This is the Tithonus myth of ancient times: To wish for eternal life, but forget to wish for eternal youth.

I, too, remember this documentary (and the anecdotes) and I, too, cannot find a mention of it on the web. (Maybe it exists only on Laser Video Disc somewhere . ..) I remember it as a documentary specifically of the methods used by 3M, as a large company, to remain innovative and flexible, and emphasizing the value of that "board" to support the creation of new products in markets 3M wasn't already in.

All these comments on green aluminum, and not one mention of transparent aluminum.

Slashdot, I thought I knew ye.

I'm doomed.

The Federal minimum wage in 2021 is $7.25. $25 is three hours and twenty-seven minutes' pay for someone trying to get by in the U.S. on minimum wage, $290 per week. I submit that no one who has actually had to survive any length of time on $290 per week in the U.S. would argue that $25 "is simply not a big amount."

Besides, if the only goal is to make sure it is not "a big amount," why not make the law apply equally to everyone, by requiring a fraction of one's income, rather than a fixed amount? Since an economist would argue (correctly, to my understanding) that poor people have less discretionary income than rich people, in that the fraction of their income devoted to paying for food, clothing, and shelter is higher than that of rich people, perhaps the fraction of their income poor people would pay to exercise their right to vote actually would be less than that of rich people. Or would you describe a poll tax as a non-discretionary expense, and have poor people choose between paying to exercise their right to vote and, say, feeding their family?

I would submit that if poor people "could not be bothered to engage civically," there would be no issue here, because poor people would not be trying to vote. Besides, where in the U.S. Constitution does it require voters to care? And what do you care if a voter shows up to vote in a church bus, a school bus, on foot, or on a unicycle? And who cares whether someone votes on a full stomach, or an empty one? I, for one, welcome a drink of water on a hot day. Don't you? I'm not following your argument.

As an aside, you keep mentioning that voters "rule us," that they "make decisions for all of us." This is a very strange understanding of the civics of the U.S. What poor people in the U.S. want is just what rich people in the U.S. want, which is to elect someone to *represent* them in government, not to *rule* them. In the U.S., the people elected by the voters make the decisions on behalf of the voters, or they get voted out and replaced; nobody "rules" anyone, least of all the voters. In what country did you study civics?

Yes, I do, for several reasons, and I think you do, too.

(Logical) I am quite wealthy now, thank you very much, but at several times in my life I did not have $25 to my name, and certainly not in disposable cash. Would you rather I had lost my right to vote during one of the times when I was desperately short of cash, as it was a sign I was "dumb"? Did I become smart enough to decide who "rules" me only when I became a success? What if I only decided who "represented" me?

(Practical) It's not reasonable to expect people to defend the nation, pay taxes, and perform all the duties of a citizen, and be excluded from one of the main rights of a citizen merely due to personal cash flow. If [name of wealthy person] had advocated setting the price for voting at, say, $25 million, because "Do you really want people dumb enough to not have $25 million deciding who rules us?", would your opinion be different? Social Darwinism works both ways.

(Social) Like everyone else, unrepresented people still have grievances, gripes, and things they would like to see the Nation do (and not do), some of which you may even agree with. However, without representation in government, the only avenue they would have to make their desires known is through social action and interaction with wealthy people -- becoming active in social media seen by wealthy people (using access wealthy people pay for, like public libraries), holding street demonstrations where wealthy people can see them, and in general becoming more visible to wealthy people -- as they would be the only ones having representatives able to make change. Is this what you want?

(Legal) The 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified on 23 January 1964, made poll taxes unconstitutional in federal elections. The U.S. Supreme Court's decision on 24 March 1966 in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections extended that to state and local elections, basing its decision not on the 24th Amendment, but on the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. To enable the position you espouse, the U.S. Constitution would have to be amended (again), and the U.S. Supreme Court would have to rule on a case before it reversing Harper. That seems like a lot of work, and is unlikely to succeed in one's lifetime. Is this really what you want to do?

In addition to nuclear-powered electricity generation, Nimitz-class carriers have four emergency diesels of 10,720hp (8MW). It's really impressive to see what looks very much like the locomotive engines they are, in a large room in the bowels of the ship.

I'm sure the sound in the room while running must be even more impressive.

Wow, fascinating. Could you give us an example? Preferably one related to the topic of this thread?

Well, it took a little while, but the OP's satirical prediction that we'd hear "It clearly wouldn't work in this one edge case that applies to less than one percent of people so it can never be implemented for everyone else" has finally come to pass.

Well, since there are many types of football fields, and many parts of them to measure, it's difficult to give a definitive response. However, to a first approximation a typical football field is approximately 100 meters in length, so a physical feature of 7 nanometers is approximately 70 picofootballfields in length.

Yes, "7 nanometer" is a marketing term, not corresponding to any physical dimension of the circuitry. That is why you will note that the second and third sentences of the post read, "Ostensibly. I say "nominally" because in modern processes there is substantially nothing that is at the process node length."

Um, no. A "7 nanometer process" is a process in which the smallest planar dimension of the transistors is nominally 7 nanometers. Ostensibly. I say "nominally" because in modern processes there is substantially nothing that is at the process node length.

The design rules of the process typically place circuits much, much further apart than the process node length.

He's promoting the sale of "healthy" foods, whatever those are, which would increase revenue, and the elimination of employee health care costs, which would reduce expenses. If you're an investor, it's a win-win.

Of course, the fact that societies without health care tend to have high rates of, oh, infant mortality, infectious disease, death due to accidental injury, et al. seems to be lost on him. I presume he expects his wife to provide her own prenatal health care? Health care in developed societies has become a prisoner of its own success.

Please accept my apology. It was late, I was tired, but really, I have no excuse.

See, for example, this article. Water may have "extremely consistent density," for suitable definitions of "extremely consistent," but seawater does not, due to its varying salinity (which affects its density due to the mass of the salt). In addition, one must account for the themocline (a region in which the temperature changes rapidly with depth), the halocline (a region in which the salinity changes rapidly with depth), and the pycnocline (a region in which the density changes rapidly with depth), all of which are, of course, interrelated. One can measure the temperature, salinity, and even the density, if one were so motivated, on the way down, but the measurements will not be isochronous, as it takes anywhere from 90 minutes to 5 hours, depending on the craft, to make the descent. When one is at the bottom, the surface data is hour(s) old.

So if one is measuring depth by measuring pressure, one needs to do a rather sophisticated integration of water density on the way down, and assume that the density profile of that water column does not change during the dive. Or measure it on the way down and the way back up, and somehow interpolate or otherwise account for measurements the values of which have changed over time.

An alternative is to use echo-sounding techniques. But in addition to the same density profile issues, these also suffer from another, more insidious source of error: horizontal density gradients. A variation of density in the horizontal plane refracts the sound wave, so that its path is not straight, but curves. This curve, of course, adds to the measured path length, and the horizontal gradient can only be discovered by placing more sensors in a volume of seawater around the area of interest, a not-insignificant increase in complexity.

But after all this, if you can produce a system having an overall RSS error of less than 0.23%, I suggest that this is opportunity knocking at your door, and you should get involved in a future expedition.