I'm hardly saying that it's impossible(after all, 'Nylonase' enzymes were identified in 1975, for a compound that had only existed for ~40 years. Just that it's impressive. If anybody is going to be metabolizing plastics, it'll be bacteria, through sheer numbers and rapid mutation; but evolving, with no assistance, to attack novel compounds, designed for resilience, in less than a century after their introduction is pretty good work...
Given how late to the game plastics are, it is fairly impressive how fast they've moved. Some modified natural polymers go a fair way back; but most of the synthetics that we think of as 'plastics' are under a century old, are reasonably novel(not just a synthesis technique that is cheaper than the organic method for producing an existing material), and are often selected, at least in part, for good resistance to decay.
Also, polymers can be pretty tough molecules to crack: even something like cellulose, which is literally older than (some) dirt, is attacked primarily by a relatively small group of specialist organisms.
I was thinking more "Why DNA instead of fluorescent dye?"
For truly efficient brigand-tracking, you want a globally-unique taggant, rather than being limited to the few dozen-ish colors of fluorescent dye...
Just imagine! Incentivize your riot cops during the next protest by mixing a unique DNA tag into each one's pepper spray and then analyzing the detainees. The more dirty hippies with your spray on 'em, the better your chance to win the department raffle!
My chemistry is a bit rusty, no pun intended; but my understanding is that chlorine is a stronger oxidizing agent than oxygen is. Are there any (feasible) conditions under which the chlorine could be persuaded to replace the oxygen in the iron oxide, leaving you with iron chloride and a considerable amount of oxygen?
Just because most members of the species are highly social doesn't mean that all of them have to be, or that it's bad when an individual is not.
I'm sure that there are peppy-people-person guidance counselors who haven' gotten the memo yet; but the criteria(or at least criteria for intervention) for most psych disorders includes '*whatever symptoms* are present and cause the patient significant trouble or distress'. Starting "Operation Afflict The Solitary" purely because Being Social Is Good! is pointless and unethical norm-imposition.
Providing a means by which the lonely-but-socially-anxious can acclimatize themselves, by contrast, would certainly be a good thing, even better if it can be done by means that are cheaper, easier to distribute, and lower-stigma than psychologists/psychiatrists.
I'd be a bit sceptical as to whether present-day retail-ready tech is good enough at reading and displaying things like facial nuance that(much to my vexation) are vital to in-person communication; but if they are, this seems like a good thing.
GCHQ is a British organization. How would Snowden get copies of their plans, if there are in fact legitimate? He seems to be making some mighty big claims for having been employed as an employee of an NSA contractor for three months.
One might be tempted to suspect that the NSA is 100% to be trusted when it comes to securing those giant piles 'o data they are Hoovering up, even in the (vanishingly unlikely) event that they are, as they claim, actually not doing anything illicit with them themselves.
You can chat over any TCP connection. You can chat through HTTP on a web page. Short of banning all Internet connections and all web access, they can't even come up with a legal definition that kills online chatting, let alone police it.
'You' in the generic sense can, 'you' in the 'a given user' sense is much less likely to be able to. 'You' in the sense of 'a given user who is using a locked-down device that he can't even add non-approved software to' is even less likely.
Absolutely effective bans are pretty hard. Breaking things hard enough to keep the clueless from having them is substantially easier.
Bush bears his share of the blame; but he was still a hard-drinking, draft-dodging, daddy's boy when the US clandestine services were already in up to their eyeballs in seriously dodgy shit.
The Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission(both reactions to things that had already been going on for some time, but had begun to seep out to the point where they couldn't be ignored) were ~1975. On the domestic side, the FBI was squelching 'radicals' more or less the moment Hoover oozed onto the scene. And, of course, almost as soon as WWII ended, we started up the Cold War secrecy-and-ethically-troubling-activities division in a serious way, and never really recovered.
Bush certainly contributed his push in the wrong direction, when his turn came; but the rot goes a lot deeper.
Empirically, most tech-startup founders seem to disagree with you...
I've always been a trifle puzzled by the 'Everyday Low Prices!' theory of "business friendliness"... There are industries where cost is king(many of them not very good neighbors), and access to cheap, docile, labor and a regulatory environment flexible enough to let you keep your externalities externalized are the overriding factors; but the continued existence of high cost, high status, markets suggests that human capital and network effects count for a lot(especially if you can structure the company so that the real money is mysteriously being earned in Nevada or Ireland or wherever).
Bloomberg will probably push facial recognition software for self serving soda fountains to prevent people from getting 2 small sodas instead of 1 large one.
I don't know if Bloomberg just doesn't give a fuck about public perception of either issue, or whether the soda thing is a brilliant PR move: He's a walking trainwreck on civil liberties; but the one that leads the pack, front and center, is his terrifying war on our god-given right to Big Gulps. It's genius, really.
Not to diminish the (quite demanding) task faced by civil engineers and workers on large construction projects; but it's arguable that the least well-solved problem in infrastructure is within the realm of political science, rather than engineering.
The actual tech levels required to achieve infrastructure objectives tend to be pretty modest; but building and maintaining infrastructure is a thankless task, that people notice only when it has been neglected for long enough to fall apart, and doesn't come cheap. Societies that enjoy reasonably stable, non-dysfunctional, civic institutions for a solid length of time get it(the actual tech level required to build what the people of a given era regard as 'basic infrastructure' is rarely bleeding-edge); but societies that don't have that tend to discover that there isn't really a substitute for it.
You can only rush build infrastructure so fast, and you need genuine institutional competence to keep it in good shape once you have it.
You mean to say that the initial story about Snowden just being a narcissistic traitor who couldn't possibly have known about those things that weren't happening in any case weren't entirely true?
And that, despite Senator Pelosi, wicked witch of the west's, assertions, congress was not in fact clued in to what was going on?
Hiring SAIC to do something was bad enough, letting the project get so out of hand that the cost increased by a factor of ten, half a billion dollars of which was recovered by the feds as being directly tainted by fraud...
The rest of the participants should probably just tell mean jokes about the Bloomberg terminal's embarrassing little spying-on-customers-who-really-don't-like-that problem until he goes away.
When was the last time an astronaut would survive exposure to anything outside Earth's atmosphere. Keep those helmets on kids, regulations and all that.
I imagine that the problem is astronauts in suits tracking dust back into the airlock and then, once unsuited, breathing in the perchlorate goodness, possibly with a side of delicious silicosis...
I remember reading about a scheme where the 'suit' would remain permanently outside the habitat, with a docking hatch in the rear, specifically to avoid this sort of contamination.
Even if you want to introduce microbes, you'll need to find some that are useful under Martian conditions.
They are tough little bastards, so finding microbes that aren't killed will probably be easy enough; but finding ones that are metabolically active(rather than just capable of dormant endurance) could be trickier. Bacteria are pretty good at shriveling up and shrugging off downright alarming conditions(unprotected exposure to the vacuum of space, ionizing radiation, freezing, etc.); but they can't exactly shiver to keep themselves warm.
On the plus side, if you are planning on humans, you'll have to have a climate-controlled habitube setup anyway, so you could presumably use off-the-shelf perchlorate cleaner bacteria in 'scrubber' units that treat contaminated materials before they are introduced into the human support environment.
If your job title is "Prosecutor", it's not a huge secret that(whatever lip service is paid to due process and rule of law and other such highflown nonsense) your job performance is being judged based on how much prosecution you can dish out. People who end up advancing up the ladder in that particular industry should, quite naturally, turn out to be very effective indeed at at least being seen prosecuting, if not actually doing a lot of it.
The trouble is, of course, that this creates an incentive to take cases that provide maximum visible product per unit work, and to do whatever is necessary to get results. Nobody wants to hear your whiny excuses about how you only handled one case this year because the target was heavily lawyered up and quite savvy(even if many of society's most dangerous malefactors are exactly these things, and would be far more deserving of prosecutorial attention) and 'acquittal' = 'you are a loser', even if justice was done.
While I agree, architecturally, legacy infrastructure has serious inertia, which results in the world being largely held together by a mixture of dumb choices and dirty hacks laid on top of antiques that nobody wants to replace.
Even in situations where there is a logically-separated arrangement widely available(as with fluorescent tubes, where mechanical and electrical standards for fixtures with discrete ballasts have been established for decades), the market is still flooded with ghastly all-the-driver-electronics-crammed-into-an-E27-base-package models that usually fall over and die because their driver circuits are complete junk. People still buy them, because the alternative involves mucking around behind the wall with mains voltages.
With something like an LED fixture, especially if you want fancy color controls or dimming, or both, there really aren't any existing standards for sockets. The closest thing is probably gear designed for 12v halogen bulbs, which makes driving an LED array pretty painless; but that has no data/control channel. Power only.
If you had the luxury of doing a legacy-free design, top to bottom, things would definitely turn out much better; but unless you could do that and be able to get replacements from more than just a single vendor who may or may not go out of business and/or gouge you, you aren't likely to displace existing lousy but compatible solutions.
(Incidentally, this is probably why Wifi keeps popping up in home automation at all: it's brutally overpowered for the purpose, as well as relatively expensive, power hungry, and complex; but its sheer ubiquity and near-absence of vendor market power keep inspiring people to cram it into dubiously suitable places just because the alternatives are overpriced and proprietary, or only compatible with themselves, or both.)
When Western Union discontinued its telegraph service in 2006, it sold off the network to iTelegram, which inexplicably still seems to be in business.
Aside from countries where telegrams have entrenched legal status, I imagine that the 'novelty' market alone could probably sustain a telegraph operator well into the future.
As long as there is a nonzero supply of people who want to score charm and novelty points by sending somebody a telegram(and they do have some level of popular recognition and ye olde charme from period fiction and pop history), you have a customer base, and it's not as though there is anything requiring you to actually transmit the things in Morse code over copper(which is what would actually be ruinously expensive), so you can just dump them through the internet and pretty-print them at their destination.
Cause using TOR wasn't slow enough already, we'll put it on under-performing hardware.
Unless you have an atypically-nice-by-American-standards connection to play with, an rPI is luxury. Doesn't mean that onion routed connections aren't always going to be much higher latency(and, in practice, slowed by their dependence on donor bandwidth); but Tor at low speeds(especially one that is basically just serving you, not terminating a whole lot of TLS connections) isn't very demanding.
Isn't it just common knowledge that EA destroys everything they touch and have zero respect for gamers?
What kind of amazes me(not entirely, given how EA manages to fuck up things like 'Origin' so completely), is that none of the player-shafting here appears to have actually been in EA's interests...
Manual refresh to see the other player's move? That's just insanity. If anything, the bandwidth eaten by players hammering 'refresh' impatiently will be substantially greater than just having the server push things down when the other player submits their move.
Nuking play histories? Probably made some DBA's life easier(but since when has EA given a damn about the tech peons?), at the expense of cutting existing customers' perceived 'investment' in the platform. Good job, guys...
Switching dictionaries? You'd better have a convincing story about how usurious the licensing costs were for the official one; because the reaction from the hardcore scrabble heads was totally predictable. Those guys are Serious.
Had they taken it over and then larded it with DLC, microtransactions,(Would you like to buy a vowel?), and in-game ads for assorted discordant products, that'd be merely lawful evil of them. This is just stupid evil.
It's definitely safer, rather than safe; but, barring significant advances in this area, most drugs that tickle your pleasure centers are usually messing with one or more other organ systems at the same time, so dosage problems can toast your brain and/or trigger cardiac problems, depress respiration, whatever.
(That said, you might wish you'd just had a nice, soothing, fatal heart attack if you manage to burn out your capacity to experience pleasure stimuli and are left to wander in an irreparable anhedonic hell-world, so there is that...)
Slashdot Mirror
"STEM: because your outsourced replacement isn't going to train himself"
I'm hardly saying that it's impossible(after all, 'Nylonase' enzymes were identified in 1975, for a compound that had only existed for ~40 years. Just that it's impressive. If anybody is going to be metabolizing plastics, it'll be bacteria, through sheer numbers and rapid mutation; but evolving, with no assistance, to attack novel compounds, designed for resilience, in less than a century after their introduction is pretty good work...
Given how late to the game plastics are, it is fairly impressive how fast they've moved. Some modified natural polymers go a fair way back; but most of the synthetics that we think of as 'plastics' are under a century old, are reasonably novel(not just a synthesis technique that is cheaper than the organic method for producing an existing material), and are often selected, at least in part, for good resistance to decay.
Also, polymers can be pretty tough molecules to crack: even something like cellulose, which is literally older than (some) dirt, is attacked primarily by a relatively small group of specialist organisms.
I was thinking more "Why DNA instead of fluorescent dye?"
For truly efficient brigand-tracking, you want a globally-unique taggant, rather than being limited to the few dozen-ish colors of fluorescent dye...
Just imagine! Incentivize your riot cops during the next protest by mixing a unique DNA tag into each one's pepper spray and then analyzing the detainees. The more dirty hippies with your spray on 'em, the better your chance to win the department raffle!
My chemistry is a bit rusty, no pun intended; but my understanding is that chlorine is a stronger oxidizing agent than oxygen is. Are there any (feasible) conditions under which the chlorine could be persuaded to replace the oxygen in the iron oxide, leaving you with iron chloride and a considerable amount of oxygen?
as part of a highly social species
Just because most members of the species are highly social doesn't mean that all of them have to be, or that it's bad when an individual is not.
I'm sure that there are peppy-people-person guidance counselors who haven' gotten the memo yet; but the criteria(or at least criteria for intervention) for most psych disorders includes '*whatever symptoms* are present and cause the patient significant trouble or distress'. Starting "Operation Afflict The Solitary" purely because Being Social Is Good! is pointless and unethical norm-imposition.
Providing a means by which the lonely-but-socially-anxious can acclimatize themselves, by contrast, would certainly be a good thing, even better if it can be done by means that are cheaper, easier to distribute, and lower-stigma than psychologists/psychiatrists.
I'd be a bit sceptical as to whether present-day retail-ready tech is good enough at reading and displaying things like facial nuance that(much to my vexation) are vital to in-person communication; but if they are, this seems like a good thing.
GCHQ is a British organization. How would Snowden get copies of their plans, if there are in fact legitimate? He seems to be making some mighty big claims for having been employed as an employee of an NSA contractor for three months.
One might be tempted to suspect that the NSA is 100% to be trusted when it comes to securing those giant piles 'o data they are Hoovering up, even in the (vanishingly unlikely) event that they are, as they claim, actually not doing anything illicit with them themselves.
You can chat over any TCP connection. You can chat through HTTP on a web page. Short of banning all Internet connections and all web access, they can't even come up with a legal definition that kills online chatting, let alone police it.
'You' in the generic sense can, 'you' in the 'a given user' sense is much less likely to be able to. 'You' in the sense of 'a given user who is using a locked-down device that he can't even add non-approved software to' is even less likely.
Absolutely effective bans are pretty hard. Breaking things hard enough to keep the clueless from having them is substantially easier.
Bush bears his share of the blame; but he was still a hard-drinking, draft-dodging, daddy's boy when the US clandestine services were already in up to their eyeballs in seriously dodgy shit.
The Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission(both reactions to things that had already been going on for some time, but had begun to seep out to the point where they couldn't be ignored) were ~1975. On the domestic side, the FBI was squelching 'radicals' more or less the moment Hoover oozed onto the scene. And, of course, almost as soon as WWII ended, we started up the Cold War secrecy-and-ethically-troubling-activities division in a serious way, and never really recovered.
Bush certainly contributed his push in the wrong direction, when his turn came; but the rot goes a lot deeper.
Empirically, most tech-startup founders seem to disagree with you...
I've always been a trifle puzzled by the 'Everyday Low Prices!' theory of "business friendliness"... There are industries where cost is king(many of them not very good neighbors), and access to cheap, docile, labor and a regulatory environment flexible enough to let you keep your externalities externalized are the overriding factors; but the continued existence of high cost, high status, markets suggests that human capital and network effects count for a lot(especially if you can structure the company so that the real money is mysteriously being earned in Nevada or Ireland or wherever).
Bloomberg will probably push facial recognition software for self serving soda fountains to prevent people from getting 2 small sodas instead of 1 large one.
I don't know if Bloomberg just doesn't give a fuck about public perception of either issue, or whether the soda thing is a brilliant PR move: He's a walking trainwreck on civil liberties; but the one that leads the pack, front and center, is his terrifying war on our god-given right to Big Gulps. It's genius, really.
Not to diminish the (quite demanding) task faced by civil engineers and workers on large construction projects; but it's arguable that the least well-solved problem in infrastructure is within the realm of political science, rather than engineering.
The actual tech levels required to achieve infrastructure objectives tend to be pretty modest; but building and maintaining infrastructure is a thankless task, that people notice only when it has been neglected for long enough to fall apart, and doesn't come cheap. Societies that enjoy reasonably stable, non-dysfunctional, civic institutions for a solid length of time get it(the actual tech level required to build what the people of a given era regard as 'basic infrastructure' is rarely bleeding-edge); but societies that don't have that tend to discover that there isn't really a substitute for it.
You can only rush build infrastructure so fast, and you need genuine institutional competence to keep it in good shape once you have it.
You mean to say that the initial story about Snowden just being a narcissistic traitor who couldn't possibly have known about those things that weren't happening in any case weren't entirely true?
And that, despite Senator Pelosi, wicked witch of the west's, assertions, congress was not in fact clued in to what was going on?
Color me shocked.
Define "problems".
Well, acute under-surveillance and a lack of red-light camera revenue...
Just remember what happened when New York decided to use technology to solve a little payroll challenge...
Hiring SAIC to do something was bad enough, letting the project get so out of hand that the cost increased by a factor of ten, half a billion dollars of which was recovered by the feds as being directly tainted by fraud...
The rest of the participants should probably just tell mean jokes about the Bloomberg terminal's embarrassing little spying-on-customers-who-really-don't-like-that problem until he goes away.
Dude, you know what they say about sand? It gets everywhere ...
Pff... Just get the hose out and spray 'em down before you let them inside, just like when the kids have been out playing in the mud!
Oh, wait, you said that the local water is perchlorate-laced and relatively scarce? Never mind then...
When was the last time an astronaut would survive exposure to anything outside Earth's atmosphere. Keep those helmets on kids, regulations and all that.
I imagine that the problem is astronauts in suits tracking dust back into the airlock and then, once unsuited, breathing in the perchlorate goodness, possibly with a side of delicious silicosis...
I remember reading about a scheme where the 'suit' would remain permanently outside the habitat, with a docking hatch in the rear, specifically to avoid this sort of contamination.
Even if you want to introduce microbes, you'll need to find some that are useful under Martian conditions.
They are tough little bastards, so finding microbes that aren't killed will probably be easy enough; but finding ones that are metabolically active(rather than just capable of dormant endurance) could be trickier. Bacteria are pretty good at shriveling up and shrugging off downright alarming conditions(unprotected exposure to the vacuum of space, ionizing radiation, freezing, etc.); but they can't exactly shiver to keep themselves warm.
On the plus side, if you are planning on humans, you'll have to have a climate-controlled habitube setup anyway, so you could presumably use off-the-shelf perchlorate cleaner bacteria in 'scrubber' units that treat contaminated materials before they are introduced into the human support environment.
If your job title is "Prosecutor", it's not a huge secret that(whatever lip service is paid to due process and rule of law and other such highflown nonsense) your job performance is being judged based on how much prosecution you can dish out. People who end up advancing up the ladder in that particular industry should, quite naturally, turn out to be very effective indeed at at least being seen prosecuting, if not actually doing a lot of it.
The trouble is, of course, that this creates an incentive to take cases that provide maximum visible product per unit work, and to do whatever is necessary to get results. Nobody wants to hear your whiny excuses about how you only handled one case this year because the target was heavily lawyered up and quite savvy(even if many of society's most dangerous malefactors are exactly these things, and would be far more deserving of prosecutorial attention) and 'acquittal' = 'you are a loser', even if justice was done.
It's an unfortunate misalignment of incentives.
While I agree, architecturally, legacy infrastructure has serious inertia, which results in the world being largely held together by a mixture of dumb choices and dirty hacks laid on top of antiques that nobody wants to replace.
Even in situations where there is a logically-separated arrangement widely available(as with fluorescent tubes, where mechanical and electrical standards for fixtures with discrete ballasts have been established for decades), the market is still flooded with ghastly all-the-driver-electronics-crammed-into-an-E27-base-package models that usually fall over and die because their driver circuits are complete junk. People still buy them, because the alternative involves mucking around behind the wall with mains voltages.
With something like an LED fixture, especially if you want fancy color controls or dimming, or both, there really aren't any existing standards for sockets. The closest thing is probably gear designed for 12v halogen bulbs, which makes driving an LED array pretty painless; but that has no data/control channel. Power only.
If you had the luxury of doing a legacy-free design, top to bottom, things would definitely turn out much better; but unless you could do that and be able to get replacements from more than just a single vendor who may or may not go out of business and/or gouge you, you aren't likely to displace existing lousy but compatible solutions.
(Incidentally, this is probably why Wifi keeps popping up in home automation at all: it's brutally overpowered for the purpose, as well as relatively expensive, power hungry, and complex; but its sheer ubiquity and near-absence of vendor market power keep inspiring people to cram it into dubiously suitable places just because the alternatives are overpriced and proprietary, or only compatible with themselves, or both.)
When Western Union discontinued its telegraph service in 2006, it sold off the network to iTelegram, which inexplicably still seems to be in business.
Aside from countries where telegrams have entrenched legal status, I imagine that the 'novelty' market alone could probably sustain a telegraph operator well into the future.
As long as there is a nonzero supply of people who want to score charm and novelty points by sending somebody a telegram(and they do have some level of popular recognition and ye olde charme from period fiction and pop history), you have a customer base, and it's not as though there is anything requiring you to actually transmit the things in Morse code over copper(which is what would actually be ruinously expensive), so you can just dump them through the internet and pretty-print them at their destination.
Ooh, 'politically correct'. How about "Most at 30 are just smart enough to handle the concept of 'situational relevance'"
Cause using TOR wasn't slow enough already, we'll put it on under-performing hardware.
Unless you have an atypically-nice-by-American-standards connection to play with, an rPI is luxury. Doesn't mean that onion routed connections aren't always going to be much higher latency(and, in practice, slowed by their dependence on donor bandwidth); but Tor at low speeds(especially one that is basically just serving you, not terminating a whole lot of TLS connections) isn't very demanding.
Isn't it just common knowledge that EA destroys everything they touch and have zero respect for gamers?
What kind of amazes me(not entirely, given how EA manages to fuck up things like 'Origin' so completely), is that none of the player-shafting here appears to have actually been in EA's interests...
Manual refresh to see the other player's move? That's just insanity. If anything, the bandwidth eaten by players hammering 'refresh' impatiently will be substantially greater than just having the server push things down when the other player submits their move.
Nuking play histories? Probably made some DBA's life easier(but since when has EA given a damn about the tech peons?), at the expense of cutting existing customers' perceived 'investment' in the platform. Good job, guys...
Switching dictionaries? You'd better have a convincing story about how usurious the licensing costs were for the official one; because the reaction from the hardcore scrabble heads was totally predictable. Those guys are Serious.
Had they taken it over and then larded it with DLC, microtransactions,(Would you like to buy a vowel?), and in-game ads for assorted discordant products, that'd be merely lawful evil of them. This is just stupid evil.
It's definitely safer, rather than safe; but, barring significant advances in this area, most drugs that tickle your pleasure centers are usually messing with one or more other organ systems at the same time, so dosage problems can toast your brain and/or trigger cardiac problems, depress respiration, whatever.
(That said, you might wish you'd just had a nice, soothing, fatal heart attack if you manage to burn out your capacity to experience pleasure stimuli and are left to wander in an irreparable anhedonic hell-world, so there is that...)