People don't take well to the >100G acceleration the supergun would produce, and hardening probes against that kind of stress would also be costly. Perhaps not as costly as conventional rockets, but if all you're doing is launching cargo into space, you don't need a super-rocket like the Ares in any case.
Though perhaps hybrid coilgun (or railgun)/rocket propulsion systems would be more feasible. There, one would give the shuttle/rocket/etc an initial linear accelerator boost before firing up the engines. It still has problems with making a coilgun "track" point right up and all that.
It's a holdover from the Cold War, basically. The major powers didn't want to militarize space with nuclear weapons platforms and their defenses - or rather, they didn't want to waste resources building ASATs, ASAT counters, counter-counters, more sophisticated platforms, etc..
Rods from god are "just" conventional weapons, and thus aren't prohibited. I don't imagine the people at ground zero will notice the difference, though. "Ahh, I'm being turned into superheated vapor by a tungsten rod, but at least I'm not being turned into superheated vapor by a nuke!"
The NERVA page linked to in another post here said they got NERVA up to a T/W of 3 or 4. It's unlikely that a closed cycle gas-core design would be that much heavier than a solid-core one that its gains in thrust were absorbed by its weight, particularly since both engine types heat up some gas passing through it (or around it, in the case of the nuclear lightbulb). Thus there are no obvious contention issues like those that plague ion drives.
The one with the quartz. If one's to use the open-cycle, it'd have to be in space - the velocity of the gas would bring it far away as long as the engine isn't pointed at the Earth. And if one's in space, perhaps the salt-water rocket would work better -- that is, if its particular neutron-absorbing (near?) unobtainium actually exists.
What are the main engineering problems with the closed-cycle GCNR? As far as I know, the continuous reaction will be outputting EM in a range to which the quartz is transparent. This leaves the material reaction on the inside of the vessel. I thought the ablation would be manageable - does it happen too rapidly?
Freeman Dyson, group leader on the project, estimated back in the '60s that with conventional nuclear weapons, that each launch would cause on average between 0.1 and 1 fatal cancers from the fallout.
A super-Orion might be more friendly (since it would use fusion bombs), but also might not be (since it would have to use larger bombs, and would need conventional atomic bombs for the first few "strokes" anyhow). In the worst case, one could use GCNR "nuclear lightbulb" (no radioactive release whatsoever) to assemble an Orion in orbit. But even with a GCNR, I'm pretty sure you would have heard "AAH! Hiroshima! Chernobyl!" all the way round the globe.
Bah. If it had been a gas-core nuclear rocket, we could put bases on the moon in a single shot.
I would have said Orion, but there's even less chance of getting that to the moon, even if you could get rid of the outer space WMD ban -- just imagine the environmentalists' reaction to something that uses nuclear bombs as propulsion.
Any idiot can run a country into the ground. On the other hand, it takes sophistication to restrain political freedom while allowing for economic growth. As such, China wins! In the run-down countries categories, that hermit state south of China would win before Zimbabwe and Sudan.
I know, but did you have to advertise it? I had just finished owning your computer; now all the other slashdotters will get on and kick me off with their own kits!
Use an RTG with a very long-lived isotope, perhaps? Usually, long-lived isotopes put out too little power to be of use, but most anything should be able to provide enough for a 30 picowatt CPU... (Still, the efficiency would suck because of the Carnot limit; it might be better to find a beta emitter and make use of the electrons directly.)
Isn't that just a "dumb extrapolation", as you put it, on the derivative? If there are any hidden complexity snags to intelligence, then recursion would hit it and go no further. (As an example, 2-SAT is really easy; 3-SAT is really hard.)
They do, and write countermeasure papers like this one. That paper is about how to break the communications network (basically flooding it) - the next step for the Storm authors is to switch to another peer-to-peer network that's more resilient, and then the investigators find another bug, and the arms race continues.
Ultimately, the only way to shortcut the race is to keep the code from being executed, on the assumption that people aren't going to want to have the bot on their computers. Unfortunately, this is going to require heavy retooling of security systems (to lower the chance that bugs can be exploitable, and to let users know exactly what the program they're trying to execute/install wants to do).
To get back from that digression, the big deal is that it uses peer-to-peer and that so many people have fallen for it. AV companies (and other reverse engineers) do look at the code, but they can only react, hence the arms race.
Without any regulation or govt. intervention, it just doesn't make a lot of logical sense that one and only one company could become SO good at delivering a service or making their product(s) that NOBODY else would even try to compete, and take some of that revenue for themselves!
That is contingent upon that free entry is never violated. Consider the extreme case of hydraulic despotism: if a corporation owned all the oil (or water, or something equally valuable), using property rights to exclude others, then it would have an advantageous position from which it could exclude others from entry. Reality won't be that unkind, but the difference is of quantity and not of quality: a closer to-the-earth example would be Standard Oil, which upon learning that a competitor was buying pipelines, forbade that competitor from using its (Standard Oil's) railways or to pass through the land on which those were laid, limiting the competitor's transportation.
In yet other cases, economics of scale may work in favor of the already-established corporation, where it's more efficient to run a single factory producing 2X products than two producing X products. The argument towards ultimate freedom of entry in this case is that monopolies, or more broadly, corporations that enjoy this advantage become lazy enough that the competitors can catch up. Even if that is true (and the larger corporation don't plan long enough ahead and don't have the capital to buy competitors outright), it provides a slackening of the free-entry-competition dynamic, and if the slack is wide enough, the corporation could grow to the extent it attains properties of a state.
Evidence suggests that in the case there's no state (and thus no corporations), rival gangs or mafia type associations try to become states by enforcing "a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence" (to quote). But as in all other markets, there's soon competition, and the various gangs end up shooting at each other. Even if you consider this a good condition, most people do not, and try to establish a state. If they don't, eventually one of the mafia gangs will outgun the others and become a de facto state, as before.
This leaves the situation where there is a state but it does not permit limited liability and thus corporations as we know them don't exist. No state is like this (well, except for places where everything's nationalized), so there's no evidence to say as to whether it'd work.
In a more general sense, we could say there are bugs in the implementation of the democratic republic... but the developers aren't interested in fixing it, and you can't fork. This analogy breaks down when considering initiatives and referenda, but there's the problem you point out: people don't give enough of a damn to hoist themselves out of the local optimum (which is very local and not very optimal).
The problem is that any sufficiently capitalist system short of anarcho-capitalism turns into what you call mercantilism. What happens is that a corporation, through legitimate means or less so, becomes large enough to influence politics. At that point it rigs the game in its favor, or tries to do so, and from there on you have rent-seeking galore.
Anarcho-capitalism just postpones this: a corporation or group thereof becomes large enough to collude (if it's a group) or to become a de facto state (in either case). If the new state is capitalist, see the first point above. Otherwise, it'll probably still be oligarchical.
If he's that clever, tell him not to confuse evolution and abiogenesis. Abiogenesis deals with ultimate origin (life from non-life?) and evolution with what happens once you have even the tiniest sliver of life.
I think the standard answer there is "revelation", and the argument would be pretty similar to that of "I know I exist". You can't communicate it (for the same reason a philosophical zombie can say "I think therefore I am" as many times as he wants and you can still not know whether or not he's a philosophical zombie), yet you know.
That is, at least, if you're not just being told that God exists and are deferring to your leaders.. or if you believe in a god because that's what everybody else is doing. And knowing how scarce independent thought is, even if a god (or spirit or what one may call it) exists, likely more people fall within the latter case than the former.
Kinetic energy is 0.5mv^2. Thus you get a better return by having something lightweight that goes faster than something heavy that goes slower (since v is squared and m is linear). The greatest problem is that if you run it at too high a speed, it'll tear itself apart. Therefore, you need something that has high tensile strength.. like nanotubes.
I wouldn't be surprised if the program did something like this (under disassembly):
push pointer
call GetAndProcessFace
push eax
push storedinfo
call CompareFace
test eax, eax
je badboy_logout ;Else good user, so terminate program as the same user who it's designed to protect, instead of being linked to something secure like disk encryption under a password derived from a biometric hash. And with face recognition, it also has to deal with replay attacks, and again, it wouldn't surprise me if it didn't.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds eerily like Computers Don't Argue. (Why worry about malice? The amplification of initial incompetence will be much worse.)
People don't take well to the >100G acceleration the supergun would produce, and hardening probes against that kind of stress would also be costly. Perhaps not as costly as conventional rockets, but if all you're doing is launching cargo into space, you don't need a super-rocket like the Ares in any case.
Though perhaps hybrid coilgun (or railgun)/rocket propulsion systems would be more feasible. There, one would give the shuttle/rocket/etc an initial linear accelerator boost before firing up the engines. It still has problems with making a coilgun "track" point right up and all that.
That's because of this rock that keeps elephants away... and it's so strong, it works for all of Britain.
It's a holdover from the Cold War, basically. The major powers didn't want to militarize space with nuclear weapons platforms and their defenses - or rather, they didn't want to waste resources building ASATs, ASAT counters, counter-counters, more sophisticated platforms, etc..
Rods from god are "just" conventional weapons, and thus aren't prohibited. I don't imagine the people at ground zero will notice the difference, though. "Ahh, I'm being turned into superheated vapor by a tungsten rod, but at least I'm not being turned into superheated vapor by a nuke!"
The NERVA page linked to in another post here said they got NERVA up to a T/W of 3 or 4. It's unlikely that a closed cycle gas-core design would be that much heavier than a solid-core one that its gains in thrust were absorbed by its weight, particularly since both engine types heat up some gas passing through it (or around it, in the case of the nuclear lightbulb). Thus there are no obvious contention issues like those that plague ion drives.
Which kind?
The one with the quartz. If one's to use the open-cycle, it'd have to be in space - the velocity of the gas would bring it far away as long as the engine isn't pointed at the Earth. And if one's in space, perhaps the salt-water rocket would work better -- that is, if its particular neutron-absorbing (near?) unobtainium actually exists.
What are the main engineering problems with the closed-cycle GCNR? As far as I know, the continuous reaction will be outputting EM in a range to which the quartz is transparent. This leaves the material reaction on the inside of the vessel. I thought the ablation would be manageable - does it happen too rapidly?
The Wikipedia article says this about the subject:
Freeman Dyson, group leader on the project, estimated back in the '60s that with conventional nuclear weapons, that each launch would cause on average between 0.1 and 1 fatal cancers from the fallout.
A super-Orion might be more friendly (since it would use fusion bombs), but also might not be (since it would have to use larger bombs, and would need conventional atomic bombs for the first few "strokes" anyhow). In the worst case, one could use GCNR "nuclear lightbulb" (no radioactive release whatsoever) to assemble an Orion in orbit. But even with a GCNR, I'm pretty sure you would have heard "AAH! Hiroshima! Chernobyl!" all the way round the globe.
Bah. If it had been a gas-core nuclear rocket, we could put bases on the moon in a single shot.
I would have said Orion, but there's even less chance of getting that to the moon, even if you could get rid of the outer space WMD ban -- just imagine the environmentalists' reaction to something that uses nuclear bombs as propulsion.
How long is the emperor of China's nose? Mu.
Any idiot can run a country into the ground. On the other hand, it takes sophistication to restrain political freedom while allowing for economic growth. As such, China wins! In the run-down countries categories, that hermit state south of China would win before Zimbabwe and Sudan.
IE 5 is good enough for me!
I know, but did you have to advertise it? I had just finished owning your computer; now all the other slashdotters will get on and kick me off with their own kits!
Use an RTG with a very long-lived isotope, perhaps? Usually, long-lived isotopes put out too little power to be of use, but most anything should be able to provide enough for a 30 picowatt CPU... (Still, the efficiency would suck because of the Carnot limit; it might be better to find a beta emitter and make use of the electrons directly.)
20 comments on a quantum mechanics article, and still no Schroedinger's Cat superposition jokes? What's Slashdot coming to these days?
Isn't that just a "dumb extrapolation", as you put it, on the derivative? If there are any hidden complexity snags to intelligence, then recursion would hit it and go no further. (As an example, 2-SAT is really easy; 3-SAT is really hard.)
They do, and write countermeasure papers like this one. That paper is about how to break the communications network (basically flooding it) - the next step for the Storm authors is to switch to another peer-to-peer network that's more resilient, and then the investigators find another bug, and the arms race continues.
Ultimately, the only way to shortcut the race is to keep the code from being executed, on the assumption that people aren't going to want to have the bot on their computers. Unfortunately, this is going to require heavy retooling of security systems (to lower the chance that bugs can be exploitable, and to let users know exactly what the program they're trying to execute/install wants to do).
To get back from that digression, the big deal is that it uses peer-to-peer and that so many people have fallen for it. AV companies (and other reverse engineers) do look at the code, but they can only react, hence the arms race.
Without any regulation or govt. intervention, it just doesn't make a lot of logical sense that one and only one company could become SO good at delivering a service or making their product(s) that NOBODY else would even try to compete, and take some of that revenue for themselves!
That is contingent upon that free entry is never violated. Consider the extreme case of hydraulic despotism: if a corporation owned all the oil (or water, or something equally valuable), using property rights to exclude others, then it would have an advantageous position from which it could exclude others from entry. Reality won't be that unkind, but the difference is of quantity and not of quality: a closer to-the-earth example would be Standard Oil, which upon learning that a competitor was buying pipelines, forbade that competitor from using its (Standard Oil's) railways or to pass through the land on which those were laid, limiting the competitor's transportation.
In yet other cases, economics of scale may work in favor of the already-established corporation, where it's more efficient to run a single factory producing 2X products than two producing X products. The argument towards ultimate freedom of entry in this case is that monopolies, or more broadly, corporations that enjoy this advantage become lazy enough that the competitors can catch up. Even if that is true (and the larger corporation don't plan long enough ahead and don't have the capital to buy competitors outright), it provides a slackening of the free-entry-competition dynamic, and if the slack is wide enough, the corporation could grow to the extent it attains properties of a state.
Evidence suggests that in the case there's no state (and thus no corporations), rival gangs or mafia type associations try to become states by enforcing "a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence" (to quote). But as in all other markets, there's soon competition, and the various gangs end up shooting at each other. Even if you consider this a good condition, most people do not, and try to establish a state. If they don't, eventually one of the mafia gangs will outgun the others and become a de facto state, as before.
This leaves the situation where there is a state but it does not permit limited liability and thus corporations as we know them don't exist. No state is like this (well, except for places where everything's nationalized), so there's no evidence to say as to whether it'd work.
That's kinda hard to do when the congresscritters pick their voters before the voters (re-)elect them. There's a reason the House has a 94% incumbency rate, after all.
In a more general sense, we could say there are bugs in the implementation of the democratic republic... but the developers aren't interested in fixing it, and you can't fork. This analogy breaks down when considering initiatives and referenda, but there's the problem you point out: people don't give enough of a damn to hoist themselves out of the local optimum (which is very local and not very optimal).
The problem is that any sufficiently capitalist system short of anarcho-capitalism turns into what you call mercantilism. What happens is that a corporation, through legitimate means or less so, becomes large enough to influence politics. At that point it rigs the game in its favor, or tries to do so, and from there on you have rent-seeking galore.
Anarcho-capitalism just postpones this: a corporation or group thereof becomes large enough to collude (if it's a group) or to become a de facto state (in either case). If the new state is capitalist, see the first point above. Otherwise, it'll probably still be oligarchical.
If he's that clever, tell him not to confuse evolution and abiogenesis. Abiogenesis deals with ultimate origin (life from non-life?) and evolution with what happens once you have even the tiniest sliver of life.
I think the standard answer there is "revelation", and the argument would be pretty similar to that of "I know I exist". You can't communicate it (for the same reason a philosophical zombie can say "I think therefore I am" as many times as he wants and you can still not know whether or not he's a philosophical zombie), yet you know.
That is, at least, if you're not just being told that God exists and are deferring to your leaders.. or if you believe in a god because that's what everybody else is doing. And knowing how scarce independent thought is, even if a god (or spirit or what one may call it) exists, likely more people fall within the latter case than the former.
Kinetic energy is 0.5mv^2. Thus you get a better return by having something lightweight that goes faster than something heavy that goes slower (since v is squared and m is linear). The greatest problem is that if you run it at too high a speed, it'll tear itself apart. Therefore, you need something that has high tensile strength.. like nanotubes.
It says you have to upgrade Java.
I wouldn't be surprised if the program did something like this (under disassembly):
;Else good user, so terminate program
push pointer
call GetAndProcessFace
push eax
push storedinfo
call CompareFace
test eax, eax
je badboy_logout
as the same user who it's designed to protect, instead of being linked to something secure like disk encryption under a password derived from a biometric hash. And with face recognition, it also has to deal with replay attacks, and again, it wouldn't surprise me if it didn't.
EDuke32?