I was unaware of that, can you point me at any paper or research that shows this?
I'd guess that if true, no one noticed as the unbound lifetime is far too short to get one bound by the time you slow it down enough.
Hey -- yes, string theory makes few provable predictions, and if you understand the concepts in "the Elegant Universe" you'd know why, and also why Ed Witten is a hero. Yeah, it only predicts gravity, no big deal there. And it looks like handling the real issues with standard model, according to which, either quantum physics or relativity are dead wrong.
That's gotta be the least talked about tiny flaw in current thinking -- and it's not a tiny flaw, it's an utter catastrophe in the existing theory, period, full stop. Can't both be right, but both give good numbers when used in the correct domain.
Neither are all that predictive -- just explanatory after the fact, and why does standard model need all these arbitrary constants plugged into it for it to work, just tell me how that makes it a good theory again?
.
String or M theory presents the possibility of a theory that doesn't need a ton of constants, just a description of a Calibu-Yau geometry, and the rest "falls out". It's that description that is currently lacking, the search space is enormous and makes a computer search for the answer to the traveling salesman problem look trivial.
So yeah, it's far from proved, because it's far from done, and that step isn't in the cards till the right shape for that space is discovered.
.
The multiverse also solves some otherwise very nasty problems in similar fashion, or it could.
.
Neither is proved, of course, but they hold out the hope that a theory of everything is even possible, and the light was getting really dim on that -- so we can hope. All such things of course deserve skepticism, but until proved wrong, they are in some sense more right than the current models which we KNOW have to be wrong because they can't be reconciled with one another at the limits. They are just useful until we find something better.
.
Hear, Hear! Yeah, it matters - a tiny error in m becomes a crazy error in e= mc^2. As well as everything else the parent mentions. It's not even good math to average if you have the least hint there's something missing other than purely random noise creating the differences -- that averages out, systemic errors don't.
Besides, if someone learns why, well, that's more knowledge in our bag o' tricks, eh? And that is what science is really all about.
Good job by our friends to the North, I say -- Props, guys. Denigrating their equipment is ignorant, do you think it takes a better or worse scientist to get to meaningful results on the new shiny stuff, or the older stuff, anyway. Did someone with fancier stuff find this first elsewhere? Then who's got the good scientists, again?
Is theorized to work with fusible fuels (say deuterium). But muons don't seem to live long enough to make it practical, they take a lot of energy per to make and have very short lives. In essence, they don't live long enough to catalyze enough fusion to pay back the energy of creation at this point.
So what's interesting is that they were able to do this at all -- either they found a way to extend muon life (unlikely, or that would be the main news here), or they worked insanely fast to get their results before the decay.
Maybe some of the ridiculous people who currently fall for the vicious parti-scam baloney will now wake up and realize both parties want the same thing -- total domination by them in a completely centralized government. "We know what's best for you". Yeah, right -- I've been everything from a grunt child laborer, to a top rate engineer, rock and roll musician, auto racer, scientist, and stock trader -- passing through homeless bum a time or so along the way. Which "me" is it that they know what's best for, anyway?
This partisanship is the old scam all over again -- get total polarization and force people to "choose" between just two utterly not-acceptable alternatives, when without it many more choices are quite possible, some of them reasonable.
But for example, while I'm sure some people really do believe in their extreme stances on abortion, it's a sure thing meal ticket for activists to get donations around, and goes on forever because they don't want it to be solved -- they want the meal tickets.
It's a pretty old game. And vilifying bad guys is a trick long used by governments to keep themselves in power. One wonders if for example, Bush and Putin had a good laugh over drinks about it a time or two -- when we were pushing for that missile defense in their backyard that anyone who understands knows couldn't catch Russian missiles from behind. It obviously helped them both to have a fake controversy. Once you start looking at the world with that knowledge you see a lot most people miss.
Nearly all that actions taken lately "for our security" are identical to the ones a government takes when it's afraid its people will revolt because (via that old psych tenet called projection) that's what they'd be doing had they been treated the way they are treating us.
After all, who knows better how they've screwed us than the ones doing it?
I can't wait. Any engineer can probably buy the development kit for the retail side of this, hack it, and walk around creating fake transactions off any phone that has this. Wonderful! Never have to do honest work again!
Of course, you'd have to have mules etc to cover the backtrail. One thing about digital money -- someone has to "collect" the value some way, and that's just about always easy to trace. So you need some fall guys, because some will be caught.
You've just asked a question I and some other smart people have been thinking long and hard about for a long time, but every time someone comes up with what they think is a good answer to it -- someone else easily shoots it full of holes.
It's quite frustrating, given human nature and all, and the nature of evolving tech that means that even many of the smarter people at some point won't really have much to do that's worth paying them for as automation takes over more and more.
I've even brought it up here, but it seems there's not many in the audience who even understand the question.
I don't think this is a conservative/liberal issue. I don't think it's a religious issue. Human nature figures in hard, as does capitalism. We're farting around the edges of this problem, but in the limit, there's no motivation for someone to build this giant, fully automated factory that turns out all the world needs (well the stuff to survive, not arts and culture), because at that point, the capitalist system has no way to reward that guy -- no one has a paying job!
My own leanings are conservative (not republican!), non-welfare, and Christian, but I don't think that matters to intelligent discussion of this question, actually, and comparisons between this and that belief system just bring noise to it, not answers.
I don't see how you fix the human nature problem. Create a way for those who are mostly a waste of time to get paid to stay out of the way of the rest, and many who could contribute will find ways to get on the dole when the system can't yet support that -- after all, they are smart. You can see that now with SS disability, a lot of smart people know how to "fail" the tests for psychological issues and I know about 3 who did that -- who are some of the smartest and potentially productive people I know.
Capitalism is the only system that ever worked, ever -- even in communist countries. But this whole concept breaks it, or more accurately, can't happen under capitalism naturally. Unless I'm missing something here.
You raise a very difficult issue which has completely stumped many of the best minds I know, and they have diverse backgrounds and belief systems. We do share the idea that the star trek world, where no one really has to work would be nice to have happen, and would like to promote it -- but how to get there from here? That's the big one.
Newton worked for the military, in fact. It's amazing how many of the old greats did. Perhaps this is because as many nations have found out -- it's the second best military that costs the most (you lose everything). Same idea as with other "legal" violence (eg lawyers). I know that when I worked as a beltway bandit, we got to do things no one in the normal science community got to play with -- too speculative and so on. But just in case, either the military or the intelligence community thought a lot more things were at least "worth a look into". It was great fun (for us)!
If you set the text size to any but too tiny to read, the box on the left (stories, recent, etc) cuts off the first word or few of everything.....don't you guys test at all? Believe it or not, we're not all 13 years old and some of us have to + to get readable text!
That's borked now.
And I, as an employer want an honest days *results* for an honest day's pay. I don't care how much work it is. If you're intelligent and knowledgeable, it might not be much work for you. I don't grade on effort, that's total BS, and neither do our customers who are the ultimate source of your pay. If you can get 10 times done in a day more than a normal guy, I'll gladly pay 10x as much too. Saves me management costs. If you turn out to be the type of person I can hand a vision or mission statement to and say "go get it done and let me know if there are problems" and you can do that, I'll pay much more. One big flaw in a lot of people is they are afraid to make their own decisions, and just stop if they get stuck, waiting for management to notice and pull them out of sitting there doing nothing, but still expecting pay for it. Not here, pal. Like it or not, the world is competitive, and if someone else can do the necessary things to actually generate more value than they cost to hire...they do well, if not, to heck with them. And sadly, the real tragedy is that more people fall in to the latter category than the former.
though it had a short refresh time spec, would actually hold nearly all the bits for up to a minute, and we made early "digital" cameras out of them, charging up all the bits and letting light discharge the lit up pixels quicker than the others. It was a bit of a bear to figure out the pixel layout -- it wasn't in order, but we did it and even got to two bits or so per pixel resolution by taking more than one shot after a charge, different exposure times.
One wonders why someone doesn't just work along those lines. Seems to me for most uses simply increasing the refresh time interval would save tons of power, and also complexity. If you could get it to a couple of days, I'd think that would be fine for most all portable devices, and you'd just use cheap flash as the disk, like now. I am guessing you'd lose some density, as the older, less dense DRAMs had large cells that stored more charge per bit, and that new lower voltage semis are also leakier, but it might be worth looking into anyway.
I recall one case where the company I worked for designed some very early disk cache controllers. Well, actually I did about 90% of that. We used DRAM, but simply arranged the code so the basic idling operation (for example, looking for io requests or sorting the cache lookup table) took care of refresh anyway, wasn't too hard at all to manage that, and of course a block read or write always did a full page refresh. Made the thing a little bit faster, as there was never a conflict between refresh and real use in the bargain.
This would also be trivial an any current opsys to get done. Probably happens by accident except in real pathological cases.
I left too, and the above AC is telling it straight. No big deal. Hard to get permission to visit some adversary countries for a few years if you knew a lot of secrets, otherwise, they pretty much ignore you after that. They once called me a few years after I'd left to help them with something in my specialty, that was it.
The trouble with conspiracy theories around government agencies is that, well, they are government agencies. Not all that good at what they do, with some small exceptions, and mostly terrible about keeping things secret after they do them. Some secrets last years, but most of them are too boring to actually talk about, and are mostly "policy" which means, some incompetent fool classified something to cover his lousy (or unethical) job performance. We're not working with supermen or angels anymore than any other part of society there.
There's already a tax on buggy software, it's just paid by the wrong side of the equation, the user. Bruce Schneier has a ton of stuff on the issue, and as long as the makers aren't paying the price, it'll never happen.
http://www.schneier.com/
The thing is, at the point of perfect security, no system is usable -- there is always a trade-off of some kind. This sounds so hard to adjudicate, I kind of doubt it will ever happen -- and at least one software outfit that has the most issues also has enough lobbyists to keep things the way they want them -- the billions of lost dollars yearly due to their bugs will still be with the users, not them.
As long as people can pass off the costs of insecurity, there will be little to no progress in the field. Anyone remember the British banks claiming in court they were liable for hacked chips and pins because they were "perfect" so the customer must have made a mistake? As long as that sort of crap flies, why should they invest in security? Good security is hard.
Yes, batteries are terrible, especially when used at high rates in and out vs amp hour capacity. I know because I've lived off the grid with solar PV and batteries since about 1982 or so. I've used lead acid, nicads, and various other things. I'd call that some fairly real life experience. One learns more than you'd want to about battery issues, to say the least.
But they're not *that* bad, just lousy. More like you lose about 40% round trip, not 75% as you say, and that 40% is at end of life, when you get disgusted and buy new ones. Now that's at lower cyclic rates, eg capacity in 10 or more hours. The Li Ion ones are better for fast things, but still not great. But neither do you lose half each way....until they're about at end of life. The real sad story is that they're not going to have the claimed cycle life and a lot of buyers of cars where most of the cost was that battery are going to be real unhappy when they find out it doesn't live all that long and costs nearly the full car price to replace...even though like any car, the value of the basic car goes down quick the instant it comes out of the showroom.
The issue with a bunch of the other storage mechanisms is explosion risks. Gasoline burns, but only as fast as it can get air. Pressurized things (look at the safety history of early steam) let all the energy go in a fraction of a second....so, maybe OK in a system buried in a pit or something, but not so great in a crash. In a normal crash, you only release at most about 10 seconds worth of full engine power in the crash alone -- then maybe the fuel burns slowly. (reality isn't televised) Now consider what would happen if it was an hour's worth, all the car's potential energy released at once like a broken flywheel would do....not a pretty thought.
Which is another reason why things like liquid fuel will be around awhile, even though there are plenty of reasons to object to them. You don't have to carry the oxidizer, which with gasoline works out to about a 15::1 weight advantage...You burn about 16 times the weight of air (or at least that weight, which includes the nitrogen, goes through the system) for every weight of gasoline, which is what makes IC engines practical at all. With a battery, you have to carry both, in effect. With mechanical storage, you always have full total energy ready to go "bang" in an instant, not so safe.
We have a long way to go to get out of the woods on this problem, I've been studying it for a lifetime, and there's nothing new on the periodic table that's going to magically solve this anytime soon. LiIon already has nearly the energy density of high explosives....that's about the limit of chemistry, real or imaginable.
Well, perfect *anything* isn't reality. A perfect battery would also be 100% efficient, you know. In reality, you lose so much thermal energy that this doesn't work all that well -- and the piston and cylinder remain the main things hot after you let the gas out -- lost energy at some point when that leaks back into the environment. In any small system they have much more thermal mass than the gas does.
As a scientist who lives off the grid on solar PV (for decades now), I've pretty much investigated every way there is to store energy, and it's not so simple a problem. Vanadium redox batteries (utterly impractical for autos and that membrane ain't cheap) look about the best so far in terms of simple and good while being efficient. Most things that do heat storage are only efficient if huge enough that the surface area to volume ratio can be really small.
The above approach might work out fine for small amounts of energy and for short times, however, and having some is better than nothing -- it probably is pretty reliable unlike most batteries which tend to have much shorter cycle life than is claimed. I think we're going to see a big backlash against battery cars at some point because of that one.
Let a bunch of ignorant college kids try and use COTS stuff in their smaller, faster, cheaper, better plans. Almost to a man, they didn't understand certain really important issues, as in -- things that work fine fanless in air burn up in a heartbeat in a good vacuum from their own power when the only way to lose heat is by radiation -- which doesn't remove much till things get very hot indeed. Even micropower opamp chips die in vacuum. After all, there are such things as one watt incandescent bulbs....that get white hot with one watt input, and some of them aren't even in a vacuum! Ok, spread that heat around a 1 watt cpu, which is bigger -- and it's still above the destruction temperature of a chip -- well above.
So, unless they customize the boards for conductive heat removal and some temp control extras, it ain't going to fly. It's been done and evidently the UK guys don't know about it (all too common these days) or don't have a clue what that problem is.
But if they couldn't just buy the parts and make/program their own, they're not smart enough to succeed anyway -- those other problems like bit-glitches caused by radiation and so on will kill them if they don't do a very robust software design with various safeguards and redundancies. Why be stuck with a cel phone circuit board when you could just buy the same parts and add the stuff you really need on the mission all on the same board?
Back in the day, I worked on some stuff that was going into birds. They made us take this class on "What works and doesn't work in space". It was killer enlightening about what the issues are. Some of it has been obviated by new tech -- for example "no electrolytic caps" -- we have ceramics now that serve fine and are probably in most all new tech. "no potentiometers" "absolute minimum connectors" and an entire other course about how things wind up cold welding together in vacuum and most lubes don't work (including surprisingly, graphite which requires an oxygen layer to be slippery).
Things like the tempco monster when using dissimilar materials need extra thought so things don't simply warp or explode at big temperature swings as well.
So, NASA has been there, and done that, and even they forgot some of the lessons when they pissed off most of their real engineers and substituted young punk academics with no real world experience...
Sure would be nice if they did stumble onto something, for example, see my user name and what I do myself as a hobby...
Here's the main reason I doubt it and it's real simple.
They didn't get a patent because they were so vague the patent examiner couldn't figure out what they were doing, and they haven't released ANY details so I could go for duping their process.
Real scientists almost always encourage duplication -- even Pons et all did. I've run into some idiots who want to patent everything first, but in this case I don't see that being real wise, or effective - for one thing, there's so much money involved in a success that there's really not much to sweat, the speaking tour alone would make one quite rich, and I'm sure any big outfit would love to give a nice lab to a goose who lays golden eggs. Second, patent or not, the guys with the good lawyers will get it from you anyway, they can eat your lunch anytime. You have to be in this because you love it, and want to improve the planet, not for the bucks. Both risk and payoff are just too large for a few mortals to handle.
Yup, that's exactly what I did, and since I managed to set up a very low cost structure in the first place, the IRS didn't bat an eye about me doing all sorts of nice things for myself in a deductible way. Even with everything and the kitchen sink thrown in as deductions, we still didn't have all that many compared to most small businesses as a percentage, so they figured we were being extra nice to them.
Being a wage slave is just stupid under the current laws. Start your own business and be a contractor type. At least that way it's you who decides what it's important to spend the money on, not some HR jerk with a "policy". You might make more, or you might make less (though that probably means you were overpaid as a wage slave....and didn't deserve it). But either way it'll be on you -- no guts, no glory.
The best law money can buy is at the root of most of this. And it's not really even the best laws possible for those short-sighted corporations that buy them....if they got wise and bought better laws, we'd all be better off, actually. See, they are into getting more of the pie, and keeping any upstart competition out -- not increasing the total pie. Pretty mean spirited and not really good for anyone.
All you have to do to see this is look at the patent system, (or trademarks or copyrights). The big boys patent everything under the sun...even stuff they'd almost have to know there's considerable prior art on. Then they cross license these at pretty nominal rates, which in effect locks out all possibility of a small outfit innovating without running afoul of some patent (even if in a peripheral way). Even if it's a "bad" patent, it can (and usually does) take years and millions to get it tossed out - no small outfit can do that.
Another example of the pattern is the mergers and aquisitions in the tech business -- rather than increase market share via innovation, the big boys are simply buying up companies that already have some market share, not so much to get the new hot tech -- they wipe those out, see above, but to simply add to the customer list without having to do anything actually good for us.
I don't think you really want to see deflation, you should study how the monetary system works a little more. Without at least a slightly positive inflation number, the whole idea of lending/investing at a profit falls apart, and people just stop buying anything they don't absolutely have to because it's going to be cheaper later. So investments get pulled, banks (even the small and more moral ones) all fail, and due to the lack of any demand, employers wind up laying off all but skeleton staffs. Some other way to get where you want to be has to be figured out instead. Real deflation is a disaster for everyone who isn't already sitting on a mound of appreciating money...and those people don't need help at this point.
We are at the cusp of a place where it's possible to envision the star trek work where no one really has to work at all. Almost everything that actually needs to be done could in theory already be automated and mechanized, and it's happening to an extent that finally is actually costing productive jobs; there are still plenty of people getting paid to produce essentially nothing of value.
And, there are still plenty of people willing to work to produce things of value, but they can't compete with the machines.
If you do the old reductio ad absurdium on this, the end result is one super rich dude owning the one big factory that makes everything, and the robots that mine and recycle things for new raw materials. This will never happen due to human stupidity, however. Because that guy will realize he can't get paid for doing it in any meaningful way, so it's not worth it to do it and free us all from having to slog through life for the necessities.
We're farting around at the margins of this now....I know no good solution to the issue, and I'm smart and have thought about this hard for a long time. All the simple stuff that's come up as a possibility is real easy to shoot holes in a mile wide, because we not only are stuck with capitalism (the only system that ever worked) but human nature, which changes very slowly at best.
There's exactly one good reason to have an inheritance tax, and it only kicks in for really large amounts of money given to pretty young people.
The reason is that it isn't good for society to have a bunch of young, rich, loose cannons kicking around taking stances politically (and with the money to buy laws) that seem right to people who've never had to live more like the rest of us. I'm not talking about a couple million or the family business here, but real serious money, such as some of the early magnates left to their kids -- who then used it in unwise or immoral ways, sometimes without even knowing it.
In my own family, we had a couple "rich uncles" who left their kids just enough to have a bit of cushion in life, but not enough to just retire and sail around in yachts. All were happy with that, and it really seemed like the right way to go. The rest went to charity and so on.
My own parents left me about half a million. I didn't touch it for years, but hadn't set up any retirement due to the way I lived, both well off and poor, almost always self employed and needing the money cushion to make sure I could do things like pay my contractors if a bad month happened. So now I'm retired on that and trading it in the markets to keep up the principal and so on -- and I "pay" myself about 30k a year off it. Since I wisely worked hard to set myself up, that's actually really good money! Two new cars (paid for) and 45 acres and buildings and toys (all paid for). What else need money for anyway? Easier to get laid as a good musician than a rich guy -- been both.
Yup, having been both rich and poor, mainly by choice, I'd have to agree in general. When you're paying a lot of taxes in dollars, but still have plenty left over for a decent lifestyle and no big worries, it really doesn't hurt as much as when you're barely making it and have to pay SS and other taxes -- when they cost you good meals.
It's only when you think that middle-high income is an entitlement to yachts, building a huge fortune, and general greed and having to always have the very nicest things, then the rich-tax hurts. But like Buddha said, that pain is because you want wrong things.
When I was rich (which includes now) -- I still wear white socks, old clothes (they're comfortable!), and until recently drove around in cars that most would describe as "beaters" and fixed them myself. I don't have a big screen TV, since watching TV is a waste of time and worse -- it affects how you think and the adverts are maybe not even the worst of it in terms of thinking you need this and that you don't have already. I do have a few really killer computers...and a physics lab, and an EE lab, and a bunch of other "stuff" from musical instruments to guns to every tool known to man -- plenty for me, even though 3 of my four buildings don't have plumbing at all. It's just not important to me or my wife (yeah, I know, on slashdot you're not supposed to know about women).
Yes, you're most certainly right. Before I did the consulting business gig(s) that made me say, upper middle class, I did odd jobs while homesteading -- you name it (it was educational to work in a bunch of different fields anyway, and helpful in other ways). So I made just above poverty level -- and the only taxes I paid for years were SS -- no income tax or very little. As a self employed kinda guy, that SS is killer since you pay both sides of it, whereas an employee normally only pays half the total.
So, when I went into real business, you bet everyone who worked here was a contractor. I laid out what I could pay them that way vs as employees, where I'd be paying half the SS, all the unemployment and disability comp, and so forth, since the money was the same coming in either way.
In at least 10 years of doing that, not one person has ever wanted to be an employee once they understood what that cost them in income. They all would rather just have the cash and manage those kinds of things themselves. Now these were smart guys -- maybe not representative of the public at large, but that speaks to how messed up our so called "representative democracy" is, at least to me. And why there are problems with jobs of the normal kind these days -- no one with half a brain wants what are called employees. Did you know that at least in the state I live in, if you lay someone off who is an employee, you have to still pay their unemployment bennie back to the state? To hire them in the first place, you have to put some money into the "insurance fund" - and it's a lot of money. As soon as anyone draws from that -- you gotta pay it back!
I'd bet in the current job environment that a heck of a lot of people would like to be working without all that government add on costs, and that current policy costs huge amounts of possible paying work. Even in good times it seemed awfully stupid for any professional to be either an employer or employee. I guess you could make a case for the less intellectually endowed wage slaves to have those bennies, but really....even they would probably be better off with the money if they had a clue how to manage it (and not just get into ever-deeper debt).
I was actually told these very words early in my employment career by my manager at Bunker-Ramo (when they existed). I was running a bunch of new hires, and thought they were nuts borrowing money to "keep up with the joneses" and had mentioned this to him.
He said flat out -- it's a good thing, we don't need to worry about them quitting or ignoring encouragement to work lots harder as a result of their debt load.
I guess the lesson sunk in. Not too long after that, I got myself debt free, cut up the credit cards, and have lived on cash only for the last few decades -- and own my land and buildings outright. Yeah, I wasn't always holding the newest bit of shiny bling...and some people thought I was nuts to quit my high paying job at one point to homestead in the boonies. Though it was hard work, it was also fun, and now I feel pretty rich by any definition -- good friends, good neighbors, no worries, and oh yeah, I have money and things too, some of which are very very nice things for an old geek. Once I'd built up my homestead, I got bored and re-entered tech work as one of the very early telecommuters, as a consultant, and pretty much did similar to the above, though in this case I did pay myself the bulk of income as money. Hired a couple guys, we split the dough after buying and deducting every cool toy we could think of, and since we were in a near zero cost situation and reported much more of our money as income (percent wise) than the norm, the IRS was happy with that.
As in, we got a trailer free for pulling it off some other land, which became the office. Of course, we needed to install and winterize it, so that ~$1k was tax free. And heat it -- tax free (even though I also lived in the back room). And provide it with electricity off the grid -- tax free. And on and on (fix plumbing, whatever). Of course we always had to have a network of up to the minute hot rod computers and all the accessories you could name, so we all got new fancy machines every few months, and so on. Since all that wasn't hardly 10% of what we brought in gross -- IRS happy, us even happier...most businesses would barely have broken even and would have had to pay the guys a lot less to get even close, and that's the model they are looking at -- they had no clue that with zero basic costs this could be so profitable so easily. Heck, we even deducted site visit travel costs and lunch when we went to meet customers and it still wasn't squat. Made 3-4 guys well enough off to retire if they wanted, but as far as I know, I'm the only one who did -- smart guys get bored? Dunno, I do physics as a hobby, it's never boring, and still program to support that effort.
Amen. I helped develop the first VOIP applications and hardware, and for internal use (say inside a large corp building) we did it essentially P2P, in the sense that the "phone directory" was built up without a central server, dynamically. It was pretty cool, but the CEO we developed this for put the snuff on the idea for larger area use -- no way to get in the middle and rape people for the directory service.
Slashdot Mirror
I was unaware of that, can you point me at any paper or research that shows this? I'd guess that if true, no one noticed as the unbound lifetime is far too short to get one bound by the time you slow it down enough.
.
String or M theory presents the possibility of a theory that doesn't need a ton of constants, just a description of a Calibu-Yau geometry, and the rest "falls out". It's that description that is currently lacking, the search space is enormous and makes a computer search for the answer to the traveling salesman problem look trivial. So yeah, it's far from proved, because it's far from done, and that step isn't in the cards till the right shape for that space is discovered.
.
The multiverse also solves some otherwise very nasty problems in similar fashion, or it could.
.
Neither is proved, of course, but they hold out the hope that a theory of everything is even possible, and the light was getting really dim on that -- so we can hope. All such things of course deserve skepticism, but until proved wrong, they are in some sense more right than the current models which we KNOW have to be wrong because they can't be reconciled with one another at the limits. They are just useful until we find something better.
.
Such is science.
Besides, if someone learns why, well, that's more knowledge in our bag o' tricks, eh? And that is what science is really all about.
Good job by our friends to the North, I say -- Props, guys. Denigrating their equipment is ignorant, do you think it takes a better or worse scientist to get to meaningful results on the new shiny stuff, or the older stuff, anyway. Did someone with fancier stuff find this first elsewhere? Then who's got the good scientists, again?
So what's interesting is that they were able to do this at all -- either they found a way to extend muon life (unlikely, or that would be the main news here), or they worked insanely fast to get their results before the decay.
This partisanship is the old scam all over again -- get total polarization and force people to "choose" between just two utterly not-acceptable alternatives, when without it many more choices are quite possible, some of them reasonable. But for example, while I'm sure some people really do believe in their extreme stances on abortion, it's a sure thing meal ticket for activists to get donations around, and goes on forever because they don't want it to be solved -- they want the meal tickets.
It's a pretty old game. And vilifying bad guys is a trick long used by governments to keep themselves in power. One wonders if for example, Bush and Putin had a good laugh over drinks about it a time or two -- when we were pushing for that missile defense in their backyard that anyone who understands knows couldn't catch Russian missiles from behind. It obviously helped them both to have a fake controversy. Once you start looking at the world with that knowledge you see a lot most people miss.
After all, who knows better how they've screwed us than the ones doing it?
I can't wait. Any engineer can probably buy the development kit for the retail side of this, hack it, and walk around creating fake transactions off any phone that has this. Wonderful! Never have to do honest work again! Of course, you'd have to have mules etc to cover the backtrail. One thing about digital money -- someone has to "collect" the value some way, and that's just about always easy to trace. So you need some fall guys, because some will be caught.
I don't think this is a conservative/liberal issue. I don't think it's a religious issue. Human nature figures in hard, as does capitalism. We're farting around the edges of this problem, but in the limit, there's no motivation for someone to build this giant, fully automated factory that turns out all the world needs (well the stuff to survive, not arts and culture), because at that point, the capitalist system has no way to reward that guy -- no one has a paying job!
My own leanings are conservative (not republican!), non-welfare, and Christian, but I don't think that matters to intelligent discussion of this question, actually, and comparisons between this and that belief system just bring noise to it, not answers.
I don't see how you fix the human nature problem. Create a way for those who are mostly a waste of time to get paid to stay out of the way of the rest, and many who could contribute will find ways to get on the dole when the system can't yet support that -- after all, they are smart. You can see that now with SS disability, a lot of smart people know how to "fail" the tests for psychological issues and I know about 3 who did that -- who are some of the smartest and potentially productive people I know.
Capitalism is the only system that ever worked, ever -- even in communist countries. But this whole concept breaks it, or more accurately, can't happen under capitalism naturally. Unless I'm missing something here.
You raise a very difficult issue which has completely stumped many of the best minds I know, and they have diverse backgrounds and belief systems. We do share the idea that the star trek world, where no one really has to work would be nice to have happen, and would like to promote it -- but how to get there from here? That's the big one.
Newton worked for the military, in fact. It's amazing how many of the old greats did. Perhaps this is because as many nations have found out -- it's the second best military that costs the most (you lose everything). Same idea as with other "legal" violence (eg lawyers). I know that when I worked as a beltway bandit, we got to do things no one in the normal science community got to play with -- too speculative and so on. But just in case, either the military or the intelligence community thought a lot more things were at least "worth a look into". It was great fun (for us)!
If you set the text size to any but too tiny to read, the box on the left (stories, recent, etc) cuts off the first word or few of everything.....don't you guys test at all? Believe it or not, we're not all 13 years old and some of us have to + to get readable text! That's borked now.
And I, as an employer want an honest days *results* for an honest day's pay. I don't care how much work it is. If you're intelligent and knowledgeable, it might not be much work for you. I don't grade on effort, that's total BS, and neither do our customers who are the ultimate source of your pay. If you can get 10 times done in a day more than a normal guy, I'll gladly pay 10x as much too. Saves me management costs. If you turn out to be the type of person I can hand a vision or mission statement to and say "go get it done and let me know if there are problems" and you can do that, I'll pay much more. One big flaw in a lot of people is they are afraid to make their own decisions, and just stop if they get stuck, waiting for management to notice and pull them out of sitting there doing nothing, but still expecting pay for it. Not here, pal. Like it or not, the world is competitive, and if someone else can do the necessary things to actually generate more value than they cost to hire...they do well, if not, to heck with them. And sadly, the real tragedy is that more people fall in to the latter category than the former.
though it had a short refresh time spec, would actually hold nearly all the bits for up to a minute, and we made early "digital" cameras out of them, charging up all the bits and letting light discharge the lit up pixels quicker than the others. It was a bit of a bear to figure out the pixel layout -- it wasn't in order, but we did it and even got to two bits or so per pixel resolution by taking more than one shot after a charge, different exposure times. One wonders why someone doesn't just work along those lines. Seems to me for most uses simply increasing the refresh time interval would save tons of power, and also complexity. If you could get it to a couple of days, I'd think that would be fine for most all portable devices, and you'd just use cheap flash as the disk, like now. I am guessing you'd lose some density, as the older, less dense DRAMs had large cells that stored more charge per bit, and that new lower voltage semis are also leakier, but it might be worth looking into anyway. I recall one case where the company I worked for designed some very early disk cache controllers. Well, actually I did about 90% of that. We used DRAM, but simply arranged the code so the basic idling operation (for example, looking for io requests or sorting the cache lookup table) took care of refresh anyway, wasn't too hard at all to manage that, and of course a block read or write always did a full page refresh. Made the thing a little bit faster, as there was never a conflict between refresh and real use in the bargain. This would also be trivial an any current opsys to get done. Probably happens by accident except in real pathological cases.
The trouble with conspiracy theories around government agencies is that, well, they are government agencies. Not all that good at what they do, with some small exceptions, and mostly terrible about keeping things secret after they do them. Some secrets last years, but most of them are too boring to actually talk about, and are mostly "policy" which means, some incompetent fool classified something to cover his lousy (or unethical) job performance. We're not working with supermen or angels anymore than any other part of society there.
There's already a tax on buggy software, it's just paid by the wrong side of the equation, the user. Bruce Schneier has a ton of stuff on the issue, and as long as the makers aren't paying the price, it'll never happen. http://www.schneier.com/
The thing is, at the point of perfect security, no system is usable -- there is always a trade-off of some kind. This sounds so hard to adjudicate, I kind of doubt it will ever happen -- and at least one software outfit that has the most issues also has enough lobbyists to keep things the way they want them -- the billions of lost dollars yearly due to their bugs will still be with the users, not them.
As long as people can pass off the costs of insecurity, there will be little to no progress in the field. Anyone remember the British banks claiming in court they were liable for hacked chips and pins because they were "perfect" so the customer must have made a mistake? As long as that sort of crap flies, why should they invest in security? Good security is hard.
But they're not *that* bad, just lousy. More like you lose about 40% round trip, not 75% as you say, and that 40% is at end of life, when you get disgusted and buy new ones. Now that's at lower cyclic rates, eg capacity in 10 or more hours. The Li Ion ones are better for fast things, but still not great. But neither do you lose half each way....until they're about at end of life. The real sad story is that they're not going to have the claimed cycle life and a lot of buyers of cars where most of the cost was that battery are going to be real unhappy when they find out it doesn't live all that long and costs nearly the full car price to replace...even though like any car, the value of the basic car goes down quick the instant it comes out of the showroom.
The issue with a bunch of the other storage mechanisms is explosion risks. Gasoline burns, but only as fast as it can get air. Pressurized things (look at the safety history of early steam) let all the energy go in a fraction of a second....so, maybe OK in a system buried in a pit or something, but not so great in a crash. In a normal crash, you only release at most about 10 seconds worth of full engine power in the crash alone -- then maybe the fuel burns slowly. (reality isn't televised) Now consider what would happen if it was an hour's worth, all the car's potential energy released at once like a broken flywheel would do....not a pretty thought.
Which is another reason why things like liquid fuel will be around awhile, even though there are plenty of reasons to object to them. You don't have to carry the oxidizer, which with gasoline works out to about a 15::1 weight advantage...You burn about 16 times the weight of air (or at least that weight, which includes the nitrogen, goes through the system) for every weight of gasoline, which is what makes IC engines practical at all. With a battery, you have to carry both, in effect. With mechanical storage, you always have full total energy ready to go "bang" in an instant, not so safe.
We have a long way to go to get out of the woods on this problem, I've been studying it for a lifetime, and there's nothing new on the periodic table that's going to magically solve this anytime soon. LiIon already has nearly the energy density of high explosives....that's about the limit of chemistry, real or imaginable.
As a scientist who lives off the grid on solar PV (for decades now), I've pretty much investigated every way there is to store energy, and it's not so simple a problem. Vanadium redox batteries (utterly impractical for autos and that membrane ain't cheap) look about the best so far in terms of simple and good while being efficient. Most things that do heat storage are only efficient if huge enough that the surface area to volume ratio can be really small.
The above approach might work out fine for small amounts of energy and for short times, however, and having some is better than nothing -- it probably is pretty reliable unlike most batteries which tend to have much shorter cycle life than is claimed. I think we're going to see a big backlash against battery cars at some point because of that one.
So, unless they customize the boards for conductive heat removal and some temp control extras, it ain't going to fly. It's been done and evidently the UK guys don't know about it (all too common these days) or don't have a clue what that problem is.
But if they couldn't just buy the parts and make/program their own, they're not smart enough to succeed anyway -- those other problems like bit-glitches caused by radiation and so on will kill them if they don't do a very robust software design with various safeguards and redundancies. Why be stuck with a cel phone circuit board when you could just buy the same parts and add the stuff you really need on the mission all on the same board?
Back in the day, I worked on some stuff that was going into birds. They made us take this class on "What works and doesn't work in space". It was killer enlightening about what the issues are. Some of it has been obviated by new tech -- for example "no electrolytic caps" -- we have ceramics now that serve fine and are probably in most all new tech. "no potentiometers" "absolute minimum connectors" and an entire other course about how things wind up cold welding together in vacuum and most lubes don't work (including surprisingly, graphite which requires an oxygen layer to be slippery). Things like the tempco monster when using dissimilar materials need extra thought so things don't simply warp or explode at big temperature swings as well.
So, NASA has been there, and done that, and even they forgot some of the lessons when they pissed off most of their real engineers and substituted young punk academics with no real world experience...
Here goes history rhyming again.
Here's the main reason I doubt it and it's real simple. They didn't get a patent because they were so vague the patent examiner couldn't figure out what they were doing, and they haven't released ANY details so I could go for duping their process.
Real scientists almost always encourage duplication -- even Pons et all did. I've run into some idiots who want to patent everything first, but in this case I don't see that being real wise, or effective - for one thing, there's so much money involved in a success that there's really not much to sweat, the speaking tour alone would make one quite rich, and I'm sure any big outfit would love to give a nice lab to a goose who lays golden eggs. Second, patent or not, the guys with the good lawyers will get it from you anyway, they can eat your lunch anytime. You have to be in this because you love it, and want to improve the planet, not for the bucks. Both risk and payoff are just too large for a few mortals to handle.
Being a wage slave is just stupid under the current laws. Start your own business and be a contractor type. At least that way it's you who decides what it's important to spend the money on, not some HR jerk with a "policy". You might make more, or you might make less (though that probably means you were overpaid as a wage slave....and didn't deserve it). But either way it'll be on you -- no guts, no glory.
All you have to do to see this is look at the patent system, (or trademarks or copyrights). The big boys patent everything under the sun...even stuff they'd almost have to know there's considerable prior art on. Then they cross license these at pretty nominal rates, which in effect locks out all possibility of a small outfit innovating without running afoul of some patent (even if in a peripheral way). Even if it's a "bad" patent, it can (and usually does) take years and millions to get it tossed out - no small outfit can do that.
Another example of the pattern is the mergers and aquisitions in the tech business -- rather than increase market share via innovation, the big boys are simply buying up companies that already have some market share, not so much to get the new hot tech -- they wipe those out, see above, but to simply add to the customer list without having to do anything actually good for us.
I don't think you really want to see deflation, you should study how the monetary system works a little more. Without at least a slightly positive inflation number, the whole idea of lending/investing at a profit falls apart, and people just stop buying anything they don't absolutely have to because it's going to be cheaper later. So investments get pulled, banks (even the small and more moral ones) all fail, and due to the lack of any demand, employers wind up laying off all but skeleton staffs. Some other way to get where you want to be has to be figured out instead. Real deflation is a disaster for everyone who isn't already sitting on a mound of appreciating money...and those people don't need help at this point.
We are at the cusp of a place where it's possible to envision the star trek work where no one really has to work at all. Almost everything that actually needs to be done could in theory already be automated and mechanized, and it's happening to an extent that finally is actually costing productive jobs; there are still plenty of people getting paid to produce essentially nothing of value. And, there are still plenty of people willing to work to produce things of value, but they can't compete with the machines.
If you do the old reductio ad absurdium on this, the end result is one super rich dude owning the one big factory that makes everything, and the robots that mine and recycle things for new raw materials. This will never happen due to human stupidity, however. Because that guy will realize he can't get paid for doing it in any meaningful way, so it's not worth it to do it and free us all from having to slog through life for the necessities.
We're farting around at the margins of this now....I know no good solution to the issue, and I'm smart and have thought about this hard for a long time. All the simple stuff that's come up as a possibility is real easy to shoot holes in a mile wide, because we not only are stuck with capitalism (the only system that ever worked) but human nature, which changes very slowly at best.
The reason is that it isn't good for society to have a bunch of young, rich, loose cannons kicking around taking stances politically (and with the money to buy laws) that seem right to people who've never had to live more like the rest of us. I'm not talking about a couple million or the family business here, but real serious money, such as some of the early magnates left to their kids -- who then used it in unwise or immoral ways, sometimes without even knowing it.
In my own family, we had a couple "rich uncles" who left their kids just enough to have a bit of cushion in life, but not enough to just retire and sail around in yachts. All were happy with that, and it really seemed like the right way to go. The rest went to charity and so on.
My own parents left me about half a million. I didn't touch it for years, but hadn't set up any retirement due to the way I lived, both well off and poor, almost always self employed and needing the money cushion to make sure I could do things like pay my contractors if a bad month happened. So now I'm retired on that and trading it in the markets to keep up the principal and so on -- and I "pay" myself about 30k a year off it. Since I wisely worked hard to set myself up, that's actually really good money! Two new cars (paid for) and 45 acres and buildings and toys (all paid for). What else need money for anyway? Easier to get laid as a good musician than a rich guy -- been both.
It's only when you think that middle-high income is an entitlement to yachts, building a huge fortune, and general greed and having to always have the very nicest things, then the rich-tax hurts. But like Buddha said, that pain is because you want wrong things.
When I was rich (which includes now) -- I still wear white socks, old clothes (they're comfortable!), and until recently drove around in cars that most would describe as "beaters" and fixed them myself. I don't have a big screen TV, since watching TV is a waste of time and worse -- it affects how you think and the adverts are maybe not even the worst of it in terms of thinking you need this and that you don't have already. I do have a few really killer computers...and a physics lab, and an EE lab, and a bunch of other "stuff" from musical instruments to guns to every tool known to man -- plenty for me, even though 3 of my four buildings don't have plumbing at all. It's just not important to me or my wife (yeah, I know, on slashdot you're not supposed to know about women).
So, when I went into real business, you bet everyone who worked here was a contractor. I laid out what I could pay them that way vs as employees, where I'd be paying half the SS, all the unemployment and disability comp, and so forth, since the money was the same coming in either way.
In at least 10 years of doing that, not one person has ever wanted to be an employee once they understood what that cost them in income. They all would rather just have the cash and manage those kinds of things themselves. Now these were smart guys -- maybe not representative of the public at large, but that speaks to how messed up our so called "representative democracy" is, at least to me. And why there are problems with jobs of the normal kind these days -- no one with half a brain wants what are called employees. Did you know that at least in the state I live in, if you lay someone off who is an employee, you have to still pay their unemployment bennie back to the state? To hire them in the first place, you have to put some money into the "insurance fund" - and it's a lot of money. As soon as anyone draws from that -- you gotta pay it back!
I'd bet in the current job environment that a heck of a lot of people would like to be working without all that government add on costs, and that current policy costs huge amounts of possible paying work. Even in good times it seemed awfully stupid for any professional to be either an employer or employee. I guess you could make a case for the less intellectually endowed wage slaves to have those bennies, but really....even they would probably be better off with the money if they had a clue how to manage it (and not just get into ever-deeper debt).
He said flat out -- it's a good thing, we don't need to worry about them quitting or ignoring encouragement to work lots harder as a result of their debt load.
I guess the lesson sunk in. Not too long after that, I got myself debt free, cut up the credit cards, and have lived on cash only for the last few decades -- and own my land and buildings outright. Yeah, I wasn't always holding the newest bit of shiny bling...and some people thought I was nuts to quit my high paying job at one point to homestead in the boonies. Though it was hard work, it was also fun, and now I feel pretty rich by any definition -- good friends, good neighbors, no worries, and oh yeah, I have money and things too, some of which are very very nice things for an old geek. Once I'd built up my homestead, I got bored and re-entered tech work as one of the very early telecommuters, as a consultant, and pretty much did similar to the above, though in this case I did pay myself the bulk of income as money. Hired a couple guys, we split the dough after buying and deducting every cool toy we could think of, and since we were in a near zero cost situation and reported much more of our money as income (percent wise) than the norm, the IRS was happy with that.
As in, we got a trailer free for pulling it off some other land, which became the office. Of course, we needed to install and winterize it, so that ~$1k was tax free. And heat it -- tax free (even though I also lived in the back room). And provide it with electricity off the grid -- tax free. And on and on (fix plumbing, whatever). Of course we always had to have a network of up to the minute hot rod computers and all the accessories you could name, so we all got new fancy machines every few months, and so on. Since all that wasn't hardly 10% of what we brought in gross -- IRS happy, us even happier...most businesses would barely have broken even and would have had to pay the guys a lot less to get even close, and that's the model they are looking at -- they had no clue that with zero basic costs this could be so profitable so easily. Heck, we even deducted site visit travel costs and lunch when we went to meet customers and it still wasn't squat. Made 3-4 guys well enough off to retire if they wanted, but as far as I know, I'm the only one who did -- smart guys get bored? Dunno, I do physics as a hobby, it's never boring, and still program to support that effort.
Amen. I helped develop the first VOIP applications and hardware, and for internal use (say inside a large corp building) we did it essentially P2P, in the sense that the "phone directory" was built up without a central server, dynamically. It was pretty cool, but the CEO we developed this for put the snuff on the idea for larger area use -- no way to get in the middle and rape people for the directory service.