frank2

If this next page is accurate, then Apple is not the only one offering an expensive light laptop without a fan:

https://www.ultrabookreview.com/6520-fanless-ultrabooks/

Bitcoin has proven to be a poor "medium of exchange", but that is OK because buying and selling Bitcoin is easy enough for it to be a practical place in which to park money. I.e., it has proven to be a satisfactory "store of value".

Gold is a poor medium of exchange, too, but that has not prevented it from being a satisfactory store of value.

(Yes, I know that gold actually was a common medium of exchange at one time; it was displaced centuries ago by the greater convenience of paper money.)

Some visionary types hoped Bitcoin would disrupt government-issued (paper) money and governments and banks generally. The fact that these hopes were dashed does not mean Bitcoin will not remain an OK place to park money.

Out of all the coins, Bitcoin has the longest history of being an OK place to park money. History is probably the largest factor in people's decisions about which coin to park their money in. The fact that other coins solve various technical problems will continue to be a small factor as long as Bitcoin continues to avoid running into a disastrous technical problem.

I found it interesting that Wallace didn't start out racist: he became racist when he discovered it would help him win elections. Before that he was a liberal.

Good point about the need to process the grains and beans. Here is the author of Nuclear War Survival Skills on the subject:

Whole-kernel grains or soybeans cannot be eaten in sufficient quantities to maintain vigor and health if merely boiled or parched. A little boiled whole-kernel wheat is a pleasantly chewy breakfast cereal, but experimenters at Oak Ridge got sore tongues and very loose bowels when they tried to eat enough boiled whole-kernel wheat to supply even half of their daily energy needs. Even the most primitive peoples grind or pound grains into a meal or paste before cooking. (Rice is the only important exception.) Few Americans know how to process whole-kernel grains and soybeans (our largest food reserves) into meal. This ignorance could be fatal to survivors of a nuclear attack. Making an expedient metate, the hollowed-out grinding stone of Mexican Indians, proved impractical under simulated post-attack conditions. Pounding grain into meal with a rock or a capped, solid-ended piece of pipe is extremely slow work. The best expedient means developed and field-tested for pounding grain or beans into meal and flour is an improvised 3-pipe grain mill. Instructions for making and using this effective grain-pounding device follow. . . . As soon as fallout decay permits travel, the grain-grinding machines on tens of thousands of hog and cattle farms should be used for milling grain for survivors. It is vitally important to national recovery and individual survival to get back as soon as possible to labor-saving, mechanized ways of doing essential work. In an ORNL experiment, a farmer used a John Deere Grinder-Mixer powered by a 100-hp tractor to grind large samples of wheat and barley. When it is used to grind rather coarse meal for hogs, this machine is rated at 12 tons per hour. Set to grind a finer meal-flour mixture for human consumption, it ground both hard wheat and feed barley at a rate of about 9 tons per hour. This is 2400 times as fast as using muscle power to operate even the best expedient grain mill.

https://info.ornl.gov/sites/publications/Files/Pub57110.pdf

as in "we can't produce enough food."

US nuclear-war planners in the 1970s or 1980s estimated that there was enough food in silos in the US to feed the survivors for about 3 years. I think they assumed that 50% or 60% of Americans would survive. Usually, most of the grains and beans in those silos would go to feeding livestock, but in an emergency they could be used to keep people alive instead.

So, unless the livestock-feed supply chain has tightened up significantly since the 1970s or 1980s, the US would have about 3 years to get mechanized agriculture back up and running.

Also, ISTR that they estimated that most cars and trucks will survive the attack, but since the electrical systems of automobiles have changed drastically since the 1980s, maybe the US's current inventory of automobiles is a lot more sensitive to electromagnetic pulses. (Cars and trucks are relevant because the US would need some way to transport the grain and beans in silos, most of which are on farms or near farms, to where the people are.)

My tiny desktop is on all the time (but idle most of the time) and that was the frame in which I wrote my comment.

Taking power consumption into account makes sense when the machine is running on battery power, but all modern processors are power efficient enough for the cost of electricity to be negligible for a tiny desktop computer.

no companies actually decline these acquisitions.

Not true. Yahoo made 2 separate offers to acquire Google, and an established social-media company offered to acquire Facebook (for a billion dollars IIRC).

I read somewhere about 15 years ago that the term was introduced when laptops would get so hot that the legal departments at laptop vendors started to worry about their liability if they kept calling them laptops and they got sued by someone whose lap got burned.

Now that Apple's laptops run much cooler, my guess is that they continue to say "notebook" because Apple owns an important trademark that ends in "Book".

And yet the most impactful scientists, Newton and Darwin, spoke English, and the main way France industrialized was to copy developments in England.

There was a stretch of 40 days or so where there was no sun even in the Bay Area. It is very rare, but it has happened (circa 2006).

The usual term for the thing you call "subjective" is "the nominative case".

Thanks. For some reason I couldnt think of that on my own.

I am mystified by your comment.

How has OS X's "multi-userness" helped organizations?

Do you literally mean two or more people using the same Mac?

Has it been useful for organizations that users can ssh into Macs? Or is Apple Remote Desktop involved? (Does Apple Remote Desktop even allow 2 people two use two instance of OS X's GUI at the same time?)

Or by "multi-user" do you refer to the services that can be enabled using the "Sharing" pane of System Preferences (e.g., file sharing, printer sharing, remote management, internet sharing)?

But a duplicate of the actuator failed in a lab on Earth after almost exactly as many turns as the actuator in space lasted -- that's how they determined the cause of the spacecraft's going offline.

"catabolic", not "catatonic".

They activate in response to eating.

--and access to my viewing history and ability to add easily a video to my "watch later" list.

Maybe the US should spend less on defense and should refrain from sending humans to Mars.

[Bitcoin] only appreciates if you can talk other people into believing it's worth more

I would say the same about gold (though you probably disagree). Gold has some "intrinsic value" (e.g., as a plating on electrical conductors) but would be worth much much less if no one believed that it is a good way to store money.

But perhaps more importantly, Bitcoin differs drastically from most fiat currencies in that its rate of inflation is capped: over 85% of all bitcoin that will ever be created have already been created.

The same BTW cannot be said of gold, which is being mined at an increasing rate:

https://fee.org/media/30406/figure-1_bitcoin_inflation.png

https://fee.org/media/30407/figure-2_inflation_bitcoin_gold....

Sure, but CO2 removal can be funded otherwise than by CO2 offsets or carbon credits -- by a tax on fossil fuels, for example. It is even possible that research can be targeted at using the carbon removed from the atmosphere for fuel or for production of plastic. Burning the carbon (again) as fuel results in no net reduction in atmospheric CO2 of course, but it would probably replace fossil fuels (just as any other renewable source of energy would) and if it ever looks to become profitable, then that would tend to cause increases in the efficiency of CO2-removal tech at no expense to the taxpayer with the result that any CO2-removal efforts not funded by profit-motivated fuel production (e.g., taxpayer funded CO2 removal) become more efficient.

But my main point is that global warming is eminently amenable to technical solutions similar to how for example putting humans on the moon was eminently amenable. Not all societal concerns are so amenable, but for those that are, it seems to me very suboptimal to resort to analogies with religious concepts in public discussions of the concern.

My first comment has a score of -4 now by the way.

carbon removal . . . smells of indulgences

Do you believe a religious metaphor to be useful for understanding climate change?

Do you believe adding CO2 molecules to the air to be intrinsically sinful with the result that no amount of subsequent removal of CO2 can wash away the sin?

How much a person can take without producing symptoms varies. My threshold was much lower than average probably because of chronic infections, e.g., Lyme disease.

https://mpkb.org/home/pathogenesis/th1spectrum

I once took too much vitamin D, and it took months of avoiding dietary D and sunlight before the symptoms went away.

OK, but I hope you realize that the Gulf stream is a water current whereas I,m talking about an air current.

I heard that more important than ocean currents is the Rocky Mountains, which causes the jet stream to go south, then north.

X11 used shared libraries since its beginning in the 1980s.

Meh. I liked Emacs better when RMS still led the project than afterwards. Fewer changes that annoyed me.

RMS was definitely opinionated, but he was consistent about it, so that once you are familiar with some of his decisions, you could guess how he would decide other things.

Antibiotics . . . would be impossible without refrigeration

Any idea what the author means by this?