Well I would think that
a) they would be using a private IP address range with NAT and therefore have plenty of IP address range to play with.
b) a good admin should be able to use a simple script (be it bash, python, emacs lisp, whatever) to quickly generate configuration files for the hubs and switches and upload them. You would think an organizer of a security conference would have somebody in their rolodex who they could tap to do this efficiently and correctly
You should always view any network not controlled by your organization with a certain degree of suspicion. Any passwords should never be transmitted in the clear. Personally, I wish they had posted the information on which reporters had had information compromised. You would think eWeek and ctNews, who are IT/computing focused, could find people who have a reasonable background in computer security to send to the conference.
I tend to take those publications with a grain of sand anyways, but now their whole organization is tarred with that incompetence. Then again, if the reporters were uploading their stories to a plain FTP server because that's the only mechanism the company has available (in an age where OpenSSH and WinSCP are freely available, and https web submission forms are easy to set up) then the whole paper does deserve to have its reputation muddied a bit. So I also wouldn't mind knowing what was captured and how.
Like, ripping out a beating heart from a living body?
For some, yes (my post did not omit the blood-thirsty religions), as well as massive parties where people exchanged food and gifts. Instead we replaced that by taking their children away and giving them to monks and priests who physically and sexually abused them to help them "adapt" to Western society.
Then those priests couldn't do it anymore and had to do it to white people instead. Nobody cared as long as it happened to injuns but boy did people scream when it happened to white folks!
A world government with real legal power and real spending power would just be a massive attractor for corruption, for people wanting to usurp the power from inside the system, and from organizations outside the government wanting to exploit it's need for services from third parties.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Yeah there are some other major screw-ups too, like the last 3, 4? attempts to modernize the core computing systems of the IRS. Or some of those attempts to upgrade the air traffic control systems in the last 2 decades. Of course, you know what? Most of the ones I and you listed were contracted and subcontracted out to private and public corporations, not carried out directly by government employees.
Oh, and let's not forget defense contractors like Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater, Boeing/Rockwell, etc.
Government is often pretty efficient, but their biggest problems are that markets are more prone to corruption when there is no or little competition either on the selling side or on the buying side. The larger the government the more it presents a tempting target for corruption. The biggest inefficiencies are usually in the corruption of companies that feed at the public trough.
There are no great Indian authors, inventors, or musicians. Period.
That you know about. Period.
Most North American indian cultures were nomadic or semi-nomadic. They therefore had oral cultures because when you move constantly, you don't tend to pack big libraries around, just the tools you need to survive. So no great inventors in North America - I'll give you that one. But authors or musicians? You really have no idea. Were any of the troubadours in the Dark/Middle Age Europe any good? Most of them would have been illiterate so there's no telling is there? If a first millennium musical prodigy hadn't been interested in writing hymns for the church, there would be little trace of his output except in unattributed folk songs that survived hundreds of years to be incorporated into symphonies and pieces by 18th and 19th century composers, or Paul Simon.
Now mind you, if you go south into Mexico and further, the Inca, Aztec, and Maya empires had roads, irrigation, and cities comparable to a lot of Europe, as well as writing, oh and bloodthirsty religions and governments. Now certainly, they stopped evolving technologically after a certain point, but water monopolies have a tendency to suppress research that might upset the status quo. And when your government controls its people through fear, it tends to have a deleterious effect on the production of art.
What I'm getting at is that the lack of the types of artists and creative peoples that you point to as a sign of their savagery is often more due to environmental conditions. There are for instance very strong artistic and cultural traditions in the Pacific Northwest native communities, even though a large number of examples of those artworks were pilfered by missionaries in their zeal to replace the native religions with Christianity. For generations, the government actively worked to suppress native culture by making its core ceremonies illegal. That tends to have a fairly strong negative impact in the transmission of music and myths in a culture with oral traditions.
Note that the same thing happened with native cultures in the Pacific islands like Fiji, Tahiti, etc. because those cultures also had very rich oral and musical traditions. So your statement is only founded on an ignorance of, and ensured by, white missionaries and invaders.
That makes sense for a car (although a normal battery might make more sense at the moment), but I can't imagine any sort of metal hydride thingy being cheaper than a simple balloon for the home.
Hydrogen, and the quantities you would be storing would make for a big balloon, is highly combustible, even explosive. Unless there's no bored kids in your neighborhoods, let alone someone disgruntled, that balloon just isn't a very good idea. Storing the hydrogen under pressure would require extra energy to build the pressure. The advantage of metal hydride storage is that it doesn't take much energy to "charge" and isn't explosive if you use particular metals.
Well, most physicists were quite skeptical of that at the time because there had been prior false alarms down that avenue of research. A better and more recent example would be the human cloning/stem cell research fraud by Dr. Hwang Woo Suk.
That "acceptable level" depends on what your target is. If it's a military target, then you need a fair amount of precision. But if it's a market square, you've got a pretty big fudge factor.
It also depends on what your weapon is. Close counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and nuclear weapons.
Sure. But deserts also have weather. It may not be moisture, but sand in a sand storm is just as (or more) likely to disperse or attenuate light as moisture is. So while sandstorms are more common in Iraq, they are not unknown in Israel either. So if you timed your attack in the season where sandstorms are common, you would negate a lot of the advantage of these weapons.
Indeed. A CEO sets the strategic direction of a company, right? And strategy tends to be something with a longer term outlook. Unlike a COO, who is responsible for the day-to-day operations of a company, if your CEO becomes incapacitated, you will have a little time to find a replacement before the company goes under. True, finding as good a replacement might be tricky, especially somebody with as good a success track record as Steve Jobs, but it's not impossible and more than a few people would be attracted to working with the team that Steve J. has assembled.
Well, it would have been funny if his pseudonym was something like Phil Gramm. However James Welch is a Mass state representative, not a former US senator.
Once people work out how to do space colonies, I bet most colonizers would rather live in a space station than live on inhospitable planets in something that is just as restrictive as a space station ( if not more so - it's trapped on the planet and can't move) - it's not like you'd be able to walk outside in Venus without a protective suit. So what's the difference?
Atmosphere, even if it's poisonous, does have some advantages:
- limited protection from high-energy radiation
- protection from micrometeorites and many larger meteorites
- structures can be lighter and easier to repair if they don't have to maintain large pressure gradients.
- a certain amount of insulation against temperature gradients of space
However atmospheres have a potentially serious drawback: weather (i.e. dust storms on Mars and the storms on Jupiter and Saturn) which can cause physical wear and tear, and perhaps electrical disturbances.
It's also not clear how much Coriolis forces would affect Earthling life long-term in a rotating space station. Those gravity wells do have their advantages and a big one is that we've evolved to live in them.
Now, for terraforming Venus, I've been batting around some ideas but I'm not sure how well they would work out. It does assume a process for creating >kilometer-long carbon nanotubes. We would hopefully first figure out how to do that to build a space elevator on Earth.
So first, you would genetically engineer an algae to break down the CO2, release O2 and bind the carbon. You would probably also want it to strip some of the sulphur out of the atmosphere as well somehow. Initially you would have it work off man-made platforms that you could design to collect the released oxygen. But a second phase would be airborne, possibly using hydrogen from atmospheric water vapour for buoyancy. What water vapor?
Rather than shipping in Hydrogen from the Gas giants, you might just catch some of the solar wind. Perhaps use a modified solar sail in Venus' shadow with a grounding space tether down to the atmosphere to provide a source of electrons to convert the photon wind into hydrogen. Ship the hydrogen to the base of the tether where you let it react with stored oxygen to create water and release that into the atmosphere.
Then use the carbon that's being pulled out of Venus' atmosphere to build a really big composite solar sail and transfer it in pieces to Mercury for assembly. Each piece will have its own attachment point with a set of carbon nanotube tethers to the surface. The attachment "point" on the surface is going to be tricky since Mercury rotates. You would probably have to attach it at the poles to transfer the sail's force to the planet. Those two attachment surfaces are going to be very tricky to design. The sail will need to have dimensions of a size equal to multiple mercury diameters, so the compression stresses involved in keeping the combined sail components stiff are going to be huge, and I'm not sure we have materials capable of it. Perhaps you could use a composite like a pre-stressed and nanotube-wrapped steel backbone? But assuming that it's possible, then you would sail Mercury into Venus' orbit and let Venus capture it so that they form a double system. At that point it becomes easier to strip some of Venus' extra remaining atmosphere and transfer it to Mercury to get extra habitable real estate out of the deal.
If it works and you're feeling cocky, take your sail out to Jupiter or Saturn and repeat the process by pulling Titan or Europa down to Mars. You would need to have a lot of small sails handy to clean up the mess that's going to occur as the planet disturbs the Asteroid belt.
Putting all five planets in a Rosette with Earth would be really cool, but you probably couldn't manage enough acceleration out of the solar sails to avoid multiple close approaches with Earth that would have devastating effects. You might be able to do it if you timed it to ca
Maybe because most vehicles are built in a few states (our outside the US) and shipped across the country and therefore might more legitimately be regulated under the interstate commerce clause than other pollution sources.
It's also a study that's nearly 30 years old. Could 30 years of "working the refs" by the right wing and increasing pressure/involvement in the editorial process by corporatist publishers changed the makeup of the newsroom? I would expect most of those people in that study would have retired by now. If you ran it again, using the same criteria (i.e. not moving the goalpost of what was then considered conservative and liberal) would you get the same result?
Moral or ethical worth can be considered for facts when they purport to be Truth, and not just true. The moon orbiting the earth may not seem an ethical question -- and I agree that it is not -- but the Catholic church certainly considered it an ethical issue when it persecuted Galileo.
You just proved his point. Facts are facts. Our interpretation of those facts may have ethical considerations. However, the Catholic church persecuted Galileo not because of ethics but because of politics - his pointing out that the facts contradicted church doctrine and effectively attacked the moral supremacy of the church because the church claimed to be the final authority in an area in which it was more likely to be wrong than right.
Whenever somebody questions the "religious morality" of facts, I'm as suspicious that it's likely to be due to a failure or inconsistency of the morality as it is due to the interpretation of the facts.
The GP is right: while religion can certainly provide good guidelines for living harmoniously in society with others, its failings become apparent when it tries to explain how things are rather than why.
It could very well be faster to analytically solve the equations of motion every so often, and simply plug into those results as time evolves.
Analytical solutions tend to be derived with algorithms that aren't vectorable/parallelizable, whereas the strength of GPUs is in vectorized/parallel calculations. So, yes your approach might work, but wouldn't gain much efficiency from GPUs.
Still, I have found some of the comments for this article much more informative than is usual for a Slashdot article. There's very little "In Soviet Russia, hot GPU models physick you"-type trolls that I would have expected, and I actually learned a few things.
I recently read that the relative lengths of your index and ring fingers (if the latter are longer than the former) are related to an aptitude for higher mathematics. Genetic trait relationships can be damn weird and unexpected. What if this wasn't known and 20 years from now there was a big fad that indexes should be longer than ring fingers?
I like the line in S.M. Stirling's Drakon where it's revealed that, while doing a lot of of genetic manipulation in creating themselves and their slave race, the Draka accidentally selected against many of the genes for creativity, removing them from their gene pool.
How so? Beethoven's deafness had an adult onset, and it's now believed to have been due to lead poisoning, not a genetic cause. I don't think there's anyone who doesn't have a genetic propensity to heavy metal poisoning. Although some people may be more sensitive than others, I wouldn't call it a genetic disorder.
Now if you had talked about Edison's or A.G. Bell's dyslexia, you might have had a better point. But even so, dyslexia's a disability that, properly diagnosed, can be worked around. Still it does raise a good point which is, what positive traits with disability co-factors might we eliminate if we try to eliminate disabilities. The best example of that is how the genetic traits for thalassemia and sickle-cell anemia also provide limited protection against malaria
"Malaria's not a problem for me, I live and have evolved for northern latitude where the mosquitoes and malaria are less prevalent", you might say. Ah, but what happens when you get something like Global Warming combined with air travel increasing the territory for malaria? Could genetic defect selection be wiping out currently unnecessary gene variations that could prove critical in another few hundred years?
As usual, SF touched on some of these issues already decades ago, starting with a Heinlein novella called "Beyond this Horizon".
Of course, this is all for solving problems analytically. Computers most likely do things differently.
Yeah. I would be very surprised if they were solving this stuff analytically:-). My guess is that it's using techniques similar to those used for finite element analysis with quantum time increments. For FEM, I would think an approximation of Newtonian mechanics should be a lot simpler to deal with and more appropriate for GPUs.
Well yeah, that too. However, with trollish news tickers and banners along the screen bottom, you don't actually need to hear what they say (or close captioning) to realize how ludicrous they are. In addition, "appears" is visually associated, not auditory, so for once I was trying to avoid mixing my metaphors.
The fact is that liberals have control of the networks - I saw poll that showed essentially all journalists at CNN, ABC, CBS etc vote for the Democrats.
Uh, no it was that around 90% of journalists that make campaign contributions contribute to the Democrats. But the number of journalists making campaign contributions was around 10%. So you can only say for certain that <10% of those journalists support Democrats. The party orientation of those who donate doesn't necessarily match those who don't. I could conceive of a scenario where those who don't donate are greedy and figure they're sufficiently supporting the Republican party through biased news worth far in excess of the monetary contribution of their Democratic-donating counterparts. Not saying that's the case, just that the data that's available could be consistent with either scenario.
Now, most contemporary journalists are also pretty scientifically illiterate, which make them an easy target of ridicule in the technical community. And their understanding of economics and far too much else is often not much better. However, that Fox talking head in the linked video seems like a particularly egregious example.
Fox News appears bad to anybody who isn't blind since they seem to insist on giving equal or more time to the emperor and his tailors than to the small child and his observations.
Nevertheless, you might also want to consider that many journalists get to see and hear about the raw information before it gets massaged by editorial boards that are selected by corporatist management. So when it comes to coming to conclusions that only require facts and common sense, not technical knowledge, like the general state of the country and how various political parties influence it, they're likely to be better informed than you.
When you're doing below ground mining, many seams aren't very thick. If you've got smaller people running machinery that's proportionally sized, you don't need to waste as much time, energy and money digging out base rock for your tunnels along with the good stuff. While you may still have a lot of seams that are worthwhile using adult labour on, with reasonably small children half their height and equipment to match, a whole bunch of seams that aren't currently economical could become so. And when your workers only have a 3-5 year working lifetime, you don't need to worry as much about protecting them from things like black lung. So how much time does it take to train a miner, really?
Doing maintenance on the equipment when the equipment breaks down would be your biggest problem since the kids wouldn't have the know-how or as much strength, but you need far fewer maintenance people than operators. Your operators don't have to be that educated with modern equipment, and kids are like sponges. If you don't worry about filling their heads with things like math, reading, writing, or history (you particularly don't want them learning history - seems to be working with you, BTW) then they can learn to operate that kind of machinery pretty quickly. I've heard it's not uncommon for young farm kids to be quite capable of driving the farm tractor around. Think how much more motivated candidate child miners would be if their food supply and entertainment time is tied to to how well they do on the precursor classroom time! Heck, you could even use some video games to teach them how to mine.
Biggest bonus? Kids won't go on strike because they're easier to intimidate, and it would also be harder to organize them since they've got high turnover.
So yeah, you're right the economic conditions aren't the same anymore, but that doesn't mean that somebody wouldn't find some way to profit from using child labour in mines or elsewhere even in our current technological environment. What the industrial revolution did teach us is that, if there's profit to be made in using child labour, no matter how unethical, demeaning, or dangerous, if it's permitted, somebody will do it. That is the parallel between overseas clothing sweatshops and mining: the sweatshops show it's a fundamental part of human nature and capitalism that hasn't changed in 200 years.
Your argument is that techniques and equipment that evolved since mining with child labour was banned make using children for mining unfeasible. My argument is that if you make child labour legal again, we'll quickly find out how easy it is to adapt or create new equipment to make child labour economically feasible again. While my argument is based on the darker side of human nature, nothing you've proposed is a valid technical or sociological reason that invalidates that argument.
Generally, history and current social symptoms like the mistreatment of illegal Mexican labour in the US support my argument. Ethically-challenged employers like vulnerable workers which are more easily exploited. In industries which only require a low skill level for most of its labour force, ethically-challenged employers clean up.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? I take it to mean that when people produce less and consume more, everyone wins. Surely that's not what you mean because that's obviously false. It's related to the multiplier effect. It's why Henry Ford paid his employees well enough so they could buy his cars. And it's also why supply-side economics are fundamentally flawed.
There's no point in producing more if there's nobody to buy the product. If you want to grow an economy, you have to cultivate the supply and the demand. If you don't pay your workers enough, their disposable income drops and the market for everything other than basic needs shrink. So unless you own real estate or produce food, a low minimum wage is not in your interest because fewer people will be able to buy your product.
And noone has yet to address the fundamental problem with such regulations - how do they justify the rights violations that come with it? Forcing anyone to do with their lives and property other than they wish is a violation of their rights as human beings. Any gain that results from such endeavors is not justified - ie, the ends do not justify the means. Well, if everyone thought the way you did, you'd quickly get a chance to re-evaluate your position when the revolution came and you had your back to the wall. Crime and violence (including war) have steadily declined in Western countries over the last century as the standard of living has improved. People who have something to lose are less willing to risk it than people with nothing. It's in everybody's best interest to make sure that class divisions don't get too big and, fortunately, (most of) the people who are in control in the West understand that better than you do.
So that's why most clothing that is bought is made in North America and not in sweatshops in SE Asia or the Dominican Republica! Oh wait, it's the other way around and the NA/European clothing manufacturing industry sucks except for haute couture. I think there's something wrong with your argument.
Yeah, open pit mining is more efficient at extracting some types of resources. But if you were trying to get coal a couple of Km down, and it was legal to use child labour at a fraction of the wages of adults without needing to worry about black lung protection, I think you'd find kids in coal mines again pretty quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I would think that a) they would be using a private IP address range with NAT and therefore have plenty of IP address range to play with. b) a good admin should be able to use a simple script (be it bash, python, emacs lisp, whatever) to quickly generate configuration files for the hubs and switches and upload them. You would think an organizer of a security conference would have somebody in their rolodex who they could tap to do this efficiently and correctly
You should always view any network not controlled by your organization with a certain degree of suspicion. Any passwords should never be transmitted in the clear. Personally, I wish they had posted the information on which reporters had had information compromised. You would think eWeek and ctNews, who are IT/computing focused, could find people who have a reasonable background in computer security to send to the conference.
I tend to take those publications with a grain of sand anyways, but now their whole organization is tarred with that incompetence. Then again, if the reporters were uploading their stories to a plain FTP server because that's the only mechanism the company has available (in an age where OpenSSH and WinSCP are freely available, and https web submission forms are easy to set up) then the whole paper does deserve to have its reputation muddied a bit. So I also wouldn't mind knowing what was captured and how.
You're not paranoid enough. It's your bank and financial information for crying out loud. Bookmark the https login page.
For some, yes (my post did not omit the blood-thirsty religions), as well as massive parties where people exchanged food and gifts. Instead we replaced that by taking their children away and giving them to monks and priests who physically and sexually abused them to help them "adapt" to Western society.
Then those priests couldn't do it anymore and had to do it to white people instead. Nobody cared as long as it happened to injuns but boy did people scream when it happened to white folks!
A world government with real legal power and real spending power would just be a massive attractor for corruption, for people wanting to usurp the power from inside the system, and from organizations outside the government wanting to exploit it's need for services from third parties. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Yeah there are some other major screw-ups too, like the last 3, 4? attempts to modernize the core computing systems of the IRS. Or some of those attempts to upgrade the air traffic control systems in the last 2 decades. Of course, you know what? Most of the ones I and you listed were contracted and subcontracted out to private and public corporations, not carried out directly by government employees.
Oh, and let's not forget defense contractors like Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater, Boeing/Rockwell, etc.
Government is often pretty efficient, but their biggest problems are that markets are more prone to corruption when there is no or little competition either on the selling side or on the buying side. The larger the government the more it presents a tempting target for corruption. The biggest inefficiencies are usually in the corruption of companies that feed at the public trough.
That you know about. Period.
Most North American indian cultures were nomadic or semi-nomadic. They therefore had oral cultures because when you move constantly, you don't tend to pack big libraries around, just the tools you need to survive. So no great inventors in North America - I'll give you that one. But authors or musicians? You really have no idea. Were any of the troubadours in the Dark/Middle Age Europe any good? Most of them would have been illiterate so there's no telling is there? If a first millennium musical prodigy hadn't been interested in writing hymns for the church, there would be little trace of his output except in unattributed folk songs that survived hundreds of years to be incorporated into symphonies and pieces by 18th and 19th century composers, or Paul Simon.
Now mind you, if you go south into Mexico and further, the Inca, Aztec, and Maya empires had roads, irrigation, and cities comparable to a lot of Europe, as well as writing, oh and bloodthirsty religions and governments. Now certainly, they stopped evolving technologically after a certain point, but water monopolies have a tendency to suppress research that might upset the status quo. And when your government controls its people through fear, it tends to have a deleterious effect on the production of art.
What I'm getting at is that the lack of the types of artists and creative peoples that you point to as a sign of their savagery is often more due to environmental conditions. There are for instance very strong artistic and cultural traditions in the Pacific Northwest native communities, even though a large number of examples of those artworks were pilfered by missionaries in their zeal to replace the native religions with Christianity. For generations, the government actively worked to suppress native culture by making its core ceremonies illegal. That tends to have a fairly strong negative impact in the transmission of music and myths in a culture with oral traditions.
Note that the same thing happened with native cultures in the Pacific islands like Fiji, Tahiti, etc. because those cultures also had very rich oral and musical traditions. So your statement is only founded on an ignorance of, and ensured by, white missionaries and invaders.
Hydrogen, and the quantities you would be storing would make for a big balloon, is highly combustible, even explosive. Unless there's no bored kids in your neighborhoods, let alone someone disgruntled, that balloon just isn't a very good idea. Storing the hydrogen under pressure would require extra energy to build the pressure. The advantage of metal hydride storage is that it doesn't take much energy to "charge" and isn't explosive if you use particular metals.
Well, most physicists were quite skeptical of that at the time because there had been prior false alarms down that avenue of research. A better and more recent example would be the human cloning/stem cell research fraud by Dr. Hwang Woo Suk.
That "acceptable level" depends on what your target is. If it's a military target, then you need a fair amount of precision. But if it's a market square, you've got a pretty big fudge factor.
It also depends on what your weapon is. Close counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and nuclear weapons.
Still, you raise some good counterpoints.
Sure. But deserts also have weather. It may not be moisture, but sand in a sand storm is just as (or more) likely to disperse or attenuate light as moisture is. So while sandstorms are more common in Iraq, they are not unknown in Israel either. So if you timed your attack in the season where sandstorms are common, you would negate a lot of the advantage of these weapons.
Indeed. A CEO sets the strategic direction of a company, right? And strategy tends to be something with a longer term outlook. Unlike a COO, who is responsible for the day-to-day operations of a company, if your CEO becomes incapacitated, you will have a little time to find a replacement before the company goes under. True, finding as good a replacement might be tricky, especially somebody with as good a success track record as Steve Jobs, but it's not impossible and more than a few people would be attracted to working with the team that Steve J. has assembled.
Well, it would have been funny if his pseudonym was something like Phil Gramm. However James Welch is a Mass state representative, not a former US senator.
Atmosphere, even if it's poisonous, does have some advantages:
- limited protection from high-energy radiation
- protection from micrometeorites and many larger meteorites
- structures can be lighter and easier to repair if they don't have to maintain large pressure gradients.
- a certain amount of insulation against temperature gradients of space
However atmospheres have a potentially serious drawback: weather (i.e. dust storms on Mars and the storms on Jupiter and Saturn) which can cause physical wear and tear, and perhaps electrical disturbances.
It's also not clear how much Coriolis forces would affect Earthling life long-term in a rotating space station. Those gravity wells do have their advantages and a big one is that we've evolved to live in them.
Now, for terraforming Venus, I've been batting around some ideas but I'm not sure how well they would work out. It does assume a process for creating >kilometer-long carbon nanotubes. We would hopefully first figure out how to do that to build a space elevator on Earth.
So first, you would genetically engineer an algae to break down the CO2, release O2 and bind the carbon. You would probably also want it to strip some of the sulphur out of the atmosphere as well somehow. Initially you would have it work off man-made platforms that you could design to collect the released oxygen. But a second phase would be airborne, possibly using hydrogen from atmospheric water vapour for buoyancy. What water vapor?
Rather than shipping in Hydrogen from the Gas giants, you might just catch some of the solar wind. Perhaps use a modified solar sail in Venus' shadow with a grounding space tether down to the atmosphere to provide a source of electrons to convert the photon wind into hydrogen. Ship the hydrogen to the base of the tether where you let it react with stored oxygen to create water and release that into the atmosphere.
Then use the carbon that's being pulled out of Venus' atmosphere to build a really big composite solar sail and transfer it in pieces to Mercury for assembly. Each piece will have its own attachment point with a set of carbon nanotube tethers to the surface. The attachment "point" on the surface is going to be tricky since Mercury rotates. You would probably have to attach it at the poles to transfer the sail's force to the planet. Those two attachment surfaces are going to be very tricky to design. The sail will need to have dimensions of a size equal to multiple mercury diameters, so the compression stresses involved in keeping the combined sail components stiff are going to be huge, and I'm not sure we have materials capable of it. Perhaps you could use a composite like a pre-stressed and nanotube-wrapped steel backbone? But assuming that it's possible, then you would sail Mercury into Venus' orbit and let Venus capture it so that they form a double system. At that point it becomes easier to strip some of Venus' extra remaining atmosphere and transfer it to Mercury to get extra habitable real estate out of the deal.
If it works and you're feeling cocky, take your sail out to Jupiter or Saturn and repeat the process by pulling Titan or Europa down to Mars. You would need to have a lot of small sails handy to clean up the mess that's going to occur as the planet disturbs the Asteroid belt.
Putting all five planets in a Rosette with Earth would be really cool, but you probably couldn't manage enough acceleration out of the solar sails to avoid multiple close approaches with Earth that would have devastating effects. You might be able to do it if you timed it to ca
Maybe because most vehicles are built in a few states (our outside the US) and shipped across the country and therefore might more legitimately be regulated under the interstate commerce clause than other pollution sources.
It's also a study that's nearly 30 years old. Could 30 years of "working the refs" by the right wing and increasing pressure/involvement in the editorial process by corporatist publishers changed the makeup of the newsroom? I would expect most of those people in that study would have retired by now. If you ran it again, using the same criteria (i.e. not moving the goalpost of what was then considered conservative and liberal) would you get the same result?
You just proved his point. Facts are facts. Our interpretation of those facts may have ethical considerations. However, the Catholic church persecuted Galileo not because of ethics but because of politics - his pointing out that the facts contradicted church doctrine and effectively attacked the moral supremacy of the church because the church claimed to be the final authority in an area in which it was more likely to be wrong than right.
Whenever somebody questions the "religious morality" of facts, I'm as suspicious that it's likely to be due to a failure or inconsistency of the morality as it is due to the interpretation of the facts.
The GP is right: while religion can certainly provide good guidelines for living harmoniously in society with others, its failings become apparent when it tries to explain how things are rather than why.
Analytical solutions tend to be derived with algorithms that aren't vectorable/parallelizable, whereas the strength of GPUs is in vectorized/parallel calculations. So, yes your approach might work, but wouldn't gain much efficiency from GPUs. Still, I have found some of the comments for this article much more informative than is usual for a Slashdot article. There's very little "In Soviet Russia, hot GPU models physick you"-type trolls that I would have expected, and I actually learned a few things.
I recently read that the relative lengths of your index and ring fingers (if the latter are longer than the former) are related to an aptitude for higher mathematics. Genetic trait relationships can be damn weird and unexpected. What if this wasn't known and 20 years from now there was a big fad that indexes should be longer than ring fingers?
I like the line in S.M. Stirling's Drakon where it's revealed that, while doing a lot of of genetic manipulation in creating themselves and their slave race, the Draka accidentally selected against many of the genes for creativity, removing them from their gene pool.
How so? Beethoven's deafness had an adult onset, and it's now believed to have been due to lead poisoning, not a genetic cause. I don't think there's anyone who doesn't have a genetic propensity to heavy metal poisoning. Although some people may be more sensitive than others, I wouldn't call it a genetic disorder.
Now if you had talked about Edison's or A.G. Bell's dyslexia, you might have had a better point. But even so, dyslexia's a disability that, properly diagnosed, can be worked around. Still it does raise a good point which is, what positive traits with disability co-factors might we eliminate if we try to eliminate disabilities. The best example of that is how the genetic traits for thalassemia and sickle-cell anemia also provide limited protection against malaria
"Malaria's not a problem for me, I live and have evolved for northern latitude where the mosquitoes and malaria are less prevalent", you might say. Ah, but what happens when you get something like Global Warming combined with air travel increasing the territory for malaria? Could genetic defect selection be wiping out currently unnecessary gene variations that could prove critical in another few hundred years?
As usual, SF touched on some of these issues already decades ago, starting with a Heinlein novella called "Beyond this Horizon".
Yeah. I would be very surprised if they were solving this stuff analytically :-). My guess is that it's using techniques similar to those used for finite element analysis with quantum time increments. For FEM, I would think an approximation of Newtonian mechanics should be a lot simpler to deal with and more appropriate for GPUs.
Well yeah, that too. However, with trollish news tickers and banners along the screen bottom, you don't actually need to hear what they say (or close captioning) to realize how ludicrous they are. In addition, "appears" is visually associated, not auditory, so for once I was trying to avoid mixing my metaphors.
Uh, no it was that around 90% of journalists that make campaign contributions contribute to the Democrats. But the number of journalists making campaign contributions was around 10%. So you can only say for certain that <10% of those journalists support Democrats. The party orientation of those who donate doesn't necessarily match those who don't. I could conceive of a scenario where those who don't donate are greedy and figure they're sufficiently supporting the Republican party through biased news worth far in excess of the monetary contribution of their Democratic-donating counterparts. Not saying that's the case, just that the data that's available could be consistent with either scenario.
Now, most contemporary journalists are also pretty scientifically illiterate, which make them an easy target of ridicule in the technical community. And their understanding of economics and far too much else is often not much better. However, that Fox talking head in the linked video seems like a particularly egregious example. Fox News appears bad to anybody who isn't blind since they seem to insist on giving equal or more time to the emperor and his tailors than to the small child and his observations.
Nevertheless, you might also want to consider that many journalists get to see and hear about the raw information before it gets massaged by editorial boards that are selected by corporatist management. So when it comes to coming to conclusions that only require facts and common sense, not technical knowledge, like the general state of the country and how various political parties influence it, they're likely to be better informed than you.
When you're doing below ground mining, many seams aren't very thick. If you've got smaller people running machinery that's proportionally sized, you don't need to waste as much time, energy and money digging out base rock for your tunnels along with the good stuff. While you may still have a lot of seams that are worthwhile using adult labour on, with reasonably small children half their height and equipment to match, a whole bunch of seams that aren't currently economical could become so. And when your workers only have a 3-5 year working lifetime, you don't need to worry as much about protecting them from things like black lung. So how much time does it take to train a miner, really?
Doing maintenance on the equipment when the equipment breaks down would be your biggest problem since the kids wouldn't have the know-how or as much strength, but you need far fewer maintenance people than operators. Your operators don't have to be that educated with modern equipment, and kids are like sponges. If you don't worry about filling their heads with things like math, reading, writing, or history (you particularly don't want them learning history - seems to be working with you, BTW) then they can learn to operate that kind of machinery pretty quickly. I've heard it's not uncommon for young farm kids to be quite capable of driving the farm tractor around. Think how much more motivated candidate child miners would be if their food supply and entertainment time is tied to to how well they do on the precursor classroom time! Heck, you could even use some video games to teach them how to mine.
Biggest bonus? Kids won't go on strike because they're easier to intimidate, and it would also be harder to organize them since they've got high turnover.
So yeah, you're right the economic conditions aren't the same anymore, but that doesn't mean that somebody wouldn't find some way to profit from using child labour in mines or elsewhere even in our current technological environment. What the industrial revolution did teach us is that, if there's profit to be made in using child labour, no matter how unethical, demeaning, or dangerous, if it's permitted, somebody will do it. That is the parallel between overseas clothing sweatshops and mining: the sweatshops show it's a fundamental part of human nature and capitalism that hasn't changed in 200 years.
Your argument is that techniques and equipment that evolved since mining with child labour was banned make using children for mining unfeasible. My argument is that if you make child labour legal again, we'll quickly find out how easy it is to adapt or create new equipment to make child labour economically feasible again. While my argument is based on the darker side of human nature, nothing you've proposed is a valid technical or sociological reason that invalidates that argument.
Generally, history and current social symptoms like the mistreatment of illegal Mexican labour in the US support my argument. Ethically-challenged employers like vulnerable workers which are more easily exploited. In industries which only require a low skill level for most of its labour force, ethically-challenged employers clean up.
There's no point in producing more if there's nobody to buy the product. If you want to grow an economy, you have to cultivate the supply and the demand. If you don't pay your workers enough, their disposable income drops and the market for everything other than basic needs shrink. So unless you own real estate or produce food, a low minimum wage is not in your interest because fewer people will be able to buy your product.
And noone has yet to address the fundamental problem with such regulations - how do they justify the rights violations that come with it? Forcing anyone to do with their lives and property other than they wish is a violation of their rights as human beings. Any gain that results from such endeavors is not justified - ie, the ends do not justify the means. Well, if everyone thought the way you did, you'd quickly get a chance to re-evaluate your position when the revolution came and you had your back to the wall. Crime and violence (including war) have steadily declined in Western countries over the last century as the standard of living has improved. People who have something to lose are less willing to risk it than people with nothing. It's in everybody's best interest to make sure that class divisions don't get too big and, fortunately, (most of) the people who are in control in the West understand that better than you do.So that's why most clothing that is bought is made in North America and not in sweatshops in SE Asia or the Dominican Republica! Oh wait, it's the other way around and the NA/European clothing manufacturing industry sucks except for haute couture. I think there's something wrong with your argument.
Yeah, open pit mining is more efficient at extracting some types of resources. But if you were trying to get coal a couple of Km down, and it was legal to use child labour at a fraction of the wages of adults without needing to worry about black lung protection, I think you'd find kids in coal mines again pretty quickly.