Also, Uranium is not the densest naturally occuring element. It's not just about the atomic mass, it's also about the crystal structure. Osmium packs the atoms much more tightly, so it is way denser than Uranium.
I think you underestimate just how much work - like real human legwork - that Wikileaks actually needs to do. You can't just dump documents. You must redact stuff that could cause harm. And because you're not omniscient, you need to get help from people who are able to do it right. Somebody needs to call them, collaborate with them, etc. You need to have somebody who negotiates a pre-release to responsible global media outlets.
Wikileaks doesn't have a point man simply because of some guy's narcissism. They need a human being to coordinate all the stuff that's necessary for their leaking to be morally responsible. His second role is to be the target of the inevitable shitstorm, so as to protect all the key people behind the organization who gain safety from staying out of view. Think of him as casting a shit-shadow. (Hope you watch Trailer Park Boys!) The more flamboyant he is, the better he protects the people who really make Wikileaks work.
Yes, actually. Much of that chaos shows clear signs of a master plan. The master goal of that plan is to weaken the government to the point where the terrorist cell can graduate to being a local warlord and become the de-facto rulers of a region. In Mexico and Nigeria, this involves taking out key nodes of the oil infrastructure, which sets off a cascade of failures. Identifying the infrastructure points on which other parts of the infrastructure depend is one thing that smart terrorists think about. How to hit those points cheaply is another.
But I think we can call this "advanced" terrorism. The USA has nothing like this domestically. If narco-warlords crossed the border into the US, they wouldn't get a foothold for long. So smart terrorists realize that our government needs to collapse before they can operate freely in our country. That's not an easy thing to bring about, but these days, it's also not inconceivable. They got the Soviet government to collapse by forcing it to overreact expensively, go bankrupt, lose legitimacy, and ultimately lose control over the country. Their playbook for the US is about the same, but we might be an easier mark than the Soviets were. If our government stops being able to provide us with vital services (like security), private local parties (like mafias) will spring up and fill the vacuum. Neighborhoods in Detroit are already doing this, because "911" does nothing there. Many towns have private firefighting firms. Is it so crazy to imagine that the most effective private security "company" in El Paso will be a branch of the Mexican narco-mafia? Maybe not in 5 years, but in 20?
In any case, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, etc., are much farther along in this process. Their governments have made deals with regional warlords, and basically don't have the resources to fight them. They have huge "ungoverned" zones, where terrorists can openly climb on monkey bars and worse. Of course governments don't like this, and sometimes posture by sending soldiers to "clean up" an area. So the terrorists need to deter this with credible threats of system disruption, and they need to do enough damage to keep the government from consolidating enough power to actually put up a fight. One way to do that is to make sure the government remains bankrupt. There are many ways to do this. Some of them could even happen here. Some "starve the beast" Republicans are even trying to speed this process along, thinking that this would somehow be a good thing.
Interesting point! I didn't think of it that way. Of course, I doubt that Angela Merkel's credit card, that she uses on Amazon.de, for example, has "Angela Merkel" as the account name. I really don't know how it works, but I can imagine that governments have a rotating set of pseudonym accounts for the private use of diplomats. So maybe it's not a matter of having the records, but a matter of knowing which records match which diplomats.
So you have a way to instantly kill somebody you can't see who hid behind a wall in a gunfight. Gee, what could possibly go wrong? Oh, I know! I understand that innocent people also tend to duck behind cover when a firefight breaks out. I know that's what I would do. So now we have yet another way of killing people we can't even see. I mean, I know that this is on balance a good thing; it will save lives, speed up gun fights, etc. But unless the rules of engagement for this weapon are pretty strict and strictly followed, a bunch of innocent people will be killed by it.
I don't know if this happened to many other people, but when I was reading through the leaks, I thought: It's good that my government knows all this stuff and keeps track of it. I think I've grown so used to thinking of the USA as being run by fools that it was actually a bit comforting to see that they actually do research and know stuff. Too bad that doesn't stop them acting foolishly!
There are places on the internet where smart people think very hard about issues like this. It turns out that the most effective terrorism is inspired by Open Source Software models, where sharing and reuse of common components improves efficiency. (It's not so strange to think of the Kalashnikov or a bomb detonator design as a piece of code.) The goal of terrorists is to de-legitimize national governments by causing them to weaken or collapse. Then, non-state entities can find a niche in the vacuum left behind. They've been incredibly effective in Mexico, Nigeria and many other places. Giant powers like the USA and the USSR are much harder beast to take down, but clearly, there is precedent.
My point was about sales tax, i.e., its regressive nature. I expressed the opinion that there are better ways for the government to raise money than to take a percentage of retail sales. I don't object to taxes in general; you named some that I support and some that might be worth increasing. But I do object to (most) regressive taxes.
No, I'm just stating empirical facts about spending patterns. Look at what I wrote. If you can't think of things you can buy that don't have a sales tax, you're not rich enough. How much sales tax do you think you pay when you buy real estate? When you buy a company? When you buy a hooker? When you buy your Porsche in Stuttgart? That's what rich people buy while we're waiting for Black Friday deals on Amazon so that we can mail in a fucking rebate and save $15.
Were they named after this cheesy but proficient Canadian band? Now someone in Canada needs to build a collider called the Relativistic Electron Smashing Hammer, and we'd really be rocking!
Yeah, that was really important. I would not have been able to even make sense of what was discovered in that Swiss/French collider without the information about the Canadian input. It wasn't just a quark-gluon plasma; it was a quark-gluon plasma that Canadians had something to do with! That's totally more revolutionary!
Hmm, it's hard to find anyone using a monitor with a worse resolution than their living room TV. I'm certainly not. Well, maybe on my laptop.
The point about the amibot is interesting. It's something I didn't think of. I figured a part of what's happening is an attempt to control game piracy by forcing the use of locked down hardware. Honestly, I don't know how well that's working, though I don't know anyone who burns their own Xbox disks, so maybe they're on to something.
Look, maybe many Amazon customers don't pay sales taxes, but that's not the real problem here. Sales taxes are highly regressive (as in, poor people pay a much higher portion of their salary in sales tax than rich people). If you want justice for tax dodgers, you need to do three things: close the ridiculous corporate income tax loopholes, make our income tax structure more progressive, and raise capital gains taxes. Compared to that, sales taxes are small potatoes, and they're being paid by the wrong people.
If Microsoft is smart, their next Xbox will just be an standard PC running Windows 8 or maybe even some modified Windows 7 on an x86 processor. If they do this, Xbox(future) games will also run on a regular PC, and their future controllers (like Kinect, rock band gear, etc) will also work with ordinary PCs. I'm suggesting this because many people are getting living room PCs. Microsoft makes money from games, not game systems. So why not just target the PCs that are already in our living rooms? Then there doesn't have to be a separate Xbox port, which would really incentivize publishers to develop for the PC. To take care of the fact that generic PCs have different capacities, MS should just release a simple app that gives your PC a game hardware score, and then you can compare that number to what's on the back of the game box to see if your PC can play it. There are many benefits to MS from this move. One is that it puts Windows in more places and tightens their grip on the OS market. Another is that it cuts off the oxygen from Sony, because smaller developers will want to aim at the big, familiar PC/Xbox market and ignore boutique RISC systems. Basically, I don't see a good reason to keep a separation between PC games and console games.
So I just watched the whole talk by Jonathan Blow, and I'm pretty impressed with his analysis. As someone who teaches ethics and loves gaming, it's a bit humbling to be blindsided by some of those ideas. ("Why didn't I think of it that way before I heard the talk?") The point that hit home is the idea that commercial game design is inconsistent with a respect for the valuable projects of the user. If the goal is to appeal to the evolutionary weaknesses of the human character to trick them into forking out money, that really isn't more moral than any other blatant con. Motives matter in ethics, and it really seems (judging from the product) that the motives of Farmville designers are based around farming money from the players, rather than giving them an experience that would be fun or in any other way worthwhile. They're not thinking at all about doing right by the user, and wouldn't be bothered if the most profitable game mechanic caused pain rather than pleasure, because pleasure was never their goal. That's a classic example of treating people as a means to an end, and there are interesting and deep reasons why we should suspect that it might be straight up immoral. Blow is a revolutionary because he aims explicitly to make games that respect his users, but the real question is: Why is something that should be considered morally obligatory also considered revolutionary? Maybe this is just how capitalism works. Maybe we'll all buy EA's neural implants and humanity's last generation will be a bunch of blissful wireheads.
Funny you mention that. Japan is developing technology that can remove Uranium from seawater for (allegedly) $120/kg. Right now that's more than the market price, so people aren't working very hard on this, but once the other easy sources dry up, we can just get our Uranium from seawater. That $120 of material can produce a whole lot of energy, especially if it's burned smartly.
But the nice thing about getting Uranium from seawater is that the world's rivers add Uranium to the sea much faster than we could ever extract it, so that this is basically a self-renewing resource for as long as the rivers keep running. And btw, it's pretty much the same story with Thorium, also abundant in seawater.
I suspect that smaller modern reactors are just inherently safer. Toshiba is selling one that you bury in the back yard, and forget about it for 5 years. At that point, they come in and refuel it. It generates enough power to run a small town and the total number of maintenance staff it requires is zero. That's the kind of reactor that should be powering cargo ships.
Slashdot Mirror
It won't be a problem. They can make it up in volume.
Yeah, we all know that in Soviet Russia, the gold boils you.
Also, Uranium is not the densest naturally occuring element. It's not just about the atomic mass, it's also about the crystal structure. Osmium packs the atoms much more tightly, so it is way denser than Uranium.
Really? Silver silver? You mean like ture silver, as in mithril? Damn, has anyone tried to make chain mail from it?
I think you underestimate just how much work - like real human legwork - that Wikileaks actually needs to do. You can't just dump documents. You must redact stuff that could cause harm. And because you're not omniscient, you need to get help from people who are able to do it right. Somebody needs to call them, collaborate with them, etc. You need to have somebody who negotiates a pre-release to responsible global media outlets.
Wikileaks doesn't have a point man simply because of some guy's narcissism. They need a human being to coordinate all the stuff that's necessary for their leaking to be morally responsible. His second role is to be the target of the inevitable shitstorm, so as to protect all the key people behind the organization who gain safety from staying out of view. Think of him as casting a shit-shadow. (Hope you watch Trailer Park Boys!) The more flamboyant he is, the better he protects the people who really make Wikileaks work.
Yes, actually. Much of that chaos shows clear signs of a master plan. The master goal of that plan is to weaken the government to the point where the terrorist cell can graduate to being a local warlord and become the de-facto rulers of a region. In Mexico and Nigeria, this involves taking out key nodes of the oil infrastructure, which sets off a cascade of failures. Identifying the infrastructure points on which other parts of the infrastructure depend is one thing that smart terrorists think about. How to hit those points cheaply is another.
But I think we can call this "advanced" terrorism. The USA has nothing like this domestically. If narco-warlords crossed the border into the US, they wouldn't get a foothold for long. So smart terrorists realize that our government needs to collapse before they can operate freely in our country. That's not an easy thing to bring about, but these days, it's also not inconceivable. They got the Soviet government to collapse by forcing it to overreact expensively, go bankrupt, lose legitimacy, and ultimately lose control over the country. Their playbook for the US is about the same, but we might be an easier mark than the Soviets were. If our government stops being able to provide us with vital services (like security), private local parties (like mafias) will spring up and fill the vacuum. Neighborhoods in Detroit are already doing this, because "911" does nothing there. Many towns have private firefighting firms. Is it so crazy to imagine that the most effective private security "company" in El Paso will be a branch of the Mexican narco-mafia? Maybe not in 5 years, but in 20?
In any case, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, etc., are much farther along in this process. Their governments have made deals with regional warlords, and basically don't have the resources to fight them. They have huge "ungoverned" zones, where terrorists can openly climb on monkey bars and worse. Of course governments don't like this, and sometimes posture by sending soldiers to "clean up" an area. So the terrorists need to deter this with credible threats of system disruption, and they need to do enough damage to keep the government from consolidating enough power to actually put up a fight. One way to do that is to make sure the government remains bankrupt. There are many ways to do this. Some of them could even happen here. Some "starve the beast" Republicans are even trying to speed this process along, thinking that this would somehow be a good thing.
Interesting point! I didn't think of it that way. Of course, I doubt that Angela Merkel's credit card, that she uses on Amazon.de, for example, has "Angela Merkel" as the account name. I really don't know how it works, but I can imagine that governments have a rotating set of pseudonym accounts for the private use of diplomats. So maybe it's not a matter of having the records, but a matter of knowing which records match which diplomats.
So you have a way to instantly kill somebody you can't see who hid behind a wall in a gunfight. Gee, what could possibly go wrong? Oh, I know! I understand that innocent people also tend to duck behind cover when a firefight breaks out. I know that's what I would do. So now we have yet another way of killing people we can't even see. I mean, I know that this is on balance a good thing; it will save lives, speed up gun fights, etc. But unless the rules of engagement for this weapon are pretty strict and strictly followed, a bunch of innocent people will be killed by it.
This might be my favorite talk of all the internet: Bruce Sterling's "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole"
It's funny, insightful, interesting, informative, underrated with just the right amount of flamebait.
I don't know if this happened to many other people, but when I was reading through the leaks, I thought: It's good that my government knows all this stuff and keeps track of it. I think I've grown so used to thinking of the USA as being run by fools that it was actually a bit comforting to see that they actually do research and know stuff. Too bad that doesn't stop them acting foolishly!
I'm sure the TSA is working on it.
There are places on the internet where smart people think very hard about issues like this. It turns out that the most effective terrorism is inspired by Open Source Software models, where sharing and reuse of common components improves efficiency. (It's not so strange to think of the Kalashnikov or a bomb detonator design as a piece of code.) The goal of terrorists is to de-legitimize national governments by causing them to weaken or collapse. Then, non-state entities can find a niche in the vacuum left behind. They've been incredibly effective in Mexico, Nigeria and many other places. Giant powers like the USA and the USSR are much harder beast to take down, but clearly, there is precedent.
My point was about sales tax, i.e., its regressive nature. I expressed the opinion that there are better ways for the government to raise money than to take a percentage of retail sales. I don't object to taxes in general; you named some that I support and some that might be worth increasing. But I do object to (most) regressive taxes.
No, I'm just stating empirical facts about spending patterns. Look at what I wrote. If you can't think of things you can buy that don't have a sales tax, you're not rich enough. How much sales tax do you think you pay when you buy real estate? When you buy a company? When you buy a hooker? When you buy your Porsche in Stuttgart? That's what rich people buy while we're waiting for Black Friday deals on Amazon so that we can mail in a fucking rebate and save $15.
Were they named after this cheesy but proficient Canadian band? Now someone in Canada needs to build a collider called the Relativistic Electron Smashing Hammer, and we'd really be rocking!
Yeah, that was really important. I would not have been able to even make sense of what was discovered in that Swiss/French collider without the information about the Canadian input. It wasn't just a quark-gluon plasma; it was a quark-gluon plasma that Canadians had something to do with! That's totally more revolutionary!
Hmm, it's hard to find anyone using a monitor with a worse resolution than their living room TV. I'm certainly not. Well, maybe on my laptop.
The point about the amibot is interesting. It's something I didn't think of. I figured a part of what's happening is an attempt to control game piracy by forcing the use of locked down hardware. Honestly, I don't know how well that's working, though I don't know anyone who burns their own Xbox disks, so maybe they're on to something.
Look, maybe many Amazon customers don't pay sales taxes, but that's not the real problem here. Sales taxes are highly regressive (as in, poor people pay a much higher portion of their salary in sales tax than rich people). If you want justice for tax dodgers, you need to do three things: close the ridiculous corporate income tax loopholes, make our income tax structure more progressive, and raise capital gains taxes. Compared to that, sales taxes are small potatoes, and they're being paid by the wrong people.
You're not too lazy to post, but you are too lazy to follow that link? Apparently! Anyway, here is one link to get you started, and here's another.
It's not that hard to google, people, sheesh.
If Microsoft is smart, their next Xbox will just be an standard PC running Windows 8 or maybe even some modified Windows 7 on an x86 processor. If they do this, Xbox(future) games will also run on a regular PC, and their future controllers (like Kinect, rock band gear, etc) will also work with ordinary PCs. I'm suggesting this because many people are getting living room PCs. Microsoft makes money from games, not game systems. So why not just target the PCs that are already in our living rooms? Then there doesn't have to be a separate Xbox port, which would really incentivize publishers to develop for the PC. To take care of the fact that generic PCs have different capacities, MS should just release a simple app that gives your PC a game hardware score, and then you can compare that number to what's on the back of the game box to see if your PC can play it. There are many benefits to MS from this move. One is that it puts Windows in more places and tightens their grip on the OS market. Another is that it cuts off the oxygen from Sony, because smaller developers will want to aim at the big, familiar PC/Xbox market and ignore boutique RISC systems. Basically, I don't see a good reason to keep a separation between PC games and console games.
So I just watched the whole talk by Jonathan Blow, and I'm pretty impressed with his analysis. As someone who teaches ethics and loves gaming, it's a bit humbling to be blindsided by some of those ideas. ("Why didn't I think of it that way before I heard the talk?") The point that hit home is the idea that commercial game design is inconsistent with a respect for the valuable projects of the user. If the goal is to appeal to the evolutionary weaknesses of the human character to trick them into forking out money, that really isn't more moral than any other blatant con. Motives matter in ethics, and it really seems (judging from the product) that the motives of Farmville designers are based around farming money from the players, rather than giving them an experience that would be fun or in any other way worthwhile. They're not thinking at all about doing right by the user, and wouldn't be bothered if the most profitable game mechanic caused pain rather than pleasure, because pleasure was never their goal. That's a classic example of treating people as a means to an end, and there are interesting and deep reasons why we should suspect that it might be straight up immoral. Blow is a revolutionary because he aims explicitly to make games that respect his users, but the real question is: Why is something that should be considered morally obligatory also considered revolutionary? Maybe this is just how capitalism works. Maybe we'll all buy EA's neural implants and humanity's last generation will be a bunch of blissful wireheads.
Funny you mention that. Japan is developing technology that can remove Uranium from seawater for (allegedly) $120/kg. Right now that's more than the market price, so people aren't working very hard on this, but once the other easy sources dry up, we can just get our Uranium from seawater. That $120 of material can produce a whole lot of energy, especially if it's burned smartly.
But the nice thing about getting Uranium from seawater is that the world's rivers add Uranium to the sea much faster than we could ever extract it, so that this is basically a self-renewing resource for as long as the rivers keep running. And btw, it's pretty much the same story with Thorium, also abundant in seawater.
Correct, but this toy does something very entertaining that the iPad can't, which is to stream and display video from the home network.
I suspect that smaller modern reactors are just inherently safer. Toshiba is selling one that you bury in the back yard, and forget about it for 5 years. At that point, they come in and refuel it. It generates enough power to run a small town and the total number of maintenance staff it requires is zero. That's the kind of reactor that should be powering cargo ships.