This is just my guess, but I don't think the plasma will be controllable in environments where purity cannot be guaranteed. So you'd do better to generate the electricity, and then use the electricity to generate the processing plasma.
And a lot is going to depend on how small (and cheap) the smallest practical fusion reactor is. Are we talking about a homestead, a village, a town, a city, a metropolitan area, or what? And it will be a long time after the first fusion reactor is built before we really have an idea as to what the answers are. It's just this decade that people started seriously talking about fission reactors small enough to power an apartment complex. That's probably still not viable, but it might be viable to power the Antarctica research station.
There are definitely applications for which it will be unsuited. But there are important applications for which it would be extremely desirable. We often *could* make fission work (though not in all of them), but that has it's own problems, and refueling is a major risk.
That said, we won't know the downsides of this approach to fusion until afterwards. But at least the fuel should be readily available. (It will need processing, but that's not new. It won't require finding bodies of ore. Water and methane are relatively common in the use cases I'm interested in.)
It's not completely silly, but I'm not going to believe any promises until they have a pilot plant working, and then I'll be a bit dubious. I understand that it's a hard problem, and they currently have a few new tools, and slightly altered approaches, but this has happened before.
That said, we won't be able to determine the downsides until they have it working. I hope they do, because that's a crucial piece of kit for building long-term space habitats...especially ones that move out past Jupiter's orbit.
Claiming that land plant life will benefit from rising CO2 levels isn't exactly substantiated by experiments. It's also not exactly refuted.
The plants grow more vigorously, but have a harder time producing proteins, and experience some additional trouble reproducing. This, of course, varies by species, but it's "generally true" among the particular species tested (generally important agricultural plants). And this is when other conditions (temperature, humidity, etc.) are held constant...which, of course won't happen. So the results don't exactly reflect what should be expected, because they only investigated variation in one variable.
Now among sea life there will be problems among those with enzymes that depend on, e.g., calcium ions reacting in a particular way. In general, any enzyme that is sensitive to a change in pH will experience a change in activity, and this is almost always to the detriment of the organism that has evolved to use it. So far it looks like jellyfish will do well, and some fish will do well, but others will experience problems. And, of course, any animal that depends on precipitating Calcium will experience problems, including all shell-fish. I haven't heard of many detailed studies, but the basis of the problem generally is at the molecular level, so expect generalized difficulties in survival, with occasional species benefiting. (All animals evolved to fit the circumstances experienced by their ancestors...plants too.) The basic problem can be expressed as "it's going to take more energy to drive the reactions in the way the bodies expect them to go...or, occasionally, the current reaction will overdrive in the changed environment.)
P.S.: About plants on land: The grow faster, but they are weaker, and more likely to break under environmental stresses, say rain or a heavy wind. And, as I said, they are lower in protein. So every herbivore is going to be switching to a diet high in carbohydrates. So they'll need to eat more to get sufficient protein. People have already demonstrated that this is survivable is you can get enough food, but they've also demonstrated that it's rather unhealthy.
Those who organize or lead the events are, indeed, generally well off. The same statement is wrong, however, about the attendees at the "occupy" events that I have personal knowledge of. Most of them were, if not actually destitute (many were), extremely poor. And I suspect this is generally true. I don't, however, have any personal knowledge of most of the events, and in particular not of the two you explicitly mentioned. I just doubt that you do either.
The problem is, it's true, sort of, as stated, but the people promoting it are among the ones that should be eliminated. Not all of them, but a very large percentage. I wouldn't say, e.g., that Francis Galton was among those who should be eliminated.
If you're going to go that way, select against bad backs, astigmatism, etc. You'll improve the species. But face the fact that we don't know enough about things like intelligence to know how to select for that. It's almost certainly a multi-factor problem with lots of recessive genes, and some combinations that only work when combined with certain others, so you'll need separate "races" to achieve optimal results. And people have a history of ignoring strong social barriers against that.
Of course, the very idea is stupid. CRISPR is merely the current step along the way, and technological progress is so much faster then even assisted biological evolution that the whole argument is really silly. And mutations keep happening, and environments keep changing, so it's a never-ending process.
Also note that selecting against the things we *know* are bad would have eliminated, among other, Stephen Hawking.
Simple solutions to multi-variate problems are almost always wrong.
On what basis do you claim "Practically speaking nobody does." I don't think I've ever even heard of someone intentionally disabling the airbag, except one person whose mother weighted less than 80 pounds, and wouldn't legally be able to ride in the front seat if the airbag wasn't disabled. (Not sure how the law currently reads.)
But how does this apply to Google and Facebook? I can understand how it works when you're selling something that is persistent, but not how it works when you're giving away something that isn't persistent. Is it per web page loaded or what?
The real question is "What are the important use cases?".
If I thought the only use case was breaking net security, I'd say why bother, there are other, cheaper, ways. But it also seems to be good at modeling molecule interactions. What else?
The real (current) problem is getting an accurate 3-D scan of a person before the clothing is built. (It would also still be a lot more expensive, but some people would pay for that.)
The mistake in your reasoning is that "stressed Jeans" is a luxury item. Notice that a lot of work went into the ability to alter the wear patterns in an artistic manner. That means the software was made a lot more complex than it had to be, and that costs.
What this is about it letting them sell artistically designed brands. IOW, it's a luxury good. And that means that they are sole source for each design. Now they need to create a design that will catch on and they can sell at a huge markup.
They may not be successful in this, or only mildly successful, but it will likely save them money over time anyway, so it wasn't a bad decision. But the goal is to create a fad for a design over which they have a monopoly. And the technique allows them to try lots of different designs at little additional cost. So, yes, this is about becoming a monopoly. If one of their designs really catches on, they'll make a mint. It they're only moderately successful, they'll still have increased profits.
Cost to make only affects the minimum possible selling price. Actual selling price is more closely related to demand and competition. If there's not much competition, the price will be the highest that people will pay.
OTOH, that's just for manufacturers. Vendors have problems with managing demand, which leads to things like loss-leaders, etc. which are sold at a price designed to attract customers, so you can sell them something else. (Sometimes instead, though that's often called bait-and-switch, and is illegal here, if not often prosecuted.)
You could define punctuation from the Unicode Classification. In fact that's what I did when writing the Java definition. But that I should have to do so is appalling. That should be built into the language. And 16 bit Unicode is only decent when strictly dealing with western European languages. Either utf-8 or utf-32 would handled the entire character set. Utf-8 is more complex code because of the variable length encoding, but *IF* you build all the basic functions into the language that's not a problem. Utf-32 is more straightforwards when dealing with code in RAM, but it requires more memory space to handle things. So either one is a reasonable choice. Utf-16 has the worst feature of both and the good features of neither.
The Apple ][ was one of the computers that could run the UCSD Pascal environment. And I can't see any reason to deny that that environment was a virtual machine. But that was nearly a decade later.
OK, but by any name Java is still piss-poor at handling Unicode. You can do it, but I kept having to write basic library functions myself, and finally switched. Admittedly, C is worse, and C++ has a different set of problems, but go and D handle it well. (So, in fact, do Vala, Python, and Ruby, but they're a different class of language.) I presume that Rust handles it well, but I've never really studied Rust.
Java really needs a Unicode character type built into the language, and not that 16-bit mish-mash that they used. It was a reasonable choice when they made it, but it's really a drag on it's general utility. Last I checked the language didn't even have a usable "is punctuation" function. You had to write it yourself. Either standardize on utf-8 or utf-32 (I think they call that UCS4 or some such). Either is a reasonable choice, Utf-8 matches external media, and utf-32 is better for internal manipulation. Utf-16 is neither fish nor fowl, but only foul. You need to maintain it for backwards compatibility, but really it should be deprecated, and planned for elimination in a decade or so.
No. The first mainstream language that had a VM was either Algol or Pascal, depending on exactly what your definitions are. (Pascal was more mainstream, but Algol had the earlier VM...I used to use BCAlgol which implemented Algol with a reverse polish VM for the IBM 7094...or at least it ran on the IBM 7090-7094 DCS system.)
Actually, there probably *isn't* a middle ground that more than meta-stable. Of course, there's also a question of whether anarchy or totalitarianism are more than meta-stable. No form of government seems to be stable over an extended period of time. My belief is that this is because positions of power tend to attract psychopathic personalities. This is one of the best justifications of Monarchy....that it keeps someone worse from getting in charge. Based on English history I'm rather in favor of a monarchy where the monarch doesn't speak the local language, but that, of course, had its own problems.
Nobody can reasonably respond within an hour, so the only real choice is the move the post objected to into a holding queue for evaluation. Possibly there could be multiple levels of evaluation with several being done programmatically. Each evaluator would either reject the post, or return it to active status. This would allow it to be removed and evaluated within an hour, but each time it was flagged it would be re-evaluated by a different method. Finally after 3 or 4 rounds it would go to the site administrator, who would make a final decision. The problem with this is that it would make a ddos rather effective.
OTOH, that's just for "terrorist" posts. It doesn't address the copyright problem, which doesn't seem to have any solution, outside of "remove anything that anyone objects to".
I suppose the question that they consider significant could be paraphrased as "Which is more important, FaceBook or civility?". If they're willing to scrub social media that isn't tightly monitored, then the demand isn't impossible. Of course, this requires a definition of "civility" that is operationally usable in multiple countries. Probably a next-gen AI could do it...but only by being overly censorious, and possibly also doing a lot of re-writing.
OTOH, if they give a strict operational definition of "Terror content", then it might be doable now. Perhaps one of the advanced translator programs could do it, as I don't think I could be terrorized by anything written in Etruscan.
(And what I'm really objecting to is your use of the word impossible, when what you really meant was excessively undesirable..)
You know, it's rather interesting, but I think that I see worse intolerance on the right than on the left. Both sides are intolerant, but the folks on the right are more likely to swing into violence while the ones on the left are just screaming. Given historic trends I suspect this is because the police look the other way when the right gets violent, but come down hard when the left does, but whatever the reason, that's what I see reported.
Well I was never "the best of the best", and I certainly wasn't into infosec. But I think I was pretty good, and at least a couple of times I did things that people had thought were impossible. And I kept at least one public facing system from using social security numbers as a unique identifier.
Slashdot Mirror
This is just my guess, but I don't think the plasma will be controllable in environments where purity cannot be guaranteed. So you'd do better to generate the electricity, and then use the electricity to generate the processing plasma.
And a lot is going to depend on how small (and cheap) the smallest practical fusion reactor is. Are we talking about a homestead, a village, a town, a city, a metropolitan area, or what? And it will be a long time after the first fusion reactor is built before we really have an idea as to what the answers are. It's just this decade that people started seriously talking about fission reactors small enough to power an apartment complex. That's probably still not viable, but it might be viable to power the Antarctica research station.
FWIW, this has nothing to do with Rust.
OTOH, I don't think there's anywhere a claim that things written in Rust are guaranteed to be secure, so that's another problem with your assertion.
FWIW, this is either a hardware or a microcode flaw, and a high level programming language isn't even going to address the issue.
There are definitely applications for which it will be unsuited. But there are important applications for which it would be extremely desirable. We often *could* make fission work (though not in all of them), but that has it's own problems, and refueling is a major risk.
That said, we won't know the downsides of this approach to fusion until afterwards. But at least the fuel should be readily available. (It will need processing, but that's not new. It won't require finding bodies of ore. Water and methane are relatively common in the use cases I'm interested in.)
It's not completely silly, but I'm not going to believe any promises until they have a pilot plant working, and then I'll be a bit dubious. I understand that it's a hard problem, and they currently have a few new tools, and slightly altered approaches, but this has happened before.
That said, we won't be able to determine the downsides until they have it working. I hope they do, because that's a crucial piece of kit for building long-term space habitats...especially ones that move out past Jupiter's orbit.
I don't remember whether it was ads or show quality, but I quit TV decades ago, and now I have no desire to go back.
Claiming that land plant life will benefit from rising CO2 levels isn't exactly substantiated by experiments. It's also not exactly refuted.
The plants grow more vigorously, but have a harder time producing proteins, and experience some additional trouble reproducing. This, of course, varies by species, but it's "generally true" among the particular species tested (generally important agricultural plants). And this is when other conditions (temperature, humidity, etc.) are held constant...which, of course won't happen. So the results don't exactly reflect what should be expected, because they only investigated variation in one variable.
Now among sea life there will be problems among those with enzymes that depend on, e.g., calcium ions reacting in a particular way. In general, any enzyme that is sensitive to a change in pH will experience a change in activity, and this is almost always to the detriment of the organism that has evolved to use it. So far it looks like jellyfish will do well, and some fish will do well, but others will experience problems. And, of course, any animal that depends on precipitating Calcium will experience problems, including all shell-fish. I haven't heard of many detailed studies, but the basis of the problem generally is at the molecular level, so expect generalized difficulties in survival, with occasional species benefiting. (All animals evolved to fit the circumstances experienced by their ancestors...plants too.) The basic problem can be expressed as "it's going to take more energy to drive the reactions in the way the bodies expect them to go...or, occasionally, the current reaction will overdrive in the changed environment.)
P.S.: About plants on land: The grow faster, but they are weaker, and more likely to break under environmental stresses, say rain or a heavy wind. And, as I said, they are lower in protein. So every herbivore is going to be switching to a diet high in carbohydrates. So they'll need to eat more to get sufficient protein. People have already demonstrated that this is survivable is you can get enough food, but they've also demonstrated that it's rather unhealthy.
Those who organize or lead the events are, indeed, generally well off. The same statement is wrong, however, about the attendees at the "occupy" events that I have personal knowledge of. Most of them were, if not actually destitute (many were), extremely poor. And I suspect this is generally true. I don't, however, have any personal knowledge of most of the events, and in particular not of the two you explicitly mentioned. I just doubt that you do either.
The problem is, it's true, sort of, as stated, but the people promoting it are among the ones that should be eliminated. Not all of them, but a very large percentage. I wouldn't say, e.g., that Francis Galton was among those who should be eliminated.
If you're going to go that way, select against bad backs, astigmatism, etc. You'll improve the species. But face the fact that we don't know enough about things like intelligence to know how to select for that. It's almost certainly a multi-factor problem with lots of recessive genes, and some combinations that only work when combined with certain others, so you'll need separate "races" to achieve optimal results. And people have a history of ignoring strong social barriers against that.
Of course, the very idea is stupid. CRISPR is merely the current step along the way, and technological progress is so much faster then even assisted biological evolution that the whole argument is really silly. And mutations keep happening, and environments keep changing, so it's a never-ending process.
Also note that selecting against the things we *know* are bad would have eliminated, among other, Stephen Hawking.
Simple solutions to multi-variate problems are almost always wrong.
On what basis do you claim "Practically speaking nobody does." I don't think I've ever even heard of someone intentionally disabling the airbag, except one person whose mother weighted less than 80 pounds, and wouldn't legally be able to ride in the front seat if the airbag wasn't disabled. (Not sure how the law currently reads.)
But how does this apply to Google and Facebook? I can understand how it works when you're selling something that is persistent, but not how it works when you're giving away something that isn't persistent. Is it per web page loaded or what?
The real question is "What are the important use cases?".
If I thought the only use case was breaking net security, I'd say why bother, there are other, cheaper, ways. But it also seems to be good at modeling molecule interactions. What else?
The real (current) problem is getting an accurate 3-D scan of a person before the clothing is built. (It would also still be a lot more expensive, but some people would pay for that.)
The mistake in your reasoning is that "stressed Jeans" is a luxury item. Notice that a lot of work went into the ability to alter the wear patterns in an artistic manner. That means the software was made a lot more complex than it had to be, and that costs.
What this is about it letting them sell artistically designed brands. IOW, it's a luxury good. And that means that they are sole source for each design. Now they need to create a design that will catch on and they can sell at a huge markup.
They may not be successful in this, or only mildly successful, but it will likely save them money over time anyway, so it wasn't a bad decision. But the goal is to create a fad for a design over which they have a monopoly. And the technique allows them to try lots of different designs at little additional cost. So, yes, this is about becoming a monopoly. If one of their designs really catches on, they'll make a mint. It they're only moderately successful, they'll still have increased profits.
Cost to make only affects the minimum possible selling price. Actual selling price is more closely related to demand and competition. If there's not much competition, the price will be the highest that people will pay.
OTOH, that's just for manufacturers. Vendors have problems with managing demand, which leads to things like loss-leaders, etc. which are sold at a price designed to attract customers, so you can sell them something else. (Sometimes instead, though that's often called bait-and-switch, and is illegal here, if not often prosecuted.)
Well, it sounds like an ad, but I can't tell for what.
Well, there's some evidence that red haired people are more sensitive to pain, and I can see how that might make them more interested in security.
You could define punctuation from the Unicode Classification. In fact that's what I did when writing the Java definition. But that I should have to do so is appalling. That should be built into the language. And 16 bit Unicode is only decent when strictly dealing with western European languages. Either utf-8 or utf-32 would handled the entire character set. Utf-8 is more complex code because of the variable length encoding, but *IF* you build all the basic functions into the language that's not a problem. Utf-32 is more straightforwards when dealing with code in RAM, but it requires more memory space to handle things. So either one is a reasonable choice. Utf-16 has the worst feature of both and the good features of neither.
The Apple ][ was one of the computers that could run the UCSD Pascal environment. And I can't see any reason to deny that that environment was a virtual machine. But that was nearly a decade later.
OK, but by any name Java is still piss-poor at handling Unicode. You can do it, but I kept having to write basic library functions myself, and finally switched. Admittedly, C is worse, and C++ has a different set of problems, but go and D handle it well. (So, in fact, do Vala, Python, and Ruby, but they're a different class of language.) I presume that Rust handles it well, but I've never really studied Rust.
Java really needs a Unicode character type built into the language, and not that 16-bit mish-mash that they used. It was a reasonable choice when they made it, but it's really a drag on it's general utility. Last I checked the language didn't even have a usable "is punctuation" function. You had to write it yourself. Either standardize on utf-8 or utf-32 (I think they call that UCS4 or some such). Either is a reasonable choice, Utf-8 matches external media, and utf-32 is better for internal manipulation. Utf-16 is neither fish nor fowl, but only foul. You need to maintain it for backwards compatibility, but really it should be deprecated, and planned for elimination in a decade or so.
No. The first mainstream language that had a VM was either Algol or Pascal, depending on exactly what your definitions are. (Pascal was more mainstream, but Algol had the earlier VM...I used to use BCAlgol which implemented Algol with a reverse polish VM for the IBM 7094...or at least it ran on the IBM 7090-7094 DCS system.)
Actually, there probably *isn't* a middle ground that more than meta-stable. Of course, there's also a question of whether anarchy or totalitarianism are more than meta-stable. No form of government seems to be stable over an extended period of time. My belief is that this is because positions of power tend to attract psychopathic personalities. This is one of the best justifications of Monarchy....that it keeps someone worse from getting in charge. Based on English history I'm rather in favor of a monarchy where the monarch doesn't speak the local language, but that, of course, had its own problems.
Nobody can reasonably respond within an hour, so the only real choice is the move the post objected to into a holding queue for evaluation. Possibly there could be multiple levels of evaluation with several being done programmatically. Each evaluator would either reject the post, or return it to active status. This would allow it to be removed and evaluated within an hour, but each time it was flagged it would be re-evaluated by a different method. Finally after 3 or 4 rounds it would go to the site administrator, who would make a final decision. The problem with this is that it would make a ddos rather effective.
OTOH, that's just for "terrorist" posts. It doesn't address the copyright problem, which doesn't seem to have any solution, outside of "remove anything that anyone objects to".
I suppose the question that they consider significant could be paraphrased as "Which is more important, FaceBook or civility?". If they're willing to scrub social media that isn't tightly monitored, then the demand isn't impossible. Of course, this requires a definition of "civility" that is operationally usable in multiple countries. Probably a next-gen AI could do it...but only by being overly censorious, and possibly also doing a lot of re-writing.
OTOH, if they give a strict operational definition of "Terror content", then it might be doable now. Perhaps one of the advanced translator programs could do it, as I don't think I could be terrorized by anything written in Etruscan.
(And what I'm really objecting to is your use of the word impossible, when what you really meant was excessively undesirable..)
You know, it's rather interesting, but I think that I see worse intolerance on the right than on the left. Both sides are intolerant, but the folks on the right are more likely to swing into violence while the ones on the left are just screaming. Given historic trends I suspect this is because the police look the other way when the right gets violent, but come down hard when the left does, but whatever the reason, that's what I see reported.
Well I was never "the best of the best", and I certainly wasn't into infosec. But I think I was pretty good, and at least a couple of times I did things that people had thought were impossible. And I kept at least one public facing system from using social security numbers as a unique identifier.