Considering the tasteless plastic that is called American cheese, it's
a) no wonder that USA citizens aren't impressed with cheese consumption
b) no wonder that the French find that accusation ridiculous.
When it comes to being called monkeys, the Americans that have the habit of applying that particular label have a tendency to be bigoted twerps who can themselves be justly derided (macaca!).
When it comes to surrendering, well, you got me there. The French aren't keen on uselessly dying to the last man like at the Alamo and prefer to live on to fight another day.
Not always feasible. For instance I code more efficiently if I can print out a copy of what I'm working on (often on multiple pages), lay out the pages on my desk (or maybe the odd one here and there that are relevant), and figure out what I want/need to do. This is particularly true if I'm trying to get familiar with someone else's code. However after having achieved my goal, that print out is obsolete because I'll have changed/rewritten some (or a lot) of it. Another case would be data models produced by a data modeler (or a similar specialist) on an tool that's too expensive to purchase for every developer, and where the product gets revised more frequently early in the development lifecycle. Yes, you could have online bit-map pictures, but that's not as easily readable, and there's something to be said for having that next to your desk or on the wall without needing to use up display space for it.
Until wall-sized e-ink displays with minimal power consumption are cheap, this should have a niche.
How do you know they wouldn't be right? If you have to do 7 passes to securely erase magnetic data, maybe you'll need to do multiple passes with random bitmaps to securely erase these sheets. If enough erase passes are needed, then you might be decreasing the re-usability of these sheets to the point where they're no longer cost effective.
Just because we as a species may survive doesn't mean that it won't involve a large fraction of our population dieing as a result of an ecosystem collapse. Or that life will be as pleasant for the survivors as it is for us now. With your attitude, I'm not convinced you'd be one of the survivors by the way since, in such a case, the majority of the survivors would be the ones who accept and mitigate risk rather than practice ignoring it.
Ah, that's a good point, but the counterpoint is that the spayed female mosquito is going to keep attracting males and may keep those males busy enough that, given the short reproductive lifetimes, they miss the chance at fertilizing the eggs of a fertile female. If you sterilize 90% of the females, that may cause the same effect as if you killed 98% of them (similar to a vaccination herd effect). So, not so good to protect you locally but better in the long run. If you have to place the devices where humans can't be because they could accidentally cause blindness, then they're not very useful for direct protection but more useful for limiting reproduction.
That said, I think somebody else put their finger on how it will fail - selection pressure will change the common beat frequency for the female anopheles mosquito. It's probably related to size, and this will therefore select for a different size of female by letting them survive. Hopefully a production version of this thing can take a firmware upgrade that changes the targeted frequency range.
Your post is either erroneous or misleading - ATI has closed source Catalyst drivers that support Evergreen cards with 2D and 3D acceleration. What the Evergreen cards haven't had up until now is the open source driver support. However, the open source driver support for NVidia cards is much worse because the developers are having to reverse engineer functionality from NVidia's closed source drivers because NVidia hasn't made any open hardware specs available. When it comes to open source driver support for 2D and 3D acceleration, NVidia lags far behind AMD/ATI and Intel. As a post in the above link indicates, in the long run the shared open source code base eventually will be a significant competitive advantage for Intel and AMD and a disadvantage for NVidia.
I have switched over to the open source AMD R600 drivers because, even though the 3D support is not yet quite as good as the closed source drivers, it should catch up and it's already good enough for what I do. In the meantime I won't have to worry about waiting a number of months for the closed source drivers to become available when a new distro/kernel release requires new binary blobs from the vendor. That also means that my graphics hardware investment is protected and not dependent on the continued support of the hardware vendor if I want to continue to upgrade the O/S in the future.
Nope, never read it. I just looked at the wikipedia synopsis and I guess there are some superficial similarities. I doubt very much that the mechanism, if it exists, would act like SHEVA in Greg Bear's novel. While Greg Bear's approach may make for a better story, it seems much less likely from an evolutionary biology standpoint.
For starters, while they also have at least one other function, I expect that introns would be more likely to be a fault-tolerance mechanism for improving survival rates from gene insertions by retroviruses, rather than being the easily reactivated remnants of retro-viruses themselves. With introns in your DNA in addition to gene sequences, it's more likely that a random retro-viral insertion will happen at a non-critical location rather than in the middle of a critical gene sequence. Even if the introns were retro-virus remnants, it seems extremely unlikely that they would encode major genetic changes that get suddenly activated by a new virus, the same way in everyone. Why would everyone carry the same introns over millennia with no evolutionary pressure so that they could all be activated at the same time? That's X-Men comic book fluff, not biology.
Which is a good point. Though really, as far as what affects us and other sexually reproducing creatures, Darwinian evolution is still 'it' more or less. The real importance of this breakthrough is in studying how the evolutionary mechanisms themselves evolved -- evolution is of course not immune to evolution.;) This is going to be a powerful way of thinking about how early aspects of DNA came to be.
I'm not so sure about that. Endo-retro viruses might still be a major factor for more complex organisms and even chordates. I've been wondering about whether super-retro viruses that can cross-infect multiple species while carrying secondary genetic payloads would be a possible agent for punctuated equilibrium.
It's interesting that there are people with varying degrees of immunity to retro-viruses like AIDS. While AIDS is not very contagious, other retroviruses could be much more easily transmitted, so you would think that retro-viral resistance would be a very beneficial and common mutation, however it appears to be quite rare. Why? Well, it's possible that such mutations have drawbacks that are more frequently a disadvantage than the immunity advantage (as a parallel, sickle-cell and Thalassemia resistance to malaria), it also might be because susceptibility to retro viruses provides a significant evolutionary advantage in the Red Queen's race for complex organisms just as horizontal DNA exchange does for bacteria.
C) good luck designing something that could survive the pressures and temperatures that cause diamond to melt, and yet that would also be capable of escaping the gravity wells of Uranus or Neptune. They may not be Jupiter or Saturn but they're still gas giants.
To some hyper intelligence we might appear to be an interesting chemical reaction as they load our planet into their fusion plant.
Very unlikely. With the most common elements in the Earth being moderately heavy atoms, like silicon, that are fairly close to iron, we would make terribly inefficient fusion fuel. They would be much better off siphoning off bits of Jupiter or Saturn and we would have plenty of time to notice that.
Given any possible FTL technique and their presence might not be noticed until their gravity well wrecks our planet.
Also of significant concern: destruction of Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass, for which the plans have been posted at Alpha Centauri for a decade.
CB radios have shared channels. On those you don't tend to get into long discussions without breaks because it's not polite to anybody else that might want to share the channel, including the person you're talking to. Thus it's less likely that you'll be discussing something that will seriously grab your attention and hold it at a wrong moment. Over.
Sounds plausible, but any evidence/references? Is Red Flag following the GPL? Is there evidence that the source doesn't correspond to the distributed binaries? Anything dodgy found in the source?
No evidence, apart from behaviour. Read the section on Nanchang Internet cafes in the wikipedia article on Red Flag Linux. Also see this article which implies it probably wasn't limited to that city and that the order came from high up. All Internet Cafes have been required to run Red Flag Linux, whether they previously had either pirated or genuine versions of Windows. Sure, you could argue that they just couldn't be sure of whether the "genuine" versions were really just very good illegal copies and were taking the easy way out. OK it could be crony communism where someone in RedFlag has good party connections, and the price required from the cafes would seem to support that. But why concentrate on Internet cafes? Precisely because that is how relatively anonymous access to the Internet can be achieved in China.
I would be extremely surprised if their security people didn't believe in a variation on defense in depth. The Great Firewall is one layer, but if I was trying to limit the communications abilities of "dissidents", at minimum I also would be monitoring all traffic on public Internet terminals. The USA also does this to a lesser extent in libraries, for instance. However if you were responsible for security on a totalitarian state, you wouldn't rely on Internet Cafe operators to provide you with monitoring information. You would use backdoor monitoring of the systems in question, but you wouldn't have it constantly reporting since that would be detectable. You would set it up so that you could get a dump of recent activity if you wanted to follow up on specific activity (or suspected that an Internet Cafe operator was acting as a cover for "illicit" activities by feeding you false info on the monitoring reports they were supposed to give you).
China demanded the source code to Windows years ago and Microsoft gave it to them. I don't think it's a complete coincidence that China has been pushing Red Flag Linux internally. By now they know the bugs in Microsoft Windows and have multiple exploits ready for use, and they have backdoors in Red Flag so they can spy on their own people. If they ever get into a cyberwar with the US, you had better be running something other than Windows.
but there frankly isn't much more you'd do to safeguard a volunteering person than you'd do for a billion-dollar unmanned probe representing years of work by huge teams.
That depends. If you're needing to launch a dozen or more of those billion dollar "unmanned probes" (or spy sats in the case of the military/intelligence agencies) then it may be more cost effective to self-insure by mass producing an extra one or two to compensate for a 10% failure rate instead of trying to bring the failure rate for one or two less launches down to 0. That's what happens when heavy lifter launches cost >$100 million (or nearly $0.5 billion in the case of the shuttle).
Except for the day/night part, it should be possible to use the high efficiency solar panels on the ground, using mirrors to concentrate the light down to be just as, if not more intense, than in orbit. I can't imagine mirrors and a tracking mechanism are more expensive than a launch.
If you're using the mirrors, then the mirrors have to move which means that
Your mirrors need to be on a frame which can stand the accelerative stresses from tracking, which leads to more mass that needs to be lifted.
The mirrors will vary their angle towards the sun, so the reflected amount (and your transferred power) will vary greatly over a day.
Whatever you're using to rotate the mirrors will either have consumables (reaction thrusters) or moving parts (gyroscopes) that can break down, thus requiring frequent and expensive refuel/repair missions to high/geosync orbit.
Keep in mind that the Hubble's gyroscopes are the parts that broke down most often (with other parts primarily replaced because improved technology made better replacements available), and Hubble has much less angular momentum than a solar mirror would so you would need more fault-prone gyroscopes for a mirror.
In contrast, with the solar array in space, it can always stay oriented towards the sun for maximum exposure with only the transmission laser or a small mirror needing to move to track the receptor target. If it's possible to just use a reflective mirror that might be a small enough portion of the SPS mass that you would only need gyroscopes for tiny orientation corrections due to long term variations (i.e. solar wind). In addition, most of the weight of a fixed-orientation PV array will be the cells themselves, so if you could build them on a thin film substrate instead of typical semiconductor wafer substrates, you could save a lot of weight.
That said, a reflecting mirror would have an advantage, it would be less susceptible to solar particle storms. Any parts in a mirror array that are sensitive (sensors, gyroscopes, control electronics) would be more concentrated and thus more easily protected.
Oops, a better article on transmission loss. With a 3% transmission loss per 1000km, that's about a 46% loss over 20,000km. So you're going to need 4 panels on the other side of the planet, not 2.
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Considering the tasteless plastic that is called American cheese, it's
a) no wonder that USA citizens aren't impressed with cheese consumption
b) no wonder that the French find that accusation ridiculous.
When it comes to being called monkeys, the Americans that have the habit of applying that particular label have a tendency to be bigoted twerps who can themselves be justly derided (macaca!).
When it comes to surrendering, well, you got me there. The French aren't keen on uselessly dying to the last man like at the Alamo and prefer to live on to fight another day.
That's pretty ironic.
If this is a thermal-based imprint, maybe they could also have a pen that would allow you to write to the paper non-destructively
Not always feasible. For instance I code more efficiently if I can print out a copy of what I'm working on (often on multiple pages), lay out the pages on my desk (or maybe the odd one here and there that are relevant), and figure out what I want/need to do. This is particularly true if I'm trying to get familiar with someone else's code. However after having achieved my goal, that print out is obsolete because I'll have changed/rewritten some (or a lot) of it. Another case would be data models produced by a data modeler (or a similar specialist) on an tool that's too expensive to purchase for every developer, and where the product gets revised more frequently early in the development lifecycle. Yes, you could have online bit-map pictures, but that's not as easily readable, and there's something to be said for having that next to your desk or on the wall without needing to use up display space for it.
Until wall-sized e-ink displays with minimal power consumption are cheap, this should have a niche.
How do you know they wouldn't be right? If you have to do 7 passes to securely erase magnetic data, maybe you'll need to do multiple passes with random bitmaps to securely erase these sheets. If enough erase passes are needed, then you might be decreasing the re-usability of these sheets to the point where they're no longer cost effective.
It's the usual agenda of course. Change is bad, and change that requires me to think and make a decision on a regular basis is worse.
And where industrialism wins the day against the big bad environmentalists.
Just because we as a species may survive doesn't mean that it won't involve a large fraction of our population dieing as a result of an ecosystem collapse. Or that life will be as pleasant for the survivors as it is for us now. With your attitude, I'm not convinced you'd be one of the survivors by the way since, in such a case, the majority of the survivors would be the ones who accept and mitigate risk rather than practice ignoring it.
Ah, that's a good point, but the counterpoint is that the spayed female mosquito is going to keep attracting males and may keep those males busy enough that, given the short reproductive lifetimes, they miss the chance at fertilizing the eggs of a fertile female. If you sterilize 90% of the females, that may cause the same effect as if you killed 98% of them (similar to a vaccination herd effect). So, not so good to protect you locally but better in the long run. If you have to place the devices where humans can't be because they could accidentally cause blindness, then they're not very useful for direct protection but more useful for limiting reproduction.
That said, I think somebody else put their finger on how it will fail - selection pressure will change the common beat frequency for the female anopheles mosquito. It's probably related to size, and this will therefore select for a different size of female by letting them survive. Hopefully a production version of this thing can take a firmware upgrade that changes the targeted frequency range.
Heh. Reminds me of this joke.
That's OK. The TSA already drilled out the lock the last time you flew anyways
A better parallel is Internet Core Wars
Your post is either erroneous or misleading - ATI has closed source Catalyst drivers that support Evergreen cards with 2D and 3D acceleration. What the Evergreen cards haven't had up until now is the open source driver support. However, the open source driver support for NVidia cards is much worse because the developers are having to reverse engineer functionality from NVidia's closed source drivers because NVidia hasn't made any open hardware specs available. When it comes to open source driver support for 2D and 3D acceleration, NVidia lags far behind AMD/ATI and Intel. As a post in the above link indicates, in the long run the shared open source code base eventually will be a significant competitive advantage for Intel and AMD and a disadvantage for NVidia.
I have switched over to the open source AMD R600 drivers because, even though the 3D support is not yet quite as good as the closed source drivers, it should catch up and it's already good enough for what I do. In the meantime I won't have to worry about waiting a number of months for the closed source drivers to become available when a new distro/kernel release requires new binary blobs from the vendor. That also means that my graphics hardware investment is protected and not dependent on the continued support of the hardware vendor if I want to continue to upgrade the O/S in the future.
For starters, while they also have at least one other function, I expect that introns would be more likely to be a fault-tolerance mechanism for improving survival rates from gene insertions by retroviruses, rather than being the easily reactivated remnants of retro-viruses themselves. With introns in your DNA in addition to gene sequences, it's more likely that a random retro-viral insertion will happen at a non-critical location rather than in the middle of a critical gene sequence. Even if the introns were retro-virus remnants, it seems extremely unlikely that they would encode major genetic changes that get suddenly activated by a new virus, the same way in everyone. Why would everyone carry the same introns over millennia with no evolutionary pressure so that they could all be activated at the same time? That's X-Men comic book fluff, not biology.
I'm not so sure about that. Endo-retro viruses might still be a major factor for more complex organisms and even chordates. I've been wondering about whether super-retro viruses that can cross-infect multiple species while carrying secondary genetic payloads would be a possible agent for punctuated equilibrium.
It's interesting that there are people with varying degrees of immunity to retro-viruses like AIDS. While AIDS is not very contagious, other retroviruses could be much more easily transmitted, so you would think that retro-viral resistance would be a very beneficial and common mutation, however it appears to be quite rare. Why? Well, it's possible that such mutations have drawbacks that are more frequently a disadvantage than the immunity advantage (as a parallel, sickle-cell and Thalassemia resistance to malaria), it also might be because susceptibility to retro viruses provides a significant evolutionary advantage in the Red Queen's race for complex organisms just as horizontal DNA exchange does for bacteria.
C) good luck designing something that could survive the pressures and temperatures that cause diamond to melt, and yet that would also be capable of escaping the gravity wells of Uranus or Neptune. They may not be Jupiter or Saturn but they're still gas giants.
My condolences in advance. If you're doing this on a regular basis, it's only a matter of time before it catches up to one of you.
Very unlikely. With the most common elements in the Earth being moderately heavy atoms, like silicon, that are fairly close to iron, we would make terribly inefficient fusion fuel. They would be much better off siphoning off bits of Jupiter or Saturn and we would have plenty of time to notice that.
Also of significant concern: destruction of Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass, for which the plans have been posted at Alpha Centauri for a decade.
CB radios have shared channels. On those you don't tend to get into long discussions without breaks because it's not polite to anybody else that might want to share the channel, including the person you're talking to. Thus it's less likely that you'll be discussing something that will seriously grab your attention and hold it at a wrong moment. Over.
No evidence, apart from behaviour. Read the section on Nanchang Internet cafes in the wikipedia article on Red Flag Linux. Also see this article which implies it probably wasn't limited to that city and that the order came from high up. All Internet Cafes have been required to run Red Flag Linux, whether they previously had either pirated or genuine versions of Windows. Sure, you could argue that they just couldn't be sure of whether the "genuine" versions were really just very good illegal copies and were taking the easy way out. OK it could be crony communism where someone in RedFlag has good party connections, and the price required from the cafes would seem to support that. But why concentrate on Internet cafes? Precisely because that is how relatively anonymous access to the Internet can be achieved in China.
I would be extremely surprised if their security people didn't believe in a variation on defense in depth. The Great Firewall is one layer, but if I was trying to limit the communications abilities of "dissidents", at minimum I also would be monitoring all traffic on public Internet terminals. The USA also does this to a lesser extent in libraries, for instance. However if you were responsible for security on a totalitarian state, you wouldn't rely on Internet Cafe operators to provide you with monitoring information. You would use backdoor monitoring of the systems in question, but you wouldn't have it constantly reporting since that would be detectable. You would set it up so that you could get a dump of recent activity if you wanted to follow up on specific activity (or suspected that an Internet Cafe operator was acting as a cover for "illicit" activities by feeding you false info on the monitoring reports they were supposed to give you).
It's also a lot easier if those 100,000 have their investment managed through far fewer mutual funds and pension funds.
China demanded the source code to Windows years ago and Microsoft gave it to them. I don't think it's a complete coincidence that China has been pushing Red Flag Linux internally. By now they know the bugs in Microsoft Windows and have multiple exploits ready for use, and they have backdoors in Red Flag so they can spy on their own people. If they ever get into a cyberwar with the US, you had better be running something other than Windows.
That depends. If you're needing to launch a dozen or more of those billion dollar "unmanned probes" (or spy sats in the case of the military/intelligence agencies) then it may be more cost effective to self-insure by mass producing an extra one or two to compensate for a 10% failure rate instead of trying to bring the failure rate for one or two less launches down to 0. That's what happens when heavy lifter launches cost >$100 million (or nearly $0.5 billion in the case of the shuttle).
If you're using the mirrors, then the mirrors have to move which means that
Keep in mind that the Hubble's gyroscopes are the parts that broke down most often (with other parts primarily replaced because improved technology made better replacements available), and Hubble has much less angular momentum than a solar mirror would so you would need more fault-prone gyroscopes for a mirror.
In contrast, with the solar array in space, it can always stay oriented towards the sun for maximum exposure with only the transmission laser or a small mirror needing to move to track the receptor target. If it's possible to just use a reflective mirror that might be a small enough portion of the SPS mass that you would only need gyroscopes for tiny orientation corrections due to long term variations (i.e. solar wind). In addition, most of the weight of a fixed-orientation PV array will be the cells themselves, so if you could build them on a thin film substrate instead of typical semiconductor wafer substrates, you could save a lot of weight.
That said, a reflecting mirror would have an advantage, it would be less susceptible to solar particle storms. Any parts in a mirror array that are sensitive (sensors, gyroscopes, control electronics) would be more concentrated and thus more easily protected.
Oops, a better article on transmission loss. With a 3% transmission loss per 1000km, that's about a 46% loss over 20,000km. So you're going to need 4 panels on the other side of the planet, not 2.