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Ignorance is bliss to the ignorant...

In a system like any of the *nixes, root can change time stamps, update log files, simply change anything that could possible trace what was done to the operating system.

In Multics, if the OS is writing a log file (Ring 0), no other user (and you cannot escalate to OS) can change that log file.
Here are the five security principals of Multics:
1. the default situation should be lack of access
2. there should be regular audits that maintain current authority
3. the design should be open and collaboration should be supported by peer review
4. it should incorporate the principle of least privilege
5. there should be ease of use so that the user doesn't have to think about the underlying design

In addition they put "Address Descriptors" into the memory management system which effective eliminated the chance of infringing on another process's memory

The sad thing (soooo saaaad) is that Microsoft, Linux and all of the Unixes have ignored, or intentionally broken, these simple principals, i.e. MSoft running the UI with full system privileges because it makes it faster.

Haystack's description has it as Gbps:
https://www.haystack.mit.edu/t...

She designed the algorithm. This does not necessarily relates to lines of code. Also eht-imaging is used for a wide area of applications. Mr. Chael is a PhD student at Harvard working on that piece of software. While Dr. Bouman performed the analysis and "developed the algorithm that turned telescopic data into the historic photo we see today". Here is her CV https://people.csail.mit.edu/k...
If Chael had done all this, his supervisors had claimed that or pushed that he would have been in the media.

Honestly, would you question her abilities if she would have been a male professor?

One aspect of all this that we geeks might find interesting is the recording systems developed for handling the huge amounts of data a high-bandwidth radio telescope spits out. MIT Haystack Observatory, NRAO and a company called Conduant have created storage packs for those times when there just isn't a level of RAID that can handle your data needs. Here's the latest (Mark 6) from Haystack's site:

https://www.haystack.mit.edu/t...

If I correctly understood and recall the way it was explained to me once, it's basically a box of cheap disks with a controller smart enough and fast enough to shove data to whatever drive can take it, and keep a journal of what was put where, so when all the drive packs from around the world are shipped back to Haystack for correlating, it can all be sorted out and put into the right order.

So... not only is there the whole "imagine what you could do with 5 petabytes of storage," there's the whole "imagine what you could do with storage that you can write to at a sustained rate of 16Gbps."

This is exactly the same problem (well, one of the problems) that Mythbusters ran into while reproducing the Archimedes Death Ray myth: using mirrors to focus sunlight onto a wooden ship to burn it. You may be able to find explanations of it under that heading; I can just find a brief one here (search down for "true point source").

It may help to think of a curved orbital mirror as being composed of a large number of small, flat elements. Each mirror element will reflect the sun, producing an image of the sun on the earth's surface, and some basic ray-tracing will show you that the spot size (from low earth orbit) is ~10km. If the mirror is perfectly focused, then the sun-images from each mirror element are perfect aligned. If the mirror is *not* perfectly focused, then the combined sun-image is blurred, and the spot size is larger.

This also explains why you can't, as you suggested, concentrate the light further within the illuminated spot. The distribution of light over the spot is determined by the distribution of emissivity over the surface of the sun, which is more-or-less uniform.

[,,,] the determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language.

Ironically, this is an article why Real Programmers avoid Pascal.

We can't define it, but we could start by crowdsourcing it.

it's based on false assumptions. ... Skin color, not an issue.

So *that*'s what it is! I knew something was missing from this exercise.

A 2006 MIT study, The Future of Geothermal Energy funded by the US Department of Energy provides a comprehensive review of geothermal as a base load energy resource. It concludes that the primary impediment to the development of this virtually unlimited, pollution and carbon free energy resource is the political will to invest in the necessary technical development for very deep drilling ie greater than 3 kilometers. The investment required is far smaller than has been invested in nuclear power systems. The threat that this technology represents to entrenched interests probably explains why all funding for this area of research was cut.

https://energy.mit.edu/wp-cont...

Virtually 100% of the carriage making industry has been lost. There were 13,000 of those businesses in 1890, now they're pretty much all defunct.

Nonsense. There are now just a few dozen companies, but there are at least 4x as many people, so presumably at least 4x as many (horseless) carriages, and probably more given that most families only had one carriage, and the average family probably has 2.5 cars or something.

There's almost nobody who hand spins thread for a living anymore, either. That used to employ vast numbers of people, mostly across the South.

Even that was replaced by similarly semi-skilled jobs, though. The difference between those changes and the current changes is that right now, it is looking like in 20-30 years, there will be no more semi-skilled jobs.

It's one thing to retrain someone to do something else that requires only average mental ability. It's quite another to say, "If you cannot get a job as a delivery driver, you should retrain to become a brain surgeon." Believing such a thing is broadly possible would require borderline Marie Antoinette levels of naïveté.

Fortunately, there is literally no limit to the amount of work available for people to do, just a lack of people to be available to do it. Specific jobs have been being destroyed by automation for hundreds of years. Yes, the process has accelerated recently. Guess what, it hasn't had a noticeable effect on unemployment rates, rather it leads to increased wages over time as increased productivity as a result of more capital (automation) being able to be used by people to accomplish more.

That is only true because as humans are still needed for some parts of the process. We're rapidly approaching a tipping point where that will no longer be true. And we're already seeing increased unemployment from automation.

A 2017 study out of MIT and Boston University found that from 1993 to 2007, for every one additional robot added per 1000 workers, unemployment increased by .18–.34% and average wages decreased by .25–.5%. They found that somewhere between 360,000 and 670,000 jobs were lost due to automation, and further found that "Interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly, we do not find positive and offsetting employment gains in any occupation or education groups."

Let that sink in for a moment. Jobs were lost and nothing took their place. Unemployment increased because of automation. And nothing replaced those jobs. And the jobs that remained paid less money because people were competing against automation and trying to underbid it. And the more automation replaces people, the faster it will do so.

We could just crowdsource it and call it done. Well, after crowdsourcing for folly and indecency and letting the machine pick which one it would like to use.

China-Japan trade is also high, https://www.bbc.com/news/world...

The top export destinations of South Korea are China ($121B), the United States ($70.1B), https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en...

https://vietnamnews.vn/economy...

It's over an hour long, if you want to skip to the cost/planning information, skip to 55:13 http://www.psfc.mit.edu/news/m...

Shaitan remonstrated:

You do realize this article is in fact an analysis of these materials and their accessible quantities and the determination that THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH OF THEM for the demand required through 2050. Abundant within the Earth's crust isn't particularly meaningful, we can't get to all the earths crust by a long shot and not all of what we can get to is easily accessible or cheaply accessible and even if we can get to it easily and cheaply we can still only pull it out so fast.

The major problems with the supply of rare earths are:

1. Their ores most commonly occur intermixed with uranite, so refining them entails the production of radioactive waste, and
2. They are not yet commonly recycled.

There's no real getting around the radioactive waste issue (although, if widespread support for licensing and constructing new nuclear power plants develops over the coming decades, I expect that REE separation and refining operations will become a routine feature of any new uranite refining and processing plants). However, as demand ramps up, there are plenty of existing piles of uranite tailings that have not thus far been seen as economically viable sources of REE that I expect will eventually be processed for them, as prices continue to rise.

There're also bound to be large-scale efforts to extract REE ores from undersea deposits, the mining of which has thus far been considered unaffordable. Again, as scarcity (particularly of praseodymium and neodymium) drives their price up, it's inevitable that seabottom mines will become important new sources. Likewise, recycling REE from discarded tech devices will eventually become viable - and very likely mandatory.

And it's not as though the Dutch study's conclusions are exactly news. People who follow that sector are well aware that demand is already outstripping the available supply - and that disparity is swiftly growing.

The thing is, there's plenty of REE, especially in the deep crust and upper mantle. It's just expensive and difficult to extract. Increasing demand will take care of the former roadblock, and experience in deep mining eventually will reduce the latter to a manageable level.

But, yes. It's going to get expensive in here, RSN. Will that stop either the development of ever newer and more powerful consumer tech or that of green energy sources to replace fossil fuels?

Signs point to "No" ...

"The current global supply of several critical metals is insufficient to transition to a renewable energy system." So, demand for rare earth minerals will go up, increasing the odds that mining for such minerals will increase. "The list of environmental concerns that can be connected with rare earth elements is not a brief one." So... is the huge push for 'green' energy going to end up being as big of a problem for the environment as global oil production has been? (Consider that there are, already in nature, creatures that break down oil, but there are none that consume and render inert, rare earth metals.) https://www.metabolic.nl/publi... http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/...

Blinking, or other biomimetic movement, that's what ultimately makes a real head distinguishable from a statue, no matter how good the artist.

Or, if you've got a decent imaging apparatus, you can detect blood pusations in real flesh (e.g., http://news.mit.edu/2010/pulse...)

Individual panels seem lower but like in this article from 2011, what matters more is the system efficiency. Solar panels had improved even more by 2014 , with clear pathways for further improvement and that is even before looking at concentrators. Overall though, the real question is cost per watt which was $0.35/watt without subsidy in the US in 2017 and has an even clearer path to become cheaper and more productive.

A good precedent is the Morris Worm, the first major worm attack against UNIX systems. Published on Nov. 2, 1988, the worm used known vulnerabilities in popular UNIX tools such as sendmail, and also cracked weak passwords. Defenders effectively _broke_ the early Internet to contain the Morris Worm and while they frantically applied patches they'd considered risks to production systems before that day. Its author was eventually convicted, but Robert Tappan Morris had the best "get out of jail free" card one could imagine. His father was the head of the NSA. He is now a professor of computer science at MIT, and his current projects are listed at https://www.csail.mit.edu/pers... .

SCIgen referring to https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/arc... if anyone is interested

I have little doubt that Amazon had the necessary corpus to generate books including ones containing all the elements that people look for in a good book. That said, well designed and programmed robots can make reasonable food out of correct quantities of each ingredients in the correct order, but after a while it will all just begin to taste the same and be bland. In the case of the software generated stories, some of it might be accidentally good enough to make it into a literary publications if all of the vogue themes show up; however, until such time that we have "electric readers" that will read for us so that we won't have to do so, I doubt the bulk of it will make the upper ranks for the bulk of readers, at least for the first few generations of such.

IP

We have a replacement, it's called TESS https://tess.mit.edu/ It's not quite the same as Kepler, but has a similar mission. Good news is TESS's imaging sensors cover a LOT more area than Kepler.

Back in 1998 Janet Murray already hinted at what the issue would be.

It's not just technology that decides if VR is mass adopted.

It's that just as with film it takes 20 years..
- for a medium's language to (a) be developed. Film has the jump-cut, the Shot-reverse-shot, etc. To go from Vertov's experiments (Man with a movie camera, for example), to the Hollywood style a few decades later.
- to educate a wider audience to read and enjoy that language.

The issue with this round of VR mania was that venture capitalists all wanted to invest in the hardware. But the storytelling? I've been at VR conferences where hyped up VR proponents pointed to government subsidies to make that part happen..

As long as Silicon Valley remains deaf to the lessons from the humanities these exaggerated boom-bust cycles will continue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books...

That name was dreamt up to play on the fears of Republican voters, including the suggestion that it would have "death panels". A survey early last year showed 35% of respondents still didn't realize "Obamacare" was the same thing as the ACA. We need to make decisions rationally, not out of fear.

For instance, you're more likely to be killed by pollution (200,000 early deaths per year) than an undocumented immigrant (750 per year). However, our administration wants to spend money building a wall to protect you from the "dangerous" Mexicans, but doesn't mention anything about how many people die from pollution when announcing cuts to emissions standards.

(The 750 number is 456 arrests per year, plus an estimated correction factor due to cases not being solved.)

Seriously?

And you just had the balls to lecture about misusing fear as a political factor?

What about the massive and widespread identity theft perpetrated by illegal immigrants?

IRS: 1.2 Million Illegal Aliens Committed Identity Theft in FY 2017

Hell, you just tried to paper over a complex issue with a lot of aspects using a childish fear-based statistic.

You played your NPC role well.

For instance, you're more likely to be killed by pollution (200,000 early deaths per year) than an undocumented immigrant (750 per year). However, our administration wants to spend money building a wall to protect you from the "dangerous" Mexicans, but doesn't mention anything about how many people die from pollution when announcing cuts to emissions standards.

Some people want a wall to protect the fiscal integrity of their state and/or country. Certainly "undocumented workers" (nee: illegal immigrants) pay some taxes and produce, and there are plenty of success stories. The problem is... illegal immigration is a net loss, and one method of slowing the losses is to better control immigration. Whether a wall will do it remains to be seen, but the only option I've heard is to try to make those countries a place in which nobody wants to leave... good luck with that considering those in charge south of the U.S. Border....

That name was dreamt up to play on the fears of Republican voters, including the suggestion that it would have "death panels". A survey early last year showed 35% of respondents still didn't realize "Obamacare" was the same thing as the ACA. We need to make decisions rationally, not out of fear.

For instance, you're more likely to be killed by pollution (200,000 early deaths per year) than an undocumented immigrant (750 per year). However, our administration wants to spend money building a wall to protect you from the "dangerous" Mexicans, but doesn't mention anything about how many people die from pollution when announcing cuts to emissions standards.

(The 750 number is 456 arrests per year, plus an estimated correction factor due to cases not being solved.)

This sounds eerily like the 1988 fire at the switching center in Hinsdale, IL. Hopefully they didn't ignore alarms as happened then.

FYI people didn't work 12-16 hours on a farm on a regular basis, the industrial revolution made people work longer hours than before.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/ma...

https://www.adamsmith.org/blog...

I know a few people who got cancer in the US - and they did not lose their house, their car, their everything. Payment plans with vastly-reduced costs were worked out, no interest, and ultimately paid off in each case

Contrary to the typical memes and beliefs, bankruptcy for medical issues is extremely rare: about 4% of all bankruptcies are due to medical costs. Given that 0.3% of households file for bankruptcy each year, and there are 126 million households in the US, that means there are about (126MM * 0.003 * 0.04) 15,000 medical bankruptcies each year in the US. Yes, a large number, but nowhere near the oft-quoted 643,000 annually (which is actually more than the number of bankruptcies filed overall).

MIT says we'd have to add around 55 deg C, minimum, to top over that positive feedback loop. I think we're probably quite safe from becoming a Venusian planet.

Errm, that source doesn't even mention methane, and only focuses on the role of water vapor.

No. But we have some facts.

But they have alternative facts.

Carbon dioxide has strong absorption bands in the near infrared (namely 2.7 micrometer, 4.2 micrometer and 15 micrometer). That means, that infrared radiation with those wavelengths will not penetrate a layer of carbon dioxide very well, but instead heat the carbon dioxide (which in turn then radiates itself, but in all directions, thus reflecting 50% of the radiation back to Earth).

I have attempted to get the idea of the concept of the greenhouse gas effect through some folks by the concept of energy retention. Different gases and water vapor have the effect of energy retention. A few, like Sulfur Dioxide function in reverse of that.

I have no expectation that I will actually convince any person who denies this energy retention for political reasons. I only put it out there as an example of politics trying to trump physics, and hopefully others might see the folly of that.

Meanwhile, as of 2007, we have had 800 Terawatts of radiative forcing. since 1750. http://news.mit.edu/2010/expla...

We also have carbon dioxide data for the atmosphere since about 250 years, when Joseph Priestley first found out that air is actually a mixture of different gasses, and started to measure the respective shares. We know for instance, that around 1900, the carbon dioxide share of the atmosphere was around 270 ppm (or 0,027 percent), as we can read in Anatol Leduc: Nouvelles recherches sur le Gaz (1899) or numerous other publications of the time.

Something important to point out here. Over this long timeline, nothing has changed except the accuracy of the measurements. The first mention of the global effect was made in the late 1890's by Svante Arrhenius.

This ain't rocket surgery, AGW deniers, the physics is real. The release of much sequestered Carbon Dioxide and Methane is real. The denialists need to come up with a sound reason why these simple truths fail on a global scale.

So far, they have failed miserably. The political rhetoric, like calling Michael Mann an asshole - he isn't - doesn't hack it, and the tactic of jumping on every anomaly like it is a smoking gun simply helps point scientists in the direction to send their research. Cherry pick away deniers, you are helping refute your denialism.

because we have more forests now than we had in 1900).

Side note. I was at an old iron furnace a few years ago. Greenwood Furnace to be exact, in that section of Pennsylvania made famous by the LANDSAT images from space for it's tortured terrain.

They cut trees and turned them into charcoal for the furnaces. So much that you could stand on top of the mountains in that area, and eventually not see one tree from horizon to horizon. Which is what always put the furnaces out of business before coke production allowed the big furnaces in Western PA to take over and kill charcoal smelting for good.

MIT says we'd have to add around 55 deg C, minimum, to top over that positive feedback loop. I think we're probably quite safe from becoming a Venusian planet.

Actually lots, especially sw dev. managers and IT security. It's been in the news here and elsewhere and you can do your own search.

But more importantly, I said the "cost" of IT security. The total cost of an employee is usually 1.25 - 1.4 times the base salary. Again, you can do a search, but here's one reference: http://web.mit.edu/e-club/hadzima/how-much-does-an-employee-cost.html

Even if you tighten the numbers, that fine will still only buy you 4 or 5 IT security analysts for 1 year. Maybe that would have made a difference, maybe not.

My point stands, and we see many similar stories here and in IT news: corporations would rather take the higher-profit route of minimizing hiring IT security, frequently "outsourcing" it, rather than build and support a strong permanent team.

the vile screed "a message to Garcia" Elbert Hubbard, 1899
https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.803/pdf/hubbard1899.pdf

MIT is working on one approach

Because letting a buoy with an antenna rise up to the surface would be too difficult.

Let me preface this with two things ... 1) I assume we're talking about military applications, and 2) everything I know about submarines I learned from Tom Clancy novels. ;-)

If you don't need to be stealthy, you could use a buoy or surface.

If you do need to be stealthy, the buoy or going to the surface would give away your position.

If you're in a submarine and trapped on the bottom, you need a way to signal to people where you might be.

At present this sounds like this is preliminary work to allow comms to cross the water/air layer.

The actual article that BBC links to provides more actual information:

Using the system, military submarines, for instance, wouldn't need to surface to communicate with airplanes, compromising their location. And underwater drones that monitor marine life wouldn't need to constantly resurface from deep dives to send data to researchers.

Another promising application is aiding searches for planes that go missing underwater. "Acoustic transmitting beacons can be implemented in, say, a plane's black box," Adib says. "If it transmits a signal every once in a while, you'd be able to use the system to pick up that signal."

So, a couple of possible applications to the technology.

Really, this is an early steps type of technology, and it isn't going to be deployed on a wide scale any time soon. But, like so many things, it has some promise, and the potential to open up some new things.

Expanding the flight data recorders of planes to include something like this might also help in search and rescue operations, because it might at least give you a beacon to look for instead of "somewhere in the ocean".

Let's analyze micro water ripples in a lab setting instead, it will totally work on the oceans.

You know, 20 years ago the idea of using software to account for atmospheric turbulence for ground-based telescopes was new too. Now ground-based telescopes can be far better than they used to be. As people refine the techniques, they get better and better.

What they've done is something new, how far they can take it ... well, that's why we do research.

Most of the fake science was generated!

https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/arc...

the team analyzed over 175,000 articles published in predatory journals and found hundreds of papers from academics at leading institutions, as well as substantial amounts of research pushed by pharmaceutical corporations, tobacco companies, and others. Last year, one fake science institution run by a Turkish family was estimated to have earned over $4 million in revenue through conferences and journals.

What's the criteria used in determining a publication "fake" and/or "predatory"?

Is it the accuracy and reproducibility of the results? That's been a known problem for years.

What else? "High" fees? Why would that be a reflection of "fakeness"? TFA cites susceptibility to fakes, but that too has been very well known problem, you can even generate your own CS "paper" online.

Seems like TFA is just a salvo in the war of some magazine-publishers against competitors... Slashdot editors have been duped into posting it...

the team analyzed over 175,000 articles published in predatory journals and found hundreds of papers from academics at leading institutions, as well as substantial amounts of research pushed by pharmaceutical corporations, tobacco companies, and others. Last year, one fake science institution run by a Turkish family was estimated to have earned over $4 million in revenue through conferences and journals.

What's the criteria used in determining a publication "fake" and/or "predatory"?

Is it the accuracy and reproducibility of the results? That's been a known problem for years.

What else? "High" fees? Why would that be a reflection of "fakeness"? TFA cites susceptibility to fakes, but that too has been very well known problem, you can even generate your own CS "paper" online.

Seems like TFA is just a salvo in the war of some magazine-publishers against competitors... Slashdot editors have been duped into posting it...

Google search doesn't even return relevant results anymore but more results that may look like what you ask. Soon just expect that an AI will generate the results on the fly SCIgen style.

Now they even remove keywords from your query to get more irrelevant matches from higher scored sites.

Also the +"" or intext: tags are basically ignored and worse if you insist they start throwing captchas at you.

Unfortunately you will be one of those few people who notice, may be poining it out a couple more will also realize, like when you point out about bad kerning.

https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

Perhaps you want to look at the numbers, and not only the ranking :D

In this specific case, I suspect it was a timelord trying to warn us against the consequences of the DMCA. But if you really want to, you could try to visit the time traveller's convention.

Here's an interesting article about how the Holocene (or what some might call Anthropocene) extinction and how it compares with mass extinctions in the fossil record. After making my post, I found another interesting article comparing the impact of human activity with the Permian-Triassic extinction. Humans have done tremendous damage, but as a matter of scale, the damage done by humans to date doesn't approach any of the five mass extinctions. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere dramatically increased near the Permian-Triassic boundary, with estimated rates during the event estimated to be close to the present day, but over a much longer period of time. I'm not aware that anyone really knows the source of the carbon dioxide, but it was a dramatic and extremely rapid event with respect to geologic time. It also took about 10 million years to recover from that extinction.

As the first article notes, however, ecosystems can behave in a non-linear way much like the climate system does. I am personally skeptical of our ability to establish where those tipping points occur. It's not that I distrust the science, but rather that I appreciate the complexity of the systems involved. It's all the more reason to play it safe and limit our damage as much as possible. We haven't caused a mass extinction yet, but we're more than capable of doing so.

There's nothing right-wing about it except that it's aimed at someone on the left of American politics.

Birtherism is the most glaring manifestion (yet) of the right's ongoing obsession with race and othering the left as unamerican. Its a common refrain with the right, in 1994 Newt Gingrich was going around saying that democrats are the enemy of real americans. That's the man who became speaker of the house, the titular head of the party, just one year later. The fact that you don't see birtherism as extremism is a testament to the GOP's hypernormalization of their extremism.

but are you really going to tell me that's exclusive to the right?

I am going to tell you for the 4th time that there is no equivalent on the left. You don't see anybody even remotely like d'felon anywhere near anything resembling a mainstream liberal publication. Not to mention a god damn senior editor of a magazine like The New Republic calling conservatism fascism - y'all lost your shit when Hillary said merely half of you were good people.

No, the Left absolutely overuses the term. I've been called a Nazi for saying Jose Zarate, the person who killed Kate Steinle, should be deported after he's released from jail. Nazi and fascist are not the same thing

So, you are a fascist who does not consider himself of the right. Yeah, kinda not surprised. The thing about you guys — "nazi" is the one n-word y'all just won't stand for. If your objection is nothing more than an pedantic argument as to what precisely constitute nazism, you've so completely and utterly lost the thread that you might as well just go full nazi.

, I really can't see anyone who supports the state of Israel being a Nazi.

Fuck that shit. Supporting the extremist government of Israel is not the same as supporting jews. Netanyahoo and his son have gone so far to the right that they are embracing modern-day nazi memes and David Duke is backing them up. Christian nationalists love Israel, but they don't love jews, they just want to kick off the rapture and if the jews won't convert at that point, they are happy to let them burn in hell.

FYI, some of the children haven't been reunited with the adults they came with because the adults were either not their parents or were convicted of things like child abuse.

Yeah, how many? Name ONE. Wait, you can't? And yet, your knee-jerk response to 2500 kidnappings and 450+ deportations of asylum seekers nearly assuring that they've permanently lost their children is to cite something, that at most, could be counted on one woman's fingers? You've been drinking deep from the well of right-wing propaganda. WAKE THE FUCK UP

“The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”

— Aldous Huxley
The Olive Tree (1936).

Hal Draper? http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/%3...

Your delusion is that the U.S. needs the world. Not that I hate the others but we are diverse enuff to make it on our own.

Depends on what you mean by 'need' here. I mean sure, the US is large enough and wealthy enough that you could survive on your own, but with both China and the US the thing is that exporting goods and services is deeply integral to the economy and society. The US is the second largest export economy in the world. And that's only counting stuff you directly export to other countries. When you factor in the fact that most of the top US companies do business globally via subsidiaries which - depending on how the corporations and sales are structured - may not show up at all as exports, it becomes even more clear just how connected you and everyone else is to the global economy.

So could you 'make it on your own'? Absolutely, and moreso than most other western countries, including for example my own small country (Finland) that's more heavily dependent on exports because the domestic market is small. Buuut at the same time seizing exports would cause a significant dent in your economy, lead to shrinking of the economy, loss of millions jobs which in turn would lower the incomes of Americans leading to reduced domestic demand, and in general diminished influence on the global stage. It would be survivable, but it wouldn't be pleasant 'business as usual' stuff. Same goes with China who exports even more than you do.

So that being the case I'd say the US does in fact need the rest of the world, not in terms of survival, but in terms of maintaining your current economic status and the quality of life it brings.

This part is already solved

There are ANN hardware designs wherein computer memory cells are integrated with the circuitry of artificial neurons, such as an LSTM neuron. Rather than a bunch of RAM and some program code, there's a bunch of flip-flop circuitry (RAM) built right into the neuron circuitry to create a fully-functional neuron package, along with supporting circuitry to allow programming by wiring those neurons inputs and outputs to each other how you like and writing or reading their values.

Theoretically, once you've programmed the contents and the connections, feeding input into the system would execute on-clock: if you have 5 layers of ANN, it should take 5 clock cycles to turn an input into an output. On a conventional CPU, you have to run a bunch of mathematical instructions which might take one cycle each, or be SIMD, or take multiple cycles for something like a division, or whatnot.

MIT did some interesting stuff with that.

Since cold is the absence of heat, yes, space is very cold indeed. I did not mean to infer otherwise.

"Space has a background temperature. You will not cool to below it."

I believe otherwise. CMB has a thermal black body spectrum at a temperature over 2.7 K. Back in 2003 MIT was able to lower the temperature of sodium gaz below 1 nanokelvin.
http://news.mit.edu/2003/cooli...

Gravity Probe B (2004-2005) was using gyroscopes housed within superfluid helium, maintaining a required temperature of under 2 kelvins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

There has also just been a launch of the Cold Atom Lab on May 21'st this year, which may allow temperatures as low as 1 pK.

https://coldatomlab.jpl.nasa.g...
https://science.nasa.gov/scien...

Aluminum was more valuable than gold before Deville came along and figured out electrolysis in 1859. Guess what made that process so cheap that we now throw piles of aluminum cans away without a thought -- not that we should?

Cheap electricity.

Guess what? You can extract iron from ore using electrolysis as well.

Iron Metal Production through Bulk Electrolysis
Green Iron

MIT has solved industrial production already. Not sure what the cost is but it's definitely far below lab sample $10,000/g levels.