the Russians are able to send humans into orbit with little trouble, whereas the "advanced" Europeans can't and never have
... and have never considered sending meat-bags into space as a particularly useful target. Though on the other hand, we have built some human-flight components for the ISS and a lab module for the Shuttle IIRC. There has just never been any urgent desire to put humans into space. That is slowly changing - increased cooperation with the Russians over launches, for example. And I'm sure we'll cooperate with the Chinese too. And the Indians. After all, it's not as if Europeans are a different species to Russians, Chinese or Indians.
There's even a rumour that, physically at least, Americans are compatible with humans, which kind-of begs the question of what political motives prevented them from cooperating with the rest of the species previously.
What maintains our atmosphere is the magnetic field generated by the liquid mantle rotating around the core.
Liquid outer core stirred up by thermal and magnetic turbulence and a solid inner core. The mantle is more-or-less solid.
Mars has no magnetic field.
Now ; it probably had one for a short period early in it's history ; there is some evidence of "magnetic stripes" (and by implication, something resembling sea-floor spreading ?) in the region to the south of the Tharsis volcanoes.(IIRC)
Bayer... wouldn't surprise me - very respectable chemical company. So "Heroin" is, like "Asprin" is another piece of European property stolen by the US-govt. "Quelle Surprise!"-NOT.
Methadone as a "treatment" for Pot Addiction... not surprising. I've got some thoroughly blessed Passover "Bitter Herbs" here that, if eaten in sufficient quantity, will remove suspicion of being a terrorist from you (though you might be misidentified as a fitting epileptic, and taken to an extermination camp).
Why is this here? What geek appeal does this have?
A fair enough question. It's (in part, at least) driven a fair amount of discussion of medical and pharmacological matters - which may not be your thing, but it is reasonably technological.
Remember when we used to talk about things like beowulf clusters of things,
Just think of what you could do with a Beowulf cluster of methadone patients waiting for their dose? Errr, not a lot, but inserting the cabling might be "interesting".
Why is this here and why is Kim Song Ils death worthy of note here?
Because (1) some of us [/self] are trying to get work in DPRK and are concerned if this will screw the job up even more ; (2) DPRK probably has nukes; (3) any discussion of DPRK that doesn't include condemnation of them for being a bunch of pinko commie bastards is likely to get the redneck septics frothing at the mouth in a most amusing fashion.
Or is it just a slow news days in the tech geek world?
Methadone is worse than heroin. As hard or harder to kick.
I've been told this by friends with experience of both.
They can just manage your addiction with it better. I don't believe they want people getting off of opiates. They just want to manage your addiction.
"The Authorities" are quite open about this - at least in this country, if you're talking to the civil servants and scientific/ medical advisers (talking to politicians is of negative utility, in this case as generally).
If you're working on a general purpose algorithm to (say, recent news) improve the efficiency of multiplication of large sparse matrices, which will have multiple non-murderous uses, then you're probably going to be able to talk your way off the gallows by pointing to how widely your application is used outside the kill-bot industry.
OTOH, your script for tracking moving humanoid targets and calculating whether it's better in a fiscal (and re-supply logistics) sense to use the machine gun or the napalm torch... isn't likely to get much use outside kill-bots and gaming.
Oh dear - I wonder... if there are any games out there with user-scripted 'bots' that perform various militarily interesting things... could the TLA agencies be using them as a front for testing such algorithms? "Could" is a bit obvious there : a programming "Rule 34" ; "Do" might be a better question.
I'm sure that it could be done by the Mechanical Turk. But considering the amount of data that they've got... possibly it would be too expensive. The Turk may be flexible and relatively cheap, but it's still got a finite cost per computation, and meat-puppets are not particularly cheap. (It might be useful for cross-checking hit rates etc though. Quicker and cheaper than coding and testing a second/ third/ fourth algorithm in detail.)
Is that an oxmoron? Possibly. But I'll let it pass for the moment.
to perpetuate a surveillance society, an AI must exist
MUST ? I really hate people who use excessive didacticism ; I think that they should be taken out and shot in front of Jeremy Clarkson's family.
which is powerful enough to search the infinite amount of data created,
Consult your dictionary for the difference between "large" and infinite. If you feel brave, or are already under medical care, you may wish to read Georg Cantor's versions of the Necronomicon.
and determine it's enemies as efficiently as the market determines winners and losers.
The blame is attached to the parents for not supervising their children more closely. They fail at being good parents ; their children die ; life goes on and either they're better parents next time round (children being cheaply replaceable, in a resources-investment sense), or their blood line dies out.
Substitute "ate poisonous plants" or "cuddled a poisonous snake" for "ate a dangerous plaything" and you'll see how our ancestors have been applying this selection test to parents for several millions of generations.
I also note that this is repeated neglect - the child had to swallow at least two magnets at enough separation in time (enough time to empty the stomach into the upper bowel - say, 6 hours?) that they pinch a section of bowel. So these are not isolated oversights, but repeated failings by the parents.
Were any surviving siblings taken into protective custody? Should have been.
FFS the CIO (or his family) is an obvious target for kidnap and torture to attempt to suborn him to get information out of him.
The guy's family are in a location known to the CIA. They were proactively placed into protective custody hours before he got his promotion and were replaced with CIA shills. The shills are living the public life of his family while he knows that if he steps out of line, his family die. Sequentially. And when the kidnap attempt comes... the CIO carries on working in the knowledge that the gun in his family's face is a CIA gun, not the kidnapper's.
Remember, you're talking about agencies and agents who are perfectly willing to murder to get their political master's way. Makes me think of how the German's (generally) kept control of their Sonderkommando. Efficiency and pleasantness are not frequent bedfellows.
Well for laptops you can install software that can help you track your laptop or protect your files from a remote location.
Standard Operating Practice amongst the laptop thieves in this area (or more likely, amongst the fences they are sold on to) is that the first thing that is done is insert a boot disk for $OS$ and do a blind install over-writing everything on the drive and rendering moot all passwords. When the police recovered my laptop (by coincidence) I was lucky in that they'd not investigated beyond the "insert disc and install" level, so I'd had my system partition overwritten with IIRC Win98, while the NTFS Win2K data partition was untouched. So it was a "meh".
I've seen and heard of a number of similar occurrences from people who work in local computer shops, normally with rather more troublesome consequences because they hadn't partitioned. They've also seen the symptoms with people who come in (honestly or not) with stories like "I brought this laptop second hand from an advert in the paper (or man in pub ; whatever) and the modem doesn't work. Can you help?" When you see the same ham-fisted virus-laden install with the same serial number 5 times in a month, it becomes pretty obvious what is happening.
So... your installed software, lasts until part way into the next boot. Unless American fences are remarkably more stupid than British fences. Which would be difficult, considering how remarkably stupid many fences seem to be ; unless you have baboons working as fences.
Hardware level encryption? Never seen it in the wild. Replacing the hard drive is a manageable expense, given the low price of the bare laptop.
I know that when I was single and childless, I would have done it instantly.
I'll take you seriously on that.
When I was single, childless and dependant-free (I'm still childless, but now have dependants), I was doing various moderately dangerous sports - long distance solo winter walking, solo caving, solo cave diving, that sort of thing. I calculated risks before taking (or rejecting) them, then went to work drilling oil wells, where I (err) calculated risks before taking (or rejecting) them. (The unofficial motto of the Cave Diving Group is "Turn your back and swim away / and live to dive another day." Which is a successful exploration strategy with only a few percent per year mortality rate.)
I'm sure there are quite a number of people ("ppl"??, or do you have a vowel tax in your jurisdiction?) who would take a trip to Mars with un-proven technology. However, for development of the technology you need people who are going to test the equipment, analyse it's performance in real time (i.e. on site, not at the end of a 30 light-minute round trip), then come back and report on it to drive the next round of development.
See you on Dome-C next winter for testing the Mk-I habitat. Bring a scarf.
If you get a ticket to Mars, I'll come to your launch funeral and bring you a bottle of good whisky to stow alongside the cyanide pills.
Which part of "in my night-time job as a divorce private eye" did you not read?
Oh, and yes, I do take decent cameras to parties from time to time. They may not be as populated by degenerate idiots as the ones you frequent, but that's your choice of party. Babboon-like beer-swilling college retards are unlikely to be able or willing to pay my divorce investigation fees, so don't come into consideration.
While it's not a peer-reviewed paper, it looks as if someone is (or was) working towards such publication.
There are a number of credible references (including photos in that presentation) of fungi growing on the INNER surfaces of the rubber gaskets around the windows of Mir. Which should surprise no-one. Also, I'd expect that, like airplanes, the windows on Mir have an outer structural pressure-proof pane and an inner cosmetic pane, and therefore a potentially moist section in between which could form a biological habitat.
Elsewhere in the presentation is discussion of other microbes retrieved from the INNER surfaces of Mir ; which again, should surprise no-one apart from a Hollywood set-dresser.
OTOH, radiotrophic fungi are known to exist, as well as microbes surviving the vacuum of space, so it's not implausible,
Being radiotrophic is one set of evolutionary adaptations ; surviving at low PPO2 (partial pressure O2), PPCO2, PPH2, PPCH4, and low humidity (including vacuum as an extreme ; low PPeverything) are different evolutionary adaptations. I don't see any particular reasons that mutations to help in one direction are particularly likely to help in the other direction. So I'd consider them (unless proven otherwise) to be "independent experiments" in the terminology of statistics, and their probabilities are multiplicative. (This is why multiple-drug treatments are harder to evolve resistance to, compared to surviving sequential applications of several drugs to a single infection.)
There's a long way between implausible and impossible; but at best, I'd say we're looking at the "implausible" end of the spectrum.
So... in my night-time job as a divorce private eye, I get someone to go around pick-up bars with a flash camera, dropping fliers for this device (which I sell in my day job) ; this lulls the idiots whose spouses hire me into a false sense of security. When I'm paid to photograph them in flagrenti, I use my big-lens low-light camera.
The current thought is that 150 degrees (0.4 kK) is the biologic limit, but I'm skeptical.
That's the sort of figures I was thinking about. Allowing for some degree of stabilisation from pressure induced increases in density and fluid viscosity, I might just about find somewhere a little over 0.5kK credible. Or at least, not "bat shit, dismiss out-of-hand crazy" (I'm watching an Inspecteur Clouseau/ Pink Panther movie with half an eye and ear ; it colours my thoughts).
E. coli can grow at 400,000 times normal gravity.
Errr, citatation, please. Where would such an experiment have been carried out?
OK ; having done some calculations, I make that the acceleration in a 0.1m radius ultracentrifuge turning at 1000RPM ; not a particularly demanding piece of engineering. What is the pressure going to be at that "depth" in that pseudo-gravity field? I make it a smidgin under 2000 bar, which is a depth you'd get at approx 20km in seawater. Which is not actually a drastic extension of what we know already : given that the bottom of the Marianas Trench (11km) is not sterile.
What might be more of an issue in these centrifuge experiments is the gradient of pressure : a small movement of the bacterium would lead to a large change in pressure, and all sorts of potentially troubling osmotic effects. However, clearly such experiments are not particularly turbulent (which considering that the devices are used for settling out components of mixtures in density gradients - using relatively compressible fluids - is not surprising).
The headline figure is impressive 400,000g ! OMG!, but it's physical implications are not that drastic. See the original paper (PNAS, May 10, 2011 vol. 108 pp7997-8002) for experimental details.
The MIR space station had a problem with fungi growing on the outside of the windows...
Once again, citation?
This one, perhaps? Which tells of "progressing decline of window optics" and "areas of visible growth of mold fungi on frames, TCS, insulation tubes, behind panels, rubber spacers of the hatches, metallic corrosion" (22 crew changes later). There is no mention of fungi growing on the outside of the window.
When they tried to kill it with radiation, it grew
Op. cit. makes it a bit more explicit that the radiation experiments were carried out on samples returned to earth, and that the fungi which grew under high radiation had significant differences of colony form. Which is rather what you'd expect for anything growing under high radiation.
I was wondering how/ when/ why they'd taken to radiating the walls of their own spacecraft, but they didn't do that. And the fungi suffered (see the photos in op. cit.) under the radiation.
Life is pretty resilient, but that doesn't mean that it lives and thrives everywhere. While the inside of the Chernobyl sarcophagus is not hospitable to human life, that doesn't mean that other organisms cannot live there. After all, it's only a moderately high radiation environment, not an extremely high radiation environment.
Slashdot Mirror
There's even a rumour that, physically at least, Americans are compatible with humans, which kind-of begs the question of what political motives prevented them from cooperating with the rest of the species previously.
s/generals/sister/
Liquid outer core stirred up by thermal and magnetic turbulence and a solid inner core. The mantle is more-or-less solid.
Now ; it probably had one for a short period early in it's history ; there is some evidence of "magnetic stripes" (and by implication, something resembling sea-floor spreading ?) in the region to the south of the Tharsis volcanoes.(IIRC)
Methadone as a "treatment" for Pot Addiction ... not surprising. I've got some thoroughly blessed Passover "Bitter Herbs" here that, if eaten in sufficient quantity, will remove suspicion of being a terrorist from you (though you might be misidentified as a fitting epileptic, and taken to an extermination camp).
A fair enough question. It's (in part, at least) driven a fair amount of discussion of medical and pharmacological matters - which may not be your thing, but it is reasonably technological.
Just think of what you could do with a Beowulf cluster of methadone patients waiting for their dose? Errr, not a lot, but inserting the cabling might be "interesting".
Because
(1) some of us [/self] are trying to get work in DPRK and are concerned if this will screw the job up even more ;
(2) DPRK probably has nukes;
(3) any discussion of DPRK that doesn't include condemnation of them for being a bunch of pinko commie bastards is likely to get the redneck septics frothing at the mouth in a most amusing fashion.
It's a slow news day ; you'll get over it.
I've been told this by friends with experience of both.
"The Authorities" are quite open about this - at least in this country, if you're talking to the civil servants and scientific/ medical advisers (talking to politicians is of negative utility, in this case as generally).
"Terminal Velocity" is a great concept - you don't need to reach such great heights to achieve the full effect.
I'm trying to remember which company owns the trademark rights on "Heroin". I wonder why they don't enforce their rights?
That was the stuffed grouse in a box with the bottle of whisky.
How did you know it worked? Apart from waking up this morning with a smile on your lips and feathers round your mouth?
That should fix it.
If you're working on a general purpose algorithm to (say, recent news) improve the efficiency of multiplication of large sparse matrices, which will have multiple non-murderous uses, then you're probably going to be able to talk your way off the gallows by pointing to how widely your application is used outside the kill-bot industry.
OTOH, your script for tracking moving humanoid targets and calculating whether it's better in a fiscal (and re-supply logistics) sense to use the machine gun or the napalm torch ... isn't likely to get much use outside kill-bots and gaming.
Oh dear - I wonder ... if there are any games out there with user-scripted 'bots' that perform various militarily interesting things ... could the TLA agencies be using them as a front for testing such algorithms? "Could" is a bit obvious there : a programming "Rule 34" ; "Do" might be a better question.
Almost as immoral as using the Mechanical Turk! (As someone else suggested upthread.)
I'm sure that it could be done by the Mechanical Turk. But considering the amount of data that they've got ... possibly it would be too expensive. The Turk may be flexible and relatively cheap, but it's still got a finite cost per computation, and meat-puppets are not particularly cheap. (It might be useful for cross-checking hit rates etc though. Quicker and cheaper than coding and testing a second/ third/ fourth algorithm in detail.)
Is that an oxmoron? Possibly. But I'll let it pass for the moment.
MUST ? I really hate people who use excessive didacticism ; I think that they should be taken out and shot in front of Jeremy Clarkson's family.
Consult your dictionary for the difference between "large" and infinite. If you feel brave, or are already under medical care, you may wish to read Georg Cantor's versions of the Necronomicon.
OIC, it's all a joke. Sick fuck.
Substitute "ate poisonous plants" or "cuddled a poisonous snake" for "ate a dangerous plaything" and you'll see how our ancestors have been applying this selection test to parents for several millions of generations.
I also note that this is repeated neglect - the child had to swallow at least two magnets at enough separation in time (enough time to empty the stomach into the upper bowel - say, 6 hours?) that they pinch a section of bowel. So these are not isolated oversights, but repeated failings by the parents.
Were any surviving siblings taken into protective custody? Should have been.
The guy's family are in a location known to the CIA. They were proactively placed into protective custody hours before he got his promotion and were replaced with CIA shills. The shills are living the public life of his family while he knows that if he steps out of line, his family die. Sequentially. And when the kidnap attempt comes ... the CIO carries on working in the knowledge that the gun in his family's face is a CIA gun, not the kidnapper's.
Remember, you're talking about agencies and agents who are perfectly willing to murder to get their political master's way. Makes me think of how the German's (generally) kept control of their Sonderkommando. Efficiency and pleasantness are not frequent bedfellows.
Well, it just proves you were right - vampire or zombie is undecided, but "Living Dead" for sure.
Standard Operating Practice amongst the laptop thieves in this area (or more likely, amongst the fences they are sold on to) is that the first thing that is done is insert a boot disk for $OS$ and do a blind install over-writing everything on the drive and rendering moot all passwords. When the police recovered my laptop (by coincidence) I was lucky in that they'd not investigated beyond the "insert disc and install" level, so I'd had my system partition overwritten with IIRC Win98, while the NTFS Win2K data partition was untouched. So it was a "meh".
I've seen and heard of a number of similar occurrences from people who work in local computer shops, normally with rather more troublesome consequences because they hadn't partitioned. They've also seen the symptoms with people who come in (honestly or not) with stories like "I brought this laptop second hand from an advert in the paper (or man in pub ; whatever) and the modem doesn't work. Can you help?" When you see the same ham-fisted virus-laden install with the same serial number 5 times in a month, it becomes pretty obvious what is happening.
So ... your installed software, lasts until part way into the next boot. Unless American fences are remarkably more stupid than British fences. Which would be difficult, considering how remarkably stupid many fences seem to be ; unless you have baboons working as fences.
Hardware level encryption? Never seen it in the wild. Replacing the hard drive is a manageable expense, given the low price of the bare laptop.
I'll take you seriously on that.
When I was single, childless and dependant-free (I'm still childless, but now have dependants), I was doing various moderately dangerous sports - long distance solo winter walking, solo caving, solo cave diving, that sort of thing. I calculated risks before taking (or rejecting) them, then went to work drilling oil wells, where I (err) calculated risks before taking (or rejecting) them. (The unofficial motto of the Cave Diving Group is "Turn your back and swim away / and live to dive another day." Which is a successful exploration strategy with only a few percent per year mortality rate.)
I'm sure there are quite a number of people ("ppl"??, or do you have a vowel tax in your jurisdiction?) who would take a trip to Mars with un-proven technology. However, for development of the technology you need people who are going to test the equipment, analyse it's performance in real time (i.e. on site, not at the end of a 30 light-minute round trip), then come back and report on it to drive the next round of development.
See you on Dome-C next winter for testing the Mk-I habitat. Bring a scarf.
If you get a ticket to Mars, I'll come to your launch funeral and bring you a bottle of good whisky to stow alongside the cyanide pills.
Oh, and yes, I do take decent cameras to parties from time to time. They may not be as populated by degenerate idiots as the ones you frequent, but that's your choice of party. Babboon-like beer-swilling college retards are unlikely to be able or willing to pay my divorce investigation fees, so don't come into consideration.
http://slashdot.org/ecls.esa.int/ecls/attachments/ECLS/.../russianspacecraftcontam.pdf
When I should have posted : http://ecls.esa.int/ecls/attachments/ECLS/Russianspace-biocontaminantion/russianspacecraftcontam.pdf
While it's not a peer-reviewed paper, it looks as if someone is (or was) working towards such publication.
There are a number of credible references (including photos in that presentation) of fungi growing on the INNER surfaces of the rubber gaskets around the windows of Mir. Which should surprise no-one. Also, I'd expect that, like airplanes, the windows on Mir have an outer structural pressure-proof pane and an inner cosmetic pane, and therefore a potentially moist section in between which could form a biological habitat.
Elsewhere in the presentation is discussion of other microbes retrieved from the INNER surfaces of Mir ; which again, should surprise no-one apart from a Hollywood set-dresser.
Being radiotrophic is one set of evolutionary adaptations ; surviving at low PPO2 (partial pressure O2), PPCO2, PPH2, PPCH4, and low humidity (including vacuum as an extreme ; low PPeverything) are different evolutionary adaptations. I don't see any particular reasons that mutations to help in one direction are particularly likely to help in the other direction. So I'd consider them (unless proven otherwise) to be "independent experiments" in the terminology of statistics, and their probabilities are multiplicative. (This is why multiple-drug treatments are harder to evolve resistance to, compared to surviving sequential applications of several drugs to a single infection.)
There's a long way between implausible and impossible; but at best, I'd say we're looking at the "implausible" end of the spectrum.
To successfully get there, they would need to be extreme-in-2-or-3-different-directions-simultaneously-o-philes. Which is a steep hill to climb.
Which part of "you're a danger to yourself and your colleagues" did you not understand?
Err, (3) ... Profit?
That's the sort of figures I was thinking about. Allowing for some degree of stabilisation from pressure induced increases in density and fluid viscosity, I might just about find somewhere a little over 0.5kK credible. Or at least, not "bat shit, dismiss out-of-hand crazy" (I'm watching an Inspecteur Clouseau/ Pink Panther movie with half an eye and ear ; it colours my thoughts).
Errr, citatation, please. Where would such an experiment have been carried out?
OK ; having done some calculations, I make that the acceleration in a 0.1m radius ultracentrifuge turning at 1000RPM ; not a particularly demanding piece of engineering.
What is the pressure going to be at that "depth" in that pseudo-gravity field? I make it a smidgin under 2000 bar, which is a depth you'd get at approx 20km in seawater. Which is not actually a drastic extension of what we know already : given that the bottom of the Marianas Trench (11km) is not sterile.
What might be more of an issue in these centrifuge experiments is the gradient of pressure : a small movement of the bacterium would lead to a large change in pressure, and all sorts of potentially troubling osmotic effects. However, clearly such experiments are not particularly turbulent (which considering that the devices are used for settling out components of mixtures in density gradients - using relatively compressible fluids - is not surprising).
The headline figure is impressive 400,000g ! OMG!, but it's physical implications are not that drastic. See the original paper (PNAS, May 10, 2011 vol. 108 pp7997-8002) for experimental details.
Once again, citation?
This one, perhaps? Which tells of "progressing decline of window optics" and "areas of visible growth of mold fungi on frames, TCS, insulation tubes, behind panels, rubber spacers of the hatches, metallic corrosion" (22 crew changes later). There is no mention of fungi growing on the outside of the window.
Op. cit. makes it a bit more explicit that the radiation experiments were carried out on samples returned to earth, and that the fungi which grew under high radiation had significant differences of colony form. Which is rather what you'd expect for anything growing under high radiation.
I was wondering how/ when/ why they'd taken to radiating the walls of their own spacecraft, but they didn't do that. And the fungi suffered (see the photos in op. cit.) under the radiation.
Life is pretty resilient, but that doesn't mean that it lives and thrives everywhere. While the inside of the Chernobyl sarcophagus is not hospitable to human life, that doesn't mean that other organisms cannot live there. After all, it's only a moderately high radiation environment, not an extremely high radiation environment.