Lets put things into context. In Fukushima, the main problem was that they didn't have a seawall, unlike in Onagawa. You could also point out the Chernobyl disaster. The key problems there were old technology compared to today, combined with soviet halfassery and the fact that they made a conscious effort to make the plant go boom under the name of "safety testing".
http://slashdot.org/story/12/0...
Sources for Chernobyl disaster: go find your own.
In a research done by Liebetanz on rats, it appeared that it would take tDCS current density of 142.9A/m2 for durations greater than 10 minutes to cause lesions in rats brains. So if we take a tDCS device that has relatively small electrodes, like 3x3cm, we would need at least 128.61mA current for more than 10 minutes to cause any brain damage. Given that even 2mA (most typical) sessions can cause skin burns when the electrodes have been poorly prepared, the currents above 127.8mA would probably feel torturous. I think the user would figure out that there is something really wrong fairly quickly. Typical DIY device uses a 9V convenient store battery as a power source, its capacity could be around 400-1200mAh, which means the subject would only get less than 10 seconds of 129mA "fun" if everything goes wrong, in case the internal resistance of the battery would allow that high current, but it won't.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
- "His six-year-old daughter, Leide das Neves Ferreira, later ate a sandwich while sitting on the floor. She was also fascinated by the blue glow of the powder, and applying it to her body, showed it off to her mother. Dust from the powder fell on the sandwich she was consuming"
The DDOS attack method is the most primitive attack method besides a hammer. It cannot be considered a serious threat if things are done right. It could merely be a discomfort and a publicity stunt - that was also the case in the above mentioned DDOS attacks five years ago. One banks web page (a front end) wasn't available for a couple of hours, and maybe something else as well, but the core functionalities were intact.
A virus Affecting votes Inside the Servers
The servers receiving the votes should be at least duplicated (guessing here) so that the virus would have to have infected them all to affect the results without anybody noticing.
Over all I agree with you that no system is 100% safe of course.
There is also an electronic voting system in Estonia that uses ID cards (a smart card) for secure authentication. There is also a short summary about the secrecy scheme of the voting process in the document referenced below. http://www.vvk.ee/public/dok/Internet_Voting_in_Estonia.pdf
If you read the abstract of the article then it states that the tasks presented to the subjects where -"tasks requiring social cognition, i.e., reasoning about the mental states of other persons, and tasks requiring physical cognition, i.e., reasoning about the causal/mechanical properties of inanimate objects". Social reasoning does not equal empathy. Empathy requires one to share and understand others feelings while social reasoning is something a sociopath could do.
It seems to me that you are advocating the use of air bags without using seat belts. Here are some references:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18365327 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12169939
Airbag helps to very much lessen the incidence of the neck-related injuries that are the biggest problem with seat belts. So I would rather say that air bags and seat belts are good in combination, which is a common belief as well.
Meth (speed) is a prescription drug for example:
Methamphetamine is FDA approved for the treatment of ADHD and exogenous obesity. It is dispensed in the USA under the trademark name Desoxyn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methamphetamine
Although I don't know that much about the biochemistry that the Gizmag is talking about, and I can't criticize that, the sentence that contains "memories are stored somewhere, somehow in our brains but the exact process has never been entirely understood." is suspicious - almost as if the author has actually no interest in what so ever in the subject. You are right, we do know approximately where the memories are stored. These neocortex parts+hippocampuses are called temporal lobes, left for abstract information, and right for spatial, contextual and events information and it has been established for quite a long time that they are specialized in long term memory.
"..in the 1930s whe Wilder Penfield observed that his concious epileptic patients would occasionally report "flashbacks" while the superior or upper lateral surfaces of their temporal cortices were electrically stimulated."- Origins of Neuroscience: A History of Explorations Into Brain Function By Stanley Finger
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_lobe
You are right. No person with an adequate basic worldview of physics would write a sentence like "... is made up of just a few subatomic particles: electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, and so on." because he/she knew that protons and neutrons consist of quarks. The "and so on", seems inapropriate as well.
Also the Mike Ross's article raises some questions (although it is far from being a bad journalism when compared to many others):
- The statement that these "special electrons" had no mass was passed so lightly as it was nothing. Although, now I know that it is some special case which was found a while ago. http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/23538
- "..the researchers repositioned the carbon monoxide molecules on the surface" - So, how did they do it? With a scanning tunneling microscope? I am not arguing on this one, I just didn't find it out from the article.
- The force that forced the electrons in a graphene pattern was still electromagnetic, wasn't it? So how were these particles 'fooled'
? The statement about fooling the electrons came from one of the researchers, but I would still like to know. The journalist should have asked.
I wouldn't mind if the journalist reread some of the materials about basic nuclear physics before writing an article, no problem, that's what I did just a moment ago. It is the journalists job to gather background information and it is just a fraction of the information gathered that reaches the article. I mean the journalist should have just a notch of a deeper understanding than the level he/she is writing in. Although I have to admit, It probably is a bit harder in case of the breakthrough science journalism though.
It is a question of graph theory (it is a branch of computer science), and I am sure it can be solved with some efficiency because it seems like a typical one. If you want anything more specific, then how about reading the white paper? The theory including average and worst case scenarios is all there. Do not forget that the effects of this are cumulative. When one car frees the road quicker, then other cars can move quicker as well. The human factor seems to be a very important bottleneck in the traffic load management. If this would be in conjunction with the automatic driving system, there wouldn't be 0.2-0.4 second reaction times, uneven brakings, and keeping a safe distance from the car driving ahead would cost less time (and nerves). So my point is that when we would take the same amount of cars with (effective) AI-s and the same roads as of today, the peak hours wouldn't be the peak hours as we know them.
The paper seems to be free to download, I wonder why the Slashdot news narration doesn't include a reference to it :
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pstone/Papers/bib2html-links/AAMAS04.pdf
It is called transcranial direct current stimulation. Usually it is something like 3-9V (Why is it called electric shock in the Slashdot headline?) and probably low amperage as well because a typical 9v battery is allegedly enough. The TDCS is being considered a rediscovery, because 20 years ago psychiatrists would have been very sceptical about the current with so low voltage being able to pass through subjects skull and brain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_direct-current_stimulation
AC: "A stab in the arm, prior to learning a new task does enhance memory." - No, it is believed to be depending on the physiology of the orbitofrontal cortices of the subjects whether good or bad memories will dominate. Stress interferes with human memory formation systems in a negative way (and with all other cognitive abilities as well).
Maybe they should have considered something that uses electronic ink display. The picture would remain the same when the battery ran out or even when the internal electronics circuit failed somehow.
Failure in sense of what? They are practical, but the main reason why people don't use them seems to be that people don't want to be seen riding them. I would suggest that it could be the same with these cars but... It is GM that we are talking about, I bet they would use their influence, so that decision makers would take measures to encourage the stupid majority to use them. So given that these things are said to consume less energy as well, it is a good news then, right?
Wasn't it a X-45 of some kind(maybe X-45c?). It is supposed to be fully autonomous. Just because somobody might want to try to jam it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-45
icebike:"Burning the CO2 after separating it into its component parts" (Chemistry anyone? Is it Slashdot?)
How about stop talking about the CO2 like it was cryptonite or something. A growing biomass uses sun to capture the CO2. Wouldn't you ask what to do with all that biomass captured CO2? How about using sun to power the above mentioned endothermic reaction and then using methanol in the fuel cell instead of burning million years old trees, then getting 10% of that heat into electricity and then losing 90% of this into the grid leaving you 1%? Of course its practical use may be limited but using the CO2 term like this is just plain stupid and it shouldn't get insightful from anyone with more than basic education.
Its all true. Then the hydrogen fuel cells are said to be unstable or expensive. Holding methanol is easy and relatively safe, unless someone really thirsty decides to drink up the battery or something.
The laptop prototype using fuel cell with methanol: http://greenupgrader.com/2481/polyfuel-methanol-fuel-cell-t40-laptop-prototype/
Getting really pure methanol out of other sources requires a lots of energy costly refining as well. Maybe it will require smaller equipment too (thinking of domestic chargers)?
icebike:And then you are still left with the CO2 you captured. What to do with that?
Article:..could harvest atmospheric CO2 and combine it with hydrogen stripped from water to generate a methanol fuel for myriad uses..
CO2+3H2 <-> CH3OH+H2O
CO2 is carbon and oxygen btw.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets put things into context. In Fukushima, the main problem was that they didn't have a seawall, unlike in Onagawa. You could also point out the Chernobyl disaster. The key problems there were old technology compared to today, combined with soviet halfassery and the fact that they made a conscious effort to make the plant go boom under the name of "safety testing".
http://slashdot.org/story/12/0...
Sources for Chernobyl disaster: go find your own.
"variety, which is fissile (= radioactive, potentially dangerous and useable as nuclear fuel)" Fissile does not equal radioactive. All uranium isotopes are radioactive. And for the 238 isotope the term applies - fissionable, which means the fission can be brought on by high energy neutrons.
http://www.epa.gov/radiation/r...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
In a research done by Liebetanz on rats, it appeared that it would take tDCS current density of 142.9A/m2 for durations greater than 10 minutes to cause lesions in rats brains. So if we take a tDCS device that has relatively small electrodes, like 3x3cm, we would need at least 128.61mA current for more than 10 minutes to cause any brain damage. Given that even 2mA (most typical) sessions can cause skin burns when the electrodes have been poorly prepared, the currents above 127.8mA would probably feel torturous. I think the user would figure out that there is something really wrong fairly quickly. Typical DIY device uses a 9V convenient store battery as a power source, its capacity could be around 400-1200mAh, which means the subject would only get less than 10 seconds of 129mA "fun" if everything goes wrong, in case the internal resistance of the battery would allow that high current, but it won't.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
You are right, so that must mean there is no need to complain about legality of the Soviet Union dissolution either. I am fine with this one too.
Assembling the Soviet Union was illegal, so any laws and treaties made by Soviet Union are void anyway.
Reminds me of the Goiânia accident. A modern horror story.
- "His six-year-old daughter, Leide das Neves Ferreira, later ate a sandwich while sitting on the floor. She was also fascinated by the blue glow of the powder, and applying it to her body, showed it off to her mother. Dust from the powder fell on the sandwich she was consuming"
"Hollywood revisionism is to blame for a lot of the misconceptions about the American role in the war".
By the way, it was the Eastern Front, which claimed 80 percent of all German military casualties in the war. So basically, it was one evil empire against other and the winning one got away with its crimes. That is the reality. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/21/arts/a-job-for-rewrite-stalin-s-war.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
The DDOS attack method is the most primitive attack method besides a hammer. It cannot be considered a serious threat if things are done right. It could merely be a discomfort and a publicity stunt - that was also the case in the above mentioned DDOS attacks five years ago. One banks web page (a front end) wasn't available for a couple of hours, and maybe something else as well, but the core functionalities were intact.
A virus Affecting votes Inside the Servers
The servers receiving the votes should be at least duplicated (guessing here) so that the virus would have to have infected them all to affect the results without anybody noticing.
Over all I agree with you that no system is 100% safe of course.
There is also an electronic voting system in Estonia that uses ID cards (a smart card) for secure authentication. There is also a short summary about the secrecy scheme of the voting process in the document referenced below.
http://www.vvk.ee/public/dok/Internet_Voting_in_Estonia.pdf
If you read the abstract of the article then it states that the tasks presented to the subjects where -"tasks requiring social cognition, i.e., reasoning about the mental states of other persons, and tasks requiring physical cognition, i.e., reasoning about the causal/mechanical properties of inanimate objects". Social reasoning does not equal empathy. Empathy requires one to share and understand others feelings while social reasoning is something a sociopath could do.
It seems to me that you are advocating the use of air bags without using seat belts. Here are some references:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18365327
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12169939
Airbag helps to very much lessen the incidence of the neck-related injuries that are the biggest problem with seat belts. So I would rather say that air bags and seat belts are good in combination, which is a common belief as well.
Meth (speed) is a prescription drug for example: Methamphetamine is FDA approved for the treatment of ADHD and exogenous obesity. It is dispensed in the USA under the trademark name Desoxyn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methamphetamine
This comment, and the other comments of this user remind me of an "Unspeakable Vault" comic strip:
http://www.goominet.com/unspeakable-vault/vault/376/
There is a 1500 electrode bionic eye already in use, or I am missinterpreting something.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120308-will-we-ever-restore-sight
Have you ever been so drunk that you just can't walk on your two feet? There your go.
Although I don't know that much about the biochemistry that the Gizmag is talking about, and I can't criticize that, the sentence that contains "memories are stored somewhere, somehow in our brains but the exact process has never been entirely understood." is suspicious - almost as if the author has actually no interest in what so ever in the subject. You are right, we do know approximately where the memories are stored. These neocortex parts+hippocampuses are called temporal lobes, left for abstract information, and right for spatial, contextual and events information and it has been established for quite a long time that they are specialized in long term memory.
"..in the 1930s whe Wilder Penfield observed that his concious epileptic patients would occasionally report "flashbacks" while the superior or upper lateral surfaces of their temporal cortices were electrically stimulated."- Origins of Neuroscience: A History of Explorations Into Brain Function By Stanley Finger
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_lobe
You are right. No person with an adequate basic worldview of physics would write a sentence like "... is made up of just a few subatomic particles: electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, and so on." because he/she knew that protons and neutrons consist of quarks. The "and so on", seems inapropriate as well.
Also the Mike Ross's article raises some questions (although it is far from being a bad journalism when compared to many others):
- The statement that these "special electrons" had no mass was passed so lightly as it was nothing. Although, now I know that it is some special case which was found a while ago.
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/23538
- "..the researchers repositioned the carbon monoxide molecules on the surface" - So, how did they do it? With a scanning tunneling microscope? I am not arguing on this one, I just didn't find it out from the article.
- The force that forced the electrons in a graphene pattern was still electromagnetic, wasn't it? So how were these particles 'fooled' ? The statement about fooling the electrons came from one of the researchers, but I would still like to know. The journalist should have asked.
I wouldn't mind if the journalist reread some of the materials about basic nuclear physics before writing an article, no problem, that's what I did just a moment ago. It is the journalists job to gather background information and it is just a fraction of the information gathered that reaches the article. I mean the journalist should have just a notch of a deeper understanding than the level he/she is writing in. Although I have to admit, It probably is a bit harder in case of the breakthrough science journalism though.
It is a question of graph theory (it is a branch of computer science), and I am sure it can be solved with some efficiency because it seems like a typical one. If you want anything more specific, then how about reading the white paper? The theory including average and worst case scenarios is all there.
Do not forget that the effects of this are cumulative. When one car frees the road quicker, then other cars can move quicker as well. The human factor seems to be a very important bottleneck in the traffic load management. If this would be in conjunction with the automatic driving system, there wouldn't be 0.2-0.4 second reaction times, uneven brakings, and keeping a safe distance from the car driving ahead would cost less time (and nerves). So my point is that when we would take the same amount of cars with (effective) AI-s and the same roads as of today, the peak hours wouldn't be the peak hours as we know them.
The paper seems to be free to download, I wonder why the Slashdot news narration doesn't include a reference to it :
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pstone/Papers/bib2html-links/AAMAS04.pdf
It is called transcranial direct current stimulation. Usually it is something like 3-9V (Why is it called electric shock in the Slashdot headline?) and probably low amperage as well because a typical 9v battery is allegedly enough. The TDCS is being considered a rediscovery, because 20 years ago psychiatrists would have been very sceptical about the current with so low voltage being able to pass through subjects skull and brain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_direct-current_stimulation
AC: "A stab in the arm, prior to learning a new task does enhance memory." - No, it is believed to be depending on the physiology of the orbitofrontal cortices of the subjects whether good or bad memories will dominate. Stress interferes with human memory formation systems in a negative way (and with all other cognitive abilities as well).
Maybe they should have considered something that uses electronic ink display. The picture would remain the same when the battery ran out or even when the internal electronics circuit failed somehow.
Failure in sense of what? They are practical, but the main reason why people don't use them seems to be that people don't want to be seen riding them. I would suggest that it could be the same with these cars but... It is GM that we are talking about, I bet they would use their influence, so that decision makers would take measures to encourage the stupid majority to use them. So given that these things are said to consume less energy as well, it is a good news then, right?
Wasn't it a X-45 of some kind(maybe X-45c?). It is supposed to be fully autonomous. Just because somobody might want to try to jam it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-45
icebike:"Burning the CO2 after separating it into its component parts" (Chemistry anyone? Is it Slashdot?)
How about stop talking about the CO2 like it was cryptonite or something. A growing biomass uses sun to capture the CO2. Wouldn't you ask what to do with all that biomass captured CO2? How about using sun to power the above mentioned endothermic reaction and then using methanol in the fuel cell instead of burning million years old trees, then getting 10% of that heat into electricity and then losing 90% of this into the grid leaving you 1%? Of course its practical use may be limited but using the CO2 term like this is just plain stupid and it shouldn't get insightful from anyone with more than basic education.
Its all true. Then the hydrogen fuel cells are said to be unstable or expensive. Holding methanol is easy and relatively safe, unless someone really thirsty decides to drink up the battery or something. The laptop prototype using fuel cell with methanol :
http://greenupgrader.com/2481/polyfuel-methanol-fuel-cell-t40-laptop-prototype/
Getting really pure methanol out of other sources requires a lots of energy costly refining as well. Maybe it will require smaller equipment too (thinking of domestic chargers)?
icebike:And then you are still left with the CO2 you captured. What to do with that? :..could harvest atmospheric CO2 and combine it with hydrogen stripped from water to generate a methanol fuel for myriad uses..
Article
CO2+3H2 <-> CH3OH+H2O
CO2 is carbon and oxygen btw.