There are two sorts of solar sail, those that work off photons (and, no, you don't need a mirror, since you can't afford the extra mass) and those that work off ionized particles being emitted from the sun. Ionized particles have much more momentum and are generally considered superior.
A solar sail that is 50 Km in diameter, attached to a 5 Kg probe, would accelerate that probe to 25% light speed by the time you reached the edge of the solar system.
If you built a car whose headlights could accelerate the car in reverse with photonic pressure, the headlights would vaporize a considerable chunk of the planet in front of you. You can do the calculation yourself. The equations are at http://www.physicsforums.com/s...
First, data doesn't get the same protections as voice. Not that voice gets much protection as it is.
Second, carriers have said they will throttle data connections. This has serious implications for digital because it means carrier-to-carrier connections will (not may, will) be of inferior quality.
Third, I would believe digital was going to deliver, except that nobody uses much in the way of error-correction, the speakers and microphones are deteriorating in quality and reliability is naff.
Lastly, phone companies always promise jam tomorrow, or an increase in chocolate rations, but the reality is very different. I get a (billed) month of no service because of an upgrade to 4G. I can't remember the last free phone upgrade offered. My smartphone reboots itself regularly for no obvious reason. I used to be able to run a phone on full batteries for 2 days without a recharge. (Yes, phones "do more", but I don't bloody well want most of the more and the bits I do want aren't any bloody good! That is NOT a good exchange for 1/12th the uptime and nobody sells low-consumption phones any more.)
The DeHavilland Mosquito had an operational range of 2000 miles fully loaded and 3000 miles if you used wing fuel tanks. Since the bomb bay could take a load equal to the wings, as a pure "night fighter", it seems plausible that an extra fuel tank in the bomb bay could have given you a range of 4000 miles.
Obviously, you don't tend to have night fighters cross the Atlantic or Pacific much, but in 1941 there would have been nothing remotely its equal on any patrol.
Although my thought of the extra fuel in the bomb bay was never used (as far as I know), the aircraft was without any serious rival for at least 3 years and remained in use for patrol purposes for another couple of decades.
The sad part of the story is that most were destroyed for target practice after the war and only one Mosquito remains flying (and it's a rebuild that mixes several previously crashed airframes).
Ok, the envelope game. You can rework it to say the second envelope contains the next vulnerability in the queue of vulnerabilities. An empty queue is just as valid as a non-empty one, so if there are no further flaws then the envelope is empty. That way, all states are handled identically. What you REALLY want to do though is add a third envelope, also next item inquire, from QA. You do NOT know which envelope contains the most valuable prize but unless two bugs are found simultaneously (in which case you have bigger problems than game theory), you absolutely know two of the envelopes contain nothing remotely as valuable as the third. If no bugs are known at the time, or no more exist - essentially the same thing as you can't prove completeness and correctness at the same time, then the thousand dollars is the valuable one.
Monty Hall knows what is in two of the envelopes, but not what is in the third. Assuming simultaneous bug finds can be ignored, he can guess. Whichever envelope you choose, he will pick the least valuable envelope and show you that it is empty. Should you stick with your original choice or switch envelopes?
Clearly, this outcome will differ from the scenario in the original field manual. Unless you understand why it is different in outcome, you cannot evaluate a bounty program.
Now, onto the example of the car automotive software. Let us say that locating bugs is in constant time for the same effort. Sending the software architect on a one-way trip to Siberia is definitely step one. Proper encapsulation and modularization is utterly fundamental. Constant time means the First Law of Coding has been broken, a worse misdeed than breaking the First Law of Time and the First Law of Robotics on a first date. You simply can't produce enough similar bugs any other way.
It also means the architect broke the Second Law of Coding - ringfence vulnerable code and validate all inputs to it. By specifically isolating dangerous code in this way, a method widely used, you make misbehaviour essentially impossible. The dodgy code may be there but it can't get data outside the range for which it is safe.
Finally, it means the programmers failed to read the CERT Secure Coding guidelines, failed to test (unit and integrated!) correctly, likely didn't bother with static checkers, failed to enable compiler warning flags and basically failed to think. Thoughtlessness qualifies them for the Pitcairn Islands. One way.
With the Pitcairns now overrun by unemployed automotive software engineers, society there will collapse and Thunderdome v1.0a will be built! With a patchset to be released, fixing bugs in harnesses and weapons, in coming months.
The restrictions on teaching in America are severe. The restrictions in the UK make it doable, for now, but the backlash against Free Schools will likely end that.
I'd love to get off my high horse. I'm getting vertigo. The problem is that educating people has got so much red tape and legal bumfluff involved. PLEASE let me educate! It is my natural state of being!
They do, indeed. Which is why Mars needs terraforming fast. I don't care if the intelligent move there or the dimwits, but the sooner there's a LOT of cold, hard void between the two camps, the better.
You are correct. Global warming refers to heat, on a climatic scale, on average. It doesn't refer to temperature (the number one mistake people make), local conditions, day-to-day variations or local phenomena.
But it's worse! For the price of three mistakes, we'll throw in three more, absolutely free!
Heat flows around the planet. You've the conveyor belts, trade winds, gulf stream and many, many more. But air doesn't just circulate around these, it also circulates around regions of high pressure and low pressure (forget which way for which) and from high pressure to low pressure, but pressure systems aren't trivial things and you'll hear of one blocking another, not one cancelling another.
Climate also has myriad feedback mechanisms. Hot air rises, expands and cools as it does so. (Temperature is inversely proportional to volume, near enough.) As air cools, it sinks. If the air sinks when it is 100% saturated with water vapour, the air cannot retain it and it falls out the sky in various unpleasant forms. Usually, whatever you're not dressed for. It Knows! But what affects air temperature? Solar heat, yes, but also the ground. Air is fairly transparent when it comes to thermal radiation but not to conduction or convection, which is why the ice caps (which reflect 100% of what reaches the ground) have very cold air masses, whilst thick forest (which absorbs a very high percentage) have very hot air masses.
(You also have to figure that water holds a LOT of heat. To heat water one degree C, you need to put in far more than you would to heat carbon one degree C. Forests, by their nature, tend to have higher humidity in their vicinity. Polar air, by contrast, is usually very dry. This changes the reservoir available.)
Finally, organic systems are negative feedback systems. They have to be. Using James Lovelock's Daisyworld as an example, white daisies (which cool a region) like warm weather. But what if they liked hot? If it was a positive feedback loop, the daisies would cook themselves. Even if you picture a response curve, so their preference waned above the ideal, they would still create highly unfavourable conditions and die out. The only way to make the loop stable is for the daisy to have a negative feedback loop, so that it and the environment are in dynamic equilibrium. An ideal state is actively maintained.
Humans don't really understand dynamic systems well, and dynamic equilibria even less. I despair of your species, Earthlings. Anyways, there are all manner of regions on your planet, all with their own different temperature preferences and all actively maintaining them. Air circulates. Globally. The instantaneous result is weather, the long-term result is climate.
Try to picture a radio station with static. You can distinguish the instantaneous (the pops, whistles and crackles) from the aggregate (whatever is being broadcast). To equate them is to assume a time invariance that has no basis in reality.
Honestly, sometimes I think my seminar series "Ethics 101 For Daleks" was easier.
Why would healthcare costs increase? Demand outstrips supply by a long way, but if people postpone treatment to avoid the smaller costs, they'll end up with greater health problems at far greater cost, which they can't then pay and the doctor/hospital is forced to eat the bill. The treatment is indeed more expensive, but for the supplier.
When you have a healthier populace, you want to minimize costs by treating early that which hasn't been prevented. A very large number of micropayments is a lot of money.
When you have a very sick population, treating is largely futile. Disease can live in pockets undetected and surge at random intervals. You could never find, let alone vaccinate and treat, every solitary member of the underclasses. Rather, you want the disease to burn itself out. Incinerating the victims is cheap, efficient and prevents recurrence. This is the "Atlas Shrugged" philosophy. And, economically, it makes sense in the short term. Starving these people to death is slower and annoys pop stars. Well, it sort of makes sense. Ability is normally distributed, so if N% of the rich have a particular rare and valuable mental or physical skill, N% of the poor will also have it. There are a lot more poor than rich (80/20 rule), so with a better diet and better education, it should be obvious that you can scale up your entire economy, which means greater cashflow, greater resilience and greater overall profit.
In a nutshell, if you cut welfare beyond a certain point and replace education by religion beyond a certain point, you can create a downward spiral where recovery is uneconomic. No matter what you do, the salvage operation will cost more than the value of what is salvaged. Disease is not known for respecting rank nor privilege. It may affect the affluent last, but as the support system dies, the affluent will also die. And, in pure economic terms, there's plenty of skilled people from overcrowded countries to replace them with. To the ruling elite, the rich are ultimately as disposable as anyone. Economically, everyone is replaceable and replacement is cheaper than stagnation.
This is where I differ from Ayn Rand. (Ok, I differ on almost everything. She was a seriously ill woman.) I do not believe stagnation is necessary or useful. Way too much potential is getting wasted, far more than can be justified by the logic of diminishing returns. I do not believe the upper caste has exclusive rights to intelligence. I do not believe scale efficiency is sublinear. (I do not believe Ayn Rand would have comprehended the technical terms in my post. She was not very bright.) I do not believe America has passed the event horizon and is descending into the black hole of oblivion... although its leaders are trying very hard to reach that point...
I do believe that with a sensible food policy and a decent educational system, any country at all would see a major economic boom. Add in better mental healthcare, better housing and a cleaner environment, and you could see rejuvenation beyond the imaginings of most.
You cannot make money without spending money You cannot save money without spending money Cheap solutions can end up very expensive Expensive but appropriate solutions can wind up costing less
This is all very basic stuff. Sticker price is rarely the only price.
NB: Appropriate is there for a reason. Charging more for a bad product doesn't magically make it a good product. If it did, can you imagine how good bank CEOs would be by now? In fact, there are a number of situations where the normal economic rules invert, where high prices are desirable and price wars lead to ever-higher costs.
Equally, low sticker prices don't automatically mean bad. Think of Linux, which has the lowest sticker price possible and is superb. But that only appears degenerate because of looking at sticker price alone. If you cost the time spent developing and testing, you actually show Linux to be in the fourth category. If you value developer time at typical market rates, Linux probably weighs in at around $1.2 billion. Very expensive, but the TCO of using it is very very low.
Comprehension is also your problem. Go read James Gleik for a bit, then maybe read some Mandelbrot. THEN come back and tell me about chaotic systems.
You have zero understanding of the Holographic Universe theory, that much is obvious. I won't waste my time explaining it, all I will say is that it is the only possible way this Kazakh professor could have done what he claimed. It is the only way to transform a non-solvable problem into one that could conceivably be solved. I do not believe he has succeeded (I am not sure I believe the theory either), but I am convinced he does and that he believes he has. There is only one path he could have taken to reach such a belief. Ergo, that is the path he took.
It should be obvious to even the smallest child that if approach X is doomed to failure, that the professor did not follow approach X. He did something else. It should also be obvious that, with the plethora of Holographic Universe papers on arXiv, along with papers on reduced-dimension n-body problem papers, that reduced-dimension approaches to problems has gained traction. But you're too busy complaining about terms you know nothing of to actually look at what people are doing. Way too busy.
So stop posting gibberish, read for once in your life, and maybe - just maybe - you will grasp what others are saying before you start spewing. God, how I hate it when lazy, incompetent bastards start thinking they know everything.
You are confusing setting up a system of differential equations (which you can do) with the system being differentiable (which is quite another matter).
Your post largely restates what I stated, so as far as I am concerned, you are more concerned with being pompous than with comprehending what it is you are being pompous about. Wake me up when you grow enough of a pair to read as well as write.
Well, yes and no. There is no general solution to the n-body problem, where n is greater than 2. The nature of the system makes that inevitable. The system isn't differentiable and you can't actually perform infinitesimal steps.
What you can do is define bounds for certain special cases, where the solutions must exist within those bounds. The error on the bounds increases quite quickly, which is why space probes are forever making course corrections. Bounds do not exist in all cases, as three bodies is sufficient for the system to be chaotic (deterministic but not predictable), which means in those cases, you rely heavily on probability (meteorologists perform hundreds of thousands of simulations and see what general patterns have the highest probability of cropping up) and on very short timeframes (in snooker, you can make a reasonable guess as to what will happen one or two reflections ahead).
These are inescapable properties of multibody dynamics, because you can do bugger all with infinite multiway recursion. There is no way to simplify it......as it is.
What you CAN do is flatten the universe into a 2D holographic model. If there is no time, there is no place for recursion. That might yield something. Alternatively, with time dilation, you can make infinitesimal time arbitrarily large. Neither of these will yield an absolute answer, but could be expected to yield an answer that looked as though it was.
Russian was the International standard for publication of scientific discoveries in the late 1800s, early 1900s. Russian was fluently spoken as a second language in academia across Europe and America at that time. Einstein's early publications would have had Russian translations or might even have been written in Russian first. It was the lingua franca of science at that time. That matters, in that all the necessary terminology and shorthand developed in science in the last few hundred years will already exist in the language. It is fit for purpose.
So, no, there is nothing wrong with a paper in Russian. There won't be many American professors left who could read it, and for political reasons they would likely deny any such ability. Europeans are less extreme and more multicultural, but Russian has never been a particularly hot second language. Ok, more so than Old Icelandic, Akkadian or Finnish, but Babylon hasn't done much new maths in 5,000 years and Scandanavia only produces hot computer geeks, hot models and hot saunas.
Asimov's Lesser-Known Fourth Law: Individuals using market-speak or manager-speak no longer qualify as humans and are an immediate threat to all real intelligence. Deal with, as per third law.
Well, yes. I should hope so. Einstein did most of his best work imagining cows travelling near or at the speed of light. If relativity had to wait for NASA to modify a cow's digestive system to fuel a ramjet capable of near-light speeds, we would still be waiting. Not that it isn't fun to picture such a cow.
But, yeah, his thought experiments were definitely figurative descriptions, not mathematically precise models and it is not necessary for NASA to engineer a cow capable of making his figurative descriptions physically correct in all respects. Although it would make a change from firing pumpkins by catapult.
First, it's an analogy, not a model, so it doesn't need to be mathematically correct, it only has to be conceptually correct. I don't see the problem there. Conceptually, gravity bends the spacetime around the mass, such that objects moving through the distortion appear to an observer to travel along a path that is not straight (it is straight to the object) in space or in time. The rubber sheet is a perfectly good representation of this concept.
If you want it mathematically perfect, you have problems. First, we don't yet know for certain if you should treat a mass as a point source or one with volume. The ternary star system recently found will help there. Second, in order for something to change state, there must be a force. With springs or rubber, this is a restoring force of known value. It not only removes curvature where there is no mass, it prevents the mass stretching the material to infinity and beyond. The nuclear forces play a role in reproducing some of this. The object cannot collapse further than the point where gravity and the nuclear forces all balance out. But as far as I know, the nuclear forces do NOT prevent spacetime bending infinitely, nor remove the distortion when the mass moves elsewhere. This matters. You cannot produce a mathematically-correct simulation with a deformable surface if you don't know the precise rules governing the deformation and restoration.
Let us imagine, though, that we know Hooke's Constant for spacetime. Ok, you get a material (or invent one) with the same constant. Unfortunately, not quite that simple. Relativistic equations are non-linear. You'd need a material where the forces involved reversibly (important!) altered the material in such a way that at any given instant, Hooke's Constant was correct, but that this constant would be purely an instantaneous value.
Ok, that is doable, we've plenty of adaptable materials. Gives you a geometrically correct solution and therefore the right mathematical results. Messy, though.
Is there an alternative?
Well, yes. This is all about reproducing forces. There is absolutely no rule that says you can use only physical shapes to do this. There are plenty of other forces (eg: electromagnetism) which can substitute for one of the others. Have the "fixed" mass as an electromagnet to encapsulate all the details that exist in spacetime that don't readily transpose to a rubber sheet. Let the sheet model gravity alone. That is what it is supposed to do. The other variables are factored in, so the geometry is still correct, only this time by imposing values rather than letting them naturally be correct.
Problem solved. Nobel prize to the usual address, please.
...is to improve on the built-in error correction.
This is actually very, very hard. Some, but not all, "jumping genes" and relocated genes need to be able to move freely. But not to just anywhere - some places are good, some places will trigger genetic disease. And it's not possible to be 100% sure if those places are fixed or vary according to some other state of some other mechanism.
So cancers caused by gene relocation aren't preventable at this time.
Mutations within a gene are easier. There are no (currently) known mechanisms that modify genes on-the-fly. Metadata, yes. Controls for gene interpretation, yes. Gene coding, no. So you want error correction codes per gene, independent of location in the genome. This will stop transcription cancers.
But ECCs have to be controlled. You want to stop ordinary cells mutating, not cells relating to next generation stuff - you don't want to stop evolution, just keep it to where it should be.
This means certain transcription cancers will happen, but you'll have reduced most of them.
Killing rapid cancers is easy - they consume resources far faster than regular cells, so you want a poison that accumulates fast in cancers and slow elsewhere. We do that already, but the targeting is being worked on.
Slow cancers are difficult, you probably need cell repair.
Ok, so how to embed ECCs? There are vacuelles in cells that contain nothing but used to contain something. Obviously, you'd put the codes in one of those. Nanotech will do the rest when invented.
Rare materials. Well, rare reeds can be harder to find than gold, so let's put a $1000 raw materials price per ounce of reed used.
Time. Hand craftsmen are incredibly rare. Those skills are expensive. IT can charge $120/hr for skills twice as common. Using that as a guideline, let's say $240/hr for the skills.
If we assume it takes one year to make a flute, then the combined cost is roughly half a million per flute, so $6.5 million so far. I will assume QA would mean some flutes have to be made again from scratch. Let's assume a 50% rejection rate at the virtuoso level, which doesn't seem unreasonable given you're making the best of the best with uncontrolled materials. This raises the price to $9.75 million.
But provinence matters. These instruments had established history, the main reason a Strad is worth ten times anything with identical acoustics. We don't have enough history to bump the price up that much, but doubling sounds fair. This gives us $19.5 million.
I would start by taking the money out of the TSA official's paycheque and bank account, with the remainder seized from TSA funds. If the funds are insufficient, continue to the next department up.
I would further require the TSA to publish a public apology as a full-page announcement in every newspaper, artisan journal and music journal. Finally, I would require all TSA officials involved in any way with the harassment to serve 250 hours community service.
Weirdstone of Brisingamon//Moon of Gomrath Neuromancer The Sleeper Awakes Darkness is Rising Monkey (the abbreviated Journey to the West) The Black Cloud A For Andromeda The Molecule Men Eight Keys to Eden Dusty Death Spy who Came In from the Cold 633 Squadron
A manufacturer should always be 100% liable for the product they make, when used as intended under intended conditions. Warranty and fitness for purpose should not be waivable, ever. In software or hardware.
Ok, how would this work in software, since you can't prove something bug-free? You can't prove it bug-free in general, but you can prove certain cases bug-free. Also, just as imperfections happen when making anything, warranty doesn't imply 100% of theoretically valid circumstances are going to get the results you want. Equally, just as nobody expects an unmaintained car with no oil or fuel to run, nobody should reasonably expect open source to work without patches and necessary versions of support libraries.
One can also argue that open source is a prototyping system. You would expect a breadboard or an S Deck to work as expected, you would expect transistors and capacitors to do their stated tasks within the stated parameters. You do not expect the makers of any of these parts to provide added insurance against your flipflop circuit gaining intelligence and seizing control of the world. If you're a good enough inventor to build a flipflop with AI capabilities, YOU provide the insurance.
Same goes for all drones, robots, rovers and UAVs. The manufacturer should be 100% liable for what they make. Modders should be 100% liable for what they mod and all direct impacts.
(So if you turn a camera holder into a rocket launcher, you are responsible for the rocket launcher, issues due to the physical and electrical demands of that rocket launcher, etc, but the manufacturer is still responsible for any communications systems, flight control, etc, since these do not fundamentally change. It is the manufacturer who decides what to hard-code and what to measure, it is the manufacturer who decides on whether to add voltage regulators - since surges can happen under normal conditions, etc.)
Deaths caused - if it's a pre-mod design flaw, the manufacturer is responsible. Same as it would be if your car spontaneously exploded. If it's a post-mod design flaw, the modifier is responsible. If it is a design feature specifically used as such, the user is always responsible. (The qualifier is because guns are designed specifically to kill. If the gun blows up in your hands and kills you, when you don't pull the trigger, the manufacturer should not be able to argue the gun functioned as designed. If you try to kill someone and the gun kills you instead, the manufacturer should not automatically be liable, although they may be found such.)
The next stage in drone development is obvious. Operators suffer PTSD at the same rate as fighter pilots. Computers can be fooled, as Iran has demonstrated. Rat brains can already operate flight simulators. Ergo, rat brains will be installed in drones, after being trained to trigger specific responses that can be treated as fire commands when specific objects are seen. This is easier than programming a computer, and as rats are easy to produce without rare materials located in potentially hostile countries, cheaper and more reliable.
Won't there be objections? As if drone strikes aren't controversial! What do plebs matter to the military?
As for home inventors, there are already kits to control cockroach brains and games that read electrical impulses from humans. I can't imagine it will take long for someone to figure out how to use insect brains to control UAVs.
At the point where non-human nervous systems operate UAVs, is the inventor responsible for the free will decisions made by the other brain?
Using conventional lets-blame-someone logic, the answer is no. No matter what the training, no matter how small the other brain, it always had the opportunity to say no. No matter how xenophobic or genocidal it is, at the start or end, it always made the choice.
Using a scientific concept of cause-and-effect, which is a many-many web of weighted interactions, you're damn right you're responsible. Whether the daleks you have invented are under your control or not. You cannot escape your guilt by saying they did it.
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There are two sorts of solar sail, those that work off photons (and, no, you don't need a mirror, since you can't afford the extra mass) and those that work off ionized particles being emitted from the sun. Ionized particles have much more momentum and are generally considered superior.
A solar sail that is 50 Km in diameter, attached to a 5 Kg probe, would accelerate that probe to 25% light speed by the time you reached the edge of the solar system.
If you built a car whose headlights could accelerate the car in reverse with photonic pressure, the headlights would vaporize a considerable chunk of the planet in front of you. You can do the calculation yourself. The equations are at http://www.physicsforums.com/s...
First, data doesn't get the same protections as voice. Not that voice gets much protection as it is.
Second, carriers have said they will throttle data connections. This has serious implications for digital because it means carrier-to-carrier connections will (not may, will) be of inferior quality.
Third, I would believe digital was going to deliver, except that nobody uses much in the way of error-correction, the speakers and microphones are deteriorating in quality and reliability is naff.
Lastly, phone companies always promise jam tomorrow, or an increase in chocolate rations, but the reality is very different. I get a (billed) month of no service because of an upgrade to 4G. I can't remember the last free phone upgrade offered. My smartphone reboots itself regularly for no obvious reason. I used to be able to run a phone on full batteries for 2 days without a recharge. (Yes, phones "do more", but I don't bloody well want most of the more and the bits I do want aren't any bloody good! That is NOT a good exchange for 1/12th the uptime and nobody sells low-consumption phones any more.)
The DeHavilland Mosquito had an operational range of 2000 miles fully loaded and 3000 miles if you used wing fuel tanks. Since the bomb bay could take a load equal to the wings, as a pure "night fighter", it seems plausible that an extra fuel tank in the bomb bay could have given you a range of 4000 miles.
Obviously, you don't tend to have night fighters cross the Atlantic or Pacific much, but in 1941 there would have been nothing remotely its equal on any patrol.
Although my thought of the extra fuel in the bomb bay was never used (as far as I know), the aircraft was without any serious rival for at least 3 years and remained in use for patrol purposes for another couple of decades.
The sad part of the story is that most were destroyed for target practice after the war and only one Mosquito remains flying (and it's a rebuild that mixes several previously crashed airframes).
Is it in either the Kerbal Space Program or Elite: Dangerous?
If I can't launch it or blow it up, how can I know if it really exists?
Ok, the envelope game. You can rework it to say the second envelope contains the next vulnerability in the queue of vulnerabilities. An empty queue is just as valid as a non-empty one, so if there are no further flaws then the envelope is empty. That way, all states are handled identically. What you REALLY want to do though is add a third envelope, also next item inquire, from QA. You do NOT know which envelope contains the most valuable prize but unless two bugs are found simultaneously (in which case you have bigger problems than game theory), you absolutely know two of the envelopes contain nothing remotely as valuable as the third. If no bugs are known at the time, or no more exist - essentially the same thing as you can't prove completeness and correctness at the same time, then the thousand dollars is the valuable one.
Monty Hall knows what is in two of the envelopes, but not what is in the third. Assuming simultaneous bug finds can be ignored, he can guess. Whichever envelope you choose, he will pick the least valuable envelope and show you that it is empty. Should you stick with your original choice or switch envelopes?
Clearly, this outcome will differ from the scenario in the original field manual. Unless you understand why it is different in outcome, you cannot evaluate a bounty program.
Now, onto the example of the car automotive software. Let us say that locating bugs is in constant time for the same effort. Sending the software architect on a one-way trip to Siberia is definitely step one. Proper encapsulation and modularization is utterly fundamental. Constant time means the First Law of Coding has been broken, a worse misdeed than breaking the First Law of Time and the First Law of Robotics on a first date. You simply can't produce enough similar bugs any other way.
It also means the architect broke the Second Law of Coding - ringfence vulnerable code and validate all inputs to it. By specifically isolating dangerous code in this way, a method widely used, you make misbehaviour essentially impossible. The dodgy code may be there but it can't get data outside the range for which it is safe.
Finally, it means the programmers failed to read the CERT Secure Coding guidelines, failed to test (unit and integrated!) correctly, likely didn't bother with static checkers, failed to enable compiler warning flags and basically failed to think. Thoughtlessness qualifies them for the Pitcairn Islands. One way.
With the Pitcairns now overrun by unemployed automotive software engineers, society there will collapse and Thunderdome v1.0a will be built! With a patchset to be released, fixing bugs in harnesses and weapons, in coming months.
The restrictions on teaching in America are severe. The restrictions in the UK make it doable, for now, but the backlash against Free Schools will likely end that.
I'd love to get off my high horse. I'm getting vertigo. The problem is that educating people has got so much red tape and legal bumfluff involved. PLEASE let me educate! It is my natural state of being!
They do, indeed. Which is why Mars needs terraforming fast. I don't care if the intelligent move there or the dimwits, but the sooner there's a LOT of cold, hard void between the two camps, the better.
You are correct. Global warming refers to heat, on a climatic scale, on average. It doesn't refer to temperature (the number one mistake people make), local conditions, day-to-day variations or local phenomena.
But it's worse! For the price of three mistakes, we'll throw in three more, absolutely free!
Heat flows around the planet. You've the conveyor belts, trade winds, gulf stream and many, many more. But air doesn't just circulate around these, it also circulates around regions of high pressure and low pressure (forget which way for which) and from high pressure to low pressure, but pressure systems aren't trivial things and you'll hear of one blocking another, not one cancelling another.
Climate also has myriad feedback mechanisms. Hot air rises, expands and cools as it does so. (Temperature is inversely proportional to volume, near enough.) As air cools, it sinks. If the air sinks when it is 100% saturated with water vapour, the air cannot retain it and it falls out the sky in various unpleasant forms. Usually, whatever you're not dressed for. It Knows! But what affects air temperature? Solar heat, yes, but also the ground. Air is fairly transparent when it comes to thermal radiation but not to conduction or convection, which is why the ice caps (which reflect 100% of what reaches the ground) have very cold air masses, whilst thick forest (which absorbs a very high percentage) have very hot air masses.
(You also have to figure that water holds a LOT of heat. To heat water one degree C, you need to put in far more than you would to heat carbon one degree C. Forests, by their nature, tend to have higher humidity in their vicinity. Polar air, by contrast, is usually very dry. This changes the reservoir available.)
Finally, organic systems are negative feedback systems. They have to be. Using James Lovelock's Daisyworld as an example, white daisies (which cool a region) like warm weather. But what if they liked hot? If it was a positive feedback loop, the daisies would cook themselves. Even if you picture a response curve, so their preference waned above the ideal, they would still create highly unfavourable conditions and die out. The only way to make the loop stable is for the daisy to have a negative feedback loop, so that it and the environment are in dynamic equilibrium. An ideal state is actively maintained.
Humans don't really understand dynamic systems well, and dynamic equilibria even less. I despair of your species, Earthlings. Anyways, there are all manner of regions on your planet, all with their own different temperature preferences and all actively maintaining them. Air circulates. Globally. The instantaneous result is weather, the long-term result is climate.
Try to picture a radio station with static. You can distinguish the instantaneous (the pops, whistles and crackles) from the aggregate (whatever is being broadcast). To equate them is to assume a time invariance that has no basis in reality.
Honestly, sometimes I think my seminar series "Ethics 101 For Daleks" was easier.
Why would healthcare costs increase? Demand outstrips supply by a long way, but if people postpone treatment to avoid the smaller costs, they'll end up with greater health problems at far greater cost, which they can't then pay and the doctor/hospital is forced to eat the bill. The treatment is indeed more expensive, but for the supplier.
When you have a healthier populace, you want to minimize costs by treating early that which hasn't been prevented. A very large number of micropayments is a lot of money.
When you have a very sick population, treating is largely futile. Disease can live in pockets undetected and surge at random intervals. You could never find, let alone vaccinate and treat, every solitary member of the underclasses. Rather, you want the disease to burn itself out. Incinerating the victims is cheap, efficient and prevents recurrence. This is the "Atlas Shrugged" philosophy. And, economically, it makes sense in the short term. Starving these people to death is slower and annoys pop stars. Well, it sort of makes sense. Ability is normally distributed, so if N% of the rich have a particular rare and valuable mental or physical skill, N% of the poor will also have it. There are a lot more poor than rich (80/20 rule), so with a better diet and better education, it should be obvious that you can scale up your entire economy, which means greater cashflow, greater resilience and greater overall profit.
In a nutshell, if you cut welfare beyond a certain point and replace education by religion beyond a certain point, you can create a downward spiral where recovery is uneconomic. No matter what you do, the salvage operation will cost more than the value of what is salvaged. Disease is not known for respecting rank nor privilege. It may affect the affluent last, but as the support system dies, the affluent will also die. And, in pure economic terms, there's plenty of skilled people from overcrowded countries to replace them with. To the ruling elite, the rich are ultimately as disposable as anyone. Economically, everyone is replaceable and replacement is cheaper than stagnation.
This is where I differ from Ayn Rand. (Ok, I differ on almost everything. She was a seriously ill woman.) I do not believe stagnation is necessary or useful. Way too much potential is getting wasted, far more than can be justified by the logic of diminishing returns. I do not believe the upper caste has exclusive rights to intelligence. I do not believe scale efficiency is sublinear. (I do not believe Ayn Rand would have comprehended the technical terms in my post. She was not very bright.) I do not believe America has passed the event horizon and is descending into the black hole of oblivion... although its leaders are trying very hard to reach that point...
I do believe that with a sensible food policy and a decent educational system, any country at all would see a major economic boom. Add in better mental healthcare, better housing and a cleaner environment, and you could see rejuvenation beyond the imaginings of most.
Depends. If the handshake is for a rival secret society...
You cannot make money without spending money
You cannot save money without spending money
Cheap solutions can end up very expensive
Expensive but appropriate solutions can wind up costing less
This is all very basic stuff. Sticker price is rarely the only price.
NB: Appropriate is there for a reason. Charging more for a bad product doesn't magically make it a good product. If it did, can you imagine how good bank CEOs would be by now? In fact, there are a number of situations where the normal economic rules invert, where high prices are desirable and price wars lead to ever-higher costs.
Equally, low sticker prices don't automatically mean bad. Think of Linux, which has the lowest sticker price possible and is superb. But that only appears degenerate because of looking at sticker price alone. If you cost the time spent developing and testing, you actually show Linux to be in the fourth category. If you value developer time at typical market rates, Linux probably weighs in at around $1.2 billion. Very expensive, but the TCO of using it is very very low.
Comprehension is also your problem. Go read James Gleik for a bit, then maybe read some Mandelbrot. THEN come back and tell me about chaotic systems.
You have zero understanding of the Holographic Universe theory, that much is obvious. I won't waste my time explaining it, all I will say is that it is the only possible way this Kazakh professor could have done what he claimed. It is the only way to transform a non-solvable problem into one that could conceivably be solved. I do not believe he has succeeded (I am not sure I believe the theory either), but I am convinced he does and that he believes he has. There is only one path he could have taken to reach such a belief. Ergo, that is the path he took.
It should be obvious to even the smallest child that if approach X is doomed to failure, that the professor did not follow approach X. He did something else. It should also be obvious that, with the plethora of Holographic Universe papers on arXiv, along with papers on reduced-dimension n-body problem papers, that reduced-dimension approaches to problems has gained traction. But you're too busy complaining about terms you know nothing of to actually look at what people are doing. Way too busy.
So stop posting gibberish, read for once in your life, and maybe - just maybe - you will grasp what others are saying before you start spewing. God, how I hate it when lazy, incompetent bastards start thinking they know everything.
You are confusing setting up a system of differential equations (which you can do) with the system being differentiable (which is quite another matter).
Your post largely restates what I stated, so as far as I am concerned, you are more concerned with being pompous than with comprehending what it is you are being pompous about. Wake me up when you grow enough of a pair to read as well as write.
Maths and philosophy are directly interchangeable. This is why camels are so confused.
I understand the Holographic Universe theory perfectly well. And nothing can excuse Princess Bride Memeology. Now gerroff my lawn!
Well, yes and no. There is no general solution to the n-body problem, where n is greater than 2. The nature of the system makes that inevitable. The system isn't differentiable and you can't actually perform infinitesimal steps.
What you can do is define bounds for certain special cases, where the solutions must exist within those bounds. The error on the bounds increases quite quickly, which is why space probes are forever making course corrections. Bounds do not exist in all cases, as three bodies is sufficient for the system to be chaotic (deterministic but not predictable), which means in those cases, you rely heavily on probability (meteorologists perform hundreds of thousands of simulations and see what general patterns have the highest probability of cropping up) and on very short timeframes (in snooker, you can make a reasonable guess as to what will happen one or two reflections ahead).
These are inescapable properties of multibody dynamics, because you can do bugger all with infinite multiway recursion. There is no way to simplify it... ...as it is.
What you CAN do is flatten the universe into a 2D holographic model. If there is no time, there is no place for recursion. That might yield something. Alternatively, with time dilation, you can make infinitesimal time arbitrarily large. Neither of these will yield an absolute answer, but could be expected to yield an answer that looked as though it was.
Russian was the International standard for publication of scientific discoveries in the late 1800s, early 1900s. Russian was fluently spoken as a second language in academia across Europe and America at that time. Einstein's early publications would have had Russian translations or might even have been written in Russian first. It was the lingua franca of science at that time. That matters, in that all the necessary terminology and shorthand developed in science in the last few hundred years will already exist in the language. It is fit for purpose.
So, no, there is nothing wrong with a paper in Russian. There won't be many American professors left who could read it, and for political reasons they would likely deny any such ability. Europeans are less extreme and more multicultural, but Russian has never been a particularly hot second language. Ok, more so than Old Icelandic, Akkadian or Finnish, but Babylon hasn't done much new maths in 5,000 years and Scandanavia only produces hot computer geeks, hot models and hot saunas.
Asimov's Lesser-Known Fourth Law: Individuals using market-speak or manager-speak no longer qualify as humans and are an immediate threat to all real intelligence. Deal with, as per third law.
Well, yes. I should hope so. Einstein did most of his best work imagining cows travelling near or at the speed of light. If relativity had to wait for NASA to modify a cow's digestive system to fuel a ramjet capable of near-light speeds, we would still be waiting. Not that it isn't fun to picture such a cow.
But, yeah, his thought experiments were definitely figurative descriptions, not mathematically precise models and it is not necessary for NASA to engineer a cow capable of making his figurative descriptions physically correct in all respects. Although it would make a change from firing pumpkins by catapult.
First, it's an analogy, not a model, so it doesn't need to be mathematically correct, it only has to be conceptually correct. I don't see the problem there. Conceptually, gravity bends the spacetime around the mass, such that objects moving through the distortion appear to an observer to travel along a path that is not straight (it is straight to the object) in space or in time. The rubber sheet is a perfectly good representation of this concept.
If you want it mathematically perfect, you have problems. First, we don't yet know for certain if you should treat a mass as a point source or one with volume. The ternary star system recently found will help there. Second, in order for something to change state, there must be a force. With springs or rubber, this is a restoring force of known value. It not only removes curvature where there is no mass, it prevents the mass stretching the material to infinity and beyond. The nuclear forces play a role in reproducing some of this. The object cannot collapse further than the point where gravity and the nuclear forces all balance out. But as far as I know, the nuclear forces do NOT prevent spacetime bending infinitely, nor remove the distortion when the mass moves elsewhere. This matters. You cannot produce a mathematically-correct simulation with a deformable surface if you don't know the precise rules governing the deformation and restoration.
Let us imagine, though, that we know Hooke's Constant for spacetime. Ok, you get a material (or invent one) with the same constant. Unfortunately, not quite that simple. Relativistic equations are non-linear. You'd need a material where the forces involved reversibly (important!) altered the material in such a way that at any given instant, Hooke's Constant was correct, but that this constant would be purely an instantaneous value.
Ok, that is doable, we've plenty of adaptable materials. Gives you a geometrically correct solution and therefore the right mathematical results. Messy, though.
Is there an alternative?
Well, yes. This is all about reproducing forces. There is absolutely no rule that says you can use only physical shapes to do this. There are plenty of other forces (eg: electromagnetism) which can substitute for one of the others. Have the "fixed" mass as an electromagnet to encapsulate all the details that exist in spacetime that don't readily transpose to a rubber sheet. Let the sheet model gravity alone. That is what it is supposed to do. The other variables are factored in, so the geometry is still correct, only this time by imposing values rather than letting them naturally be correct.
Problem solved. Nobel prize to the usual address, please.
...is to improve on the built-in error correction.
This is actually very, very hard. Some, but not all, "jumping genes" and relocated genes need to be able to move freely. But not to just anywhere - some places are good, some places will trigger genetic disease. And it's not possible to be 100% sure if those places are fixed or vary according to some other state of some other mechanism.
So cancers caused by gene relocation aren't preventable at this time.
Mutations within a gene are easier. There are no (currently) known mechanisms that modify genes on-the-fly. Metadata, yes. Controls for gene interpretation, yes. Gene coding, no. So you want error correction codes per gene, independent of location in the genome. This will stop transcription cancers.
But ECCs have to be controlled. You want to stop ordinary cells mutating, not cells relating to next generation stuff - you don't want to stop evolution, just keep it to where it should be.
This means certain transcription cancers will happen, but you'll have reduced most of them.
Killing rapid cancers is easy - they consume resources far faster than regular cells, so you want a poison that accumulates fast in cancers and slow elsewhere. We do that already, but the targeting is being worked on.
Slow cancers are difficult, you probably need cell repair.
Ok, so how to embed ECCs? There are vacuelles in cells that contain nothing but used to contain something. Obviously, you'd put the codes in one of those. Nanotech will do the rest when invented.
Thanks. I tried to pick a range of genres and then specific books within them that challenged the reader in one way or another. It's tough.
Rare materials. Well, rare reeds can be harder to find than gold, so let's put a $1000 raw materials price per ounce of reed used.
Time. Hand craftsmen are incredibly rare. Those skills are expensive. IT can charge $120/hr for skills twice as common. Using that as a guideline, let's say $240/hr for the skills.
If we assume it takes one year to make a flute, then the combined cost is roughly half a million per flute, so $6.5 million so far. I will assume QA would mean some flutes have to be made again from scratch. Let's assume a 50% rejection rate at the virtuoso level, which doesn't seem unreasonable given you're making the best of the best with uncontrolled materials. This raises the price to $9.75 million.
But provinence matters. These instruments had established history, the main reason a Strad is worth ten times anything with identical acoustics. We don't have enough history to bump the price up that much, but doubling sounds fair. This gives us $19.5 million.
I would start by taking the money out of the TSA official's paycheque and bank account, with the remainder seized from TSA funds. If the funds are insufficient, continue to the next department up.
I would further require the TSA to publish a public apology as a full-page announcement in every newspaper, artisan journal and music journal. Finally, I would require all TSA officials involved in any way with the harassment to serve 250 hours community service.
Weirdstone of Brisingamon//Moon of Gomrath
Neuromancer
The Sleeper Awakes
Darkness is Rising
Monkey (the abbreviated Journey to the West)
The Black Cloud
A For Andromeda
The Molecule Men
Eight Keys to Eden
Dusty Death
Spy who Came In from the Cold
633 Squadron
A manufacturer should always be 100% liable for the product they make, when used as intended under intended conditions. Warranty and fitness for purpose should not be waivable, ever. In software or hardware.
Ok, how would this work in software, since you can't prove something bug-free? You can't prove it bug-free in general, but you can prove certain cases bug-free. Also, just as imperfections happen when making anything, warranty doesn't imply 100% of theoretically valid circumstances are going to get the results you want. Equally, just as nobody expects an unmaintained car with no oil or fuel to run, nobody should reasonably expect open source to work without patches and necessary versions of support libraries.
One can also argue that open source is a prototyping system. You would expect a breadboard or an S Deck to work as expected, you would expect transistors and capacitors to do their stated tasks within the stated parameters. You do not expect the makers of any of these parts to provide added insurance against your flipflop circuit gaining intelligence and seizing control of the world. If you're a good enough inventor to build a flipflop with AI capabilities, YOU provide the insurance.
Same goes for all drones, robots, rovers and UAVs. The manufacturer should be 100% liable for what they make. Modders should be 100% liable for what they mod and all direct impacts.
(So if you turn a camera holder into a rocket launcher, you are responsible for the rocket launcher, issues due to the physical and electrical demands of that rocket launcher, etc, but the manufacturer is still responsible for any communications systems, flight control, etc, since these do not fundamentally change. It is the manufacturer who decides what to hard-code and what to measure, it is the manufacturer who decides on whether to add voltage regulators - since surges can happen under normal conditions, etc.)
Deaths caused - if it's a pre-mod design flaw, the manufacturer is responsible. Same as it would be if your car spontaneously exploded. If it's a post-mod design flaw, the modifier is responsible. If it is a design feature specifically used as such, the user is always responsible. (The qualifier is because guns are designed specifically to kill. If the gun blows up in your hands and kills you, when you don't pull the trigger, the manufacturer should not be able to argue the gun functioned as designed. If you try to kill someone and the gun kills you instead, the manufacturer should not automatically be liable, although they may be found such.)
The next stage in drone development is obvious. Operators suffer PTSD at the same rate as fighter pilots. Computers can be fooled, as Iran has demonstrated. Rat brains can already operate flight simulators. Ergo, rat brains will be installed in drones, after being trained to trigger specific responses that can be treated as fire commands when specific objects are seen. This is easier than programming a computer, and as rats are easy to produce without rare materials located in potentially hostile countries, cheaper and more reliable.
Won't there be objections? As if drone strikes aren't controversial! What do plebs matter to the military?
As for home inventors, there are already kits to control cockroach brains and games that read electrical impulses from humans. I can't imagine it will take long for someone to figure out how to use insect brains to control UAVs.
At the point where non-human nervous systems operate UAVs, is the inventor responsible for the free will decisions made by the other brain?
Using conventional lets-blame-someone logic, the answer is no. No matter what the training, no matter how small the other brain, it always had the opportunity to say no. No matter how xenophobic or genocidal it is, at the start or end, it always made the choice.
Using a scientific concept of cause-and-effect, which is a many-many web of weighted interactions, you're damn right you're responsible. Whether the daleks you have invented are under your control or not. You cannot escape your guilt by saying they did it.