Typical pacemaker batteries last 5-15 years, not 2.5. And the surgery for battery replacement isn't a "major operation", as it's significantly less invasive than the original pacemaker installation. But more importantly, there is a better option. https://mednews.uw.edu/news/re...

According to the summary, a standard alkaline AA battery has an energy-storage rating of 700 joules per gram and weighs 20 grams. So that's a total energy storage of 700 * 20 = 14,000 joules. At 15 joules per day, the diamond battery can produce that same amount of energy in 14,000 / 15 = 933.33 days. So it takes about 2.5 years to produce the power contained in one AA battery. How much trouble is it to replace a AA battery in a low-draw device every 2.5 years? Even if it was fairly cheap, this would have no practical purpose for any device accessible to human hands. But they won't be cheap. Not at all.

The "conspiracy theorists" didn't have to work hard on this one. There were already numerous studies showing the link. Here's one from 2012 for instance: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... There are probably better ways to apply fluoride to teeth than putting it into the water (e.g. fluoride in toothpaste gets it to the teeth while minimizing ingestion). OTOH, correlation is not causation. Perhaps people with lower IQ are less likely to have access to clean water and therefore consume fluoride at higher concentrations. Or maybe water with higher fluoride levels often also has higher lead content. I think a cautious approach is merited regardless.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The statistics for safety of self-driving vehicles are useless bullshit for a variety of reasons.

Chief among them is that there aren't many actual self-driving cars out there. You can't use statistics from a company like Tesla, because the system isn't capable of autonomous driving, and when things get tough it simply alerts the human driver to take over. But then you get to blame the human if there is a crash! If the vehicle wasn't capable of handling the situation itself and needed to call on the human driver, you should effectively treat that as a failure of the self-driving system. We can't say that the self-driving system is safer than a human if it literally abdicates responsibility because it doesn't know what to do.

Even for the rare companies that actually operate fully autonomous vehicles, the data isn't particularly good. This article from Scientific American gives some insight into why:
https://www.scientificamerican...

Either they show the full amount as income and then a loss of 30% to Apple, or they show only the 70% as income in the first place (hint, it's the second one). But in either case the net income is identical and the tax liability is also identical. "Writing off" is not a magical incantation that reduces taxes. It just means it's profit you didn't make.

I am perfectly aware of the 3:2 pulldown issue with displaying movies on a TV screen, which results from the conversion of 24 fps material to 30 fps. You mentioned video games needing something more, but without any apparent recognition of the underlying implications. As I stated previously, the issue of "choppy" frame rates could be solved completely by programming games to output only 1 frame every 30th of a second. This would result in a consistent frame rate that can be easily matched by a display. For a 50Hz screen you could even slow it down to 25 fps (which is just a tad faster than the 24fps standard used for movies. The fact that game designers didn't simply do this and pat themselves on the back demonstrates there is much more going on. As for your "cherry picking" argument, you're clearly out of your depth, since your argument is unrelated to the issue. You stated that human eyes can see a single photon (true). But this has NOTHING WHATEVER to do with resolution. Responding to a photon is simple stimulus response. If a photon strikes a rod or cone in your eye, you will "see" it. Resolution is not about simple detection though. Resolution is a measurement of angular differentiation. The question isn't whether you can see a photon, but at what minimum angle can you tell that a second photon is coming from a different direction? You are correct that the human eye cannot simultaneously see 576 million pixels. Again that is irrelevant. We don't look at screen images by viewing the whole thing at once. We focus on a narrow section of the screen with high acuity and have low acuity over the remainder of the visual field. This does make screen resolution vs eye resolution a bit of an apples and oranges comparison. However, for the functional purpose we are discussing (i.e. maximum usable screen resolution), there is a sensible way to make the comparison. In order to exceed the performance of the human eye a screen must do one of two things: 1) Display 576 million simultaneous pixels so that every possible point of visual focus provides maximum resolution to the eye; or 2) Track eye movements for each viewer and provide higher resolution display within the area of focal acuity, while reducing display resolution elsewhere. Either of these options requires the display to be capable of producing pixel pitch commensurate with the full 576 megapixels. That is why within the context of this discussion 576 megapixels is the correct number to use. Notably, the second option would reduce the per-person bandwidth required to display the image to less than what the optic nerve carries, since high detail is needed only over a narrow field. Yes, for the most part the differences are trivial and your conclusions were largely correct. But as I demonstrated previously from the specific example of drawing in CAD, there are applications where your argument/understanding provably falls apart. By the principle of GIGO, it would be super easy to argue that your conclusions are flawed by demonstrating that the assumptions you rely on are false. A more nuanced understanding leads to a defensible position that is not subject to casual disproof.

Your arguments have significant problems, even though your conclusions are mostly sound. If the only problem with 30fps is mismatched frame rates, then I shouldn't be weirded out by "the soap opera effect" from higher interpolated frame rates in movies. Game makers should also be able to force their games to output exactly 30 fps and simply idle while waiting to process in between frames, resulting in perfect gaming motion. But they don't, despite the fact that it would allow them to run higher resolutions on cheaper hardware with zero sacrifice? They aren't idiots. Optimization is HUGE in the gaming industry. The evidence shows that 30 fps is absolutely not an upper limit on human perception, although the brain generally does a good job of smoothing out motion at frame rates as low as 24 fps when they are displayed uniformly. The whole "you can't see pixels" argument is bullshit. Individual pixels are generally detectable at resolutions orders of magnitude higher than 1080p (i.e. something much more in line with the 576 megapixels cited in the original article. To wit, I can not only see individual pixels on screens, I can often see the inter-pixel spacing (screen door) on display devices. Most people report that they are seeing pixels only when they see the gaps that differentiate them, but the gaps are far smaller than the pixels themselves. What we actually have trouble differentiating is differences in color over tight pixel spacing. If the image you are observing is a high contrast grid (e.g. a literal screen door) and you have good vision, you will have no difficulty in differentiating between different resolutions. But if you're viewing a display where the inter-pixel spacing is sufficiently tight that light visually bleeds to fill the gaps and the color contrast between pixels is within normal ranges, your brain will smooth the image and you functionally can't tell the difference in resolution. However, this smoothing doesn't always happen, and the difference can be significant in some applications. For instance, when drawing in CAD, even on my 4k monitor nearly anyone can see the "jaggies" that occur when a line is displayed at a slight angle rather than directly along a row of pixels. The jaggies are obvious not because our eyes suddenly got better at detecting resolution, but because the CAD software is not using anti-aliasing algorithms on the line to trick your eye into thinking that it is straight by blending the line across pixels rather than just jumping on/off from one to the next. In general, I'd agree with your conclusion that going beyond 4K isn't needed for TV and movies, since the images they render have inherent anti-aliasing. (Note: this happens to the source material naturally when filming in digital since the camera sensor pixels within edge areas are exposed to light from multiple contrasting sources and therefore report the weighted average results for each pixel.) There are still some specific instances in which naturally filmed artifacts may be visible at 4k that would not be at higher resolution; however for 99.9% of consumers those artifacts will not rise to the level that they need something else.

I think this might actually be made of chicken wire and plaster. Also, the pilots aren't meant to look calm. I believe they were trying to capture the stunned silence of the bewildered pilots realizing that they can't see anything below them, which is a bit of a problem for engaging a ground-based enemy, spotting a would-be attacker, or even just landing the craft. "Hey, are we airborne yet?"

There are many similar clues indicating that this is not a real prototype. The pilot's view is too obstructed by the body of the "spaceship" to be useful. The aerodynamics of the cockpit are abysmal. The body's molding is in no way "stealthy", looking like it was molded by hand from clay or Bondo by someone who has never worked in the medium before. For design and practicality, I would rank this prototype well below the police "Hoversurf" hoverbikes in Dubai.

I feel like I am just pointing out the obvious here, but the X-15 was powered by a rocket engine. It's altitude ceiling was not limited by wing lift, but by the available rocket fuel. Perhaps I should have said "the current (official) flight altitude record for a fixed-wing aircraft achieving lift using its wings..." The space shuttle had wings too, but you could hardly use it as an example of fixed-wing flight to the Karman Line.

I appreciate the reference, since it provides a reason for settling on a definition near 100km. Is airplane flight at the Karman Line actually achievable though? The current (official) flight altitude record for a fixed-wing aircraft is 123,520 ft (23.4 miles). That's a far cry from the Karman Line, and still less than half the 50 mile altitude that Virgin Galactic would reach.

The 62-mile internationally-accepted boundary is a completely arbitrary artifact of the metric system. It happens to be a nice, even 100 kilometers. There is nothing physically distinct about hitting 100 kilometers that makes it become "space". NASA previously defined it as 50 miles because they also wanted a nice even-sounding number and they were using imperial units to express it. I agree that if I got into a rocket, blasted off, saw the curvature of the earth and the blackness of space (and felt weightlessness for an appreciable period of time), I would say I have been to space, whether it meets the internationally-accepted definition or not.

I think you are mixing your classical Newtonian physics and relativistic physics. The Schwartzschild radius equation accounts for relativistic effects, but the "a = GM/R^2" does not, so it should not be valid near the event horizon.

Google can't actually use this patent. Google made their name and their money by providing information to users. It is the core of their business model. Dynamic pricing, on the other hand, relies on lack of information. If you know you are getting screwed you get mad and won't pay. Google can either: 1) Continue providing information people want, empowering the users to make wise choices; or 2) Stop providing pricing information data and lose customers to a search engine that will actually provide needed information.

In the long run I'm sure you are right.