?
If you hire those who can communicate well, where they came from is unimportant.
There was another variation where you could give the expert system a list of ingredients that you had available, and the system would tell you which drinks you could make and optionally how many.
Back in the 1990's, having a expert system that could generate the course timetables for the whole university was a holy grail of all AI departments. Most of the time it worked but every now and again it would generate courses that clashed, requiring some extra modification. Never knew whether they got it finally working.
It's the last 2.5% which involves a controlled collision with a rocky planet which is the worrying part.
Instruments are rendered in software on generic high-contrast LCD monitors. If one monitor fails, they can switch over to another display. If engine power fails, they have an auxiliary generator. The only time all four engines have failed is when going through the ash-cloud plume of a volcano.
The patent describes a 3D view or holographic view. That's going to be interesting. Some sci-fi stories have described the idea of flying an aircraft using a 360 view dome/cylinder with cameras projecting images from each direction. The pilot would have a complete 360 degree view all around. With the latest projection technology, this would work with stereoscopic glasses. If the system could see infra-red, then it would be possible to see through fog, mist and haze.
God made humans rational beings.
Telling people who collect stamps they're idiots could be a hobby.
Peer reviewed. Yeah, right. And just who is reviewing the peers?
Ha! I knew the denialists would come swarming out of the woodwork on this one.
Consider the stem cell paper that we're talking about here. It was published in January and immediately started going down in flames. Here we are six months later, watching scientists gleefully kick the cold corpse of the authors' reputations. And you're still wondering who keeps the reviewers and editors of a scientific journal honest?
Peer review isn't some kind of certification of a paper's truth. It can't reliably weed out misconduct, experimental error, or statistical bad luck. It's just supposed to reduce the frequency of fiascos like this one by examining the reasoning and methods as described in the paper. It doesn't have to be perfect; in fact it's preferable for it to let the occasional clunker through onto the slaughterhouse floor than to squelch dissenting views or innovation.
That's why climate change denialists still get published today, even the ones who disbelieve climate change because it contravenes their view of the Bible. Peer review allows them to keep tugging at the loose threads of the AGW consensus while preventing them from publishing papers making embarrassingly broad claims for which they don't have evidence that has any chance of convincing someone familiar with the past fifty years of furious scientific debate.
Here's what I think is the confounding factor (there always is one): I'd be wondering, "Does that button REALLY deliver a shock, or is it some kind of sham social psychology experiment prop? I bet it's a prop. If it isn't, it won't deliver THAT bad a shock. If it is, I wonder what the researchers will do when I push it?"
The confounding factor is curiosity. They'd have to do *two* sessions with the overly curious.
It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
