Building an app for winter sports. You can download the map for a ski resort, and use the map to see where individuals in your group are, and suggest meetups (summits) on the map, and everyone gets a personalized route generated to that point.
Add in some evolutionary strategies, and you have the recipe for a good sci-fi book: a fungus in Chernobyl rapidly outpaces its competitors due to its ability to absorb radiation. Each iteration grows and reproduces faster, until it is so blindingingly fast that it begins to outpace the output the fuel rods produce.
The world rejoices as this fungus is perfect for cleaning up nuclear waste products, until we realize that it evolved to function outside of Chernobyl and begins to eat everything it can reach. Mankind launches into a desperate struggle for survival as the fungus lays waste to large swathes of land.
This! Since our money is being inflated away, hard assets like precious metals, bitcoin, and real estate get bid up because those with cash bleed out purchasing power.
Assuming our models of the universe are correct, and faster than light travel is impossible. There are very strong reasons to believe this, but perhaps we can cheat by stretching and compressing space around us.
Without having checked the study because I can't open the link on this machine: does it also take recycling of the metals into account? There's also cost in placement (which are very significant in places like the North Sea for instance), and digging up the rare earth minerals and such.
My experiences with tiling window managers is that they struggle in judging a modal screen like a confirmation box or detachable/dockable mini-containers like the interface of certain programs like GIMP. Considering those as new tile-able windows tends to be a hinderance instead of increasing productivity.
Bitcoin mining is currently at 52% renewable. This is a very significant number, since most other industries aren't nearly that renewable. Are you going to go for a plastic or paper car because steel foundries aren't producing steel on renewable power?
The key is emissions, not energy use. If I have a process that benefits mankind (a global, decentralized, permissionless hard money that doesn't suffer from politics or unelected officials) and I am using 100% renewable energy, then there is no environmental cost.
Bitcoin mining is very cutt-throat. It is a bleeding-edge, hyper-competitive business of reducing margins. Because I only needs an energy connection, some HVAC and internet connectivity, miners are very mobile and can move from place to place after setting up shop somewhere. This means that they seek the absolute lowest energy cost (the difference of paying 1c more per kWh can be essential) means that they are the energy consumer of last resort. Hydrodams and other renewables often produce at moments that demand is lower, and having a bitcoin miner nearby that is willing to gobble up all your excess production means your solar farm or hydrodam suddenly makes a profit at most times of the day.
It also means that investors are more willing to invest in renewable energy in places where formerly, building this infrastructure was impossible. There is a village in Malawi, Afrika where building a hydro dam was possible, but not financially sensible. None of the villagers had electric appliances, so building the dam meant running it would not be profitable for a very long time. Now, you can just add a set of bitcoin miners and run the dam at 100% capacity until people start installing freezers, televisions, etc. This benefits the investors, the villagers, and the bitcoin ecosystem.
Bitcoin's environmental costs is a highly politicized complex puzzle that is hardly as negative as the mainstream media and anyone that hasn't researched it claims it is. It bothers me to no end.
Another alternative to using an exchange is to actually spend the bitcoin on a good or service. There's quite a few places where you can use Bitcoin to buy things, like web hosting, socks, coffee, and more.
Expected time to first block confirmation is always 10 minutes. If the last block was found 10 minutes ago, then the expected time to the next block is still 10 minutes. It is always 10 minutes until it is actually found, at which point it is still 10 minutes.
The only thing that can change value is if the global hash rate significantly changes. This is why we have the difficulty readjustment every 2016 blocks (give or take 2 weeks).
As always: there is nothing inherently wrong about either plastics or carbon fuels. The problem is in using it in incorrect situations. Plastics are perfect for transporting an preserving foodstuffs in. Cheeses, meats, etc all have significantly longer shelf-lives because they are placed in plastics in a protective atmosphere. It is things like plastic bottle-caps, plastic straws, and other (generally small) disposable plastic tools that find their way into nature and wreak havoc.
Similarly for carbon fuels: these can have extremely high energy density coefficients, and are usable on a global scale. I would still prefer a move away from them and into Nuclear, but for some situations, having a small canister of fuel and a tool to convert that into mechanical action is extremely useful. Chainsaws for instance.
Also: I don't know what the tolerances for this material are, but they might be interesting for use in space?
I loved this dialogue in Monkey Island 2, where this is basically the first NPC you talk to, and the dialogue options get wordier and wordier to the point of overflowing all screen real-estate. Perfectly sets the stage for the remainder of the game.
Large black holes do have significant accretion disks that do impact their visibility and can and will spew forth vast amounts of radiation. Anything caught in their event horizon gets pulled in and is never seen again. Anything near it bumps into other things in orbit around it, which lights it up like a candle.
Note that there is also a 'weight class' of black holes that are significantly large that their event horizon would be visible to the naked eye, but which don't have an accretion disk. We currently don't know enough to make scientific estimates on how many of each weight class exists.
I've had a similar experience where Dutch surnames were translated from English to Dutch by Excel for some reason. Since many Dutchman have a surname prefixed with the Dutch word "van" (which means "of") Excel dutifully translated it to "Busje", which meant that many of our clients suddenly were called "Lieke Busje Lexmond" or "Vincent Busje Gogh".
It got a chuckle from our marketing department which caught the error before badges were printed for the very high-profile event we had planned for the next day.