Two corrections: you forgot to write "probably impossible" in reference to the balloons, and instead of "shutting down worldwide production", you meant to write, "costs less than the amount saved in terms of health costs just from reducing coal power plant emissions" (in the US, that's 2.5 to 12 cents per kWh, depending on the plant; the cost difference between coal and wind in the US averages about 2 cents per kWh).
Oh, and "carbon" is not a law of economics, no more than chalk is a law of classrooms or caramel color is a law of food.
The more giant leaps from reality the viewer/reader is asked to accept, the further into fantasy you sink. And as for your comparison, warp drive and subspace radio are only half-hard. Real hard sci-fi has only sub-FTL, IMHO.
What part of "likely cause major drought in monsoon areas" was hard for you to understand? And, FYI, these aren't just "balloons". Apparently you didn't bother to click the links. For example, "The proposed delivery system is a tethered balloon that would represent the tallest man-made structure in history." -- did you miss that part? With a whole cargo ship as the base station? With the balloon remaining stationary in 55m/s winds, with 125m/s against the pipe? How about the several-dozen-tonne pipe pumping 3kg/s *straight up for 25 kilometers*? At 4,000 to 6,000 atmospheres pressure? In a pipe that needs to be both flexible and ultralight?
To give you an idea, a high pressure oil pipe may handle 2,000 atmospheres, but does so with 1/4 inch thick steel and weigh something like 25lb/foot. This needs to be flexible, withstand 125m/s winds, handle lightning strikes, three times the internal pressure, *and* weigh only about 1 pound per foot.
Heck, forget unintended consequences; people have been pointing out for ages the problem with solutions like this one. First, it's only masking. So it must continue to operate and grow ever bigger and bigger of an operation. If it ever fails -- or, if we find some other devastating unintended consequence and have to stop -- all of the "masked" effects suddenly appear in a very short amount of time. Second, we already know that spraying high-altitude sulphate particles is bad for both ozone and acid rain, decreases sunlight available to plants, provides an uneven heat compensation profile, and would likely cause major drought in monsoon areas. Third, this does nothing to address the other (and potentially larger) consequences of ever-rising CO2 levels, such as ocean acidification.
Some geoengineering proposals have promise. This is not one of them.
Midichlorians weren't hard sci-fi. They were just bad soft-sci-fi.
Whether sci-fi is hard or not doesn't declare whether it's good or not. It actually seems to have relatively little bearing (unless the author decides to turn the show into a lecture). There's just as much fascinating real stuff out there as there is what any soft sci-fi writer can conjure up.
I don't see at all where the gp advocated for a spherical hyper-dimensional universe. Rather, my read of their post was the simple postulate that what we perceive as an expanding universe can be seen as alterations of the universe within the same region of spacetime, causing the illusion of unending expansion. For example, picture that you're on a floating marble within a balloon. The balloon remains the same size, but your marble (with you on it) starts to shrink (along with the scale of all laws of physics' interactions) and move toward the center of the balloon. How do you perceive the balloon? Expanding ad-infinitum, with you remaining constant. And if I don't constrain you toward "moving toward the center of the balloon" in addition to shrinking? You perceive the balloon (your universe) as expanding, and all matter in the universe as radiating out from a central point (sound familiar?). Now if I *don't tell you* whether you're shrinking or the balloon is expanding, but you simply made the observations of what you can see, I would posit that not only is there no way to tell the difference, but that the difference is fundamentally meaningless.
Of course, Firefly is soft sci-fi. And Avatar has a much more hard sci-fi background. Hence I can only conclude that how accurate the science is isn't necessarily the biggest factor in geek enjoyment;)
Personally, I don't see why science can't be more accurately represented in the more popular, but currently "soft", sci-fi shows. A lot of real space science and technology is more fascinating than the fake stuff.
I don't know... as soon as I heard about this, my immediate thoughts jumped to, "WE COME IN PEACE... PRIORITY OVERRIDE. NEW BEHAVIOR DICTATED. MUST BREAK TARGET INTO COMPONENT MATERIALS.";)
annoying... "filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like yelling".
The voting verification method need not be non-anonymous (you can avoid vote "proving" (to avoid threats, vote buying, etc) by allowing the voter to create fake confirmation passwords that will claim that you voted for someone you didn't), and merely having a vote verification method doesn't make internet voting valid. You still need to allow time to overcome problems such as DOS preventing any sort of vote at all within the time frame, and you need to make sure that the validation method occurs over a different medium than the vote (aka, if your computer has a trojan, it could fake you having properly confirmed your vote if you tried to check it via your computer).
And the PHB to whom that person must prove how he voted ALSO votes in the same area and knows that there are "any number of alternative passcodes" that will return the wrong answer. He is not permitted to enter the same passcode more than once while proving how he voted, so "entered one passcode" is false.
??? Are you confusing a password with a user id? Since when are passwords unique between users? Passwords are unique per user ID (in this case voter ID), but I'd have to struggle to think of any system in any field where passwords must be unique *across different users*.
If you have him do it twice with different codes, he either does it once with the right one and once with the wrong one, or twice with wrong ones. If he does the former, you get two different answers and no indication which is correct. If he does the latter, you get two of the same answer and you know the correct answer is the opposite.
Wrong. Since when was there a constraint, "a person can only have one passcode that matches to a single candidate"? The person could have two different passcodes that both point to the right candidate. They could have two different passcodes that both match the same wrong candidate. They could have *no* correct passcode. It's all their choice. There are *no llimits* to and *no constraints about* who you can have passcodes for. It's really simple: after you vote, a little box comes up: "Would you like a confirmation?" If you choose it, "Would you like a real confirmation or a fake one?" (Options: "Real" and "Fake"). If you choose "Real", it says, "Please enter a password to access this confirmation". It takes your password, then gives you instructions on how to check up on it, and takes you back to, "Would you like another confirmation?". If you chose "Fake", it says, "Who do you want this fake confirmation to say who you voted for?" It gives you the list of *all* candidates, and you pick one -- *no constraints*. Then it says "Please enter a password to access this fake confirmation." You enter it. It gives you the same check-up-on-it instructions and then goes back to "Would you like another confirmation?". Repeat up to MAXINT times.
This whole thing seems so unavoidable. I'd think a couple hundred grams of well-placed high explosive could shred it up enough that it all breaks up in the atmosphere. Launch costs to LEO average around 10k per kg (give or take a factor of two), so it's not like that would be an absurd additional launch cost.
Not true. The person says, "I only entered one passcode", and that's the end of it. They can create as few or as many as they want. Where you came to the conclusion that there's precisely three, I have no clue.
But there are serious problems with internet voting -- trojans stealing votes, denial of service attacks in targeted districts, etc. The only way you can reliably have internet voting is to offer a long period for voting (to allow for working around problems, for appeals to erroneous votes, etc) and a way to validate with the central servers (ideally using a different medium, such as a phone call) that your vote was successfully cast for who you wanted it cast for.
There are some solutions to this, of course -- for example, allowing the user to enter a passcode to see the real vote and any number of alternative passcodes to get to see fake votes registered to them. So they can still check up on their vote with their real passcode but can "prove" a fake vote to someone else with a fake passcode. Nobody can thus be assured that they successfully pressured someone to vote the way they wanted.
So now we turn to South Park to justify our views?:P
The motive behind a crime is *THE* number one factor used in judging sentencing. What do you think the difference is between first-degree murder and manslaughter? It's all about motive. Did you plan in detail how to kill the person, channelling your hatred toward your carefully plotted ends, or did you unintentionally, spur-of-the-moment end up causing someone's death? You better believe that matters!
Hate crime law is all about *motive*. It's the basic premise that committing a crime because you view their whole "group" (which they have no choice whether or not to belong to) as bad is a particularly vile motive. And you know what? I agree with that premise.
As for the "tyranny of the masses", you can still have delegated voting (I've long wished for such a system) while having a strong judiciary to protect minority views. There's no reason why delegated voting must inherently disempower the judiciary any more than our current crazy system tries to. The judiciary is the of the few against the many. They have to hear in detail the facts of the case instead of relying on broad stereotypes and cursory knowledge like the masses do, and they must make judgements based on broad principles that apply equally to everyone. At least, that's how the judiciary is supposed to work; it will never be perfect, of course.
A neat bit of history: Chile's Allende government, before being overthrown by Pinochet, was working on a project called "Cybersyn", which has been dubbed "The Socialist Internet". This was back in the early 1970s, and they were struggling with the issue of how to manage a planned economy in the modern age. They basically invented their own version of the internet, where terminals all over the country would maintain bidirectional communication with a set of central servers for data exchange. The initial incarnation was designed to provide the government information about what needed to be produced, where, and when it needed to be in other locations (they got it mostly up and running only shortly before Allende was overthrown). The longer term picture, however, was to allow anyone with an ID card to fetch information from the government (speeches, laws, etc) and to vote on the issues of the day (starting with what they wanted produced, but later extending to referendums and the like).
After taking over, Pinochet's people couldn't figure out what to make of the system, and only thinking of it in the context of it being a tool for managing planned economies, destroyed it.
Speaking as a contractor, l can tell you a contractor's personal politics comes into play heavily when choosing jobs.
Three weeks ago, l was offered a job up in the hills. Beautiful house. Tons of property. A simple re-shingling job. They told me if l could finish it in one day, l would double my price. Then l realized whose house it was. Dominic Bambino's. The money was right, but the risk was too high. I knew who he was, and based on that, I turned the job over to a friend. The next week, the Foresie family put a hit on Baby Face's house. My friend was shot and killed. Didn't even finish re-shingling. I'm alive because l knew the risk involved in that particular client. My friend wasn't so lucky.
Any contractor working in Iraq knew the risk involved. If they got killed, it's their own fault.
Not to defend China too much, but it's quite worth noting that China spends a far smaller percent of its GDP on its military than the US does. The official Chinese military budget for 2010 was under 90B, although estimates peg actual spending between 100 and 150 billion. The US does a bit of off-books military budgeting, too, such as putting nuclear weapons in the DOE and having war spending come as supplementals. Overall, the US spends about 6x on the military what China spends, but has under 3x the GDP.
It's not a simple issue of "more impulse being provided". The form that the energy would arrive at the plate and spacecraft is totally different, so how the craft will interact with it being imparted is totally different. Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere are a series of shockwaves and thermal waves. Nuclear explosions in space are a rapid, intense high-frequency radiation burst. A single spacecraft design will not properly interact with both. Heck, it'd be hard to capture more than one of the main energy carriers of an atmospheric detonation (are you going for the the thermal pulse, the supersonic shockwave, the subsonic overpressure wave, etc?)
Nobody ever, ever will do any sort of uncontained nuclear pulse launch from the surface of Earth, so there's no point to even bringing that up. Not to mention that a nuclear explosion within the atmosphere is totally different from one in space, so your spacecraft needs to have a radically different earth-launch and space-propulsion configuration anyway. And the earth-launch aspect is seriously problematic, all issues of contamination aside.
Orion is such an obsolete concept, I don't know why people keep citing it. At least cite something like Medusa. It's superior to Orion in every way -- captures more energy, weighs less, exposes the crew to less radiation, has a gentler pusher stroke, scales down better, etc. Basically, you invert the paradigm; the explosions occur *ahead* of the spacecraft, which is *towed*, not pushed, by a large "parachute" that catches the explosive force.
I'm quite surprised that your starter turns over with the battery at -34C.
I also doubt that the batteries just fail after 10-15 years, they most likely shrink in capacity slowly over time, so the range slowly decreases.
Indeed, the standard for modern EVs is to warranty the pack for 8-10 years, with "failure" being rated as below 80% capacity. Tesla doesn't do that, though -- they "estimate" a 7 year pack lifespan, but don't warranty it (but will pre-sell a replacement pack at a notably reduced price, counting on the future cell price reduction, since it's predictable enough). Note that the warranty age is obviously shorter than the typical failure age.
The average car on the road in the US is about 10 years old. Congrats for keeping yours running so long.:)
Oh, and concerning your 32A panel: Amazing that you can run a house on that. Even old farmhouses in the US generally have twice that much power at their panel. Are you sure you're not just looking at a single breaker? In what country are such tiny feeds standard?
Slashdot Mirror
Two corrections: you forgot to write "probably impossible" in reference to the balloons, and instead of "shutting down worldwide production", you meant to write, "costs less than the amount saved in terms of health costs just from reducing coal power plant emissions" (in the US, that's 2.5 to 12 cents per kWh, depending on the plant; the cost difference between coal and wind in the US averages about 2 cents per kWh).
Oh, and "carbon" is not a law of economics, no more than chalk is a law of classrooms or caramel color is a law of food.
The more giant leaps from reality the viewer/reader is asked to accept, the further into fantasy you sink. And as for your comparison, warp drive and subspace radio are only half-hard. Real hard sci-fi has only sub-FTL, IMHO.
What part of "likely cause major drought in monsoon areas" was hard for you to understand? And, FYI, these aren't just "balloons". Apparently you didn't bother to click the links. For example, "The proposed delivery system is a tethered balloon that would represent the tallest man-made structure in history." -- did you miss that part? With a whole cargo ship as the base station? With the balloon remaining stationary in 55m/s winds, with 125m/s against the pipe? How about the several-dozen-tonne pipe pumping 3kg/s *straight up for 25 kilometers*? At 4,000 to 6,000 atmospheres pressure? In a pipe that needs to be both flexible and ultralight?
To give you an idea, a high pressure oil pipe may handle 2,000 atmospheres, but does so with 1/4 inch thick steel and weigh something like 25lb/foot. This needs to be flexible, withstand 125m/s winds, handle lightning strikes, three times the internal pressure, *and* weigh only about 1 pound per foot.
Pish posh -- "an easy, cheap solution"!
So there's a set of sentient bacteria that have a consciousness spanning the universe and can control it is hard sci-fi? Really?
Heck, forget unintended consequences; people have been pointing out for ages the problem with solutions like this one. First, it's only masking. So it must continue to operate and grow ever bigger and bigger of an operation. If it ever fails -- or, if we find some other devastating unintended consequence and have to stop -- all of the "masked" effects suddenly appear in a very short amount of time. Second, we already know that spraying high-altitude sulphate particles is bad for both ozone and acid rain, decreases sunlight available to plants, provides an uneven heat compensation profile, and would likely cause major drought in monsoon areas. Third, this does nothing to address the other (and potentially larger) consequences of ever-rising CO2 levels, such as ocean acidification.
Some geoengineering proposals have promise. This is not one of them.
Midichlorians weren't hard sci-fi. They were just bad soft-sci-fi.
Whether sci-fi is hard or not doesn't declare whether it's good or not. It actually seems to have relatively little bearing (unless the author decides to turn the show into a lecture). There's just as much fascinating real stuff out there as there is what any soft sci-fi writer can conjure up.
I don't see at all where the gp advocated for a spherical hyper-dimensional universe. Rather, my read of their post was the simple postulate that what we perceive as an expanding universe can be seen as alterations of the universe within the same region of spacetime, causing the illusion of unending expansion. For example, picture that you're on a floating marble within a balloon. The balloon remains the same size, but your marble (with you on it) starts to shrink (along with the scale of all laws of physics' interactions) and move toward the center of the balloon. How do you perceive the balloon? Expanding ad-infinitum, with you remaining constant. And if I don't constrain you toward "moving toward the center of the balloon" in addition to shrinking? You perceive the balloon (your universe) as expanding, and all matter in the universe as radiating out from a central point (sound familiar?). Now if I *don't tell you* whether you're shrinking or the balloon is expanding, but you simply made the observations of what you can see, I would posit that not only is there no way to tell the difference, but that the difference is fundamentally meaningless.
Of course, Firefly is soft sci-fi. And Avatar has a much more hard sci-fi background. Hence I can only conclude that how accurate the science is isn't necessarily the biggest factor in geek enjoyment ;)
Personally, I don't see why science can't be more accurately represented in the more popular, but currently "soft", sci-fi shows. A lot of real space science and technology is more fascinating than the fake stuff.
Or, more in the spirit of Slashdot: "What is the best way to combat pushers of pseudo-science like deniers of anthropogenic climate change?"
I think his response to that would engender a much stronger response here.
I don't know... as soon as I heard about this, my immediate thoughts jumped to, "WE COME IN PEACE... PRIORITY OVERRIDE. NEW BEHAVIOR DICTATED. MUST BREAK TARGET INTO COMPONENT MATERIALS." ;)
annoying... "filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like yelling".
The voting verification method need not be non-anonymous (you can avoid vote "proving" (to avoid threats, vote buying, etc) by allowing the voter to create fake confirmation passwords that will claim that you voted for someone you didn't), and merely having a vote verification method doesn't make internet voting valid. You still need to allow time to overcome problems such as DOS preventing any sort of vote at all within the time frame, and you need to make sure that the validation method occurs over a different medium than the vote (aka, if your computer has a trojan, it could fake you having properly confirmed your vote if you tried to check it via your computer).
??? Are you confusing a password with a user id? Since when are passwords unique between users? Passwords are unique per user ID (in this case voter ID), but I'd have to struggle to think of any system in any field where passwords must be unique *across different users*.
Wrong. Since when was there a constraint, "a person can only have one passcode that matches to a single candidate"? The person could have two different passcodes that both point to the right candidate. They could have two different passcodes that both match the same wrong candidate. They could have *no* correct passcode. It's all their choice. There are *no llimits* to and *no constraints about* who you can have passcodes for. It's really simple: after you vote, a little box comes up: "Would you like a confirmation?" If you choose it, "Would you like a real confirmation or a fake one?" (Options: "Real" and "Fake"). If you choose "Real", it says, "Please enter a password to access this confirmation". It takes your password, then gives you instructions on how to check up on it, and takes you back to, "Would you like another confirmation?". If you chose "Fake", it says, "Who do you want this fake confirmation to say who you voted for?" It gives you the list of *all* candidates, and you pick one -- *no constraints*. Then it says "Please enter a password to access this fake confirmation." You enter it. It gives you the same check-up-on-it instructions and then goes back to "Would you like another confirmation?". Repeat up to MAXINT times.
This whole thing seems so unavoidable. I'd think a couple hundred grams of well-placed high explosive could shred it up enough that it all breaks up in the atmosphere. Launch costs to LEO average around 10k per kg (give or take a factor of two), so it's not like that would be an absurd additional launch cost.
Not true. The person says, "I only entered one passcode", and that's the end of it. They can create as few or as many as they want. Where you came to the conclusion that there's precisely three, I have no clue.
But there are serious problems with internet voting -- trojans stealing votes, denial of service attacks in targeted districts, etc. The only way you can reliably have internet voting is to offer a long period for voting (to allow for working around problems, for appeals to erroneous votes, etc) and a way to validate with the central servers (ideally using a different medium, such as a phone call) that your vote was successfully cast for who you wanted it cast for.
There are some solutions to this, of course -- for example, allowing the user to enter a passcode to see the real vote and any number of alternative passcodes to get to see fake votes registered to them. So they can still check up on their vote with their real passcode but can "prove" a fake vote to someone else with a fake passcode. Nobody can thus be assured that they successfully pressured someone to vote the way they wanted.
So now we turn to South Park to justify our views? :P
The motive behind a crime is *THE* number one factor used in judging sentencing. What do you think the difference is between first-degree murder and manslaughter? It's all about motive. Did you plan in detail how to kill the person, channelling your hatred toward your carefully plotted ends, or did you unintentionally, spur-of-the-moment end up causing someone's death? You better believe that matters!
Hate crime law is all about *motive*. It's the basic premise that committing a crime because you view their whole "group" (which they have no choice whether or not to belong to) as bad is a particularly vile motive. And you know what? I agree with that premise.
As for the "tyranny of the masses", you can still have delegated voting (I've long wished for such a system) while having a strong judiciary to protect minority views. There's no reason why delegated voting must inherently disempower the judiciary any more than our current crazy system tries to. The judiciary is the of the few against the many. They have to hear in detail the facts of the case instead of relying on broad stereotypes and cursory knowledge like the masses do, and they must make judgements based on broad principles that apply equally to everyone. At least, that's how the judiciary is supposed to work; it will never be perfect, of course.
A neat bit of history: Chile's Allende government, before being overthrown by Pinochet, was working on a project called "Cybersyn", which has been dubbed "The Socialist Internet". This was back in the early 1970s, and they were struggling with the issue of how to manage a planned economy in the modern age. They basically invented their own version of the internet, where terminals all over the country would maintain bidirectional communication with a set of central servers for data exchange. The initial incarnation was designed to provide the government information about what needed to be produced, where, and when it needed to be in other locations (they got it mostly up and running only shortly before Allende was overthrown). The longer term picture, however, was to allow anyone with an ID card to fetch information from the government (speeches, laws, etc) and to vote on the issues of the day (starting with what they wanted produced, but later extending to referendums and the like).
After taking over, Pinochet's people couldn't figure out what to make of the system, and only thinking of it in the context of it being a tool for managing planned economies, destroyed it.
Speaking as a contractor, l can tell you a contractor's personal politics comes into play heavily when choosing jobs.
Three weeks ago, l was offered a job up in the hills. Beautiful house. Tons of property. A simple re-shingling job. They told me if l could finish it in one day, l would double my price. Then l realized whose house it was. Dominic Bambino's. The money was right, but the risk was too high. I knew who he was, and based on that, I turned the job over to a friend. The next week, the Foresie family put a hit on Baby Face's house. My friend was shot and killed. Didn't even finish re-shingling. I'm alive because l knew the risk involved in that particular client. My friend wasn't so lucky.
Any contractor working in Iraq knew the risk involved. If they got killed, it's their own fault.
"They carry weapons and they know if you've been bad or good
Not everybody's good, but everyone tries!"
(Sorry, just getting in the holiday spirit!)
Not to defend China too much, but it's quite worth noting that China spends a far smaller percent of its GDP on its military than the US does. The official Chinese military budget for 2010 was under 90B, although estimates peg actual spending between 100 and 150 billion. The US does a bit of off-books military budgeting, too, such as putting nuclear weapons in the DOE and having war spending come as supplementals. Overall, the US spends about 6x on the military what China spends, but has under 3x the GDP.
It's not a simple issue of "more impulse being provided". The form that the energy would arrive at the plate and spacecraft is totally different, so how the craft will interact with it being imparted is totally different. Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere are a series of shockwaves and thermal waves. Nuclear explosions in space are a rapid, intense high-frequency radiation burst. A single spacecraft design will not properly interact with both. Heck, it'd be hard to capture more than one of the main energy carriers of an atmospheric detonation (are you going for the the thermal pulse, the supersonic shockwave, the subsonic overpressure wave, etc?)
Nobody ever, ever will do any sort of uncontained nuclear pulse launch from the surface of Earth, so there's no point to even bringing that up. Not to mention that a nuclear explosion within the atmosphere is totally different from one in space, so your spacecraft needs to have a radically different earth-launch and space-propulsion configuration anyway. And the earth-launch aspect is seriously problematic, all issues of contamination aside.
Orion is such an obsolete concept, I don't know why people keep citing it. At least cite something like Medusa. It's superior to Orion in every way -- captures more energy, weighs less, exposes the crew to less radiation, has a gentler pusher stroke, scales down better, etc. Basically, you invert the paradigm; the explosions occur *ahead* of the spacecraft, which is *towed*, not pushed, by a large "parachute" that catches the explosive force.
I'm quite surprised that your starter turns over with the battery at -34C.
Indeed, the standard for modern EVs is to warranty the pack for 8-10 years, with "failure" being rated as below 80% capacity. Tesla doesn't do that, though -- they "estimate" a 7 year pack lifespan, but don't warranty it (but will pre-sell a replacement pack at a notably reduced price, counting on the future cell price reduction, since it's predictable enough). Note that the warranty age is obviously shorter than the typical failure age.
The average car on the road in the US is about 10 years old. Congrats for keeping yours running so long. :)
Oh, and concerning your 32A panel: Amazing that you can run a house on that. Even old farmhouses in the US generally have twice that much power at their panel. Are you sure you're not just looking at a single breaker? In what country are such tiny feeds standard?