Biomass. CO2 is converted, along with nitrogen and water, into biomass by plants. Thus, floating plants can thrive in a CO2 rich atmosphere.
That's why the terraforming wouldn't be so darn hard, you already have the plant food right there! You just gotta engineer and release 'em. I mean, I'm not saying it's EASY, but things about planets that are nearly impossible to change, like mass, venus has. Of course, it's rotational period of 243 earth days would suck for colonists, but if you've already gone through all the trouble to terraform a planet, you probably have the resources to create something to simulate the night/day change, such as giant strips of metal orbiting venus, etc.
There's no doubt that it would take hundreds of years to fully terraform venus, however most of the work could be done by biological agents rather than manmade machines, which should help signifigantly, and the final effect should be much better than what one can obtain with Mars.
It's about time we did more with Venus. Of all the planets in the solar system, it's the most like earth (has a dense atmosphere, about the same mass, etc). IMHO it is a better place to terraform than mars, as there's plenty of sunlight for plants, etc, and it's mostly a matter of getting rid of greenhouse gasses (tiny floating plants may be able to help immensly with this). I hope to see the study of this strange and beautiful world continue. Of course I'm a little biased in that I work for the Jet Propulsion Lab and I like to see any space exploration, but this in particular is important to me.
My gosh, finally a voice of something other than Anarchy on slashdot. Every other CCTV post on slashdot seems to be irrationally reacting to the supposed losses of freedom caused by these systems. Glad to hear someone modded up for saying something reasonable!
Re:Not only the net. THe article mentions CPRM als
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Taming the Web
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his statement is somewhat naive... One can always write a program to emulate any piece of hardware, and there will always be ways of breaking them.
I don't know about you, but I'm not aware of any way to write software to emulates a CD-ROM drive (that is, has the capability to directly read the CD-ROM without a CD-ROM drive being present). Hardware does things that software can't BECAUSE IT IS IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD. So while it's quite possible to emulate some parts of hardware (namely computational functions), physical interaction isn't truely emulatable (otherwise I'd just write code to have my laptop make my bed, pick up chicks, and haul them back to my dorm room).
I think it is you who is naive.
The internet was designed to be a research tool, used by accademia. That should never be compramised to suit the needs of businesses. Businesses need to learn to use hte medium as it is. I am all for adding additional infrastructure and standards (like XML for catalogs, etc) but restructuring the internet is rediculess. If they wanna create their own protocol (Business Transfer Protocol anyone?) then I'm all for it.
Just remember where the internet came from, all you big shots out there. (And no, it wasn't Al Gore:) )
I can't offer a perfect solution, however I would suggest that using ultra-strong (100 kb key) public key encryption (to prevent future computers from readily eating it up) to provide authentication. This would go a long ways towards stopping people from tampering with the material, once it was submitted. The papers could be archived in two forms, one which is encrypted/authenticated, and one which is plain text for fast processing. If there's ever a dispute that something was changed, go to the authenticated one (so long as you still have the public keys archived somewhere they can't be changed).
The problem with archival to CD-ROMs, besides the obvious lifetime problem, is that they might be able to be easily tampered with in the future (readily available nanotech, etc). I guess the only way to counter this is to make a *LOT* of CDs... that way you'd have to fake thousands instead of just one.
Just my two cents.
PS I konw that the proposed key size would be computationally intensive. It's just a rough estimate, 128 bit keys are so... wussy! (think quantum computers, guys)
Do you really *WANT* the slashdot people to write up an article on this stuff? They are called EDITORS for a reason (look at anything JohnKatz has written, I'd much rather he be just an "editor").
Might be nice if they just posted a quick little something on it, but it'll probably suck if they write it!
Your talk of adventure is rather inspiring, however when we spend all this money to send astronauts up into space, we need to be getting maximal bang for our buck, not some amazing space adventure. The less problems they have, the better they can work, the more science and engineering they can perform, and the more benefits we reap from their presence. IT is true that too often the worry about things they don't really need, however if you spend tens of thousands of dollars to have a DVD up there and it didn't work, you'd be pretty ticked off too.
Morale up there is very important. Unlike the wild west, or the open sea, it's so small and cramped, no open areas whatsoever that the psychological effects can easily make someone's efficiency go down with time. And when you're in a station in what is perhaps the most dangerous part of the universe any man has ever been in, things breaking and running out of supplies are big deals, even if the things themselves are not. Their lives are at stake, and while I'm sure the structure is build better than some of their electronics/software they have up there, it's a sobering though to realize that one rip in the exterior and they'd all be sucking vaccuum. The adventure is there, it's a dangerous, deadly pit of fire they are being held over, diquised as a living room.
I don't think they were complaining about the workload, but about all the things that just don't work. Sometimes it's not so much the lack of functionality, but the sheer stupidity on the part of those people who planned and made prepration (including the engineers who designed the stuff) that can be mind numbing.
Basically I think we have to remember that the space station is more about science than exploration (we've been in orbit for half a century, not much new stuff there). It's about getting things done, and keeping the crew working optimally, not about seeing what kind of stories we can give the astronauts to tell their grandchildren ("back in my day, we were stuck in orbit in a pile of metal where even the CD player didn't work..."). It's about discovery and progress, both in science and technology. And when things suck like this, it takes time away from the science and tech they are supposed to be doing. So should they whine, yeah, but because of that and ONLY because of that. But I do have to agree with an earlier post that they should generally have a good attitude no matter what, it's an amazing adventure.
Sounds like a great idea to me, I mean if they can accellerate in such a small distance, then there's no worries about synchrotron radiation, etc. But then of course, you don't get all the synchrotron radiation to use with other studies.
I'm actually rather surprised there aren't more people investigating this, as this could possibly allow super-high energy colliders that aren't that big at all. I think the main problem is that there are so many unsolved issues with plasma physics (I am doing some research on plasma simulation myself) and there seem to be a lot of tech issues to overcome as well. I hope to see one of thse things built in my lifetime though.
Dump Python? Are you kidding? Countless man-hours have been invested in creating and becoming proficient in the language. Check out some of the +4 or 5 posts below that explain about some of Ruby's weaknesses. It's not like Ruby is the end-all and be-all of programming! My gosh!
I said *TOO MUCH* diversity is bad. Not *ANY* diversity. Open source is about COOPERATION, and the only way that can happen is if those who are cooperating have a common reference point. If there were 300 different programming languages, each with their own compiler, used throughout things like the linux kernel, and GNU utilities, how much help could people give in their spare time? I mean that's rediculess, but basically there has to be a balance, and I think that balance has already been achieved. Perl is great. Python is great. Java is great. They all do different things well, and if you want to use Ruby that's fine, but don't expect other people to learn it or extend/enhance what you are doing, it's a big burden on people who already spend too much time every day programming as it is! I'm not meaning to be a troll here, but I think there has to be *SOME* form of unity for Open Source to work. Right now we have that, as most projects are done in C, C++, Java, Python and Perl (with occasional lexx/yacc stuff). This is one reason open source has been so successful, the sheer volume of people working together. We really don't *NEED* another language, as good as Ruby may be.
If this offends you, I'm sorry that's not the point. And I"m not saying that any group needs to decide for the rest of us which languages to use, but in a way when Linus made Linux in the first place, he decided a lot of it, same with the FSF and GNU software.
There's so many scripting languages out there already, and it takes time to become proficient in each one. It is better to have a few that are widely used, and then some like Ruby that are nice but mostly used by code hackers who enjoy new and different things.
Too much diversity can be a bad thing, especially in open source where people have to be able to read the code to extend it.
Point taken. Drug tests will undoubtably get better as medical technology improves, which is why it's important that we not have legislation blocking it. And yes, there is a false sense of security, however that's better than taking no action (and I don't think the companies are concerned about marijuana users so much as people who do crack, etc).
I feel that if a company is going to institute these tests, it should be unilateral, and be in a non-descriminatory way. That means yes, the boss and CEO should take them too.
People that have nothing to hide have no worry about this. People who have something to hide need help. If you know that getting help with your drug problem is going to help you get a job, you're more likely to get that help.
How much is privacy worth? Is it worth lives? Personally I dont' care if the government reads my e-mails, if AOL tracks what web sites I go to (AOL trackign what web sites you go to is like a grocery store keeping tabs on what you buy, you're buying it from them). I dont' care if the government puts up cameras and knows I take my girlfriend to Victoria Secret. If it helps cut crime, if they use it for enforcing laws which are designed to protect, and if that information is never given out to third parties, then yeah, go ahead, survey away. When you're in public, you're in public, duh! If you want privacy, live in your parents basement. If you have something to hide, well, hide! Otherwise don't complain about things which are not being abused.
I feel the same way about employers monitoring employee e-mail and computer use. Privacy is for at home. What you do on company time with company resources (computers, bandwidth, etc) you have to be accountable for. And I feel there is a definate corrilation between drug use and job productivity. Corporations care about the bottom line, and they spend money on these tests because there IS a correlation there.
Privacy is not living in a police state. We don't live in a police state. You go see how people lived behind the iron curtain, and then you talk about stupid privacies like drug tests.
Why do you think people accept drug tests being part of job interviews? If my employer can prove that my being a coke addict directly affects my job performance fine. But it's an invasion of privacy to see if I am indeed a coke addict. People are drawn to it because some Demopublican will mask it about being for the children.
And just what the heck is wrong with a drug test? This isn't the police coming into your home and taking a urine sample, this is voluntary (hey, no one said you had to work there) and it for the benefit of others. You want to go in and be around hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment, work with hundreds of others of employees, and be trusted with the materials and tasks of a company, and you expect them to hire people who voluntarily break numerous laws and modify the workings of their brain? I mean, if someone has enough disrespect for the law and for the safety of others to start using stuff like cocaine, I don't see why they would have more respect for their boss, their coworkers, or the rules of the company. I don't see why their cognitive functions could be fully trusted when they are sitting there wanting their next fix. This isn't the company going through your private posessions, they are simply analysing that which you give away for free every time you visit the company john. Corporations, good or bad, need to be able to trust their employees to some extent, and I'm not sure if people who routinely fry their brains and break numerous (and very serious) laws are the most trustworthy bunch. We're not talking about people who speed a little on their way to work, these are people who knowingly posess and use substances which are prohibited nationwide, substances which are dangerous, deadly (even sometimes in small doses) and people kill others over consistantly. If I was an employer, big business or small, I would want to be able to trust my employees at least enough to respect established rules, etc. And if people lie about their drug use, what else are they lying about, their qualifications? Their resume? Whether they indeed worked 40 hours last week? No one's perfect but there's nothing wrong with wanting to know before you invest a lot of time, effort, and resources in someone whether or not they can be trusted.
This isn't like DNA testing, (which I'm against in most circumstances) there's no such thing as having "illegal DNA", and furthermore you cannot choose your DNA (at least not yet). This is testing for an illegal activity which has hazardous side effects. Cocaine, to use your example, can cause extreme irritability, sleep disorders, confusion, hallucinations, violent behavior, paranoia, and deep depression. I wouldn't want anyone using such mind-altering drugs (whose effects can last long beyond the time they have their "fix) to be in a situation where they could cause signifigant harm to one or more other beings (e.g. running heavy equipment, a nuclear reactor, etc). I think that those people have a right to be protected from those who abuse substances and could cause problems.
For those who are caught in addiction, there are many workplace and government sponsored agencies that are happy to help those who are willing to break their addiction, and rehabilitate themselves. The system is far from perfect, but it's better than letting them live their lives as they are, and endanger others in the process.
Here on slashdot, along with the corporation bashing, we also bash laws. Some laws like the DCMA, do, in fact, nothing more than serve the interests of large corporations. But the majority of laws are there to protect the individual, and the public. I think people are putting their rights to not have their urine examined above the rights of others to have a safe work atmosphere. It's not a private hobby, you bring the effects with you into the workplace.
The rights of the individual CAN be taken to an extreme, and that is when society suffers.
I stand corrected. I looked up on dictionary.com, and you were confirmed. Interesting enough, google.com pulled up over 38000 pages with the imaginary word virii, I've heard it used several times.
I wanted to take Latin, but we didn't have it at my high school. Oh well, I'm a physics major, I don't need latin that much.
Virii are great as a naturally provided way to replace genes, however i can't help but wonder what would happen if these were to get out of control, could they not cause more damage than they were designed to do? I mean scientists are humans, even they make mistakes... I feel uncomfortable with biotechnology like this for the sole reason that there's so much yet to be understood about biology, especially on a cellular level. I'm all for helping people, and I'm not full of FUD, but genes still aren't even close to being fully understood... it's like how X-rays were used for everything, even in shoe stores where you could see your daughter's foot going into a shoe... but then they realized it killed people (or at least made them very ill).
Anyways... I think bio research is great, stuff like this concerns me slightly though... so much room for error.
Read this. The amount of coral used is very small, and the methods used for harvesting supposedly have little to no effect on the coral population.
It's such a small amount that they are using, it makes very little impact. Or at least so they say...
Scientists can already create structures that are similar to coral (at least in their porousity). An example of this would be Aerogels which have a similar structure.
A gel is formed, which contains a porous, solid network, and the liquid component is removed, leaving a hunk of material with an ultra-low density (comparable to that of air). Obviously this stuff couldn't be implanted into the body, but perhaps as our understanding of these processes increases we could create materials that are even more like coral.
It's definately worth doing, if you could create something like coral, only made out of aluminum, it'd be incredibly strong and incredibly light. It might also have some other interesting properties (if the tiny spaces inside were all the same size, there might be resonance effects, etc). Overall this really won't affect the coral population though, so we have nothing to worry. It'll be years till this is even common anyways.
Justin
Disclaimer: I study physics, not biology. I have a friend working on a project with kindey rejection and computer analyses of statistical correlations, however my knowlege of tissue rejection is rather limited.
The coral is almost certainly dead. Rejection by the body is mostly caused by the immune system's failure to recognize surface proteins on cells from foreign tissue, thus causing an attack. Dead coral is mostly just the minerals, etc, that go into making the structure, and our not very reactive. If we can put plastic or metal into someone, putting coral into them really isn't much different. There may have been one or two things they had to do (sterelize it, possibly apply some kind of coating) but for the most part it's a lot easier than getting the body to accept something that's living.
Justin
(warning, I'm a physicist, not a bio major, and although i have friends working on organ rejection, there's still stuff that I wouldn't be aware of)
The short answer to this is not really. The long answer to this is below:)
First of all, the type of fusion you mentioned is called magnetic confinement fusion. It is as you said, where magnetic fields trap a plasma which is at a temperature high enough to fuse. While it is true that many problems with this stem from the fact that the field strength is limited, room-temperature superconductors would by no means magically fix this problem. If this was the only problem, we'd simply use normal superconductors. This, however, is only one type of fusion.
There are several other types of fusion, the most easily understood being inertial confinement fusion. Instead of using ultra-strong magnetic fields to contain the plasma, it attempts to use the inertia of the reacting particles to keep the material contained. Lasers hit by extreme bursts of laser energy accomplish this as they rapidly implode. Ion beams directed at each other at relativistic velocities are also another way of accomplishing this same effect.
A few more interesting types are muon catalysed fusion, and antiproton catalysed fusion. The latter is being investigated for its uses in propulsion (Here is an excellent link on NASA's page about it, my younger brother researched this as a school project and won first place.). Muon-catalysed fusion is a pretty wacky idea, shooting negatively charged muons (like electrons, only heavier) into a bunch of hydrogen, which causes sponaneous fusion to occur. A muon is a particle like an electron, but much heavier, produced easily by many particle accellerators. The problem with this sort of fusion is that producing muons takes a lot of energy, and you need a lot of muons.
There was a slashdot article earlier on the different types of fusion, which points to an excellent article.
To reiterate my point, these quantum wires are very small, and would not carry much current. This may be extremely useful for semiconductor chips (if you read they are already interfaced through semiconductors) and could allow very small chips that consume such small amount of power that they could be easily powered by the ambient RF radiation (Just think, talk radio would actually be good for something, he he he). There's a lot of uses, but sadly I don't think that small defect free wires will play much of a role in bringing about fusion.
Not much, since you would still need a refridgeration unit to keep the 'wire' cold. Super low means on the order of a few Kelvin. High-temp superconductors means about the same temperature of Liquid Nitrogen or better.
Did you even read the article? You don't need to keep quantum wires cold at all, just so long as the structure isn't damaged. Any old piece of wire will superconduct at low enough temperatures, that's no big deal... quantum wires here superconduct because there's no defects that lead to resistance. Nothing in the article suggests low temperatures, or mentions Cooper pairs, which are typically found in a superconductor.
For those of you who do not know, a Cooper pair is a pair of electrons whose close proximity allows their spins to cancel out, and acts as a "Boson" rather than a "Fermion." Bosons obey one sort of statistical laws, whereas Fermions obey another. Fermions have half-integer multiple spins, and bosons have whole-integer multiple spins, so combining two fermions together creates the effect of a boson. Because bosons do not follow the Pauli exclusion rule, they can all be in the same energy state, and flow through a superconductor unimpeded. The article does not mention this.
Once again, if they discovered that a tiny wire conducted electricity perfectly when very cold, that would not be news, that would be 100 year old history. It's a sorta moot point anyways, you won't be seeing this in your portable computer for a long time.
Tear the earth in two? Do you know how much energy would be needed to do that? I think you're a little confused... if it collapsed it could possibly strike something on the earth, or cause damage to spaceborne objects in its path, however there's nothing even close to an engineering reality at the moment that could tear the earth in two.
Just my two cents.
You are missing something here... air resistance. In this case air resistance pushes *BOTH* things downwards, however because the tank is no longer full, its density will be smaller than that of the pod, thus it will feel more accelleration from the air (think basketball vs. beachball). To move upwards two miles coasting in an airless environment, the pod would have to have a velocity of approximately 600 miles per hour (v = sqrt(2*g*h)) upwards, which is a very reasonable speed for a small rocket to attain.
The air up there will of course be much thinner than it is at ground level, however it should be more than enough to make a signifigant difference in the trajectories of the two objects. Air resistance is roughly proportional to the speed of the object moving through the viscous medium, so that large speed will mean a large difference in trajectories (the forces themselves will be large, so the differences will be more pronounced than, say, a microscopic force would be).
Slashdot Mirror
Biomass. CO2 is converted, along with nitrogen and water, into biomass by plants. Thus, floating plants can thrive in a CO2 rich atmosphere.
That's why the terraforming wouldn't be so darn hard, you already have the plant food right there! You just gotta engineer and release 'em. I mean, I'm not saying it's EASY, but things about planets that are nearly impossible to change, like mass, venus has. Of course, it's rotational period of 243 earth days would suck for colonists, but if you've already gone through all the trouble to terraform a planet, you probably have the resources to create something to simulate the night/day change, such as giant strips of metal orbiting venus, etc.
There's no doubt that it would take hundreds of years to fully terraform venus, however most of the work could be done by biological agents rather than manmade machines, which should help signifigantly, and the final effect should be much better than what one can obtain with Mars.
It's about time we did more with Venus. Of all the planets in the solar system, it's the most like earth (has a dense atmosphere, about the same mass, etc). IMHO it is a better place to terraform than mars, as there's plenty of sunlight for plants, etc, and it's mostly a matter of getting rid of greenhouse gasses (tiny floating plants may be able to help immensly with this). I hope to see the study of this strange and beautiful world continue.
Of course I'm a little biased in that I work for the Jet Propulsion Lab and I like to see any space exploration, but this in particular is important to me.
My gosh, finally a voice of something other than Anarchy on slashdot. Every other CCTV post on slashdot seems to be irrationally reacting to the supposed losses of freedom caused by these systems. Glad to hear someone modded up for saying something reasonable!
his statement is somewhat naive... One can always write a program to emulate any piece of hardware, and there will always be ways of breaking them.
I don't know about you, but I'm not aware of any way to write software to emulates a CD-ROM drive (that is, has the capability to directly read the CD-ROM without a CD-ROM drive being present). Hardware does things that software can't BECAUSE IT IS IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD. So while it's quite possible to emulate some parts of hardware (namely computational functions), physical interaction isn't truely emulatable (otherwise I'd just write code to have my laptop make my bed, pick up chicks, and haul them back to my dorm room). I think it is you who is naive.
The internet was designed to be a research tool, used by accademia. That should never be compramised to suit the needs of businesses. Businesses need to learn to use hte medium as it is. I am all for adding additional infrastructure and standards (like XML for catalogs, etc) but restructuring the internet is rediculess. If they wanna create their own protocol (Business Transfer Protocol anyone?) then I'm all for it.
:) )
Just remember where the internet came from, all you big shots out there. (And no, it wasn't Al Gore
I can't offer a perfect solution, however I would suggest that using ultra-strong (100 kb key) public key encryption (to prevent future computers from readily eating it up) to provide authentication. This would go a long ways towards stopping people from tampering with the material, once it was submitted. The papers could be archived in two forms, one which is encrypted/authenticated, and one which is plain text for fast processing. If there's ever a dispute that something was changed, go to the authenticated one (so long as you still have the public keys archived somewhere they can't be changed).
The problem with archival to CD-ROMs, besides the obvious lifetime problem, is that they might be able to be easily tampered with in the future (readily available nanotech, etc). I guess the only way to counter this is to make a *LOT* of CDs... that way you'd have to fake thousands instead of just one.
Just my two cents.
PS I konw that the proposed key size would be computationally intensive. It's just a rough estimate, 128 bit keys are so... wussy! (think quantum computers, guys)
Do you really *WANT* the slashdot people to write up an article on this stuff? They are called EDITORS for a reason (look at anything JohnKatz has written, I'd much rather he be just an "editor").
Might be nice if they just posted a quick little something on it, but it'll probably suck if they write it!
Your talk of adventure is rather inspiring, however when we spend all this money to send astronauts up into space, we need to be getting maximal bang for our buck, not some amazing space adventure. The less problems they have, the better they can work, the more science and engineering they can perform, and the more benefits we reap from their presence. IT is true that too often the worry about things they don't really need, however if you spend tens of thousands of dollars to have a DVD up there and it didn't work, you'd be pretty ticked off too.
Morale up there is very important. Unlike the wild west, or the open sea, it's so small and cramped, no open areas whatsoever that the psychological effects can easily make someone's efficiency go down with time. And when you're in a station in what is perhaps the most dangerous part of the universe any man has ever been in, things breaking and running out of supplies are big deals, even if the things themselves are not. Their lives are at stake, and while I'm sure the structure is build better than some of their electronics/software they have up there, it's a sobering though to realize that one rip in the exterior and they'd all be sucking vaccuum. The adventure is there, it's a dangerous, deadly pit of fire they are being held over, diquised as a living room.
I don't think they were complaining about the workload, but about all the things that just don't work. Sometimes it's not so much the lack of functionality, but the sheer stupidity on the part of those people who planned and made prepration (including the engineers who designed the stuff) that can be mind numbing.
Basically I think we have to remember that the space station is more about science than exploration (we've been in orbit for half a century, not much new stuff there). It's about getting things done, and keeping the crew working optimally, not about seeing what kind of stories we can give the astronauts to tell their grandchildren ("back in my day, we were stuck in orbit in a pile of metal where even the CD player didn't work..."). It's about discovery and progress, both in science and technology. And when things suck like this, it takes time away from the science and tech they are supposed to be doing. So should they whine, yeah, but because of that and ONLY because of that. But I do have to agree with an earlier post that they should generally have a good attitude no matter what, it's an amazing adventure.
Just my two and a half cents.
Sounds like a great idea to me, I mean if they can accellerate in such a small distance, then there's no worries about synchrotron radiation, etc. But then of course, you don't get all the synchrotron radiation to use with other studies.
I'm actually rather surprised there aren't more people investigating this, as this could possibly allow super-high energy colliders that aren't that big at all. I think the main problem is that there are so many unsolved issues with plasma physics (I am doing some research on plasma simulation myself) and there seem to be a lot of tech issues to overcome as well. I hope to see one of thse things built in my lifetime though.
Dump Python? Are you kidding? Countless man-hours have been invested in creating and becoming proficient in the language. Check out some of the +4 or 5 posts below that explain about some of Ruby's weaknesses. It's not like Ruby is the end-all and be-all of programming! My gosh!
I said *TOO MUCH* diversity is bad. Not *ANY* diversity. Open source is about COOPERATION, and the only way that can happen is if those who are cooperating have a common reference point. If there were 300 different programming languages, each with their own compiler, used throughout things like the linux kernel, and GNU utilities, how much help could people give in their spare time? I mean that's rediculess, but basically there has to be a balance, and I think that balance has already been achieved. Perl is great. Python is great. Java is great. They all do different things well, and if you want to use Ruby that's fine, but don't expect other people to learn it or extend/enhance what you are doing, it's a big burden on people who already spend too much time every day programming as it is! I'm not meaning to be a troll here, but I think there has to be *SOME* form of unity for Open Source to work. Right now we have that, as most projects are done in C, C++, Java, Python and Perl (with occasional lexx/yacc stuff). This is one reason open source has been so successful, the sheer volume of people working together. We really don't *NEED* another language, as good as Ruby may be.
If this offends you, I'm sorry that's not the point. And I"m not saying that any group needs to decide for the rest of us which languages to use, but in a way when Linus made Linux in the first place, he decided a lot of it, same with the FSF and GNU software.
This was not meant to be a troll. Sorry.
There's so many scripting languages out there already, and it takes time to become proficient in each one. It is better to have a few that are widely used, and then some like Ruby that are nice but mostly used by code hackers who enjoy new and different things.
Too much diversity can be a bad thing, especially in open source where people have to be able to read the code to extend it.
Just my two cents.
I guess the idea there is if you admit to it, and "try" to get help, that's better than trying to hide it.
Justin
Point taken. Drug tests will undoubtably get better as medical technology improves, which is why it's important that we not have legislation blocking it. And yes, there is a false sense of security, however that's better than taking no action (and I don't think the companies are concerned about marijuana users so much as people who do crack, etc).
I feel that if a company is going to institute these tests, it should be unilateral, and be in a non-descriminatory way. That means yes, the boss and CEO should take them too.
People that have nothing to hide have no worry about this. People who have something to hide need help. If you know that getting help with your drug problem is going to help you get a job, you're more likely to get that help.
How much is privacy worth? Is it worth lives? Personally I dont' care if the government reads my e-mails, if AOL tracks what web sites I go to (AOL trackign what web sites you go to is like a grocery store keeping tabs on what you buy, you're buying it from them). I dont' care if the government puts up cameras and knows I take my girlfriend to Victoria Secret. If it helps cut crime, if they use it for enforcing laws which are designed to protect, and if that information is never given out to third parties, then yeah, go ahead, survey away. When you're in public, you're in public, duh! If you want privacy, live in your parents basement. If you have something to hide, well, hide! Otherwise don't complain about things which are not being abused.
I feel the same way about employers monitoring employee e-mail and computer use. Privacy is for at home. What you do on company time with company resources (computers, bandwidth, etc) you have to be accountable for. And I feel there is a definate corrilation between drug use and job productivity. Corporations care about the bottom line, and they spend money on these tests because there IS a correlation there.
Privacy is not living in a police state. We don't live in a police state. You go see how people lived behind the iron curtain, and then you talk about stupid privacies like drug tests.
Justin
Why do you think people accept drug tests being part of job interviews? If my employer can prove that my being a coke addict directly affects my job performance fine. But it's an invasion of privacy to see if I am indeed a coke addict. People are drawn to it because some Demopublican will mask it about being for the children.
And just what the heck is wrong with a drug test? This isn't the police coming into your home and taking a urine sample, this is voluntary (hey, no one said you had to work there) and it for the benefit of others. You want to go in and be around hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment, work with hundreds of others of employees, and be trusted with the materials and tasks of a company, and you expect them to hire people who voluntarily break numerous laws and modify the workings of their brain? I mean, if someone has enough disrespect for the law and for the safety of others to start using stuff like cocaine, I don't see why they would have more respect for their boss, their coworkers, or the rules of the company. I don't see why their cognitive functions could be fully trusted when they are sitting there wanting their next fix. This isn't the company going through your private posessions, they are simply analysing that which you give away for free every time you visit the company john. Corporations, good or bad, need to be able to trust their employees to some extent, and I'm not sure if people who routinely fry their brains and break numerous (and very serious) laws are the most trustworthy bunch. We're not talking about people who speed a little on their way to work, these are people who knowingly posess and use substances which are prohibited nationwide, substances which are dangerous, deadly (even sometimes in small doses) and people kill others over consistantly. If I was an employer, big business or small, I would want to be able to trust my employees at least enough to respect established rules, etc. And if people lie about their drug use, what else are they lying about, their qualifications? Their resume? Whether they indeed worked 40 hours last week? No one's perfect but there's nothing wrong with wanting to know before you invest a lot of time, effort, and resources in someone whether or not they can be trusted.
This isn't like DNA testing, (which I'm against in most circumstances) there's no such thing as having "illegal DNA", and furthermore you cannot choose your DNA (at least not yet). This is testing for an illegal activity which has hazardous side effects. Cocaine, to use your example, can cause extreme irritability, sleep disorders, confusion, hallucinations, violent behavior, paranoia, and deep depression. I wouldn't want anyone using such mind-altering drugs (whose effects can last long beyond the time they have their "fix) to be in a situation where they could cause signifigant harm to one or more other beings (e.g. running heavy equipment, a nuclear reactor, etc). I think that those people have a right to be protected from those who abuse substances and could cause problems.
For those who are caught in addiction, there are many workplace and government sponsored agencies that are happy to help those who are willing to break their addiction, and rehabilitate themselves. The system is far from perfect, but it's better than letting them live their lives as they are, and endanger others in the process.
Here on slashdot, along with the corporation bashing, we also bash laws. Some laws like the DCMA, do, in fact, nothing more than serve the interests of large corporations. But the majority of laws are there to protect the individual, and the public. I think people are putting their rights to not have their urine examined above the rights of others to have a safe work atmosphere. It's not a private hobby, you bring the effects with you into the workplace.
The rights of the individual CAN be taken to an extreme, and that is when society suffers.
I stand corrected. I looked up on dictionary.com, and you were confirmed. Interesting enough, google.com pulled up over 38000 pages with the imaginary word virii, I've heard it used several times.
I wanted to take Latin, but we didn't have it at my high school. Oh well, I'm a physics major, I don't need latin that much.
Thanks!
Justin
Virii are great as a naturally provided way to replace genes, however i can't help but wonder what would happen if these were to get out of control, could they not cause more damage than they were designed to do? I mean scientists are humans, even they make mistakes... I feel uncomfortable with biotechnology like this for the sole reason that there's so much yet to be understood about biology, especially on a cellular level. I'm all for helping people, and I'm not full of FUD, but genes still aren't even close to being fully understood... it's like how X-rays were used for everything, even in shoe stores where you could see your daughter's foot going into a shoe... but then they realized it killed people (or at least made them very ill).
Anyways... I think bio research is great, stuff like this concerns me slightly though... so much room for error.
Justin
Read this. The amount of coral used is very small, and the methods used for harvesting supposedly have little to no effect on the coral population.
It's such a small amount that they are using, it makes very little impact. Or at least so they say...
Scientists can already create structures that are similar to coral (at least in their porousity). An example of this would be Aerogels which have a similar structure.
A gel is formed, which contains a porous, solid network, and the liquid component is removed, leaving a hunk of material with an ultra-low density (comparable to that of air). Obviously this stuff couldn't be implanted into the body, but perhaps as our understanding of these processes increases we could create materials that are even more like coral.
It's definately worth doing, if you could create something like coral, only made out of aluminum, it'd be incredibly strong and incredibly light. It might also have some other interesting properties (if the tiny spaces inside were all the same size, there might be resonance effects, etc). Overall this really won't affect the coral population though, so we have nothing to worry. It'll be years till this is even common anyways.
Justin
Disclaimer: I study physics, not biology. I have a friend working on a project with kindey rejection and computer analyses of statistical correlations, however my knowlege of tissue rejection is rather limited.
The coral is almost certainly dead. Rejection by the body is mostly caused by the immune system's failure to recognize surface proteins on cells from foreign tissue, thus causing an attack. Dead coral is mostly just the minerals, etc, that go into making the structure, and our not very reactive. If we can put plastic or metal into someone, putting coral into them really isn't much different. There may have been one or two things they had to do (sterelize it, possibly apply some kind of coating) but for the most part it's a lot easier than getting the body to accept something that's living.
Justin
(warning, I'm a physicist, not a bio major, and although i have friends working on organ rejection, there's still stuff that I wouldn't be aware of)
...give this breakthrough two thumbs up!
This is seriously too cool.
Justin
The short answer to this is not really. The long answer to this is below :)
First of all, the type of fusion you mentioned is called magnetic confinement fusion. It is as you said, where magnetic fields trap a plasma which is at a temperature high enough to fuse. While it is true that many problems with this stem from the fact that the field strength is limited, room-temperature superconductors would by no means magically fix this problem. If this was the only problem, we'd simply use normal superconductors. This, however, is only one type of fusion.
There are several other types of fusion, the most easily understood being inertial confinement fusion. Instead of using ultra-strong magnetic fields to contain the plasma, it attempts to use the inertia of the reacting particles to keep the material contained. Lasers hit by extreme bursts of laser energy accomplish this as they rapidly implode. Ion beams directed at each other at relativistic velocities are also another way of accomplishing this same effect.
A few more interesting types are muon catalysed fusion, and antiproton catalysed fusion. The latter is being investigated for its uses in propulsion (Here is an excellent link on NASA's page about it, my younger brother researched this as a school project and won first place.). Muon-catalysed fusion is a pretty wacky idea, shooting negatively charged muons (like electrons, only heavier) into a bunch of hydrogen, which causes sponaneous fusion to occur. A muon is a particle like an electron, but much heavier, produced easily by many particle accellerators. The problem with this sort of fusion is that producing muons takes a lot of energy, and you need a lot of muons.
There was a slashdot article earlier on the different types of fusion, which points to an excellent article.
To reiterate my point, these quantum wires are very small, and would not carry much current. This may be extremely useful for semiconductor chips (if you read they are already interfaced through semiconductors) and could allow very small chips that consume such small amount of power that they could be easily powered by the ambient RF radiation (Just think, talk radio would actually be good for something, he he he). There's a lot of uses, but sadly I don't think that small defect free wires will play much of a role in bringing about fusion.
Maybe someday...
Justin
Not much, since you would still need a refridgeration unit to keep the 'wire' cold. Super low means on the order of a few Kelvin. High-temp superconductors means about the same temperature of Liquid Nitrogen or better.
Did you even read the article? You don't need to keep quantum wires cold at all, just so long as the structure isn't damaged. Any old piece of wire will superconduct at low enough temperatures, that's no big deal... quantum wires here superconduct because there's no defects that lead to resistance. Nothing in the article suggests low temperatures, or mentions Cooper pairs, which are typically found in a superconductor.
For those of you who do not know, a Cooper pair is a pair of electrons whose close proximity allows their spins to cancel out, and acts as a "Boson" rather than a "Fermion." Bosons obey one sort of statistical laws, whereas Fermions obey another. Fermions have half-integer multiple spins, and bosons have whole-integer multiple spins, so combining two fermions together creates the effect of a boson. Because bosons do not follow the Pauli exclusion rule, they can all be in the same energy state, and flow through a superconductor unimpeded. The article does not mention this.
Once again, if they discovered that a tiny wire conducted electricity perfectly when very cold, that would not be news, that would be 100 year old history. It's a sorta moot point anyways, you won't be seeing this in your portable computer for a long time.
More on superconductors here.
Just my $.02
Tear the earth in two? Do you know how much energy would be needed to do that? I think you're a little confused... if it collapsed it could possibly strike something on the earth, or cause damage to spaceborne objects in its path, however there's nothing even close to an engineering reality at the moment that could tear the earth in two. Just my two cents.
You are missing something here... air resistance. In this case air resistance pushes *BOTH* things downwards, however because the tank is no longer full, its density will be smaller than that of the pod, thus it will feel more accelleration from the air (think basketball vs. beachball). To move upwards two miles coasting in an airless environment, the pod would have to have a velocity of approximately 600 miles per hour (v = sqrt(2*g*h)) upwards, which is a very reasonable speed for a small rocket to attain.
:)
The air up there will of course be much thinner than it is at ground level, however it should be more than enough to make a signifigant difference in the trajectories of the two objects. Air resistance is roughly proportional to the speed of the object moving through the viscous medium, so that large speed will mean a large difference in trajectories (the forces themselves will be large, so the differences will be more pronounced than, say, a microscopic force would be).
Yay, I used my freshman physics