Slashdot Mirror

HughPickens.com writes: Jeff Guo reports at the Washington Post that development of qinghaosu — or artemisinin — is one of modern China's proudest accomplishments winning a Noble Prize in Medicine this year for Tu Youyou, but it's also a story about Communism, Chairman Mao, and China's return to the world economy. On May 23, 1967, Chinese scientists commenced Project 523, a secret effort that enlisted hundreds of researchers to discover a new malaria drug during the Vietnam War. Although in a better warfare position, the People's Army of Vietnam (North Vietnamese Army) and its allies in the South, Viet Cong, suffered increasing mortality because of malaria epidemics. The project began at the height of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, a brutal time during which academics and intellectuals were murdered, imprisoned, or sent to "reeducation camps" in mass purges.

For doctors and chemists. Project 523 was a lifeline, according to Professor Zhou Yiqing. "By the time Project 523 had got under way, the Cultural Revolution had started and the research provided shelter for scientists facing political persecution." Tu's husband had been banished to the countryside when she was asked to get involved in Project 523. Tu's research project sought to find modern logic in ancient ways, much as the French researchers identified quinine from the bark of the cinchona tree. According to Tu, she and her team screened over 2,000 different Chinese herbs described in old texts, of which about 200 were good enough to test in mice. That's when they hit upon a plant called Artemisia annua: annual wormwood, or qinghao in Chinese. At the time, all of this work remained a Chinese military secret; some of the results were published in Chinese-language journals, but it would be well after the death of Mao Zedong until China would reveal that it had discovered a surprisingly potent new weapon against malaria.

According to Guo the lion's share of the credit rightly goes to Tu and the countless other Chinese scientists who worked on Project 523. But Oxford anthropologist Elisabeth Hsu suggests that the political climate at the time also deserves recognition. Qinghaosu might never have been discovered had it not been for Maoist China's nationalist infatuation with Chinese folk medicine. "It was thus a feature specific to institutions of the People's Republic of China that scientists, who themselves had learnt ways of appreciating traditional knowledge, worked side by side with historians of traditional medicine, who had textual learning," Hsu argues. "This was crucial for the 'discovery' of qinghao."

HughPickens.com writes: Jeff Guo reports at the Washington Post that development of qinghaosu — or artemisinin — is one of modern China's proudest accomplishments winning a Noble Prize in Medicine this year for Tu Youyou, but it's also a story about Communism, Chairman Mao, and China's return to the world economy. On May 23, 1967, Chinese scientists commenced Project 523, a secret effort that enlisted hundreds of researchers to discover a new malaria drug during the Vietnam War. Although in a better warfare position, the People's Army of Vietnam (North Vietnamese Army) and its allies in the South, Viet Cong, suffered increasing mortality because of malaria epidemics. The project began at the height of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, a brutal time during which academics and intellectuals were murdered, imprisoned, or sent to "reeducation camps" in mass purges.

For doctors and chemists. Project 523 was a lifeline, according to Professor Zhou Yiqing. "By the time Project 523 had got under way, the Cultural Revolution had started and the research provided shelter for scientists facing political persecution." Tu's husband had been banished to the countryside when she was asked to get involved in Project 523. Tu's research project sought to find modern logic in ancient ways, much as the French researchers identified quinine from the bark of the cinchona tree. According to Tu, she and her team screened over 2,000 different Chinese herbs described in old texts, of which about 200 were good enough to test in mice. That's when they hit upon a plant called Artemisia annua: annual wormwood, or qinghao in Chinese. At the time, all of this work remained a Chinese military secret; some of the results were published in Chinese-language journals, but it would be well after the death of Mao Zedong until China would reveal that it had discovered a surprisingly potent new weapon against malaria.

According to Guo the lion's share of the credit rightly goes to Tu and the countless other Chinese scientists who worked on Project 523. But Oxford anthropologist Elisabeth Hsu suggests that the political climate at the time also deserves recognition. Qinghaosu might never have been discovered had it not been for Maoist China's nationalist infatuation with Chinese folk medicine. "It was thus a feature specific to institutions of the People's Republic of China that scientists, who themselves had learnt ways of appreciating traditional knowledge, worked side by side with historians of traditional medicine, who had textual learning," Hsu argues. "This was crucial for the 'discovery' of qinghao."

the_newsbeagle writes: Researchers have demonstrated a laser-based pacemaker in fruit flies, and say that a human version is "not impossible."

The invention makes use of optogenetics, a technique in which the DNA that codes for a light-sensitive protein is inserted into certain cells, enabling those cells to be activated by pulses of light. Researchers often use this method to study neurons in the brain, but in this case the researchers altered flies' heart cells. Then they activated those cardiac cells using pulses of light, causing them to contract in time with the pulses (abstract). Voila, they had an optical pacemaker that worked on living adult fruit flies.

Don't worry, no one can control your heartbeat with a laser just yet. That would require inserting foreign DNA into your heart cells, and also finding a way to shine light through the impediment of your flesh and bones. But lead researcher Chao Zhou of Lehigh University is working on it.

szczys writes: The screen on that new cellphone has amazing pixel density, color vibrance, and refresh rate. The high-end headphones you just picked up do an amazing job reproducing sound. These devices interface extremely well with humans but might not be very good modes of communication for an Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Sure, we haven't made contact with alien life yet. Even if they did pick up our broadcasts or space probes the relatively narrow-range of audio (narrow and low frequency), visual (slow refresh rate), and data transmission methods are likely to make no sense to non-human entities. The Voyager Golden Record took a fascinating approach to making some data available to new civilizations; it's interesting to think of other ways we might communicate with beings of fundamentally different biology.

An anonymous reader writes: Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar have earned the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discoveries about how DNA is repaired at the cellular level (PDF), and how genetic information is protected. "Each day our DNA is damaged by UV radiation, free radicals and other carcinogenic substances, but even without such external attacks, a DNA molecule is inherently unstable. Thousands of spontaneous changes to a cell's genome occur on a daily basis. Furthermore, defects can also arise when DNA is copied during cell division, a process that occurs several million times every day in the human body."

Tomas Lindahl first published work in this field back in 1974, when he found a bacterial enzyme that culled damaged remains of cytosines from DNA. He methodically worked out how base excision repair works, and even managed to recreate the process in vitro in 1996. Aziz Sancar's contribution has to do with how DNA repairs damage from ultraviolet light. After struggling to find a lab interested in his work, he went on to show how a group of enzymes identify and excise UV damage. Paul Modrich's focus was on how natural processes corrected base pair mismatches in DNA. He spent a decade laboriously mapping out how each enzyme interacted with this process — an important thing to know, since defects in the repair system can cause cells to turn cancerous.

the_newsbeagle writes: DARPA is sinking some cash into the buzzy new research field of "electroceuticals," which involves stimulating nerves to control the activity of organs or bodily systems. The newest techniques have little in common with electroshock therapy, which sends a strong current broadly through the brain tissue; today's cutting-edge methods can target individual neurons, and turn them "on" and "off" with great precision. Under DARPA's new ElectRx program, seven research teams will explore different ways to modulate activity of the peripheral nervous system. Some will stimulate neurons directly with electricity, while others will take more roundabout routes involving light, acoustics, and magnetic fields.

HughPickens.com writes: Joe Drape and Jacqueline Williams report at the NYT that a major scandal is erupting in the multibillion-dollar industry of fantasy sports, the online and unregulated business in which an estimated 57 million people participate where players assemble their fantasy teams with real athletes. Two major fantasy sports companies were forced to release statements defending their businesses' integrity after what amounted to allegations of insider trading — that employees were placing bets using information not generally available to the public. "It is absolutely akin to insider trading. It gives that person a distinct edge in a contest," says Daniel Wallach. "It could imperil this nascent industry unless real, immediate and meaningful safeguards are put in place."

In FanDuel's $5 million "NFL Sunday Million" contest this week, DraftKings employee Ethan Haskell placed second and won $350,000 with his lineup that had a mix of big-name players owned by a high number of users. Haskell had access to DraftKings ownership data meaning that he may have seen which NFL players had been selected by DraftKings users, and by how many users. In light of this scandal, DraftKings and FanDuel have, for now, banned their employees from playing on each other's sites. Many in the highly regulated casino industry insist daily fantasy sports leagues are gambling sites and shouldn't be treated any differently than traditional sports betting. This would mean a high amount of regulation. Industry analyst Chris Grove says this may be a watershed moment for a sector that may need the legislation it has resisted in order to prove its legitimacy. "You have information that is valuable and should be tightly restricted," says Grove. "There are people outside of the company that place value on that information. Is there any internal controls? Any audit process? The inability of the industry to produce a clear and compelling answer to these questions to anyone's satisfaction is why it needs to be regulated."

Dave Knott writes with news that the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to Takaaki Kajita (of the University of Tokyo in Japan) and Arthur McDonald (of Queens University in Canada), for discovering how neutrinos switch between different "flavours." As the linked BBC article explains: In 1998, Prof Kajita's team reported that neutrinos they had caught, bouncing out of collisions in the Earth's atmosphere, had switched identity: they were a different "flavour" from what those collisions must have released. Then in 2001, the group led by Prof McDonald announced that the neutrinos they were detecting in Ontario, which started out in the Sun, had also "flipped" from their expected identity. This discovery of the particle's wobbly identity had crucial implications. It explained why neutrino detections had not matched the predicted quantities — and it meant that the baffling particles must have a mass. This contradicted the Standard Model of particle physics and changed calculations about the nature of the Universe, including its eternal expansion.

The New York Times reports that four high school students in the small California town of Tuolumne, about 120 miles east of San Francisco, have been arrested, but not yet charged, for planning an attack on their school, Summerville High School. According to the Times, three of the four were overheard discussing this plot, and a fourth conspirator was later identified. Their goal, according to Toulumne sheriff James Mele, was "to shoot and kill as many people as possible at the campus"; they had not however been able yet to obtain the weapons they wanted to carry out the attack. From NBC News' version of the story: "Detectives located evidence verifying a plot to shoot staff and students at Summerville High School," Mele said. "The suspects' plan was very detailed in nature and included names of would-be victims, locations and the methods in which the plan was to be carried out."

While proponents suggest that international trade agreements increase economic prosperity, writes reader Dangerous_Minds, it's often hard to find much detail about their details. Here's an exception: Freezenet is offering an update to known provisions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), and the Trades in Services Agreement (TiSA). Among the findings are provisions permitting a three-strikes law and site blocking, multiple anti-circumvention laws, ISP liability, the search and seizure of personal devices to enforce copyright at the border, and an open door for ISP-level surveillance. Freezenet also offers a brief summary of what was found while admitting that provisions found in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) as it relates to digital rights remains elusive for the time being.

CNN and other sources report that an attacker, now in custody, shot and killed a reported ten people, and wounded another 20, at Oregon's Umpqua Community College, about three hours south of Portland, and described by CNN as "technically a gun-free zone." Students are being evacuated to a nearby fairgrounds, and local authorities advise anyone to avoid the area of the college. Wikipedia editors are also quickly compiling information about the attack. More news on the attack is still breaking; expect updates here.

A whimsical headline, but not much more of a shark-jumper than some of the talk we've heard lately from ad agencies, online publishers, and others who earn their living from online advertising. Doc Searls recently wrote a piece on his personal blog titled Beyond ad blocking — the biggest boycott in human history. Naturally, we wanted to ask Doc to expand a bit on what he's been writing about ad blocking and advertising in general. So we had a fine conversation about online advertising -- ending with a challenge to the advertising industry, which Doc says should be looking for ways to produce better, more effective, and less annoying ways to sell to us online.

An anonymous reader writes: Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi is under investigation for using superlative messaging on its website, according to a leaked document from the Beijing Ministry of Industry and Commerce. A new Chinese law states that adjectives used to promote products must not mislead consumers. The Xiaomi investigation [Chinese] follows claims made by rival Cong that the company used phrases such as 'the best' and 'the most advanced', in its online campaigns and therefore violated the country's advertising law. (The law against suprelatives doesn't seem to apply to communications by the government, about the government.)

Meet Kickstarter co-founder and CEO Yancey Strickler. Timothy Lord asked Yancey about Kickstarter's recent move to become a Public Benefit Corporation, which is, according to Wikipedia, "a specific type of corporation that allows for public benefit to be a charter purpose in addition to the traditional corporate goal of maximizing profit for shareholders."

This corporate restructuring has no tax advantages, and creates a slight increase in paperwork, Yancey says. So why did they do it? Please view the video (or read the transcript, which has more info than the video) to find out.

the_newsbeagle writes: With electrodes implanted in their neural tissue and a new brain-computer interface, two paralyzed people with ALS used their thoughts to control a computer cursor with unprecedented accuracy and speed. They showed off their skills by using a predictive text-entering program to type sentences, achieving a rate of 6 words per minute. While paralyzed people can type faster using other assistive technologies that are already on the market, like eye-gaze trackers and air-puff controllers, a brain implant could be the only option for paralyzed people who can't reliably control their eyes or mouth muscles.

Patrick O'Neill writes: The FBI and DEA were among the agencies fed information from an NSA surveillance program described as "staggering" by one judge who helped strike the program down. Now the two agencies are under review by the Justice Department for the use of parallel construction as well as looking into the specifics and results of cases originating from NSA tips. (Here's some more on the practice of parallel construction in this context.)

New submitter Elixon writes: Czech trademark monitoring service IP Defender reported that The British Broadcasting Corporation applied for a figurative trademark on the "POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX" for wide range of goods and services like cinematographic and photographic films, printed publications, key chains, textile goods, toys, telecommunications and more. The Metropolitan Police was defeated by the BBC in the past while trying to monopolize the London police box; now it's the BBC's turn.

According to the Baltimore Sun, and despite claims by its maker Raytheon that the system is "performing well right now," the expensive tethered-blimp observatory called JLENS (for "Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System") seems to be mostly a boondoggle. The report focuses on the JLENS installation that was launched in Maryland last year. The Sun makes much of the flight taken by disaffected postal worker Douglas Hughes last April to the White House lawn, directly in the JLENS observation area -- the success of which (to be charitable) casts doubt on the effectiveness of the flying observatory system. Beyond its evidently low utility in doing its job, JLENS seems to be a brittle system, amplying its potential costs as well as its military vulnerability with grand, expensive failures as well as everyday difficulties: in 2010, "a civilian balloon broke loose from its mooring, destroying a grounded JLENS blimp that had cost about $182 million." The article lays out some political shenanigans, too: politicians in a wide range of states have supported the project, which has a nationwide footprint of contractors and possible deployment locations. From the article: Within the Pentagon, Marine Corps Gen. James E. "Hoss" Cartwright, then vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came to JLENS' defense, arguing that it held promise for enhancing the nation's air defenses. At Cartwright's urging, money was found in 2011 for a trial run of the technology in the skies above Washington. Cartwright retired the same year — and joined Raytheon's board of directors five months later. By the end of 2014, Raytheon had paid him more than $828,000 in cash and stock for serving as a director, Securities and Exchange Commission records show.

mask.of.sanity writes: The chief hacker behind the infamous iCloud celebrity hacks has revealed in a documentary how the group dubbed RipSec shook Hollywood by plundering thousands of naked photos and financial data of Tinsel Town icons. The film maker gained access to RipSec using a photoshopped naked image of major TV star who offered access to her iCloud account. "I contacted some of the celebrities and she gave me access to her account," Doering says. "From there I baited them (the hackers)."

An anonymous reader writes: As the Snowden revelations have shown, personal data stored in the United States of America is not protected from the US government, be it through warrantless eavesdropping or national security letters. In light of this, the general attorney for the Court of Justice of the European Union has just issued an opinion requiring the US to be removed from the list of "safe harbors", where the transfer of personal data of European citizens is permitted. If the court follows his opinion, the change will have deep impact in the operations of large transnational Internet companies, between a US government that wants to keep on spying, and European authorities that will punish them if they let it happen.

An anonymous reader writes: Pokemon Go marks Nintendo's biggest move into mobile yet: the augmented reality mobile game makes use of your location as well as your phone's camera to let you interact with pocket monsters in the real world. It's an audacious idea — with an accompanying trailer — but as one writer points out it will have to nail a lot of different systems to build up an active community in the same that developer Niantic has done for its previous game, Ingress. The author looks at Ingress to see where Nintendo and Niantic may draw inspiration, pointing out that the game's portal modding system could prove a great mechanism for allowing Pokemon evolutions. Expect plenty more Pokemon amiibo to interact with the upcoming wristband, too.

the_newsbeagle writes: Many prior experiments that tried to restore function after a spinal cord injury have used electrical stimulation to replace the signals from the brain, essentially implanting a replacement nervous system. But a new project instead used electrical stimulation to encourage the natural nervous system to adapt to a severe injury. When researchers repeatedly jolted a rat's damaged spinal cord at the precise moment that it tried to move a paralyzed limb, its nervous system developed new neural pathways that detoured around the site of injury in the spine. Researchers don't think it grew new neurons, but think instead that new connections formed between surviving neurons.

Mr. Droopy Drawers writes with news that the famous "Dancing Baby" case will move forward to trial, after a pre-trial ruling Monday that's already unpopular with the copyright holders on one side of the case. The New York Times reports that a three-judge panel has "ruled that copyright holders must consider fair use before asking services like YouTube to remove videos that include material they control. ... [The guideline] "sends a strong message that copyright law does not authorize thoughtless censorship of lawful speech," Corynne McSherry, the legal director for Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in a statement." Mr. Droopy Drawers adds, "Of course, the RIAA is none too happy about the ruling saying, that it puts undue burden on copyright holders. However, the judge countered, 'Even paying "lip service" to the consideration of fair use is not enough, and could expose a copyright holder to liability.'"

(Also covered in an AP story carried by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.)

aglider writes: The newest stable iteration of the famous and glorious OpenWRT has just been released in the wild for all the supported architectures. The latest version is 15.05, codenamed "Chaos Calmer" after a cocktail drink, just like all previous ones. Major changes from the official announcements: "Linux kernel updated to version 3.18. Improved Security Features. Rewritten package signing architecture based on ed25519. Added support for jails. Added support for hardened builds. Improved Networking Support. Platform and Driver Support." For the full details you are welcome on the forums while the firmware itself and extra packages are available from the distribution servers.

An anonymous reader writes: Over at the Escapist, games historian Jon Peterson (of Playing at the World) reviews a recently-unearthed copy of James Goldman's 1982 script for a Dungeons & Dragons movie. The synopsis sounds even worse than the Jeremy Irons Dungeons & Dragons film from 2000, if such a thing is possible. Given the resolution of recent legal problems paving the way for a new D&D cinematic universe, will we have better luck with the franchise today? How can you translate the interactive experience of D&D into a compelling movie?

New submitter JustAnotherOldGuy writes with some news that might worry anyone caught up in the Ashley Madison data breach. ("Uh-oh," he says.) Now, besides any other possible repercussions of having one's name on the list of account holders, there's a new wrinkle. The passwords used to secure those accounts were theoretically robustly protected with bcrypt. However, as Ars Technica reports, That assurance was shattered with the discovery of the programming error disclosed by a group calling itself CynoSure Prime. Members have already exploited the weakness to crack more than 11 million Ashley Madison user passwords, and they hope to tackle another four million in the next week or two. This would matter much less if passwords weren't so frequently re-used.

Bennett Haselton writes: The comedy world crucified Josh "Fat Jew" Ostrovsky for building his career on re-tweeting other people's jokes without attribution. But Twitter, or whichever company rises as their successor, could easily implement an algorithm that could stop plagiarists from building a following, while still rewarding joke writers who come up with original content. Read on for Bennett's take on how such a system could work.

The basic algorithm is very similar to the random-sample-voting algorithm that I've advocated as a way to stop vote manipulation on Digg, how to handle abuse reports in a scalable way on Twitter and on Facebook, and how to identify the best ideas submitted to the White House's "We The People" petition site. The algorithm can be used to rate the best jokes (at least according to the average rating of users, not according to some Platonic ideal), while still flagging plagiarized jokes and preventing anyone from building up a following by using them.

Under the algorithm, suppose a subset of users -- let's say, 1 million -- signs up to receive tweets in the general humor category. When a would-be amateur comedian comes up with a funny tweet, then in addition to tweeting it to their followers (if they have any), they can submit it to the humor category generally. The joke is first pushed to the feeds of, say, 1,000 randomly selected users, who have the option of rating it (independently of each other, without seeing the opinions of other raters). Once the joke has acquired enough ratings to constitute a statistically significant sample -- so that the average rating really does reflect the community's "opinion" of the joke -- then the joke gets released into the general pool of jokes available to all 1 million users subscribed to the "humor" category. Those users can decide what threshold of quality they want to set for the jokes that show up in their feed -- for example, if you only want to see jokes that got an average rating of 9 out of 10 or higher, you might only see 50 a day, but if you can lower your standards down to an 8, you might see 100 or 200. And if a user really likes a particular joke that they see in their "threshold feed," they can browse the other jokes in that author's Twitter feed and decide whether to follow them.

So if your joke sucks, it will only end up wasting the time of about 1,000 people, but if it gets a high rating, it will be available in the feeds of up to 1 million people. Thus from the user's point of view, only about 0.1% of the jokes that they see in their feed, are sucky jokes that were pushed to them as part of an initial "focus group" to measure their quality; the other 99.9% is made up of jokes that met whatever threshold they set for the average rating.

As I've stressed in the case of other applications of the random-sample-voting algorithm, this system is scalable, because the number of available reviewers grows as the community grows. It's also non-gameable -- because the raters are randomly selected, even if you create a large number of zombie accounts to try and upvote your own joke, the zombies won't constitute a significant portion of the raters, if the raters are selected from the entire pool of 1 million users.

Still, even under this system, it would be possible to take a highly rated joke and re-word it slightly (to fool any text filters looking for blatant copy-and-paste jobs), and pass it off as your own, hoping that your re-worded version will also get pushed out to a wide audience and net you some extra followers. To prevent this, you can implement a "duplicate" flagging feature that also relies on the random-sample-voting system:

1. If a user recognizes a joke as a re-worded version of someone else's tweet, they can flag it as a "duplicate", with a link to the earlier tweet that they think is similar. (Flagging it as intentional "plagiarism" would be a bit harsh, since it's quite common for multiple comedians to come up with the same joke.)
2. The flagged joke, along with a copy of the earlier joke, would once again be sent out to a random sample of subscribers to the humor category, who are then asked to vote on whether the two jokes are substantially similar.
3. If a statistically significant majority of those users vote that the two jokes are essentially duplicates, then the second tweet gets displayed with a flag icon (shorthand for "our users have identified this as a duplicate of an earlier joke") with a link back to other tweet that was identified as an earlier version of essentially the same joke.
4. If a majority votes that the two jokes are not similar, then nothing happens. Optionally, if an overwhelming majority of the users vote that the two jokes are not at all similar, then some kind of reputation point penalty could be applied to the user who flagged the second joke as a "duplicate". This discourages people from frivolously duplicate-flagging a joke.

This does have the unfortunate result that if you unintentionally write a joke that duplicates someone else's, it will still end up with the "duplicate" flag after users recognize the similarity to the earlier version. This is, however, something that I don't think any algorithm can solve, because it's impossible to detect the difference between someone copying another person's joke and independently coming up with it on their own. A comedian whose joke ends up being labeled with the "duplicate flag", just because someone else came up with the same gag first, could leave the joke in their feed, but they might consider the duplicate flag to be a mild embarrassment.

On the other hand, if you're just a full-time plagiarist like the Fat Jew, and virtually all of your jokes end up being flagged as clones of other people's work, then your entire feed will be littered with "duplicate" flags that mark you as a hack. Depending on whether Twitter's terms of service prohibit serial plagiarism, your account could even get suspended.

Meanwhile, anybody could still set themselves up as a curator who re-tweets other people's jokes with the original attribution intact. Many users would find that they wouldn't need curators at all, when they can just subscribe to all jokes that get an average rating of, say, 8.5 or higher, but if your humor happens to align very closely with the kind of jokes picked out by a particular curator, you could subscribe to get jokes re-tweeted directly from them. And since the original attribution would be intact, any time you saw a joke that you really liked, you could subscribe to updates directly from that author. Curating can still serve a valuable function that plagiarism does not.

In addition to dealing with plagiarists, though, what I think is interesting about this system is how it would overturn everything we know about what it takes to build a reputation. In the current ecosystem, to build a following, it helps to have good content, but what really matters is hustle -- making friends in high places who might be able to give you a boost with a re-tweet or a shout-out, looking out for opportunities for free publicity, etc. Well, I admire the people who have the energy to keep that up. But from an economic standpoint, "hustling" is a non-productive activity, because it doesn't actually make your content better, it's just an attempt to crowd out someone else's content with your own, which may be better or worse, and it's a zero-sum game. The "hustling" ecosystem is also non-optimal from the user's point of view -- if Joe is better at writing jokes, but Bob is better at hustling, then you as the user are more likely to be exposed to Bob's sub-optimal content, and may never even hear about Joe.

The random-sample rating system, however, makes the entire notion of "hustling" obsolete. The only way to get your content in front of lots of people, is to write content that gets a high average rating from the initial sample of people who see it.

If such a system ever gets implemented, by Twitter or any other company, maybe the Fat Jew can find out if any of his own original material meets the bar. But don't hold your breath -- the marquee joke currently displayed on his Twitter feed is "You can't get an STD if you never get tested."

An anonymous reader writes: As tweeted by Jacob Appelbaum, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority today listed .onion as a special-use domain, and the IETF approved a Draft RFC for the domain describing its intended uses. As described on the Facebook Over Tor page, "Jointly, these actions enable '.onion' as special-use, top-level domain name for which SSL certificates may be issued in accordance with the Certificate-Authority & Browser Forum 'Ballot 144' — which was passed in February this year. ... Together, this assures the validity and future availability of SSL certificates in order to assert and protect the ownership of Onion sites throughout the whole of the Tor network."

szczys writes: We've been hearing about it for years; bacteria are developing resistance to antibiotics and evolving into what are called superbugs. Some forecast the end of our ability to combat infection, but humanity has a knack for making breakthroughs that carry everyone forward. Dan Maloney looked at what is being done to combat antibiotic-resistance and the answer combines new technology with old remedies. It turns out that there are many ancient cures that successfully combat infections (video); they're just mixed in among a lot of cruft. More modern efforts focus on attacking bacteria on the genetic level which is a research area just getting itself up to speed now.

HughPickens.com writes: Matt McGrath writes at BBC that Bhutan, the strongly Buddhist country where up to three-quarters of the population follow the religion, is the only country in the world considered a role model by the Climate Action Tracking organization. Bhutan has put forward the concept of "Gross National Happiness", that represents a commitment to building an economy that would serve Bhutan's culture based on Buddhist spiritual values instead of western material development gauged by gross domestic product (GDP). Bhutan's Constitution mandates its territory to be at least 60% covered by forest – the vast carbon sink a boon for its balancing of humanity and nature. Right now over 70% is under trees, and so great are the forests, that the country absorbs far more carbon than its 750,000 population can produce. As well as inhaling all that CO2, the Bhutanese are pushing out large amounts of electricity to India, generated by hydropower from their fast flowing rivers. The prime minister says that their waters hold the potential to offset 100 million tonnes of Indian emissions every year. That's around a fifth of Britain's current annual outpourings.

Bhutan has embraced electric vehicles and the government envisages the capital city Thimpu, as a "clean-electric" city with green taxis for its 100,000 citizens — Bold plans for a city that at present doesn't have any traffic lights! "We see ourselves on the one hand being able to use electric cars for our own purposes, to protect our environment, to improve our economy, but also to show in a small measure that sustainable transport works and that electric vehicles are a reality," says Tshering Tobgay. ""In Bhutan the distances are short, electricity is very cheap and because of the mountains you can't drive exceedingly fast, so all these combined to provide us with the opportunity for the investment."

According to Dr Marcia Rocha, it's not just a question of Bhutan being spectacularly endowed with natural advantages. "I think they are a country that culturally are very connected to nature, in every document that they submit it's there, it's just a very important focus of their politics." "We may be small, our impact not huge, but we always try many conservation projects," says Kinlay Dorjee, mayor of capital Thimphu. However the modest Bhutanese Prime Minister rejects the idea that his country is the leader of the climate pack. "I feel that calling Bhutan a role model is not appropriate, every country has their own sets of challenges and their own sets opportunities."

Solandri writes: Ricardo Taylor, a former supervisor at the U.S. Department of Labor, ran a bootleg DVD operation for seven years, copying DVDs and selling them to other employees via the Department's internal email system. You know — exactly the sort of thing our draconian copyright fines were meant to prevent. He made more than $19,000 from these pirated movie sales in 2013 alone. His punishment? 24 months probation. Apparently, using the Internet to share Copyrighted materials at no personal profit is a more serious crime than selling copyrighted works for profit on physical media. More details on this local NBC site with auto-playing video.

smitty_one_each writes: Timothy Sandefur, a lawyer at the Pacific Legal Foundation has written a breezy overview of the politics of the little-known show Star Trek. His thesis: "...the key to Star Trek's longevity and cultural penetration was its seriousness of purpose, originally inspired by creator Gene Roddenberry's science fiction vision. Modeled on Gulliver's Travels, the series was meant as an opportunity for social commentary, and it succeeded ingeniously, with episodes scripted by some of the era's finest science fiction writers. Yet the development of Star Trek's moral and political tone over 50 years also traces the strange decline of American liberalism since the Kennedy era." The article traces through episodes at each phase of the franchise, exploring literary allusions and lamenting that "Star Trek's latest iterations — the 'reboot' films directed by J.J. Abrams — shrug at the franchise's former philosophical depth."

smitty_one_each writes: Timothy Sandefur, a lawyer at the Pacific Legal Foundation has written a breezy overview of the politics of the little-known show Star Trek. His thesis: "...the key to Star Trek's longevity and cultural penetration was its seriousness of purpose, originally inspired by creator Gene Roddenberry's science fiction vision. Modeled on Gulliver's Travels, the series was meant as an opportunity for social commentary, and it succeeded ingeniously, with episodes scripted by some of the era's finest science fiction writers. Yet the development of Star Trek's moral and political tone over 50 years also traces the strange decline of American liberalism since the Kennedy era." The article traces through episodes at each phase of the franchise, exploring literary allusions and lamenting that "Star Trek's latest iterations — the 'reboot' films directed by J.J. Abrams — shrug at the franchise's former philosophical depth."

An anonymous reader writes: The Saiga antelope has been hunted to near extinction. They've been put on the endangered species list, and they play a vital role in the ecosystems around Russia, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan, where their grazing helps get rid of fallen plant matter, which is prevented from decomposing by the cold temperatures. But earlier this year, a huge die-off hit the Saiga antelope herd in Kazakhstan, felling over 120,000 of them in a few short weeks. Scientists say an entire group of 60,000 died within a four-day span. The cause of this die-off is still a mystery. The researchers suspect some sort of bacteria, and early on pointed to Pasteurella strains. But those bacteria don't usually cause this much damage unless something else has weakened the antelope. "There is nothing so special about it. The question is why it developed so rapidly and spread to all the animals," one researcher said. They're looking into environmental factors, but nothing else seems too far out of the ordinary.

jan_jes writes: After weeks of investigation, Wikipedia has blocked 381 user accounts for "black hat" editing. The reason for the ban is that the accounts were engaged in undisclosed paid advocacy — the practice of accepting or charging money to promote external interests on Wikipedia without revealing their affiliation, in violation of Wikimedia's Terms of Use. In addition to blocking the 381 "sockpuppet" account, the editors deleted 210 articles created by these accounts.

BrianFagioli tips news that Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Intel, Amazon, and Netflix are teaming up to create the Alliance for Open Media, "an open-source project that will develop next-generation media formats, codecs and technologies in the public interest." Several of these companies have been working on this problem alone: Mozilla started Daala, Google has VP9 and VP10, and Cisco just recently announced Thor. Amazon and Netflix, of course, are major suppliers of online video streaming, so they have a vested interested in royalty-free codecs. They're inviting others to join them — the more technology and patents they get on their side, the less likely they'll run into the issues that Microsoft's VC-1 and Google's VP8 struggled with. "The Alliance will operate under W3C patent rules and release code under an Apache 2.0 license. This means all Alliance participants are waiving royalties both for the codec implementation and for any patents on the codec itself."

HughPickens.com writes: Brian Booker writes at Digital Journal that carbon dating suggests the Koran, or at least portions of it, may actually be older than the prophet Muhammad himself, a finding that if confirmed could rewrite early Islamic history and shed doubt on the "heavenly" origins of the holy text. Scholars believe that a copy of the Koran held by the Birmingham Library was actually written sometime between 568 AD and 645, while the Prophet Mohammad was believed to have been born in 570 AD and to have died in 632 AD. It should be noted, however, that the dating was only conducted on the parchment, rather than the ink, so it is possible that the Koran was simply written on old paper. Some scholars believe, however, that Muhammad did not receive the Koran from heaven, as he claimed during his lifetime, but instead collected texts and scripts that fit his political agenda. "This gives more ground to what have been peripheral views of the Koran's genesis, like that Muhammad and his early followers used a text that was already in existence and shaped it to fit their own political and theological agenda, rather than Muhammad receiving a revelation from heaven," says Keith Small, from the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library. "'It destabilises, to put it mildly, the idea that we can know anything with certainty about how the Koran emerged," says Historian Tom Holland. "and that in turn has implications for the history of Muhammad and the Companions." Update: 09/01 17:32 GMT by S : There was a typo in the dates used by the original linked article — in the press release from the University of Birmingham, the date range given for the parchment is between 568 AD and 645 AD, which overlaps more closely with Muhammad's lifetime. The dates and link have been fixed now in the summary. Historians say this new information highlights the uncertainty surrounding the emergence of such religious texts, rather than being a major upheaval.

An anonymous reader writes: For any longtime Linux users, you probably remember the LILO bootloader from Linux distributions of many years ago. This bootloader has been in development since the 90's but development is finally ending. A homepage message reads, "I plan to finish development of LILO at 12/2015 because of some limitations (e.g. with BTFS, GPT, RAID). If someone want to develop this nice software further, please let me know ..."

New submitter JamesA writes: Wes Craven, the famed writer-director of horror films known for the Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream movies, died Sunday after a battle with brain cancer. He was 76. Though he's far less known as a novelist than for his various horror film jobs (writer, director, producer, actor ...), Craven also wrote a few books; I can't vouch for "Coming of Rage," but "Fountain Society" is pretty solid speculative fiction. Wikipedia notes that Craven also "designed the Halloween 2008 logo for Google, and was the second celebrity personality to take over the YouTube homepage on Halloween."

An anonymous reader writes: Lara Seligman from Defense News reports that the capabilities of the Joint Strike Fighter are to be evaluated for close-air support (CAS) missions. She writes, "To gauge the joint strike fighter's ability to perform in a close-air support role, the Pentagon's top weapons tester has declared the sleek new fighter jet must face off against the lumbering A-10. The Pentagon's Office of Operational Test and Evaluation plans to pit the full-up F-35 against the legacy A-10 Warthog and potentially other fighter jets to evaluate the next-generation aircraft's ability to protect soldiers on the ground."

An anonymous reader writes: Lara Seligman from Defense News reports that the capabilities of the Joint Strike Fighter are to be evaluated for close-air support (CAS) missions. She writes, "To gauge the joint strike fighter's ability to perform in a close-air support role, the Pentagon's top weapons tester has declared the sleek new fighter jet must face off against the lumbering A-10. The Pentagon's Office of Operational Test and Evaluation plans to pit the full-up F-35 against the legacy A-10 Warthog and potentially other fighter jets to evaluate the next-generation aircraft's ability to protect soldiers on the ground."

There are a lot of open source operating systems out there; being open source, they lend themselves to forks, clones or near clones, and friendly offshoots. There are even services to let you customize, download, and (if you choose) bulk-install your own OS based on common components. Phoronix notes a new project called NeXTBSD that might turn more heads than most new open source OSes, in part because of the developers behind it, and in part because of the positive thoughts many people have toward the aesthetics of NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X. (And while it might be a fork of FreeBSD, the developers would rather call it a spork, instead.) NeXTBSD was announced last week by Jordan Hubbard and Kip Macy at the Bay Area FreeBSD Users Group (BAFUG). NeXTBSD / FreeBSD X is based on the FreeBSD-CURRENT kernel while adding in Mach IPC, Libdispatch, notifyd, asld, launchd, and other components derived from Apple's open-source code for OS X. The basic launchd/notifyd/asld/libdispatch stack atop their "fork" of FreeBSD is working along with other basic components of their new design. You can watch a recording of the announcement as well as a longer introduction linked from Phoronix's story.

An anonymous reader writes: A few days ago Slashdot carried a piece of news from Malaysia whereby [news] websites based in Malaysia must be registered. Now comes the news that Malaysia is actively blocking websites which carry political opinion contrary to those of the ruling elite. Granted, Malaysia is no US of A nor Europe, but the world must understand that Malaysia is the only country in the world where racial apartheid laws are still being actively practiced — and have received endorsement from the ruling elite which has controlled Malaysia for the past 58 years. (Wikipedia lists some other candidates for modern-day apartheid in its entry on Contemporary segregation.)

Vox reports on the next target destination for NASA's New Horizons probe, an ice chunk in the Kuiper Belt designated 2014 MU69. The plan is not yet final; like any space mission, complications are bound to come up. But if this selection sticks, New Horizons should reach 2014 MU69 in 2019. (Re/Code has the story, too.)

An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from James Forshaw's recent post at Google's Project Zero, which begins For the past couple of years I've been researching Windows elevation of privilege attacks. This might be escaping sandboxing or gaining system privileges. One of the techniques I've used multiple times is abusing the symbolic link facilities of the Windows operating system to redirect privileged code to create files or registry keys to escape the restrictive execution context. Symbolic links in themselves are not vulnerabilities, instead they're useful primitives for exploiting different classes of vulnerabilities such as resource planting or time-of-check time-of-use. Click through that link to see examples of this abuse in action, but also information about how the underlying risks have been (or can be) mitigated.

An anonymous reader links to Fast Company's profile of Obi Worldphone, one-time Apple CEO John Sculley's venture into smartphones. The company's first two products (both reasonably spec'd, moderately priced Android phones) are expected to launch in October. And though the phones are obviously running a different operating system than Apple's, Sculley says that Obi is a similarly design-obsessed company: "The hardest part of the design was not coming up with cool-looking designs," Sculley says. "It was sweating the details over in the Chinese factories, who just were not accustomed to having this quality of finish, all of these little details that make a beautiful design. We had teams over in China, working for months on the floor every day. We intend to continue that process and have budgeted accordingly." Obi is also trying to set itself apart from the low-price pack by cutting deals for premium parts. "Instead of going directly to the Chinese factories, we went to the key component vendors, because we know that ecosystem and have the relationships," Sculley says. "We went to Sony. It’s struggling and losing money on its smartphone business, but they make the best camera modules in the world."

An anonymous reader writes: While many recognize Yann LeCun as the father of convolutional neural networks, the momentum of which has ignited artificial intelligence at companies like Google, Facebook and beyond, LeCun has not been strictly rooted in algorithms. Like others who have developed completely new approaches to computing, he has an extensive background in hardware, specifically chip design and this recognition of specialization of hardware, movement of data around complex problems, and ultimately core performance, has proven handy. He talks in depth this week about why FPGAs are coming onto the scene as companies like Google and Facebook seek a move away from "proprietary hardware" and look to "programmable devices" to do things like, oh, say, pick out a single face of one's choosing from an 800,000 strong population in under five seconds.

Dave Knott writes: Space burials are longer the stuff of science fiction (and wealthy science fiction TV show creators.) The cremated remains of more than 450 people have been shot into orbit. Yet, despite the promise of space being a unique "resting place," almost every tiny vial of remains ever sent there has come back down to Earth or burned up upon re-entry. This wouldn't have happened had the ashes landed on Earth's moon — a fact that hasn't been lost on the companies pioneering this futuristic funeral technology. The San Francisco-based company Elysium Space officially launched its 'lunar memorial' service earlier this month, and will soon be sending the remains of a U.S. Army Infantry Soldier's mother upwards as part of its first ever moon burial.

The company's website further explains how the lunar burials will work: "You receive a kit containing a custom ash capsule to collect a cremated remains sample. After we receive the ash capsule back from you, we place your capsule in the Elysium memorial spacecraft. The latter is eventually integrated to the Astrobotic lander during the designated integration event. From here, the lander is integrated onto the launch vehicle. On launch day, the remains are carried to the moon where the lander will be deployed to its dedicated location, preserving our memorial spacecraft for eternity." Because Elysium can only send a small portion of cremated remains to the moon (less than a gram), participants aren't actually paying to have their loved ones literally buried on the moon. However, this has not deterred the company from launching the service, charging $11,950 per "burial".

Last week you had the chance to ask electrical engineer and L5 society co-founder Keith Henson about space colonization, his solar power satellite project, and his run-ins with Scientology. Below you'll find his answers to your questions. Microwaving power to Earth from space
by Anonymous Coward

If the beam becomes misaligned and strikes Iowa, how do you stop the entire state from exploding into a massive popcorn volcano?

Henson: Sorry to disappoint about the popcorn, but it can’t happen. The transmission needs a guide beam to phase the wave front. Lose the beam and the power scatters into the entire half space in front of the antenna. Also, the power inside a microwave oven popping popcorn is around 10 kW/m^2. The beam from a power satellite is under 0.3 kW/m^2. Sunlight is around a kW/m^2.



Cost per KWh
by Rob Lister

What is the cost per KW for the build/deployment and resultant cost per KWh for the end user?

Henson: If you are going to do power satellites at all, they have to undercut coal or there is little point in doing them. If you go through the levelized cost of electric power for a no-fuel power source, the capital cost can’t exceed $2400/kW for 3 cent per kWh power. That undercuts coal, which costs around 4 cent per kWh. Because the cost of power to the end user includes a lot of fixed distribution cost, the retail cost to households probably will not change a lot, but it won’t go up either. Also it puts a cap on transport fuel because we can use cheap electricity to make cheap gasoline.

The investment to set up the parts pipeline to GEO is probably around $60 B (not counting Skylon). The financial model shows the whole capital investment paid off in less than ten years.



Minimum cost
by Winged Cat

By focusing only on $ per kW or $ per other unit, you seem to be ruling out consideration of $ per mission or $ per step, thus requiring $billions to be spent up front on technology that has only been proven in the laboratory. This is roughly as difficult as trying to kickstart a fusion reactor using nothing more than a matchbook.

Have you given any thought to demonstration missions, or realistic paths to funding that might eventually unlock enough money for the full system as you describe it? ("Government funding" not being a realistic path, given their demonstrated history with regard to projects that might actually give cheap power to the masses. This applies to any government large enough to fund this - such as US, EU, Russia, or China - though the exact means by which each one has demonstrated it wouldn't fund this, except to sabotage it and thereby waste the energy of those who might otherwise build this for real, varies by government.)

If not, why not? That's as much a part of the problem that needs solving here as the technology, and you've shown you can solve the technical side.

Henson: I have thought a lot about demonstration missions. Sorry to say, but they don’t make sense, at least not if you are trying to use expendable rockets. For less than the cost of one full sized demonstration power satellite, you can set up the low cost transport system and build half a dozen. That recently (last few days) might have changed. There may be a reason to build a 1/8th scale power satellite using a 25 GHz transmission beam. It’s to power the LEO to GEO leg of the transport system, but it would also demonstrate that power satellites work. It also looks like it will cost much less than the alternate, a $15-20 B, 8 GW transmitter on the ground at the equator.

As for why not, convincing governments or private investors to build any part of this is a different skill set. Be delighted to have you (or anyone) help. And thanks for the compliment.



What "wear and tear" factors are relevant
by ShieldW0lf

Could you give a general overview of what the wear factors are for your system, how long you would expect a satellite to last, and what the post failure plan would be?

Henson: PV type power satellites degrade because of radiation damage to the cells. That’s predictable but it might not be as bad as what we have seen on communication satellites. If you build many power satellites, and that’s the only program that makes sense, then the satellites capture the trapped particles in the Van Allen belt. When you start talking about hundreds to thousands of power satellites at 32,500 tons each and a total of 3 kg of protons trapped in the belts, you can see that the trapped particles are going to be soaked up rather fast. There is also a proposal to drain the belts.

If we build thermal power satellites, then there will be a lot of turbines, steam or possibly supercritical CO2. How the bearings will work in space is unknown, but the forces are so small that we could use noncontact bearings. Seals are harder. The levelized cost calculations included 10% per year maintenance based on the cost of the original parts. Thermal power satellites also require steady patching of micrometeorite holes in the radiators.

There is no reason I can think of why a power satellite would last less than several decades. For worn out power satellites, the assumption is that we reprocess the material into new ones. Mass in GEO is worth $200/kg, and it costs much less to reprocess mass than to haul up new materials. If the program comes about, there would be a substantial industrial and human presence in GEO, perhaps upwards of 10,000 people.



Why geosynchronous orbit?
by Anonymous Coward

Has anyone considered using a semi synchronous orbit with multiple receivers around the world to provide electricity to places at peak times (4pm to 8pm) when electricity is more expensive? I'm curious about the economics of it all.. e.g. how much down time would such a system have (as it's over the pacific say), what's the price of a receiving station, what's the comparative peak vs base load price of electricity? Would the sun still be visible to a satellite in semi synchronous orbit that can beam to a place on earth at 8pm (I imagine so) etc.

Henson: Addressing the economics, electricity is a commodity, especially base load power. Market goes to the lowest cost producers. Power satellites are cheaper than ground solar in close to the ratio of their utilization (i.e., fraction of the year they are selling power). Ground solar plants sell power about 20% of the time, vs space-based upwards of 90%. The problem with orbits other than GEO is the low utilization when the power satellites are in a bad location to deliver power. The last thing a utility wants is a big intermittent power plant.

If we build space-based solar power at all, it has to be 3 cents a kWh or less, otherwise the project just does not happen. Since the power uses no fuel and costs 3 cents a kWh, then run half the time it would cost 6 cents a kWh. That’s the same price as gas turbines used for intermediate and peaking loads. In a mature market, off peak power might be worth 2 cents a kWh to make hydrogen. The hydrogen plants are not efficiently used, but there is no reason they should be expensive, which is to say $200/kW or less. The effect of a 2-cent diversion market for power over the base load reduces the cost of intermediate power used half the time to 4 cents (6 +2)/2.

The long-range effect of power satellites will be to greatly reduce the value of peaking power, essentially to zero. What do we do with the hydrogen? Combine it with CO2 to make transport fuel. That solves the other half of the energy problem.



Space Elevator
by Btrot69

Most of us on slashdot will probably agree that "Economics, Energy, Carbon and Climate" are all one big problem that needs more investment. But the devil is in the details of how to do it.

I'm not an expert on this subject like Henson, but IMHO a space elevator seems just as close to being technically viable as space plane powered by a ground-based laser and microwave power beamed to earth.

Not only that -- a space elevator would be much cleaner and the cables might even be able to double as power transmission lines.And -- since all the good tethering points are in the third world (the equator) it would be a big solution to economic disparities too.

Why does Henson's article not consider the possibility of a space elevator?

Henson: The easy reason is that we don’t have the materials for the cable. I worked on the problem years ago, even figured out how to make a step-taper, moving-cable elevator. I can’t make one work for the Earth. I am not down on elevators; a Lunar elevator out through L1 makes sense with current strong materials such as Spectra. If someone finds material good enough for an Earth to GEO cable, we can then try to solve the other problems with satellites hitting and vaporizing the cable.



We've learned a lot
by Geoffrey.landis

We've learned a lot since the rather naive plans of the 1970s, when space colonization was first proposed by Gerard O'Neill and his students.How are things different now? What's the most important thing we've learned since then?

Henson: The main thing that is different now is the single-stage-to-orbit space plane—Skylon. Space has always been tightly constrained by the cost of launch, $20,000 to get a kg to GEO. The energy cost is under a dollar so there is lots of room to improve. At 10,000 flights per year Skylon should get the cost down to around $120/kg to LEO and with remotely powered electric rockets, the cost to GEO should not exceed $200/kg.

It’s hard to say what is the most important thing we have learned since O’Neill’s days. For me it might be that humans may not leave the Earth in significant numbers, but instead leave reality as we know it (by uploading).

I think O’Neill was aware of the problem, but if you read up on the space-station activities, the fraction of time they spend on maintenance is impressive. I think the solution might be to send up families, and put the kids to work.

If you want to keep up with the progress look here, It used to be low traffic, but activity is picking up. There are a few conferences on the topic and it gets coverage at the International Space Development Conference.



Transportation station
by Jack Dixon

With some of the income and infrastructure from this project, why not use it as a way station for Mars expeditions? Build a self sufficient habitat and inject it into the favorable orbit between L5 and Mars. Then every two years a group of colonists could ride it with very little fuel expenditure to Mars. They would need to park their descent vehicle nearby. Food, water, and radiation protection could be provided in the habitat, with artificial gravity and greenhouse food production managed by a team of robots during the long sector of the orbit.

Henson: I am not a big Mars fan. O’Neill convinced me long ago that planetary surfaces are not good places for a growing industrial society. Still, I have proposed that the charter for the construction company include a “hundredth one goes to Mars” clause. The Mars fans can have a power satellite to move to Mars and use there, or the mass (~30,000 tons) of one in GEO for a Mars mission. This could happen rapidly. Governments could decide that they just have to quit burning fossil fuels and that power satellites are the only way to do it without destroying the economy from high energy prices. If we started building power satellites at 5 per year in 2023, and doubled every year (mostly building more Skylons) then the Mars mission could leave before 2030.



Asteroid Mining
by meta-monkey

Leaving aside the not insignificant economic and safety concerns, I'm interested in the technical feasibility of extracting minerals from asteroids in useful quantities. On earth, we extract minerals concentrated by geological and biological processes that are unlikely to have occurred on an inert asteroid.

What do we know about the distribution of minerals within asteroids, what more do we need to know in order to design machines that can extract these minerals, and what can you speculate about how those machines might work?

Henson: You are correct, other than the Siderophile separation, same that sent most of the gold to the center of the Earth, it doesn’t look like the asteroids had mechanisms that concentrated minerals. There may be exceptions on asteroids as large as Vesta.

We know a lot about asteroid mineral concentrations from the tens of thousands of samples found as meteorites. Most of them would not be valuable if you found them in the millions of tons on Earth.

On the last question, you are in luck! I happen to be one of the few space fans who actually worked in mining. A few years ago I wrote up my thoughts on how to mine a huge asteroid (1986 DA). It is the metallic core of a differentiated asteroid.



So, whatever happened, anyway?
by Anonymous Coward

So, whatever happened to the scientology thing, anyway? I remember reading about what was going on, but I never really heard how it all came out.

Henson: It’s still in process. The cult has shrunk from around 100,000 when they tried to rmgroup alt.religion.scientology to (some say) 10,000. With all the data on the net, they have an awful time trying to recruit new members, and former members sue the cult in an orgy of litigation. After the recent “Going Clear” documentary on HBO, there are now many people saying the IRS should yank the cult’s tax-exempt status. The cult abused the IRS through the courts back in the early 1990s to get that status. The IRS still fears the cult so that’s not likely to happen soon, in spite of huge abuses such as hiring PIs that have no legitimate corporate function. That makes the money spent on them an illegal use of a non-profit funds (inurement). If any ordinary religion did this they would be facing jail time. Of course, the cult has more in common with organized crime than religion.

I got a couple of academic papers out of my involvement. I was trying to figure out why (some) people are so vulnerable to cult attention rewards that they act like drug addicts, for example abandoning their own children. Search for Sex, Drugs, and Cults or just go here. Other papers are here.

Last week you had the chance to ask electrical engineer and L5 society co-founder Keith Henson about space colonization, his solar power satellite project, and his run-ins with Scientology. Below you'll find his answers to your questions. Microwaving power to Earth from space
by Anonymous Coward

If the beam becomes misaligned and strikes Iowa, how do you stop the entire state from exploding into a massive popcorn volcano?

Henson: Sorry to disappoint about the popcorn, but it can’t happen. The transmission needs a guide beam to phase the wave front. Lose the beam and the power scatters into the entire half space in front of the antenna. Also, the power inside a microwave oven popping popcorn is around 10 kW/m^2. The beam from a power satellite is under 0.3 kW/m^2. Sunlight is around a kW/m^2.



Cost per KWh
by Rob Lister

What is the cost per KW for the build/deployment and resultant cost per KWh for the end user?

Henson: If you are going to do power satellites at all, they have to undercut coal or there is little point in doing them. If you go through the levelized cost of electric power for a no-fuel power source, the capital cost can’t exceed $2400/kW for 3 cent per kWh power. That undercuts coal, which costs around 4 cent per kWh. Because the cost of power to the end user includes a lot of fixed distribution cost, the retail cost to households probably will not change a lot, but it won’t go up either. Also it puts a cap on transport fuel because we can use cheap electricity to make cheap gasoline.

The investment to set up the parts pipeline to GEO is probably around $60 B (not counting Skylon). The financial model shows the whole capital investment paid off in less than ten years.



Minimum cost
by Winged Cat

By focusing only on $ per kW or $ per other unit, you seem to be ruling out consideration of $ per mission or $ per step, thus requiring $billions to be spent up front on technology that has only been proven in the laboratory. This is roughly as difficult as trying to kickstart a fusion reactor using nothing more than a matchbook.

Have you given any thought to demonstration missions, or realistic paths to funding that might eventually unlock enough money for the full system as you describe it? ("Government funding" not being a realistic path, given their demonstrated history with regard to projects that might actually give cheap power to the masses. This applies to any government large enough to fund this - such as US, EU, Russia, or China - though the exact means by which each one has demonstrated it wouldn't fund this, except to sabotage it and thereby waste the energy of those who might otherwise build this for real, varies by government.)

If not, why not? That's as much a part of the problem that needs solving here as the technology, and you've shown you can solve the technical side.

Henson: I have thought a lot about demonstration missions. Sorry to say, but they don’t make sense, at least not if you are trying to use expendable rockets. For less than the cost of one full sized demonstration power satellite, you can set up the low cost transport system and build half a dozen. That recently (last few days) might have changed. There may be a reason to build a 1/8th scale power satellite using a 25 GHz transmission beam. It’s to power the LEO to GEO leg of the transport system, but it would also demonstrate that power satellites work. It also looks like it will cost much less than the alternate, a $15-20 B, 8 GW transmitter on the ground at the equator.

As for why not, convincing governments or private investors to build any part of this is a different skill set. Be delighted to have you (or anyone) help. And thanks for the compliment.



What "wear and tear" factors are relevant
by ShieldW0lf

Could you give a general overview of what the wear factors are for your system, how long you would expect a satellite to last, and what the post failure plan would be?

Henson: PV type power satellites degrade because of radiation damage to the cells. That’s predictable but it might not be as bad as what we have seen on communication satellites. If you build many power satellites, and that’s the only program that makes sense, then the satellites capture the trapped particles in the Van Allen belt. When you start talking about hundreds to thousands of power satellites at 32,500 tons each and a total of 3 kg of protons trapped in the belts, you can see that the trapped particles are going to be soaked up rather fast. There is also a proposal to drain the belts.

If we build thermal power satellites, then there will be a lot of turbines, steam or possibly supercritical CO2. How the bearings will work in space is unknown, but the forces are so small that we could use noncontact bearings. Seals are harder. The levelized cost calculations included 10% per year maintenance based on the cost of the original parts. Thermal power satellites also require steady patching of micrometeorite holes in the radiators.

There is no reason I can think of why a power satellite would last less than several decades. For worn out power satellites, the assumption is that we reprocess the material into new ones. Mass in GEO is worth $200/kg, and it costs much less to reprocess mass than to haul up new materials. If the program comes about, there would be a substantial industrial and human presence in GEO, perhaps upwards of 10,000 people.



Why geosynchronous orbit?
by Anonymous Coward

Has anyone considered using a semi synchronous orbit with multiple receivers around the world to provide electricity to places at peak times (4pm to 8pm) when electricity is more expensive? I'm curious about the economics of it all.. e.g. how much down time would such a system have (as it's over the pacific say), what's the price of a receiving station, what's the comparative peak vs base load price of electricity? Would the sun still be visible to a satellite in semi synchronous orbit that can beam to a place on earth at 8pm (I imagine so) etc.

Henson: Addressing the economics, electricity is a commodity, especially base load power. Market goes to the lowest cost producers. Power satellites are cheaper than ground solar in close to the ratio of their utilization (i.e., fraction of the year they are selling power). Ground solar plants sell power about 20% of the time, vs space-based upwards of 90%. The problem with orbits other than GEO is the low utilization when the power satellites are in a bad location to deliver power. The last thing a utility wants is a big intermittent power plant.

If we build space-based solar power at all, it has to be 3 cents a kWh or less, otherwise the project just does not happen. Since the power uses no fuel and costs 3 cents a kWh, then run half the time it would cost 6 cents a kWh. That’s the same price as gas turbines used for intermediate and peaking loads. In a mature market, off peak power might be worth 2 cents a kWh to make hydrogen. The hydrogen plants are not efficiently used, but there is no reason they should be expensive, which is to say $200/kW or less. The effect of a 2-cent diversion market for power over the base load reduces the cost of intermediate power used half the time to 4 cents (6 +2)/2.

The long-range effect of power satellites will be to greatly reduce the value of peaking power, essentially to zero. What do we do with the hydrogen? Combine it with CO2 to make transport fuel. That solves the other half of the energy problem.



Space Elevator
by Btrot69

Most of us on slashdot will probably agree that "Economics, Energy, Carbon and Climate" are all one big problem that needs more investment. But the devil is in the details of how to do it.

I'm not an expert on this subject like Henson, but IMHO a space elevator seems just as close to being technically viable as space plane powered by a ground-based laser and microwave power beamed to earth.

Not only that -- a space elevator would be much cleaner and the cables might even be able to double as power transmission lines.And -- since all the good tethering points are in the third world (the equator) it would be a big solution to economic disparities too.

Why does Henson's article not consider the possibility of a space elevator?

Henson: The easy reason is that we don’t have the materials for the cable. I worked on the problem years ago, even figured out how to make a step-taper, moving-cable elevator. I can’t make one work for the Earth. I am not down on elevators; a Lunar elevator out through L1 makes sense with current strong materials such as Spectra. If someone finds material good enough for an Earth to GEO cable, we can then try to solve the other problems with satellites hitting and vaporizing the cable.



We've learned a lot
by Geoffrey.landis

We've learned a lot since the rather naive plans of the 1970s, when space colonization was first proposed by Gerard O'Neill and his students.How are things different now? What's the most important thing we've learned since then?

Henson: The main thing that is different now is the single-stage-to-orbit space plane—Skylon. Space has always been tightly constrained by the cost of launch, $20,000 to get a kg to GEO. The energy cost is under a dollar so there is lots of room to improve. At 10,000 flights per year Skylon should get the cost down to around $120/kg to LEO and with remotely powered electric rockets, the cost to GEO should not exceed $200/kg.

It’s hard to say what is the most important thing we have learned since O’Neill’s days. For me it might be that humans may not leave the Earth in significant numbers, but instead leave reality as we know it (by uploading).

I think O’Neill was aware of the problem, but if you read up on the space-station activities, the fraction of time they spend on maintenance is impressive. I think the solution might be to send up families, and put the kids to work.

If you want to keep up with the progress look here, It used to be low traffic, but activity is picking up. There are a few conferences on the topic and it gets coverage at the International Space Development Conference.



Transportation station
by Jack Dixon

With some of the income and infrastructure from this project, why not use it as a way station for Mars expeditions? Build a self sufficient habitat and inject it into the favorable orbit between L5 and Mars. Then every two years a group of colonists could ride it with very little fuel expenditure to Mars. They would need to park their descent vehicle nearby. Food, water, and radiation protection could be provided in the habitat, with artificial gravity and greenhouse food production managed by a team of robots during the long sector of the orbit.

Henson: I am not a big Mars fan. O’Neill convinced me long ago that planetary surfaces are not good places for a growing industrial society. Still, I have proposed that the charter for the construction company include a “hundredth one goes to Mars” clause. The Mars fans can have a power satellite to move to Mars and use there, or the mass (~30,000 tons) of one in GEO for a Mars mission. This could happen rapidly. Governments could decide that they just have to quit burning fossil fuels and that power satellites are the only way to do it without destroying the economy from high energy prices. If we started building power satellites at 5 per year in 2023, and doubled every year (mostly building more Skylons) then the Mars mission could leave before 2030.



Asteroid Mining
by meta-monkey

Leaving aside the not insignificant economic and safety concerns, I'm interested in the technical feasibility of extracting minerals from asteroids in useful quantities. On earth, we extract minerals concentrated by geological and biological processes that are unlikely to have occurred on an inert asteroid.

What do we know about the distribution of minerals within asteroids, what more do we need to know in order to design machines that can extract these minerals, and what can you speculate about how those machines might work?

Henson: You are correct, other than the Siderophile separation, same that sent most of the gold to the center of the Earth, it doesn’t look like the asteroids had mechanisms that concentrated minerals. There may be exceptions on asteroids as large as Vesta.

We know a lot about asteroid mineral concentrations from the tens of thousands of samples found as meteorites. Most of them would not be valuable if you found them in the millions of tons on Earth.

On the last question, you are in luck! I happen to be one of the few space fans who actually worked in mining. A few years ago I wrote up my thoughts on how to mine a huge asteroid (1986 DA). It is the metallic core of a differentiated asteroid.



So, whatever happened, anyway?
by Anonymous Coward

So, whatever happened to the scientology thing, anyway? I remember reading about what was going on, but I never really heard how it all came out.

Henson: It’s still in process. The cult has shrunk from around 100,000 when they tried to rmgroup alt.religion.scientology to (some say) 10,000. With all the data on the net, they have an awful time trying to recruit new members, and former members sue the cult in an orgy of litigation. After the recent “Going Clear” documentary on HBO, there are now many people saying the IRS should yank the cult’s tax-exempt status. The cult abused the IRS through the courts back in the early 1990s to get that status. The IRS still fears the cult so that’s not likely to happen soon, in spite of huge abuses such as hiring PIs that have no legitimate corporate function. That makes the money spent on them an illegal use of a non-profit funds (inurement). If any ordinary religion did this they would be facing jail time. Of course, the cult has more in common with organized crime than religion.

I got a couple of academic papers out of my involvement. I was trying to figure out why (some) people are so vulnerable to cult attention rewards that they act like drug addicts, for example abandoning their own children. Search for Sex, Drugs, and Cults or just go here. Other papers are here.