Umm. The distances mentioned to keep the collectors outside of the Earth's magnetic field mean that the collectors won't be in synchronous orbit.
That will mean at least 3 collectors, and likely 4-6 collectors. It will be interesting to know if you can keep microwaves in phase so that a receiver can pull power off of 2 collectors simultaneously while doing the transition.
For most of the immunity the bug pays a cost. Either it has to use a less efficient metabolic pathway, or it has to have active processes that counteract the antibiotic.
Remove the antibiotic and the bug reverts to a susceptible form again in a relatively short number of generations.
Were this not the case, then the TB bugs that are immune to 11 different antibiotic, and the hospital bred super-staphylococcus would be running rampant through the world.
Apparently this was a problem in the cold war too with bio-warfare. Selecting virulent strains of bugs was fine and dandy, but they wouldn't maintain their virulence.
Tidal locking depends on the differential gravity between the sides closest and furthest from the paired object. The moon has had time to tidally lock to the earth, but the earth, with 64 times the mass has not.
An orbiting planet has much smaller tides relative to the primary. (Our earth's solar tides are on the order of a few inches) I'd expect that planetary locking requires MUCH closer orbits to the parent body. And sure, dwarfs are lower in illumnination, so a planet at the right temp would need to be closer.
But I would be interested in knowing how they figure the planet to be tidally locked instead of, say, having a month long rotational period.
***
At one point Mercury was supposed to be locked, and they figured that the night side of Mercury was the coldest place in the solar system.
On at least Earth and Mars winter produces net precipitation at the poles.
What keeps a tidally locked planet from becoming a desert?
And given how cold Antarctica gets in jsut 6 months of winter, what keeps all the CO2 from freezing out?
Right now in Canada we have broadband coming into semi-rural areas (lake cottages, acreages, with spillover to Farms)
Xplornet has just put up a new tower 15 km away. Unfortuantely I'm in a hollow, and can't 'see' it.
The way they work locally uses small directional antennas at the house end -- they look like a tupperware square cake container on a stick) -- and presumably a zoned antenna on the tower.
My expectation is that the new frequencies will be licensed, similar to the present ones, at least for power greater than N watts.
An application I *would* like to see: Cordless phones that I could use anywhere on my 80 acre farm. There exist such, but they cost about $800 -- not worth it.
Parent is correct: bandwidth, coverage, and population are mutually exclusive as a triple. However this gives some better options for sparsely populated areas.
Broadcast is not an answer in the city. In the Bad Old Days before cell phones, getting a radio license in a city was very hard to do. Way too many people wanted one.
Narrowcasting makes a lot more sense.
Cheap free standing towers start at $2000 for 80-100 feet. Place as needed. Each tower has a microwave relay to a more central tower, and a router that distributes packets to the appropriate house link. The house links can range from millewatts to watts depending on distance.
If power consumption of a tower isn't outlandish, the terms of rental are something like, "we pay you 20 bucks a month, and give you free 10 Mbit/s internet, and we plug the tower into your outlet.
If it's higher, or too far from the house to be practical to plug in, run a separate electrical service.
I used to work with a private school's outdoor program. We used sat phones when on remote trips to check in. ($100/month + $2/minute)
We found:
An overstory of pine usually wasn't a problem. Spruce had enough sectional density that it was a problem.
On canoe trips, we stand on a north shore to get a clear view. Once I had to go sit in a canoe when we were on a south shore to get a good enough view to the south. (N and S are relative to the body of water)
Forests generally weren't continuous. On hiking trips in the Rockies, valley floors were usually clear of trees, covered in scrub birch. And ridge tops were clear, as were spring run-off channels (100 yard wide boulder path), recent forest fire burns, avalanche paths.
When we were working in areas that had roads, the road right of way was typically 30-40 feet wide. Finding a spot where the road ran north/south, or if on an E/W chunk on a south facing slope, climbing the north side usually would work.
Heavy fog would block the signal, as would major precipitation events, or storm clouds.
In 10 years of using them, I don't think we ever had to work more than an hour to get through, and 95% of the time it was just dial.
Oh goody. ANOTHER (*$&)#*&(&*(&* remote control to lose!
Right now I have an iPod and a cheapy cell phone. That's bad enough. ONE device. I'm giving serious thought to upgrading to an iPhone JUST to decrease my gadget count.
I don't want a device to control my HP printer. I want to be able to download an app for ANY smart device to control my printer. E.g. I want any wifi device in my house to control my printer (subject to usual network security.)
So my iPod, my wife's iPhone, an android tablet, a kindle, whatever.
And they should be able to find each other with minimimum hassle. And if there are small devices, there needs to be a way to wake them up lighting up, and ringing.
One device to rule them all. One device to find them. One device to ring them all and in their brightness bind them.
Sauron had the right idea. He had too many )@(#&$_ rings, so he made ONE to do all the work.
Where delivery isn't built into the prices, it seems that typical delivery costs are $10 to $15 for an item, at least until you get to the 'bigger than a breadbox' size.
To operate my pickup (Don't shoot me, I can't deliver trees in a Subaru) costs about 40 cents per kilometer. So if picking something up is more than 30 km ($12) round trip, then economically I should get it delivered.
Since the nearest good city for shopping is 75 km away, I try to clump purchases. E.g. last week, I combined delivery 400 trees, picking up a crate of pots, doing the grocery shopping, stopping at a book store, picking up plumbing fittings at the hardware store, and stopping at the cardlock for gas for the truck and the lawnmower.
But if you compress it with a well known compression program will it not produce a standard header? Knowing that it has a standard header gives you a crib which should speed up breaking it, yes?
You would want to modify the compression program to put the header info in a non-standard place.
By stuffing files with encrypted random data (indistinguishable from encrypted compromising data until decrypted) you dilute the the attempts of the Other Side.
Even with weak systems such as DES decryption without the key is enormously more time consuming than encryption.
If the Other Side requries a 10,000 core server farm to break 1 message a minute, and you can keep them busy by generating 1 false message a minute with a single core, and still have cpu cycles to spare, you are ahead of the game.
A second reason for encrypting random data: Thwart operational traffic analysis. A darknet that spends free cycles moving encrypted random chunks around makes it more difficult (impossble?) to figure out who is talking to who.
The places where plant matter parks for long time spans tend to be highly acidic bogs. Even ordinary landfills, with their sealed bottoms, and layers of clay on top produce significant quantities of methane -- an even more potent greenhouse gas.
Oops. Back to the drawing board.
I don't about where you are, but here, they aren't allowed to burn forest waste, not in the open anyway. Many large mills burn their own waste to generate process steam to heat the OSB and particle board presses, or to generate power to run the saws.
Straw is used for feed (straw + grain works pretty well) or bedding. After bedding use, it can't be burned (wet with soggy bits) and it's frequently spread on fields.
The big fad right now in agriculture is zero tillage. Leave the stubble. In some cases leave the straw. Plant the next crop through the straw and stubble, with precisely the amount of fertilizer that crop needs parked next to the seed.
So in a nutshell, there isn't any ag waste here.
There is some merit in reducing waste to biochar. You can extract some of the energy out of it, use it for whatever, and put about half the original carbon back into the ground as charcoal. Charcoal is quite stable.
The jury is still out whether adding charcoal to temperate soils will work the same way it has in the Amazon. But even if it doesn't, it's likely to do no harm, which makes it a suitable parking space for carbon.
Oh come now! We've got somewhere between half a billion and several billion years before the sun cooks the earth. Move the planet further from the sun. Damp the solar reactions
What do you mean, "How"
New technology, of course. You surely don't think that a few thousand years of technology (starting with the flint scraper) and a few hundred years of science have reached the end of what's posssible.
Heck half a billion years ago we (ok, ok, our ancestors) were still in the ocean.
Oh, I don't know. I'd say that polical violence is ineffective because it's not very good at being violent.
If war is considered a form of political violence, it can be effective. Seems to me that Rome did a pretty effective bit of political violence on Carthage, yes? And conversely after their defeat in Teutonwald, they backed out of northern Europe and didn't return.
Consider: 9/11 killed fewer people than died slipping in their bathtubs that year. Lever Brothers, and Proctor & Gamble are responsible for more deaths than the 9/11 guys.
A terrorist kills 10 people, and injures 40. It's international news. A million kids die of diarrhoea from bad water. WHO report page 42.
The war in Afganistan makes national news whenever a soldier gets killed. At the height of Vietnam the U.S. was losing 17,000 soldiers a year -- about 50 a day.
Political violence is good for getting a lot of attention for a small amount of violence, but like most P.R. it's all sizzle and no steak.
We're getting a lot more news and publicity per death. That's progress, isn't it?
So you speed up the spacecraft and slow down the railgun.
Back to the drawing board.
Hmm. I guess if the railgun has enough umph, you could accelerate some mass the other way.
Good Now you have things in the same orbital plane, going in opposite directions.
Back to the drawing board.
Ok, for the railgun to gain momentum again, you accelerate a smaller mass, but send it at greater than earth escape velocity.
But it's still in solar orbit, in one that will eventually come close by again. Can we keep track of a few zillion of these 10-30 km/sec objects?
Back to the drawing board.
Ok, when we de-orbit, we also use the railgun. This way we drop the rocket straight down. If we drop as much mass as we orbit, the railgun averages out.
Oh joy. Drop straight down from 150 km up. And just how do we dispose of that energy. Remember that half the air that you will use for braking is below 18,000 feet.
Create a unique test for each student. You will have to spend some time doing some programming, but in essence it works like this:
1. For each concept you want to test, you generate N parameterized questions. By the latter, I mean that the individual instances of a given question may have all the words the same, but will have different numbers.
2. When you generate a test, you also generate an answer key for it.
3. If N=5 then for multiple choice questions, the wrong answers for instance 1 are the right answers for instances 2-5.
4. The questions are generated in random order for each test, so not everyone is working on the falling cannonball problem at the same time.
5. When you print them, print them on a variety of colours of paper. Nothing like having the person next to you getting a pink exam, with obvious different problems on the first page to thwart their nefarious ambitions.
Off the top of my head, I'd do it in perl or python. A question would be a file that looks like this:
On a planet far away, a physics student drops a rock off a [CLIFF] meter high cliff. The rock takes [FALL] second to hit the ground. What is the acceleration of gravity on that planet
If more than one template exists in a file, one is chosen at random.
One advantage of this: If someone is sick, misses the exam, or is challenging the course, it's easy to generate a new exam for them to take.
This still doesn't stop someone from querying the world for answers, but with each test unique, cheating inside the classroom is a lot harder, and just communicating the problem is slow enough that getting answers to all of the problems would be hard to do in the time available.
As another option, could you bring in your own access points? Bring cheapy AP's If you bring 3 in the campus AP won't be able to automatically find a clear free channel. If you run a broadcast storm on your mini-network, the room's wifi should be, at best, erratic.
One of my preferred recordings of one of the Brandenburg concertos is done entirely on synthesizer. I like it because the different instruments are far more distinctive, so it's much easier to follow different strands.
1. At present in chemistry patents there is a tendency to patent the periodic table. "The use of a transition metal catalyst either as pure metal, oxide or sulfide, embedded into a suitable substrate" when what they did was use platinum on ceramic beads. Claims should be allowed only for what you ahve done.
2. The patent office now officially rejects perpetual motion and net energy machines "unless accompanied by a working model" This should be far more universal.
3. Some form of public review as to "prior art"
4. Some qualitative threshold on "improvement" E.g. You have to demonstrate not only is your patent different, but it is also better, and not just by a hair. E.g. If you have a new sorting algorithm, you have to show that it is at least 20% faster that the existing ones or that it is 20% better for small cases. If you have a patent for new kind of brakes for a car, you have to show that it's simpler to make, or works better in the rain.
The touchstone for this should be, "Is this enough better, that existing practitioners in the art are likely to want to license the patent because it will save them money or allow them to produce a better product." If the answer is no, then the product is insufficiently innovative.
A library with an intelligent acquisitions policy will get both paper and electronic forms of the book. ebook versions allow fast loaning for surges in popularity.
Right now when a popular pot boiler comes out, out library buys 10-30 copies, then a year later sells them for a buck each. Far better to buy 1 copy, and tell patrons, "use the ebook, or go on the wait list.
The expense of ebook readers is temporary. Look at what has happened to low end MP3 players.
My suspicion is that at some point ebook, netbook and phone will merge. The resulting form factor will likely be larger than the present iphone, but smaller than the present netbook. I can also see niche markets for larger readers/displays.
(Would it not be cool if you could buy an iPad that had an iphone shaped slot in it? All the smarts were on the iphone, and the ipad was just a display terminal. ONE telephone account/data account. When you are on the road, you just have the iphone. Maybe the ipad is in your briefcase. When you are on the plane, you ahve the bigger screen to work with.)
I would be interested in seeing how the cost breaks down on a popular book.
From what I've read about the publishing business, there is an awful lot of time and energy used in moving dead tree stuff around. Right now I expect that 40% is paper, printing and transport.
Yes the publishing/editing is a significant effort and therefore cost. But my understanding is that an author gets less than 10% of the cover price of a paperback, the retailer gets about 40% and the publisher about 50% out of which he has to pay for shipping, printing and so on.
Now with internet, the price of publicity is way down. I know that with Jim Baen's books his editor team is good enough that just having the Baen logo is a good enough reason to borrow the book at the library.
Fiction publishing is is a competition for beer money. I will spend X dollars on books a year, more or less. If the books are cheaper (chapter's sales,) I don't spend less, I buy more books.
An electronic format is virtually free to distribute. If a publisher like Baen offered subscriptions for, say $20/month, that included every new book they produced, or allowed me to order from their backlog at $1/book, then they would get ALL of my beer money instead of having to share it with the book store. Sure there would be a few lemons in the basket, but so what. The net effect is a win-win. Baen gets more of my beer money. I get more books per buck.
Publishers could make somewhat more money by having tiered releases. "First Day Release" costs a buck more. If you are connected to social networks, you can start chatting about the latest release from some author ahead of hte crowd. If you are more parsimonious, you wait a month for it to be on the general release list 2 weeks later. (This may be a way to reduce their servers being swamped too.)
This assumes that people respect the IP. And from what I've read about in the Indie music scene, people don't begrudge the creator his pound of flesh, they rebel at having to give the publisher a pound so the creator gets a bite.
As to the self publishing trade, and the dreck it produces. I expect that with time, this business will evolve the way the indie music scene has too. There will be specialist free lance copy editors, continuity checkers and proof readers that for a fee will go over your work.
***
As to reference books. I dearly wish I could subscribe to Dirr's "Woody Plants & Ornamentals." as a database instead of as a book. That way I would be up to date, instead of having to shell out a hundred bucks every two years for the current edition. Probably be a lot more searchable.
1. Currently most DNS records have Time to Live of a few days to a week. I would expect that servers of secure sites would want much longer times than this. Clients then know that certain servers are to be connected at specific addresses, and bring up an alarm when the last IP of record for server.foobank.com has changed.
2. I'm always suspicious when any web site makes reference to a server outside of it's own domain. Is this not also a place that responsible secure servers could take a step. Couple this with browsers that recognize this step. (Perhaps special content on the web page, or an added HINFO record in DNS.) Thus the people in charge of foobank.com can take steps that in the long run will make them harder to spoof.
3. As criminal domains are found, their registrar gets a black mark. When your computer's DNS lookup goes and gets an address, it also checks who the registrar is. (can do that in background) and records that info locally. Your brower in turn can be programmed to warn/block domains that have greater than a certain black mark fraction. Of course it would more efficient if this were done at a larger scale.
4. Registars have to pay a fine if a domain registered with them is discovered to be engaged in criminal activity?
5. One of the DNS requests that is sent when you encounter a new domain name is a recursive one finding out when the domain was originally registered. (Not speaking of individual hosts, the domain) If foobank.com has been around for 50 years, but the domain is only 7 days old, I'm going to be suspicious. Indeed. Email servers could easily opt to not accept email, or alternately flag email when it came from a domain less than X days old. This in turn could mean that a young domain is scanned more closely for fraud & spam indicators.
Some of these won't work as done. Surely however this can be fixed.
Perhaps we should take a another leaf out of the plant's operations manual:
Instead of making a photocell that generates electricity, make one that generates either hydrogen or methanol. Both of these can be stored for use at night.
Hydrogen is trickier to store and move around. Methanol is less efficient, and may be harder to get out of the cell.
Hmm.
Let it make a solid compound isntead, and just rebuild itself above the solid compound. Let's see. Cellulose is just a complex sugar, and has enough structural strength to support the cells.
Hmm.
If we could program it to put vessels in the cellulose, then we could supply the raw materials for creating the fuel at a single point. The cell controls it's own distribution.
Hmm.
And with suitable programming we may be able to get a single source point to spread sideways as well as up, to optimize light collection.
And if we are *really* clever the system could make a dehydrated easily stored self assembling system that all we would have to do is find a suitable site and put it in.
Damn. It's been done. Called a 'Tree'. Prior art gets me every ()&*&*( time.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm. The distances mentioned to keep the collectors outside of the Earth's magnetic field mean that the collectors won't be in synchronous orbit.
That will mean at least 3 collectors, and likely 4-6 collectors. It will be interesting to know if you can keep microwaves in phase so that a receiver can pull power off of 2 collectors simultaneously while doing the transition.
For most of the immunity the bug pays a cost. Either it has to use a less efficient metabolic pathway, or it has to have active processes that counteract the antibiotic.
Remove the antibiotic and the bug reverts to a susceptible form again in a relatively short number of generations.
Were this not the case, then the TB bugs that are immune to 11 different antibiotic, and the hospital bred super-staphylococcus would be running rampant through the world.
Apparently this was a problem in the cold war too with bio-warfare. Selecting virulent strains of bugs was fine and dandy, but they wouldn't maintain their virulence.
Tidal locking depends on the differential gravity between the sides closest and furthest from the paired object. The moon has had time to tidally lock to the earth, but the earth, with 64 times the mass has not.
An orbiting planet has much smaller tides relative to the primary. (Our earth's solar tides are on the order of a few inches) I'd expect that planetary locking requires MUCH closer orbits to the parent body. And sure, dwarfs are lower in illumnination, so a planet at the right temp would need to be closer.
But I would be interested in knowing how they figure the planet to be tidally locked instead of, say, having a month long rotational period.
***
At one point Mercury was supposed to be locked, and they figured that the night side of Mercury was the coldest place in the solar system.
On at least Earth and Mars winter produces net precipitation at the poles.
What keeps a tidally locked planet from becoming a desert?
And given how cold Antarctica gets in jsut 6 months of winter, what keeps all the CO2 from freezing out?
Right now in Canada we have broadband coming into semi-rural areas (lake cottages, acreages, with spillover to Farms)
Xplornet has just put up a new tower 15 km away. Unfortuantely I'm in a hollow, and can't 'see' it.
The way they work locally uses small directional antennas at the house end -- they look like a tupperware square cake container on a stick) -- and presumably a zoned antenna on the tower.
My expectation is that the new frequencies will be licensed, similar to the present ones, at least for power greater than N watts.
An application I *would* like to see: Cordless phones that I could use anywhere on my 80 acre farm. There exist such, but they cost about $800 -- not worth it.
Parent is correct: bandwidth, coverage, and population are mutually exclusive as a triple. However this gives some better options for sparsely populated areas.
Broadcast is not an answer in the city. In the Bad Old Days before cell phones, getting a radio license in a city was very hard to do. Way too many people wanted one.
Narrowcasting makes a lot more sense.
Cheap free standing towers start at $2000 for 80-100 feet.
Place as needed. Each tower has a microwave relay to a more central tower, and a router that distributes packets to the appropriate house link. The house links can range from millewatts to watts depending on distance.
If power consumption of a tower isn't outlandish, the terms of rental are something like, "we pay you 20 bucks a month, and give you free 10 Mbit/s internet, and we plug the tower into your outlet.
If it's higher, or too far from the house to be practical to plug in, run a separate electrical service.
Gaack! I don't envy you your life style.
I leave my keys in my car so that I can find them. I don't remember the last time I locked my house doors. Not sure I know where the key is.
Guns are for dealing with porcupines and putting venison on the table.
I used to work with a private school's outdoor program. We used sat phones when on remote trips to check in. ($100/month + $2/minute)
We found:
An overstory of pine usually wasn't a problem. Spruce had enough sectional density that it was a problem.
On canoe trips, we stand on a north shore to get a clear view. Once I had to go sit in a canoe when we were on a south shore to get a good enough view to the south. (N and S are relative to the body of water)
Forests generally weren't continuous. On hiking trips in the Rockies, valley floors were usually clear of trees, covered in scrub birch. And ridge tops were clear, as were spring run-off channels (100 yard wide boulder path), recent forest fire burns, avalanche paths.
When we were working in areas that had roads, the road right of way was typically 30-40 feet wide. Finding a spot where the road ran north/south, or if on an E/W chunk on a south facing slope, climbing the north side usually would work.
Heavy fog would block the signal, as would major precipitation events, or storm clouds.
In 10 years of using them, I don't think we ever had to work more than an hour to get through, and 95% of the time it was just dial.
Oh goody. ANOTHER (*$&)#*&(&*(&* remote control to lose!
Right now I have an iPod and a cheapy cell phone. That's bad enough. ONE device. I'm giving serious thought to upgrading to an iPhone JUST to decrease my gadget count.
I don't want a device to control my HP printer. I want to be able to download an app for ANY smart device to control my printer. E.g. I want any wifi device in my house to control my printer (subject to usual network security.)
So my iPod, my wife's iPhone, an android tablet, a kindle, whatever.
And they should be able to find each other with minimimum hassle. And if there are small devices, there needs to be a way to wake them up lighting up, and ringing.
One device to rule them all.
One device to find them.
One device to ring them all
and in their brightness bind them.
Sauron had the right idea. He had too many )@(#&$_ rings, so he made ONE to do all the work.
Where delivery isn't built into the prices, it seems that typical delivery costs are $10 to $15 for an item, at least until you get to the 'bigger than a breadbox' size.
To operate my pickup (Don't shoot me, I can't deliver trees in a Subaru) costs about 40 cents per kilometer. So if picking something up is more than 30 km ($12) round trip, then economically I should get it delivered.
Since the nearest good city for shopping is 75 km away, I try to clump purchases. E.g. last week, I combined delivery 400 trees, picking up a crate of pots, doing the grocery shopping, stopping at a book store, picking up plumbing fittings at the hardware store, and stopping at the cardlock for gas for the truck and the lawnmower.
Really hard to see the inflight movie when sun is streaming in over your shoulder.
Presumably, they make an exception for the bathrooms?
If the hull doesn't block UV you could work on your tan on the way to Mexico.
Maintenance will be more interesting. Hard enough now with extensive colour coding. (The aircraft repair industry can employ color blind techs!)
Two people can keep a secret . . . If one of them is dead.
But if you compress it with a well known compression program will it not produce a standard header? Knowing that it has a standard header gives you a crib which should speed up breaking it, yes?
You would want to modify the compression program to put the header info in a non-standard place.
Teach me.
By stuffing files with encrypted random data (indistinguishable from encrypted compromising data until decrypted) you dilute the the attempts of the Other Side.
Even with weak systems such as DES decryption without the key is enormously more time consuming than encryption.
If the Other Side requries a 10,000 core server farm to break 1 message a minute, and you can keep them busy by generating 1 false message a minute with a single core, and still have cpu cycles to spare, you are ahead of the game.
A second reason for encrypting random data: Thwart operational traffic analysis. A darknet that spends free cycles moving encrypted random chunks around makes it more difficult (impossble?) to figure out who is talking to who.
The places where plant matter parks for long time spans tend to be highly acidic bogs. Even ordinary landfills, with their sealed bottoms, and layers of clay on top produce significant quantities of methane -- an even more potent greenhouse gas.
Oops. Back to the drawing board.
I don't about where you are, but here, they aren't allowed to burn forest waste, not in the open anyway. Many large mills burn their own waste to generate process steam to heat the OSB and particle board presses, or to generate power to run the saws.
Straw is used for feed (straw + grain works pretty well) or bedding. After bedding use, it can't be burned (wet with soggy bits) and it's frequently spread on fields.
The big fad right now in agriculture is zero tillage. Leave the stubble. In some cases leave the straw. Plant the next crop through the straw and stubble, with precisely the amount of fertilizer that crop needs parked next to the seed.
So in a nutshell, there isn't any ag waste here.
There is some merit in reducing waste to biochar. You can extract some of the energy out of it, use it for whatever, and put about half the original carbon back into the ground as charcoal. Charcoal is quite stable.
The jury is still out whether adding charcoal to temperate soils will work the same way it has in the Amazon. But even if it doesn't, it's likely to do no harm, which makes it a suitable parking space for carbon.
Oh come now! We've got somewhere between half a billion and several billion years before the sun cooks the earth. Move the planet further from the sun. Damp the solar reactions
What do you mean, "How"
New technology, of course. You surely don't think that a few thousand years of technology (starting with the flint scraper) and a few hundred years of science have reached the end of what's posssible.
Heck half a billion years ago we (ok, ok, our ancestors) were still in the ocean.
Oh, I don't know. I'd say that polical violence is ineffective because it's not very good at being violent.
If war is considered a form of political violence, it can be effective. Seems to me that Rome did a pretty effective bit of political violence on Carthage, yes? And conversely after their defeat in Teutonwald, they backed out of northern Europe and didn't return.
Consider: 9/11 killed fewer people than died slipping in their bathtubs that year. Lever Brothers, and Proctor & Gamble are responsible for more deaths than the 9/11 guys.
A terrorist kills 10 people, and injures 40. It's international news. A million kids die of diarrhoea from bad water. WHO report page 42.
The war in Afganistan makes national news whenever a soldier gets killed. At the height of Vietnam the U.S. was losing 17,000 soldiers a year -- about 50 a day.
Political violence is good for getting a lot of attention for a small amount of violence, but like most P.R. it's all sizzle and no steak.
We're getting a lot more news and publicity per death. That's progress, isn't it?
So you speed up the spacecraft and slow down the railgun.
Back to the drawing board.
Hmm. I guess if the railgun has enough umph, you could accelerate some mass the other way.
Good Now you have things in the same orbital plane, going in opposite directions.
Back to the drawing board.
Ok, for the railgun to gain momentum again, you accelerate a smaller mass, but send it at greater than earth escape velocity.
But it's still in solar orbit, in one that will eventually come close by again. Can we keep track of a few zillion of these 10-30 km/sec objects?
Back to the drawing board.
Ok, when we de-orbit, we also use the railgun. This way we drop the rocket straight down. If we drop as much mass as we orbit, the railgun averages out.
Oh joy. Drop straight down from 150 km up. And just how do we dispose of that energy. Remember that half the air that you will use for braking is below 18,000 feet.
Back to the drawing board.
Sigh.
Create a unique test for each student. You will have to spend some time doing some programming, but in essence it works like this:
1. For each concept you want to test, you generate N parameterized questions. By the latter, I mean that the individual instances of a given question may have all the words the same, but will have different numbers.
2. When you generate a test, you also generate an answer key for it.
3. If N=5 then for multiple choice questions, the wrong answers for instance 1 are the right answers for instances 2-5.
4. The questions are generated in random order for each test, so not everyone is working on the falling cannonball problem at the same time.
5. When you print them, print them on a variety of colours of paper. Nothing like having the person next to you getting a pink exam, with obvious different problems on the first page to thwart their nefarious ambitions.
Off the top of my head, I'd do it in perl or python. A question would be a file that looks like this:
On a planet far away, a physics student drops a rock off a [CLIFF] meter high cliff. The rock takes [FALL] second to hit the ground. What is the acceleration of gravity on that planet
{integer, 25..120}
{float.1, 2..10}
2 * cliff / fall^2
If more than one template exists in a file, one is chosen at random.
One advantage of this: If someone is sick, misses the exam, or is challenging the course, it's easy to generate a new exam for them to take.
This still doesn't stop someone from querying the world for answers, but with each test unique, cheating inside the classroom is a lot harder, and just communicating the problem is slow enough that getting answers to all of the problems would be hard to do in the time available.
As another option, could you bring in your own access points? Bring cheapy AP's If you bring 3 in the campus AP won't be able to automatically find a clear free channel. If you run a broadcast storm on your mini-network, the room's wifi should be, at best, erratic.
The earth is flat, supported on 4 elephants that stand on a large turtle.
One of my preferred recordings of one of the Brandenburg concertos is done entirely on synthesizer. I like it because the different instruments are far more distinctive, so it's much easier to follow different strands.
But will he stay bought?
Things that would help:
1. At present in chemistry patents there is a tendency to patent the periodic table. "The use of a transition metal catalyst either as pure metal, oxide or sulfide, embedded into a suitable substrate" when what they did was use platinum on ceramic beads. Claims should be allowed only for what you ahve done.
2. The patent office now officially rejects perpetual motion and net energy machines "unless accompanied by a working model" This should be far more universal.
3. Some form of public review as to "prior art"
4. Some qualitative threshold on "improvement" E.g. You have to demonstrate not only is your patent different, but it is also better, and not just by a hair.
E.g. If you have a new sorting algorithm, you have to show that it is at least 20% faster that the existing ones or that it is 20% better for small cases. If you have a patent for new kind of brakes for a car, you have to show that it's simpler to make, or works better in the rain.
The touchstone for this should be, "Is this enough better, that existing practitioners in the art are likely to want to license the patent because it will save them money or allow them to produce a better product." If the answer is no, then the product is insufficiently innovative.
A library with an intelligent acquisitions policy will get both paper and electronic forms of the book. ebook versions allow fast loaning for surges in popularity.
Right now when a popular pot boiler comes out, out library buys 10-30 copies, then a year later sells them for a buck each. Far better to buy 1 copy, and tell patrons, "use the ebook, or go on the wait list.
The expense of ebook readers is temporary. Look at what has happened to low end MP3 players.
My suspicion is that at some point ebook, netbook and phone will merge. The resulting form factor will likely be larger than the present iphone, but smaller than the present netbook. I can also see niche markets for larger readers/displays.
(Would it not be cool if you could buy an iPad that had an iphone shaped slot in it? All the smarts were on the iphone, and the ipad was just a display terminal. ONE telephone account/data account. When you are on the road, you just have the iphone. Maybe the ipad is in your briefcase.
When you are on the plane, you ahve the bigger screen to work with.)
I would be interested in seeing how the cost breaks down on a popular book.
From what I've read about the publishing business, there is an awful lot of time and energy used in moving dead tree stuff around. Right now I expect that 40% is paper, printing and transport.
Yes the publishing/editing is a significant effort and therefore cost. But my understanding is that an author gets less than 10% of the cover price of a paperback, the retailer gets about 40% and the publisher about 50% out of which he has to pay for shipping, printing and so on.
Now with internet, the price of publicity is way down. I know that with Jim Baen's books his editor team is good enough that just having the Baen logo is a good enough reason to borrow the book at the library.
Fiction publishing is is a competition for beer money. I will spend X dollars on books a year, more or less. If the books are cheaper (chapter's sales,) I don't spend less, I buy more books.
An electronic format is virtually free to distribute. If a publisher like Baen offered subscriptions for, say $20/month, that included every new book they produced, or allowed me to order from their backlog at $1/book, then they would get ALL of my beer money instead of having to share it with the book store. Sure there would be a few lemons in the basket, but so what. The net effect is a win-win. Baen gets more of my beer money. I get more books per buck.
Publishers could make somewhat more money by having tiered releases. "First Day Release" costs a buck more. If you are connected to social networks, you can start chatting about the latest release from some author ahead of hte crowd. If you are more parsimonious, you wait a month for it to be on the general release list 2 weeks later. (This may be a way to reduce their servers being swamped too.)
This assumes that people respect the IP. And from what I've read about in the Indie music scene, people don't begrudge the creator his pound of flesh, they rebel at having to give the publisher a pound so the creator gets a bite.
As to the self publishing trade, and the dreck it produces. I expect that with time, this business will evolve the way the indie music scene has too. There will be specialist free lance copy editors, continuity checkers and proof readers that for a fee will go over your work.
***
As to reference books. I dearly wish I could subscribe to Dirr's "Woody Plants & Ornamentals." as a database instead of as a book. That way I would be up to date, instead of having to shell out a hundred bucks every two years for the current edition. Probably be a lot more searchable.
1. Currently most DNS records have Time to Live of a few days to a week. I would expect that servers of secure sites would want much longer times than this. Clients then know that certain servers are to be connected at specific addresses, and bring up an alarm when the last IP of record for server.foobank.com has changed.
2. I'm always suspicious when any web site makes reference to a server outside of it's own domain. Is this not also a place that responsible secure servers could take a step. Couple this with browsers that recognize this step. (Perhaps special content on the web page, or an added HINFO record in DNS.) Thus the people in charge of foobank.com can take steps that in the long run will make them harder to spoof.
3. As criminal domains are found, their registrar gets a black mark. When your computer's DNS lookup goes and gets an address, it also checks who the registrar is. (can do that in background) and records that info locally. Your brower in turn can be programmed to warn/block domains that have greater than a certain black mark fraction. Of course it would more efficient if this were done at a larger scale.
4. Registars have to pay a fine if a domain registered with them is discovered to be engaged in criminal activity?
5. One of the DNS requests that is sent when you encounter a new domain name is a recursive one finding out when the domain was originally registered. (Not speaking of individual hosts, the domain) If foobank.com has been around for 50 years, but the domain is only 7 days old, I'm going to be suspicious. Indeed. Email servers could easily opt to not accept email, or alternately flag email when it came from a domain less than X days old. This in turn could mean that a young domain is scanned more closely for fraud & spam indicators.
Some of these won't work as done. Surely however this can be fixed.
Perhaps we should take a another leaf out of the plant's operations manual:
Instead of making a photocell that generates electricity, make one that generates either hydrogen or methanol. Both of these can be stored for use at night.
Hydrogen is trickier to store and move around. Methanol is less efficient, and may be harder to get out of the cell.
Hmm.
Let it make a solid compound isntead, and just rebuild itself above the solid compound. Let's see. Cellulose is just a complex sugar, and has enough structural strength to support the cells.
Hmm.
If we could program it to put vessels in the cellulose, then we could supply the raw materials for creating the fuel at a single point. The cell controls it's own distribution.
Hmm.
And with suitable programming we may be able to get a single source point to spread sideways as well as up, to optimize light collection.
And if we are *really* clever the system could make a dehydrated easily stored self assembling system that all we would have to do is find a suitable site and put it in.
Damn. It's been done. Called a 'Tree'. Prior art gets me every ()&*&*( time.