In other words, moving in air so super-thin and close to a vacuum as makes no difference.
The air immediately around the capsule is not as sparse as the bulk air in the tube, due to the compression of the moving capsule.
The oxygen mask aboard an airplane is good for ten minutes.
Versus the matter of seconds it would take to repressurize a tube at maximum rate.
The airplane flies in open air not inside a sealed pipeline
With regularly spaced emergency exits
mounted on pylons and elevated rather high above the ground.
This is a joke, right? Airplanes operate in the ballpark of 10km altitude. Hyperloop ranges from ground level to a couple dozen meters altitude.
This isn't anything like the Channel Tunnel which has a parallel and built-in escape route.
Yes, the design does call for regularly spaced escape routes. Read the damned design document before debating the concept on an open forum.
No movement, no compression.
No movement, no low pressure air. The tube is designed to be repressurized in the event of an incident.
As the bird flies, the distance between San Diego and San Francisco is 450 miles.
Which is utterly irrelevant to the conversation. Repressurization is not to happen from the endpoints.
No one is certain, but it's thought that a China Airlines 747 might have gone supersonic during an emergency descent in 1985. According to the Wikipedia article, "Altitude decreased 10,000 ft (3,000 m) within only twenty seconds." and "They had descended 30,000 ft (9,100 m) in under two and a half minutes".
Which is again, nothing compared to the potential seconds in which Hyperloop could be repressurized. They wouldn't actually repressurize it that fast - there's no need to and it'd be hard on the tube, craft, and any passengers exposed to the low pressure. But they're effectively unlimited in the potential speed in which they can repressurize the air in the tube - unlike a plane, which has to fly supersonic to be able to repressurize in two and a half minutes.
Judging from this post of yours, you have some serious misconceptions about the Hyperloop concept and you seriously need to read the design document. Since you don't know about the emergency exists, I expect that there's an awful lot of other things that you think about the concept that don't actually match up to what's being proposed.
You do have it now. Everyone has it now. But it's this giant disguised patchwork of programs that lets some people fall through the cracks, provides perverse disincentives for working, and is loaded up with overhead and inefficiencies.
Why not just call a spade a spade and make it simple? Basic minimum standard of living for everyone (not nice, but if you want better, you've got to work), and in exchange, no more social housing, welfare, medicaid, social security, even minimum wage. They're all just disguised aspects of this minimum standard patchwork.
It's not hard to imagine, that person would be looked at the same way a person who responds "I'm on welfare" gets looked at today.
It just simplifies things. We've already effectively decided as members of modern society that we by and large (except for a couple percent of Ayn Rand fans) don't want people out on the streets or starving, so we (pretty much every country with even moderate wealth, even conservative ones like America) have made this massive patchwork of programs trying to catch them all. Let's just face this fact and give everyone this sort of minimum standard so nobody falls through the cracks or cheats the system and so we can save a huge amount of overhead.
Even conservatives should be able to get behind it because one of the many patchwork things we've had to do to try to make sure that nobody starves is minimum wage, which they hate. Minimum wage could be reduced or eliminated, with the job paying simply what the laws of supply and demand dictate. As it stands, minimum wage is just yet another "don't let them starve or have to live on the street" patchwork element. They should also like the fact that one could switch income taxes to a flat or nearly flat tax, since the basic income will naturally graduate the percentage of a person's total income (salary plus basic income) that goes toward taxes. Progressives might want some higher rate brackets for very high income earners to make the curve steeper at the very top end, as well as capital gains taxes, but apart from this edge case, both left and right could probably agree on a flat tax.
The baseline income wouldn't be great. IMHO I'd think it should be something along the lines of "two people living together can afford to rent a bottom 25th-percentile apartment, pay for basic foodstuffs, pay for minimal utilities, pay for minimal in-town transportation, and another 25% or so for all of the other random aspects of life. This assumes also that medical care and education are kept cheap, otherwise more money would need to be budgeted for them. So in your average place in the US, for example, that's an annual income of maybe $15k a year per adult (plus small child benefits where applicable), versus the average US per-capita adult income of about $75k a year (US per-capita GDP is $55k but that's per person, not per adult). So don't get me wrong, that $15k-ish would be not an insignificant expense. But then Social Security would disappear, Medicare would disappear, Medicaid would disappear, and on and on. Government budgets unrelated to the basic income would plunge.
Really, if conservatives could get past their initial Randian knee-jerk reaction to the concept, I think they'd find that there's an awful lot there that they'd like. Republicans: if you go along with a concept like this, liberals will actually let you drown the government in a bathtub like you've been dreaming of for ages in exchange for it.
Methinks you need to actually read about how Hyperloop works - it's not even remotely like an atmospheric railway. Air pressure no more drives Hyperloop than it drives a train going through a tunnel. A key part of the Hyperloop design is about how to avoid pressure buildup. Hyperloop spends most of its time in free coast. Acceleration (and deceleration) is handled by magnetic accelerator segments, like a big coilgun.
And to head you off: no, it's not a vactrain either. It doesn't roll on rails or float on maglev or anything of that nature - it floats as a ground-effect aircraft, and hence needs some air.
Hyperloop could potentially go at hypersonic plane speeds, if filled with very diffuse hydrogen, or very diffuse hot gas (no, hydrogen is not dangerous nor corrosive at such very low pressures), rather than room temperature air. The speed of sound (the limiting factor) depends on the gas mixture and its temperature. In fact, one kind of expects the gas to be pretty hot on its own from the capsules moving through it - such low pressure gases are poor thermal conductors.
Of course, the faster you want to go, the more your requirements are for a very straight path.
1. Let's say it all together: "Hyperloop Is Not A Vactrain". It's like a super-high-altitude aircraft, at ground level, operating in ground effect. It actually needs the (super thin) air it moves through for lift. The air gets built up in front of the capsule and shunted via a compressor to underneath it (for lift) and behind it, to prevent the buildup of air resistance.
2. The difficulties of providing oxygen through masks are no greater in a hyperloop capsule than in an airplane.
3. A hyperloop capsule is a giant air ram which has to work to move its air to behind the vehicle. If you get a leak in the front, you're ramming air into the capsule. If you get a leak on the back, that's where the compressor is shoving the air into. Significant air is also getting compressed into the tiny areas on the sides.
4. In the event of major emergencies, the tube is designed to repressurize, with the cars settling onto their low speed wheels and cruising to the nearest emergency exit. Repressurization can surely be done far faster than an airplane can descend in altitude.
For the longest time I seriously just assumed it had something to do with Star Trek - until the increasingly strange-sounding headlines I randomly stumbled across threw that assumption out the door.
I could google it, but rather than doing that (as that'd be too easy), I'm going to guess: Aren't they those type of people who are famous just for being famous?
Lol, your reference is a satire site that starts off "Adrian Chen (aka Gaydrian Chen)" and that he's "a half-breed dwarf fresh out of community college" using "jew-gold rearing techniques"?
For those who want actual background... Basically, there was for a period a Reddit war against him because he exposed one of their moderators who ran a section peddling racy images of young girls, among many other kinds of nastiness.
If you had a minimum level of income, sufficient for you to share a small apartment with a couple roomates and buy low budget groceries and bus fare and the like, but nothing else, would you just say "I've got it made!" and never work again?
Believe it or not, the vast majority of people want to take steps to better their lives. They don't want to just sit around on their arse all day. They want to own things, they want to be able to do things - that's human nature. And people take on work to be able to afford the things that they want. People also work to avoid boredom and to have achievements they can feel proud of. It's simply not true that you have to threaten people with starvation to keep them working.
One of the biggest discouragements to people working in most conventional welfare systems is that when they start working they lose their benefits. In some cases, they can even end up poorer by working; it's a counterincentive. Under a basic income scenario, this never happens - all work is extra money. And at the same time you ensure that nobody ever starves in the streets. Having such a safety net also ensures that people feel more free to work toward their passions and take big steps that they might otherwise have been too afraid to take for fear of ending up in the streets. And society ends up a better place, even more productive, when people are working in fields that they enjoy. It's a huge benefit to general happiness - which of course should be the goal.
There's other benefits as well. Namely, it simplifies everything. Think of how many various social services are run for different people who have been disadvantaged by different situations. And all of the paperwork and review to see if people quality, and the effort to administer the programs, and ensure compliance, and this, and that. A large chunk of the existing welfare infrastructure can simply disappear if everyone has a minimum level of guaranteed income - X amount for each adult plus Y for each dependent child.
Israel's tack is usually different, they use more military censorship and pressure at home, while when trying to influence the US they use pressure groups like AIPAC and conservative Christian ally groups to pressure media organizations relentlessly on messaging that they don't like to encourage self-censorship.
Many countries have at various times used the technique of planting false stories in the media with fake grassroots groups promoting the message - Russia is hardly breaking new ground here. However, the more you read about the operation, the depths they've taken it to and the breadth of their usage of it, they seem to have blown out all records in terms of scope and ambition for such a project. Internet Research Agency alone takes up 40 rooms of an office building.
They work their employees on a rather slave-driver schedule, with 12-hour shifts. They not only have to post the troll stuff, but they have to spend even more of their time making apolitical posts to build up fake identities. However, once a mission gets launched, the cooperate large numbers of these built up fake identities into a single task, to overwhelm any voices trying to correct the record. For example, if they want to hurt the US oil industry by making people nervous about nearby plants, they'll make up a story about an explosion at an oil refinery. Then they'll have numerous fake news websites carry the story, and a whole fake corporate website covering it, many hundreds of these built-up twitter and other social media users forwarding it, claiming to have seen it, posting doctored photos of it, etc. Eventually the true story comes out, but many people never see the retraction, and even for those they do, they've put the scare into their minds about "what could happen". With the sheer number of employees they have, they can run several of these campaigns per day with fresh built-up identities. They cooperate closely with the FSB using hacks, blackmail, candid photography, etc wherever needed.
Russia never managed to compete with the NSA's dominance on digital snooping (not for lack of trying). But they've put way more emphasis than the US on message control, which is essential both for maintaining domestic support for the current regime, as well as playing a key element in their hybrid warfare technique (that is, lay enough confusion about what's actually going on that nobody can react until after the mission objectives are already achieved). It's proven very effective in these regards. They've also tried to use it to assist in foreign policy - to divide Europe on sanctions, to support pro-Russian political parties, to discourage Europe from seeking energy independence, to discourage the US from pursuing natural gas exports, etc. In these regards their successes are more questionable.
Even stony asteroids contain grains of metallic iron. Iron asteroids are, of course, predominantly iron-nickel alloy. And some of its oxides are even better candidates - most notably, magnetite. I was very surprised when I found that random pieces of basalt from my land were showing an easily measurable magnetic field, until it occurred to me that some percentage of the grains that make it up will naturally be magnetite.
Our code doesn't even work with valgrind. It (again, no tomatoes!) uses shmat to seize a particular address space (clobbering whatever was there in the process) because it uses pointer addresses that are hard coded into the program rather than being allocated dynamically by the operating system.
I can't speak for their code, but ours is written in C. And... (don't throw tomatoes, I'm actively working to remedy this!)... it's C compiled without warnings even enabled, let alone -Werror. When you turn warnings on you get heavily, heavily spammed.
Hopefully I'll have that aspect fixed within a few months, if other tasks don't eat up too much of my time.
So, I actually am a programmer for an ATC system...
First off, this isn't as bad as it sounds as far as safety goes. One first needs to ask themselves, "what is the purpose of an ATC system?". The simple answer is, "don't ever let two aircraft exist in the same location at the same time". So any two aircraft can be separated in a) time, b) location, or c) altitude, and so long as they meet the minimum safety distances, that's all okay. Complicating this is the great variety of hardware on the aircraft, communications methods and protocols, and gaps in the information available to you, plus the wide variety in ATC systems and how they talk to each other. And there's a lot of potential instability at each stage. So basically ATC systems are massive collections of "special cases" that need to be handled on top of the basics. Maybe some line in Denmark is garbling messages that lead to you being fed bogus data. Maybe some aircraft in India's buggy hardware is for some reason spamming everyone on the network. Maybe you've got two different systems handling radar data and one says the radars are all fine and the other says they're not. Maybe the aircraft says they were at X point at Y time but some radar says something different. These are the sorts of things we have to deal on a weekly if not daily interval, and they lead what seems like it should be very simple pieces of software to become really huge systems.
As mentioned, there can be lots of instability. Yep, it's true, these things can be rather buggy - both hardware and software. They're usually old designs that may have been poor design from the beginning, but have had to be continually patched and patched over the course of decades. Don't like that? Throw some more funds in for new ATC systems designed from scratch, otherwise this is going to continue to be the reality (yeah, new subsystems do come in every now and then for various purposes, but old systems are slow to go away).
So, instability and bugs can sound scary. But remember the goals of an ATC system: separation. So let's just say that you lose the whole system for a long time - what do you do? Well, you basically revert to paper, and you've got a LOT more phone calls to make. You have to allow for more separation, and because of the increased workload, you can't handle as many planes. So you have to greatly reduce the number of planes in your region - they have to divert or wait. It's big delays, which costs big money. But it's not like we just start guessing whether planes are going to run into something or not.
Our software here is predominantly old C code with a little bit of C++, and miscellaneous like yacc and lex. There are changelog entries dating back to the 80s - though that's the manual changelogs, it didn't go under revision control until the late 90s. Its core uses macros to an annoying degree to emulate object-oriented design in C; macros can be nested dozens of layers deep. It makes bugs very hard to find sometimes, but it's the core of the software, so it's not something that can be easily changed. So we do our best. Yes, there are "WONTFIX" bugs that we know about, and operators have documented procedures for working around them (usually involving restarting some module - the system is very modular, you don't have to restart the whole thing to fix a part that's acting up). But we always prioritize fixing the things that get in the way of their work the most - there's a lot of direct back and forth. Again, safety always takes top priority, then throughput. Everything else is way down below on the priority list.
Changes work through the following process. A report of a bug or feature request is made. Someone analyses it and if they think it's worth working on writes up a task and assigns it to a programmer. The programmer works on the task and when they think it's ready they submit it for code review. Another programmer looks through all of the code and tries to see if they have any complaints. After any necessary back and forth to get things r
Simulating a neuron, and getting something to actually act exactly like a brain made up of billions of neurons are two completely different things.
Given the premise of an accurate simulation of a neuron and its interactions, how does that not logically imply the ability to simulate a collection of them by letting them interact in the same simulation, given sufficient processing power, memory, etc? If I can simulate the behavior of a single X, then I can simulate the behavior of a thousand Xs, a billion Xs, 1e100000 Xs, so long as I have sufficient computing hardware.
Scientists still don't know how a single neuron works, not even close, so recreating it is still impossible.
Which is the reason I wrote "Of course, we're still nowhere near either the hardware and software requirements of being able to pull off such a system". I'm well aware that we are not yet to the point of having a good understanding all of the properties of neural behavior to be able to make an accurate model. But I also think it unrealistic to expect that we will never be able to. There's nothing about a neuron that renders it forever immune to analysis.
Some people seem to think that if you could just imitate all of the electrical activity in the brain you would create a mind.
I am not those "some people", and if you had read my post instead of just assuming that about me, you would be aware of this point. I'm well aware that there is far more going on than just mimicking a pattern of synapses.
To make a brain, you are going to need to use wetware, not hardware
You have not presented a single argument to support this claim. Unless you think that neurons are physically knowable (evidence, please), that no amount of research can understand their working (wherein you're moving into metaphysics, not science), then they are simulatable (given sufficient research). And if one neuron is simulatable then an arbitrarily large grouping of them is, given sufficient computing resources.
Indeed, while it's interesting to note that while polygamy has been moderately common at times and in some societies throughout human history, polyandry is fairly rare, and true mixed polyamory very rare. And most cases of polygamy, there was no expectation that the wives would physically love each other, only that they'd get along and try not to be jealous of each other getting attention from their husband.
Interestingly, the views toward children vary significantly between polygamy and polyandry. One of the more common arrangements is associated with a view that a man having sex is just a "trigger" for a woman to conceive, that the child is simply part of her line and has nothing to do with him (the opposite to the view that a woman contributes nothing to a child but the growth environment for a man's seed). In such arrangements, men still do often assist in raising children, but usually the children of their sisters or other close relatives. Another of the more common arrangements is for a woman to share multiple brothers in a family; they are all effectively seen as equal "fathers" to the children and help raise them. Both of these arrangements are easy to explain genetically - in all cases, the men are raising children who carry genes similar to theirs, whether they're literally the father or not.
Slashdot Mirror
The air immediately around the capsule is not as sparse as the bulk air in the tube, due to the compression of the moving capsule.
Versus the matter of seconds it would take to repressurize a tube at maximum rate.
With regularly spaced emergency exits
This is a joke, right? Airplanes operate in the ballpark of 10km altitude. Hyperloop ranges from ground level to a couple dozen meters altitude.
Yes, the design does call for regularly spaced escape routes. Read the damned design document before debating the concept on an open forum.
No movement, no low pressure air. The tube is designed to be repressurized in the event of an incident.
Which is utterly irrelevant to the conversation. Repressurization is not to happen from the endpoints.
Which is again, nothing compared to the potential seconds in which Hyperloop could be repressurized. They wouldn't actually repressurize it that fast - there's no need to and it'd be hard on the tube, craft, and any passengers exposed to the low pressure. But they're effectively unlimited in the potential speed in which they can repressurize the air in the tube - unlike a plane, which has to fly supersonic to be able to repressurize in two and a half minutes.
Judging from this post of yours, you have some serious misconceptions about the Hyperloop concept and you seriously need to read the design document. Since you don't know about the emergency exists, I expect that there's an awful lot of other things that you think about the concept that don't actually match up to what's being proposed.
You'll be given cushy jobs!
You do have it now. Everyone has it now. But it's this giant disguised patchwork of programs that lets some people fall through the cracks, provides perverse disincentives for working, and is loaded up with overhead and inefficiencies.
Why not just call a spade a spade and make it simple? Basic minimum standard of living for everyone (not nice, but if you want better, you've got to work), and in exchange, no more social housing, welfare, medicaid, social security, even minimum wage. They're all just disguised aspects of this minimum standard patchwork.
It's not hard to imagine, that person would be looked at the same way a person who responds "I'm on welfare" gets looked at today.
It just simplifies things. We've already effectively decided as members of modern society that we by and large (except for a couple percent of Ayn Rand fans) don't want people out on the streets or starving, so we (pretty much every country with even moderate wealth, even conservative ones like America) have made this massive patchwork of programs trying to catch them all. Let's just face this fact and give everyone this sort of minimum standard so nobody falls through the cracks or cheats the system and so we can save a huge amount of overhead.
Even conservatives should be able to get behind it because one of the many patchwork things we've had to do to try to make sure that nobody starves is minimum wage, which they hate. Minimum wage could be reduced or eliminated, with the job paying simply what the laws of supply and demand dictate. As it stands, minimum wage is just yet another "don't let them starve or have to live on the street" patchwork element. They should also like the fact that one could switch income taxes to a flat or nearly flat tax, since the basic income will naturally graduate the percentage of a person's total income (salary plus basic income) that goes toward taxes. Progressives might want some higher rate brackets for very high income earners to make the curve steeper at the very top end, as well as capital gains taxes, but apart from this edge case, both left and right could probably agree on a flat tax.
The baseline income wouldn't be great. IMHO I'd think it should be something along the lines of "two people living together can afford to rent a bottom 25th-percentile apartment, pay for basic foodstuffs, pay for minimal utilities, pay for minimal in-town transportation, and another 25% or so for all of the other random aspects of life. This assumes also that medical care and education are kept cheap, otherwise more money would need to be budgeted for them. So in your average place in the US, for example, that's an annual income of maybe $15k a year per adult (plus small child benefits where applicable), versus the average US per-capita adult income of about $75k a year (US per-capita GDP is $55k but that's per person, not per adult). So don't get me wrong, that $15k-ish would be not an insignificant expense. But then Social Security would disappear, Medicare would disappear, Medicaid would disappear, and on and on. Government budgets unrelated to the basic income would plunge.
Really, if conservatives could get past their initial Randian knee-jerk reaction to the concept, I think they'd find that there's an awful lot there that they'd like. Republicans: if you go along with a concept like this, liberals will actually let you drown the government in a bathtub like you've been dreaming of for ages in exchange for it.
Not on your life, my Hindu friend!
Methinks you need to actually read about how Hyperloop works - it's not even remotely like an atmospheric railway. Air pressure no more drives Hyperloop than it drives a train going through a tunnel. A key part of the Hyperloop design is about how to avoid pressure buildup. Hyperloop spends most of its time in free coast. Acceleration (and deceleration) is handled by magnetic accelerator segments, like a big coilgun.
And to head you off: no, it's not a vactrain either. It doesn't roll on rails or float on maglev or anything of that nature - it floats as a ground-effect aircraft, and hence needs some air.
Hyperloop could potentially go at hypersonic plane speeds, if filled with very diffuse hydrogen, or very diffuse hot gas (no, hydrogen is not dangerous nor corrosive at such very low pressures), rather than room temperature air. The speed of sound (the limiting factor) depends on the gas mixture and its temperature. In fact, one kind of expects the gas to be pretty hot on its own from the capsules moving through it - such low pressure gases are poor thermal conductors.
Of course, the faster you want to go, the more your requirements are for a very straight path.
1. Let's say it all together: "Hyperloop Is Not A Vactrain". It's like a super-high-altitude aircraft, at ground level, operating in ground effect. It actually needs the (super thin) air it moves through for lift. The air gets built up in front of the capsule and shunted via a compressor to underneath it (for lift) and behind it, to prevent the buildup of air resistance.
2. The difficulties of providing oxygen through masks are no greater in a hyperloop capsule than in an airplane.
3. A hyperloop capsule is a giant air ram which has to work to move its air to behind the vehicle. If you get a leak in the front, you're ramming air into the capsule. If you get a leak on the back, that's where the compressor is shoving the air into. Significant air is also getting compressed into the tiny areas on the sides.
4. In the event of major emergencies, the tube is designed to repressurize, with the cars settling onto their low speed wheels and cruising to the nearest emergency exit. Repressurization can surely be done far faster than an airplane can descend in altitude.
For the longest time I seriously just assumed it had something to do with Star Trek - until the increasingly strange-sounding headlines I randomly stumbled across threw that assumption out the door.
I could google it, but rather than doing that (as that'd be too easy), I'm going to guess: Aren't they those type of people who are famous just for being famous?
Lol, your reference is a satire site that starts off "Adrian Chen (aka Gaydrian Chen)" and that he's "a half-breed dwarf fresh out of community college" using "jew-gold rearing techniques"?
For those who want actual background... Basically, there was for a period a Reddit war against him because he exposed one of their moderators who ran a section peddling racy images of young girls, among many other kinds of nastiness.
If you had a minimum level of income, sufficient for you to share a small apartment with a couple roomates and buy low budget groceries and bus fare and the like, but nothing else, would you just say "I've got it made!" and never work again?
Believe it or not, the vast majority of people want to take steps to better their lives. They don't want to just sit around on their arse all day. They want to own things, they want to be able to do things - that's human nature. And people take on work to be able to afford the things that they want. People also work to avoid boredom and to have achievements they can feel proud of. It's simply not true that you have to threaten people with starvation to keep them working.
One of the biggest discouragements to people working in most conventional welfare systems is that when they start working they lose their benefits. In some cases, they can even end up poorer by working; it's a counterincentive. Under a basic income scenario, this never happens - all work is extra money. And at the same time you ensure that nobody ever starves in the streets. Having such a safety net also ensures that people feel more free to work toward their passions and take big steps that they might otherwise have been too afraid to take for fear of ending up in the streets. And society ends up a better place, even more productive, when people are working in fields that they enjoy. It's a huge benefit to general happiness - which of course should be the goal.
There's other benefits as well. Namely, it simplifies everything. Think of how many various social services are run for different people who have been disadvantaged by different situations. And all of the paperwork and review to see if people quality, and the effort to administer the programs, and ensure compliance, and this, and that. A large chunk of the existing welfare infrastructure can simply disappear if everyone has a minimum level of guaranteed income - X amount for each adult plus Y for each dependent child.
There's a lot of good reasons for such a program.
Careful with calling oreos "biscuits" around Americans, lest they become tempted to start dipping them in gravy or eating them with bacon ;)
You clearly haven't read much about Internet Research Agency. What you linked to is not even remotely comparable.
Israel's tack is usually different, they use more military censorship and pressure at home, while when trying to influence the US they use pressure groups like AIPAC and conservative Christian ally groups to pressure media organizations relentlessly on messaging that they don't like to encourage self-censorship.
Many countries have at various times used the technique of planting false stories in the media with fake grassroots groups promoting the message - Russia is hardly breaking new ground here. However, the more you read about the operation, the depths they've taken it to and the breadth of their usage of it, they seem to have blown out all records in terms of scope and ambition for such a project. Internet Research Agency alone takes up 40 rooms of an office building.
They work their employees on a rather slave-driver schedule, with 12-hour shifts. They not only have to post the troll stuff, but they have to spend even more of their time making apolitical posts to build up fake identities. However, once a mission gets launched, the cooperate large numbers of these built up fake identities into a single task, to overwhelm any voices trying to correct the record. For example, if they want to hurt the US oil industry by making people nervous about nearby plants, they'll make up a story about an explosion at an oil refinery. Then they'll have numerous fake news websites carry the story, and a whole fake corporate website covering it, many hundreds of these built-up twitter and other social media users forwarding it, claiming to have seen it, posting doctored photos of it, etc. Eventually the true story comes out, but many people never see the retraction, and even for those they do, they've put the scare into their minds about "what could happen". With the sheer number of employees they have, they can run several of these campaigns per day with fresh built-up identities. They cooperate closely with the FSB using hacks, blackmail, candid photography, etc wherever needed.
Russia never managed to compete with the NSA's dominance on digital snooping (not for lack of trying). But they've put way more emphasis than the US on message control, which is essential both for maintaining domestic support for the current regime, as well as playing a key element in their hybrid warfare technique (that is, lay enough confusion about what's actually going on that nobody can react until after the mission objectives are already achieved). It's proven very effective in these regards. They've also tried to use it to assist in foreign policy - to divide Europe on sanctions, to support pro-Russian political parties, to discourage Europe from seeking energy independence, to discourage the US from pursuing natural gas exports, etc. In these regards their successes are more questionable.
There was a truly excellent article on this "Internet Research Agency" group a while back. The ending is just brilliant.
Not sure whether this or this is more appropriate ;)
Even stony asteroids contain grains of metallic iron. Iron asteroids are, of course, predominantly iron-nickel alloy. And some of its oxides are even better candidates - most notably, magnetite. I was very surprised when I found that random pieces of basalt from my land were showing an easily measurable magnetic field, until it occurred to me that some percentage of the grains that make it up will naturally be magnetite.
Our code doesn't even work with valgrind. It (again, no tomatoes!) uses shmat to seize a particular address space (clobbering whatever was there in the process) because it uses pointer addresses that are hard coded into the program rather than being allocated dynamically by the operating system.
I wish I was kidding. It's kind of like this.
I've spent time on enough websites that get mad at people for writing the word fuck that it's just easier to abbreviate it.
I can't speak for their code, but ours is written in C. And... (don't throw tomatoes, I'm actively working to remedy this!)... it's C compiled without warnings even enabled, let alone -Werror. When you turn warnings on you get heavily, heavily spammed.
Hopefully I'll have that aspect fixed within a few months, if other tasks don't eat up too much of my time.
So, I actually am a programmer for an ATC system...
First off, this isn't as bad as it sounds as far as safety goes. One first needs to ask themselves, "what is the purpose of an ATC system?". The simple answer is, "don't ever let two aircraft exist in the same location at the same time". So any two aircraft can be separated in a) time, b) location, or c) altitude, and so long as they meet the minimum safety distances, that's all okay. Complicating this is the great variety of hardware on the aircraft, communications methods and protocols, and gaps in the information available to you, plus the wide variety in ATC systems and how they talk to each other. And there's a lot of potential instability at each stage. So basically ATC systems are massive collections of "special cases" that need to be handled on top of the basics. Maybe some line in Denmark is garbling messages that lead to you being fed bogus data. Maybe some aircraft in India's buggy hardware is for some reason spamming everyone on the network. Maybe you've got two different systems handling radar data and one says the radars are all fine and the other says they're not. Maybe the aircraft says they were at X point at Y time but some radar says something different. These are the sorts of things we have to deal on a weekly if not daily interval, and they lead what seems like it should be very simple pieces of software to become really huge systems.
As mentioned, there can be lots of instability. Yep, it's true, these things can be rather buggy - both hardware and software. They're usually old designs that may have been poor design from the beginning, but have had to be continually patched and patched over the course of decades. Don't like that? Throw some more funds in for new ATC systems designed from scratch, otherwise this is going to continue to be the reality (yeah, new subsystems do come in every now and then for various purposes, but old systems are slow to go away).
So, instability and bugs can sound scary. But remember the goals of an ATC system: separation. So let's just say that you lose the whole system for a long time - what do you do? Well, you basically revert to paper, and you've got a LOT more phone calls to make. You have to allow for more separation, and because of the increased workload, you can't handle as many planes. So you have to greatly reduce the number of planes in your region - they have to divert or wait. It's big delays, which costs big money. But it's not like we just start guessing whether planes are going to run into something or not.
Our software here is predominantly old C code with a little bit of C++, and miscellaneous like yacc and lex. There are changelog entries dating back to the 80s - though that's the manual changelogs, it didn't go under revision control until the late 90s. Its core uses macros to an annoying degree to emulate object-oriented design in C; macros can be nested dozens of layers deep. It makes bugs very hard to find sometimes, but it's the core of the software, so it's not something that can be easily changed. So we do our best. Yes, there are "WONTFIX" bugs that we know about, and operators have documented procedures for working around them (usually involving restarting some module - the system is very modular, you don't have to restart the whole thing to fix a part that's acting up). But we always prioritize fixing the things that get in the way of their work the most - there's a lot of direct back and forth. Again, safety always takes top priority, then throughput. Everything else is way down below on the priority list.
Changes work through the following process. A report of a bug or feature request is made. Someone analyses it and if they think it's worth working on writes up a task and assigns it to a programmer. The programmer works on the task and when they think it's ready they submit it for code review. Another programmer looks through all of the code and tries to see if they have any complaints. After any necessary back and forth to get things r
Corr: That should have read "Unless you think that neurons are physically unknowable"
Given the premise of an accurate simulation of a neuron and its interactions, how does that not logically imply the ability to simulate a collection of them by letting them interact in the same simulation, given sufficient processing power, memory, etc? If I can simulate the behavior of a single X, then I can simulate the behavior of a thousand Xs, a billion Xs, 1e100000 Xs, so long as I have sufficient computing hardware.
Which is the reason I wrote "Of course, we're still nowhere near either the hardware and software requirements of being able to pull off such a system". I'm well aware that we are not yet to the point of having a good understanding all of the properties of neural behavior to be able to make an accurate model. But I also think it unrealistic to expect that we will never be able to. There's nothing about a neuron that renders it forever immune to analysis.
I am not those "some people", and if you had read my post instead of just assuming that about me, you would be aware of this point. I'm well aware that there is far more going on than just mimicking a pattern of synapses.
You have not presented a single argument to support this claim. Unless you think that neurons are physically knowable (evidence, please), that no amount of research can understand their working (wherein you're moving into metaphysics, not science), then they are simulatable (given sufficient research). And if one neuron is simulatable then an arbitrarily large grouping of them is, given sufficient computing resources.
Where you live, but not where I live. People here really don't care who you're F*ing. Honestly. Yet polyamory still isn't common.
Indeed, while it's interesting to note that while polygamy has been moderately common at times and in some societies throughout human history, polyandry is fairly rare, and true mixed polyamory very rare. And most cases of polygamy, there was no expectation that the wives would physically love each other, only that they'd get along and try not to be jealous of each other getting attention from their husband.
Interestingly, the views toward children vary significantly between polygamy and polyandry. One of the more common arrangements is associated with a view that a man having sex is just a "trigger" for a woman to conceive, that the child is simply part of her line and has nothing to do with him (the opposite to the view that a woman contributes nothing to a child but the growth environment for a man's seed). In such arrangements, men still do often assist in raising children, but usually the children of their sisters or other close relatives. Another of the more common arrangements is for a woman to share multiple brothers in a family; they are all effectively seen as equal "fathers" to the children and help raise them. Both of these arrangements are easy to explain genetically - in all cases, the men are raising children who carry genes similar to theirs, whether they're literally the father or not.