Not that I'm really disagreeing with you, but you'll actually get around 8+ times the power capacity. 4 times for being above the atmosphere, 2 times for not having night to worry about (depending on your orbit). Throw in a bit more for cloudy days (assuming their transfer mechanism goes through with minimal losses. And combine that with the the kinds of super-efficient panels that are used for space technology, and you'll get a pretty significant increase.
Two things stand in the way as I see it. 1) Launch costs are just plain too high. Cut them to a 20th of what they are now and this idea might work. 2) Except for the day/night part, it should be possible to use the high efficiency solar panels on the ground, using mirrors to concentrate the light down to be just as, if not more intense, than in orbit. I can't imagine mirrors and a tracking mechanism are more expensive than a launch.
Is minting a competing currency legal in South Korea? I thought it was illegal in the States, I seem to remember some libertarians a while back trying to set up a gold standard currency that would have competed with the dollar and they got closed down.
If someone has a gun to your head you're probably not very worried about the misquitos, why? Because the gun is a larger and more immediate danger. You are 2 orders of magnitude more likely to die in a car accident than a terrorist attack (and even those numbers are skewed by the largest terrorist act in our nation's history, the real value is probably closer to 3 orders of magnitude).
Yet we still invest hundreds of billions of dollars, give away our rights, and piss off the international community all in an effort to reduce deaths by terrorism. If we had put that same amount of money into things like high speed rail, improved roads, or enforcing drunk driving laws, we could have saved many more lives.
Total number of Americans killed in Terrorist attacks in the last decade: ~3000 (No, soldiers fighting a way don't count) Total number of Americans killed in car accidents in the last decade: ~400,000
I have to wonder what the benefit of having "the ability to travel" is if the end result is being killed in a car accident. Being alive is a prerequisite to enjoying travel, being dead means you'll never travel anyway. We should be preserving life now, as the most important first step, and we can focus on preserving our ability to travel later since we'll still be alive to work for it.
It's still a chemical reaction, it's just a very precisly controlled one. You would still have to add energy to break the bond in a molecule of CO2. I suspect that if someone goes through all the trouble to do that, they'll have it produce diamonds instead of pencil lead, since at least then you can sell the result and maybe make a bit of profit off of it (though not for long, what with economies of scale and everything. If this is really possible in large scale diamond will be cheaper than glass someday).
Actually, the article is about using a DNA strand to place individual atoms where you want with a 100% success rate. Basically, its using the DNA strand as a robotic arm, in that it does exactly what you would expect a robotic arm to do.
I would agree with you, if not for Von Neumann probes.
Humanity isn't technologically far from being able to put a collection of probes in every solar system in the Galaxy. All that you need is a probe that's durable enough to cross interstellar distances and versatile enough to make a few copies of itself when it gets there. It doesn't need to be particularly fast, even at.5 c it would only take a few hundred million years (blink of an eye in cosmological terms) to probe the entire galaxy. Put a half dozen probes in each system and have them repair or replace each other when they break and they could last effectively forever.
The fact that we don't see any probes can only mean one of a few things A) We're the only ones who would come up with or implement the idea (probably pretty unlikely, and the idea has been at least discussed as a hypothetical in NASA). B) We're the first (also unlikely given the age of the earth compared to that of the galaxy). Or C) The probes remain hidden from us. This is also unlikely but it is a bit harder to understand why. Once you say there are intelligences other than us, it implies that there are many in the galaxy. Either intelligence is exceedingly rare and we're the fluke, or it isn't and with the number of stars in the galaxy there should be many intelligences. The odds of all the various hypothetical races (and divisions within races presumably) not wanting to make contact would seem to be low. It would only take one to broadcast out a signal and say "here we are!" and the game would be up.
It doesn't nuke the Drake equation, it just moves the tiny number one or two steps to the right. We know that there are trillions of trillions of stars in the universe, we're slowly learning how many of them have planets and how many of those planets might be habitable. If life is confirmed on Mars we'll begin to have an idea how common simple life is. Unfortunatly, we also know that we haven't detected any alien civilizations, despite a few decades worth of looking.
The fact that we figure there are plenty of stars and planets that could support life but don'tmake contact means that one of the things we don't know about must be very unlikely. Maybe life is exceedingly rare, something life on Mars would seem to refute. Maybe intelligence is exceedingly rare, and the galaxy is filled with lush, but wild, environments. Or maybe not all intelligence leads to producing technology that can facilitate interstellar communication. After all, new research says that non-beamed radio will not travel as far as was previously thought, aliens more than a few dozen light years away won't be able to watch I Love Lucy reruns, it's washed out by the cosmic noise.
Then of course it's possible that technological civilizations don't survive very long. We've only been technologically capable of attempting contact for 50 years or so, and we already have the means to kill every man, woman, and child on the planet if the wrong kind of fight breaks out. Not to mention the possibility of environmental damage and depletion of resources (more because they will lead to war than because they would lead to extinction of humanity in and of themselves).
My rambling point is this: Finding life on Mars doesn't mean that ET is out there, it means that there must be another reason that we haven't found ET yet. It means that the origin of life isn't the hurdle, but the hurdle must still exist, otherwise we'd be seeing or hearing our neighbors by now.
It's not just that, it's the bully picking on all the kids on the playground until one of them just says "stop!". It doesn't matter which kid says it first, after the first kid does it the bully's days are going to be a lot more difficult. Everyone in tech circles has suspected for years that the Chinese government is involved in these activities (my company forbids taking company hardware into China for instance), Google is the first one to publicly call them out in a way that the US government and the world cannot ignore.
I have one of the original 60 Gb models so I was able to enable the swap. It might be a joke but it has allowed me to play emulators on my TV using a nice wireless controller so it wasn't a total bust.
Maybe this is a stupid question, so just tell me if so. Is there any chance of getting this running on my PS3 Linux partition? That would radically change things for me (I'm not quite willing to set up a dedicated a/v server). You'd think it would be a perfect target for it. Already in the media cabinet, already hooked up to internet and TV. I would probably cancel my cable TV if it worked well enough.
No, the mission was designed to last 90 days (and probably more for budgetary reasons than anything else). The rovers were designed to last as long as possible while still fulfilling the mission goals and staying below the weight and size limits. If you need a high cost, high risk, extreme environment piece of equipment to last 90 days, you design it to last for decades. I'm not saying 7 years on Mars isn't impressive, but the idea that engineers expected the rovers to drop dead after 90 days is inaccurate.
As for the military not being as efficient, the space program uses one off engineering projects to solve unique challenges. Each rover and lander is designed specifically for the exact environment they will be placed in and is engineered nearly from the ground up. It produces amazing results but it is not economically efficient. The difference is, compared to the cost of getting a rover to mars, the cost of the rover itself is almost negligible so you may as well over engineer it and make sure the money you paid for the flight out there was worth it.
I'd love to see what the space program would do with twice or three times its current budget, it's a crying shame the way it's pushed to the back burner the way it is now. When was the last time a genuinely revolutionary space concept was flown by NASA? The first shuttle launch? Lots of people have ideas that can be made to work, ideas that could make space travel as cheap and common as Arthur C Clark ever envisioned it, we just haven't put the R&D into turning ideas into technology.
I think what you're getting at is that consistancy matters more than maximum frame rate. For different reasons than the one you state, I'd rather play a game at a constant 20 hz than at 30 (or even 60) hz most of the time but dropping down to 15 during the most intense moments. It's the large changes in framerate that are noticable, your brain can fill in the missing pieces if the framerate is constant.
If we say it's safe and we're wrong, we'll all be dead and it won't matter.
Unless every scientist that took part in the safety analysis has a death wish, I'd say it would probably matter to them. Actually, not just a death wish for themselves but also for their families, their friends, and every single person they've ever met. This argument is equivalent to calling every scientist that took part in the safety studies a suicidal, homicidal psychopath. You might be able to convince me one or two are, but all of them?
Seriously, if someone noticed him comming in, then confront him and send him right back the way he came; if he refuses escort him out of the area and press charges if he is truly unruly. Admit that 99.99% of the time it's going to be someone lost and/or looking for a family member and move on.
What, other than a larger screen, does this bring that isn't already covered by a premium smartphone? Granted, a smartphone without a contract will cost quite a bit more, but with a contract the Motorola droid is $199 and can do pretty much everything I imagine this device doing with very similar specs, all while being small enough to fit in your pocket.
Not that I'm saying he should do this, especially if his boss has already told him not to, but it isn't taking his neighbors car and letting someone else have it. If approved it would be a government agency using your tax dollars and putting them to use to support the purposes of that government agency. This whole taxes equal theft thing has just gotta stop. Yes, taxes can go too far, lord knows I pay enough of them. If the agency he works for thinks that the best way to fulfil their objectives is with a donation to open source projects, that isn't theft, it's government.
This is still pre-alpha, so further speed gains should be expected.
Isn't the opposite ussually the case? Alphas and betas are often a bit quicker than the final releases. I've always assumed it is an artifact of trying to tie off issues quickly right before release so maybe this isn't ussually the case with the Opera dev team?
You'd be surprised what people find sexy and cool. There's an entire generation of engineers and scientists who think the Apollo program is and was the coolest thing humanity has ever done. Some percentage of them almost certainly were inspired by that cool factor to become the professionals they are today. Even outside the technology fields I'll bet the vast majority of people can name the first people to step on the moon (poor Micheal Collins, probably not though). If you want to inspire people you have to show them how something they think is impossible is possible with technology, something that is becoming very hard as people are slowly becoming accustomed to rapidly advancing technology. Even landing on Mars won't do it because people don't actually understand how much more difficult that is than landing on the moon, they assume it would just be an extension of the Apollo technology.
The only thing I can think of on the horizon that could inspire people in that way would be the building of a space elevator. When I explain to people how a space elevator could work, it's amazing. People not in technology or science fields start asking distinctly sciency questions, questions that could be the launching point to detailed discussions about orbital mechanics, centripetal force, rockets, materials sciences, photovoltaics, and lasers. Things that push the boundaries of what people think are possible make them want to learn; which is of course the most important step in teaching something.
Well, in theory she's raising money against one candidate. That money could be going to any number of politicians who are opposed to that candidate's policies. I believe that the PAC laws are written in terms of how many candidates you support, rather than how many candidates you are against. It's possible that she may still have a problem if all the money raised went directly to a single opposing candidate; but that isn't necessarily the case.
Bike rentals. Charge a few dollars to rent a bike for the day, a few extra for a bike with one of the new in wheel electric motors installed. Automate the system and run it like a red box; take the customer's credit card information at check-out. Put a small GPS tracker inside the frame of the bike with a privacy statement that it will only activate if not returned to its rack within 24 hours. If the customer reports the bike stolen put a $10 'recovery' charge on their account and use the GPS device to find it. If they just don't bring it back charge them the regular daily rental fee up to the purchase cost of the bike.
That was about 5 minutes of effort and makes a hell of a lot more sense than a segway. The laws are already in place and everyone knows how to ride a bike. If you don't want to get sweaty on your way to work you can rent a motorized one. If you're not comfortable riding on the street most places I've been to allow you to ride on the sidewalk at a jogging pace or slower. Actually, this isn't a half bad idea; I wonder if any-one's tried it yet.
"so the ice would burst out of the cell ravaging the cell membranes and everything else at the same time." Plants have cell walls, animals have cell membranes.
Not really. Instead of thinking of it as music you like versus music you don't like, think of it as music that succedes and music that doesn't. By analogy, imagine the listeners are hunters and the music the prey, better music is equivilent to prey that is better at evading preditors.
Maybe a more interesting experiment would be to have a baseline of human generated music which the computer generated music would have to hide in. Play it as a loop with computer generated music randomly interspersed with human generated and have the listener push a button as soon as they are sure the music is artificial. Of course, this would require large database of human generated electronic music, and would probably take more generations to produce a good result but it would be closer to natural selection in the survival quality is the ability to 'hide' inside human composed music, rather than an arbitrary 'goodness' rating.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that I'm really disagreeing with you, but you'll actually get around 8+ times the power capacity. 4 times for being above the atmosphere, 2 times for not having night to worry about (depending on your orbit). Throw in a bit more for cloudy days (assuming their transfer mechanism goes through with minimal losses. And combine that with the the kinds of super-efficient panels that are used for space technology, and you'll get a pretty significant increase.
Two things stand in the way as I see it. 1) Launch costs are just plain too high. Cut them to a 20th of what they are now and this idea might work. 2) Except for the day/night part, it should be possible to use the high efficiency solar panels on the ground, using mirrors to concentrate the light down to be just as, if not more intense, than in orbit. I can't imagine mirrors and a tracking mechanism are more expensive than a launch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_kindle#Content_sources
Dollar bills are not 'minted' either, but they are still covered by the constitution and laws that govern the minting of currency.
Is minting a competing currency legal in South Korea? I thought it was illegal in the States, I seem to remember some libertarians a while back trying to set up a gold standard currency that would have competed with the dollar and they got closed down.
If someone has a gun to your head you're probably not very worried about the misquitos, why? Because the gun is a larger and more immediate danger. You are 2 orders of magnitude more likely to die in a car accident than a terrorist attack (and even those numbers are skewed by the largest terrorist act in our nation's history, the real value is probably closer to 3 orders of magnitude).
Yet we still invest hundreds of billions of dollars, give away our rights, and piss off the international community all in an effort to reduce deaths by terrorism. If we had put that same amount of money into things like high speed rail, improved roads, or enforcing drunk driving laws, we could have saved many more lives.
Total number of Americans killed in Terrorist attacks in the last decade: ~3000 (No, soldiers fighting a way don't count)
Total number of Americans killed in car accidents in the last decade: ~400,000
I have to wonder what the benefit of having "the ability to travel" is if the end result is being killed in a car accident. Being alive is a prerequisite to enjoying travel, being dead means you'll never travel anyway. We should be preserving life now, as the most important first step, and we can focus on preserving our ability to travel later since we'll still be alive to work for it.
It's still a chemical reaction, it's just a very precisly controlled one. You would still have to add energy to break the bond in a molecule of CO2. I suspect that if someone goes through all the trouble to do that, they'll have it produce diamonds instead of pencil lead, since at least then you can sell the result and maybe make a bit of profit off of it (though not for long, what with economies of scale and everything. If this is really possible in large scale diamond will be cheaper than glass someday).
Actually, the article is about using a DNA strand to place individual atoms where you want with a 100% success rate. Basically, its using the DNA strand as a robotic arm, in that it does exactly what you would expect a robotic arm to do.
I would agree with you, if not for Von Neumann probes.
Humanity isn't technologically far from being able to put a collection of probes in every solar system in the Galaxy. All that you need is a probe that's durable enough to cross interstellar distances and versatile enough to make a few copies of itself when it gets there. It doesn't need to be particularly fast, even at .5 c it would only take a few hundred million years (blink of an eye in cosmological terms) to probe the entire galaxy. Put a half dozen probes in each system and have them repair or replace each other when they break and they could last effectively forever.
The fact that we don't see any probes can only mean one of a few things A) We're the only ones who would come up with or implement the idea (probably pretty unlikely, and the idea has been at least discussed as a hypothetical in NASA). B) We're the first (also unlikely given the age of the earth compared to that of the galaxy). Or C) The probes remain hidden from us. This is also unlikely but it is a bit harder to understand why. Once you say there are intelligences other than us, it implies that there are many in the galaxy. Either intelligence is exceedingly rare and we're the fluke, or it isn't and with the number of stars in the galaxy there should be many intelligences. The odds of all the various hypothetical races (and divisions within races presumably) not wanting to make contact would seem to be low. It would only take one to broadcast out a signal and say "here we are!" and the game would be up.
It doesn't nuke the Drake equation, it just moves the tiny number one or two steps to the right. We know that there are trillions of trillions of stars in the universe, we're slowly learning how many of them have planets and how many of those planets might be habitable. If life is confirmed on Mars we'll begin to have an idea how common simple life is. Unfortunatly, we also know that we haven't detected any alien civilizations, despite a few decades worth of looking.
The fact that we figure there are plenty of stars and planets that could support life but don'tmake contact means that one of the things we don't know about must be very unlikely. Maybe life is exceedingly rare, something life on Mars would seem to refute. Maybe intelligence is exceedingly rare, and the galaxy is filled with lush, but wild, environments. Or maybe not all intelligence leads to producing technology that can facilitate interstellar communication. After all, new research says that non-beamed radio will not travel as far as was previously thought, aliens more than a few dozen light years away won't be able to watch I Love Lucy reruns, it's washed out by the cosmic noise.
Then of course it's possible that technological civilizations don't survive very long. We've only been technologically capable of attempting contact for 50 years or so, and we already have the means to kill every man, woman, and child on the planet if the wrong kind of fight breaks out. Not to mention the possibility of environmental damage and depletion of resources (more because they will lead to war than because they would lead to extinction of humanity in and of themselves).
My rambling point is this: Finding life on Mars doesn't mean that ET is out there, it means that there must be another reason that we haven't found ET yet. It means that the origin of life isn't the hurdle, but the hurdle must still exist, otherwise we'd be seeing or hearing our neighbors by now.
It's not just that, it's the bully picking on all the kids on the playground until one of them just says "stop!". It doesn't matter which kid says it first, after the first kid does it the bully's days are going to be a lot more difficult. Everyone in tech circles has suspected for years that the Chinese government is involved in these activities (my company forbids taking company hardware into China for instance), Google is the first one to publicly call them out in a way that the US government and the world cannot ignore.
I have one of the original 60 Gb models so I was able to enable the swap. It might be a joke but it has allowed me to play emulators on my TV using a nice wireless controller so it wasn't a total bust.
Maybe this is a stupid question, so just tell me if so. Is there any chance of getting this running on my PS3 Linux partition? That would radically change things for me (I'm not quite willing to set up a dedicated a/v server). You'd think it would be a perfect target for it. Already in the media cabinet, already hooked up to internet and TV. I would probably cancel my cable TV if it worked well enough.
No, the mission was designed to last 90 days (and probably more for budgetary reasons than anything else). The rovers were designed to last as long as possible while still fulfilling the mission goals and staying below the weight and size limits. If you need a high cost, high risk, extreme environment piece of equipment to last 90 days, you design it to last for decades. I'm not saying 7 years on Mars isn't impressive, but the idea that engineers expected the rovers to drop dead after 90 days is inaccurate.
As for the military not being as efficient, the space program uses one off engineering projects to solve unique challenges. Each rover and lander is designed specifically for the exact environment they will be placed in and is engineered nearly from the ground up. It produces amazing results but it is not economically efficient. The difference is, compared to the cost of getting a rover to mars, the cost of the rover itself is almost negligible so you may as well over engineer it and make sure the money you paid for the flight out there was worth it.
I'd love to see what the space program would do with twice or three times its current budget, it's a crying shame the way it's pushed to the back burner the way it is now. When was the last time a genuinely revolutionary space concept was flown by NASA? The first shuttle launch? Lots of people have ideas that can be made to work, ideas that could make space travel as cheap and common as Arthur C Clark ever envisioned it, we just haven't put the R&D into turning ideas into technology.
I think what you're getting at is that consistancy matters more than maximum frame rate. For different reasons than the one you state, I'd rather play a game at a constant 20 hz than at 30 (or even 60) hz most of the time but dropping down to 15 during the most intense moments. It's the large changes in framerate that are noticable, your brain can fill in the missing pieces if the framerate is constant.
If we say it's safe and we're wrong, we'll all be dead and it won't matter.
Unless every scientist that took part in the safety analysis has a death wish, I'd say it would probably matter to them. Actually, not just a death wish for themselves but also for their families, their friends, and every single person they've ever met. This argument is equivalent to calling every scientist that took part in the safety studies a suicidal, homicidal psychopath. You might be able to convince me one or two are, but all of them?
Seriously, if someone noticed him comming in, then confront him and send him right back the way he came; if he refuses escort him out of the area and press charges if he is truly unruly. Admit that 99.99% of the time it's going to be someone lost and/or looking for a family member and move on.
What, other than a larger screen, does this bring that isn't already covered by a premium smartphone? Granted, a smartphone without a contract will cost quite a bit more, but with a contract the Motorola droid is $199 and can do pretty much everything I imagine this device doing with very similar specs, all while being small enough to fit in your pocket.
Not that I'm saying he should do this, especially if his boss has already told him not to, but it isn't taking his neighbors car and letting someone else have it. If approved it would be a government agency using your tax dollars and putting them to use to support the purposes of that government agency. This whole taxes equal theft thing has just gotta stop. Yes, taxes can go too far, lord knows I pay enough of them. If the agency he works for thinks that the best way to fulfil their objectives is with a donation to open source projects, that isn't theft, it's government.
This is still pre-alpha, so further speed gains should be expected.
Isn't the opposite ussually the case? Alphas and betas are often a bit quicker than the final releases. I've always assumed it is an artifact of trying to tie off issues quickly right before release so maybe this isn't ussually the case with the Opera dev team?
You'd be surprised what people find sexy and cool. There's an entire generation of engineers and scientists who think the Apollo program is and was the coolest thing humanity has ever done. Some percentage of them almost certainly were inspired by that cool factor to become the professionals they are today. Even outside the technology fields I'll bet the vast majority of people can name the first people to step on the moon (poor Micheal Collins, probably not though). If you want to inspire people you have to show them how something they think is impossible is possible with technology, something that is becoming very hard as people are slowly becoming accustomed to rapidly advancing technology. Even landing on Mars won't do it because people don't actually understand how much more difficult that is than landing on the moon, they assume it would just be an extension of the Apollo technology.
The only thing I can think of on the horizon that could inspire people in that way would be the building of a space elevator. When I explain to people how a space elevator could work, it's amazing. People not in technology or science fields start asking distinctly sciency questions, questions that could be the launching point to detailed discussions about orbital mechanics, centripetal force, rockets, materials sciences, photovoltaics, and lasers. Things that push the boundaries of what people think are possible make them want to learn; which is of course the most important step in teaching something.
Well, in theory she's raising money against one candidate. That money could be going to any number of politicians who are opposed to that candidate's policies. I believe that the PAC laws are written in terms of how many candidates you support, rather than how many candidates you are against. It's possible that she may still have a problem if all the money raised went directly to a single opposing candidate; but that isn't necessarily the case.
Bike rentals. Charge a few dollars to rent a bike for the day, a few extra for a bike with one of the new in wheel electric motors installed. Automate the system and run it like a red box; take the customer's credit card information at check-out. Put a small GPS tracker inside the frame of the bike with a privacy statement that it will only activate if not returned to its rack within 24 hours. If the customer reports the bike stolen put a $10 'recovery' charge on their account and use the GPS device to find it. If they just don't bring it back charge them the regular daily rental fee up to the purchase cost of the bike.
That was about 5 minutes of effort and makes a hell of a lot more sense than a segway. The laws are already in place and everyone knows how to ride a bike. If you don't want to get sweaty on your way to work you can rent a motorized one. If you're not comfortable riding on the street most places I've been to allow you to ride on the sidewalk at a jogging pace or slower. Actually, this isn't a half bad idea; I wonder if any-one's tried it yet.
"so the ice would burst out of the cell ravaging the cell membranes and everything else at the same time." Plants have cell walls, animals have cell membranes.
Not really. Instead of thinking of it as music you like versus music you don't like, think of it as music that succedes and music that doesn't. By analogy, imagine the listeners are hunters and the music the prey, better music is equivilent to prey that is better at evading preditors.
Maybe a more interesting experiment would be to have a baseline of human generated music which the computer generated music would have to hide in. Play it as a loop with computer generated music randomly interspersed with human generated and have the listener push a button as soon as they are sure the music is artificial. Of course, this would require large database of human generated electronic music, and would probably take more generations to produce a good result but it would be closer to natural selection in the survival quality is the ability to 'hide' inside human composed music, rather than an arbitrary 'goodness' rating.