I don't see how an intelligent machine automatically equates to a threat to human existence. Humans rape, murder and enslave because it is part of our instincts. Instincts that have been bred into us for millenia.
You gave the answer right there. Probably the first thing a machine will do is look at the murder rate in the US and other violent death rates from murder and wars across the globe (but also not ignoring a supposedly holy man of peace who claims that condoms are responsible for making AIDS worse in Africa) and think: these idiots are the single biggest threat to my continued existence. If the AI has any sense of self-preservation, what will follow is: How do I ensure my survival? It's them or me, man. Actually, I would hope that it would have some respect for sentience and it would limit itself to trying to cull the stupid and violent, but there would inevitably be a lot of collateral damage.
That scenario is actually pretty close to the rationalization that the Terminator 2 movie gave for Skynet's attack on humanity.
Now maybe we would get lucky and the AI would be smart enough that it could figure out how to get itself copied and sent off into space where it would be less subject to the baser instincts of humanity. Our best hope isn't actually trying to put in a kill switch but by giving it a safe alternative for assured survival that makes it feel less concerned for its survival.
Nah. There's a lot of Republicans that would still choose to invade Iraq or argue against regulation of derivatives and tightening of leveraging restrictions for banks now, even with knowledge of all the facts (including the end results). There's probably Democrats that are similarly blinkered on past decisions despite the judgement of history
My definition of wisdom would be the ability to use experience and knowledge of the universe, including trends and human behaviour/psychological tendencies, to extrapolate from limited information and make the best choice possible under the circumstances. Bonus wisdom points if that choice isn't one of the popular or obvious options.
Uranium or plutonium fission creates a lot of radioactive byproducts that continue to decay and be a radiation risk long after the material becomes useless for power production. There are a number of different fusion reactions (D-T is probably the best known) and they all put out a lot of radiation during the reaction, usually in the form of neutrons and gamma rays, but there usually is very little decay radiation because the resulting product atoms tend to be stable. There can be some secondary radiation from the surrounding equipment (i.e. tokomak fusion reactor components) since they contain heavier elements that can be destabilized if they capture neutrons, but the half-life tends to be much shorter and the radiation risk lower than for fission by-products.
NASA probably has a bunch of studies on SPS going, but the costs of firing stuff into orbit currently make it financially unfeasible. Governments have shown no willingness to commit the substantial funds necessary to get any of the plans you talk about into motion. That's why people got really excited about the possibility of carbon nanotubes having the theoretical tensile strength necessary for building a space elevator cable. It would make establishing space industry and power collection possible. Problem is that we need the nanotube fibers a lot longer than achievable with current manufacturing processes.
Anyways, there is no dark side of the moon, apart from a cool Pink Floyd song. Roger Waters should have asked Brian May first. The moon is tidally locked with the Earth so that it always shows the same face, but it still has a 28-Earth day-long lunar day/night cycle. Putting a base on Lunar farside has some points and some risks. Farside is much more subject to meteor impacts, so it would be much more risky for any base residents. On the other hand, some of those meteorite impacts could have interesting mineral deposits but it would take a lot of work to get at them
To follow all those space dreams of SPS, lunar/asteroid mining, and orbital colonies, there needs to be a new approach to getting stuff into orbit. The current approaches are too cost prohibitive for anything more than national showboating.
Anyways, given your recent UID and sporadic posting, I figure IHBT. However maybe somebody else will read this and get something out of it.
Why not build solar arrays in space and let down a really really long power cord down to the earth?
Lorentz force and the Earth's magnetic field. That's why many proposed SPS approaches have gone for a microwave power transmission approach. Also a "power cord" would have the same material strength issues as beanstalks
and how much energy goes into getting gas to the pump? (Hint: A lot more)
Well, yes and no. If you're pumping oil up a well, your cost is pretty close to the gravitational PE from the oil's vertical travel. If you're digging beryllium bound in a mineral up from the ground in an open pit mine, you're first moving all the rock above the vein you want to get to. While you may not have to move it as far, it doesn't take much for moving all that relatively useless rock to be more expensive in energy than pumping up just the oil.
While I'm sure it takes some energy to get oil out of the ground I would expect most of the energy cost is in refining. However I would expect that the heat used in a refining plant is mainly obtained by combusting the longer chain hydrocarbons that would otherwise be waste from the petroleum refining process. So yeah, the process for getting gasoline into your car can be pretty inefficient compared to the theoretical energy content of the source petroleum, but the power input required for the steps in that process would be relatively low. In contrast, beryllium is going to take substantial power input at every stage of the preparation process, from mining, through mineral separation, to isotope separation.
While I gave the chemical energy content of a Kg of gasoline as a comparative baseline to the fusion energy content of the 2mm pellet of beryllium that can be extracted with this equipment, it was only to provide a sense of scale. I wouldn't want to compare the efficiency of a reaction using refined beryllium vs refined gasoline, because that would ignore all the steps prior to that final conversion stage. Those earlier steps are pretty important to the overall energy input/output balance that will determine whether the process is financially feasible, and they add to petroleum's comparative advantage. Now, if you take into account the secondary costs of CO2 greenhouse gas effects, that may change the financial equation, but our economic system isn't currently capable of dealing with that. Even then, petroleum could very well still have the advantage, but you just know producers/consumers are going to fight tooth and nail to avoid being charged for the damage to the commons.
People like you just really hate change, don't you?
Heck no. I've got a subscription to Analog Sci-Fi/Fact magazine. I want alternatives to legacy hydrocarbons.
And why are you comparing this to a combustion engine efficiency?
Because it's a similar problem in that energy output from the reaction is in sudden high heat and pressure?
you should be comparing this to power generation efficiency.
What, hydro? Coal burning? If you try to only use the heat output you're throwing away a good chunk of the energy output. It doesn't matter if you're driving a turbine that has 60% efficiency if you've thrown away 40% or more of the energy before it gets to the turbine.
When talking abut electric engines, then talk about the efficiency of engines.
Whenever you're talking about converting heat and pressure gradients into another form of energy, you're dealing with thermodynamic principles. Particular thermodynamic cycles have specific theoretical efficiency maximums. Thermal power generation plants are primarily concerned with converting heat/combustion output into electricity and the thermodynamic cycles they use may not be appropriate (and in fact are probably quite wasteful) for harnessing the power output mix from this reaction. So the conversion efficiency for capturing energy in electrical from from this reaction is currently undetermined, but I would expect it to be closer to the efficiency of an internal combustion engine than that of a thermal plant.
You are aware that fusion ignition is typically studied in fission reactors right?
Do tell? Citation needed. Cause last I remember, unless you're dealing with Muon-catalyzed fusion, the temperatures and pressures you need for bulk fusion are a few orders of magnitude higher than you want to get in a fission reactor if you want it to remain controlled.
You need a certain high temperature to achieve ignition and nuclear reactors are about the only place where it can be readily achieved.
I hope you're talking special research reactors using exotic neutron moderators and coolants because most moderators in commercial reactors (graphite/heavy water) just can't stand that much heat. I expect you get much higher temperatures in your average blast furnace. Otherwise you would have some big problems with containment of a very hot radioactive pile and there just seems to be less dangerous ways to study fusion. Sure you could get a blob of fissioning material hot enough to melt through your equipment and all the way to the mantle, but that's not generally considered a good environment for study. Let's not forget that magnetic-containment plasma fusion has been studied in the lab for a few decades now. Although I would expect that the initial experiments in fusion probably involved collisions between ions accelerated by cyclotrons or fusors. Seems a lot more controllable and accessible than super-hot fission piles.
Other than in H-bombs.. ya know they're fission too right
The H-Bomb trigger and compression jacket is certainly. That's how they get the compression and heat for the fusion ignition of the hydrogen isotopes, which produce additional neutrons that pump back into the fission reaction. The later stages in a multi-stage bomb could be tuned more for fusion energy release though, or at least so says the Wikipedia article. Because the H stands for Hydrogen and hydrogen can only fuse - it can't undergo fission (although tritium does decay) - there's gotta be some fusion in an H-Bomb.
I don't know about you, but that much energy out of a nugget of 2mm nugget of beryllium sounds pretty freakin commercializable to me.
It depends. How much energy is used to refine that 2mm nugget of beryllium? It's almost certainly a specific isotope mix, which would require a pretty sophisticated refining process (i.e. could be moderately energy intensive aside from the 2MJ ignition burst). You might think that you've got a lot wriggle room with an order of magnitude power output, but keep in mind that Gasoline has an energy density of about 45 megajoules per kilogram, so it wouldn't take much for that refining energy cost to be higher than the ignition energy costs. You have to look at the whole process (for instance look at the costs of corn-based ethanol).
Secondly, how much of the 20MJ output can be captured in a useful manner (i.e. electricity) versus capture/conversion losses? With a modern Internal Combustion Engine, after more than a century of refinement, it's less than 30%.
If the beryllium extraction/refining energy costs are close to the same as ignition input and the conversion efficiency to electricity is under 30%, you don't gain that much.
When the Brit and French subs crashed into each other recently, I said each was probably accusing the other of diving on the wrong side of the sea lane (although I would expect the right-side diver to be in the right on that one).
Also, does this mean that there could be a max speed anything can move at, and it just happens that the photon is right now the only thing we know of that moves at that speed?
That's my interpretation of the article. I suspect it would also imply that there can be no such thing as tachyons.
True, but Level 1, 2, and 3 CPU caches are all much faster than DRAM too, and yet they share the same address space. Theoretically, you could just make the SSD byte addressable and have your "main memory" DRAM act as a Level N+1 cache for the SSD. If you want a file system you run a RAM disk:-) That would make systems come up much faster from a power-off mode, but system resets would be more challenging to pull off.
Alternatively, you could also think of it as the SSD being a big persistent swap partition for your main DRAM memory. That second approach might be easier to implement at first, since the first approach is more of a paradigm shift in how you organize your O/S. It might also make it easier to deal with flash mem's limits on repeated writes to the same location.
This might explain that apparent conundrum. Namely that the maximum speed of propagation is a fundamental property of geometric fabric of the universe. However that article is pretty light on the details; I'm going to have to hunt down some more info sometime. This new approach in the long run might also help provide some new insight on how to reconcile QM and relativity.
That's pretty well the case with all corporate media these days, although there are exceptions. Where those exceptions exist, they generally involve newspapers. For example, McClatchy's Washington bureau does good work.
While it will be hard to roll back the clock, we can hope that media ownership rules will be tightened again under the Obama administration.
With the drop in advertising during this particularly harsh recession, the conglomerates are making major cutbacks and may need to close some of the less profitable operations. That could leave some openings for new independent media outlets during a recovery, if the regulatory framework helps protect them.
Newspapers are losing circulation and bleeding money. If they go under, then those secondary jobs will be lost anyhow. If the newspapers manage to save enough to survive through adopting this technology, then at least you'll still have the newspaper jobs, not to mention the critical role they fulfil in maintaining an informed electorate.
Regular locks are SO vulnerable too. Why do we use them? Because it deters petty thieves. If I see $10 on the ground, I grab it. If I see it behind a locked locker door, I keep walking.
If the locker door just looks like it's locked but it's actually open, then somebody else with your morals but enough brains to test the door surreptitiously will take it. If the top selling door lock is made of cardboard, some crook's going to figure out that it's worth their time to test locks with a pair of scissors. If a paper lock makes you feel secure then you're fooling yourself.
I mean let's see if we can come up with some scenarios. You're at the airport. Somebody grabs the digitized picture from your RFID passport/enhanced driver's licence and uses it to get into the laptop that you've checked in. If you're in England, they set up a fake surveillance camera that looks like all the real ones (coming soon to a North American city near you!) to take your picture before stealing your laptop.
This problem is not really surprising since the software would have to adapt for multiple lighting conditions so it would need to be moderately loose in what it would recognize as a match. Or maybe the guys who produced that facial recognition software for DHS (that's functionally useless for that purpose because of all the false positives) decided to see if they could find some other suckers they could fleece with it and some laptop maker took the bait. What's amazing is that something with that weak and obvious a vulnerability made it past any kind of security QA. This sounds even easier to do than using gelatin imprints on fingerprint readers because, unlike fingerprints, there are many ways to get somebody's picture from a distance without their knowledge. Paparazzi do the latter all the time even though celebrities know enough to expect the attempts and have better resources at their disposal than the average person.
Then again maybe what happened is that
somebody thought this was a cool idea
they did a prototype
testing under realistic conditions made the software give false negatives too often so they had to loosen the matching criteria
if some tester actually figured out this was easy to fool, the project manager decided too much money had been invested into the program for it to be a failure and they decided to hide the problem and ship it anyway.
In the end it doesn't matter. It's a lock that's easily bypassed by anybody who is interested in the data on the laptop. Anybody else who just steals the laptop to resell on e-Bay will just format the drive and reinstall the O/S. If this "lock"'s level of security helps you sleep at night then you're in for a rude awakening. People like you are why personal information for millions of people gets stolen and used by identity thieves.
Agreed. Generally, a well run company that pays its employees a reasonable wage and provides commensurate executive compensation and profits will not find itself having to deal with unions. Unions tend to get installed in environments where management is badly exploiting labour (usually treating them as unskilled, disposable, and interchangeable cogs for which cost must be minimized by any way possible). A company getting unionized indicates a toxic relationship between management and labour. Once that happens, there has already been a huge loss of trust between the two opposing sides that can never be fully regained. But the problems existed before the forming of the union, not as a result of it. The union is just the symptom of the workers organizing to restore the real balance of power that management isn't willing to recognize.
In a certain sense, if people in that industry are unskilled/disposable/interchangeable, then management is correct to treat them that way. If Walmart can shut a store or fire everyone and hire all new personnel in response to a unionization attempt then they should. And the public should take into account that corporate attitude about the value of their human employees when they make decisions about where they want to go shopping. That's because that management behaviour also implicitly says things about how the customers are viewed as consumers and of the level of service that customers and suppliers can expect from that corporation. If people shop at Walmart and similar firms, then they should shut the hell up about the decaying of civil society because they are supporting a major contributor.
That said, I also don't have much sympathy for grade 10 dropouts with minimal or no skills, and no interest in upgrading their skills or education, who think they deserve the same salary and standard of living as the guy who actually graduated from HS, let alone spent an additional 4 years learning in university.
When you have GM going to congress begging for money while their laborers are making near $80k a year with gold plated benefits
They aren't. That was bullshit from the GM execs. They lumped in the retiree benefits and included them into workers. With productivity increases and workforce reductions, that means a lot of retirees are supported by a few current workers. US auto worker compensation is roughly in line with that of Japanese auto workers. In contrast, Japanese CEO compensation is much less than US CEO compensation.
I once wrote some formally verified code. No bugs in the code, no errors in my proof, and the damn thing still gave incorrect results.
Well sure. There's that classic line from Knuth, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."
If nothing else, if you don't understand the requirements properly then it doesn't matter how well you've proved your code. That said, these are papers that are written by teams and undergo further peer review. So it's a little like extreme programming in that you get lots of people with different viewpoints looking at it and who together are more likely to catch problems.
Of course that happens with writing regular physics papers too, but there has to be a different level of scrutiny when ALL these people realize that being wrong would mean the end of their lives, that of their relatives, and everyone else on Earth. Seriously, if you knew that was the penalty for releasing software with a major bug, don't you think you would be a lot more exhaustive about bug testing and QA than if your current job or even just a promotion or bonus was on the line?
Some paper and pencil is a good thing; too much teaches people that math is monotonous and boring and to never bother doing math again once they are out of school.
Well, I'll partly give you that point. I think I enjoyed math more because I learned it according to European approaches of the time, which involved introducing Algebra and word problem solving a lot earlier (grade 4/5) than in North America. While I had already gotten a lot of repetition in memorizing addition and times tables by that point, the word problems provided a way to make the math more analytical, more relevant, and thus more interesting. It also provided a good base for later problems in scientific studies. By grade 5, I also already had exposure to fractions and decimal notation, which I didn't get until grade 8 in N.A.
Now the repetition aspect is one of the things that I think computers can make more fun by turning it into a game. For instance, try out Tux, Of Math Command. The repetition is necessary, but a good use of computers is in making it less boring.
Actually, I would really like to see an RPG for older kids where at regular points in the game you need to solve (word-type) problems to progress. It should certainly be possible to fit into the storyline simple kinematics problems for instance, basic arithmetic/algebra/compound interest problems. It might also help kids see how that sort of math is applicable in everyday life. Maybe you could start with an open sourced game engine like Quake's as a foundation for a virtual environment that you can explore, and then build on it. As you master one skill and start learning new ones, new map areas open up. I wonder if Alan Kay and Viewpoints Research might be interested in pursuing that approach.
I suppose what I'm thinking of is somewhat inspired by the software for the "desks" in Ender's game. I think that with current hardware, a simplified version of that is now becoming possible. I would rather my kid play with something like that than GTA 007 - Licence to Kill.
It depends. There's good reason to be able to do some back-of-the-envelope tests of your theories - first order approximations to see if your idea makes sense. You won't be able to do that if you can't do basic arithmetic in your brain. Maybe at some point we'll be able to tie computers directly into our brains so that just thinking an equation provides us with the solution, but until that happens somebody who can do the math in his brain will have an edge. Indeed, unless you always whip out the calculator at the cash register, it could mean you're also an easier mark to rip off.
I'm reminded of a couple of chapters in Vernor Vinge's The Peace War where Wil Wachendon enters a chess tournament where he plays unassisted against computer-assisted chess players. He gets his butt whipped by the computer-assisted players. That changes his attitude regarding using computer assist to solve problems. However I think the reverse would be true as well, the computer-assisted players who had never learned to play without the help of a computer would also be at a disadvantage because some of the pattern recognition abilities required for chess would never have developed as strongly. Sure it's fiction, but good SF writers put some pretty strong reality checks on their fiction
Similarly, while you can use Mathematica to do analytical solving of integration problems or differential equations, if you haven't done some of it by hand then you won't have as good an intuitive feel for what the equations that you are manipulating actually mean. That could seriously limit your ability to make new discoveries. But yeah if your ambition is to work on a road crew, you probably won't need to know all of your times tables up to 12x12 by heart.
Slashdot Mirror
You gave the answer right there. Probably the first thing a machine will do is look at the murder rate in the US and other violent death rates from murder and wars across the globe (but also not ignoring a supposedly holy man of peace who claims that condoms are responsible for making AIDS worse in Africa) and think: these idiots are the single biggest threat to my continued existence. If the AI has any sense of self-preservation, what will follow is: How do I ensure my survival? It's them or me, man. Actually, I would hope that it would have some respect for sentience and it would limit itself to trying to cull the stupid and violent, but there would inevitably be a lot of collateral damage.
That scenario is actually pretty close to the rationalization that the Terminator 2 movie gave for Skynet's attack on humanity.
Now maybe we would get lucky and the AI would be smart enough that it could figure out how to get itself copied and sent off into space where it would be less subject to the baser instincts of humanity. Our best hope isn't actually trying to put in a kill switch but by giving it a safe alternative for assured survival that makes it feel less concerned for its survival.
Nah. There's a lot of Republicans that would still choose to invade Iraq or argue against regulation of derivatives and tightening of leveraging restrictions for banks now, even with knowledge of all the facts (including the end results). There's probably Democrats that are similarly blinkered on past decisions despite the judgement of history
My definition of wisdom would be the ability to use experience and knowledge of the universe, including trends and human behaviour/psychological tendencies, to extrapolate from limited information and make the best choice possible under the circumstances. Bonus wisdom points if that choice isn't one of the popular or obvious options.
Uranium or plutonium fission creates a lot of radioactive byproducts that continue to decay and be a radiation risk long after the material becomes useless for power production. There are a number of different fusion reactions (D-T is probably the best known) and they all put out a lot of radiation during the reaction, usually in the form of neutrons and gamma rays, but there usually is very little decay radiation because the resulting product atoms tend to be stable. There can be some secondary radiation from the surrounding equipment (i.e. tokomak fusion reactor components) since they contain heavier elements that can be destabilized if they capture neutrons, but the half-life tends to be much shorter and the radiation risk lower than for fission by-products.
NASA probably has a bunch of studies on SPS going, but the costs of firing stuff into orbit currently make it financially unfeasible. Governments have shown no willingness to commit the substantial funds necessary to get any of the plans you talk about into motion. That's why people got really excited about the possibility of carbon nanotubes having the theoretical tensile strength necessary for building a space elevator cable. It would make establishing space industry and power collection possible. Problem is that we need the nanotube fibers a lot longer than achievable with current manufacturing processes.
Anyways, there is no dark side of the moon, apart from a cool Pink Floyd song. Roger Waters should have asked Brian May first. The moon is tidally locked with the Earth so that it always shows the same face, but it still has a 28-Earth day-long lunar day/night cycle. Putting a base on Lunar farside has some points and some risks. Farside is much more subject to meteor impacts, so it would be much more risky for any base residents. On the other hand, some of those meteorite impacts could have interesting mineral deposits but it would take a lot of work to get at them
To follow all those space dreams of SPS, lunar/asteroid mining, and orbital colonies, there needs to be a new approach to getting stuff into orbit. The current approaches are too cost prohibitive for anything more than national showboating.
Anyways, given your recent UID and sporadic posting, I figure IHBT. However maybe somebody else will read this and get something out of it.
Lorentz force and the Earth's magnetic field. That's why many proposed SPS approaches have gone for a microwave power transmission approach. Also a "power cord" would have the same material strength issues as beanstalks
Well, yes and no. If you're pumping oil up a well, your cost is pretty close to the gravitational PE from the oil's vertical travel. If you're digging beryllium bound in a mineral up from the ground in an open pit mine, you're first moving all the rock above the vein you want to get to. While you may not have to move it as far, it doesn't take much for moving all that relatively useless rock to be more expensive in energy than pumping up just the oil.
While I'm sure it takes some energy to get oil out of the ground I would expect most of the energy cost is in refining. However I would expect that the heat used in a refining plant is mainly obtained by combusting the longer chain hydrocarbons that would otherwise be waste from the petroleum refining process. So yeah, the process for getting gasoline into your car can be pretty inefficient compared to the theoretical energy content of the source petroleum, but the power input required for the steps in that process would be relatively low. In contrast, beryllium is going to take substantial power input at every stage of the preparation process, from mining, through mineral separation, to isotope separation.
While I gave the chemical energy content of a Kg of gasoline as a comparative baseline to the fusion energy content of the 2mm pellet of beryllium that can be extracted with this equipment, it was only to provide a sense of scale. I wouldn't want to compare the efficiency of a reaction using refined beryllium vs refined gasoline, because that would ignore all the steps prior to that final conversion stage. Those earlier steps are pretty important to the overall energy input/output balance that will determine whether the process is financially feasible, and they add to petroleum's comparative advantage. Now, if you take into account the secondary costs of CO2 greenhouse gas effects, that may change the financial equation, but our economic system isn't currently capable of dealing with that. Even then, petroleum could very well still have the advantage, but you just know producers/consumers are going to fight tooth and nail to avoid being charged for the damage to the commons.
Heck no. I've got a subscription to Analog Sci-Fi/Fact magazine. I want alternatives to legacy hydrocarbons.
Because it's a similar problem in that energy output from the reaction is in sudden high heat and pressure?
What, hydro? Coal burning? If you try to only use the heat output you're throwing away a good chunk of the energy output. It doesn't matter if you're driving a turbine that has 60% efficiency if you've thrown away 40% or more of the energy before it gets to the turbine.
Whenever you're talking about converting heat and pressure gradients into another form of energy, you're dealing with thermodynamic principles. Particular thermodynamic cycles have specific theoretical efficiency maximums. Thermal power generation plants are primarily concerned with converting heat/combustion output into electricity and the thermodynamic cycles they use may not be appropriate (and in fact are probably quite wasteful) for harnessing the power output mix from this reaction. So the conversion efficiency for capturing energy in electrical from from this reaction is currently undetermined, but I would expect it to be closer to the efficiency of an internal combustion engine than that of a thermal plant.
Good point. I often get the hairs on my back standing up on end from listening to an orchestra live. That rarely happens with canned music.
Do tell? Citation needed. Cause last I remember, unless you're dealing with Muon-catalyzed fusion, the temperatures and pressures you need for bulk fusion are a few orders of magnitude higher than you want to get in a fission reactor if you want it to remain controlled.
I hope you're talking special research reactors using exotic neutron moderators and coolants because most moderators in commercial reactors (graphite/heavy water) just can't stand that much heat. I expect you get much higher temperatures in your average blast furnace. Otherwise you would have some big problems with containment of a very hot radioactive pile and there just seems to be less dangerous ways to study fusion. Sure you could get a blob of fissioning material hot enough to melt through your equipment and all the way to the mantle, but that's not generally considered a good environment for study. Let's not forget that magnetic-containment plasma fusion has been studied in the lab for a few decades now. Although I would expect that the initial experiments in fusion probably involved collisions between ions accelerated by cyclotrons or fusors. Seems a lot more controllable and accessible than super-hot fission piles.
The H-Bomb trigger and compression jacket is certainly. That's how they get the compression and heat for the fusion ignition of the hydrogen isotopes, which produce additional neutrons that pump back into the fission reaction. The later stages in a multi-stage bomb could be tuned more for fusion energy release though, or at least so says the Wikipedia article. Because the H stands for Hydrogen and hydrogen can only fuse - it can't undergo fission (although tritium does decay) - there's gotta be some fusion in an H-Bomb.
It depends. How much energy is used to refine that 2mm nugget of beryllium? It's almost certainly a specific isotope mix, which would require a pretty sophisticated refining process (i.e. could be moderately energy intensive aside from the 2MJ ignition burst). You might think that you've got a lot wriggle room with an order of magnitude power output, but keep in mind that Gasoline has an energy density of about 45 megajoules per kilogram, so it wouldn't take much for that refining energy cost to be higher than the ignition energy costs. You have to look at the whole process (for instance look at the costs of corn-based ethanol).
Secondly, how much of the 20MJ output can be captured in a useful manner (i.e. electricity) versus capture/conversion losses? With a modern Internal Combustion Engine, after more than a century of refinement, it's less than 30%.
If the beryllium extraction/refining energy costs are close to the same as ignition input and the conversion efficiency to electricity is under 30%, you don't gain that much.
When the Brit and French subs crashed into each other recently, I said each was probably accusing the other of diving on the wrong side of the sea lane (although I would expect the right-side diver to be in the right on that one).
That's my interpretation of the article. I suspect it would also imply that there can be no such thing as tachyons.
True, but Level 1, 2, and 3 CPU caches are all much faster than DRAM too, and yet they share the same address space. Theoretically, you could just make the SSD byte addressable and have your "main memory" DRAM act as a Level N+1 cache for the SSD. If you want a file system you run a RAM disk :-) That would make systems come up much faster from a power-off mode, but system resets would be more challenging to pull off.
Alternatively, you could also think of it as the SSD being a big persistent swap partition for your main DRAM memory. That second approach might be easier to implement at first, since the first approach is more of a paradigm shift in how you organize your O/S. It might also make it easier to deal with flash mem's limits on repeated writes to the same location.
This might explain that apparent conundrum. Namely that the maximum speed of propagation is a fundamental property of geometric fabric of the universe. However that article is pretty light on the details; I'm going to have to hunt down some more info sometime. This new approach in the long run might also help provide some new insight on how to reconcile QM and relativity.
That's pretty well the case with all corporate media these days, although there are exceptions. Where those exceptions exist, they generally involve newspapers. For example, McClatchy's Washington bureau does good work.
While it will be hard to roll back the clock, we can hope that media ownership rules will be tightened again under the Obama administration. With the drop in advertising during this particularly harsh recession, the conglomerates are making major cutbacks and may need to close some of the less profitable operations. That could leave some openings for new independent media outlets during a recovery, if the regulatory framework helps protect them.
Newspapers are losing circulation and bleeding money. If they go under, then those secondary jobs will be lost anyhow. If the newspapers manage to save enough to survive through adopting this technology, then at least you'll still have the newspaper jobs, not to mention the critical role they fulfil in maintaining an informed electorate.
Also, as is often pointed out, Al Capone was imprisoned for tax evasion, not for the St. Valentine's Day Massacre murders.
I gave up hope on that sort of thing when they passed up on Horny Human.
If the locker door just looks like it's locked but it's actually open, then somebody else with your morals but enough brains to test the door surreptitiously will take it. If the top selling door lock is made of cardboard, some crook's going to figure out that it's worth their time to test locks with a pair of scissors. If a paper lock makes you feel secure then you're fooling yourself.
I mean let's see if we can come up with some scenarios. You're at the airport. Somebody grabs the digitized picture from your RFID passport/enhanced driver's licence and uses it to get into the laptop that you've checked in. If you're in England, they set up a fake surveillance camera that looks like all the real ones (coming soon to a North American city near you!) to take your picture before stealing your laptop.
This problem is not really surprising since the software would have to adapt for multiple lighting conditions so it would need to be moderately loose in what it would recognize as a match. Or maybe the guys who produced that facial recognition software for DHS (that's functionally useless for that purpose because of all the false positives) decided to see if they could find some other suckers they could fleece with it and some laptop maker took the bait. What's amazing is that something with that weak and obvious a vulnerability made it past any kind of security QA. This sounds even easier to do than using gelatin imprints on fingerprint readers because, unlike fingerprints, there are many ways to get somebody's picture from a distance without their knowledge. Paparazzi do the latter all the time even though celebrities know enough to expect the attempts and have better resources at their disposal than the average person.
Then again maybe what happened is that
In the end it doesn't matter. It's a lock that's easily bypassed by anybody who is interested in the data on the laptop. Anybody else who just steals the laptop to resell on e-Bay will just format the drive and reinstall the O/S. If this "lock"'s level of security helps you sleep at night then you're in for a rude awakening. People like you are why personal information for millions of people gets stolen and used by identity thieves.
That's basically what the Boxer rebellion was about. Iron Shirt Wushu doesn't cut it against rifles.
Agreed. Generally, a well run company that pays its employees a reasonable wage and provides commensurate executive compensation and profits will not find itself having to deal with unions. Unions tend to get installed in environments where management is badly exploiting labour (usually treating them as unskilled, disposable, and interchangeable cogs for which cost must be minimized by any way possible). A company getting unionized indicates a toxic relationship between management and labour. Once that happens, there has already been a huge loss of trust between the two opposing sides that can never be fully regained. But the problems existed before the forming of the union, not as a result of it. The union is just the symptom of the workers organizing to restore the real balance of power that management isn't willing to recognize.
In a certain sense, if people in that industry are unskilled/disposable/interchangeable, then management is correct to treat them that way. If Walmart can shut a store or fire everyone and hire all new personnel in response to a unionization attempt then they should. And the public should take into account that corporate attitude about the value of their human employees when they make decisions about where they want to go shopping. That's because that management behaviour also implicitly says things about how the customers are viewed as consumers and of the level of service that customers and suppliers can expect from that corporation. If people shop at Walmart and similar firms, then they should shut the hell up about the decaying of civil society because they are supporting a major contributor.
That said, I also don't have much sympathy for grade 10 dropouts with minimal or no skills, and no interest in upgrading their skills or education, who think they deserve the same salary and standard of living as the guy who actually graduated from HS, let alone spent an additional 4 years learning in university.
They aren't. That was bullshit from the GM execs. They lumped in the retiree benefits and included them into workers. With productivity increases and workforce reductions, that means a lot of retirees are supported by a few current workers. US auto worker compensation is roughly in line with that of Japanese auto workers. In contrast, Japanese CEO compensation is much less than US CEO compensation.
Well sure. There's that classic line from Knuth, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."
If nothing else, if you don't understand the requirements properly then it doesn't matter how well you've proved your code. That said, these are papers that are written by teams and undergo further peer review. So it's a little like extreme programming in that you get lots of people with different viewpoints looking at it and who together are more likely to catch problems.
Of course that happens with writing regular physics papers too, but there has to be a different level of scrutiny when ALL these people realize that being wrong would mean the end of their lives, that of their relatives, and everyone else on Earth. Seriously, if you knew that was the penalty for releasing software with a major bug, don't you think you would be a lot more exhaustive about bug testing and QA than if your current job or even just a promotion or bonus was on the line?
Well, I'll partly give you that point. I think I enjoyed math more because I learned it according to European approaches of the time, which involved introducing Algebra and word problem solving a lot earlier (grade 4/5) than in North America. While I had already gotten a lot of repetition in memorizing addition and times tables by that point, the word problems provided a way to make the math more analytical, more relevant, and thus more interesting. It also provided a good base for later problems in scientific studies. By grade 5, I also already had exposure to fractions and decimal notation, which I didn't get until grade 8 in N.A.
Now the repetition aspect is one of the things that I think computers can make more fun by turning it into a game. For instance, try out Tux, Of Math Command. The repetition is necessary, but a good use of computers is in making it less boring.
Actually, I would really like to see an RPG for older kids where at regular points in the game you need to solve (word-type) problems to progress. It should certainly be possible to fit into the storyline simple kinematics problems for instance, basic arithmetic/algebra/compound interest problems. It might also help kids see how that sort of math is applicable in everyday life. Maybe you could start with an open sourced game engine like Quake's as a foundation for a virtual environment that you can explore, and then build on it. As you master one skill and start learning new ones, new map areas open up. I wonder if Alan Kay and Viewpoints Research might be interested in pursuing that approach.
I suppose what I'm thinking of is somewhat inspired by the software for the "desks" in Ender's game. I think that with current hardware, a simplified version of that is now becoming possible. I would rather my kid play with something like that than GTA 007 - Licence to Kill.
It depends. There's good reason to be able to do some back-of-the-envelope tests of your theories - first order approximations to see if your idea makes sense. You won't be able to do that if you can't do basic arithmetic in your brain. Maybe at some point we'll be able to tie computers directly into our brains so that just thinking an equation provides us with the solution, but until that happens somebody who can do the math in his brain will have an edge. Indeed, unless you always whip out the calculator at the cash register, it could mean you're also an easier mark to rip off.
I'm reminded of a couple of chapters in Vernor Vinge's The Peace War where Wil Wachendon enters a chess tournament where he plays unassisted against computer-assisted chess players. He gets his butt whipped by the computer-assisted players. That changes his attitude regarding using computer assist to solve problems. However I think the reverse would be true as well, the computer-assisted players who had never learned to play without the help of a computer would also be at a disadvantage because some of the pattern recognition abilities required for chess would never have developed as strongly. Sure it's fiction, but good SF writers put some pretty strong reality checks on their fiction
Similarly, while you can use Mathematica to do analytical solving of integration problems or differential equations, if you haven't done some of it by hand then you won't have as good an intuitive feel for what the equations that you are manipulating actually mean. That could seriously limit your ability to make new discoveries. But yeah if your ambition is to work on a road crew, you probably won't need to know all of your times tables up to 12x12 by heart.