I believe you are correct. Two types of nuclear reactions (well, its much more complicated than that, but still) can produce heat. Radioactive decay, such as that used in RTGs by deep-space probes, relies on the fact that radioactive elements naturally decay and produce heat in the process. Nuclear chain reactions, on the other hand, rely on the radioactive decay of a mass of material causing a (hopefully) controlled chain reaction. The latter is used in pretty much all nuclear power plants, and requires strict regulation and controls to keep safe. The former requires no controls at all, and is therefore (nearly) perfectly safe, but normally requires short-lived isotopes that don't occur in nature and is therefore not a suitable means of widespread power generation. If the half-life of Thorium can be shortened through heating to produce net heat, than it would make a near-perfect and almost totally safe source of power. Since no/very few chain reactions take place, there is no chance of an explosion, and since thorium is naturally negligibly radioactive, would not be dangerous even if the containment vessel was destroyed.
On the other hand, the article still reeks of a hoax. And disclaimer: I am by no means a nuclear physicist (yet).
You don't see why deliberately shouting a false warning that creates fear and panic that can easily result in serious injury or death through trampling is a crime? Wow. Truly, a genius among ACs. Also, shouting false warnings lowers the impact of real warnings, thus could lead to even more deaths if permitted.
I kinda wonder if Google didn't apply for this patent just to show how thoroughly bad the patent system is broken. I mean, come on, this patent is absolutely ridiculous. It can't be that Google doesn't know about it already (it is a search engine company, after all). But if Google can go to court and hold up this patent as being granted, it pretty much calls into question the entire USPTO and every patent they have granted in recent years.
Unless there is something more to this patent than meets the eye, which seems entirely possible, though unlikely.
Plasma. Seriously. At that speeds (above Mach 10 I believe), a cone of plasma forms around the aircraft like it does in re-entry of spacecraft and plays major havoc with telecommunications. By which I mean it prevents it unless you design the craft very carefully. Hence, this test.
What that has to do with the Doppler effect... I have no idea.
Wait, you're serious? Hmmm, lets see. Who else wants desktops/laptops. Well, there's gamers, media editors and media PC users, anyone who types a lot, people who use multiple monitors, pretty much every business, and, well, anyone who doesn't want to shell out $500 dollars everytime the integrated battery on their tablet wears out or it becomes so obsolete or the OS doesn't get updated for a while and it becomes useless. A niche? Maybe. I'm more inclined to think that tablets are the real niche here. And sure, I've invested time learning how to use a PC. Granted, it only took a few days, but yeah, I guess that's some time. And most of it translates to tablets, as well (I should know, I just bought an android PMP/MID/mini-tablet).
But if you want to buy into the Apple "rebuy our product every 1.5 years because your old system is obsolete" Kool-Aid (TM), be my guest. Are there uses for tablets, and good ones? Yes. Will they replace PCs? Hardly. They complement them nicely for some uses, but replace? No.
Re:Experiments performed only on 3 test subjects
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
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· Score: 2
The funding would have to be allocated before any trials actually took place. In other words, the scientists go to the foundation, say "we have this idea which we think might work but is completely untried, will you give us money", and hope they are interested. So, the funders would have no idea if the treatment has any chance of success prior to funding it. Lots of potentially good research goes untried because no one is willing/able to fund it.
In short, the fact it wasn't able to get good funding tells us absolutely nothing about how well it actually works, only how well some people in positions of power, who may or may not even be scientists (in the case of pharma companies are more likely bean counters), thought it might work. And 2 out of 3, with 70% remission on the 3rd is quite impressive. Especially when one of them was weeks from dying.
calling their friends & neighbors to arms to help them protect their families, homes and businesses.
Are you sure that isn't part of the reason they want these networks shut down? I wouldn't have thought it few years ago, but then I wouldn't have thought the UK government would call to shut down social networks either.
Maybe I should have. Orwell did set 1984 in England, after all.
3.xx Ghz quad core right now, 8GB+ of much faster ram, faster HDD access speeds, Ethernet ports, ridiculously faster GPU, higher than HDMI resolution, a dozen kinds of ports and outputs (HDMI, DVI, 10+ USB, 1394, SPDIF, etc.) All of that, for not much more than the price of 1 tablet. Seriously. 100$ MB, 150$ GPU, 150$CPU,100$ RAM. 500$ right there or the price of your average tablet. Sure, power supply/case cost a bit, and you need a display, but you get far, far more bang/buck than anything in the portable market can or ever will offer.
Oh, and anything that breaks can be replaced/upgraded individually, and I can install any OS I want with no lockdown and far greater selection. But feel free to stick to your overpriced underperforming but highly portable tablet, if you want.
I see someone has played Deus Ex:) (IIRC the nanites in that game were not generally self-replicating. Rather, they were created by the Universal Constructor.) That seems like a much more reasonable proposition.
For instance, the problem that never gets mentioned is where the nanites would get the energy. Very few elementary particles would be suitable to become nanites, and reordering them on that scale would take vast amounts of energy. Not to mention memory if they try to act intelligently (hell, on the nano-molecular scale even storing a self-blueprint would be difficult. Not impossible: see DNA).
Actually, I think Stargate's Replicators had it right. Macro scale blocks that together were able to self-replicate, and tiny-scale nanites had to be created out of specific material and were not (completely) self-replicating. I think to really have any efficiency at all, you need a certain threshold size for replication to take place. Bacteria sized, at least, probably larger for artificial machines. It would be possible, though, at least in theory. At least 100 years beyond us, in any case.
No. It is, however, extremely odd, considering that Reuters lists only the dollar and yuan amount. I'm extremely confused why pounds sterling entered into it. Perhaps the submitter has an axe to grind about/. being an American website?
I'm more questioning if the effort put into designing this program will be worth the return based on the number of people who actually use it. I love physics, but I know lots of people don't. If it's hard to see the practical usage, a lot of people won't dedicate their CPU time to it. I might, as might some on/., but I can't imagine many beyond that will. Maybe that's all they need.
Do they really expect that many people to take part? There is already SETI@Home, Folding@Home, and a few others I can't think of ATM. IMO Folding@home is most useful of these (huge potential medical usefulness), so they've got that down, and SETI is, well, kinda cool. I can understand if you're a huge physics buff, but I don't know too many people like that. And I'm not sure why you want to do simulations of particle collisions when you can do the real thing and get real results.
Yeah, I'm not sure how making it open source counts as "pulling the plug." The summary is extremely misleading, to say the very least. I wouldn't even be surprised if Google continues developing AI after open sourcing it. In fact, they mention that they are looking to do precisely that, and because of its educational usefulness.
Seems like/. should be praising this move by Google. If Google doesn't release source code (see: Honeycomb) they're evil, and if they do... they're evil. I'm guessing someone just doesn't like Google. My guess is they don't want to develop it anymore because it just isn't powerful enough to be used for real app development, but they still want people to be able to use it. Good for Google.
So, to install the rootkit, you also need to exploit a bug in the user. Where do I file the bug report?
With nature. The bug is already fixed in some new generations of humans, but unfortunately the widespread deployment of the old version and it's tenacity, combined with the fact that most people have updates turned off, prevents a rapid fix of the problem.
However, a long-term plan is currently in effect. A few more earthquakes and hurricanes should do the trick.
I think his point is that the DoD is thinking about cyberwarfare wrongly. To do this, he invokes a psychoanalyst and psychoanalytic principles and attempts to connect them to the Internet.
He fails. The Internet is not some new form of "cyber-space-time". It is a massive repository of information, connected by wires (mostly) and run by computers according to the rules we have established. Its complexity does not make it something new. It is no more a new field of "space-time" than Conway's Game of Life is. Using psychoanalysis to talk about it is, frankly, somewhat ridiculous and makes me question just how much of a "leading analyst" he is.
I think you mean pre-iphone we had this. Look like anything you've seen before? Pics came out ~6 months before the iPhone was announced. Apple made it "cool", they didn't invent the modern smartphone by a long shot.
Pretty sure the fact that there was Android devices before the iPhone (incidentally Google bought Android in 2005... way before the iPhone) shows that Google isn't just copying their design and slapping Linux on it. Oh, and the base Android setup looks nothing like the base iPhone setup. Incidentally, you might want to look up the LG Prada, which had pictures of it released into the wild ~6 months before the iPhone (AFAICT) and looks quite similar. In fact, it's quite likely Apple copied that phone in making the iPhone (LG claimed Apple did, but never actually filed suit). So, Apple is in the right? I doubt it.
Ah, cool, I didn't know about that system. It's still a pretty small rocket, though. I'm guessing something large enough to be man-rated would be a considerably greater technical challenge.
Chrome may have a nice interface and be a bit faster than Firefox's rendering engine,but if Firefox failed as a project I'd miss its Emacs-like extensibility (something all other browsers lack).
-1 Flamebait - emacs vs. vi.:)
However, I have to tip my hat for cleverly bringing up emacs in an article about browsers. Or, wait, is emacs a browser now? Wouldn't surprise me in the least.
Actually, the "big dumb rocket" mentality exists for a very good reason. While it is certainly (theoretically) possible to build multiple stage launchers, such as strapping a smaller rocket onto a jet plane, the jet then has to be built to take it's own weight+the rocket. I'm not sure if you can build (conventional) jet planes big enough to carry a rocket large enough to reach escape velocity even after being released at high altitudes and speed. Jets only work up to a certain altitude and speed, problems rockets don't have at all. Then there are separation issues of firing rockets on top of a plane. Added complexity should be obvious, but you also get added weight from extra support systems for the different engines.
Rockets, despite the term "rocket science", are actually pretty simple. They scale up well in size, they are pretty reliable, require no air, have no maximum speed (or thrust, for that matter). Hypersonic jets, on the other hand, are very, very complicated. They require certain speeds to function right (turbojets only work if the incoming air is subsonic, for instance, giving them a practical maximum speed. On the other hand, ramjets, IIRC, only work if the incoming air is supersonic, giving them a minimum speed.) Airflow has to be just right, fuel for them is tricky (often extremely dangerous). The SR-71, for example, needed a special, very dangerous, fuel that combusts spontaneously in air to ignite its afterburner. And they incorporate moving parts. Solid fuel rockets don't (at least not in the actual thrust mechanism. Could be wrong about that, though. Small ones don't, I assume larger ones work more or less the same.)
However, I agree that multi-stage engines systems are the future of space travel. They are just quite a bit more tricky than you would think, which is why we don't have them even now.
According to Wikipedia, LEO is actually ~7-8 km/s. This goes 13. So, this thing IS at orbital speeds.
Problem is likely height, since the engines likely require air. And, of course, it's starting at high altitude already using a rocket. Most theoretical ground-orbit planes use multiple engines, since many high-speed engines require you to be supersonic already. Still, this tech could potentially give us much cheaper ground-to-orbit methods.
Also, as to where (besides orbit, and since this is DARPA): it's probably for spy planes. Being able to reach anyplace on earth in an hour or two with higher resolution and longer loiter times than any satellite is a huge advantage. The SR-71 was built for precisely that (but was rather expensive and not quite worth it). Not to mention with that kind of speed no missile created can touch you (the SR-71 standard missile evasion tactic was to simply increase speed, and this is 3-4 times faster).
Slashdot Mirror
This is Slashdot so I doubt it.
Wait, did you mean are you the only one who noticed that?
It's hard sometimes to wade through hordes of trolls and misinformed people, I guess...
Well then, it's a good thing he works in the video game industry, which is troll and misinformation free!
I believe you are correct. Two types of nuclear reactions (well, its much more complicated than that, but still) can produce heat. Radioactive decay, such as that used in RTGs by deep-space probes, relies on the fact that radioactive elements naturally decay and produce heat in the process. Nuclear chain reactions, on the other hand, rely on the radioactive decay of a mass of material causing a (hopefully) controlled chain reaction. The latter is used in pretty much all nuclear power plants, and requires strict regulation and controls to keep safe. The former requires no controls at all, and is therefore (nearly) perfectly safe, but normally requires short-lived isotopes that don't occur in nature and is therefore not a suitable means of widespread power generation. If the half-life of Thorium can be shortened through heating to produce net heat, than it would make a near-perfect and almost totally safe source of power. Since no/very few chain reactions take place, there is no chance of an explosion, and since thorium is naturally negligibly radioactive, would not be dangerous even if the containment vessel was destroyed.
On the other hand, the article still reeks of a hoax. And disclaimer: I am by no means a nuclear physicist (yet).
Sorry to nitpick, but Sulu was Japanese. Japanese != Chinese, despite what many people seem to think.
You don't see why deliberately shouting a false warning that creates fear and panic that can easily result in serious injury or death through trampling is a crime? Wow. Truly, a genius among ACs. Also, shouting false warnings lowers the impact of real warnings, thus could lead to even more deaths if permitted.
I kinda wonder if Google didn't apply for this patent just to show how thoroughly bad the patent system is broken. I mean, come on, this patent is absolutely ridiculous. It can't be that Google doesn't know about it already (it is a search engine company, after all). But if Google can go to court and hold up this patent as being granted, it pretty much calls into question the entire USPTO and every patent they have granted in recent years.
Unless there is something more to this patent than meets the eye, which seems entirely possible, though unlikely.
Plasma. Seriously. At that speeds (above Mach 10 I believe), a cone of plasma forms around the aircraft like it does in re-entry of spacecraft and plays major havoc with telecommunications. By which I mean it prevents it unless you design the craft very carefully. Hence, this test.
What that has to do with the Doppler effect... I have no idea.
Hahaha, ah, thats funny.
Wait, you're serious? Hmmm, lets see. Who else wants desktops/laptops. Well, there's gamers, media editors and media PC users, anyone who types a lot, people who use multiple monitors, pretty much every business, and, well, anyone who doesn't want to shell out $500 dollars everytime the integrated battery on their tablet wears out or it becomes so obsolete or the OS doesn't get updated for a while and it becomes useless. A niche? Maybe. I'm more inclined to think that tablets are the real niche here. And sure, I've invested time learning how to use a PC. Granted, it only took a few days, but yeah, I guess that's some time. And most of it translates to tablets, as well (I should know, I just bought an android PMP/MID/mini-tablet).
But if you want to buy into the Apple "rebuy our product every 1.5 years because your old system is obsolete" Kool-Aid (TM), be my guest. Are there uses for tablets, and good ones? Yes. Will they replace PCs? Hardly. They complement them nicely for some uses, but replace? No.
The funding would have to be allocated before any trials actually took place. In other words, the scientists go to the foundation, say "we have this idea which we think might work but is completely untried, will you give us money", and hope they are interested. So, the funders would have no idea if the treatment has any chance of success prior to funding it. Lots of potentially good research goes untried because no one is willing/able to fund it.
In short, the fact it wasn't able to get good funding tells us absolutely nothing about how well it actually works, only how well some people in positions of power, who may or may not even be scientists (in the case of pharma companies are more likely bean counters), thought it might work. And 2 out of 3, with 70% remission on the 3rd is quite impressive. Especially when one of them was weeks from dying.
calling their friends & neighbors to arms to help them protect their families, homes and businesses.
Are you sure that isn't part of the reason they want these networks shut down? I wouldn't have thought it few years ago, but then I wouldn't have thought the UK government would call to shut down social networks either.
Maybe I should have. Orwell did set 1984 in England, after all.
3.xx Ghz quad core right now, 8GB+ of much faster ram, faster HDD access speeds, Ethernet ports, ridiculously faster GPU, higher than HDMI resolution, a dozen kinds of ports and outputs (HDMI, DVI, 10+ USB, 1394, SPDIF, etc.) All of that, for not much more than the price of 1 tablet. Seriously. 100$ MB, 150$ GPU, 150$CPU,100$ RAM. 500$ right there or the price of your average tablet. Sure, power supply/case cost a bit, and you need a display, but you get far, far more bang/buck than anything in the portable market can or ever will offer.
Oh, and anything that breaks can be replaced/upgraded individually, and I can install any OS I want with no lockdown and far greater selection. But feel free to stick to your overpriced underperforming but highly portable tablet, if you want.
I see someone has played Deus Ex :) (IIRC the nanites in that game were not generally self-replicating. Rather, they were created by the Universal Constructor.) That seems like a much more reasonable proposition.
For instance, the problem that never gets mentioned is where the nanites would get the energy. Very few elementary particles would be suitable to become nanites, and reordering them on that scale would take vast amounts of energy. Not to mention memory if they try to act intelligently (hell, on the nano-molecular scale even storing a self-blueprint would be difficult. Not impossible: see DNA).
Actually, I think Stargate's Replicators had it right. Macro scale blocks that together were able to self-replicate, and tiny-scale nanites had to be created out of specific material and were not (completely) self-replicating. I think to really have any efficiency at all, you need a certain threshold size for replication to take place. Bacteria sized, at least, probably larger for artificial machines. It would be possible, though, at least in theory. At least 100 years beyond us, in any case.
No. It is, however, extremely odd, considering that Reuters lists only the dollar and yuan amount. I'm extremely confused why pounds sterling entered into it. Perhaps the submitter has an axe to grind about /. being an American website?
I'm more questioning if the effort put into designing this program will be worth the return based on the number of people who actually use it. I love physics, but I know lots of people don't. If it's hard to see the practical usage, a lot of people won't dedicate their CPU time to it. I might, as might some on /., but I can't imagine many beyond that will. Maybe that's all they need.
Do they really expect that many people to take part? There is already SETI@Home, Folding@Home, and a few others I can't think of ATM. IMO Folding@home is most useful of these (huge potential medical usefulness), so they've got that down, and SETI is, well, kinda cool. I can understand if you're a huge physics buff, but I don't know too many people like that. And I'm not sure why you want to do simulations of particle collisions when you can do the real thing and get real results.
Yeah, I'm not sure how making it open source counts as "pulling the plug." The summary is extremely misleading, to say the very least. I wouldn't even be surprised if Google continues developing AI after open sourcing it. In fact, they mention that they are looking to do precisely that, and because of its educational usefulness.
Seems like /. should be praising this move by Google. If Google doesn't release source code (see: Honeycomb) they're evil, and if they do... they're evil. I'm guessing someone just doesn't like Google. My guess is they don't want to develop it anymore because it just isn't powerful enough to be used for real app development, but they still want people to be able to use it. Good for Google.
So, to install the rootkit, you also need to exploit a bug in the user. Where do I file the bug report?
With nature. The bug is already fixed in some new generations of humans, but unfortunately the widespread deployment of the old version and it's tenacity, combined with the fact that most people have updates turned off, prevents a rapid fix of the problem.
However, a long-term plan is currently in effect. A few more earthquakes and hurricanes should do the trick.
I think his point is that the DoD is thinking about cyberwarfare wrongly. To do this, he invokes a psychoanalyst and psychoanalytic principles and attempts to connect them to the Internet.
He fails. The Internet is not some new form of "cyber-space-time". It is a massive repository of information, connected by wires (mostly) and run by computers according to the rules we have established. Its complexity does not make it something new. It is no more a new field of "space-time" than Conway's Game of Life is. Using psychoanalysis to talk about it is, frankly, somewhat ridiculous and makes me question just how much of a "leading analyst" he is.
I think you mean pre-iphone we had this. Look like anything you've seen before? Pics came out ~6 months before the iPhone was announced. Apple made it "cool", they didn't invent the modern smartphone by a long shot.
Pretty sure the fact that there was Android devices before the iPhone (incidentally Google bought Android in 2005... way before the iPhone) shows that Google isn't just copying their design and slapping Linux on it. Oh, and the base Android setup looks nothing like the base iPhone setup. Incidentally, you might want to look up the LG Prada, which had pictures of it released into the wild ~6 months before the iPhone (AFAICT) and looks quite similar. In fact, it's quite likely Apple copied that phone in making the iPhone (LG claimed Apple did, but never actually filed suit). So, Apple is in the right? I doubt it.
Ah, cool, I didn't know about that system. It's still a pretty small rocket, though. I'm guessing something large enough to be man-rated would be a considerably greater technical challenge.
Chrome may have a nice interface and be a bit faster than Firefox's rendering engine,but if Firefox failed as a project I'd miss its Emacs-like extensibility (something all other browsers lack).
-1 Flamebait - emacs vs. vi. :)
However, I have to tip my hat for cleverly bringing up emacs in an article about browsers. Or, wait, is emacs a browser now? Wouldn't surprise me in the least.
You work at NASA?
No, but I want to :)
For some reason I assumed the 13,000 was m/s. It's actually ~3.6 miles/sec, or ~5.76 km/s. So, pretty close anyways.
Actually, the "big dumb rocket" mentality exists for a very good reason. While it is certainly (theoretically) possible to build multiple stage launchers, such as strapping a smaller rocket onto a jet plane, the jet then has to be built to take it's own weight+the rocket. I'm not sure if you can build (conventional) jet planes big enough to carry a rocket large enough to reach escape velocity even after being released at high altitudes and speed. Jets only work up to a certain altitude and speed, problems rockets don't have at all. Then there are separation issues of firing rockets on top of a plane. Added complexity should be obvious, but you also get added weight from extra support systems for the different engines.
Rockets, despite the term "rocket science", are actually pretty simple. They scale up well in size, they are pretty reliable, require no air, have no maximum speed (or thrust, for that matter). Hypersonic jets, on the other hand, are very, very complicated. They require certain speeds to function right (turbojets only work if the incoming air is subsonic, for instance, giving them a practical maximum speed. On the other hand, ramjets, IIRC, only work if the incoming air is supersonic, giving them a minimum speed.) Airflow has to be just right, fuel for them is tricky (often extremely dangerous). The SR-71, for example, needed a special, very dangerous, fuel that combusts spontaneously in air to ignite its afterburner. And they incorporate moving parts. Solid fuel rockets don't (at least not in the actual thrust mechanism. Could be wrong about that, though. Small ones don't, I assume larger ones work more or less the same.)
However, I agree that multi-stage engines systems are the future of space travel. They are just quite a bit more tricky than you would think, which is why we don't have them even now.
According to Wikipedia, LEO is actually ~7-8 km/s. This goes 13. So, this thing IS at orbital speeds.
Problem is likely height, since the engines likely require air. And, of course, it's starting at high altitude already using a rocket. Most theoretical ground-orbit planes use multiple engines, since many high-speed engines require you to be supersonic already. Still, this tech could potentially give us much cheaper ground-to-orbit methods.
Also, as to where (besides orbit, and since this is DARPA): it's probably for spy planes. Being able to reach anyplace on earth in an hour or two with higher resolution and longer loiter times than any satellite is a huge advantage. The SR-71 was built for precisely that (but was rather expensive and not quite worth it). Not to mention with that kind of speed no missile created can touch you (the SR-71 standard missile evasion tactic was to simply increase speed, and this is 3-4 times faster).