Look at Lockheed-Martin's announcements on this so far. They are predicting (again, who know if they will hit it) 5 years to deployment. Some of the technologies being investigated won't take forever to implement -- they could be drop-in replacements for coal furnaces in existing plants. There would be a SERIOUS advantage to converting, assuming that they can manage to burn Deuterium.
I agree that the large scale reactor projects are more like 20 years out, but I suspect they are going to be overtaken. I could be wrong, but some physics groups I actually respect are making noises that they are going to get there before e.g. ITER.
But you are right -- photovoltaics and wind won't do it in the foreseeable future, at least not without efficient high-density storage and low-loss long range transport. Solar isn't going to run Iceland or Finland or Siberia in the winter...
Did you get the bit about "insufficient evidence to even speculate out loud" in a public forum? Because building a model that shows that it could have been so is not, actually, evidence, and -- as I tried to point out, "Mr. Zippy" -- even if the model built doesn't CONTRADICT any of the limited collection of factual evidence we have on Venus, that at best raises the model hypothesis by only a paltry amount relative to models that AREN'T EVEN consistent with that evidence, and doesn't really help it at all relative to alternative hypotheses that might explain the evidence equally well.
Now -- and I'm going out on a limb here, just thinking out loud -- do you think there MIGHT be some TINY chance that a model based on the hypothesis that Venus never had a liquid ocean, let alone one that lasted two billion years, could conceivably explain the little evidence that we have equally well? Do you think that even if one argues that the model with the ocean is marginally a tiny bit better, the evidence ITSELF is so very weak that nobody sane would accept the conclusion as being anything more than science fiction masquerading as science?
Don't get me wrong. Running models is a good, healthy passtime for physicists. Keeps 'em off the streets. Feeds them and clothes their children. And who knows! This model could end up (eventually) being proven right by actual evidence! And I say this as a physicist who built and ran large scale models for close to 20 years. And/. is even an appropriate venue for a repost.
It is the add-on bullshit, the veiled threat that This Could Happen To Earth if we don't mend our ways, along the lines of James Hansen's "boiling oceans" nonsense, that is inappropriate. It is presenting it as if it is a lot more "true" than it actually is that is inappropriate.
I repeat. A similar hypothesis exists for Mars, and is a lot older. The evidence for it is far, far stronger. And it is still considered to be unproven even with rovers on the ground looking directly for hard evidence that it was so.
If they find the evidence, then of course it should be reported and will be a big deal. In the meantime, somebody writing a paper that claims that a model computation shows that Mars could have once had a liquid ocean is bo-ring, because it is obviously true, and equally obviously unproven.
I'm even more cynical. Who actually benefits from the global warming panic? Oh, wait, snap! Energy companies, all of which are "fossil fuel" companies simply because we cannot produce the energy we need to sustain civilization without using fossil fuels this decade, and probably won't be able to for the next two or three decades if not forever (where if fusion really does come home, deuterium is still a "fossil fuel", it's just been "fossilized" for a bit longer than coal). How do they benefit?
Well, let's see. Most energy companies are public utilities, which basically means that they cannot just raise prices arbitrarily, because they are granted a virtual monopoly on whatever part of whatever state they serve. We don't have multiple power lines and cannot shop for a company that sells electricity at the lowest price. The regulators basically permit them only to make money at a fixed margin relative to costs as reflected in a set retail price.
So how can you make MORE money if you are a public utility? Well, let's see. How about raising the set retail price by inflating costs? Yeah, that would work! If we double the price of coal (or coal burning plants) and we sell at the same commission-permitted margin, we make twice the real income! Everybody wins! The coal miner gets twice the money. The power company gets twice the money (same margin, but now they've increased their retail cost to reflect the higher upstream costs). The only loser is -- wait for it -- the consumer!
But then there is the pesky problem of the fact that we have a lot of coal, enough to fuel the US for what, a few centuries at least? Hard to create the illusion of scarcity in that kind of marketplace. So let's invent an entirely artificial scarcity by limiting how much coal we use! Let's ramp up the cost of the coal burning plants! Let's get laws passed that force us to build solar and wind generation systems that -- wait for it again -- generate electricity at an amortized cost that is even greater than coal, and requires huge capital investment to boot! Now we can perfectly legitimately ramp up the retail price of the electricity we sell because we can demonstrate higher costs, and since our profit MARGINS, not the dollar amounts, are fixed, the more expensive the energy the more money we make from it!
Power companies have been by far, overwhelmingly, the greatest beneficiaries of the global warming panic. They don't give a damn how they generate the electricity they sell us, and they have an interest so strong and obvious that it cannot reasonably be called "vested" in selling us electricity generated the most expensive way possible, because (as public utilities) they are PROTECTED from risk and have a damn monopoly!
Hence in California, electricity costs well over 50% more than it costs in the rest of the country. In NY it is even more costly.
Now, this cynicism isn't entirely justified. Some power companies probably do have a board-driven "conscience" within the bounds permitted by maintaining profitability, and large scale PV solar has, actually, come down in cost to where it one can amortize new solar construction in many states (including NC) in a reasonable time frame, making it a comparatively cheap alternative to building expensive new coal or nuclear or even natural gas burners to handle e.g. summer air conditioning overloads and eke out fuel generated sources. But make no mistake about this. Portraying greedy energy companies as being knee jerk opposed to solar or wind is absurd. They'll make electricity using rodents running in spinning wheels if consumers can be forced to pay for it at fixed marginal profit.
The only possible real solution to this is fusion, or maybe PV solar in a decade, when we have perfected cost efficient storage and long distance transport with e.g. HVDC transmission lines from the sunny states to Maine and Alaska. Lockheed-Martin claims to have fusion licked. Two or three other groups do too. Fusion would actually elimi
It remains open to debate until we have direct evidence one way or the other. We cannot even resolve this question with Mars with eyes and instruments on the ground and looking down through clear, thin, atmosphere. On Venus we have a bit less than three hours of total ground based lander observations, taken from three landers that survived an average of maybe 50 minutes or so each. Broken, dying landers, looking through 500 C, 90+ atmosphere, acid laced atmosphere while the heat penetrated them to where they perished the rest of the way.
This article is a joke, or as I suggest below, a fundraiser for future lander missions.
I think you'll find that the Venus atmosphere has closer to 100x the total mass of Earth's atmosphere, consistent with it being close to the same size and having a surface pressure around 90 atmospheres. Otherwise, play on through, I generally agree with your post. It isn't about the greenhouse effect on Venus, it is about the dry (very dry!) adiabatic lapse rate from the surface to the top of an atmosphere close to 100x as dense as Earth's and maybe six times deeper (roughly 60 km out to where its pressure and temperature are comparable to the top of the troposphere). The greenhouse effect was saturated long before one got to 96.5% CO2. The reason Mars is equally uninhabitable because it is too COLD, in spite of having an atmosphere that is almost pure CO2 is that its atmosphere is the opposite, far LESS dense than the Earth's, or Venus's. The density and TOA insolation are much more important than CO2, even on the Earth where the greenhouse effect due to CO2 is ALSO saturated and exhibits a weak logarithmic growth with CO2 concentration as a consequence.
NASA scientists need to learn the difference between evidence and simulation. There is almost no evidence to support this hypothesis -- the best that one can say for the simulation is that it shows that the hypothesis isn't overtly incompatible with the little evidence that there is. People need to read Jaynes' lovely book on the logic of science and Bayesian analysis so that they can quit confusing model consistency with model correctness. As it is, it is as if one has the hypothesis that there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll. One examines the grassy knoll and finds, sure enough, that the grass appears to have been stepped on -- there is evidence that "something" has been there. One does an elaborate computation demonstrating that yes, a sniper on the grassy knoll would have had to step on the grass in order to be there, so that the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis, and then publishes the result in the National Enquirer as proven fact (and if possible, blame the presence of the sniper on the Clintons -- after all they COULD have done it, right?).
Never mind the possibility that the grass might have been pressed down by a passing giraffe, a sleeping hobo, the lawnmower that last mowed it, or that the grass actually WASN'T "pressed down", it just grew that way. Never mind that the Clintons were in middle school at the time and would have had to fund it with lunch money, which they (obviously) shook down from other students or accepted as a bribe so that they could intervene with the teachers to get the students who paid them off A's.
Alas, that science has come to this. National Enquirer, look out!
After all, the hypothesis that Mars has had liquid oceans dates back to science fiction authors and the earliest observations of "canals". It has its own wikipedia page:
But even in the case of Mars, with eyes in the sky looking down through a clear, thin atmosphere and multiple landers on the ground looking for a smoking gun, we lack anything like conclusive evidence that Mars once had a liquid ocean.
Venus, on the other hand, has an atmosphere with around 100x the mass of Earth's entire atmosphere, a pressure of 90 or so atmospheres on the ground, where the temperature is only a couple of hundred degrees too cool to melt lead. It contains nontrivial amounts of several acids in its predominantly CO2 base. It is corrosive, hot, and crushing. The average survival time for the landers sent there so far is around one hour (actually, a bit less). We have something less than around 3 hours of total observational time on the ground, IIRC, all taken from dying landers with some dysfunctional bits through air a bit over twice the temperature of boiling water, before the conditions killed the lander altogether.
We have almost NO evidence from the surface AT ALL, and the little that we have contains no direct evidence that could even be VAGUELY construed as a smoking gun for oceans.
This makes me suspect that this is a fundraiser for the proposed lander missions. "Hey, maybe Venus once had a liquid ocean! Life could have developed there! Never mind that the atmosphere even a few billion years ago if anything probably had a GREATER mass and HIGHER pressures at the surface (while still being enormously hot with 40% more incident solar radiation and an adiabatic lapse rate from hell down to the surface in the dense atmosphere). Give us money! We'll go find out!"
Oh, AC, you are so cynical! In fact, perhaps it stands for "anonymous cynic" in this instance. I'm certain that putting content online that encourages passive memorization will have nothing but benefits for the millions of children who will willingly give up playing Pokemon Go for the joy of "catching" the year that Columbus discovered the Americas or what 7*9 really is...
You missed the better SF reference. Coffiest is from The Space Merchants, by Pohl and Kornbluth, and it is one of the most brilliant satires of the modern progression towards multinational corporate world control ever written. Highly recommended...
Well said, sir! Also, simulated neural networks in software have been around since rather far back in the last century (on paper, back to 1933 and Nicholas Rashevsky), and as the author of a very large, very advanced neural network modeling tool, I'd further add that we can already build rather large simulated neural networks in software, and even build composite NNs using a mix of software and parallel hardware.
A transistor-based gate is already in some sense a neuron, and it isn't that difficult to build collections of them that perform even more like a neuron. The problem is that even if we do so, we don't really have any good idea what to do with it, and we have a very hard time scaling it up to the number of connections visible in the human brain. By "very hard", I mean "not possible to achieve, not likely to become possible to achieve, any time soon", at least not without a serious breakthrough. We are two orders of magnitude short of matching the number of neurons in the human brain in JUST transistor count, and we cannot come anywhere near 1000 to 10000 connections per transistor. And finally, transistors are not neurons, and even if they were neurons we have no idea how to build a massive, amorphous neural network and then train it somehow (or program it somehow) to do useful work.
It is enormously difficult to write a good simulated neural network program to do relatively simple tasks such as noisy pattern identification or predictive modeling of unstructured high dimensional data, even with complete control over the algorithm. There seems to be this feeling out there that if one just builds an artificial brain with a lot of artificial neurons and hit it with data it will somehow "wake up" and smell the metaphorical coffee of life and do some sort of useful work. I personally think this is enormously optimistic, but then, I actually have some grasp of the mathematical complexity of the optimization problem involved.
This is more in the category of building (or rebuilding with more modern technology) a unit that MAY prove useful if we ever have a breakthrough on the half-dozen serious obstacles associated with AI via NNs, most of which can actually be made and will actually be made (if at all) with simulated NNs. Only after simulated NNs demonstrate a clear pathway to going from a collection of artificial "neurons" with some specific algorithmic functionality and ability to be interconnected at a very fine scale to a useful, profitable, neural network that does actual work worth doing will anybody bother to dump a billion or so dollars into a foundry for artificial neuron devices. And there may even be a few such applications today -- some networks are very simple algorithmically, but they are also the least extendable to really hard problems or problems we cannot already solve efficiently other ways. Letter recognition, maybe.
The human brain has a quadrillion or so synaptic connections, and it is difficult to even start estimate the volume of the phase space represented by all of those connections. The "switches" are indeed much slower than they are in computers, but they run in parallel as well as serially, and it is estimated that they are "equivalent" to a terabit per second processor in their full-parallel speed. We can achieve similar scales in simulation on parallel supercomputers, of course, but not with anywhere near the number of "neurons" or "synapses" and if we really use TIPS scale computing resources, they probably aren't going to be doing their "AI" with NNs anyway for anything but selected problems.
So cool top article, good on IBM, and all that, but I'm not holding my breath for a phone that actually completes words sanely using its IBM(tm) Neural Processor...
Yeah, I wasn't even a fan of Pascal, but Turbo Pascal for DOS was an awesome experience, as was both Turbo C and to a similar extent Microsoft's early QuickC. And QuickBasic was lovely -- an IDE that would literally pop up the manual page for any instruction you could type enough of to recognize, or match a string in. QB was in some sense my favorite IDE of all time, and I wrote a slew of code in Basic back in IBM PC days.
I didn't even include Microsoft's screwing of OS/2 and IBM in the list -- I put on the Extreme Linux expo in Raleigh, NC back in the day not long after that and IBM was an avid supporter; their staffers were all literally burning with anger at Microsoft and were particularly eager to loan us piles of PCs and more for our cluster demos. Claiming that Microsoft was all warm and fuzzy towards developers and that it wasn't their fault that important packages inevitably broke on every major version update, or that there was no "conspiracy" because it was against the law to deliberately break them to the advantage of Microsoft's competing packages simply ignores reality. There wasn't a "conspiracy" to remove competing web browers from Windows machines or disable them so that they wouldn't work right, but Microsoft did it anyway and lost a small mountain of money on a lawsuit. And they won, won, won the lawsuit in spite of the hundreds of millions they spent on the settlement and the billions they spent dragging the suit out for close to a decade. By then it was a moot point. After that, nobody had or is likely to have in the future, the stomach to tackle Microsoft in court but somebody enormous with equally deep pockets.
That's the problem. A hundred-odd billion dollar multinational company is largely above the law. They can outspend almost anybody, and anybody who thinks that this doesn't matter in civil or corporate court (or even in criminal court) is naive in the extreme. Once enough retirement funds are heavily invested in Microsoft stock, nobody wants them to go down, not really, no matter how much they hate them. Not congressmen. Not the president. Not union leaders. Not corporate leaders. Most of the everyday people don't care. The only ones that do are oddball nerds like me who find their corporate ethics revolting and who resent the rise of the corporate shadow government to the detriment of personal and economic freedom. And there just aren't enough of us to matter.
As Donald Trump (defending his actions exploiting major economic downturns in the past) says, "It was just business". And so it is, and so it will be, without toothy laws regulating just what "business" activities are ethical and permitted in law.
Not that much more subtle. I watched as Microsoft crushed a long list of companies using exactly this strategy across the 80's and early 90's. Borland was easy -- it's so easy to break a compiler with an OS upgrade. Lotus. Word Perfect. Wordstar. Various games. They certainly tried it with their browser and it took a decade long billion dollar court case to stop them. Every operating system update, everybody else's software would break, a bit, while Microsoft's clone -- often a clone of a startlingly original and brilliant idea -- did not. Add in their marketing team to convince businesses that if they didn't buy Microsoft's house product, they would break their... um... not arms, not legs, what's the word, "interface" if the competing product didn't perfectly comply with the new specs (and of course, they never did).
Microsoft simply made it impossible to buy a PC without their operating system pre-installed in any store that sells systems WITH their operating system pre-installed with punitive pricing agreements that dropped the margins below any possibility of profit if you tried selling a naked system or a system preinstalled with some other OS. They then convinced freelance software developers that they could get rich, quick, writing for their platform (and at first, it was true!) But gradually it has become clear that if you have a brilliant software concept, write the next killer application, and do so for Windows, Microsoft will let you run wild for a few years to build up the market and use their enormous software foundry to write their clone, then they will jerk around the OS so that your product breaks but theirs doesn't until they have the lions share of the market IF you don't sell out to them when they politely knock on your door and make you an offer you can't refuse. Five years later you will wish you hadn't.
I have to admit that I'm a tiny bit surprised that they are doing this with Steam as it could backfire. I'm guessing that part of this is punitive. They WANT game developers to be in a Microsoft cage, with huge cross-platform development barriers, and Valve is the company that has seriously broken out of that mold and made Linux gaming with native libraries and code possible for games that run on Windows as well. Since they are preparing to make users lease Windows for eternity and ensure a perpetual cash flow for every Windows computer purchased, and since software sales through "app stores" run by the company are now a major profit center for companies that have successfully built them, they hope to retake world domination while they still have control of congress and the unions and all those companies with 401 and 403 plans heavily invested in Microsoft.
Unless and until the government actually enforces anti-trust laws across the board, we'll have to put up with this shit. The "free" market doesn't, and won't, have a chance as long as the company that makes and sells the OS, with a virtual lock on third party PC sales in spite of much lower priced and viable alternatives, also writes software for their own OS with an insuperable advantage over independent developers, no matter how large or powerful. Software store selling "certification" (still the same company) make it even worse.
Face it. Microsoft is in the protection racket, and has been for nearly 30 years now. FUD is their stock and trade. They represent everything that is wrong with capitalism that isn't restrained by strong anti-trust controls and limits on things like sales agreements so that they do not and cannot become long term monopolies. They have so much money that they could CONTINUE to be mismanaged for another decade and STILL would be huge. And who has the guts to tackle them (again) in the US courts? They can spend a billion dollars a year in defense, stretch an antitrust case out for a decade, lose it, and still come out a total winner. They've done so in the past and will do so again in the future.
But what a great insult! Don't take away the genius of it just because it was, well, less than genius in its conclusion. After all, one can get milk in cardboard boxes already that will last "indefinitely" on an actual shelf, so the entire article is only marginally interesting from the point of view of increasing our quality of life, and since the entire first half of the discussion seemed to focus on a wilfull ignorance of the simple fact that unpasturized milk can carry all sorts of potentially fatal diseases -- including one that was a scourge at the time the process was instituted, tuberculosis -- instead of the science of the process itself. At least this thread discusses the process.
To quote the Wikipedia article on pasteurization:
The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says improperly handled raw milk is responsible for nearly three times more hospitalizations than any other food-borne disease source, making it one of the world's most dangerous food products.[16][17] Diseases prevented by pasteurization can include tuberculosis, brucellosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and Q-fever; it also kills the harmful bacteria Salmonella, Listeria, Yersinia, Campylobacter, Staphylococcus aureus, and Escherichia coli O157:H7,[18][19] among others.
So, one can take the chance that the raw milk you drink is "properly handled", which may be a reasonable bet in a rural setting where you know the cow and farmer involved, or you can insist that your milk be pasteurized. As a firm believer in the second law of thermodynamics and evolution, I personally will opt for pasteurization and encourage believers in in the comparative virtue of raw milk to drink lots of it, preferably while still young.
Given this level of nonsense in the discussion, one has to take what one can from it! "High UID Monkeys" is actually highly competitive with TFA and post itself.
Is it really that god damn difficult for you high UID monkeys to use a bit of simple logic? Do you really need literally everything spoon-fed to you?
I must commend you, sir, on the invention of a unique new insult. I will remember this one, as it is spectacular. UID as a sorting mechanism for intelligence -- scary, that one is...;-)
Interesting that it is probably spread via the air, too. But that would affect all speciem not only bats.
Only, as bats fly around a room at night over your bed (which happens not infrequently in old houses with bats in the attic, I will personally attest) they emit sonar pulses and if they are rabid, tend to be sloppy. So they emit aerosolized rabies-laden bat-sputum too. Then you can inhale it, or get it on a cut in your skin, or open your eyes and get droplets in your eye, etc. A rabid fox out in open air might run you down and bite you, foaming at the mouth or not, but it isn't that likely to sneeze at you violently enough to infect you through the air. It is also lower than your airways instead of above them. In North Carolina bats are by far the primary vector anyway -- no-bite transmission is just a bonus.
As several people pointed out, bats are one of the most common vectors of rabies in the US. And sadly, you do not have to be bitten by a bat to get rabies. There is evidence that just being in the same room with a rabid bat can lead to exposure, probably from aerosolized saliva. Three men (out of the 19 total) who died of rabies over the last ten years had no reported history of contact with bats at all, but had bat-associated rabies viruses. It isn't probable that you will get rabies just being outdoors with bats flying overhead (you have to be super-unlucky, as the bats have to have rabies AND you have to inhale or otherwise introduce aerosolized bat saliva into your system) but it is possible. My wife is a physician who used to work with bats before she went to medical school (and went to Jamaica to collect them because they don't have rabies in Jamaica) and once the evidence that rabies could be transmitted by bats without any bite at all came out, she has actively discouraged even building outdoor bat houses to attract them to our yard.
Yes, one is balancing risks. Mosquitoes carry many diseases (and bats carry a few besides rabies, e.g. histoplasmosis) and some of them can be fatal. Killing mosquitoes with e.g. chemical agents carries risks that have to be balanced against the costs and risks of the diseases they carry. Increasing the bat population will likely enough reduce the mosquito population and chance of mosquito borne infection, but at the risk of increasing the number of deaths due to bat-borne disease instead. I'd guess that the bet is a good one, but (naturally) not for the losers.
There are other efficient mosquito eaters. Purple martins, for example, dragonflies for another. These are not rabies or disease vectors AFAIK. But rabies is an especially scary disease because if you get it, you are basically dead, and 17 out of the 19 deaths reported to the CDC from 1997 to 2006 were from bat-related variants of the rabies virus (so even if the bite was e.g. from a fox or racoon, the fox got it from a bat). It is like mad cow disease -- scary because you may not even know you were exposed and then at some later point -- possibly years later for vCJD -- you develop the incurable disease and die. Because vCJD is so difficult to detect or diagnose, you might even die without anyone ever knowing why. If you remember the panic over mad cow disease in the US, try to also remember that more people die of bat borne rabies in three years that have ever -- to the best of our current knowledge -- died of vCJD in the US, and of the four that HAVE died, all of them are believed to have contracted the disease overseas.
The flu, on the other hand, kills well over 100 children every year, and many times that many adults. Yet people don't fear it enough to even get vaccinated, all too often, because MOST people who get it don't die (but a lot of people get it!). It's not rational. Go figure.
But that doesn't work if they have probable cause to search it, any more than saying "sorry, you can't come in just now" works if they have a warrant to search your house. The constitution only protects against UNREASONABLE search and seizure, and the historical definition of this has been "enough to convince a judge to issue a warrant". So you can plead anything you want, but you'll stay in jail until you cough up the keys, be they keys to your house or to your encrypted phone or laptop. I learned this, BTW, directly from FBI agents at a crypto conference I attended many years ago, where the rest of the discussion centered on cracking. The feeb was a lot less concerned -- then -- with cracking encryption than you might have thought, simply because they already had adequate eternajail means to gain access in cases with probable cause. This might even have been pre-9/11 -- since then they have clearly come to see the importance of being able to crack things even when somebody is CONTENT to sit in jail forever relative to what would happen if a file were decrypted, or to be able to crack the encrypted files of dead terrorists in the aftermath of events.
Note that Ithe above is not commenting on what is or isn't good or just or right here. Only that there is a constitutionally approved and commonly enough used way to mandate access to encrypted files, and it doesn't involve NSA-level resources or techno-spooks or back doors into encryption routines. It involves getting a warrant. To comment NOW -- that's by far the way I'd prefer it. A warrant or court order at least gives you some chance to defend yourself -- probably not invoking the fifth, but perhaps challenging the strength of the evidence used to get the court order. It is also done in the light of day. I think what a substantial fraction of the world is worried about is that Russia is regressing to where no court at all is required, no oversight, and where they might literally use a wrench -- or a testicle-taser -- to coerce the keys on demand.
One might worry about this in the United States as well. Or "by" the United States in places like Cuba. IMO both Trump and Clinton are perfectly willing to use non-constitutional means against perceived enemies or possible terrorists -- Clinton demonstrably so, Trump by his overblown jingoist rhetoric.
That's why I'm voting for Cthulhu. With Cthulhu you know where you stand. If elected, It promises to eat all of the enemies of the United States first, in some cases only a little bit at a time... Vote for Cthulhu: "No Lives Matter"
Which is the "official and legal" way to obtain access to encrypted information in the US. The "wrench" is called a "subpoena" or a "warrant" issued by a judge for probable cause, combined with an unbounded eternity in jail for contempt of court until you cough up the keys. Yes, you can be in prison for life without even having a trial for ongoing contempt of court. Every day is a new offense and another day in jail.
I'm even reasonably comfortable with that. At least there is some sort of due process with a nod to the constitution and the rights of citizens. The PROBLEM is all of these agencies that want to just be able to browse all the files in existence looking for trouble, or decrypt any file they want (or any phone or laptop they want) without going through the constitutionally mandated process of obtaining a warrant etc to use as a wrench. I don't think they have any clue as to the computational implausibility of what they are asking, as well. I'm personally good for a few hundred GB of data -- call it a TB. Some of that goes over the internet, encrypted, every day. Just to send or receive it at 200 Mbps (premium service) often takes me an hour or two. Now multiply.
The only way to accomplish their goal is to build a powerful AI agent into every operating system in the world that monitors every single byte typed or saved or displayed on a system, the ultimate electronic big brother. Then network the whole thing together into a nation-spanning compute cluster with hierarchical decisioning at all levels. Because categorizing the human interpretive MEANING of any given content is much more computationally intensive than moving the bytes around (it requires our enormously complex human brains to do it) we can anticipate that every laptop and desktop and server would need to devote at least 90% of its resources to bigbrotherd operation. And bigbrotherd hooks would have to be built into the hardware, or it would be too easy to write kernels without it, or with a bigbrotherd that runs in a sandbox to make the global network happy but leaves the user the actual system running free and clear, especially with open source OS's in abundance that cannot easily be controlled.
And this will all happen approximately when hell freezes over. So don't worry about it! In Putin's Russia, keys encrypt you!
My biggest concern is the free lunch thing -- second law violation is -- unlikely. Literally. Energy quanta and attendant uncertainty is all great, but it can't be used to generate free energy. Momentum uncertainty doesn't seem as though it could be used to generate free momentum. And finally, I am deeply skeptical of violating the relativistic relation between (massless) energy and momentum.
But sure, anything is possible. And no doubt, a reactionless drive would be very cool and enormously useful, maybe even enough to permit the exploitation of near-earth space. As I said, even mm/sec^2 accelerations are plenty to get around if you can afford to take your time to get places and all your ship needs to run is sunlight. Light sails would be equally cool, except for that pesky E/c bit, and even so NASA is testing using those to at least overcome high orbit drag and keep satellites up longer without an expensive boost (at whatever acceleration they can produce, maybe microns per second squared, dunno).
I love science fiction, and would like nothing better than to see new physics that enables all the things that forty years of studying, doing research in, and teaching physics have taught me are just plain impossible (barring new physics). But at the same time, I can't suspend my disbelief the way I do with e.e. smith's space opera (with its TERRIBLE physics) when it is the real world. Either way, time will tell. It usually does.
C'mon, if they can program experiments that prove that there could be no hidden variables that explain the randomness in quantum mechanics (using, of course, hidden variables that simulate the randomness in quantum mechanics in their computer) they ought to be able to fix this bug...
Well, I am a theorist that teaches graduate level CED and a science fiction author, so I'm really good at making stuff up that sounds plausible. But let's maintain perspective, please. The point of my post is that energy and momentum are strictly conserved in the two slit experiment in the observable universe. Sure, the missing energy/momentum "could" be in a direction we know nothing about, but that is pretty implausible, basically just science fiction so far. We would need way more evidence before we started to take that sort of hypothesis seriously.
Put it up in space, power it with solar cells. One ought to be able to build one that should produce an acceleration of 1 mm/sec^2, "forever", off of sunlight. That's a delta-v of around 200 mph/day, unmistakable, and if it can produce this without losing mass and using only sunlight as energy input, CED, QED, and the second law of thermodynamics are going to all be very sad... as we will have built a machine that violates the second law of thermodynamics, (electrical) energy into work "with no other effect".
Until then, let's remain just a bit skeptical, shall we?
Oh, I was just being facetious. As you say, physics has undergone multiple "complete rewrites" (not really, but yeah, aristotelian->newtonian, newtonian->quantum, galiliean->lorentz are at the very least very, very serious revisions of the way we think even if they do eat their predecessors and continue to support their successful results).
However, the law of conservation of momentum is one of those things that it is difficult to muck with, without requiring a pretty complete rewrite. If you put this thing in deep space and it just moves (accelerates) without shooting mass/energy/momentum out in some form, it would make me -- and physics -- pretty sad. I have to put it in the same category as the prior reports of transluminal neutrinos and the like. Always possible that they are true, but claims that will change everything require the most solid of evidence, and so far this is in the category of any number of famous "marginal" results that turned out to be accidents of one sort or another.
At the end of the day, of course, physics is KNOWN to be incomplete. Maybe the damn thing is acting as a darkon drive and is through a process we do not understand converting microwaves to darkons to momentum through some unknown resonance process. Maybe it is evidence for a dual universe where charge and spacetime are reversed, and the cavity somehow couples the two so it is pushing off against its shadow twin. Maybe we can make up a dozen theoretical explanations for it -- eventually, if necessary.
But for the moment it, like transluminal neutrinos, is still in the "probably magic" category pending extraordinary evidence to back up the extraordinary claim. Maybe if NASA launches one into orbit with its own solar power system and runs it for a few years, during which time it promotes its orbit in unmistakable ways. It doesn't look like it needs to mass more than a few hundred kilograms total, solar panels ought to be able to provide it with at least a kilowatt or three, so getting a thrust of around a newton should be possible. A newton may not sound like much pushing 100+ kg, but an acceleration of 1 mm/sec^2 over a day adds 84600 mm/sec, or roughly 90 m/sec, or (multiplying by 9/4) roughly 200 mph. It wouldn't take many days to make a clear, unmistakable alteration in the orbit. With modern instrumentation, I would think "one" (or even less) would suffice. Even 20 m/sec/day acceleration at a tenth of this ought to show up almost immediately.
In space, there is nothing nearby to push against. One can actually use the observed thrust itself to measure the mass of the satellite and see if it varies over time (eliminating the possibility that mass is being thrown out somehow assuming that it does not, as it should not). With solar cells with a cross-sectional area of at most a few square meters, radiation pressure is utterly incapable of producing this acceleration because you have at most Pr = S/c to work with, and S is order of 1400 W/m^2 and by the time you divide by c you have basically nothing left (as observed elsewhere in the thread).
At that point, if it accelerates as advertised, Classical Electrodynamics is dead as a doorknob, and QED is walking wounded as it still works off of CED and at the microwave level and high power, "photons" ought to be irrelevant anyway. Note well: you are converting a substantial amount of incoming electromagnetic energy directly into work "with no other effect" if it works as advertised. So even the second law of thermodynamics is going to be very sad. I'm tempted to quote Eddington:
"The second law of thermodynamics holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the Universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, those experimentalists do bungle things up sometimes. but if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing to do but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
Elementary E&M. The EM field, quantum or not, "particle like" or not, is a FIELD. If you set up the two slit experiment there are places on the screen where the fields from two coherent sources (slits) are out of phase and no energy or momentum is transferred. Even if you turn the intensity down to where one "photon" at a time goes through the pair of slits (yes, it goes through BOTH slits, or at least the FIELD does) the photons appear only in the BRIGHT bands where the fields are IN phase. No energy or momentum is transferred to the dark bands.
So the correct answer is that if there is a volume of space where the photons are out of phase and cancel, there is another volume of space (at a different angle) where they are IN phase and do NOT cancel, they add. Energy and momentum are conserved. The light just goes only to places where the FIELD addition is coherent and at least partly in phase. QED.
The photon is its own antiparticle, BTW.
This drive is (so far) like a hypothetical box in space containing a kid with a basketball. He keeps bouncing the ball off of one wall so that it recoils off and he catches it. Every time he bounces it off the wall, however, the box recoils away from the kid, and gradually builds up an appreciable momentum.
So all we need to explain this drive is a way for the kid to catch the ball, inside the box, and not just transfer the exact same momentum back to the other side of the box that he's standing on in order to be able to throw the ball in fhe first place.
Ah, but this drive is MAGIC, and doesn't obey the laws of conservation of momentum and equal action/reaction and all that. It pulls itself up by its bootstraps. It gets rich by selling itself rocks. And if it violates momentum conservation it almost certainly violates energy conservation too. Chaos ensues. The Universe collapses in a puff of physical inconsistency.
Or, as it moves forward, it kicks something else backwards. There really aren't a lot of choices here that don't require a fairly complete rewrite of physics. Even at the quantum level, outside of irrelevant borrowings at the scale of hbar, these conservation laws hold and it is pretty well believed that they hold globally for closed systems and that energy and momentum and angular momentum are in detailed balance in interactions. That's the entire basis of field theory. You're talking about a nearly complete rewrite of field theory (along with everything else).
Or, it kicks something backwards. Or, something else is going on. I'll take a heap 'o convincing, though, before I throw out physics in favor of "magic".
If I had any ligoites in my addressbook, sure, but lacking that, posting on/. is a good way to proceed. OTOH, reading the wikipedia page would probably do it too. At the moment I'm making up a physics final and don't have time -- I was just dangling bait to see if I could get a lazy answer in the meantime...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Look at Lockheed-Martin's announcements on this so far. They are predicting (again, who know if they will hit it) 5 years to deployment. Some of the technologies being investigated won't take forever to implement -- they could be drop-in replacements for coal furnaces in existing plants. There would be a SERIOUS advantage to converting, assuming that they can manage to burn Deuterium.
I agree that the large scale reactor projects are more like 20 years out, but I suspect they are going to be overtaken. I could be wrong, but some physics groups I actually respect are making noises that they are going to get there before e.g. ITER.
But you are right -- photovoltaics and wind won't do it in the foreseeable future, at least not without efficient high-density storage and low-loss long range transport. Solar isn't going to run Iceland or Finland or Siberia in the winter...
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Well, yes, or maybe not.
Did you get the bit about "insufficient evidence to even speculate out loud" in a public forum? Because building a model that shows that it could have been so is not, actually, evidence, and -- as I tried to point out, "Mr. Zippy" -- even if the model built doesn't CONTRADICT any of the limited collection of factual evidence we have on Venus, that at best raises the model hypothesis by only a paltry amount relative to models that AREN'T EVEN consistent with that evidence, and doesn't really help it at all relative to alternative hypotheses that might explain the evidence equally well.
Now -- and I'm going out on a limb here, just thinking out loud -- do you think there MIGHT be some TINY chance that a model based on the hypothesis that Venus never had a liquid ocean, let alone one that lasted two billion years, could conceivably explain the little evidence that we have equally well? Do you think that even if one argues that the model with the ocean is marginally a tiny bit better, the evidence ITSELF is so very weak that nobody sane would accept the conclusion as being anything more than science fiction masquerading as science ?
Don't get me wrong. Running models is a good, healthy passtime for physicists. Keeps 'em off the streets. Feeds them and clothes their children. And who knows! This model could end up (eventually) being proven right by actual evidence! And I say this as a physicist who built and ran large scale models for close to 20 years. And /. is even an appropriate venue for a repost.
It is the add-on bullshit, the veiled threat that This Could Happen To Earth if we don't mend our ways, along the lines of James Hansen's "boiling oceans" nonsense, that is inappropriate. It is presenting it as if it is a lot more "true" than it actually is that is inappropriate.
I repeat. A similar hypothesis exists for Mars, and is a lot older. The evidence for it is far, far stronger. And it is still considered to be unproven even with rovers on the ground looking directly for hard evidence that it was so.
If they find the evidence, then of course it should be reported and will be a big deal. In the meantime, somebody writing a paper that claims that a model computation shows that Mars could have once had a liquid ocean is bo-ring, because it is obviously true, and equally obviously unproven.
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I'm even more cynical. Who actually benefits from the global warming panic? Oh, wait, snap! Energy companies, all of which are "fossil fuel" companies simply because we cannot produce the energy we need to sustain civilization without using fossil fuels this decade, and probably won't be able to for the next two or three decades if not forever (where if fusion really does come home, deuterium is still a "fossil fuel", it's just been "fossilized" for a bit longer than coal). How do they benefit?
Well, let's see. Most energy companies are public utilities, which basically means that they cannot just raise prices arbitrarily, because they are granted a virtual monopoly on whatever part of whatever state they serve. We don't have multiple power lines and cannot shop for a company that sells electricity at the lowest price. The regulators basically permit them only to make money at a fixed margin relative to costs as reflected in a set retail price.
So how can you make MORE money if you are a public utility? Well, let's see. How about raising the set retail price by inflating costs? Yeah, that would work! If we double the price of coal (or coal burning plants) and we sell at the same commission-permitted margin, we make twice the real income! Everybody wins! The coal miner gets twice the money. The power company gets twice the money (same margin, but now they've increased their retail cost to reflect the higher upstream costs). The only loser is -- wait for it -- the consumer!
But then there is the pesky problem of the fact that we have a lot of coal, enough to fuel the US for what, a few centuries at least? Hard to create the illusion of scarcity in that kind of marketplace. So let's invent an entirely artificial scarcity by limiting how much coal we use! Let's ramp up the cost of the coal burning plants! Let's get laws passed that force us to build solar and wind generation systems that -- wait for it again -- generate electricity at an amortized cost that is even greater than coal, and requires huge capital investment to boot! Now we can perfectly legitimately ramp up the retail price of the electricity we sell because we can demonstrate higher costs, and since our profit MARGINS, not the dollar amounts, are fixed, the more expensive the energy the more money we make from it!
Power companies have been by far, overwhelmingly, the greatest beneficiaries of the global warming panic. They don't give a damn how they generate the electricity they sell us, and they have an interest so strong and obvious that it cannot reasonably be called "vested" in selling us electricity generated the most expensive way possible, because (as public utilities) they are PROTECTED from risk and have a damn monopoly!
Hence in California, electricity costs well over 50% more than it costs in the rest of the country. In NY it is even more costly.
Now, this cynicism isn't entirely justified. Some power companies probably do have a board-driven "conscience" within the bounds permitted by maintaining profitability, and large scale PV solar has, actually, come down in cost to where it one can amortize new solar construction in many states (including NC) in a reasonable time frame, making it a comparatively cheap alternative to building expensive new coal or nuclear or even natural gas burners to handle e.g. summer air conditioning overloads and eke out fuel generated sources. But make no mistake about this. Portraying greedy energy companies as being knee jerk opposed to solar or wind is absurd. They'll make electricity using rodents running in spinning wheels if consumers can be forced to pay for it at fixed marginal profit.
The only possible real solution to this is fusion, or maybe PV solar in a decade, when we have perfected cost efficient storage and long distance transport with e.g. HVDC transmission lines from the sunny states to Maine and Alaska. Lockheed-Martin claims to have fusion licked. Two or three other groups do too. Fusion would actually elimi
It remains open to debate until we have direct evidence one way or the other. We cannot even resolve this question with Mars with eyes and instruments on the ground and looking down through clear, thin, atmosphere. On Venus we have a bit less than three hours of total ground based lander observations, taken from three landers that survived an average of maybe 50 minutes or so each. Broken, dying landers, looking through 500 C, 90+ atmosphere, acid laced atmosphere while the heat penetrated them to where they perished the rest of the way.
This article is a joke, or as I suggest below, a fundraiser for future lander missions.
I think you'll find that the Venus atmosphere has closer to 100x the total mass of Earth's atmosphere, consistent with it being close to the same size and having a surface pressure around 90 atmospheres. Otherwise, play on through, I generally agree with your post. It isn't about the greenhouse effect on Venus, it is about the dry (very dry!) adiabatic lapse rate from the surface to the top of an atmosphere close to 100x as dense as Earth's and maybe six times deeper (roughly 60 km out to where its pressure and temperature are comparable to the top of the troposphere). The greenhouse effect was saturated long before one got to 96.5% CO2. The reason Mars is equally uninhabitable because it is too COLD, in spite of having an atmosphere that is almost pure CO2 is that its atmosphere is the opposite, far LESS dense than the Earth's, or Venus's. The density and TOA insolation are much more important than CO2, even on the Earth where the greenhouse effect due to CO2 is ALSO saturated and exhibits a weak logarithmic growth with CO2 concentration as a consequence.
NASA scientists need to learn the difference between evidence and simulation. There is almost no evidence to support this hypothesis -- the best that one can say for the simulation is that it shows that the hypothesis isn't overtly incompatible with the little evidence that there is. People need to read Jaynes' lovely book on the logic of science and Bayesian analysis so that they can quit confusing model consistency with model correctness. As it is, it is as if one has the hypothesis that there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll. One examines the grassy knoll and finds, sure enough, that the grass appears to have been stepped on -- there is evidence that "something" has been there. One does an elaborate computation demonstrating that yes, a sniper on the grassy knoll would have had to step on the grass in order to be there, so that the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis, and then publishes the result in the National Enquirer as proven fact (and if possible, blame the presence of the sniper on the Clintons -- after all they COULD have done it, right?).
Never mind the possibility that the grass might have been pressed down by a passing giraffe, a sleeping hobo, the lawnmower that last mowed it, or that the grass actually WASN'T "pressed down", it just grew that way. Never mind that the Clintons were in middle school at the time and would have had to fund it with lunch money, which they (obviously) shook down from other students or accepted as a bribe so that they could intervene with the teachers to get the students who paid them off A's.
Alas, that science has come to this. National Enquirer, look out!
After all, the hypothesis that Mars has had liquid oceans dates back to science fiction authors and the earliest observations of "canals". It has its own wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But even in the case of Mars, with eyes in the sky looking down through a clear, thin atmosphere and multiple landers on the ground looking for a smoking gun, we lack anything like conclusive evidence that Mars once had a liquid ocean.
Venus, on the other hand, has an atmosphere with around 100x the mass of Earth's entire atmosphere, a pressure of 90 or so atmospheres on the ground, where the temperature is only a couple of hundred degrees too cool to melt lead. It contains nontrivial amounts of several acids in its predominantly CO2 base. It is corrosive, hot, and crushing. The average survival time for the landers sent there so far is around one hour (actually, a bit less). We have something less than around 3 hours of total observational time on the ground, IIRC, all taken from dying landers with some dysfunctional bits through air a bit over twice the temperature of boiling water, before the conditions killed the lander altogether.
We have almost NO evidence from the surface AT ALL, and the little that we have contains no direct evidence that could even be VAGUELY construed as a smoking gun for oceans.
This makes me suspect that this is a fundraiser for the proposed lander missions. "Hey, maybe Venus once had a liquid ocean! Life could have developed there! Never mind that the atmosphere even a few billion years ago if anything probably had a GREATER mass and HIGHER pressures at the surface (while still being enormously hot with 40% more incident solar radiation and an adiabatic lapse rate from hell down to the surface in the dense atmosphere). Give us money! We'll go find out!"
Sigh.
Oh, AC, you are so cynical! In fact, perhaps it stands for "anonymous cynic" in this instance. I'm certain that putting content online that encourages passive memorization will have nothing but benefits for the millions of children who will willingly give up playing Pokemon Go for the joy of "catching" the year that Columbus discovered the Americas or what 7*9 really is...
You missed the better SF reference. Coffiest is from The Space Merchants, by Pohl and Kornbluth, and it is one of the most brilliant satires of the modern progression towards multinational corporate world control ever written. Highly recommended...
Well said, sir! Also, simulated neural networks in software have been around since rather far back in the last century (on paper, back to 1933 and Nicholas Rashevsky), and as the author of a very large, very advanced neural network modeling tool, I'd further add that we can already build rather large simulated neural networks in software, and even build composite NNs using a mix of software and parallel hardware.
A transistor-based gate is already in some sense a neuron, and it isn't that difficult to build collections of them that perform even more like a neuron. The problem is that even if we do so, we don't really have any good idea what to do with it, and we have a very hard time scaling it up to the number of connections visible in the human brain. By "very hard", I mean "not possible to achieve, not likely to become possible to achieve, any time soon", at least not without a serious breakthrough. We are two orders of magnitude short of matching the number of neurons in the human brain in JUST transistor count, and we cannot come anywhere near 1000 to 10000 connections per transistor. And finally, transistors are not neurons, and even if they were neurons we have no idea how to build a massive, amorphous neural network and then train it somehow (or program it somehow) to do useful work.
It is enormously difficult to write a good simulated neural network program to do relatively simple tasks such as noisy pattern identification or predictive modeling of unstructured high dimensional data, even with complete control over the algorithm. There seems to be this feeling out there that if one just builds an artificial brain with a lot of artificial neurons and hit it with data it will somehow "wake up" and smell the metaphorical coffee of life and do some sort of useful work. I personally think this is enormously optimistic, but then, I actually have some grasp of the mathematical complexity of the optimization problem involved.
This is more in the category of building (or rebuilding with more modern technology) a unit that MAY prove useful if we ever have a breakthrough on the half-dozen serious obstacles associated with AI via NNs, most of which can actually be made and will actually be made (if at all) with simulated NNs. Only after simulated NNs demonstrate a clear pathway to going from a collection of artificial "neurons" with some specific algorithmic functionality and ability to be interconnected at a very fine scale to a useful, profitable, neural network that does actual work worth doing will anybody bother to dump a billion or so dollars into a foundry for artificial neuron devices. And there may even be a few such applications today -- some networks are very simple algorithmically, but they are also the least extendable to really hard problems or problems we cannot already solve efficiently other ways. Letter recognition, maybe.
The human brain has a quadrillion or so synaptic connections, and it is difficult to even start estimate the volume of the phase space represented by all of those connections. The "switches" are indeed much slower than they are in computers, but they run in parallel as well as serially, and it is estimated that they are "equivalent" to a terabit per second processor in their full-parallel speed. We can achieve similar scales in simulation on parallel supercomputers, of course, but not with anywhere near the number of "neurons" or "synapses" and if we really use TIPS scale computing resources, they probably aren't going to be doing their "AI" with NNs anyway for anything but selected problems.
So cool top article, good on IBM, and all that, but I'm not holding my breath for a phone that actually completes words sanely using its IBM(tm) Neural Processor...
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Insightful reply, thanks,
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Yeah, I wasn't even a fan of Pascal, but Turbo Pascal for DOS was an awesome experience, as was both Turbo C and to a similar extent Microsoft's early QuickC. And QuickBasic was lovely -- an IDE that would literally pop up the manual page for any instruction you could type enough of to recognize, or match a string in. QB was in some sense my favorite IDE of all time, and I wrote a slew of code in Basic back in IBM PC days.
I didn't even include Microsoft's screwing of OS/2 and IBM in the list -- I put on the Extreme Linux expo in Raleigh, NC back in the day not long after that and IBM was an avid supporter; their staffers were all literally burning with anger at Microsoft and were particularly eager to loan us piles of PCs and more for our cluster demos. Claiming that Microsoft was all warm and fuzzy towards developers and that it wasn't their fault that important packages inevitably broke on every major version update, or that there was no "conspiracy" because it was against the law to deliberately break them to the advantage of Microsoft's competing packages simply ignores reality. There wasn't a "conspiracy" to remove competing web browers from Windows machines or disable them so that they wouldn't work right, but Microsoft did it anyway and lost a small mountain of money on a lawsuit. And they won, won, won the lawsuit in spite of the hundreds of millions they spent on the settlement and the billions they spent dragging the suit out for close to a decade. By then it was a moot point. After that, nobody had or is likely to have in the future, the stomach to tackle Microsoft in court but somebody enormous with equally deep pockets.
That's the problem. A hundred-odd billion dollar multinational company is largely above the law. They can outspend almost anybody, and anybody who thinks that this doesn't matter in civil or corporate court (or even in criminal court) is naive in the extreme. Once enough retirement funds are heavily invested in Microsoft stock, nobody wants them to go down, not really, no matter how much they hate them. Not congressmen. Not the president. Not union leaders. Not corporate leaders. Most of the everyday people don't care. The only ones that do are oddball nerds like me who find their corporate ethics revolting and who resent the rise of the corporate shadow government to the detriment of personal and economic freedom. And there just aren't enough of us to matter.
As Donald Trump (defending his actions exploiting major economic downturns in the past) says, "It was just business". And so it is, and so it will be, without toothy laws regulating just what "business" activities are ethical and permitted in law.
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Not that much more subtle. I watched as Microsoft crushed a long list of companies using exactly this strategy across the 80's and early 90's. Borland was easy -- it's so easy to break a compiler with an OS upgrade. Lotus. Word Perfect. Wordstar. Various games. They certainly tried it with their browser and it took a decade long billion dollar court case to stop them. Every operating system update, everybody else's software would break, a bit, while Microsoft's clone -- often a clone of a startlingly original and brilliant idea -- did not. Add in their marketing team to convince businesses that if they didn't buy Microsoft's house product, they would break their... um... not arms, not legs, what's the word, "interface" if the competing product didn't perfectly comply with the new specs (and of course, they never did).
Microsoft simply made it impossible to buy a PC without their operating system pre-installed in any store that sells systems WITH their operating system pre-installed with punitive pricing agreements that dropped the margins below any possibility of profit if you tried selling a naked system or a system preinstalled with some other OS. They then convinced freelance software developers that they could get rich, quick, writing for their platform (and at first, it was true!) But gradually it has become clear that if you have a brilliant software concept, write the next killer application, and do so for Windows, Microsoft will let you run wild for a few years to build up the market and use their enormous software foundry to write their clone, then they will jerk around the OS so that your product breaks but theirs doesn't until they have the lions share of the market IF you don't sell out to them when they politely knock on your door and make you an offer you can't refuse. Five years later you will wish you hadn't.
I have to admit that I'm a tiny bit surprised that they are doing this with Steam as it could backfire. I'm guessing that part of this is punitive. They WANT game developers to be in a Microsoft cage, with huge cross-platform development barriers, and Valve is the company that has seriously broken out of that mold and made Linux gaming with native libraries and code possible for games that run on Windows as well. Since they are preparing to make users lease Windows for eternity and ensure a perpetual cash flow for every Windows computer purchased, and since software sales through "app stores" run by the company are now a major profit center for companies that have successfully built them, they hope to retake world domination while they still have control of congress and the unions and all those companies with 401 and 403 plans heavily invested in Microsoft.
Unless and until the government actually enforces anti-trust laws across the board, we'll have to put up with this shit. The "free" market doesn't, and won't, have a chance as long as the company that makes and sells the OS, with a virtual lock on third party PC sales in spite of much lower priced and viable alternatives, also writes software for their own OS with an insuperable advantage over independent developers, no matter how large or powerful. Software store selling "certification" (still the same company) make it even worse.
Face it. Microsoft is in the protection racket, and has been for nearly 30 years now. FUD is their stock and trade. They represent everything that is wrong with capitalism that isn't restrained by strong anti-trust controls and limits on things like sales agreements so that they do not and cannot become long term monopolies. They have so much money that they could CONTINUE to be mismanaged for another decade and STILL would be huge. And who has the guts to tackle them (again) in the US courts? They can spend a billion dollars a year in defense, stretch an antitrust case out for a decade, lose it, and still come out a total winner. They've done so in the past and will do so again in the future.
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But what a great insult! Don't take away the genius of it just because it was, well, less than genius in its conclusion. After all, one can get milk in cardboard boxes already that will last "indefinitely" on an actual shelf, so the entire article is only marginally interesting from the point of view of increasing our quality of life, and since the entire first half of the discussion seemed to focus on a wilfull ignorance of the simple fact that unpasturized milk can carry all sorts of potentially fatal diseases -- including one that was a scourge at the time the process was instituted, tuberculosis -- instead of the science of the process itself. At least this thread discusses the process.
To quote the Wikipedia article on pasteurization:
The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says improperly handled raw milk is responsible for nearly three times more hospitalizations than any other food-borne disease source, making it one of the world's most dangerous food products.[16][17] Diseases prevented by pasteurization can include tuberculosis, brucellosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and Q-fever; it also kills the harmful bacteria Salmonella, Listeria, Yersinia, Campylobacter, Staphylococcus aureus, and Escherichia coli O157:H7,[18][19] among others.
So, one can take the chance that the raw milk you drink is "properly handled", which may be a reasonable bet in a rural setting where you know the cow and farmer involved, or you can insist that your milk be pasteurized. As a firm believer in the second law of thermodynamics and evolution, I personally will opt for pasteurization and encourage believers in in the comparative virtue of raw milk to drink lots of it, preferably while still young.
Given this level of nonsense in the discussion, one has to take what one can from it! "High UID Monkeys" is actually highly competitive with TFA and post itself.
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Is it really that god damn difficult for you high UID monkeys to use a bit of simple logic? Do you really need literally everything spoon-fed to you?
I must commend you, sir, on the invention of a unique new insult. I will remember this one, as it is spectacular. UID as a sorting mechanism for intelligence -- scary, that one is...;-)
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Interesting that it is probably spread via the air, too. But that would affect all speciem not only bats.
Only, as bats fly around a room at night over your bed (which happens not infrequently in old houses with bats in the attic, I will personally attest) they emit sonar pulses and if they are rabid, tend to be sloppy. So they emit aerosolized rabies-laden bat-sputum too. Then you can inhale it, or get it on a cut in your skin, or open your eyes and get droplets in your eye, etc. A rabid fox out in open air might run you down and bite you, foaming at the mouth or not, but it isn't that likely to sneeze at you violently enough to infect you through the air. It is also lower than your airways instead of above them. In North Carolina bats are by far the primary vector anyway -- no-bite transmission is just a bonus.
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As several people pointed out, bats are one of the most common vectors of rabies in the US. And sadly, you do not have to be bitten by a bat to get rabies. There is evidence that just being in the same room with a rabid bat can lead to exposure, probably from aerosolized saliva. Three men (out of the 19 total) who died of rabies over the last ten years had no reported history of contact with bats at all, but had bat-associated rabies viruses. It isn't probable that you will get rabies just being outdoors with bats flying overhead (you have to be super-unlucky, as the bats have to have rabies AND you have to inhale or otherwise introduce aerosolized bat saliva into your system) but it is possible. My wife is a physician who used to work with bats before she went to medical school (and went to Jamaica to collect them because they don't have rabies in Jamaica) and once the evidence that rabies could be transmitted by bats without any bite at all came out, she has actively discouraged even building outdoor bat houses to attract them to our yard.
Yes, one is balancing risks. Mosquitoes carry many diseases (and bats carry a few besides rabies, e.g. histoplasmosis) and some of them can be fatal. Killing mosquitoes with e.g. chemical agents carries risks that have to be balanced against the costs and risks of the diseases they carry. Increasing the bat population will likely enough reduce the mosquito population and chance of mosquito borne infection, but at the risk of increasing the number of deaths due to bat-borne disease instead. I'd guess that the bet is a good one, but (naturally) not for the losers.
There are other efficient mosquito eaters. Purple martins, for example, dragonflies for another. These are not rabies or disease vectors AFAIK. But rabies is an especially scary disease because if you get it, you are basically dead, and 17 out of the 19 deaths reported to the CDC from 1997 to 2006 were from bat-related variants of the rabies virus (so even if the bite was e.g. from a fox or racoon, the fox got it from a bat). It is like mad cow disease -- scary because you may not even know you were exposed and then at some later point -- possibly years later for vCJD -- you develop the incurable disease and die. Because vCJD is so difficult to detect or diagnose, you might even die without anyone ever knowing why. If you remember the panic over mad cow disease in the US, try to also remember that more people die of bat borne rabies in three years that have ever -- to the best of our current knowledge -- died of vCJD in the US, and of the four that HAVE died, all of them are believed to have contracted the disease overseas.
The flu, on the other hand, kills well over 100 children every year, and many times that many adults. Yet people don't fear it enough to even get vaccinated, all too often, because MOST people who get it don't die (but a lot of people get it!). It's not rational. Go figure.
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But that doesn't work if they have probable cause to search it, any more than saying "sorry, you can't come in just now" works if they have a warrant to search your house. The constitution only protects against UNREASONABLE search and seizure, and the historical definition of this has been "enough to convince a judge to issue a warrant". So you can plead anything you want, but you'll stay in jail until you cough up the keys, be they keys to your house or to your encrypted phone or laptop. I learned this, BTW, directly from FBI agents at a crypto conference I attended many years ago, where the rest of the discussion centered on cracking. The feeb was a lot less concerned -- then -- with cracking encryption than you might have thought, simply because they already had adequate eternajail means to gain access in cases with probable cause. This might even have been pre-9/11 -- since then they have clearly come to see the importance of being able to crack things even when somebody is CONTENT to sit in jail forever relative to what would happen if a file were decrypted, or to be able to crack the encrypted files of dead terrorists in the aftermath of events.
Note that Ithe above is not commenting on what is or isn't good or just or right here. Only that there is a constitutionally approved and commonly enough used way to mandate access to encrypted files, and it doesn't involve NSA-level resources or techno-spooks or back doors into encryption routines. It involves getting a warrant. To comment NOW -- that's by far the way I'd prefer it. A warrant or court order at least gives you some chance to defend yourself -- probably not invoking the fifth, but perhaps challenging the strength of the evidence used to get the court order. It is also done in the light of day. I think what a substantial fraction of the world is worried about is that Russia is regressing to where no court at all is required, no oversight, and where they might literally use a wrench -- or a testicle-taser -- to coerce the keys on demand.
One might worry about this in the United States as well. Or "by" the United States in places like Cuba. IMO both Trump and Clinton are perfectly willing to use non-constitutional means against perceived enemies or possible terrorists -- Clinton demonstrably so, Trump by his overblown jingoist rhetoric.
That's why I'm voting for Cthulhu. With Cthulhu you know where you stand. If elected, It promises to eat all of the enemies of the United States first, in some cases only a little bit at a time... Vote for Cthulhu: "No Lives Matter"
rgb
Which is the "official and legal" way to obtain access to encrypted information in the US. The "wrench" is called a "subpoena" or a "warrant" issued by a judge for probable cause, combined with an unbounded eternity in jail for contempt of court until you cough up the keys. Yes, you can be in prison for life without even having a trial for ongoing contempt of court. Every day is a new offense and another day in jail.
I'm even reasonably comfortable with that. At least there is some sort of due process with a nod to the constitution and the rights of citizens. The PROBLEM is all of these agencies that want to just be able to browse all the files in existence looking for trouble, or decrypt any file they want (or any phone or laptop they want) without going through the constitutionally mandated process of obtaining a warrant etc to use as a wrench. I don't think they have any clue as to the computational implausibility of what they are asking, as well. I'm personally good for a few hundred GB of data -- call it a TB. Some of that goes over the internet, encrypted, every day. Just to send or receive it at 200 Mbps (premium service) often takes me an hour or two. Now multiply.
The only way to accomplish their goal is to build a powerful AI agent into every operating system in the world that monitors every single byte typed or saved or displayed on a system, the ultimate electronic big brother. Then network the whole thing together into a nation-spanning compute cluster with hierarchical decisioning at all levels. Because categorizing the human interpretive MEANING of any given content is much more computationally intensive than moving the bytes around (it requires our enormously complex human brains to do it) we can anticipate that every laptop and desktop and server would need to devote at least 90% of its resources to bigbrotherd operation. And bigbrotherd hooks would have to be built into the hardware, or it would be too easy to write kernels without it, or with a bigbrotherd that runs in a sandbox to make the global network happy but leaves the user the actual system running free and clear, especially with open source OS's in abundance that cannot easily be controlled.
And this will all happen approximately when hell freezes over. So don't worry about it! In Putin's Russia, keys encrypt you!
rgb
My biggest concern is the free lunch thing -- second law violation is -- unlikely. Literally. Energy quanta and attendant uncertainty is all great, but it can't be used to generate free energy. Momentum uncertainty doesn't seem as though it could be used to generate free momentum. And finally, I am deeply skeptical of violating the relativistic relation between (massless) energy and momentum.
But sure, anything is possible. And no doubt, a reactionless drive would be very cool and enormously useful, maybe even enough to permit the exploitation of near-earth space. As I said, even mm/sec^2 accelerations are plenty to get around if you can afford to take your time to get places and all your ship needs to run is sunlight. Light sails would be equally cool, except for that pesky E/c bit, and even so NASA is testing using those to at least overcome high orbit drag and keep satellites up longer without an expensive boost (at whatever acceleration they can produce, maybe microns per second squared, dunno).
I love science fiction, and would like nothing better than to see new physics that enables all the things that forty years of studying, doing research in, and teaching physics have taught me are just plain impossible (barring new physics). But at the same time, I can't suspend my disbelief the way I do with e.e. smith's space opera (with its TERRIBLE physics) when it is the real world. Either way, time will tell. It usually does.
rgb
C'mon, if they can program experiments that prove that there could be no hidden variables that explain the randomness in quantum mechanics (using, of course, hidden variables that simulate the randomness in quantum mechanics in their computer) they ought to be able to fix this bug...
rgb
Well, I am a theorist that teaches graduate level CED and a science fiction author, so I'm really good at making stuff up that sounds plausible. But let's maintain perspective, please. The point of my post is that energy and momentum are strictly conserved in the two slit experiment in the observable universe. Sure, the missing energy/momentum "could" be in a direction we know nothing about, but that is pretty implausible, basically just science fiction so far. We would need way more evidence before we started to take that sort of hypothesis seriously.
Put it up in space, power it with solar cells. One ought to be able to build one that should produce an acceleration of 1 mm/sec^2, "forever", off of sunlight. That's a delta-v of around 200 mph/day, unmistakable, and if it can produce this without losing mass and using only sunlight as energy input, CED, QED, and the second law of thermodynamics are going to all be very sad... as we will have built a machine that violates the second law of thermodynamics, (electrical) energy into work "with no other effect".
Until then, let's remain just a bit skeptical, shall we?
rgb
Oh, I was just being facetious. As you say, physics has undergone multiple "complete rewrites" (not really, but yeah, aristotelian->newtonian, newtonian->quantum, galiliean->lorentz are at the very least very, very serious revisions of the way we think even if they do eat their predecessors and continue to support their successful results).
However, the law of conservation of momentum is one of those things that it is difficult to muck with, without requiring a pretty complete rewrite. If you put this thing in deep space and it just moves (accelerates) without shooting mass/energy/momentum out in some form, it would make me -- and physics -- pretty sad. I have to put it in the same category as the prior reports of transluminal neutrinos and the like. Always possible that they are true, but claims that will change everything require the most solid of evidence, and so far this is in the category of any number of famous "marginal" results that turned out to be accidents of one sort or another.
At the end of the day, of course, physics is KNOWN to be incomplete. Maybe the damn thing is acting as a darkon drive and is through a process we do not understand converting microwaves to darkons to momentum through some unknown resonance process. Maybe it is evidence for a dual universe where charge and spacetime are reversed, and the cavity somehow couples the two so it is pushing off against its shadow twin. Maybe we can make up a dozen theoretical explanations for it -- eventually, if necessary.
But for the moment it, like transluminal neutrinos, is still in the "probably magic" category pending extraordinary evidence to back up the extraordinary claim. Maybe if NASA launches one into orbit with its own solar power system and runs it for a few years, during which time it promotes its orbit in unmistakable ways. It doesn't look like it needs to mass more than a few hundred kilograms total, solar panels ought to be able to provide it with at least a kilowatt or three, so getting a thrust of around a newton should be possible. A newton may not sound like much pushing 100+ kg, but an acceleration of 1 mm/sec^2 over a day adds 84600 mm/sec, or roughly 90 m/sec, or (multiplying by 9/4) roughly 200 mph. It wouldn't take many days to make a clear, unmistakable alteration in the orbit. With modern instrumentation, I would think "one" (or even less) would suffice. Even 20 m/sec/day acceleration at a tenth of this ought to show up almost immediately.
In space, there is nothing nearby to push against. One can actually use the observed thrust itself to measure the mass of the satellite and see if it varies over time (eliminating the possibility that mass is being thrown out somehow assuming that it does not, as it should not). With solar cells with a cross-sectional area of at most a few square meters, radiation pressure is utterly incapable of producing this acceleration because you have at most Pr = S/c to work with, and S is order of 1400 W/m^2 and by the time you divide by c you have basically nothing left (as observed elsewhere in the thread).
At that point, if it accelerates as advertised, Classical Electrodynamics is dead as a doorknob, and QED is walking wounded as it still works off of CED and at the microwave level and high power, "photons" ought to be irrelevant anyway. Note well: you are converting a substantial amount of incoming electromagnetic energy directly into work "with no other effect" if it works as advertised. So even the second law of thermodynamics is going to be very sad. I'm tempted to quote Eddington:
"The second law of thermodynamics holds, I think, the supreme position among
the laws of nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the
Universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse
for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation -
well, those experimentalists do bungle things up sometimes. but if your theory
is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope;
there is nothing to do but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
There's some wisdom there...
Elementary E&M. The EM field, quantum or not, "particle like" or not, is a FIELD. If you set up the two slit experiment there are places on the screen where the fields from two coherent sources (slits) are out of phase and no energy or momentum is transferred. Even if you turn the intensity down to where one "photon" at a time goes through the pair of slits (yes, it goes through BOTH slits, or at least the FIELD does) the photons appear only in the BRIGHT bands where the fields are IN phase. No energy or momentum is transferred to the dark bands.
So the correct answer is that if there is a volume of space where the photons are out of phase and cancel, there is another volume of space (at a different angle) where they are IN phase and do NOT cancel, they add. Energy and momentum are conserved. The light just goes only to places where the FIELD addition is coherent and at least partly in phase. QED.
The photon is its own antiparticle, BTW.
This drive is (so far) like a hypothetical box in space containing a kid with a basketball. He keeps bouncing the ball off of one wall so that it recoils off and he catches it. Every time he bounces it off the wall, however, the box recoils away from the kid, and gradually builds up an appreciable momentum.
So all we need to explain this drive is a way for the kid to catch the ball, inside the box, and not just transfer the exact same momentum back to the other side of the box that he's standing on in order to be able to throw the ball in fhe first place.
rgb
Ah, but this drive is MAGIC, and doesn't obey the laws of conservation of momentum and equal action/reaction and all that. It pulls itself up by its bootstraps. It gets rich by selling itself rocks. And if it violates momentum conservation it almost certainly violates energy conservation too. Chaos ensues. The Universe collapses in a puff of physical inconsistency.
Or, as it moves forward, it kicks something else backwards. There really aren't a lot of choices here that don't require a fairly complete rewrite of physics. Even at the quantum level, outside of irrelevant borrowings at the scale of hbar, these conservation laws hold and it is pretty well believed that they hold globally for closed systems and that energy and momentum and angular momentum are in detailed balance in interactions. That's the entire basis of field theory. You're talking about a nearly complete rewrite of field theory (along with everything else).
Or, it kicks something backwards. Or, something else is going on. I'll take a heap 'o convincing, though, before I throw out physics in favor of "magic".
rgb
If I had any ligoites in my addressbook, sure, but lacking that, posting on /. is a good way to proceed. OTOH, reading the wikipedia page would probably do it too. At the moment I'm making up a physics final and don't have time -- I was just dangling bait to see if I could get a lazy answer in the meantime...;-)