Slashdot Mirror
White House Must Answer Petition To 'Build Death Star'
EdIII writes "The White House petition to secure funding for building the Death Star has garnered over 25,000 signatures, which means the White House must officially respond. I can't wait to see it. My question to Slashdot readers: what modifications would you add to the proposed Death Star? Obviously, as one journalist put it, 'guardrails around any of the facility's seemingly endless number of bridges, spans, shafts and pits.' What other changes would you ask your representatives to make?"
No more shafts leading directly to the core, please.
Enjoy post-apocalyptic and singularity science fiction? Check out www.demonarchives.com, a new online graphic-novel.
Clearly, we should make sure there is adequate shielding around all thermal exhaust ports. They may only be 1.5m wide, but you never know when some womp-rat bulls-eyeing farm kid in a snub fighter will show up.
is why we have the Electoral College.
They don't actually *have* to respond, just because there are the required number of signatures. They've ignored many of these petitions, most recently those petitions regarding state secession following the November elections.
so people finally realize that all the space fantasies they grew up with are simply not possible
People do realize that, idiot, it's just that most people aren't autistic like you and don't take this kind of thing seriously.
...it is ADA compliant.
We already have one. Where did you think all the money went?
-Obama
It just helps the White House trivialize other petitions. We are fast becoming a nation of idiots, who don't value our rights. There are so many good petitions and then we have this. Should it even be on Slashdot? It should get a curt, "No Comment" from the White House. 25,000 idiots.
Access shafts smaller than 2 meters No straight runs on access shafts that are for core ventilation Tractor Beam generator disables requiring multi-person authorization Cameras on the prison levels Better training of security staff A 5 fold increase in garbage compactor speed and no main airlock opening until the garbage has been vented into space. Defense turrets around the power core Decentralized power generators
"What, our Debt Star isn't enough? Don't try to out-greed us, peasants."
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
... and maybe more star while we're at it. Really, the previous death stars haven't caused enough of either.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Jokes going to be on you, and probably the people who thought they were kidding by making this request, if the white house pulls out a real death star made from nanorobotics and AGI they developed in secret. While it can be argued this stuff is far off, it really can't be argued that it's impossible. Short version of nanorobotics is this: You make one nanobot (atomically precise robot the size of a blood cell with manipulator arms for moving atoms), it can then make a second, those two can make four, those four can make eight and so on. Being a million times smaller than human scale machines, they would move a million times faster, so you'd end up with trillions or more in a day, more than enough. Nanobots could make vast structures of atomic precision, controlled by massive amounts of nanocomputer based AI. Building a death star would be as easy as ordering a happy meal. Along with things like eternal life spans (heat death, big crunch, etc. permitting), no diseases, no aging, omnipresent crime prevention, etc. I doubt anyone would actually build a death star if they could, except to say 'gee, look at this cool thing I built' but certainly not impossible.
"...I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease." - Linus Torvalds
Those X-Wings weren't flying very fast and the targeting couldn't hit them with lasers! Lasers travel at the speed of light and you couldn't hit a target moving less than the speed of light? Definitely gov't contractors that built the targeting system.
While you're at it, some ID requirement and checkpoints into vital area like the shield and tractor beam controls. Maybe put at guard or an alarm whenever some vital system like the shield is disabled.
And DirecTV for UFC fights. When your entire company of troops gets distracted by a light saber fight, they're just saying they need better entertainment. A firing range would help the troops relax and maybe just maybe help them hit targets with their laser rifle.
Right. People like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk. They're just dummies that haven't thought about it enough, or maybe they're just not good with numbers or technology. Why would we even consider the possibility of leaving this rock if we can't manage more than a year or so off-planet right now? Obviously you're right, it's impossible, and everyone else is wrong.
Or just maybe petitioning for a Death Star has absolutely nothing to do with seriously considering the possibility of living somewhere other than earth, and it might be possible. If you listen to some people much smarter than you or me, possibly even in our lifetime.
Beyond that, why so angry about people having dreams of space? Take a deep breath.
I think Disney should (t least partially) fund such a project ;-)
I know the holodeck is from Star Trek but hey, if we are going to do this right, a holodeck is necessary.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
Randal: A construction job of that magnitude would require a helluva lot more manpower than the Imperial army had to offer. I'll bet there were independent contractors working on that thing: plumbers, aluminum siders, roofers.
Dante: Not just Imperials, is what you're getting at.
Randal: Exactly. In order to get it built quickly and quietly they'd hire anybody who could do the job. Do you think the average storm trooper knows how to install a toilet main? All they know is killing and white uniforms.
Dante: All right, so even if independent contractors are working on the Death Star, why are you uneasy with its destruction?
Randal: All those innocent contractors hired to do a job were killed- casualties of a war they had nothing to do with. (notices Dante's confusion) All right, look-you're a roofer, and some juicy government contract comes your way; you got the wife and kids and the two-story in suburbia-this is a government contract, which means all sorts of benefits. All of a sudden these left-wing militants blast you with lasers and wipe out everyone within a three-mile radius. You didn't ask for that. You have no personal politics. You're just trying to scrape out a living.
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
Imagine if we had a true democracy where everyone had a vote on everything.
We would not have universal healthcare, we would have universal Lamborghini Aventadors.
Of course we would have no roads to drive them on since that funding would go towards universal ice cream.
Good thing corporations and rich people set our policies and not Occupy Wall Street dead beats.
The official response should look something like this, I imagine:
No.
The rules say that the White House has to respond, not that they have to do it.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
No, the short version of nanorobotics is that nanorobot power supplies are constrained by the laws of physics, like power supplies (ever notice how many bacteria thrive by eating metal and rocks for their primary energy source? yeah, me neither. i can't even get my laptop to last all day on one battery) or communications problems (how can a nanorobot know where it is relative to what it's building? deduced reckoning? how can it talk to its controller and accomplish its task without getting drowned out by trillions of other nanorobots in the communications cross-talk?) or basic materials science (what materials can have atoms gingerly placed next to each other by robots for assembly and still hold up even under the stresses of a death star's own gravity field, to say nothing of travel) or any one of a number of obstacles. Not that these problems can't be ameliorated or worked around in a variety of contexts to achieve a variety of interesting goals eventually (e.g. arbitrary lifespans for carbon-based lifeforms such as ourselves), but "ordering a Death Star as easily as ordering a happy meal" being permanently impossible *is* something I can comfortably argue.
Besides, "omnipresent crime prevention" is pretty dystopian when you get down to it.
That will be the real exciting fight to see in Congress. I propose that the Congress folks duke it out in a no-rules laser sword iron death cage rumble, to decide which state can add to their license plate, "The Death Star State!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
My guess is that the White House is going to respond a little bit seriously and call out the Outer Space Treaty as a reason why we can't create a Death Star. Or maybe if they respond around Christmas they'll show several LEGO Death Star kits they've purchased and donated to charity and call the task completed. [Nothing in the petition asked for a FULL SIZED Death Star, after all.]
Why don't you do us all a favor, and put your logic to your own computer.
200 years ago they were impossible, so that means right now you feel they are impossible. Just get rid of it. Get offline. None of this is real, you said so yourself.
Oh wait, you're just a hypocrite. How about you also ignore the parent poster, get even more angry, and just have a heart attack and die already. The world would be a better place.
Why doesn't someone start a petition that's actually useful, like, I dunno, repealing the stupid 2nd amendment or something?
What would be the point of building a space station with a planet-destroying superlaser when all live on the same planet as all of our enemies?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Exactly like my grand-grandmother, who died convinced that we never went to the moon because "that's just impossible".
That's no moon...
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
How about strong encryption for the data network, so that it can't be hacked by a simple R2 unit?
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Life seems to do pretty much all the things you're concerned with well enough.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager