Aren't there some serious problems with leakage of these containers into the groundwater table? I seem to remember hearing something akin to that...
That depends on where you bury them.
The proposals I've most recently heard about involve either burying them a few miles deep in the Canadian Shield - bedrock that water doesn't flow through - or burying them a few miles deep under the ocean floor, with the holes plugged with clay (which water doesn't flow through readily).
Both should work long enough for most of the products to decay, even if the containers don't last anywhere close to that long. The containers are mainly to protect it during transport and during temporary storage (accidents could have nasty consequences without these precautions).
Wasn't slowpoke (and most early research reactors) water boilers with an aqueous solution of uranyl-sulfate or something? No fuel rods, I think... just a big liquid solution with fuel mixed in.
I'll have to look that up; thanks for the pointer.
My understanding was that at least some versions used fuel rods, but I haven't checked in quite a while.
There is a solution to the nuclear waste problem, burn it. I dont mean with fire, i mean in a reactor. so called nuclear "waste" is waste because it can no longer be used by a conventional nuclear pwer plant. There are power plant designs that would use fuel rods until all of the fissionable material is used. Look on google for the Advanced Liquid Metal reactor. Fuel is recycled until all the uranium and plutonium has fissioned into lesser elements, some with half lives of days, rather than millions of years.
According to two different descriptions of ALMRs, you only end up burning the heavy waste products (actinides) with this scheme.
Radioactive lighter elements may be bred to something more stable, but stable ligher elements are just as easily bred into medium-lifetime radioactive isotopes.
Lastly, the "slowpoke" style of reactor described can't have runaway heating at all. As it heats up, the core expands, pushing the fuel rods away from each other and making the reactor less efficient.
My mistake, the article refers to a different type of reactor.
The graphite-laced "pebbles" in their reactor could melt down if enough were piled in one place, as graphite will stay put under meltdown temperatures (the fuel, steel, and graphite will alloy with each other and whatever's underneath them as they heat up). The PBMR is thus open to abuse.
A meltdown still won't cause a nuclear explosion. It just makes a hot molten mess that's very radioactive.
Re:Killing two birds with one stone
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Fission in a Box
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· Score: 3
And think about the chain reaction that would be caused by one "going off." If anyone else in the area had one, the resulting EMP would probably fry the control electronics and cause other devices to go "critical," thereby setting them off too. What a blast that would be (no pun intended).
Um, no nuclear plant ever built in the history of nuclear power has been able to cause a nuclear explosion. Building a nuclear bomb requires completely different conditions (for reasons that I won't go into here).
The worst that happens, with any reactor, is that the core gets hot enough to melt and/or cause coolant pipes to burst. This is ugly, because it contaminates everything nearby, but relatively minor on the "explosion" scale. There is no EMP.
I wouldn't worry about meltdowns, though. Firstly, all reactors built within the past two or three decades have doubly- or triply-redundant systems that shut them down when they overheat. Secondly, anything that uses water (heavy or light) as a moderator *can't* melt down. Without a moderator, the reactor stops dead (it needs the moderator to react). With water as a moderator, your moderator disappears as soon as it heats up enough to burst pipes. End of reaction.
Lastly, the "slowpoke" style of reactor described can't have runaway heating at all. As it heats up, the core expands, pushing the fuel rods away from each other and making the reactor less efficient. Do whatever you like to it; it doesn't run away.
They don't have to be buried. Extract the plutonium and use it up in a reactor designed for it. Put the other stuff in the business end of a nuclear accelerator, or park it on the edge of a fission reactor, and make it break down sooner than by waiting for natural decay.
The problem with any scheme that involves chemical reprocessing - which used to be widespread - is that you get a lot of minor mishaps occuring, which exposes workers and the nearby environment to small amounts of Really Nasty Stuff (tm).
If I understand correctly, worker health liabilities were why plutonium reprocessing plants were abandoned, but in general, it's just plain safer to seal up the waste in very sturdy containers and drop them in the continental sheild.
As far as transmuting the waste is concerned, there are problems. If you stick waste next to a large neutron source (like a reactor), it will be transmuted. Continuously. This has the good effect of transmuting long-lived radioactive isotopes into shorter-lived ones, and the bad effect of transmuting non-radioactive decay products into radioactive isotopes. This won't magically make the waste non-radioactive (well, after a few centuries of this, it might all end up as the four stable lead isotopes, but don't hold your breath).
In summary, while burying the waste in mine shafts is an imperfect solution, it's one of the best ones that we currently have. We can always dig it up later if we find a really good way to dispose of it.
"As long as everyone does their part safely".
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Fission in a Box
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· Score: 2
if you keep it in a lead box, within another lead box, and allow only authorized technicians to service and maintain it, then I think there wouldnt be much worry as long as everyone does their part safely
And therein lies the biggest problem: you're relying on *everyone* to do their part safely, *all* of the time, for all of the reactors that are ever installed.
One screwup (accidental or delibarate), and you've just astronomically jacked up the cancer rate for everyone in the area for the next 50,000 years or so.
Good luck getting these insured.
The current scheme - using a few big, well-monitored plants - is much safer.
Also, FYI, lead will corrode relatively quickly (and I'm ignoring earthquakes and other disasters).
Is this yet another example of how big companies are squashing the little guy?
Why must this be the result of malice?
Most components sold and used will be destined for production circuit boards. Thus, wire-wrap compatible components won't make much money, but will still require the infrastructure needed to support the different packaging type.
Add to this the fact that many small companies (including the one a hundred feet from me) send their schematics out to third-party board-makers for prototyping, and the wiretap market looks pretty small.
Why would you fault companies for dropping unprofitable product lines?
For the record, I haven't had any trouble finding DIP components in my area, so this question is academic for me.
Stupid question time - couldn't you get this functionality by setting up a mail server and a cacheing proxy server on the box you're using?
They'd hit the net when it was available to transfer data, and silently fail (and return cached data, for the proxy server) when you weren't connected. You'd just be talking to the local daemons, so as far as your mail client and web browser can tell, you'd always be connected.
Yes, this will eat system resources, but it shouldn't be that much if you've configured the system properly.
Whoever creates the music or code gets to decide how it's used.
ah, key point to remember here, musicians do not own the copyrights to their music, their label does. therefore, it is the labels that decide how the music is used, not the musicians.
However, the musicians transferred the copyrights to their labels of their own free will (they signed the contract). With that, they transfered all decision-making authority on how the music gets used. The argument still stands.
Good that you thought about it, though (I'm still waiting to be flamed to a crisp).
Please tell Morcheeba, Tranquility Bass, The Brooklyn Funk Essentials, Badly Drawn Boy and Brakeman Junction that I'm sorry I stole their music. But they might be happy to know that I now own their CD's. I know, I know, I should be a good consumer and wait for MTV or Clear Channel to tell me what music is good, but what can I say, I'm a dirty fucking thief.
I'll be happy to pass that on.
Did they benefit from your theft? Certainly.
Would it make _sense_ for them to let people download songs for free to sample them? Sure.
Does that mean you have the right to do it if they decide they don't want you to? Nope. No more than I have the right to take your GPLd code and incorporate it in my closed-source binary.
Whoever creates the music or code gets to decide how it's used. If you don't respect others' rights to that, why should they respect yours?
There is a problem with having the AI play against itself though. I can't remember the exact reason but it can only learn so much that way.
The problem is that the AIs will become good at beating other AIs - not at beating humans. If the competing AIs are all stupid in one particular way, they won't clue into it by themselves. Also, if you have deterministic AIs, you might enter a closed loop (endlessly replaying the same set of games with the same set of learning variations).
Careful design of the AI can minimize these effects (e.g. by forcing speculation on random strategies to discover new techniques by brute force), but it's not easy and not very efficient most of the time.
Humans are very good at showing AIs where the holes in their techniques are, so mixed human/AI games will provide the best learning environment for them most of the time.
What bugs me is that several opinions seem to state the view that paying attention (and responding, even) to advertising is a moral duty to ensure a low, convenient price tag on publications.
I make no such argument. I'm objecting to the idea that media should be completely free of advertising and fees, which is the implied or explicitly stated claim in a lot of the posts in this thread.
No, Zeners won't work; the issue is *when* the spikes are injected, not so much their size or polarity.
Perhaps I was misunderstanding the description of Macrovision, then. If it messes up decoding by fooling the automatic gain control, that means out-of-band voltages, right? You should be able to tailor a very simple circuit to cut out out-of-band voltages, thus making timing irrelevant (as far as the AGC's concerned, which is what we presumably care about).
If the spike is much slower than the retrace pulse, on the other hand, a simple low-pass filter should do the trick. Another $0.10 worth of components.
If the spike has a voltage range and time scale similar to the real sync pulse, then it should muck up tracking, as there'd be no way to distinguish it from the real sync pulse.
I'm obviously missing something, here. What is it?
Macrovision doesn't mess with timing at all. It puts a spike signal into the vertical retrace. This messes with signal levels in such a way that the cheap AGC (automatic gain control) circuits in most VHS video recorders freak out and mess with the brightness of the picture.
Stupid question time - does this mean that a pair of back-to-back $0.05 zener diodes would remove Macrovision?
The article mentions unmanned rovers, not a manned mission. This might indeed be do-able on a university's budget.
Research groups routinely send things to low earth orbit atop commercial boosters. A one-way moon probe carrying a couple of light autonomous rovers could be lifted for a sane price, especially if you use something like an ion drive to get from LEO to lunar orbit (no idea what engines they're actually planning to use for the transfer orbit).
They claim that they can put together a console for $350.
They'd better not be planning to do it with PC parts. Heck, even console makers that can use custom chips and boards to minimize parts count end up selling the hardware below cost.
How do the TuxBox people intend to build their console for the price they claim?
(I can think of a couple of approaches, but they involve using sub-optimal hardware or else having a large amount of development and fab funding.)
They're vulnerable to EMP, but not to fridge magnets or ambient radio noise or being put next to a vacuum cleaner. Unless you're expecting a military attack, you're fine. Much better than tape for this.
CD media do decay. This is influenced by light and temperature, I think (mainly temperature, but I wouldn't put burnt CDs under a UV lamp). CDs that are stamped in a factory don't decay, but writable and (especially!) re-writable ones will. Estimates I've heard ranged from one year to one century for lifetime.
CD media are vulnerable to water, severe heat stress, solvents, etc. Soaking for a while in water or a solvent, or uneven heat stress, may cause the CD to delaminate (the data-carrying layer may peel off the pastic, or so I'm led to understand). Many organic solvents (like acetone) will attack the plastic, too.
For peace of mind, nothing beats redundant copies and printouts of any documents that are important. For long-term data storage, tape is probably ok, as long as it's very high quality, was written with a high-quality writer, and is stored in a box shielded with both iron and aluminum (or copper) (iron shorts out low-frequency magnetic field lines, aluminum or copper or any other good conductor reflects high-frequency EM). These materials must be in closed shells around the tape enclosure (the iron shell is much less picky about being unbroken, but a broken conducting shell won't help you a bit against EMF). I'd personally trust soft iron more than steel for magnetic protection (steel is magnetically "hard", and can become permanently magnetized; soft iron can't (much)).
If you're not near any motors or monitors or speakers or high-current power conduits, you can probably get away with just the conducting shell. YMMV. Heck, stick aluminum tape boxes in an iron safe and you're fine on both counts.
You've already gotten the Right Answer (multiple copies, multiple locations) from another post. Here's my Fun Answer:).
Books are surprisingly durable things. In a cool, dry environment free of book-eating parasites and people with torches, a good-quality book can last for centuries or longer.
Enter the next generation.
Alumina - corundum - is as cheap as the dirt it's refined from. It can, with enough fiddling, be drawn into thin fibers (much like the whisps in fibreglass insulation), which can be woven into cloth.
Alumina is virtually invulnerable to chemical attack (it's an oxide of a reactive metal; it's only really vulnerable to a more reactive metal or oxidant). It's also virtually invulnerable to fire (with a melting point above 2000 degrees C, and good heat conductivity). It's also very hard and very strong (hardness 9, great tensile strength, and with very fine fibers, shear stresses are minimal [because the fiber bends, making most of it tensile stress]).
Weave cloth from alumina fibers. Cut the cloth into pages, and fuse the edges so they don't unravel. Paint words and pictures on them with oxides, and stick them in a kiln for a few hours. The metal ions in the pigments diffuse into the fibers, colouring it in the same manner as ruby and sapphire are coloured (exactly the same, since they're corundum too).
Sew the pages into books, add thicker pages as covers, and file for a few millenea. Nothing short of a direct nuclear strike or being stuck into a grinder or the heart of a foundry's forge will destroy them.
The lettering within them could be smeared by heating them in a kiln for a few hours, but careful choice of pigments makes this difficult for the vandal.
It would be really neat to copy some of the greater works of the 20th century and previous centuries into books like these, and to distribute copies far and wide. In an era where data storage is increasingly volatile, this lets us leave something for future archaeologists to find.
Heck, use glyphs (or plain ol' hex) to encode data, and you can store your pr0n and MP3s, too.
I see plenty of people dismissing the parent as a troll and wonder if they are being fair or not. True there has been more than the average amount of trolls written in the past couple days or so. But I think that Christian Soldier has a valid point here. The human genome is complex, yes, but I think that it is correct to say that "who we are" cannot be fully attributed to the genome. There is an awful lot of complexity to our very existences (and I'm getting a bit metaphysical here so I apologize.)
Of course who we are isn't fully definied by our genes - we're exposed to a vast, almost infinitely complex environment that varies greatly from person to person. As far as I can see, this provides ample source for variation between people with the same genetic material.
As for the physical complexity of the human body, see my other post. We know that complex-looking systems can arise from simple rules and simple building blocks. Until a compelling reason to believe that something more is going on is given to me, I see no reason not to think that our DNA (identified and unidentified portions) and our growth environment are solely responsible for the human physical structure.
This has been beaten to death elsewhere. The upshot is that many people argue that the complexity of the human mind and body prove divine influence in their creation, while as far as the scientific community's concerned, it's perfectly consistent with nature taking its course.
The reason why the original post is being called a troll is that, while the strong of faith still drag out the complexity argument now and then, it is far more likely that it was posted as deliberate flamebait. Back when trolltalk was still active, people would *brag* about posting plausible-sounding messages like this.
In summary, while they're not being nice about it and not contributing much to the discussion, the troll-bashers are probably correct in their assumptions.
When these "do nothing" portions are removed, though, the system does not function properly-- showing the evolution worked to take advantage of all possible types of "interaction" within the substrate of the FPGA (quantum effects, possibly?).
Try parasitic effects. There's a lot of "unwanted" capacitance, resistance, and inductance in integrated circuits. This causes crosstalk between lines and devices close to each other (physically or electrically close), and leakage of signals through parts of the device where they wouldn't propagate with ideal (perfect) components.
There's plenty of opportunity for communication here. Invoking quantum effects isn't necessary (at the relatively large feature sizes involved, quantum effects show up as low-level noise and not much else [other than the quantum effects that give the material properties in the first place]).
These results are wonderful - we're modular.
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A Map to Nowhere?
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· Score: 2
While showing that there isn't a 1:1 mapping between genes and proteins makes it a lot harder to figure out what proteins are present in the body, it *does* make it a lot easier to figure out how the proteins work.
If proteins are made of several modular components, then by understanding the relatively few component proteins we have a terrific foothold for both understanding the vast array of proteins found in nature, and on easily constructing our own.
It also raises the possibility of tricking the body into generating new proteins just by insering a couple of new "job orders" that use existing parts, instead of having to insert the blueprints for entire proteins designed from the ground up.
I look forward to seeing the research that results from this.
Object complexity != design complexity.
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A Map to Nowhere?
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Well, the entire genome can be fitted on a CDROM. That isn't very much data at all. Are we really saying that the human body is no more complex that a copy of Windows 2000?
Obviously, it is.
Not so "obviously" at all. A complex-looking object can easily arise from simple rules and/or simple building blocks.
When I build a house, I don't have to specify where every brick is laid. I just have to tell you how bricks fit together to make walls, and where I want the walls to be.
The Mandelbrot set is another example, for the math geeks among us. It looks infinitely complex, and it _is_ infinitely detailed, but the algorithm that produces it can be stated in one sentence.
In summary, the amount of data needed to describe the human body could conceivably be quite small.
Slashdot Mirror
Aren't there some serious problems with leakage of these containers into the groundwater table? I seem to remember hearing something akin to that...
That depends on where you bury them.
The proposals I've most recently heard about involve either burying them a few miles deep in the Canadian Shield - bedrock that water doesn't flow through - or burying them a few miles deep under the ocean floor, with the holes plugged with clay (which water doesn't flow through readily).
Both should work long enough for most of the products to decay, even if the containers don't last anywhere close to that long. The containers are mainly to protect it during transport and during temporary storage (accidents could have nasty consequences without these precautions).
Wasn't slowpoke (and most early research reactors) water boilers with an aqueous solution of uranyl-sulfate or something? No fuel rods, I think... just a big liquid solution with fuel mixed in.
I'll have to look that up; thanks for the pointer.
My understanding was that at least some versions used fuel rods, but I haven't checked in quite a while.
There is a solution to the nuclear waste problem, burn it. I dont mean with fire, i mean in a reactor. so called nuclear "waste" is waste because it can no longer be used by a conventional nuclear pwer plant. There are power plant designs that would use fuel rods until all of the fissionable material is used. Look on google for the Advanced Liquid Metal reactor. Fuel is recycled until all the uranium and plutonium has fissioned into lesser elements, some with half lives of days, rather than millions of years.
According to two different descriptions of ALMRs, you only end up burning the heavy waste products (actinides) with this scheme.
Radioactive lighter elements may be bred to something more stable, but stable ligher elements are just as easily bred into medium-lifetime radioactive isotopes.
Lastly, the "slowpoke" style of reactor described can't have runaway heating at all. As it heats up, the core expands, pushing the fuel rods away from each other and making the reactor less efficient.
My mistake, the article refers to a different type of reactor.
The graphite-laced "pebbles" in their reactor could melt down if enough were piled in one place, as graphite will stay put under meltdown temperatures (the fuel, steel, and graphite will alloy with each other and whatever's underneath them as they heat up). The PBMR is thus open to abuse.
A meltdown still won't cause a nuclear explosion. It just makes a hot molten mess that's very radioactive.
And think about the chain reaction that would be caused by one "going off." If anyone else in the area had one, the resulting EMP would probably fry the control electronics and cause other devices to go "critical," thereby setting them off too. What a blast that would be (no pun intended).
Um, no nuclear plant ever built in the history of nuclear power has been able to cause a nuclear explosion. Building a nuclear bomb requires completely different conditions (for reasons that I won't go into here).
The worst that happens, with any reactor, is that the core gets hot enough to melt and/or cause coolant pipes to burst. This is ugly, because it contaminates everything nearby, but relatively minor on the "explosion" scale. There is no EMP.
I wouldn't worry about meltdowns, though. Firstly, all reactors built within the past two or three decades have doubly- or triply-redundant systems that shut them down when they overheat. Secondly, anything that uses water (heavy or light) as a moderator *can't* melt down. Without a moderator, the reactor stops dead (it needs the moderator to react). With water as a moderator, your moderator disappears as soon as it heats up enough to burst pipes. End of reaction.
Lastly, the "slowpoke" style of reactor described can't have runaway heating at all. As it heats up, the core expands, pushing the fuel rods away from each other and making the reactor less efficient. Do whatever you like to it; it doesn't run away.
They don't have to be buried. Extract the plutonium and use it up in a reactor designed for it. Put the other stuff in the business end of a nuclear accelerator, or park it on the edge of a fission reactor, and make it break down sooner than by waiting for natural decay.
The problem with any scheme that involves chemical reprocessing - which used to be widespread - is that you get a lot of minor mishaps occuring, which exposes workers and the nearby environment to small amounts of Really Nasty Stuff (tm).
If I understand correctly, worker health liabilities were why plutonium reprocessing plants were abandoned, but in general, it's just plain safer to seal up the waste in very sturdy containers and drop them in the continental sheild.
As far as transmuting the waste is concerned, there are problems. If you stick waste next to a large neutron source (like a reactor), it will be transmuted. Continuously. This has the good effect of transmuting long-lived radioactive isotopes into shorter-lived ones, and the bad effect of transmuting non-radioactive decay products into radioactive isotopes. This won't magically make the waste non-radioactive (well, after a few centuries of this, it might all end up as the four stable lead isotopes, but don't hold your breath).
In summary, while burying the waste in mine shafts is an imperfect solution, it's one of the best ones that we currently have. We can always dig it up later if we find a really good way to dispose of it.
if you keep it in a lead box, within another lead box, and allow only authorized technicians to service and maintain it, then I think there wouldnt be much worry as long as everyone does their part safely
And therein lies the biggest problem: you're relying on *everyone* to do their part safely, *all* of the time, for all of the reactors that are ever installed.
One screwup (accidental or delibarate), and you've just astronomically jacked up the cancer rate for everyone in the area for the next 50,000 years or so.
Good luck getting these insured.
The current scheme - using a few big, well-monitored plants - is much safer.
Also, FYI, lead will corrode relatively quickly (and I'm ignoring earthquakes and other disasters).
Is this yet another example of how big companies are squashing the little guy?
Why must this be the result of malice?
Most components sold and used will be destined for production circuit boards. Thus, wire-wrap compatible components won't make much money, but will still require the infrastructure needed to support the different packaging type.
Add to this the fact that many small companies (including the one a hundred feet from me) send their schematics out to third-party board-makers for prototyping, and the wiretap market looks pretty small.
Why would you fault companies for dropping unprofitable product lines?
For the record, I haven't had any trouble finding DIP components in my area, so this question is academic for me.
"No more than I have the right to take your GPLd code and incorporate it in my closed-source binary."
Idiot. You _DO_ have that right. As long as you don't give anyone else that binary, you are 100% free to do whatever you wish with GPL'd code.
*Sigh*.
"incorporate and distribute it".
Now, care to actually address my argument, or are you going to stick with name-calling?
Stupid question time - couldn't you get this functionality by setting up a mail server and a cacheing proxy server on the box you're using?
They'd hit the net when it was available to transfer data, and silently fail (and return cached data, for the proxy server) when you weren't connected. You'd just be talking to the local daemons, so as far as your mail client and web browser can tell, you'd always be connected.
Yes, this will eat system resources, but it shouldn't be that much if you've configured the system properly.
Whoever creates the music or code gets to decide how it's used.
ah, key point to remember here, musicians do not own the copyrights to their music, their label does. therefore, it is the labels that decide how the music is used, not the musicians.
However, the musicians transferred the copyrights to their labels of their own free will (they signed the contract). With that, they transfered all decision-making authority on how the music gets used. The argument still stands.
Good that you thought about it, though (I'm still waiting to be flamed to a crisp).
Please tell Morcheeba, Tranquility Bass, The Brooklyn Funk Essentials, Badly Drawn Boy and Brakeman Junction that I'm sorry I stole their music. But they might be happy to know that I now own their CD's. I know, I know, I should be a good consumer and wait for MTV or Clear Channel to tell me what music is good, but what can I say, I'm a dirty fucking thief.
I'll be happy to pass that on.
Did they benefit from your theft? Certainly.
Would it make _sense_ for them to let people download songs for free to sample them? Sure.
Does that mean you have the right to do it if they decide they don't want you to? Nope. No more than I have the right to take your GPLd code and incorporate it in my closed-source binary.
Whoever creates the music or code gets to decide how it's used. If you don't respect others' rights to that, why should they respect yours?
There is a problem with having the AI play against itself though. I can't remember the exact reason but it can only learn so much that way.
The problem is that the AIs will become good at beating other AIs - not at beating humans. If the competing AIs are all stupid in one particular way, they won't clue into it by themselves. Also, if you have deterministic AIs, you might enter a closed loop (endlessly replaying the same set of games with the same set of learning variations).
Careful design of the AI can minimize these effects (e.g. by forcing speculation on random strategies to discover new techniques by brute force), but it's not easy and not very efficient most of the time.
Humans are very good at showing AIs where the holes in their techniques are, so mixed human/AI games will provide the best learning environment for them most of the time.
What bugs me is that several opinions seem to state the view that paying attention (and responding, even) to advertising is a moral duty to ensure a low, convenient price tag on publications.
I make no such argument. I'm objecting to the idea that media should be completely free of advertising and fees, which is the implied or explicitly stated claim in a lot of the posts in this thread.
No, Zeners won't work; the issue is *when* the spikes are injected, not so much their size or polarity.
Perhaps I was misunderstanding the description of Macrovision, then. If it messes up decoding by fooling the automatic gain control, that means out-of-band voltages, right? You should be able to tailor a very simple circuit to cut out out-of-band voltages, thus making timing irrelevant (as far as the AGC's concerned, which is what we presumably care about).
If the spike is much slower than the retrace pulse, on the other hand, a simple low-pass filter should do the trick. Another $0.10 worth of components.
If the spike has a voltage range and time scale similar to the real sync pulse, then it should muck up tracking, as there'd be no way to distinguish it from the real sync pulse.
I'm obviously missing something, here. What is it?
What's so special about the web? I'll be damned if they get _my_ eyeballs, or I pay a subscription.
And without at least one of these, the revenue that justifies a web (or physical) publication comes from where?
Macrovision doesn't mess with timing at all. It puts a spike signal into the vertical retrace. This messes with signal levels in such a way that the cheap AGC (automatic gain control) circuits in most VHS video recorders freak out and mess with the brightness of the picture.
Stupid question time - does this mean that a pair of back-to-back $0.05 zener diodes would remove Macrovision?
The article mentions unmanned rovers, not a manned mission. This might indeed be do-able on a university's budget.
Research groups routinely send things to low earth orbit atop commercial boosters. A one-way moon probe carrying a couple of light autonomous rovers could be lifted for a sane price, especially if you use something like an ion drive to get from LEO to lunar orbit (no idea what engines they're actually planning to use for the transfer orbit).
They claim that they can put together a console for $350.
They'd better not be planning to do it with PC parts. Heck, even console makers that can use custom chips and boards to minimize parts count end up selling the hardware below cost.
How do the TuxBox people intend to build their console for the price they claim?
(I can think of a couple of approaches, but they involve using sub-optimal hardware or else having a large amount of development and fab funding.)
For peace of mind, nothing beats redundant copies and printouts of any documents that are important. For long-term data storage, tape is probably ok, as long as it's very high quality, was written with a high-quality writer, and is stored in a box shielded with both iron and aluminum (or copper) (iron shorts out low-frequency magnetic field lines, aluminum or copper or any other good conductor reflects high-frequency EM). These materials must be in closed shells around the tape enclosure (the iron shell is much less picky about being unbroken, but a broken conducting shell won't help you a bit against EMF). I'd personally trust soft iron more than steel for magnetic protection (steel is magnetically "hard", and can become permanently magnetized; soft iron can't (much)).
If you're not near any motors or monitors or speakers or high-current power conduits, you can probably get away with just the conducting shell. YMMV. Heck, stick aluminum tape boxes in an iron safe and you're fine on both counts.
You've already gotten the Right Answer (multiple copies, multiple locations) from another post. Here's my Fun Answer :).
Books are surprisingly durable things. In a cool, dry environment free of book-eating parasites and people with torches, a good-quality book can last for centuries or longer.
Enter the next generation.
Alumina - corundum - is as cheap as the dirt it's refined from. It can, with enough fiddling, be drawn into thin fibers (much like the whisps in fibreglass insulation), which can be woven into cloth.
Alumina is virtually invulnerable to chemical attack (it's an oxide of a reactive metal; it's only really vulnerable to a more reactive metal or oxidant). It's also virtually invulnerable to fire (with a melting point above 2000 degrees C, and good heat conductivity). It's also very hard and very strong (hardness 9, great tensile strength, and with very fine fibers, shear stresses are minimal [because the fiber bends, making most of it tensile stress]).
Weave cloth from alumina fibers. Cut the cloth into pages, and fuse the edges so they don't unravel. Paint words and pictures on them with oxides, and stick them in a kiln for a few hours. The metal ions in the pigments diffuse into the fibers, colouring it in the same manner as ruby and sapphire are coloured (exactly the same, since they're corundum too).
Sew the pages into books, add thicker pages as covers, and file for a few millenea. Nothing short of a direct nuclear strike or being stuck into a grinder or the heart of a foundry's forge will destroy them.
The lettering within them could be smeared by heating them in a kiln for a few hours, but careful choice of pigments makes this difficult for the vandal.
It would be really neat to copy some of the greater works of the 20th century and previous centuries into books like these, and to distribute copies far and wide. In an era where data storage is increasingly volatile, this lets us leave something for future archaeologists to find.
Heck, use glyphs (or plain ol' hex) to encode data, and you can store your pr0n and MP3s, too.
I see plenty of people dismissing the parent as a troll and wonder if they are being fair or not. True there has been more than the average amount of trolls written in the past couple days or so. But I think that Christian Soldier has a valid point here. The human genome is complex, yes, but I think that it is correct to say that "who we are" cannot be fully attributed to the genome. There is an awful lot of complexity to our very existences (and I'm getting a bit metaphysical here so I apologize.)
Of course who we are isn't fully definied by our genes - we're exposed to a vast, almost infinitely complex environment that varies greatly from person to person. As far as I can see, this provides ample source for variation between people with the same genetic material.
As for the physical complexity of the human body, see my other post. We know that complex-looking systems can arise from simple rules and simple building blocks. Until a compelling reason to believe that something more is going on is given to me, I see no reason not to think that our DNA (identified and unidentified portions) and our growth environment are solely responsible for the human physical structure.
This has been beaten to death elsewhere. The upshot is that many people argue that the complexity of the human mind and body prove divine influence in their creation, while as far as the scientific community's concerned, it's perfectly consistent with nature taking its course.
The reason why the original post is being called a troll is that, while the strong of faith still drag out the complexity argument now and then, it is far more likely that it was posted as deliberate flamebait. Back when trolltalk was still active, people would *brag* about posting plausible-sounding messages like this.
In summary, while they're not being nice about it and not contributing much to the discussion, the troll-bashers are probably correct in their assumptions.
When these "do nothing" portions are removed, though, the system does not function properly-- showing the evolution worked to take advantage of all possible types of "interaction" within the substrate of the FPGA (quantum effects, possibly?).
Try parasitic effects. There's a lot of "unwanted" capacitance, resistance, and inductance in integrated circuits. This causes crosstalk between lines and devices close to each other (physically or electrically close), and leakage of signals through parts of the device where they wouldn't propagate with ideal (perfect) components.
There's plenty of opportunity for communication here. Invoking quantum effects isn't necessary (at the relatively large feature sizes involved, quantum effects show up as low-level noise and not much else [other than the quantum effects that give the material properties in the first place]).
While showing that there isn't a 1:1 mapping between genes and proteins makes it a lot harder to figure out what proteins are present in the body, it *does* make it a lot easier to figure out how the proteins work.
If proteins are made of several modular components, then by understanding the relatively few component proteins we have a terrific foothold for both understanding the vast array of proteins found in nature, and on easily constructing our own.
It also raises the possibility of tricking the body into generating new proteins just by insering a couple of new "job orders" that use existing parts, instead of having to insert the blueprints for entire proteins designed from the ground up.
I look forward to seeing the research that results from this.
Well, the entire genome can be fitted on a CDROM. That isn't very much data at all. Are we really saying that the human body is no more complex that a copy of Windows 2000?
Obviously, it is.
Not so "obviously" at all. A complex-looking object can easily arise from simple rules and/or simple building blocks.
When I build a house, I don't have to specify where every brick is laid. I just have to tell you how bricks fit together to make walls, and where I want the walls to be.
The Mandelbrot set is another example, for the math geeks among us. It looks infinitely complex, and it _is_ infinitely detailed, but the algorithm that produces it can be stated in one sentence.
In summary, the amount of data needed to describe the human body could conceivably be quite small.