Yes, well I have given up -- you and others do indeed seem to have thought things through more carefully than I have so far, which is to be expected I suppose but it's disappointing that it won't quite work, if only because it would make such a hell of an array if it did. But between clock problems and signal problems, looks like it almost only counts with hydrogen bombs and hand grenades, not cell phone tower radiotelescopes. Sigh. Hope I wasn't too obnoxious in my misdirected enthusiasm...;-)
Not just copyright infringement cases. It implies a completely deterministic Universe, absolving you of fundamental moral responsibility altogether. So I had no choice but to reply to you even though you are quite right, this wouldn't work in copyright infringement cases which in turn have no choice but to exist whether or not they are truly morally justified.
rgb
P.S. -- beat up a lot for saying things people find to be random? How can they? Nothing is random. No we get beat up because it is our destiny to get beat up, just as it is yours not to be helped...;-)
Just to be picky -- the default state is 1's, not 0's. NAND in particular has to start out all 1's and then "writes" turn some bits in a block into 0's. And the issue is whether or not the 1/default state is the ground state of any given bit (first) and whether or not there is some interbit interaction energy (second) and what the sign of that interaction energy is (third). One could in principle write a very simple model hamiltonian for the system that looks like:
H = - \sum_i (A b_i +/- \sum_j B_{ij} (b_i - 1/2) (b_j - 1/2))
where the first term represents the additional energy gained turning a 1 into a 0 and the second one (probably summed only over nearest neighbors) the energy gained or lost when neighboring bits are the same or different states. b_i is bit state, 1 (default) or 0.
The real question, then, is whether or not A is zero or if it should be e.g. A(b_i - 1/2) (symmetric) and whether B_{ij} is positive, negative or zero. If I didn't make any algebra mistakes in writing this down. If A and B are known, of course, one can easily estimate the cost of writing 4 GB of data, and I'm guessing that's what TFA does (without reading it, of course, what would be the fun of that!).
Actually, I was about to post the same, but then I thought about it. Suppose the medium is magnetic. "Erased" it is in a homogeneous state, which is actually a lower energy state than when there are patterns of 0's and 1's on it. Every 0/1 boundary costs energy. For magnetic media, then, writing any detailed data to the drive costs energy (most of which is expended shifting the state in a bit in a way that conserves the final energy of the state in a symmetric way) BUT there is a very slight increase in the energy associated with neighboring bits when they conflict. As you use the drive you approach an equilibrium average energy slightly higher than all 0's on the drive and slightly lower than a drive full of 01010101...s
For flash memory (if I understand it correctly, open to doubt) a bit is basically a capacitor with an RC time constant of years and a double-gate MOSFET hooked up that permit the passive reading of capacitor state. The default, energetically ground state of a bit is 1. Writing a 0 to a bit "flashes" electrons across a quantum boundary to invert the capacitor state, and the inverted state is very slightly higher energy (and increases the interbit energy as well in a manner similar to the HDD platter).
Note that one should not confuse (in either case) the energy required to switch a bit's state with the energy of the final state. The former is quite large but doesn't add energy/mass to the storage medium. I'd have to read TFA to see if the author actually confused this, but if I read the article then my head would probably explode and I have other more useful things to do -- like almost anything. Indeed, the design of flash memory looks like it might well be (almost?) completely energy-symmetric -- I'm really assuming that the 1 state is energetically stable because of the way the device is hooked up to ground -- the actual structure of a bit is two N-type "plates" separated by a P-type insulator/substrate and looks completely symmetric. If the true ground state is symmetric neutrality, then the author is incorrect -- flash memory, as you say, has the same energy over ground once initialized/formatted in ANY state, and the only increase in energy is a second order interbit interaction energy. For ferromagnets that energy would be minimum in the aligned state. For flash memory, I'd actually expect it to be antiferroelectric -- lowest energy when an equal number of 0s and 1s are written to the device, so that pairs of bits could neutralize each other and enter not-0 not-1 with no net charge (asymmetry) on either N-type plate. But I rather think that 1 is already this neutral state.
Ah, but the information theorist would argue -- with absolutely impeccable reasoning, mind you -- that both empirically and theoretically, information is strictly conserved in all physical interactions: no new information is ever created. In fact, existing physical laws strictly conserve information. Leonard Susskind has a lovely book about his "Battle with Stephen Hawking to make the world safe for quantum mechanics" that demonstrates that even black holes conserve information (and even if they didn't, nobody ever argued that they create it.
Consequently the information content of any book was, in fact, not created "by" anyone. It was inherent in the Universe itself from the non-existent oxymoronic "beginning of time" (or rather, the four-dimensional Universe itself is a static entity unless/until proven otherwise). Therefore, one cannot "steal" it (or "pirate" it) as it was not created by the author -- that is strictly an illusion -- and indeed the so-called "theft" is as inevitable as the original appearance of the bizarre and highly unstable patterns of electronic, molecular, and neural state that represent the ontological entities we call "a book".
Damn shame about the inevitable and eternal appearance of those same evanescent patterns that represent the "DMCA", wot?
Well, OK then. Yes, stability is key, although I fail to completely understand why they don't put high precision and stable clocks in the GPS satellites if they are going to put it anywhere, since putting a $300K clock at every tower would, no doubt, raise the cost a bit...;-)
Sure, but all of those issues also exist (except for the radio interference issue, which exists but is smaller) for any array of dipole antennae including the ones that are part of the SKA. However, I wouldn't argue that the cost might be higher than my student's guess -- it was predicated on various things and as you're pointing out, "reality" might be different on some of them, although the idea itself in principle would work with some tweaking.
What I suggested to my student was that he/we write a proposal for a pilot project to see if we could combine just a few -- say, 10 or 100 -- relatively local cell towers into a RT. Even if one ended up designing a very simple dipole unit that could be attached to existing towers at the very top, oriented to receive from straight up and with enough side and bottom screening to eliminate most of the noise from the tower and nearby towers I think it would still be relatively cheap, and the nice thing is (as I said) that you're sitting ON a communications line so all you have to do is record and burst transmit results to postprocess later. With a pilot one could see what works, what doesn't, and determine if the project can be scaled up (even gradually) to compete with the SKA's dipole array at far lower cost. I think it probably can.
Actually, this is not true. A million towers -- squared. The signal is there, only it is buried in the noise. With one tower you can't extract it. With ten towers (directionally phased) you basically boost the signal to noise ration by 100 (and probably still can't extract it). With a million towers, you increase (directionally selected) signal to noise by a factor of 10^12. That's the whole point of radiotelescope arrays. For small arrays, with only 1000 or so receivers, sure, you need to bump signal to noise some other way, and putting a dish or the like is certainly plausible, but the original radiotelescope array (Jansky's) was indeed just a pair of dipole antennae. Indeed, one part of the proposed SKA is a phased array of simple dipole antennae. It is left as an exercise for the studio audience to note that a significant part of the SKA proposal does indeed spread sparse clusters of these dipoles out across distances up to 3000 km. However, as you note, they are investing a lot more in electronics, installing relatively small numbers of dishes at widely separated sites (and equally small clusters of phased dipoles, ditto), trying to achieve brightness through directionality and amplification with the dishes (although the tiles and dipoles are probably no more sensitive than they would be piggybacked on cell phone towers -- perhaps you didn't realize that a major part of the SKA is these non-dish receivers?)
This is a critical point; no quotidian dish array spread out over only 1 km can even think of touching the resolution of a 3000 to 5000 km array at e.g. the hydrogen line that passes easily through the atmosphere. Tuned to 21 cm, \sin(theta) \approx 2 \times 10^-1 m / 4 \times 10^6 = 5 \times 10^4 radians -- not much compared to big optical telescopes but pretty good as far as peeking through dust clouds. Between trillionfold brightening and 100 microradian resolution, one could take a pretty awesome picture of the sky using e.g. the US, Europe, Australia, Asia as a telescope.
As a side bonus, 1.4 GHz is actually less than computer clocks these days, and with a sub-nanosecond reference one could actually digitize the incoming signal and do all of the image processing in software. Yes, it's big science -- the antennae are relatively cheap, collecting the data per station AT the station is cheap, transmitting the data back to a collection site is moderately expensive, storing there (A million terabytes of storage for order of 1000 seconds of signal from a million receivers) ditto, but the actual image processing would be seriously big computing. OTOH, it could combine building a high-res map of the hydrogen line in the entire 4\pi solid angle with SETI and various other projects all for roughly a $3 billion dollar budget, the same general ballpark as the SKA but with vastly brighter reception in both the dipole and tiled receiver bands.
Even at twice the price IMO it might be worth it. Whether it is "better" than building arrays of dish arrays over a similar baseline -- well, that is a useful question, but the answer is far better at some things, maybe not so much better in others, as one might expect. The dipoles look everywhere at once, the dishes look only at one direction (or one small patch of sky) at a time. I think it is instantly obvious that making all the cell phone towers radiotelescope dipoles (and even adding tiled receivers to them too, why not) yields a continent-spanning array with almost frightfully high resolution and brightness compared to the SKA -- anything the SKA can do the cell-phone tower array can do not just better, but likely a millionfold better, cheaper -- but it may well not be so good at doing some of the things the parabolic dish array will do.
Every cell phone tower in the US has access to extremely high precision time signals via GPS (and indeed, most of them function as secondary GPS locators by effectively forwarding that signal plus tower location data for phone "GPS" which isn't). Every cell phone tower is basically a big antenna. Every cell phone tower has excellent signal connectivity (usually fiber, sometimes microwave) to a communications network that can carry the signals they receive at any particular frequency, convolved with a universal time reference frequency synchronized by means of the aforementioned GPS, to a large processing station. Hence it is absolutely bone-simple to turn the entire network of existing cell phone towers into one great big radiotelescope.
The cost of doing so is almost certainly going to be a tiny fraction of the cost of building an actual devoted function radiotelescope. I had a student estimate the cost per tower to be in the ballpark of $1000 US for a local computer and sundry electronics, probably less purchased in bulk. One could very likely get the tower owners to donate at least the access to the radio signals (basically costs them nothing), a place to site electronics (ditto), and with luck even a channel and some bandwidth to permit the upload of x-hours of recorded phase locked signal in off-peak bursts as part of their "public service" requirement.
The additional benefit is that one ends up with a radiotelescope that spans a continent -- an aperture several thousand kilometers across, with hundreds of thousands to millions of towers contributing. The resolution would thus be orders of magnitude greater than any of these toys that they are trying to fund and the sensitivity (proportional to N^2) would be MANY orders of magnitude greater as well. In fact, one could probably build arrays that spanned continents and turn the entire surface area of the earth into one big radiofrequency "eye" that can be turned not just anywhere but everywhere 24x7 -- the towers basically record a high resolution hologram of the night sky and one can "look" in any direction you like within any single dataset by simply adjusting the phases of the recorded signals appropriately in the decoding. That is, one doesn't have to devote the towers to looking in some particular direction, one can look in all directions at once and choose what to actually look at in detail in the step where the signals are decoded and recombined with appropriate phase delays.
This will never get funded, of course -- it isn't "big science" in any visible way. Or rather, perhaps it already has been funded, because it is one of the few ways I can think of that one could provide an ABM defense with a universal direction "eye" with sufficient resolution to locate an incoming warhead, and (by using the entire array as a phase-locked TRANSMISSION array) one might even be able to deliver a megawatt or so of power of microwave energy directly onto the missile itself and burn it out. Of course, if this is true then I guess I'll soon have somebody knocking on my door for publishing this on/., but so be it.
And hence, one day, we may need COMPLETELY DIFFERENT classifications than we now have, and the designation "Dwarf Planet" may turn out not to be one of them. Besides which, I'm half kidding. Heck, I've even mastered Apatosaurus, I can cope with the cognitive dissonance I feel when I read Heinlein and read about the "Nine Planets Symphony" and my mind cringes with the knowledge that there are only eight planets because Pluto got reclassified. Of course next they'll take Mercury away, or they'll add Ceres, or....
No, it's just too horrible to face. There are at least nine Big Rocks -- well, ten, or maybe eleven -- orbiting Mr. Sun. They are all just plain PLANETS. PLANETS I say. We don't call Jupiter a "Giant Planet", we just call it a Gas Giant that happens to be a planet. Why can't Pluto just be a planet that happens to be size-challenged, somewhat, errrr, Dwarfish? It just isn't fair.
You're making fourth graders everywhere very sad with your hatin'.
Renaming it a dwarf doesn't change the actual object that "The Planet Pluto" refers to, and somehow astronomers managed not to be confused about that latter point for a rather long time. Even now, if I call Pluto a planet, I'll bet you understand perfectly well what object I'm referring to. I think that is what was being sardonically observed in one of the comments earlier about the renaming not, actually, being science any more than renaming Brontosaurus Apatosaurus was. All it did was make lots of movies and cultural reference obsolete.
It's not like there are so very many objects out there orbiting our sun that we actually NEED more adjectives or taxonomic categories. We could refer just to "Pluto" and leave off the word planet altogether and zero information would be lost.
This is close to what Duke Power does -- one gets a discount on the bill for participating in their load levelling program. I don't know about the rest of your microaccounting -- IIRC it is a flat discount -- but it seemed fair enough when I let them install it.
Our social species, by the way, has a reptile brain with all of its appetites right in the middle of all of that mammal and primate cortex, and yeah, we're nothing more than heavily evolved reptiles with all of the same appetites. We want food, shelter, sex, status, victory over competitors. Mammal cortex makes us like small cute things so we don't eat our own offspring so much any more, mostly. Primate cortex gives us a fighting chance to transcend the basic reptile and mammal drives programmed into our core, but it isn't a matter of being a psychopath or narcissist -- or not, it is a matter of using reason -- or not. Morality is either based on reason and enlightened (or if you prefer, educated) self-interest or it is almost by definition borderline insane -- for example religious mythology such as Christian or Communist morality -- and generally dysfunctional.
But if you want to solve the problems of the world by identifying and punishing everybody who disagrees with your solution (because they are obvious psychopaths and narcissists by your clearly objective standards), well, have at it. Sounds pretty psychopathic and narcissistic to me, though...
Yes indeedy. Or if Yellowstone goes. Did anyone point out that supervolcano eruptions (or straight up basaltic flows) can go on for, say, million year timescales? They can alter climate catastrophically for time frames of hundreds of thousands of years and they produce all sorts of interesting gases that are up-front toxic, not to mention the hot molten rock that can spread out over hundreds of thousands of square kilometers. They are baaaaad.
And just one of the many completely natural ways the Earth is constantly messing with "the ecosystem" -- a.k.a. life forms scrabbling not to become extinct against the background of periodic catastrophic extinction event change.
The US does something similar as well, only they use it. For example, my power company can turn my air conditioner compressor off during peak hours for up to 15 or 30 minutes. This keeps them from having to build so many new generating facilities to manage peak load (and of course reduces total consumption accordingly, at least during peak). Allowing a third party to control e.g. your freezer is generally not a good idea, especially if the plan is to turn off the power for relatively long periods of time (and you can already set the freezer temperature higher than -26C, which is colder than most things likely need). The problem is that the third party doesn't know what is in the freezer, and I'd surely hate for lab freezers or medical freezers (to name just two) to be remote-controlled by somebody that doen't realize that your vaccine will spoil and become a deadly toxin if its temperature isn't maintained below X.
The more interesting and plausible changes that accomplish something similar will be things like the creation of cheap smart receptacles and a cheap smart controller with cheap smart transducers that do simple magic like power down lights when people aren't in a room, move music with people, regulate room temperatures ditto. There is plenty of potential profit in this already -- I'm moderately conscientious but even with CF bulbs I waste dollars every months in the form of lights that are on with nobody in the room. There are already numerous "smart homes" out there, but the dollar costs of building one are still too high for mere dollars (or even tens of dollars) per month to pay back in a reasonable time frame. There was an article a few days ago about some ex-Apple people who are working on reducing costs with smarter stuff, but given that dumb power receptacles cost only order of a buck plus installation and are highly reliable and safe once installed vs a MUCH higher -- a safeplug 1202 costs $124 retail, on sale, plus shipping. Drop this to $5 and MAYBE it starts to be worth it to replace the hundred odd receptacles in my house, but at this price (plus the equally exorbitant price of the controller system) I'd be paying some $20K for whole-house conversion and repaying it will -- being generous -- $10/month in savings. Even if my savings were $100/month (which they would never be -- the bulk of my energy consumption is stuff like AC and refrigeration which this doesn't touch) that's way more than a 20 year payback on a loan at 5%, and just isn't worth it, where at $5 per receptacle it would be a no-brainer, payback in a few years and reduced costs forever.
As always, the only way to cut the costs is to increase the economies of scale. The only way to increase the economies of scale is to make the market larger. The only way to make the market larger (in a free market system) is to drop the price, which you can't do because you don't have the economies of scale!
The only way around this is for a third party -- the government -- to intervene, which is clearly some sort of voodoo magic anathema to the worshippers of capitalism as some sort of global superintelligence that transcends mere humans, trying to use their brains for something other than holding their ears apart. The government can do things that create and guarantee the market -- recognize that if everybody has to install smart receptacles because of government mandate, manufacturers will have an incentive to ramp up production, more companies will jump in, and competition and large scale production facilities will drop costs. It can do this by recognizing that while none of us wants to assume the debt because at current costs we're almost better off banking the money and paying for the power on the interest we earn (or would, if banks paid any interest at all these days) the global benefit to dropping power consumption 5 to 10% is worth it to society as a whole and we really do realize a much larger payback in even the medium run, particularly as costs per unit installed drop
Ah, but a gun type design does not require timing, it requires alignment. So accidentally triggering the explosive (in the actual context of my remark) could indeed set it off, where a lensing design makes this basically impossible. Everything else you say I agree with (and was only semi-quoting Rutherford because U235 is much slower than Pu239 and you can indeed get it supercritical before it triggers, especially without an external neutron source to use as a trigger, although sure explosives and a trigger are going to work better and implosion much better). Indeed, these days the only hard part is bomb grade material, and honestly that isn't intrinsically difficult -- it is only made difficult by government controls and so on.
However, I should probably have known that the configuration used was implosion -- I just didn't look it up. So you caught me out being lazy...
Yeah, I don't even know where one would learn this these days -- oh, wait, I see, wikipedia. Why am I not surprised? Yes, well, implosion I fully agree would be unlikely to go critical from an accidental shock from an asymmetrical compression, that's why they both use dual explosive lenses and require those itty bitty superfast switches and detonators that used to be (and probably still are) controlled munitions. Although I can't help but imagine that these days anybody with a laptop computer could design the implosion lenses from spec and that there are dozens of ways of accomplishing the timing using over the counter or homemade stuff.
Ah, but the good old gun design. Anybody could manage that one. Got an old shotgun? Make yourself a (pretty high yield) fission nuke! The only catch there was getting pure enough U235, and I rather suspect that that has been made way simpler than Oak Ridge level gas diffusion plants and centrifuges by the use of a bit more modern physics...
Depends on what the bombs are made out of. For thermonuclear bombs you're mostly correct all of the time, and completely correct most of the time. Only if the thermonuclear part of the bomb is triggered with a straight up boring U235 gun design core is it not correct. There's a Rutherford quote I don't have the energy to look up that points out that one can get a creditable nuclear explosion out of two subcritical pieces of U235 if one places one of them on the floor and drops the other onto it off of a table. Or, I imagine, grabs one in each hand and slams them together manually (what a way to commit suicide!) Setting off high explosives in the wrong place in a gun type bomb could very definitely cook off a real nuclear explosion.
Implosion bombs, OTOH, are damned difficult to set of at all, and require precise timing, shaped charges, and so on. I have no idea what the B53 bomb is -- if it is a BIG bomb and it DOES have Uranium in it it might not be a Pu implosion core. No matter what, accidentally setting off HE inside a nuke, even if not in the precise way that sets it off critically, is a baaaaad idea...
A "simple" regimen of testing? Surely you jest. And quid custodeit ipso custodes? You seem to think that we have some source of philosopher-kings, but in the end, there is just us. Furthermore, those same "psychopaths" (by your definition, which might not be the same as mine) might turn out to be the only group fit to survive in a variety of kinds of external environmental stress that may well occur in the future. These "psychopathic" genes are not only in our gene pool, one could argue that they dominate our gene pool, because they are by virtue of the very selfishness you bemoan survivors.
I therefore beg to differ with the glibness of your solution, sir or madam, and argue instead that you should definitely read The Tragedy of the Commons by Hardin at your convenience. There you -- might -- learn that nearly all humans are "psychopaths" by any definition equating greed and selfishness with psychopathy. There is no finer example (aside from the trash that continue to be thrown from car windows by "psychopaths" every day onto the margins of our nations highways and into our shared commons waterways) than the fact that the world's population has just turned 7 billion. Surely all of those psychopaths know full well that having so many children is killing our shared earth, don't they?
I actually agree with most of this, although I would have said that both Capitalism and Communism are limited as theories and ugly when practiced in pure form. Indeed, it is so very simple to come up with sensible exceptions to ideologically pure versions that make it clear that while both of these are in some sense "attractors" -- conceptually simple limits of certain social/economic parameters -- neither one could possibly be considered an optimum.
Hence most of the world has long since gravitated to a mix of socialism and capitalism that seems to work better than either one alone, although (still) probably far from optimally. Tuning the parameters and trying things to see if we could improve on what we have if we could avoid making any given choice a religious choice as it so very often is now seems highly desireable. For example, I agree that allowing people to inherit wealth beyond a certain point is anti-egalitarian and anti-competitive, but up to some point it is also both Darwinian and highly competitive and hence, pure human nature. We all (well, mostly) want to protect our children and ensure that they have survival advantages -- parents who did not have these instincts did not pass on their genes as often as those who did, over the last half billion years.
OTOH, we have all seen the failure of the tribal/feudal system that allows people to preserve vast amounts of wealth and power between generations. It is one thing to set your kids up so that they can survive and not end up "poor" (which may well be necessary if your children are mentally challenged or otherwise handicapped, quite seriously) and to pass on things like Mama's diamond ring and the family farm and Aunt Nell's antique four-poster bed, and quite another to set them up with a hundred million dollars and the controlling interest in some business. You will almost certainly never get a democracy to outlaw the former -- people work for their children's future as much or more than for their own, especially as they age and have no particular "future" of their own -- and so you need to be very careful to draw generous lines that nevertheless prevent the latter.
To be frank, those lines were not sufficiently generous twenty years ago, and hence nearly everybody hated them. Also, they weren't written to completely prevent the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars between generations, they were written to tax that transfer in ways that the uber-wealthy could and did easily avoid but that really hurt the small/family business owner seeking to transfer control to the next generation (including small farmers). They are better now, but they've also made it once again rather easy to transfer most of your wealth to the next generation of your family no matter how much wealth there is being transferred.
I'd be perfectly happy to see some very generous line drawn out there -- say five or ten million dollars per son or daughter (only) inheriting -- such that spending the principle at a rate of $100K/year per person is enough to allow that person to live perfectly comfortably for a lifetime and then some, make a much smaller limit (a few hundred thousand dollars) for everybody else not a genetic descendant of the individual, and then tax (if you will) one hundred percent of the rest, requiring that any holdings be liquidated on the open market and not in any way "sheltered" or passed on to cronies or friends or somehow rerouted to children. No more "children of Sam Walton" or "descendants of Henry Ford" running an enterprise built by Dad or great-Grandpa. Ten million dollars is more than enough to fund anyone competent as they seek to buy back into a business or found new ones, and honestly, complete incompetents will lose or spend most of it almost immediately. Darwin's happy, parents are happy (enough), society is happy, everybody's happy except for gold-digging women, step-children, and the uber-rich seeking t
...ask Google. I've had excellent results with Dell laptops over many years now, as well as Lenovos and HPs and Toshibas and... pretty nearly anything will run Linux, or (I'm guessing) any of the BSDs. The one thing you have to watch for is device drivers, and really you only need to watch carefully for four of them -- sound, video, wireless and wired networks. Google is very much your friend here -- it will fairly expeditiously help you find out if the devices on any given laptop are well-supported.
In cases where they are not -- usually brand new hardware or hardware with really obscure e.g. networking chipsets -- one can almost always find workarounds and make the laptop work, but getting an install to work then starts to require uber-skills with Unix and a lot of practice e.g. rebuilding kernels and things like that. Not for the tyro, in other words, although this sort of thing is often how those obscure devices eventually are well-supported in the FOSS world. However, these days, Ubuntu or Debian or Fedora will often/usually "just work" right out of the box, and at most require a decision about whether or not to install e.g. Nvidia's custom linux drivers for their screens or stick with the FOSS drivers that don't provide the same speed but do provide adequate functionality otherwise.
As a number of people have pointed out, it is also pretty easy to purchase laptops with Linux pre-installed, in which case there is really no question about the drivers, is there? Or buy the same laptop models without any OS installed and install it yourself.
My only suggestion there is to do your best to buy laptops where you don't have to pay the "Windows Tax" -- some version or other of Windows pre-installed on the laptop (for which you pay, never doubt it) and that you are just going to trash and replace with Linux. I would say that it is this "tax" more than any other single thing that creates anti-Microsoft sentiment among Linux/BSD users. Microsoft (and, for that matter, Apple) have the markets wired so that you have more freedom to purchase any given system without any other feature -- a different hard drive, a different video or networking feature -- than you do to purchase it with your choice of an operating system. If I were the king of the forest, there would be a massive anti-trust lawsuit (and/or legislation) on behalf of The People and that would be that -- all systems sold could offer the purchaser a pre-installed operating system at a discounted price but sellers would no longer be able to mandate the purchase of a preinstalled operating system or sign deals with Microsoft giving them the preferential prices required to survive in the low-margin retail business in exchange for exclusivity. In the meantime, vote to the extent that you can with your checkbook, without paying Microsoft for the privilege of not using their operating system.
Yes, too bad that being a psychopath makes you so darned successful from a Darwinian point of view. Or, as Mel Brooks once put it, it's good to be King, and the true-feudal structure of our tribal history has been preserved in the corporate-feudal structure of modern times without most of the pomp and glitter, even as society as a whole has cast off actual kings and barons and dukes and earls and so on.
Still, I disagree with Marx (largely because he has manifestly proven to be incorrect, or at the very least off by a few centuries). The last century (continuing into this one) was the end of the Age of Kings -- we're down to something like 25 nations, worldwide, that are arguably despotisms (from 26 last week, with 2-3 more teetering on the edge and a powerful domino effect at work). Personally I think that next up is the casting off of religious mythologies and the secularization of the world. The percentage of people who do not claim membership in a religion that worships a mythological God has increased to around 22% worldwide (including the Buddhists, since Buddhism is an atheistic practice) and this probably underestimates the true numbers since a lot of people "have" to claim membership in a religion lest they become social, political or economic outcasts.
Until this happens, religion will remain a powerful tool in our hidden masters' hands. One can see it even now on these very pages, where trolls seize upon every opportunity to insert the notion that Obama is really Muslim (when in all probability Obama is a closet atheist, just like all the rest of the world elite, cynically professing and practicing religions only to accomplish his secular goals). As long as the Republicans can wear the mask of Jesus and brandish the Cross like a sword, pandering to all of those who seek to impose their religious morality and practice on the rest of us, what hope have we of uniting against those who control most of the wealth? We have already voted ourselves into chains in order to be "protected" from the evil of Muslim Terrorists from foreign lands, from the evil of Homosexual Persons being allowed to publicly practice their perversion even unto the Right and Christian practice of marriage, from the evil of Ending Pregnancies because everybody knows God infuses that teensy zygote with a soul first thing (and then goes further and causes 50% of those fully human and ensouled zygotes to fail to implant, aborting them Himself as it were).
There is an endless list of distractions waiting in the wings, to be trotted out to defend the status quo as required. Defense of the American Flag (since it is a sacred symbol of our country. Defense of "In God we Trust" on our currency, even though it openly mocks the first amendment. Defense of our "freedom" to pump and burn all of the oil in the world, disguised in many ways. Defending our "right" to be taught lies not only in mosques, churches and synagogues but in public schools, presenting "Intelligent Design" as a "scientific theory". A system of health care wherein a four hour "experimental" cancer chemotherapy treatment costs $36,000 (little of which goes to the physicians or nurses who actually administer it) and yet where most physicians are required to accept medicare and medicaid reimbursement rates for patients who are on these plans, which just means that they have to overcharge everybody else to subsidize the loss, where hospitals are required by law to treat anybody that comes in through their doors and hence have to overcharge everybody who can pay to cover the cost -- all smoke and mirrors obscuring our unwillingness to do things fairly instead of making the health care providers provide the illusion of a free market here.
Most of this has a very definite religious edge to it, and it takes something like a near-depression to shock we the people out of our one-issue voting ways, ways that the Republicans (at the beck and call of their hidden masters) have grown skilled at exp
Well, sort of. Suppose we spill a bunch of mercury all over the ground because we were using it to make bleach for paper and then went out of business and walked away from our factory leaving a few tens of metric tons of raw mercury in vats that corroded through. We bring in a bunch of little critters -- they don't have to be ten centimeters long or single celled, acutually -- that gobble up all of that ugly toxic mercury.
So, now what? You have just as much mercury as before. Only now it is in lots of little bugs, or worms, or bacteria, or whatever. Some of them biologically convert the liquid metal mercury into biologically active and dangerous forms where liquid mercury itself is actually relatively safe. But nothing they do gets rid of the mercury itself, or even binds it up in a truly safe form.
The problem with Uranium, or Plutonium is the same, only more so. You can't make it go away, and putting it inside of a life form only makes it potentially portable or biologically more active and hence dangerous.
Fantasy exceptions might be bacteria that eat certain toxic compounds and break them down into other non-toxic compounds -- perhaps transforming PCBs into salt and sugar or something else nifty and harmless -- but nothing's going to make lead, or mercury, or uranium into a nutrient, and very few things will be able to metabolize them into a (relatively) biologically inactive form.
Granted, money too. But the law still trumps the money, if one has a government that isn't overtly bribable made up of humans who genuinely want the best for the world. Alas, the latter still seems overwhelmingly the exception to the rule.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, well I have given up -- you and others do indeed seem to have thought things through more carefully than I have so far, which is to be expected I suppose but it's disappointing that it won't quite work, if only because it would make such a hell of an array if it did. But between clock problems and signal problems, looks like it almost only counts with hydrogen bombs and hand grenades, not cell phone tower radiotelescopes. Sigh. Hope I wasn't too obnoxious in my misdirected enthusiasm...;-)
rgb
Not just copyright infringement cases. It implies a completely deterministic Universe, absolving you of fundamental moral responsibility altogether. So I had no choice but to reply to you even though you are quite right, this wouldn't work in copyright infringement cases which in turn have no choice but to exist whether or not they are truly morally justified.
rgb
P.S. -- beat up a lot for saying things people find to be random? How can they? Nothing is random. No we get beat up because it is our destiny to get beat up, just as it is yours not to be helped...;-)
Just to be picky -- the default state is 1's, not 0's. NAND in particular has to start out all 1's and then "writes" turn some bits in a block into 0's. And the issue is whether or not the 1/default state is the ground state of any given bit (first) and whether or not there is some interbit interaction energy (second) and what the sign of that interaction energy is (third). One could in principle write a very simple model hamiltonian for the system that looks like:
H = - \sum_i (A b_i +/- \sum_j B_{ij} (b_i - 1/2) (b_j - 1/2))
where the first term represents the additional energy gained turning a 1 into a 0 and the second one (probably summed only over nearest neighbors) the energy gained or lost when neighboring bits are the same or different states. b_i is bit state, 1 (default) or 0.
The real question, then, is whether or not A is zero or if it should be e.g. A(b_i - 1/2) (symmetric) and whether B_{ij} is positive, negative or zero. If I didn't make any algebra mistakes in writing this down. If A and B are known, of course, one can easily estimate the cost of writing 4 GB of data, and I'm guessing that's what TFA does (without reading it, of course, what would be the fun of that!).
rgb
Actually, I was about to post the same, but then I thought about it. Suppose the medium is magnetic. "Erased" it is in a homogeneous state, which is actually a lower energy state than when there are patterns of 0's and 1's on it. Every 0/1 boundary costs energy. For magnetic media, then, writing any detailed data to the drive costs energy (most of which is expended shifting the state in a bit in a way that conserves the final energy of the state in a symmetric way) BUT there is a very slight increase in the energy associated with neighboring bits when they conflict. As you use the drive you approach an equilibrium average energy slightly higher than all 0's on the drive and slightly lower than a drive full of 01010101...s
For flash memory (if I understand it correctly, open to doubt) a bit is basically a capacitor with an RC time constant of years and a double-gate MOSFET hooked up that permit the passive reading of capacitor state. The default, energetically ground state of a bit is 1. Writing a 0 to a bit "flashes" electrons across a quantum boundary to invert the capacitor state, and the inverted state is very slightly higher energy (and increases the interbit energy as well in a manner similar to the HDD platter).
Note that one should not confuse (in either case) the energy required to switch a bit's state with the energy of the final state. The former is quite large but doesn't add energy/mass to the storage medium. I'd have to read TFA to see if the author actually confused this, but if I read the article then my head would probably explode and I have other more useful things to do -- like almost anything. Indeed, the design of flash memory looks like it might well be (almost?) completely energy-symmetric -- I'm really assuming that the 1 state is energetically stable because of the way the device is hooked up to ground -- the actual structure of a bit is two N-type "plates" separated by a P-type insulator/substrate and looks completely symmetric. If the true ground state is symmetric neutrality, then the author is incorrect -- flash memory, as you say, has the same energy over ground once initialized/formatted in ANY state, and the only increase in energy is a second order interbit interaction energy. For ferromagnets that energy would be minimum in the aligned state. For flash memory, I'd actually expect it to be antiferroelectric -- lowest energy when an equal number of 0s and 1s are written to the device, so that pairs of bits could neutralize each other and enter not-0 not-1 with no net charge (asymmetry) on either N-type plate. But I rather think that 1 is already this neutral state.
rgb
Ah, but the information theorist would argue -- with absolutely impeccable reasoning, mind you -- that both empirically and theoretically, information is strictly conserved in all physical interactions: no new information is ever created. In fact, existing physical laws strictly conserve information. Leonard Susskind has a lovely book about his "Battle with Stephen Hawking to make the world safe for quantum mechanics" that demonstrates that even black holes conserve information (and even if they didn't, nobody ever argued that they create it.
Consequently the information content of any book was, in fact, not created "by" anyone. It was inherent in the Universe itself from the non-existent oxymoronic "beginning of time" (or rather, the four-dimensional Universe itself is a static entity unless/until proven otherwise). Therefore, one cannot "steal" it (or "pirate" it) as it was not created by the author -- that is strictly an illusion -- and indeed the so-called "theft" is as inevitable as the original appearance of the bizarre and highly unstable patterns of electronic, molecular, and neural state that represent the ontological entities we call "a book".
Damn shame about the inevitable and eternal appearance of those same evanescent patterns that represent the "DMCA", wot?
rgb
Sir, I stand corrected.
rgb
Well, OK then. Yes, stability is key, although I fail to completely understand why they don't put high precision and stable clocks in the GPS satellites if they are going to put it anywhere, since putting a $300K clock at every tower would, no doubt, raise the cost a bit...;-)
rgb
Sure, but all of those issues also exist (except for the radio interference issue, which exists but is smaller) for any array of dipole antennae including the ones that are part of the SKA. However, I wouldn't argue that the cost might be higher than my student's guess -- it was predicated on various things and as you're pointing out, "reality" might be different on some of them, although the idea itself in principle would work with some tweaking.
What I suggested to my student was that he/we write a proposal for a pilot project to see if we could combine just a few -- say, 10 or 100 -- relatively local cell towers into a RT. Even if one ended up designing a very simple dipole unit that could be attached to existing towers at the very top, oriented to receive from straight up and with enough side and bottom screening to eliminate most of the noise from the tower and nearby towers I think it would still be relatively cheap, and the nice thing is (as I said) that you're sitting ON a communications line so all you have to do is record and burst transmit results to postprocess later. With a pilot one could see what works, what doesn't, and determine if the project can be scaled up (even gradually) to compete with the SKA's dipole array at far lower cost. I think it probably can.
rgb
Actually, this is not true. A million towers -- squared. The signal is there, only it is buried in the noise. With one tower you can't extract it. With ten towers (directionally phased) you basically boost the signal to noise ration by 100 (and probably still can't extract it). With a million towers, you increase (directionally selected) signal to noise by a factor of 10^12. That's the whole point of radiotelescope arrays. For small arrays, with only 1000 or so receivers, sure, you need to bump signal to noise some other way, and putting a dish or the like is certainly plausible, but the original radiotelescope array (Jansky's) was indeed just a pair of dipole antennae. Indeed, one part of the proposed SKA is a phased array of simple dipole antennae. It is left as an exercise for the studio audience to note that a significant part of the SKA proposal does indeed spread sparse clusters of these dipoles out across distances up to 3000 km. However, as you note, they are investing a lot more in electronics, installing relatively small numbers of dishes at widely separated sites (and equally small clusters of phased dipoles, ditto), trying to achieve brightness through directionality and amplification with the dishes (although the tiles and dipoles are probably no more sensitive than they would be piggybacked on cell phone towers -- perhaps you didn't realize that a major part of the SKA is these non-dish receivers?)
This is a critical point; no quotidian dish array spread out over only 1 km can even think of touching the resolution of a 3000 to 5000 km array at e.g. the hydrogen line that passes easily through the atmosphere. Tuned to 21 cm, \sin(theta) \approx 2 \times 10^-1 m / 4 \times 10^6 = 5 \times 10^4 radians -- not much compared to big optical telescopes but pretty good as far as peeking through dust clouds. Between trillionfold brightening and 100 microradian resolution, one could take a pretty awesome picture of the sky using e.g. the US, Europe, Australia, Asia as a telescope.
As a side bonus, 1.4 GHz is actually less than computer clocks these days, and with a sub-nanosecond reference one could actually digitize the incoming signal and do all of the image processing in software. Yes, it's big science -- the antennae are relatively cheap, collecting the data per station AT the station is cheap, transmitting the data back to a collection site is moderately expensive, storing there (A million terabytes of storage for order of 1000 seconds of signal from a million receivers) ditto, but the actual image processing would be seriously big computing. OTOH, it could combine building a high-res map of the hydrogen line in the entire 4\pi solid angle with SETI and various other projects all for roughly a $3 billion dollar budget, the same general ballpark as the SKA but with vastly brighter reception in both the dipole and tiled receiver bands.
Even at twice the price IMO it might be worth it. Whether it is "better" than building arrays of dish arrays over a similar baseline -- well, that is a useful question, but the answer is far better at some things, maybe not so much better in others, as one might expect. The dipoles look everywhere at once, the dishes look only at one direction (or one small patch of sky) at a time. I think it is instantly obvious that making all the cell phone towers radiotelescope dipoles (and even adding tiled receivers to them too, why not) yields a continent-spanning array with almost frightfully high resolution and brightness compared to the SKA -- anything the SKA can do the cell-phone tower array can do not just better, but likely a millionfold better, cheaper -- but it may well not be so good at doing some of the things the parabolic dish array will do.
rgb
Every cell phone tower in the US has access to extremely high precision time signals via GPS (and indeed, most of them function as secondary GPS locators by effectively forwarding that signal plus tower location data for phone "GPS" which isn't). Every cell phone tower is basically a big antenna. Every cell phone tower has excellent signal connectivity (usually fiber, sometimes microwave) to a communications network that can carry the signals they receive at any particular frequency, convolved with a universal time reference frequency synchronized by means of the aforementioned GPS, to a large processing station. Hence it is absolutely bone-simple to turn the entire network of existing cell phone towers into one great big radiotelescope.
/., but so be it.
The cost of doing so is almost certainly going to be a tiny fraction of the cost of building an actual devoted function radiotelescope. I had a student estimate the cost per tower to be in the ballpark of $1000 US for a local computer and sundry electronics, probably less purchased in bulk. One could very likely get the tower owners to donate at least the access to the radio signals (basically costs them nothing), a place to site electronics (ditto), and with luck even a channel and some bandwidth to permit the upload of x-hours of recorded phase locked signal in off-peak bursts as part of their "public service" requirement.
The additional benefit is that one ends up with a radiotelescope that spans a continent -- an aperture several thousand kilometers across, with hundreds of thousands to millions of towers contributing. The resolution would thus be orders of magnitude greater than any of these toys that they are trying to fund and the sensitivity (proportional to N^2) would be MANY orders of magnitude greater as well. In fact, one could probably build arrays that spanned continents and turn the entire surface area of the earth into one big radiofrequency "eye" that can be turned not just anywhere but everywhere 24x7 -- the towers basically record a high resolution hologram of the night sky and one can "look" in any direction you like within any single dataset by simply adjusting the phases of the recorded signals appropriately in the decoding. That is, one doesn't have to devote the towers to looking in some particular direction, one can look in all directions at once and choose what to actually look at in detail in the step where the signals are decoded and recombined with appropriate phase delays.
This will never get funded, of course -- it isn't "big science" in any visible way. Or rather, perhaps it already has been funded, because it is one of the few ways I can think of that one could provide an ABM defense with a universal direction "eye" with sufficient resolution to locate an incoming warhead, and (by using the entire array as a phase-locked TRANSMISSION array) one might even be able to deliver a megawatt or so of power of microwave energy directly onto the missile itself and burn it out. Of course, if this is true then I guess I'll soon have somebody knocking on my door for publishing this on
rgb
And hence, one day, we may need COMPLETELY DIFFERENT classifications than we now have, and the designation "Dwarf Planet" may turn out not to be one of them. Besides which, I'm half kidding. Heck, I've even mastered Apatosaurus, I can cope with the cognitive dissonance I feel when I read Heinlein and read about the "Nine Planets Symphony" and my mind cringes with the knowledge that there are only eight planets because Pluto got reclassified. Of course next they'll take Mercury away, or they'll add Ceres, or....
No, it's just too horrible to face. There are at least nine Big Rocks -- well, ten, or maybe eleven -- orbiting Mr. Sun. They are all just plain PLANETS. PLANETS I say. We don't call Jupiter a "Giant Planet", we just call it a Gas Giant that happens to be a planet. Why can't Pluto just be a planet that happens to be size-challenged, somewhat, errrr, Dwarfish? It just isn't fair.
rgb
You're making fourth graders everywhere very sad with your hatin'.
Renaming it a dwarf doesn't change the actual object that "The Planet Pluto" refers to, and somehow astronomers managed not to be confused about that latter point for a rather long time. Even now, if I call Pluto a planet, I'll bet you understand perfectly well what object I'm referring to. I think that is what was being sardonically observed in one of the comments earlier about the renaming not, actually, being science any more than renaming Brontosaurus Apatosaurus was. All it did was make lots of movies and cultural reference obsolete.
It's not like there are so very many objects out there orbiting our sun that we actually NEED more adjectives or taxonomic categories. We could refer just to "Pluto" and leave off the word planet altogether and zero information would be lost.
rgb
This is close to what Duke Power does -- one gets a discount on the bill for participating in their load levelling program. I don't know about the rest of your microaccounting -- IIRC it is a flat discount -- but it seemed fair enough when I let them install it.
rgb
Like I said, here, I'll make it very, very easy:
http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_tragedy_of_the_commons.html
Our social species, by the way, has a reptile brain with all of its appetites right in the middle of all of that mammal and primate cortex, and yeah, we're nothing more than heavily evolved reptiles with all of the same appetites. We want food, shelter, sex, status, victory over competitors. Mammal cortex makes us like small cute things so we don't eat our own offspring so much any more, mostly. Primate cortex gives us a fighting chance to transcend the basic reptile and mammal drives programmed into our core, but it isn't a matter of being a psychopath or narcissist -- or not, it is a matter of using reason -- or not. Morality is either based on reason and enlightened (or if you prefer, educated) self-interest or it is almost by definition borderline insane -- for example religious mythology such as Christian or Communist morality -- and generally dysfunctional.
But if you want to solve the problems of the world by identifying and punishing everybody who disagrees with your solution (because they are obvious psychopaths and narcissists by your clearly objective standards), well, have at it. Sounds pretty psychopathic and narcissistic to me, though...
rgb
Yes indeedy. Or if Yellowstone goes. Did anyone point out that supervolcano eruptions (or straight up basaltic flows) can go on for, say, million year timescales? They can alter climate catastrophically for time frames of hundreds of thousands of years and they produce all sorts of interesting gases that are up-front toxic, not to mention the hot molten rock that can spread out over hundreds of thousands of square kilometers. They are baaaaad.
And just one of the many completely natural ways the Earth is constantly messing with "the ecosystem" -- a.k.a. life forms scrabbling not to become extinct against the background of periodic catastrophic extinction event change.
rgb
The US does something similar as well, only they use it. For example, my power company can turn my air conditioner compressor off during peak hours for up to 15 or 30 minutes. This keeps them from having to build so many new generating facilities to manage peak load (and of course reduces total consumption accordingly, at least during peak). Allowing a third party to control e.g. your freezer is generally not a good idea, especially if the plan is to turn off the power for relatively long periods of time (and you can already set the freezer temperature higher than -26C, which is colder than most things likely need). The problem is that the third party doesn't know what is in the freezer, and I'd surely hate for lab freezers or medical freezers (to name just two) to be remote-controlled by somebody that doen't realize that your vaccine will spoil and become a deadly toxin if its temperature isn't maintained below X.
The more interesting and plausible changes that accomplish something similar will be things like the creation of cheap smart receptacles and a cheap smart controller with cheap smart transducers that do simple magic like power down lights when people aren't in a room, move music with people, regulate room temperatures ditto. There is plenty of potential profit in this already -- I'm moderately conscientious but even with CF bulbs I waste dollars every months in the form of lights that are on with nobody in the room. There are already numerous "smart homes" out there, but the dollar costs of building one are still too high for mere dollars (or even tens of dollars) per month to pay back in a reasonable time frame. There was an article a few days ago about some ex-Apple people who are working on reducing costs with smarter stuff, but given that dumb power receptacles cost only order of a buck plus installation and are highly reliable and safe once installed vs a MUCH higher -- a safeplug 1202 costs $124 retail, on sale, plus shipping. Drop this to $5 and MAYBE it starts to be worth it to replace the hundred odd receptacles in my house, but at this price (plus the equally exorbitant price of the controller system) I'd be paying some $20K for whole-house conversion and repaying it will -- being generous -- $10/month in savings. Even if my savings were $100/month (which they would never be -- the bulk of my energy consumption is stuff like AC and refrigeration which this doesn't touch) that's way more than a 20 year payback on a loan at 5%, and just isn't worth it, where at $5 per receptacle it would be a no-brainer, payback in a few years and reduced costs forever.
As always, the only way to cut the costs is to increase the economies of scale. The only way to increase the economies of scale is to make the market larger. The only way to make the market larger (in a free market system) is to drop the price, which you can't do because you don't have the economies of scale!
The only way around this is for a third party -- the government -- to intervene, which is clearly some sort of voodoo magic anathema to the worshippers of capitalism as some sort of global superintelligence that transcends mere humans, trying to use their brains for something other than holding their ears apart. The government can do things that create and guarantee the market -- recognize that if everybody has to install smart receptacles because of government mandate, manufacturers will have an incentive to ramp up production, more companies will jump in, and competition and large scale production facilities will drop costs. It can do this by recognizing that while none of us wants to assume the debt because at current costs we're almost better off banking the money and paying for the power on the interest we earn (or would, if banks paid any interest at all these days) the global benefit to dropping power consumption 5 to 10% is worth it to society as a whole and we really do realize a much larger payback in even the medium run, particularly as costs per unit installed drop
Ah, but a gun type design does not require timing , it requires alignment. So accidentally triggering the explosive (in the actual context of my remark) could indeed set it off, where a lensing design makes this basically impossible. Everything else you say I agree with (and was only semi-quoting Rutherford because U235 is much slower than Pu239 and you can indeed get it supercritical before it triggers, especially without an external neutron source to use as a trigger, although sure explosives and a trigger are going to work better and implosion much better). Indeed, these days the only hard part is bomb grade material, and honestly that isn't intrinsically difficult -- it is only made difficult by government controls and so on.
However, I should probably have known that the configuration used was implosion -- I just didn't look it up. So you caught me out being lazy...
rgb
Yeah, I don't even know where one would learn this these days -- oh, wait, I see, wikipedia. Why am I not surprised? Yes, well, implosion I fully agree would be unlikely to go critical from an accidental shock from an asymmetrical compression, that's why they both use dual explosive lenses and require those itty bitty superfast switches and detonators that used to be (and probably still are) controlled munitions. Although I can't help but imagine that these days anybody with a laptop computer could design the implosion lenses from spec and that there are dozens of ways of accomplishing the timing using over the counter or homemade stuff.
Ah, but the good old gun design. Anybody could manage that one. Got an old shotgun? Make yourself a (pretty high yield) fission nuke! The only catch there was getting pure enough U235, and I rather suspect that that has been made way simpler than Oak Ridge level gas diffusion plants and centrifuges by the use of a bit more modern physics...
Nucleo-Terroristically yours, rgb
Depends on what the bombs are made out of. For thermonuclear bombs you're mostly correct all of the time, and completely correct most of the time. Only if the thermonuclear part of the bomb is triggered with a straight up boring U235 gun design core is it not correct. There's a Rutherford quote I don't have the energy to look up that points out that one can get a creditable nuclear explosion out of two subcritical pieces of U235 if one places one of them on the floor and drops the other onto it off of a table. Or, I imagine, grabs one in each hand and slams them together manually (what a way to commit suicide!) Setting off high explosives in the wrong place in a gun type bomb could very definitely cook off a real nuclear explosion.
Implosion bombs, OTOH, are damned difficult to set of at all, and require precise timing, shaped charges, and so on. I have no idea what the B53 bomb is -- if it is a BIG bomb and it DOES have Uranium in it it might not be a Pu implosion core. No matter what, accidentally setting off HE inside a nuke, even if not in the precise way that sets it off critically, is a baaaaad idea...
rgb
A "simple" regimen of testing? Surely you jest. And quid custodeit ipso custodes? You seem to think that we have some source of philosopher-kings, but in the end, there is just us. Furthermore, those same "psychopaths" (by your definition, which might not be the same as mine) might turn out to be the only group fit to survive in a variety of kinds of external environmental stress that may well occur in the future. These "psychopathic" genes are not only in our gene pool, one could argue that they dominate our gene pool, because they are by virtue of the very selfishness you bemoan survivors.
I therefore beg to differ with the glibness of your solution, sir or madam, and argue instead that you should definitely read The Tragedy of the Commons by Hardin at your convenience. There you -- might -- learn that nearly all humans are "psychopaths" by any definition equating greed and selfishness with psychopathy. There is no finer example (aside from the trash that continue to be thrown from car windows by "psychopaths" every day onto the margins of our nations highways and into our shared commons waterways) than the fact that the world's population has just turned 7 billion. Surely all of those psychopaths know full well that having so many children is killing our shared earth, don't they?
Come up with simple solution to that!
rgb
I actually agree with most of this, although I would have said that both Capitalism and Communism are limited as theories and ugly when practiced in pure form. Indeed, it is so very simple to come up with sensible exceptions to ideologically pure versions that make it clear that while both of these are in some sense "attractors" -- conceptually simple limits of certain social/economic parameters -- neither one could possibly be considered an optimum.
Hence most of the world has long since gravitated to a mix of socialism and capitalism that seems to work better than either one alone, although (still) probably far from optimally. Tuning the parameters and trying things to see if we could improve on what we have if we could avoid making any given choice a religious choice as it so very often is now seems highly desireable. For example, I agree that allowing people to inherit wealth beyond a certain point is anti-egalitarian and anti-competitive, but up to some point it is also both Darwinian and highly competitive and hence, pure human nature. We all (well, mostly) want to protect our children and ensure that they have survival advantages -- parents who did not have these instincts did not pass on their genes as often as those who did, over the last half billion years.
OTOH, we have all seen the failure of the tribal/feudal system that allows people to preserve vast amounts of wealth and power between generations. It is one thing to set your kids up so that they can survive and not end up "poor" (which may well be necessary if your children are mentally challenged or otherwise handicapped, quite seriously) and to pass on things like Mama's diamond ring and the family farm and Aunt Nell's antique four-poster bed, and quite another to set them up with a hundred million dollars and the controlling interest in some business. You will almost certainly never get a democracy to outlaw the former -- people work for their children's future as much or more than for their own, especially as they age and have no particular "future" of their own -- and so you need to be very careful to draw generous lines that nevertheless prevent the latter.
To be frank, those lines were not sufficiently generous twenty years ago, and hence nearly everybody hated them. Also, they weren't written to completely prevent the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars between generations, they were written to tax that transfer in ways that the uber-wealthy could and did easily avoid but that really hurt the small/family business owner seeking to transfer control to the next generation (including small farmers). They are better now, but they've also made it once again rather easy to transfer most of your wealth to the next generation of your family no matter how much wealth there is being transferred.
I'd be perfectly happy to see some very generous line drawn out there -- say five or ten million dollars per son or daughter (only) inheriting -- such that spending the principle at a rate of $100K/year per person is enough to allow that person to live perfectly comfortably for a lifetime and then some, make a much smaller limit (a few hundred thousand dollars) for everybody else not a genetic descendant of the individual, and then tax (if you will) one hundred percent of the rest, requiring that any holdings be liquidated on the open market and not in any way "sheltered" or passed on to cronies or friends or somehow rerouted to children. No more "children of Sam Walton" or "descendants of Henry Ford" running an enterprise built by Dad or great-Grandpa. Ten million dollars is more than enough to fund anyone competent as they seek to buy back into a business or found new ones, and honestly, complete incompetents will lose or spend most of it almost immediately. Darwin's happy, parents are happy (enough), society is happy, everybody's happy except for gold-digging women, step-children, and the uber-rich seeking t
...ask Google. I've had excellent results with Dell laptops over many years now, as well as Lenovos and HPs and Toshibas and... pretty nearly anything will run Linux, or (I'm guessing) any of the BSDs. The one thing you have to watch for is device drivers, and really you only need to watch carefully for four of them -- sound, video, wireless and wired networks. Google is very much your friend here -- it will fairly expeditiously help you find out if the devices on any given laptop are well-supported.
In cases where they are not -- usually brand new hardware or hardware with really obscure e.g. networking chipsets -- one can almost always find workarounds and make the laptop work, but getting an install to work then starts to require uber-skills with Unix and a lot of practice e.g. rebuilding kernels and things like that. Not for the tyro, in other words, although this sort of thing is often how those obscure devices eventually are well-supported in the FOSS world. However, these days, Ubuntu or Debian or Fedora will often/usually "just work" right out of the box, and at most require a decision about whether or not to install e.g. Nvidia's custom linux drivers for their screens or stick with the FOSS drivers that don't provide the same speed but do provide adequate functionality otherwise.
As a number of people have pointed out, it is also pretty easy to purchase laptops with Linux pre-installed, in which case there is really no question about the drivers, is there? Or buy the same laptop models without any OS installed and install it yourself.
My only suggestion there is to do your best to buy laptops where you don't have to pay the "Windows Tax" -- some version or other of Windows pre-installed on the laptop (for which you pay, never doubt it) and that you are just going to trash and replace with Linux. I would say that it is this "tax" more than any other single thing that creates anti-Microsoft sentiment among Linux/BSD users. Microsoft (and, for that matter, Apple) have the markets wired so that you have more freedom to purchase any given system without any other feature -- a different hard drive, a different video or networking feature -- than you do to purchase it with your choice of an operating system. If I were the king of the forest, there would be a massive anti-trust lawsuit (and/or legislation) on behalf of The People and that would be that -- all systems sold could offer the purchaser a pre-installed operating system at a discounted price but sellers would no longer be able to mandate the purchase of a preinstalled operating system or sign deals with Microsoft giving them the preferential prices required to survive in the low-margin retail business in exchange for exclusivity. In the meantime, vote to the extent that you can with your checkbook, without paying Microsoft for the privilege of not using their operating system.
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Yes, too bad that being a psychopath makes you so darned successful from a Darwinian point of view. Or, as Mel Brooks once put it, it's good to be King, and the true-feudal structure of our tribal history has been preserved in the corporate-feudal structure of modern times without most of the pomp and glitter, even as society as a whole has cast off actual kings and barons and dukes and earls and so on.
Still, I disagree with Marx (largely because he has manifestly proven to be incorrect, or at the very least off by a few centuries). The last century (continuing into this one) was the end of the Age of Kings -- we're down to something like 25 nations, worldwide, that are arguably despotisms (from 26 last week, with 2-3 more teetering on the edge and a powerful domino effect at work). Personally I think that next up is the casting off of religious mythologies and the secularization of the world. The percentage of people who do not claim membership in a religion that worships a mythological God has increased to around 22% worldwide (including the Buddhists, since Buddhism is an atheistic practice) and this probably underestimates the true numbers since a lot of people "have" to claim membership in a religion lest they become social, political or economic outcasts.
Until this happens, religion will remain a powerful tool in our hidden masters' hands. One can see it even now on these very pages, where trolls seize upon every opportunity to insert the notion that Obama is really Muslim (when in all probability Obama is a closet atheist, just like all the rest of the world elite, cynically professing and practicing religions only to accomplish his secular goals). As long as the Republicans can wear the mask of Jesus and brandish the Cross like a sword, pandering to all of those who seek to impose their religious morality and practice on the rest of us, what hope have we of uniting against those who control most of the wealth? We have already voted ourselves into chains in order to be "protected" from the evil of Muslim Terrorists from foreign lands, from the evil of Homosexual Persons being allowed to publicly practice their perversion even unto the Right and Christian practice of marriage, from the evil of Ending Pregnancies because everybody knows God infuses that teensy zygote with a soul first thing (and then goes further and causes 50% of those fully human and ensouled zygotes to fail to implant, aborting them Himself as it were).
There is an endless list of distractions waiting in the wings, to be trotted out to defend the status quo as required. Defense of the American Flag (since it is a sacred symbol of our country. Defense of "In God we Trust" on our currency, even though it openly mocks the first amendment. Defense of our "freedom" to pump and burn all of the oil in the world, disguised in many ways. Defending our "right" to be taught lies not only in mosques, churches and synagogues but in public schools, presenting "Intelligent Design" as a "scientific theory". A system of health care wherein a four hour "experimental" cancer chemotherapy treatment costs $36,000 (little of which goes to the physicians or nurses who actually administer it) and yet where most physicians are required to accept medicare and medicaid reimbursement rates for patients who are on these plans, which just means that they have to overcharge everybody else to subsidize the loss, where hospitals are required by law to treat anybody that comes in through their doors and hence have to overcharge everybody who can pay to cover the cost -- all smoke and mirrors obscuring our unwillingness to do things fairly instead of making the health care providers provide the illusion of a free market here.
Most of this has a very definite religious edge to it, and it takes something like a near-depression to shock we the people out of our one-issue voting ways, ways that the Republicans (at the beck and call of their hidden masters) have grown skilled at exp
Well, sort of. Suppose we spill a bunch of mercury all over the ground because we were using it to make bleach for paper and then went out of business and walked away from our factory leaving a few tens of metric tons of raw mercury in vats that corroded through. We bring in a bunch of little critters -- they don't have to be ten centimeters long or single celled, acutually -- that gobble up all of that ugly toxic mercury.
So, now what? You have just as much mercury as before. Only now it is in lots of little bugs, or worms, or bacteria, or whatever. Some of them biologically convert the liquid metal mercury into biologically active and dangerous forms where liquid mercury itself is actually relatively safe. But nothing they do gets rid of the mercury itself, or even binds it up in a truly safe form.
The problem with Uranium, or Plutonium is the same, only more so. You can't make it go away, and putting it inside of a life form only makes it potentially portable or biologically more active and hence dangerous.
Fantasy exceptions might be bacteria that eat certain toxic compounds and break them down into other non-toxic compounds -- perhaps transforming PCBs into salt and sugar or something else nifty and harmless -- but nothing's going to make lead, or mercury, or uranium into a nutrient, and very few things will be able to metabolize them into a (relatively) biologically inactive form.
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Granted, money too. But the law still trumps the money, if one has a government that isn't overtly bribable made up of humans who genuinely want the best for the world. Alas, the latter still seems overwhelmingly the exception to the rule.
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