except active mouons of sufficient energy are unlikely to be emitted on the fly. A mouon has a life expectency of some few dozen milliseconds, tops.
The reason that we have mouons from the sun this far into our atmosphere?
The mouons are created when highly energetic protons and iron nucleii from the solar wind hit our upper atmosphere. (Collisions many times more energetic than anything currently being done at CERN), and these resulting mouons have a significant imparted inertial energy behind them-- they come into being traveling at relativisitc velocities. So, for them, a few dozen miliseconds pass before they decay-- but to us, they exist for several dozens of seconds. Long enough for them to come streaming down from the sky in an endless daylight barrage of partical radiation.
Mouons that come into being from fission decay reactions arent quite as energetic-- but still useful for imaging purposes. However, being less energetic, they dont live as long to outside observers, like us.
What am I getting at here?
Dr Manhattan is unlikely to come into being from energetic mouons interacting with fissile reactor fuel rods. Transporting said fuel rods by air exposes them to shittons of them. So far, no superheros have been born this way.:D
"You misspelled something! OMG!" + "You disagree with my premade conclusions! Evidence be damned!" +"You pointed out something that's true! OMG, you must be a libtard! (Here's a hint for you, I dont intend to wax philosophically on why government has to spend energy and resources doing those things- Only pointing out that it does, and that because it does, it has a competing focus.)" = "ABORT! ABORT! I cant handle this! YOU SPEAK CRAZINESS!"
Or, in other words, your whole chain of counter arguments basically boils down to "Your statements disagree with my beliefs, so I will simply insult you for being stupid, because I dont have any REAL counter arguments"
There's quite a few other groups in the US which take a similar path to argument. Most have pretty bad reputations, given that they try to bootstomp science, lie, make shit up, and generally ignore objective reality. I am sure you know which groups I am referring to without my specifically naming them.
Any time you have a belief, instead of an opinion, there is going to be this problem where you are going to be systemically unable to process another's ideas. This is NOT a virtue sir.
This is why the obvious solution is to compartmentalize the artificial gravity habitats:
You have a single, exterior shell, which does NOT rotate. This allows spacewalks without all those nasty issues.
Inside this shell, you have several cylendrical habitats that counter-rotate. The combined rotational force is a net zero, which is why the exterior shell does not rotate.
(Simplest configuration-- One long cylendar, with two cylendars inside. One of these rotates clockwise, the other counter clockwise. The long axis of all cylendars is conserved.)
This would allow you to use the gravitational habitats as reaction control wheels. They could also be spun down for easy maintenance-- Being INSIDE the vehicle's outer shell, the whole interstitial space between the habitat and the outer hull could be pressurized. Maintenance to the moving parts would be radically less difficult, and lost tools would only happen on exterior hull maintenance. Again, exterior hull DOES NOT SPIN.
The reason we dont design space vessels this way is very blunt: It costs a WHOLE FUCKING LOT OF MONEY to orbit just a few pounds of weight. Proper design is easy--- Logistics of lofting something that works, even halfassed, is NOT.
This argument isnt about long term space missions.
This argument is really about why we arent using the moon for staging our orbiting vehicle construction.
If we used the moon this way, we could AFFORD to build CORRECT space vehicles that DO supply sufficient shielding.
We dont, because that means having a real, self-sustaining colony on the moon, which means having joe sixpack in space, and all the trappings that go with it. (Space pubs/bars, and space hookers. No society in the history of mankind has been without them. The moon would be no different.) This is VERY unattractive to high-minded politicians and researchers. NOBODY wants to be the guy who puts space whores on the moon.
However, private industry has no such qualms. They will happily put "Candy" on the moon, to do her low G poledance routine, as long as she can pay the ficket price for her flight.
We will get there eventually; but really, we should have been more aggressive about getting things set up and running on the moon.
Politically, government has to contend with things like "Making sure single mothers and orphans get subsidized health and food services"-- Again, private industry has no such requirement.
It wont be pretty, but at least it will eventually get there. Just dont expect star trek.
Instead, the grim spectre is "The company store". (I wouldnt be surprised if the early privatized space agencies actually negotiate a fee for candy's services, and actually ship her up themselves!) The companies that fund and build the colony sites up there are going to have literal material monopolies on everything from power, to water, to air, to food. And in a potentially unregulatable environment. Nasty business.
But again-- we WILL eventually get there, but the end result wont be roses and sunshine. Government is not capable of the sustained attention focus in the face of voter interests--- and private industry has no real humanitarian interests.
Private indsutry will go anywhere and do anything that people are willing to pay money for, and will tailor its actions to maximize its financial bottom line. -- That's a two edged sword of truth. (If there's a market, and profit to be made in sacrificing babies to Satan, they would cheerfully sacrifice as many babies as possible to get that money given half the chance. Private industry is NOT a moral actor.)
There is a vast and untapped market in space. The need for orbiting telecom, and improved service and uptime of same, is only getting greater by the minute. The first group to succeed in getting a viable colony on the moon to provide manufacturing, orbiting, and service agreements for terrestrial satellites (based from the moon, where such service can be cheap) will have a veritable monopoly, PLANET WIDE. The fin
Yes and no-- Depends on what the ISS's orbit is. If it has a circumpolar orbit, (crosses the polar region), then it will pass through the magnetic field lines that funnel cosmic particles into the atmosphere that cause the northern lights. EG-- it would get beamed pretty intensely with concentrated cosmic particles.
If it does not have that kind of orbit, and instead stays around the equator, then no so much. Mostly radiation free, compared to outside the magnetosphere.
What we need to do, is send a lander to the moon loaded with some microbial and planktonic colonies, where it can get beamed by high intensity, raw solar wind radiation, (And more importantly, where we can keep close tabs on it easily) and measure how the colonies do over time.
Last I checked, we have pretty much definitively determined that the moon is devoid of native flora or fauna. "Contamination" of the moon is a silly prospect.
If we decide not to land the experiment ON the moon, we could just as easily place it in orbit around the moon, and still conduct the experiment. the moon just provides a nice stable gravity well to moor the experiment so we dont have to send oodles of fuel to keep station, which is conveniently close by, and outside the magnetosphere of the planet.
I am actually surprised that there are so few experiments geared at empirically testing terrestrial microorganisms against the "Inhospitable environment" of space.
I strongly suspect it has more to do with the politics of not having to contemplate panspermia as a probable/reasonable factor in scientific debate than anything else.
That would work too, but getting your hands on CF cards is getting harder and harder, and so is the likelihood that end users will have a card reader capable of using them.
Chromebooks dont use CF.
This does throw a nasty little wrinkle in. we would need a custom SD card ASIC that purposefully does not accept writes, and does not have any code inside its firmware to facilitate writes.
That's gonna make it significantly more expensive though.
there's a possible alternative though, but it still requires custom hardware fab. A filter sleeve. It does a man-in-the-middle between the actual sdcard and the sdcard slot. it allows read requests through, but denies write packets. It instead lies, and says a write was denied, emulating the behavior of the write protect notch on the sdcard logically to the controller, while actively also prohibiting the write from getting through at all. The ideal form factor here is in the "SDHC to microSDHC adapter sleeve" format. Sits inside a real SDHC slot, accepts microSDHC, but strictly enforces write protection.
Really, revelations like this are all the more reason to run a fully rom based OS for anything touching the internet.
Before somebody says something absurd, this is basically what a thin client does anyway. The difference is that you keep the system image inside the thin client itself, rather than pulling it from the network. A modified chromebook would work just fine. An sdcard slot that is hardware designed to be electronically incapable of raising its line voltages to write-enable levels, while still being physically accessible by the owner, would round out the package for where to store the system image.
Everything else is stored exclusively in RAM, and blanks completely on power off.
If the user WANTS persistent data, they can use external media. it comes in quite acceptable sizes these days.
This could very easily be done with a chromebook with some simple modifications. Instead of doing google chrome, pack it with a squashfs knoppix image.
Politicians are expert liars and manipulators. They have agendas. they arent always good, and almost always have some kind of barb in them. Positions of power attract those who hunger for power, and that hunger is insatiable.
What is "War for what I want" to the politician, he spins as "War to prevent $atrocity" to his citizenry.
As voltaire pointed out, those who believe absurdities, can be made to commit atrocities.
The absurdity is that there is a justification for war to begin with-- a "right reason." To the politician, that just means he needs to push that "right reason" button, and you will go to war for him, and he will get what he wants.
Be it "Spreading freedom" or "assisting a revolt" or whatever.
Think about what war actually *IS*.
"I disagree with you, so strongly, that I feel compelled to use lethal violence against you to either eliminate you, or force you to adopt my position in this argument."
When you look at war that way, all pretext of "right reasons" dissolves.
As I pointed out earlier, "War is necessary because war exists(elsewhere)!" is a tautology. That is what "Violence in the name of self-defense" is. "My violence is necessary because there is violence (elsewhere)!"
The issue, is that you have governments that dont know the meaning of a peaceful "no."
You know, like,
"Hey bro-- I see you have lots of untapped oil resources. Would you please make some backroom deals with me so I can get some of it real cheap? I'll give you all the stuff to get it out of the ground for a reasonable bait and switch arrangement..."
"no, your deal is clearly not in our best interests. Seek your oil elsewhere."
"Oh, sorry to hear you say that..." (Turns around, spreads propoganda in his own country to rile up the 'For the right reasons' crowd) "For FREEDOM!(tm)"
(censored) [sounds of killing and horrors of war of scene]
[new scene, completely different person is now in charge of the other country.]
"Thanks so much for putting me in power! Now, how can I help you?"
"yes, about that oil...."
THIS is why we must not allow people to be moved by speeches about "right reasons" for war. There would never have been a war without them. That's the point.
The argument in favor of 'For the right reasons' revolves around war being inevitable and necessary. It is a logical tautology.
This is a little short sighted. Video files are not th eonly kinds of file that have grown demonstrably larger over time, due to "hey, everyone has the spaces these days, let's fill it! It's CHEAP!" being a development consideration.
Be it audio files (FLAAC vs MP3), Images (jpg vs png vs bmp vs RAW), Documents (RTF vs DOC vs DOCX) 3D object files (OBJ vs MAX vs BLEND) and of course, application files (I've seen 10mb and larger DLLs and other libraries become commonplace these days, where previously they were a few kilobytes to meg or two, with 5mb being 'large')
What you mean to say, is that 1TB is more than enough for anyone, "right now."
As the AC that also responded pointed out, you know nothing of how they spend their own time. Your argument can be boiled down to a version of the broken window fallacy, in which you are a glazier, and thus value broken windows, regardless of the outcome.
You are discounting how your business can benefit by the more efficient utilization of the time and energy of people who do not get your blessing to become your employee; The coder you dont hire, that develops the next big thing in cryptography, because he misspelled something. The musical genius that produces the next major record hit, that powers the recording studio you have as a client that ends up paying your bills. Etc.
How many of THEIR minutes are you accounting for in your value determination? How many minutes do you waste, which result in economy-wide changes in potential, because of your own laziness?
Have you ever contemplated it before?
Realistically, the best solution is one which wastes the least amount of time on both sides of the equation because it results in the greatest potential in both your own direct market potential, and your indirect market potential. Your insistence on not seeing this only demonstrates that you do not understand the real value of time as a monetary metric.
The more time people spend engaged in producing and engaging in the marketplace, and the less time they spend trying to win the lottery by being the lucky one person who gets the job, directly correlates to lost income for you. You are just too blind to see it. This is ESPECIALLY true when there are HUGE disparities in the time expended on each side of the equation.
If you have 10,000 applicants, and your laziness costs them an extra half hour PER APPLICANT, you just wasted 5000 man-hours of market potential.
If your system is adopted by other hiring directors, the number only gets bigger.
Since the applicants engaging in the process represent some semi-random slice of the total market population, you can arrive at an estimation of the lost market activity you are directly causing.
The question is, after doing so, is your time REALLY more valuable than the sum loss you have incurred?
(Or is it really just a fairytale that you tell yourself at night?)
While in normal, healthy people the levels of produced acetone and other biproducts of ketosis are well within the body's ability to safely process and eliminate, renal failure restricts the body's ability to eliminate even normal waste products, such as urea, from the blood. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Engaging in a diet that is known to increase the production rate of these compounds, while suffering from a disorder that either 1) affects the liver's ability to even create these bodies as an energy source to begin with, or 2) affects the body's ability to dispose of the resulting reactive waste compounds, is a no-brainer for being a bad idea.
In the first, you can starve to death while eating lots of fat, and in the second you pickle yourself and can severely damage already chronically affected vital organs. (Acetone, one of the metabolites of ketosis, is known to damage kidney function in high concentrations. Reduced renal function results in higher than normal syrum concentrations of metabolites, which would include the acetone produced during ketosis. Many people with impaired renal function are not aware of it.)
Since you may feel perfectly healthy, and have impaired renal function and not even know it, (especially when one considers the risks associated with being obese in relation to renal disorders-- http://jasn.asnjournals.org/co... -- when coupled with the reason why one would engage in a ketogenic diet to begin with) you could very well be making a hidden but malignant condition worse.
Besides, asking your health care provider before doing *ANYTHING* extreme is simply good medicine.
What I find distasteful, is the inherent duplicity involved with "My time is valuable" when uttered in this context.
For every minute you "avoid wasting", you force how many other people to waste how many of their minutes? How much MORE valuable is YOUR time, to THEIRS?
How do you justify this disparity?
More poignantly, how do you justify this, when parsing technology exists in such a fashion as to allow automatic population of your presented high-level form that YOU read, without forcibly requiring your applicants to MANUALLY populate redundant entries on your application forms?
The option that wastes the least amount of time total, is to implement it correctly, so that information is asked for once, and populates it in many places automatically, so that no matter where the reviewer chooses to look preferentially, they will find the exact same data.
But that clearly makes too much sense; Everyone is too lazy to do it the demonstrably correct way, and as long as any one side of the issue can claim an advantage to leverage in doing the least amount of work, the issue will always persist.
Efficiency extends beyond just "It makes MY job easier!" It extends to the whole system, and what most improves useful results. There is a terrible problem with managerial myopia in this respect; Managers dont like being told that their policies are demonstrably poor-- Even more, they find ways to fire people that can actually prove it.
What I am getting at here, is that the root of this whole problem, is the idea that "I am the manager, and thus my will is of the highest impact, no other considerations matter" is in force. I'm sorry your majesty, but you have no clothes on.
The human genome project aims to map distributions of known gene alleles across the entire genomic space of the human species; and there are many studies that track individual and sets of alleles across geographic and ethnic group boundries.
This study focuses on a single regional and ethnic group, but narrows action of a set of alleles.
Comparing both data sets to each other, will give you the difference in distribution of those alleles across the regional and ethnic domain.
I am not weighing in on either side of this sordid argument; just saying that studies specific to the mindset of "Nu uh! I want to see your studies SPECIFICALLY TRACKING these genes, or you are WRONG! WRONG I SAY, WRONG!" are not necessary.
You can get that data without bias from the statistical data already collected from the human genome project, once you have a set of target genes to cross reference, which this recent study provides.
The way I understood the quantum vacuum, was that it spontaneously produces particle and antiparticle pairs, that exist for a very tiny amount of time, recombine, and then disappear. The energy needed to create these particle pairs from "nothing" is not elaborated on well; it is a matter of some controversy as I understand. However, the existence of these particles has been experimentally verified, as they produce real, measurable effects.
Likewise, a high energy photon has a certain probability of degrading into a pair of antiparticles with low mass, (electron positron pair), which then also recombines back into a high energy photon. This happens in the presence of matter, according to wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... Even the very best made EMDrive is going to have SOME gas inside the chamber, so "Check".
Since the virtual particles have charge, and the electron-positron pair have charge, a charge interaction is possible. Since the quantum vacuum is random, this means that light will suffer some small dispersion from the interaction even in deep space (which also has diffuse hydrogen atoms). The question that makes many scientists so angry, is that when this "real particle pair interacting with a not-real particle pair" happens, the vector of motion of the real particle pair can be altered slightly, as will the not-real pair. That seems to be the explanation for EMDrive. However, the not-real pair will vanish from existence, and the real particles will turn back into a photon.
Energy is exchanged via the interaction, but the energy vanishes on one side of the interaction as the non-particles vanish into the quantum soup again.
A device like the EMDrive tries to manipulate the probabilities of these interactions so that light, and electromagnetic fields in the device create additional interactions.
When both the light and the virtual particle pairs emerge into "Being", they exhibit some electrical charge characteristics. This means that an ambient magnetic field (which will be induced by the cavity resonating with high energy microwaves) will also interact with this exchange. Some of the "momentum" will be conferred to the field, which will then push on the field's source-- the cavity walls.
This means that the interactions going on inside the chamber, if you can cause a statistically relevant change in how the interactions proceed, can produce a net push against the cavity wall which will cause pushing against "light" trapped inside the cavity (the microwaves, as expressed as an antiparticle pair), and the virtual particle plasma that exists only for small moments of time before vanishing.
This appears to violate conservation of momentum, because the other half of the equation literally disappears with the disappearing virtual particles.
it is possible that the kinetic energy imparted to the vacuum particles does not actually vanish, but instead may manifest as a local increase in virtual particle density at the aft end of the device. This could be measured as an increase in the casimir force, if you wanted to check. That's a wildly unfounded idea mind, but I would be curious enough to look if I had the nanotech casimir force detection equipment to do it, and an EMdrive to test against.
1) Snowden releases a controlled release, which starts the manhunt to collect him for prosecution.
2) NSA, CIA, and pals all BLATANTLY LIE to congress. Congress eats it up like fudge.
3) Snowden releases MORE information, catching NSA, CIA, and pals in their blatant lie.
4) NSA, CIA, and pals whine about how unamerican snowden is, and how cowardly he is to have fled the country where they cant capture him and interrogate/punish him in secret. Lie some more to congress. Congress eats it up like fudge.
5) Snowden releases MORE information...
Rinse, repeat.
This has happened about 4 times now, with the NSA and CIA heads being caught lying EACH AND EVERY TIME.
Without snowden releasing the information he has released, there would have been no proof that the NSA and CIA had been lying to congress in a blatant fashion.
He didnt just release it all at once, bradley/chelsey manning style. He released it as it was NECESSARY to have it released, to prevent the NSA and CIA from continuing to operate as they had been previously.
More along the lines of "High T people, with their greater rest-energy requirements, spent more of their time working for food to sock away to avoid starvation, where their Low T peers required less, for the same effort invested, and could carry a larger surplus, and thus provide better for offspring.
If you also make some wild leaps (not advisable, but meh), you could see how a society transitioning away from hunter-gatherer toward agrarian would have the "strong providers" leaving the settlement every day to go and hunt, leaving the beanpoles behind. This places the beanpoles at a greater opportunity for reproductive activity.
The agricultural advance enables this to happen; nature does the rest.
Seems to me that a very high frequency lightsource in the room (WAAY faster than the 60-120hz fluorescent type) would totally bork this system, especially if there were multiple light sources in the room that were not in good phase agreement.
The camera takes images at 5000 frames per second, or there abouts. So, we need to degrade the camera's ability to take good images by screwing with the light levels at a higher speed, which will then introduce noise into the images captured. A normal human in the room would not notice that there was anything special about the light-- The photopigments in the retina have a much longer acrive duration than the light pulse frequency, so the light would appear to be "ON", not flickering.
At the very least,that would make reconstruction of audio from video serveilence with a high speed camera radically more compuationally expensive.
Just for reference, I am imagining lighting from a recessed vaulted light system. The phase of the light pulses generated by this 360 degree illumination source has incident light happening at 90 degree angles, and at a frequency that randomly modulates between 5000 and 10000 hz. To the POV of the highspeed camera, it will look like "rave party meets disco fever" lighting is going on in there. To the human occupants, the lights are just on. This can be further enhanced by using color mixed LED lighting bars that are designed to produce discrete Red Green and Blue signals that flash so quickly that the human eye sees only white light. The high speed camera however, will see psychodelic colors in randomly mixed patterns.
Seeing as the SNR is already kinda low even in the lab conditions, increasing the noise in the channel will render this approach untenable. "LED high speed 'rave lights'" would do exactly that.
Testosterone is linked with increased muscle mass, and thus with increased rest metabolism. A civilization that has lots of "Adonis" look-a-likes sitting around in the winter will not survive as well as a civilization with lots of beanpoles sitting around in the winter, because the beanpoles require less food per person per winter, and as such, the society will have more energy available to invest in improvements in technology and culture.
So, while increased testosterone is more sexually attractive, lower testosterone would have conferred a large survival advantage in ancient human history.
Some experiments could be devised to test this idea in fact--
Screen the population for a threshold of testosterone production, with a good distribution over ages, (so not all the low T people are 65+ and under 12) divide into two groups of 100, one with low T, and one with high T, pay them to live in isolation in a nice little log cabin up in the mountains, then just monitor their food consumption. According to the theory, the higher T population should consume more food doing the same rest activities as the lower T group. The experiment should determine a rough baseline for the difference, from which a (dangerous) extrapolation could be made.
I am more interested in radical ideas, like anti-mass, being at work.
Say you have a large aggregation of mass that is orbiting a large, semistationary singularity-- like, a galaxy does.
Outside this rather bumpy gravity well, you have a diffuse cloud of antimass, which then pushes on, and chases the mass as it rotates around the central mass. This pushing cancels out the centripetal force.
It's an interesting idea, as it was recently postulated that there is no real compelling reason for antimass to not exist-- it is a perfectly valid solution in some circumtances-- meaning that the stuff may very well exist.
It would be interesting to see a reinterpretation of the data of for "dark matter maps" of the universe, with antimass pressure substituted for mystery gravity application-- even if the math doesnt add up.
I can't prove it, (and it is highly inflammatory to say), but I would hazard the following guess as to why:
Corporations have intellectual blinders on. They are far too focused on "Beating the other guys" (financially, economically, technologically, legally, and otherwise) that the very concept of enlightened self interest-- Helping others, to promote a better environment, which they also stand to profit from-- is not given proper attention.
Note, the company you work for only considered this charitable solution after it was discovered to be cheaper and with fewer regulatory hurdles than actual electronic waste disposal. (even though these devices will eventually get there, regardless. nothing lasts forever.) Ultimately, the allure of such initiatives at the corporate level has nothing to do whatsoever with improving the community, and everything to do with foisting a cost center onto somebody else. (Disposal fees for the ewaste now are the concern of the charities that repurpose the waste, and of the people who accept the repurposed waste, when those devices actually do catastrophically fail. Granted, this can be after many years of service-- however, they WILL eventually fail, and they WILL require proper disposal at that time. The people paying for the disposal will be the new owners. Not the company you work for.)
The concept of "enlightened self interest" is far too long term for modern corporate culture to even come close to comprehending-- It uses forces that mature over several decades, often at human-generation timescales. That's where the payoffs on recycling like this REALLY happen-- you increase availability of an essential resource, increasing the possible labor pool in 20 to 30 years, as a consequence of the increased availability of the raw equipment needed to foster competency and skill.
Corporations dont like to think this way. They want to think about how they can cheat the system to increase their profits THIS QUARTER; not how they will get competent workers in 20 years. For the latter, they tend to suckle the teat of modern 'free market capitalism' philosophies, and expect to just magically get what they need, without actually investing in the competencies they are going to need later on.
You see this rapaciously happening in the US-- Our BS with H1B visa abuses, massive over-use of foreign workforce, short-sighted erosion of regulatory laws, and so much more. All have the central theme though: Get the money, get it quick before anyone else can, crowd out everyone else-- the market will always provide, it will be OK.
In a sense, what you have done by revealing this to your employer is highly pathological, when taken in this context-- You have enabled them to circumvent a regulatory compliance directive aimed at ensuring proper disposal of their e-waste, by allowing them to redirect that waste flow into the public commons.
Having been discovered and exploited, I would forecast the following, in this order:
1) This will be suddenly become INSANELY popular. Other companies will follow suit.
2) There will be a glut of viable e-waste in the charity network, far outstripping demand. the real nature of e-waste as refuse will rear its head.
3) This glut of ewaste at the charity level will prompt a less savory secondary market, which appropriates these low cost assets and resells them abroad, or in other municipalities-- for a time.
4) regulators, (sadly, often captured by the companies they are supposed to be regulating) will step in, and impose new regulations prohibiting the disposal of ewaste in this fashion. This is because the e-waste is not being disposed of properly/disposal fees cannot be realistically charged to the new endpoint of the refuse chain. Supply to charities will dry up.
5) Ultimately, after an initial boom, there will be less overall availability of perfectly usable recycled electronics than before.
[obligatory: 6) profit]
There is an alternate pathway, of course, depending on how the regulatory agen
you arent sure how it does $FOO, exactly. You see that inputs go in, some magical process $BAR happens inside, and $FOO comes out.
Strong AI strives to reproduce this $FOO.
The issue, is that the process $BAR is very much dependent on what the system is built from. (In this case, complex organic molecules and saline ions). Understanding $BAR is insanely hard, because $BAR is carried out in a highly parallelized fashion, with many many subprocesses going on, many of which are highly dependent upon the method of construction of the system, and exist soley because of that method of construction.
So, you want to build an artificial system that takes the same imputs, does $BAR, and gets $FOO.
Do you:
1) Slavishly reimplement millions of models in the new medium's physical construction, to emulate the quirks and behaviors of the target system's physical construction, wasting huge amounts of energy and making a system that is actually *MORE* complex than the original....
OR
2) Deconstruct all the mechanisms at work in the physical system that currently performs $BAR to get $FOO, evaluate which of these are hardware dependent, and can be removed/adapted to high efficiency analouges in the new hardware platform-- and produce only the components needed for $BAR to be accomplished, to generate $FOO?
The former will most certainly get you $FOO, but is HORRIBLY INEFFICIENT, and does not really shed light on what is actually needed to get $FOO.
The latter is MUCH HARDER to do, as it requires actually understanding the process, $BAR, through which $FOO is attained. It will however, yeild the higher efficiency synthetic system, AND the means to prove that it is the best possible implementation.
Basically, it's the difference between building a rube-goldberg contraption, VS an efficient machine.
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except active mouons of sufficient energy are unlikely to be emitted on the fly. A mouon has a life expectency of some few dozen milliseconds, tops.
The reason that we have mouons from the sun this far into our atmosphere?
The mouons are created when highly energetic protons and iron nucleii from the solar wind hit our upper atmosphere. (Collisions many times more energetic than anything currently being done at CERN), and these resulting mouons have a significant imparted inertial energy behind them-- they come into being traveling at relativisitc velocities. So, for them, a few dozen miliseconds pass before they decay-- but to us, they exist for several dozens of seconds. Long enough for them to come streaming down from the sky in an endless daylight barrage of partical radiation.
Mouons that come into being from fission decay reactions arent quite as energetic-- but still useful for imaging purposes. However, being less energetic, they dont live as long to outside observers, like us.
What am I getting at here?
Dr Manhattan is unlikely to come into being from energetic mouons interacting with fissile reactor fuel rods. Transporting said fuel rods by air exposes them to shittons of them. So far, no superheros have been born this way. :D
So, basically your counter arguments are:
"You misspelled something! OMG!" + "You disagree with my premade conclusions! Evidence be damned!" +"You pointed out something that's true! OMG, you must be a libtard! (Here's a hint for you, I dont intend to wax philosophically on why government has to spend energy and resources doing those things- Only pointing out that it does, and that because it does, it has a competing focus.)" = "ABORT! ABORT! I cant handle this! YOU SPEAK CRAZINESS!"
Or, in other words, your whole chain of counter arguments basically boils down to "Your statements disagree with my beliefs, so I will simply insult you for being stupid, because I dont have any REAL counter arguments"
There's quite a few other groups in the US which take a similar path to argument. Most have pretty bad reputations, given that they try to bootstomp science, lie, make shit up, and generally ignore objective reality. I am sure you know which groups I am referring to without my specifically naming them.
Any time you have a belief, instead of an opinion, there is going to be this problem where you are going to be systemically unable to process another's ideas. This is NOT a virtue sir.
This is why the obvious solution is to compartmentalize the artificial gravity habitats:
You have a single, exterior shell, which does NOT rotate. This allows spacewalks without all those nasty issues.
Inside this shell, you have several cylendrical habitats that counter-rotate. The combined rotational force is a net zero, which is why the exterior shell does not rotate.
(Simplest configuration-- One long cylendar, with two cylendars inside. One of these rotates clockwise, the other counter clockwise. The long axis of all cylendars is conserved.)
This would allow you to use the gravitational habitats as reaction control wheels. They could also be spun down for easy maintenance-- Being INSIDE the vehicle's outer shell, the whole interstitial space between the habitat and the outer hull could be pressurized. Maintenance to the moving parts would be radically less difficult, and lost tools would only happen on exterior hull maintenance. Again, exterior hull DOES NOT SPIN.
The reason we dont design space vessels this way is very blunt: It costs a WHOLE FUCKING LOT OF MONEY to orbit just a few pounds of weight. Proper design is easy--- Logistics of lofting something that works, even halfassed, is NOT.
This argument isnt about long term space missions.
This argument is really about why we arent using the moon for staging our orbiting vehicle construction.
If we used the moon this way, we could AFFORD to build CORRECT space vehicles that DO supply sufficient shielding.
We dont, because that means having a real, self-sustaining colony on the moon, which means having joe sixpack in space, and all the trappings that go with it. (Space pubs/bars, and space hookers. No society in the history of mankind has been without them. The moon would be no different.) This is VERY unattractive to high-minded politicians and researchers. NOBODY wants to be the guy who puts space whores on the moon.
However, private industry has no such qualms. They will happily put "Candy" on the moon, to do her low G poledance routine, as long as she can pay the ficket price for her flight.
We will get there eventually; but really, we should have been more aggressive about getting things set up and running on the moon.
Politically, government has to contend with things like "Making sure single mothers and orphans get subsidized health and food services"-- Again, private industry has no such requirement.
It wont be pretty, but at least it will eventually get there. Just dont expect star trek.
Instead, the grim spectre is "The company store". (I wouldnt be surprised if the early privatized space agencies actually negotiate a fee for candy's services, and actually ship her up themselves!) The companies that fund and build the colony sites up there are going to have literal material monopolies on everything from power, to water, to air, to food. And in a potentially unregulatable environment. Nasty business.
But again-- we WILL eventually get there, but the end result wont be roses and sunshine. Government is not capable of the sustained attention focus in the face of voter interests--- and private industry has no real humanitarian interests.
Private indsutry will go anywhere and do anything that people are willing to pay money for, and will tailor its actions to maximize its financial bottom line. -- That's a two edged sword of truth. (If there's a market, and profit to be made in sacrificing babies to Satan, they would cheerfully sacrifice as many babies as possible to get that money given half the chance. Private industry is NOT a moral actor.)
There is a vast and untapped market in space. The need for orbiting telecom, and improved service and uptime of same, is only getting greater by the minute. The first group to succeed in getting a viable colony on the moon to provide manufacturing, orbiting, and service agreements for terrestrial satellites (based from the moon, where such service can be cheap) will have a veritable monopoly, PLANET WIDE. The fin
Wine.
This allows wine to run on exotic hardware. (Well, at least ARMv7)
This means that theoretically, tablet-flavor windows applications can be run on linux derived tablet OSes with wine libraries, and other fun things.
You should not be so cynical about something like this. It's a feature that's been missing from the landscape for some time now.
Yes and no-- Depends on what the ISS's orbit is. If it has a circumpolar orbit, (crosses the polar region), then it will pass through the magnetic field lines that funnel cosmic particles into the atmosphere that cause the northern lights. EG-- it would get beamed pretty intensely with concentrated cosmic particles.
If it does not have that kind of orbit, and instead stays around the equator, then no so much. Mostly radiation free, compared to outside the magnetosphere.
What we need to do, is send a lander to the moon loaded with some microbial and planktonic colonies, where it can get beamed by high intensity, raw solar wind radiation, (And more importantly, where we can keep close tabs on it easily) and measure how the colonies do over time.
Last I checked, we have pretty much definitively determined that the moon is devoid of native flora or fauna. "Contamination" of the moon is a silly prospect.
If we decide not to land the experiment ON the moon, we could just as easily place it in orbit around the moon, and still conduct the experiment. the moon just provides a nice stable gravity well to moor the experiment so we dont have to send oodles of fuel to keep station, which is conveniently close by, and outside the magnetosphere of the planet.
I am actually surprised that there are so few experiments geared at empirically testing terrestrial microorganisms against the "Inhospitable environment" of space.
I strongly suspect it has more to do with the politics of not having to contemplate panspermia as a probable/reasonable factor in scientific debate than anything else.
That would work too, but getting your hands on CF cards is getting harder and harder, and so is the likelihood that end users will have a card reader capable of using them.
Chromebooks dont use CF.
This does throw a nasty little wrinkle in.
we would need a custom SD card ASIC that purposefully does not accept writes, and does not have any code inside its firmware to facilitate writes.
That's gonna make it significantly more expensive though.
there's a possible alternative though, but it still requires custom hardware fab. A filter sleeve.
It does a man-in-the-middle between the actual sdcard and the sdcard slot. it allows read requests through, but denies write packets. It instead lies, and says a write was denied, emulating the behavior of the write protect notch on the sdcard logically to the controller, while actively also prohibiting the write from getting through at all. The ideal form factor here is in the "SDHC to microSDHC adapter sleeve" format. Sits inside a real SDHC slot, accepts microSDHC, but strictly enforces write protection.
Really, revelations like this are all the more reason to run a fully rom based OS for anything touching the internet.
Before somebody says something absurd, this is basically what a thin client does anyway. The difference is that you keep the system image inside the thin client itself, rather than pulling it from the network. A modified chromebook would work just fine. An sdcard slot that is hardware designed to be electronically incapable of raising its line voltages to write-enable levels, while still being physically accessible by the owner, would round out the package for where to store the system image.
Everything else is stored exclusively in RAM, and blanks completely on power off.
If the user WANTS persistent data, they can use external media. it comes in quite acceptable sizes these days.
This could very easily be done with a chromebook with some simple modifications. Instead of doing google chrome, pack it with a squashfs knoppix image.
watch all the seditious cat videos you want.
There-in lies the rub.
Politicians are expert liars and manipulators. They have agendas. they arent always good, and almost always have some kind of barb in them. Positions of power attract those who hunger for power, and that hunger is insatiable.
What is "War for what I want" to the politician, he spins as "War to prevent $atrocity" to his citizenry.
As voltaire pointed out, those who believe absurdities, can be made to commit atrocities.
The absurdity is that there is a justification for war to begin with-- a "right reason." To the politician, that just means he needs to push that "right reason" button, and you will go to war for him, and he will get what he wants.
Be it "Spreading freedom" or "assisting a revolt" or whatever.
Think about what war actually *IS*.
"I disagree with you, so strongly, that I feel compelled to use lethal violence against you to either eliminate you, or force you to adopt my position in this argument."
When you look at war that way, all pretext of "right reasons" dissolves.
As I pointed out earlier, "War is necessary because war exists(elsewhere)!" is a tautology. That is what "Violence in the name of self-defense" is. "My violence is necessary because there is violence (elsewhere)!"
The issue, is that you have governments that dont know the meaning of a peaceful "no."
You know, like,
"Hey bro-- I see you have lots of untapped oil resources. Would you please make some backroom deals with me so I can get some of it real cheap? I'll give you all the stuff to get it out of the ground for a reasonable bait and switch arrangement..."
"no, your deal is clearly not in our best interests. Seek your oil elsewhere."
"Oh, sorry to hear you say that..." (Turns around, spreads propoganda in his own country to rile up the 'For the right reasons' crowd) "For FREEDOM!(tm)"
(censored)
[sounds of killing and horrors of war of scene]
[new scene, completely different person is now in charge of the other country.]
"Thanks so much for putting me in power! Now, how can I help you?"
"yes, about that oil...."
THIS is why we must not allow people to be moved by speeches about "right reasons" for war. There would never have been a war without them. That's the point.
The argument in favor of 'For the right reasons' revolves around war being inevitable and necessary. It is a logical tautology.
"War is needed, because war exists(elsewhere)"
Little problem there, pal.
If EVERYONE did this, then there would be a scarce few idiots to join in behind dangerous, power-mad people, like the ones you mentioned.
Why? Because they would know that what that guy wanted, would lead to war, and know exactly what it is.
What REALLY contributes to those kinds of atrocities you cited, are people who think war is OK for "the right reasons".
Those people can be made to commit atrocities.
http://www.goodreads.com/quote...
This is a little short sighted. Video files are not th eonly kinds of file that have grown demonstrably larger over time, due to "hey, everyone has the spaces these days, let's fill it! It's CHEAP!" being a development consideration.
Be it audio files (FLAAC vs MP3), Images (jpg vs png vs bmp vs RAW), Documents (RTF vs DOC vs DOCX) 3D object files (OBJ vs MAX vs BLEND) and of course, application files (I've seen 10mb and larger DLLs and other libraries become commonplace these days, where previously they were a few kilobytes to meg or two, with 5mb being 'large')
What you mean to say, is that 1TB is more than enough for anyone, "right now."
4 years from now, not so much.
Perhaps, perhaps not.
As the AC that also responded pointed out, you know nothing of how they spend their own time. Your argument can be boiled down to a version of the broken window fallacy, in which you are a glazier, and thus value broken windows, regardless of the outcome.
You are discounting how your business can benefit by the more efficient utilization of the time and energy of people who do not get your blessing to become your employee; The coder you dont hire, that develops the next big thing in cryptography, because he misspelled something. The musical genius that produces the next major record hit, that powers the recording studio you have as a client that ends up paying your bills. Etc.
How many of THEIR minutes are you accounting for in your value determination? How many minutes do you waste, which result in economy-wide changes in potential, because of your own laziness?
Have you ever contemplated it before?
Realistically, the best solution is one which wastes the least amount of time on both sides of the equation because it results in the greatest potential in both your own direct market potential, and your indirect market potential. Your insistence on not seeing this only demonstrates that you do not understand the real value of time as a monetary metric.
The more time people spend engaged in producing and engaging in the marketplace, and the less time they spend trying to win the lottery by being the lucky one person who gets the job, directly correlates to lost income for you. You are just too blind to see it. This is ESPECIALLY true when there are HUGE disparities in the time expended on each side of the equation.
If you have 10,000 applicants, and your laziness costs them an extra half hour PER APPLICANT, you just wasted 5000 man-hours of market potential.
If your system is adopted by other hiring directors, the number only gets bigger.
Since the applicants engaging in the process represent some semi-random slice of the total market population, you can arrive at an estimation of the lost market activity you are directly causing.
The question is, after doing so, is your time REALLY more valuable than the sum loss you have incurred?
(Or is it really just a fairytale that you tell yourself at night?)
Did you have reduced liver or renal function?
Here's a little tip:
Ketonic diets make excessive use of liver function to produce the ketone bodies that get substituted in cellular metabolism for glucose.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...
While in normal, healthy people the levels of produced acetone and other biproducts of ketosis are well within the body's ability to safely process and eliminate, renal failure restricts the body's ability to eliminate even normal waste products, such as urea, from the blood. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Engaging in a diet that is known to increase the production rate of these compounds, while suffering from a disorder that either 1) affects the liver's ability to even create these bodies as an energy source to begin with, or 2) affects the body's ability to dispose of the resulting reactive waste compounds, is a no-brainer for being a bad idea.
In the first, you can starve to death while eating lots of fat, and in the second you pickle yourself and can severely damage already chronically affected vital organs. (Acetone, one of the metabolites of ketosis, is known to damage kidney function in high concentrations. Reduced renal function results in higher than normal syrum concentrations of metabolites, which would include the acetone produced during ketosis. Many people with impaired renal function are not aware of it.)
http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxfa...
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medline...
Since you may feel perfectly healthy, and have impaired renal function and not even know it, (especially when one considers the risks associated with being obese in relation to renal disorders-- http://jasn.asnjournals.org/co... -- when coupled with the reason why one would engage in a ketogenic diet to begin with) you could very well be making a hidden but malignant condition worse.
Besides, asking your health care provider before doing *ANYTHING* extreme is simply good medicine.
What I find distasteful, is the inherent duplicity involved with "My time is valuable" when uttered in this context.
For every minute you "avoid wasting", you force how many other people to waste how many of their minutes? How much MORE valuable is YOUR time, to THEIRS?
How do you justify this disparity?
More poignantly, how do you justify this, when parsing technology exists in such a fashion as to allow automatic population of your presented high-level form that YOU read, without forcibly requiring your applicants to MANUALLY populate redundant entries on your application forms?
The option that wastes the least amount of time total, is to implement it correctly, so that information is asked for once, and populates it in many places automatically, so that no matter where the reviewer chooses to look preferentially, they will find the exact same data.
But that clearly makes too much sense; Everyone is too lazy to do it the demonstrably correct way, and as long as any one side of the issue can claim an advantage to leverage in doing the least amount of work, the issue will always persist.
Efficiency extends beyond just "It makes MY job easier!" It extends to the whole system, and what most improves useful results. There is a terrible problem with managerial myopia in this respect; Managers dont like being told that their policies are demonstrably poor-- Even more, they find ways to fire people that can actually prove it.
What I am getting at here, is that the root of this whole problem, is the idea that "I am the manager, and thus my will is of the highest impact, no other considerations matter" is in force. I'm sorry your majesty, but you have no clothes on.
Unless the cancer is in your liver or renal system.
Then switching to a ketonic diet will poison you in a matter of days.
Always consult a health professional before doing ANYTHING radical with your body. :D
It would be trivial to get this information:
The human genome project aims to map distributions of known gene alleles across the entire genomic space of the human species; and there are many studies that track individual and sets of alleles across geographic and ethnic group boundries.
This study focuses on a single regional and ethnic group, but narrows action of a set of alleles.
Comparing both data sets to each other, will give you the difference in distribution of those alleles across the regional and ethnic domain.
I am not weighing in on either side of this sordid argument; just saying that studies specific to the mindset of "Nu uh! I want to see your studies SPECIFICALLY TRACKING these genes, or you are WRONG! WRONG I SAY, WRONG!" are not necessary.
You can get that data without bias from the statistical data already collected from the human genome project, once you have a set of target genes to cross reference, which this recent study provides.
This is probably very wrong. (yes. declarative.)
The way I understood the quantum vacuum, was that it spontaneously produces particle and antiparticle pairs, that exist for a very tiny amount of time, recombine, and then disappear. The energy needed to create these particle pairs from "nothing" is not elaborated on well; it is a matter of some controversy as I understand. However, the existence of these particles has been experimentally verified, as they produce real, measurable effects.
Likewise, a high energy photon has a certain probability of degrading into a pair of antiparticles with low mass, (electron positron pair), which then also recombines back into a high energy photon. This happens in the presence of matter, according to wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... Even the very best made EMDrive is going to have SOME gas inside the chamber, so "Check".
Since the virtual particles have charge, and the electron-positron pair have charge, a charge interaction is possible. Since the quantum vacuum is random, this means that light will suffer some small dispersion from the interaction even in deep space (which also has diffuse hydrogen atoms). The question that makes many scientists so angry, is that when this "real particle pair interacting with a not-real particle pair" happens, the vector of motion of the real particle pair can be altered slightly, as will the not-real pair. That seems to be the explanation for EMDrive. However, the not-real pair will vanish from existence, and the real particles will turn back into a photon.
Energy is exchanged via the interaction, but the energy vanishes on one side of the interaction as the non-particles vanish into the quantum soup again.
A device like the EMDrive tries to manipulate the probabilities of these interactions so that light, and electromagnetic fields in the device create additional interactions.
When both the light and the virtual particle pairs emerge into "Being", they exhibit some electrical charge characteristics. This means that an ambient magnetic field (which will be induced by the cavity resonating with high energy microwaves) will also interact with this exchange. Some of the "momentum" will be conferred to the field, which will then push on the field's source-- the cavity walls.
This means that the interactions going on inside the chamber, if you can cause a statistically relevant change in how the interactions proceed, can produce a net push against the cavity wall which will cause pushing against "light" trapped inside the cavity (the microwaves, as expressed as an antiparticle pair), and the virtual particle plasma that exists only for small moments of time before vanishing.
This appears to violate conservation of momentum, because the other half of the equation literally disappears with the disappearing virtual particles.
it is possible that the kinetic energy imparted to the vacuum particles does not actually vanish, but instead may manifest as a local increase in virtual particle density at the aft end of the device. This could be measured as an increase in the casimir force, if you wanted to check. That's a wildly unfounded idea mind, but I would be curious enough to look if I had the nanotech casimir force detection equipment to do it, and an EMdrive to test against.
Somebody is mis-remembering the controversy.
1) Snowden releases a controlled release, which starts the manhunt to collect him for prosecution.
2) NSA, CIA, and pals all BLATANTLY LIE to congress. Congress eats it up like fudge.
3) Snowden releases MORE information, catching NSA, CIA, and pals in their blatant lie.
4) NSA, CIA, and pals whine about how unamerican snowden is, and how cowardly he is to have fled the country where they cant capture him and interrogate/punish him in secret. Lie some more to congress. Congress eats it up like fudge.
5) Snowden releases MORE information...
Rinse, repeat.
This has happened about 4 times now, with the NSA and CIA heads being caught lying EACH AND EVERY TIME.
Without snowden releasing the information he has released, there would have been no proof that the NSA and CIA had been lying to congress in a blatant fashion.
He didnt just release it all at once, bradley/chelsey manning style. He released it as it was NECESSARY to have it released, to prevent the NSA and CIA from continuing to operate as they had been previously.
Your argument is absurd.
More along the lines of "High T people, with their greater rest-energy requirements, spent more of their time working for food to sock away to avoid starvation, where their Low T peers required less, for the same effort invested, and could carry a larger surplus, and thus provide better for offspring.
If you also make some wild leaps (not advisable, but meh), you could see how a society transitioning away from hunter-gatherer toward agrarian would have the "strong providers" leaving the settlement every day to go and hunt, leaving the beanpoles behind. This places the beanpoles at a greater opportunity for reproductive activity.
The agricultural advance enables this to happen; nature does the rest.
your understanding of the role testosterone plays in female sex drive is clearly lacking.
http://www.webmd.com/women/tes...
Seems to me that a very high frequency lightsource in the room (WAAY faster than the 60-120hz fluorescent type) would totally bork this system, especially if there were multiple light sources in the room that were not in good phase agreement.
The camera takes images at 5000 frames per second, or there abouts. So, we need to degrade the camera's ability to take good images by screwing with the light levels at a higher speed, which will then introduce noise into the images captured. A normal human in the room would not notice that there was anything special about the light-- The photopigments in the retina have a much longer acrive duration than the light pulse frequency, so the light would appear to be "ON", not flickering.
At the very least ,that would make reconstruction of audio from video serveilence with a high speed camera radically more compuationally expensive.
Just for reference, I am imagining lighting from a recessed vaulted light system. The phase of the light pulses generated by this 360 degree illumination source has incident light happening at 90 degree angles, and at a frequency that randomly modulates between 5000 and 10000 hz. To the POV of the highspeed camera, it will look like "rave party meets disco fever" lighting is going on in there. To the human occupants, the lights are just on. This can be further enhanced by using color mixed LED lighting bars that are designed to produce discrete Red Green and Blue signals that flash so quickly that the human eye sees only white light. The high speed camera however, will see psychodelic colors in randomly mixed patterns.
Seeing as the SNR is already kinda low even in the lab conditions, increasing the noise in the channel will render this approach untenable.
"LED high speed 'rave lights'" would do exactly that.
It's probably an "energy" issue.
Testosterone is linked with increased muscle mass, and thus with increased rest metabolism. A civilization that has lots of "Adonis" look-a-likes sitting around in the winter will not survive as well as a civilization with lots of beanpoles sitting around in the winter, because the beanpoles require less food per person per winter, and as such, the society will have more energy available to invest in improvements in technology and culture.
So, while increased testosterone is more sexually attractive, lower testosterone would have conferred a large survival advantage in ancient human history.
Some experiments could be devised to test this idea in fact--
Screen the population for a threshold of testosterone production, with a good distribution over ages, (so not all the low T people are 65+ and under 12) divide into two groups of 100, one with low T, and one with high T, pay them to live in isolation in a nice little log cabin up in the mountains, then just monitor their food consumption. According to the theory, the higher T population should consume more food doing the same rest activities as the lower T group. The experiment should determine a rough baseline for the difference, from which a (dangerous) extrapolation could be made.
I am more interested in radical ideas, like anti-mass, being at work.
Say you have a large aggregation of mass that is orbiting a large, semistationary singularity-- like, a galaxy does.
Outside this rather bumpy gravity well, you have a diffuse cloud of antimass, which then pushes on, and chases the mass as it rotates around the central mass. This pushing cancels out the centripetal force.
It's an interesting idea, as it was recently postulated that there is no real compelling reason for antimass to not exist-- it is a perfectly valid solution in some circumtances-- meaning that the stuff may very well exist.
It would be interesting to see a reinterpretation of the data of for "dark matter maps" of the universe, with antimass pressure substituted for mystery gravity application-- even if the math doesnt add up.
I can't prove it, (and it is highly inflammatory to say), but I would hazard the following guess as to why:
Corporations have intellectual blinders on. They are far too focused on "Beating the other guys" (financially, economically, technologically, legally, and otherwise) that the very concept of enlightened self interest-- Helping others, to promote a better environment, which they also stand to profit from-- is not given proper attention.
Note, the company you work for only considered this charitable solution after it was discovered to be cheaper and with fewer regulatory hurdles than actual electronic waste disposal. (even though these devices will eventually get there, regardless. nothing lasts forever.) Ultimately, the allure of such initiatives at the corporate level has nothing to do whatsoever with improving the community, and everything to do with foisting a cost center onto somebody else. (Disposal fees for the ewaste now are the concern of the charities that repurpose the waste, and of the people who accept the repurposed waste, when those devices actually do catastrophically fail. Granted, this can be after many years of service-- however, they WILL eventually fail, and they WILL require proper disposal at that time. The people paying for the disposal will be the new owners. Not the company you work for.)
The concept of "enlightened self interest" is far too long term for modern corporate culture to even come close to comprehending-- It uses forces that mature over several decades, often at human-generation timescales. That's where the payoffs on recycling like this REALLY happen-- you increase availability of an essential resource, increasing the possible labor pool in 20 to 30 years, as a consequence of the increased availability of the raw equipment needed to foster competency and skill.
Corporations dont like to think this way. They want to think about how they can cheat the system to increase their profits THIS QUARTER; not how they will get competent workers in 20 years. For the latter, they tend to suckle the teat of modern 'free market capitalism' philosophies, and expect to just magically get what they need, without actually investing in the competencies they are going to need later on.
You see this rapaciously happening in the US-- Our BS with H1B visa abuses, massive over-use of foreign workforce, short-sighted erosion of regulatory laws, and so much more. All have the central theme though: Get the money, get it quick before anyone else can, crowd out everyone else-- the market will always provide, it will be OK.
In a sense, what you have done by revealing this to your employer is highly pathological, when taken in this context-- You have enabled them to circumvent a regulatory compliance directive aimed at ensuring proper disposal of their e-waste, by allowing them to redirect that waste flow into the public commons.
Having been discovered and exploited, I would forecast the following, in this order:
1) This will be suddenly become INSANELY popular. Other companies will follow suit.
2) There will be a glut of viable e-waste in the charity network, far outstripping demand. the real nature of e-waste as refuse will rear its head.
3) This glut of ewaste at the charity level will prompt a less savory secondary market, which appropriates these low cost assets and resells them abroad, or in other municipalities-- for a time.
4) regulators, (sadly, often captured by the companies they are supposed to be regulating) will step in, and impose new regulations prohibiting the disposal of ewaste in this fashion. This is because the e-waste is not being disposed of properly/disposal fees cannot be realistically charged to the new endpoint of the refuse chain. Supply to charities will dry up.
5) Ultimately, after an initial boom, there will be less overall availability of perfectly usable recycled electronics than before.
[obligatory: 6) profit]
There is an alternate pathway, of course, depending on how the regulatory agen
Think about it this way--
You have a system that does $FOO.
you arent sure how it does $FOO, exactly. You see that inputs go in, some magical process $BAR happens inside, and $FOO comes out.
Strong AI strives to reproduce this $FOO.
The issue, is that the process $BAR is very much dependent on what the system is built from. (In this case, complex organic molecules and saline ions). Understanding $BAR is insanely hard, because $BAR is carried out in a highly parallelized fashion, with many many subprocesses going on, many of which are highly dependent upon the method of construction of the system, and exist soley because of that method of construction.
So, you want to build an artificial system that takes the same imputs, does $BAR, and gets $FOO.
Do you:
1) Slavishly reimplement millions of models in the new medium's physical construction, to emulate the quirks and behaviors of the target system's physical construction, wasting huge amounts of energy and making a system that is actually *MORE* complex than the original....
OR
2) Deconstruct all the mechanisms at work in the physical system that currently performs $BAR to get $FOO, evaluate which of these are hardware dependent, and can be removed/adapted to high efficiency analouges in the new hardware platform-- and produce only the components needed for $BAR to be accomplished, to generate $FOO?
The former will most certainly get you $FOO, but is HORRIBLY INEFFICIENT, and does not really shed light on what is actually needed to get $FOO.
The latter is MUCH HARDER to do, as it requires actually understanding the process, $BAR, through which $FOO is attained. It will however, yeild the higher efficiency synthetic system, AND the means to prove that it is the best possible implementation.
Basically, it's the difference between building a rube-goldberg contraption, VS an efficient machine.