Comment News flash: All drinking water is ... (Score 1) 242
... to some extent, "treated sewage". It's called "water cycle".
It's easy: User interface design is a completely different skill.
Also, if you want a program to be easily usable by someone who didn't write it, you need to let someone else design the user interface.
The US actively threatens countries with military invasion if they engage in certain forms of international law enforcement.
A simple, cheap small notebook computer should be able to do this.
I hate to break it to you, but the phrase above remains true if you replace "Russians" with any country powerful enough to get away with this kind of behavior.
Ability and willingness to harass people are inversely proportional to the capability to do real work.
I'm pretty sure the capable dogs will get trained to do real work. It's the less capable ones that will become "alert on cue" and "sniff out thumb drives" dogs.
"Truth" is a heavily cultural thing. If anything, you use facts.
And the Voyager record does basically exactly what I mentioned. It uses a subset of our own communication protocols with very low compression.
You don't. You use the parts of your own protocol that aren't too compressed (think
Once you think you have figured out the other side's protocol, you send them a message in (your understanding of) their protocol and hope that the other side will know that any horrible insults and breaches of etiquette you commit are only a sign that you're still learning.
Photosynthesis has a comparatively low efficiency, which will come back to bite you if the space for your application is limited.
Also, only works in a fairly narrow temperature range (if it's 10 degrees below zero, fairly little photosynthetic activity will happen even you have plenty of sunlight). In addition it offers some nice byproducts, like grains, tomatoes, zucchini, etc.
The electricity-to-hydrocarbon route can use space that's unsuited for growing plants. Also, if you want to use plants to bind CO2, you won't be using grains, tomatoes or zucchini - because these plants aren't optimized for maximum CO2 conversion.
Electrically-powered synthesis of methane from H2O and CO2 already exists, and the process of forming longer hydrocarbons from methane do, too.
It's just a bit too expensive right now (or rather, oil and coal are still too cheap).
Because carbon monoxide can be used as fuel and substrate for further synthesis processes.
However, I believe that (electricity and/or heat)+H2O+CO2->some hydrocarbon is going to be the next big thing in the chemical industry. The company or individual that comes up with a practical, inexpensive solution will basically have a license to print money.
The US government knows. They just pretend not to as long as you're unimportant.
The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities.
