The fact that they never touch the philosophical issues of "droids rights" makes me classify Star Wars more into the Fantasy than in the Science Fiction genre. It takes place in a universe where apart from some engineering progress towards bigger weapons no scientific progress is made (except maybe the midichlorians lapse), and technology itself is never questioned but is just a plot device. Just like droids.
A warmblooded animal, such as mammals with their core temperature of ~37ÂC for mammals and few degrees more for birds, constantly produces heat. That is heat must go somewhere, otherwise it would lead to overheating. So the only choice is to run at a temperature which is above that of the environment. Once those temperatures come too close to each other, all animals reduce their activity more and more to prevent said overheating.
So, a jump in global temperature, i.e. one that is faster than evolution can keep pace with, would pose a serious threat to animals in areas where the gap between their core temperature and the environment is reduced.
How far is multiarch support, i.e. being able to install 32 and 64 bit packages along side each other, and that not just on the Intel architecture but any CPUs which support both 32 and 64bits?
Just what I was thinking when I read the article. And then I had to think of the Marain, a fictional constructed language in the Culture universe. I wonder if a society would actually decide to change their language if there was sufficient evidence that it hinders their cultural development. Sort of like the switch to the Latin alphabet as it happened for Vietnamese and Turkish, only a bit more invasive.
Sorry to rain on your Computer Scientists discover the Wonders of Biology parade, but...
tailor a bacteria to attack or compete with a bacteria which you needed to control
This already exists in the from of a virus which attacks bacteria, also known as a Bacteriophage. It doesn't even have to be programmed from the outside to keep up with the evading, evolving bacteria; it just evolves as well. And even if you wanted to "program" this feature, you'd have to deal with the nasty problem of protein folding in silico. Better to leave this entire process highly parallel in wetware.
programmable immune system
Also known as Vaccination, and this happens naturally after every infection. And again you don't have to program anything, it uses a random walk to find matching antibodies which attach themselves to bugs.
This discovery will sooner result in a very parallel, but also clockrate wise very slow computer than in immunological advances. And if this gets used in the human body via gene therapy it will be used to regulate genes, i.e. as an if/else block, not to calculate anything fancy.
Assuming the trees are planet and the humanity stops to care we might pull out CO2 fast enough to reach a snowball earth scenario, i.e. it gets too cold and more snow reflects more sunlight resulting in a negative feedback loop. And maybe this time we won't come out of it again.
Antibodies are much larger than your typical antibiotic molecule. The latter is like jamming a wrench into a very specific part of the cellular machinery to grind it to a halt. If a mutation in the machinery changes the location where your wrench used to fit you have a resistant bacteria. Because antibodies are larger a single mutation usually doesn't throw them off. This however also means antibodies can only attach themselves to the surface, and that usually doesn't kill the bacteria but flags it for the immune system. The small molecules can pass through membranes and attach themselves anywhere. Finding the spot and designing a fitting molecule is the hard part. And since that is even harder for larger antibodies, i.e. proteins, my guess is they want to take those you find in nature and multiply them.
The immune system has its own evolutionary process to counter the problem of a moving target (somatic hypermutation, sidenote, the other idea here is to use bacteria eating viruses, phages, which evolve on their own). One way to jumpstart that is plain old vaccination, maybe there are plans to introduce those blueprints faster.
Women staying out of the engineering and "hard" sciences is mostly a phenomenon of the western world (in Cold War terms). In eastern Europe and Russia these subjects are much closer to parity, IIRC the same hold true for China. Even in Iran (!) women don't share the western prejudices against CS, Math etc.
However, once in these fields, there is the entirely different issue of the glass ceiling, i.e. not getting promoted beyond a certain level.
When I go outside, at any time of the night, I see very few stars. I remember seeing the Milky Way the first time and was quite awestruck, the name made perfect sense then.
Oh, but you do get mutations! In fact, mutations which allow you to defeat H1N1! And not just a single replaced amino acid, no, lots more! Now how does that silly virus look?
When an immune systems B-cell find something it doesn't like, such as a virus, it goes into a feedback loop, mutates itself so that some copies will dislike said virus even more. In the end you have an immune system against which this virus doesn't stand a chance even though it was a completely unknown pathogen hours earlier. And this response will remain intact for years! (see: vaccination) This is called somatic hypermutation. On the downside, somatic means it won't make it into your germ line so your children will have to mutate all on their own again (though IIRC some of the mothers immune system cells make it into the child to help out a bit).
The tech learning curve is important as well. Those who grew up with computers in pre-GUI times had a rather steep curve but as a consequence became much more proficient.
When the curve became flatter less understanding was required, however more people started using it. So I wonder if the mass adoption of technology compensates for the reduced required depth, i.e. if the first easy steps encouraged more people to take a deeper look at things compared to when you had no choice but to do that.
Data on the percentage of computer users in each generation which were hobby programmers at a certain would be interesting.
As much as nuclear energy would help reduce CO2 emissons, the the anti-nuclear crowd has to be seen as a "force of nature" making new power plants less likely. The idealist would fight against irrationality, but as a realist I would redirect that energy elsewhere, e.g. against the NIMBYs who think wind turbines ruin the coastlines and kill birds or bats.
Also, if oil is non-renewable because it takes millions of years to re-form, then nuclear fuels are the ultimate non-renewable with a "when is the next supernova due?" regeneration period. And the energy density and relative ease of use is just too good to waste it powering our washing machines and slashdot browsing. Maybe in a few hundred years outer solar system exploration will be in a serious crunch because the lack of a good power source after all the uranium, thorium, plutonium etc. has been used up.
At first this "Because there's obviously no sunlight in the body, this light-mill pulls its power from a laser run up through the center of the catheter." seemed rather silly. When you already have a cable why not use that to get all the power you want? But later on the articles mentions that blood vessels really don't like anything above one volt. Other generators/motors (applying an alternating external magnetic field maybe) produce too much voltage already, so producing the power via photons is a safe alternative.
On a related note, I wonder how far the tech for burning blood sugar in a fuel cell is, that would allow for long independent operation of tiny devices and since nothing rotates should scale low wrt. voltage
In some countries centuries are actually labelled in that fashion. So maybe you should just advise said AC to travel more of the real or virtual world instead. But less breeding is always good. Though, probably not in said countries, with their negative population growth....
Yes, the Enigma algorithm, or actually wiring, was known and Polish and later English Cryptologists worked long and hard to crack it since a lot was at stake. This one as of now relied a lot on security through obscurity. I doubt it would have lasted long in a world war scenario.
Just as the Enigma it might be impossible to de-cypher it manually, but with a machine and Turing-level minds to help you I would think it is solved quickly. But since secure encryption is perceived as a solved problem (still, where is the AES equivalent of a secure hash?) maybe bright minds turn their attention elsewhere nowadays.
The influx of money should raise the standard of living [in] those countries and it might encourage a different sort of economic growth than what we've seen in economies fueled by petrodollars.
What growth? Countries which get essentially "free money" often have shrinking economies. Whether they get paid for oil underground or sun shining on the ground doesn't matter. They don't become poor, but they end up importing everything because local labor is so unattractive an expensive. See Dutch disease etc., this was just recently discussed on/. in relation to the "trillion dollar ore miracle" in Afghanistan.
And these solar arrays are probably built by non-local companies, so no local know-how is rewarded. Then the states just get monetary compensation for maintenance work, not for fabricating anything. Now how to build a local economy.
While we are nitpicking, the Trojans are the good guys. You have to be on the lookout for the sneaky Greeks.
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts! And in all seriousness, using the proper term might cause a few more users to think twice about clicking "Ok" and instead thinking about ancient stories and their modern parallels.
Are there ARM designs yet which support the Trusted Platform Module specification? (Remember this fuzz years ago wrt. Microsoft and TCPA/NGSCB?)
If I were a hardware company and want to sell DRM'ed content with a hardware dongle, this would be the way to go, having the encryption key which ties the media to the device stored directly inside the CPU would make my platform very attractive, maybe even a de-facto standard, for certain media control freaks. And you could make sure that only signed code runs it from the moment it boots, turning it into the ultimate closed system where the producing company stays in control.
It is a reference to their early days. Back when Altavista & Co. were the dominant search engines they had incredibly cluttered interfaces, they were more like web portals.
Then Google came along with just a logo, an input field and two buttons. And of course an awesome search algorithm. Not showing the inevitable clutter that has crept in for the first few seconds is their way of having and eating the purity cake.
Playing the devils advocate: Patents exist to encourage research which, when completed, could be easily "stolen". If there were no patents, nobody would research something which a competitor could copy without doing any of the work; or everyone would obfuscate their findings if possible.*
So a company invests millions to find a gene which plays a role in cancer, i.e. it finds the connection and not just patents random junk hoping to score something later - shouldn't this be rewarded or protected somehow? If this is just one step towards a drug, competitors could just jump onto their findings and get a half-free ride.
* or, of course, the state does all the research and any individual with a smart idea which this big system doesn't support is left to his own devices with no protection from being deprived of his reward. Obviously, middle ground is where the solution is, not that I have any idea where exactly that is.
While we are talking about unusual man-made geological features, Hell's Gate should not be omitted.
It is essentially a big crater in Uzbekistan where natural gas has been burning for decades. Back when it formed they ignited the gas. From a current perspective that still makes sense, as burning it in this case converts methane which has a several times larger warming potential than CO2. Underground coal of course is just the opposite and given they have been burning so long I assume it is beyond current tech to extinguish them other than the very costly way of dumping tons of concrete into the ground.
Yep, Maemo, recently wed to Intels Moblin to form MeeGo. And while their OS seems solid enough, I am somewhat doubtful about their "kick arse hardware". To me it seems that HTC brings out ten WANTWANTWANT phones for every mildly interesting Nokia phone. Only the N900 runs Maemo and that phone is going to be two years old soon!
It seems both Nokia and Microsoft are fat cats who are mostly famous for long gone achievements, Android and WebOS look a lot more interesting at the moment.
That is not a complete myth, you do indeed develop shortsightedness from reading from an iPad or anything else held at an arms length. Though develop means you still have to be growing, i.e. a kid. So sending them outside to play instead of sitting in front of a screen does have its merits.
The study I remember was comparing kids in Israel. Some grew up in highly religious communities where they spend a lot of time reading the Torah, the other half grew up in more secular communities. The result was that those who read more were more likely to become short sighted. There is truth to the bespectacled intellectual stereotype.
IIRC the proposed mechanism is that the signal quality which the neurons receive influence the elongation of the eye, and focusing on near objects somehow makes them grow longer. Terrible control mechanism for the correct eye size, typical evolutionary hackjob:)
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that they never touch the philosophical issues of "droids rights" makes me classify Star Wars more into the Fantasy than in the Science Fiction genre. It takes place in a universe where apart from some engineering progress towards bigger weapons no scientific progress is made (except maybe the midichlorians lapse), and technology itself is never questioned but is just a plot device. Just like droids.
No, warmer would be bad.
A warmblooded animal, such as mammals with their core temperature of ~37ÂC for mammals and few degrees more for birds, constantly produces heat. That is heat must go somewhere, otherwise it would lead to overheating. So the only choice is to run at a temperature which is above that of the environment. Once those temperatures come too close to each other, all animals reduce their activity more and more to prevent said overheating.
So, a jump in global temperature, i.e. one that is faster than evolution can keep pace with, would pose a serious threat to animals in areas where the gap between their core temperature and the environment is reduced.
How far is multiarch support, i.e. being able to install 32 and 64 bit packages along side each other, and that not just on the Intel architecture but any CPUs which support both 32 and 64bits?
Have any other distros pulled this off?
Sounds like the return of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Just what I was thinking when I read the article. And then I had to think of the Marain, a fictional constructed language in the Culture universe. I wonder if a society would actually decide to change their language if there was sufficient evidence that it hinders their cultural development. Sort of like the switch to the Latin alphabet as it happened for Vietnamese and Turkish, only a bit more invasive.
tailor a bacteria to attack or compete with a bacteria which you needed to control
This already exists in the from of a virus which attacks bacteria, also known as a Bacteriophage. It doesn't even have to be programmed from the outside to keep up with the evading, evolving bacteria; it just evolves as well. And even if you wanted to "program" this feature, you'd have to deal with the nasty problem of protein folding in silico. Better to leave this entire process highly parallel in wetware.
programmable immune system
Also known as Vaccination, and this happens naturally after every infection. And again you don't have to program anything, it uses a random walk to find matching antibodies which attach themselves to bugs.
This discovery will sooner result in a very parallel, but also clockrate wise very slow computer than in immunological advances. And if this gets used in the human body via gene therapy it will be used to regulate genes, i.e. as an if/else block, not to calculate anything fancy.
It's not speed that kills, it's the speed difference.
Assuming the trees are planet and the humanity stops to care we might pull out CO2 fast enough to reach a snowball earth scenario, i.e. it gets too cold and more snow reflects more sunlight resulting in a negative feedback loop. And maybe this time we won't come out of it again.
Two things:
Don't Panic!
Women staying out of the engineering and "hard" sciences is mostly a phenomenon of the western world (in Cold War terms). In eastern Europe and Russia these subjects are much closer to parity, IIRC the same hold true for China. Even in Iran (!) women don't share the western prejudices against CS, Math etc.
However, once in these fields, there is the entirely different issue of the glass ceiling, i.e. not getting promoted beyond a certain level.
When I go outside, at any time of the night, I see very few stars. I remember seeing the Milky Way the first time and was quite awestruck, the name made perfect sense then.
Light pollution is turning us into the Krikkit!
Oh, but you do get mutations! In fact, mutations which allow you to defeat H1N1! And not just a single replaced amino acid, no, lots more! Now how does that silly virus look?
When an immune systems B-cell find something it doesn't like, such as a virus, it goes into a feedback loop, mutates itself so that some copies will dislike said virus even more. In the end you have an immune system against which this virus doesn't stand a chance even though it was a completely unknown pathogen hours earlier. And this response will remain intact for years! (see: vaccination) This is called somatic hypermutation. On the downside, somatic means it won't make it into your germ line so your children will have to mutate all on their own again (though IIRC some of the mothers immune system cells make it into the child to help out a bit).
The tech learning curve is important as well. Those who grew up with computers in pre-GUI times had a rather steep curve but as a consequence became much more proficient.
When the curve became flatter less understanding was required, however more people started using it. So I wonder if the mass adoption of technology compensates for the reduced required depth, i.e. if the first easy steps encouraged more people to take a deeper look at things compared to when you had no choice but to do that.
Data on the percentage of computer users in each generation which were hobby programmers at a certain would be interesting.
As much as nuclear energy would help reduce CO2 emissons, the the anti-nuclear crowd has to be seen as a "force of nature" making new power plants less likely. The idealist would fight against irrationality, but as a realist I would redirect that energy elsewhere, e.g. against the NIMBYs who think wind turbines ruin the coastlines and kill birds or bats.
Also, if oil is non-renewable because it takes millions of years to re-form, then nuclear fuels are the ultimate non-renewable with a "when is the next supernova due?" regeneration period. And the energy density and relative ease of use is just too good to waste it powering our washing machines and slashdot browsing. Maybe in a few hundred years outer solar system exploration will be in a serious crunch because the lack of a good power source after all the uranium, thorium, plutonium etc. has been used up.
At first this "Because there's obviously no sunlight in the body, this light-mill pulls its power from a laser run up through the center of the catheter." seemed rather silly. When you already have a cable why not use that to get all the power you want? But later on the articles mentions that blood vessels really don't like anything above one volt. Other generators/motors (applying an alternating external magnetic field maybe) produce too much voltage already, so producing the power via photons is a safe alternative.
On a related note, I wonder how far the tech for burning blood sugar in a fuel cell is, that would allow for long independent operation of tiny devices and since nothing rotates should scale low wrt. voltage
In some countries centuries are actually labelled in that fashion. So maybe you should just advise said AC to travel more of the real or virtual world instead. But less breeding is always good. Though, probably not in said countries, with their negative population growth....
Yes, the Enigma algorithm, or actually wiring, was known and Polish and later English Cryptologists worked long and hard to crack it since a lot was at stake. This one as of now relied a lot on security through obscurity. I doubt it would have lasted long in a world war scenario.
Just as the Enigma it might be impossible to de-cypher it manually, but with a machine and Turing-level minds to help you I would think it is solved quickly. But since secure encryption is perceived as a solved problem (still, where is the AES equivalent of a secure hash?) maybe bright minds turn their attention elsewhere nowadays.
The influx of money should raise the standard of living [in] those countries and it might encourage a different sort of economic growth than what we've seen in economies fueled by petrodollars.
What growth? Countries which get essentially "free money" often have shrinking economies . Whether they get paid for oil underground or sun shining on the ground doesn't matter. They don't become poor, but they end up importing everything because local labor is so unattractive an expensive. See Dutch disease etc., this was just recently discussed on /. in relation to the "trillion dollar ore miracle" in Afghanistan.
And these solar arrays are probably built by non-local companies, so no local know-how is rewarded. Then the states just get monetary compensation for maintenance work, not for fabricating anything. Now how to build a local economy.
While we are nitpicking, the Trojans are the good guys. You have to be on the lookout for the sneaky Greeks.
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts! And in all seriousness, using the proper term might cause a few more users to think twice about clicking "Ok" and instead thinking about ancient stories and their modern parallels.
Are there ARM designs yet which support the Trusted Platform Module specification? (Remember this fuzz years ago wrt. Microsoft and TCPA/NGSCB?)
If I were a hardware company and want to sell DRM'ed content with a hardware dongle, this would be the way to go, having the encryption key which ties the media to the device stored directly inside the CPU would make my platform very attractive, maybe even a de-facto standard, for certain media control freaks. And you could make sure that only signed code runs it from the moment it boots, turning it into the ultimate closed system where the producing company stays in control.
It is a reference to their early days. Back when Altavista & Co. were the dominant search engines they had incredibly cluttered interfaces, they were more like web portals.
Then Google came along with just a logo, an input field and two buttons. And of course an awesome search algorithm. Not showing the inevitable clutter that has crept in for the first few seconds is their way of having and eating the purity cake.
Playing the devils advocate: Patents exist to encourage research which, when completed, could be easily "stolen". If there were no patents, nobody would research something which a competitor could copy without doing any of the work; or everyone would obfuscate their findings if possible.*
So a company invests millions to find a gene which plays a role in cancer, i.e. it finds the connection and not just patents random junk hoping to score something later - shouldn't this be rewarded or protected somehow? If this is just one step towards a drug, competitors could just jump onto their findings and get a half-free ride.
* or, of course, the state does all the research and any individual with a smart idea which this big system doesn't support is left to his own devices with no protection from being deprived of his reward. Obviously, middle ground is where the solution is, not that I have any idea where exactly that is.
While we are talking about unusual man-made geological features, Hell's Gate should not be omitted.
It is essentially a big crater in Uzbekistan where natural gas has been burning for decades. Back when it formed they ignited the gas. From a current perspective that still makes sense, as burning it in this case converts methane which has a several times larger warming potential than CO2. Underground coal of course is just the opposite and given they have been burning so long I assume it is beyond current tech to extinguish them other than the very costly way of dumping tons of concrete into the ground.
Yep, Maemo, recently wed to Intels Moblin to form MeeGo. And while their OS seems solid enough, I am somewhat doubtful about their "kick arse hardware". To me it seems that HTC brings out ten WANTWANTWANT phones for every mildly interesting Nokia phone. Only the N900 runs Maemo and that phone is going to be two years old soon!
It seems both Nokia and Microsoft are fat cats who are mostly famous for long gone achievements, Android and WebOS look a lot more interesting at the moment.
the eyesight myth
That is not a complete myth, you do indeed develop shortsightedness from reading from an iPad or anything else held at an arms length. Though develop means you still have to be growing, i.e. a kid. So sending them outside to play instead of sitting in front of a screen does have its merits.
The study I remember was comparing kids in Israel. Some grew up in highly religious communities where they spend a lot of time reading the Torah, the other half grew up in more secular communities. The result was that those who read more were more likely to become short sighted. There is truth to the bespectacled intellectual stereotype.
IIRC the proposed mechanism is that the signal quality which the neurons receive influence the elongation of the eye, and focusing on near objects somehow makes them grow longer. Terrible control mechanism for the correct eye size, typical evolutionary hackjob :)
(jump to 0:50) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5nJVtLygOM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwFbwHaP5tE Approximately 1:04 in.
(OT) Hint for jumping to a specific time in youtube videos:
Add #t=TIMESTAMP to the urls, like so
Thanks in advance for using a bit of more your time to save us n-times our time (n = |viewers|) :-)