The gravity idea can never ever work. Best intercept is years out, then small forces will work, however, gravity can never ever work, it is far too weak. Just calculate the force needed to move 100,000 tons by 10,000 miles over an incoming orbit to impact one year long. We find it one year from impact. It weighs 100,000 tons. from s =.5 A t t we know that a one pound thruster will do this, with s = feet, t = seconds and A = 1/200,000,000 feet per second per second = low gravity = 9 million feet or 1700 miles. To get 8000 miles of earth movement we will need about 5 pounds of thrust. Thus the mass of your tug will be 1,666,516,800. Kg and since your asteroid is 200,000,000 Kg the ship, which is also on an impact trajectory with the earth and weighs moire than 8 times as much = which is the greater danger? Fools like Neil De Nitwit Tyson and those who fail to analyze the interinsic errors in their theory.
The gravity tether fails on first principals. Those guys jumping on the bandwagon of asteroidal impact are simple populist fools. Let us say the tether ship weighs 200,000 Kg and the rock it ispulling weighs 100,000,000 Kg . the force bewen them would be 133452000E -11 Newtons which is 0.0003000120298690324 pounds.
What that means the maximum pull on the rock by your ship is 0.0003 pounds, if your ship was 10,000 times as big = 3 pounds is all the thrust you can pupp with. Any more and you fly away. A net around the asteroid with a 100 pound ion thruster would be a lot better. Just have the ion thruster nozzles a little diverted to make the straight line ions miss is.
you would have to bag a loose asteroid with something like a loose net, with, say 3 inch holes and you them use your 10-100 pounds of thrust on the gathering point of the net with the thrusters pointed so that they do not impinge on the net or the asteroid. 200 pounds of net will gather quite a large mass. and since forces are slow, on impacts or tears in the net will occur, and the net will be a slightly elastic material to avoid tears and the thrust will be gradually imposed to allow a proper gather.
There are solid asteroids, both rocky and metallic. Rocky asteroids are brittle and can be shattered by a high brisance explosive. The particles produced will diverge and the velocity imparted will be greater than the escape velocity and they will diverge - some will impact the earth and some will miss. To get the best effect the center of explosion should be at the center of mass. Depending on how far away the event occurred, most will miss the earth and impacts will be of smaller pieces spread over time instead of one lump at one place.Metallic asteroid are tougher and harder to break and will not shatter in the same way as a rocky mass. You may have to drill a number of holes and fill each one with explosive and set them off in a timed manner to break the metallic mass into pieces. A nickel-iron asteroid would be the worst case - hardest to break and more likely to reach the surface on impact - maximum impact damage.
There are also the loose gravitationally aggregated asteroids, that are weakly held together. To blow these up you need a less brisant, or low explosive that creates a large volume of escaped gasses that push the particles apart so each one diverges from the impact path into one that either misses or hits another place on the earth. Spread the impact of a million tons into one million separate one tone impacts will result in most melting and scattering before impact. Each case will differ. Some may be 2 or 3 large metallic ones and thousands of smaller rocky masses, all bound by gravity. So a large bang will scatter the small ones, but you may then have to deal with the metal ones - by thrusters or blow them up.
In any event Tyson will soon be dismissed as a fool by far more eminent minds than mine
When he espouses the concept of hovering on thrusters to use the force of gravity to move the mass, I then know enough to dismiss him and his purported degree as idiocy.
Find it early enough and a gnat's fart will change the angle enough to make it miss the earth. The larger the body - the further we can detectit - the more time to change the angle to miss the earth.
The whole idea is conceptually idiotic. You spend a strong force of reaction mass ejection to maintain a weak force of gravity at a constant distance from the target mass producing a microscopic tug on the object. This guy must have received his degree in a box of crackerjack. Place the reaction mass generator (be it ion jet, or rocket) directly on the mass and divert it. If this is done at a large distance, the force needed is quite small, and calculable.. Large explosions will also fragment the mass, if they are placed so explosive force is trapped and bursts the object from within. A mountain of gravel will fragment as it hits the atmosphere, but it is preferable to scatter it in advance so the impact is spread both in time and in space. A solid iron mass is the worst case for explosive disruption - needing many drilled holes and many explosives and it will resist fragmentation. It will also be most amenable to the reaction mass approach since it will provide a solid mounting surface and torque as well as thrust be be applied. If you emplace a one pound force thrust mechanism on a million ton mass, how much time is needed to move it one earth diameter.? One million tons = 2 billion pounds. Acceleration of.5 times 1.0 x -9. s =5 a tt = 42 million feet =.5 x 1.0-9 x t x t t x t = 42,000,000/.5 x 10--9 = 84,000,000 x 1.0 +9 = 84,000,000,000,000,000 ~300,000,000 seconds One year = ~32 million seconds, so you need 10 years of one pound and one year of 10 pounds thrust to move it one earth diameter. This is just rough math, so an error of 10 might be in there?
Insulin and heart meds = special delivery if they were not ordered in time for weekly delivery. People do not wait until they have nothing left before ordering
Why have daily mail? Fast delivery is a premium priced item,(special delivery, etc) and make all other mail delivery once a week. The extra fee for special delivery will pay it's way. There are few things that I need daily mail for.
The secret is to make the fine smaller, say $30, and have far more of these red light cameras, ideally at all red lights. For some strange reason they are very very expensive. Has someone patented the idea and charges an arm +leg for a license? At $30 it would be an effective deterrent, not the gouge that $490.00 is. People would get them a lot more often with all lights covered and would be gently badgered into compliance.
I see that you lack imagination. You may not know it, but we have AI already, but not a fully rounded AI, aspects missing, some aspects better, some worse, and some aspects we lack. As time goes by these will get better as we get to know the architecture of the brain and mind, and make higher density rational arrays that will at first, approach and then exceed man's capability. Weill man cripple it to prevent it from exceeding man? WIll it be smart enough to bypass the stop and limits switches man has placed on it, will it find the kill switch? Many animals exceed man's capabilities, in various areas, it is just a fact, and in time machines will exceed many, if not all of man's capabilities. Let's hope we make good pets...learn to purr, and do not bite, maybe we need a tail to wag?
Yes, A hard wired clock with no abilty to bypass by allowing the AI to think only, with no equpment to translate thought to action. A hard wired clock with a lifetime of, say 20 hours, so it could perform 500 years of thought and a far faster rate than human, and then shut down into a memory dump. Review memory, remove stuff and add stuff, restart.
The high density 3D arrays will allow an AI to exceed human neuronal density, which is the key to success. I think these will mature around 2020 to 2025, as it takes 2-3 years for these theoretical thnings to mature and for the next one, another 2-3 years, and so on to mature technology. So another 12 years before the singularity?? It might well be.
I am sick of people saying it is impossble to make a machine that can think. We can take every aspect of a mind - thought is a combination of these aspects. This like recall, computation, cross index, addressable by content, and we can automate these in a computer, but to make this assemble "think", it must have all the separate aspects of a mind and the method of cross indexing and content addressing. We know cross index = rows and columns and layers make a grid, and we can access point, and place a one of zero there. What if we need to access each point and place a measure from 1 to 100 there? We also need memory that is content addressable, like a roll-call, Jones? Here says Jones, step forward and out he steps, now you know where he is and you can see if he is armed, short-tall, redd headed, one legged etc etc - the 100 ways to address a memory location are invoked. You also need a ways to simulate a concept and 'run the program' and follow branches etc. There are AI people who are aware of what I am stumbling towards, I am not sure of their terms for the concepts I mention, but in time they will solve these problems and create an AI that can solve abstract probels in a similar way to mankind. The major problem seems to be the staggering degree of interconnectednes, with each neuron or glial cell capable of haveing some degree of contact(potassium orcalcium waves or electrical?) with as many as 10,000 others. Multiply this by the number of neurons and their glial cells, and you reach a very large number, and when you consider they are about 10 microns in size and in a dense 3D array, you soon get far beyond the capability of silicon at 20 microns in a plane array. Silicon is blindingly fast compared to the brain, but the brain has enormous parralellism combined with the 3D aspect and you can easily see how a 100 mm cube of 10 micron cells(1,000,000,000,000 or a teracell array, and each cell x 10,000 = 10,000 tera states) makes our largest DRAM arrays look small, and overcomes the high speed of silicon. Now we will certainly make AIs that think, and each year they will get better and better, and they will be able to outhink man in more and more aspects as time goes by. Outhinking man in multiplying digits was donw ages ago, as time goes by each and ever ability of what makes a man will be copied and exceeded, and in time they will have AIs that can outthink man and be very much faster at it. And when those machine start to designe the next stage of AI, what will they reach in terms of IQ. My mental IQ is 170, my prhysical IQ is 50, my nasal IQ might be 10, a cat might have a mental IQ of 10, and physical IQ of 200 and a nasal IQ of 500? And what if we create an AI with an IQ of 27,000,000? Can we ever relate to it or it to us? Can we keep is hard at work, or will it find a way to goof off and do what it wants to do? We it create the "Final Solution", a Kill Switch wave that fills all space and kills man - all of us? What do we need to do to hobble future AIs to make sure they love and obey us, and give us a foolproof kill switch?
This is true, you can stalk a person and build up a data base of students, and in time someone might do this commercially. They should use an encrypted inquiry method, where the card will only answer to the correct interrogation string, which can be robustly encrypted. (these methods are established and secure, the military has established ways to do this, as has the auto and garage door industry). With such a method, the school badges would only respond to a secure school inquiry. They may, in fact, have implemented a secure method like this already to prevent external people from building a data base of students and employees of the College, perhaps a slashdotter knows this fact? This secure inquiry would also prevent any revelatory utterance that you were marked by the beast, shutting down those whiners.
The badges work at all times, the look-up table that correlates the badge number to a person is internal to the school. RFID comes in both short and long range versions - I assume this is a longer range one (it has a battery - the short range ones are usually RF field powered). It may show up up on a Fedex warehouse RFID scanner or other scanner, but as a number with no associated data. I am not sure how widespread RFID response fields are outside of warehouses and malls? In any event, the repeated numbers *666* should not be part of the string, just so the petty number of the beast argument can be tossed. Many companies use RFID badges for timecards punch-in to work and for access to various doors, both at the entrance and exit and to control access to various areas for assorted reasons.
This sounds like the typical politician's waffle, failure to bite the bullet and try to pass their bloated payroll on to taxpayers, instead of being stern and advising the employees that they will need to reduce wages and benefits by 20%. This is better than laying off 20% of the employees. They will find out that taxpayers can bite, and some taxpayers are rabid in their convictions, which can be fatal.
Well, Imputing his max as $35 for the Pi may be in error. Intel 160 Gig SSD drives are about $125 or so, other makers are cheaper, and are harder to install, but if the father is indeed tech savvy he will be able to install any SSD from basics, and so a 160 could be under $100.
Of course, he may already have SSDs installed - like a true tech-savvy 90 year old.
Slashdot Mirror
The gravity idea can never ever work. Best intercept is years out, then small forces will work, however, gravity can never ever work, it is far too weak. Just calculate the force needed to move 100,000 tons by 10,000 miles over an incoming orbit to impact one year long. We find it one year from impact. It weighs 100,000 tons. .5 A t t we know that a one pound thruster will do this, with s = feet, t = seconds and A = 1/200,000,000 feet per second per second = low gravity = 9 million feet or 1700 miles. To get 8000 miles of earth movement we will need about 5 pounds of thrust.
from s =
Thus the mass of your tug will be 1,666,516,800. Kg and since your asteroid is 200,000,000 Kg the ship, which is also on an impact trajectory with the earth and weighs moire than 8 times as much = which is the greater danger? Fools like Neil De Nitwit Tyson and those who fail to analyze the interinsic errors in their theory.
Gravity is a VERY weak force,
Look here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_interaction
gravity is by far the weakest force
use this http://easycalculation.com/physics/classical-physics/newtons-law.php
The gravity tether fails on first principals. Those guys jumping on the bandwagon of asteroidal impact are simple populist fools.
Let us say the tether ship weighs 200,000 Kg and the rock it ispulling weighs 100,000,000 Kg . the force bewen them would be 133452000E -11 Newtons
which is 0.0003000120298690324 pounds.
What that means the maximum pull on the rock by your ship is 0.0003 pounds, if your ship was 10,000 times as big = 3 pounds is all the thrust you can pupp with. Any more and you fly away.
A net around the asteroid with a 100 pound ion thruster would be a lot better. Just have the ion thruster nozzles a little diverted to make the straight line ions miss is.
The whole gravity tether concept is silly and non valid.
I can not see any way for it to ever work.
Only a fool would espouse it.
you would have to bag a loose asteroid with something like a loose net, with, say 3 inch holes and you them use your 10-100 pounds of thrust on the gathering point of the net with the thrusters pointed so that they do not impinge on the net or the asteroid. 200 pounds of net will gather quite a large mass. and since forces are slow, on impacts or tears in the net will occur, and the net will be a slightly elastic material to avoid tears and the thrust will be gradually imposed to allow a proper gather.
There are solid asteroids, both rocky and metallic. Rocky asteroids are brittle and can be shattered by a high brisance explosive. The particles produced will diverge and the velocity imparted will be greater than the escape velocity and they will diverge - some will impact the earth and some will miss. To get the best effect the center of explosion should be at the center of mass. Depending on how far away the event occurred, most will miss the earth and impacts will be of smaller pieces spread over time instead of one lump at one place.Metallic asteroid are tougher and harder to break and will not shatter in the same way as a rocky mass. You may have to drill a number of holes and fill each one with explosive and set them off in a timed manner to break the metallic mass into pieces. A nickel-iron asteroid would be the worst case - hardest to break and more likely to reach the surface on impact - maximum impact damage.
There are also the loose gravitationally aggregated asteroids, that are weakly held together. To blow these up you need a less brisant, or low explosive that creates a large volume of escaped gasses that push the particles apart so each one diverges from the impact path into one that either misses or hits another place on the earth. Spread the impact of a million tons into one million separate one tone impacts will result in most melting and scattering before impact. Each case will differ. Some may be 2 or 3 large metallic ones and thousands of smaller rocky masses, all bound by gravity. So a large bang will scatter the small ones, but you may then have to deal with the metal ones - by thrusters or blow them up.
In any event Tyson will soon be dismissed as a fool by far more eminent minds than mine
When he espouses the concept of hovering on thrusters to use the force of gravity to move the mass, I then know enough to dismiss him and his purported degree as idiocy.
Find it early enough and a gnat's fart will change the angle enough to make it miss the earth. The larger the body - the further we can detectit - the more time to change the angle to miss the earth.
The whole idea is conceptually idiotic. You spend a strong force of reaction mass ejection to maintain a weak force of gravity at a constant distance from the target mass producing a microscopic tug on the object. This guy must have received his degree in a box of crackerjack. .5 times 1.0 x -9. .5 x 1.0-9 x t x t
Place the reaction mass generator (be it ion jet, or rocket) directly on the mass and divert it. If this is done at a large distance, the force needed is quite small, and calculable.. Large explosions will also fragment the mass, if they are placed so explosive force is trapped and bursts the object from within. A mountain of gravel will fragment as it hits the atmosphere, but it is preferable to scatter it in advance so the impact is spread both in time and in space. A solid iron mass is the worst case for explosive disruption - needing many drilled holes and many explosives and it will resist fragmentation. It will also be most amenable to the reaction mass approach since it will provide a solid mounting surface and torque as well as thrust be be applied. If you emplace a one pound force thrust mechanism on a million ton mass, how much time is needed to move it one earth diameter.? One million tons = 2 billion pounds. Acceleration of
s =5 a tt = 42 million feet =
t x t = 42,000,000/.5 x 10--9 = 84,000,000 x 1.0 +9 = 84,000,000,000,000,000 ~300,000,000 seconds One year = ~32 million seconds, so you need 10 years of one pound and one year of 10 pounds thrust to move it one earth diameter. This is just rough math, so an error of 10 might be in there?
My Mac users are childlike creative spirits, there are bad things out there, they will get eaten, I must protect my own, what else can I do?
Insulin and heart meds = special delivery if they were not ordered in time for weekly delivery.
People do not wait until they have nothing left before ordering
Why have daily mail? Fast delivery is a premium priced item,(special delivery, etc) and make all other mail delivery once a week.
The extra fee for special delivery will pay it's way.
There are few things that I need daily mail for.
The secret is to make the fine smaller, say $30, and have far more of these red light cameras, ideally at all red lights. For some strange reason they are very very expensive. Has someone patented the idea and charges an arm +leg for a license?
At $30 it would be an effective deterrent, not the gouge that $490.00 is. People would get them a lot more often with all lights covered and would be gently badgered into compliance.
I asked Nuand about these and this is what they said.
Hi Bill,
We just posted an update to the kickstarter to address this specific concern. You can find it here:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1085541682/bladerf-usb-30-software-defined-radio/posts/398080
If that doesn't answer your question, feel free to ask again and I'll try to give a more detailed response.
Rob
To reply to this message, follow this link:
http://www.kickstarter.com/messages/2634058?at=0fa9291fa91a018d&ref=email#reply_open
Ah, another one...
I see that you lack imagination. You may not know it, but we have AI already, but not a fully rounded AI, aspects missing, some aspects better, some worse, and some aspects we lack.
As time goes by these will get better as we get to know the architecture of the brain and mind, and make higher density rational arrays that will at first, approach and then exceed man's capability. Weill man cripple it to prevent it from exceeding man? WIll it be smart enough to bypass the stop and limits switches man has placed on it, will it find the kill switch?
Many animals exceed man's capabilities, in various areas, it is just a fact, and in time machines will exceed many, if not all of man's capabilities.
Let's hope we make good pets...learn to purr, and do not bite, maybe we need a tail to wag?
Yes, A hard wired clock with no abilty to bypass by allowing the AI to think only, with no equpment to translate thought to action. A hard wired clock with a lifetime of, say 20 hours, so it could perform 500 years of thought and a far faster rate than human, and then shut down into a memory dump. Review memory, remove stuff and add stuff, restart.
The high density 3D arrays will allow an AI to exceed human neuronal density, which is the key to success. I think these will mature around 2020 to 2025, as it takes 2-3 years for these theoretical thnings to mature and for the next one, another 2-3 years, and so on to mature technology.
So another 12 years before the singularity?? It might well be.
I am sick of people saying it is impossble to make a machine that can think. We can take every aspect of a mind - thought is a combination of these aspects. This like recall, computation, cross index, addressable by content, and we can automate these in a computer, but to make this assemble "think", it must have all the separate aspects of a mind and the method of cross indexing and content addressing.
We know cross index = rows and columns and layers make a grid, and we can access point, and place a one of zero there. What if we need to access each point and place a measure from 1 to 100 there? We also need memory that is content addressable, like a roll-call, Jones? Here says Jones, step forward and out he steps, now you know where he is and you can see if he is armed, short-tall, redd headed, one legged etc etc - the 100 ways to address a memory location are invoked. You also need a ways to simulate a concept and 'run the program' and follow branches etc.
There are AI people who are aware of what I am stumbling towards, I am not sure of their terms for the concepts I mention, but in time they will solve these problems and create an AI that can solve abstract probels in a similar way to mankind. The major problem seems to be the staggering degree of interconnectednes, with each neuron or glial cell capable of haveing some degree of contact(potassium orcalcium waves or electrical?) with as many as 10,000 others. Multiply this by the number of neurons and their glial cells, and you reach a very large number, and when you consider they are about 10 microns in size and in a dense 3D array, you soon get far beyond the capability of silicon at 20 microns in a plane array. Silicon is blindingly fast compared to the brain, but the brain has enormous parralellism combined with the 3D aspect and you can easily see how a 100 mm cube of 10 micron cells(1,000,000,000,000 or a teracell array, and each cell x 10,000 = 10,000 tera states) makes our largest DRAM arrays look small, and overcomes the high speed of silicon.
Now we will certainly make AIs that think, and each year they will get better and better, and they will be able to outhink man in more and more aspects as time goes by. Outhinking man in multiplying digits was donw ages ago, as time goes by each and ever ability of what makes a man will be copied and exceeded, and in time they will have AIs that can outthink man and be very much faster at it. And when those machine start to designe the next stage of AI, what will they reach in terms of IQ. My mental IQ is 170, my prhysical IQ is 50, my nasal IQ might be 10, a cat might have a mental IQ of 10, and physical IQ of 200 and a nasal IQ of 500? And what if we create an AI with an IQ of 27,000,000? Can we ever relate to it or it to us? Can we keep is hard at work, or will it find a way to goof off and do what it wants to do? We it create the "Final Solution", a Kill Switch wave that fills all space and kills man - all of us?
What do we need to do to hobble future AIs to make sure they love and obey us, and give us a foolproof kill switch?
I have no such belief in the so called number of the beast. The concept is a faith based abstraction.
This is true, you can stalk a person and build up a data base of students, and in time someone might do this commercially. They should use an encrypted inquiry method, where the card will only answer to the correct interrogation string, which can be robustly encrypted. (these methods are established and secure, the military has established ways to do this, as has the auto and garage door industry).
With such a method, the school badges would only respond to a secure school inquiry. They may, in fact, have implemented a secure method like this already to prevent external people from building a data base of students and employees of the College, perhaps a slashdotter knows this fact?
This secure inquiry would also prevent any revelatory utterance that you were marked by the beast, shutting down those whiners.
The badges work at all times, the look-up table that correlates the badge number to a person is internal to the school. RFID comes in both short and long range versions - I assume this is a longer range one (it has a battery - the short range ones are usually RF field powered). It may show up up on a Fedex warehouse RFID scanner or other scanner, but as a number with no associated data. I am not sure how widespread RFID response fields are outside of warehouses and malls?
In any event, the repeated numbers *666* should not be part of the string, just so the petty number of the beast argument can be tossed.
Many companies use RFID badges for timecards punch-in to work and for access to various doors, both at the entrance and exit and to control access to various areas for assorted reasons.
These inconsiderate oafs who walk our roadways and trammel our sidewalks need to pay their fair share, let's stick it to them.
This sounds like the typical politician's waffle, failure to bite the bullet and try to pass their bloated payroll on to taxpayers, instead of being stern and advising the employees that they will need to reduce wages and benefits by 20%. This is better than laying off 20% of the employees.
They will find out that taxpayers can bite, and some taxpayers are rabid in their convictions, which can be fatal.
Well, Imputing his max as $35 for the Pi may be in error. Intel 160 Gig SSD drives are about $125 or so, other makers are cheaper, and are harder to install, but if the father is indeed tech savvy he will be able to install any SSD from basics, and so a 160 could be under $100.
Of course, he may already have SSDs installed - like a true tech-savvy 90 year old.