Now a group from UC Berkeley and IBM's Watson Research Lab says it has a found a classical algorithm that explains the results just as well, or even better, than quantum annealing.
So we have two possibilities here:
1) D-Wave has built a device that at least theoretically can exist, which works more-or-less as advertised, or
2) D-Wave came up with a previously unknown solution to a class of computationally difficult problems, and would rather fleece a handful of investors than simply profit legitimately from their discovery.
Perhaps most importantly, the discovery of this new algorithm (which D-Wave's offerings predate) that "looks" like quantum performance on a specific task doesn't prove the D-Wave doing it one way or another. It just means we need a better test for quantum computing.
Actually it is more political than you imagine.
KDE was not pure (L)GPL, it had dual licencing for money etc. It was the biggest FUD ever pulled successfully, even Microsoft failed to do something in this scale.
And here, you make the mistake most FOSS advocates make - You actually believe (or at least, "care about") what you just said.
I like open source. I use open source. I've rolled my own kernels, I've even modified them to fix an early broken multi-PCI bus enumeration routine. And yet...
I don't give the least fuck about the "purity" of your license. I'll pirate Windows if it works better than Gnome, for all I care, though of course I (and most people) would far, far prefer to stay legal. So if KDE has only a hint of "IP" taint, vs the abomination that we call "Gnome", hey, y'know, KDE does what I want better, so I use it.
And that last point doesn't just apply to Linux. Microsoft would do well to learn it themselves - I don't care in the least about price or legality or what "other" platforms it works well on... I just care that my desktop OS behaves like I expect, and lets me do what I want to do.
The reality is that physical damage in the aging brain can be seen, low memory recovery and basic IQ can be measured.
Whoah, careful there! Modern academia doesn't allow researchers to admit such ideas as "IQ" even exist anymore.
Despite the fact that you have a near perfect correlation between "big number = scary-smary" and "small number = catches flies with open mouth", instead we have to consider nuances... Like how your brain surgeon might not do well on formal tests, but since he stayed inside the lines when coloring in the anterior cingulate gyrus, we gave him a first place trophy (though the whole class got one of those, of course) and traded his crayon for a scalpel.
Then you go talking about measurable damage like amyloid plaques, and you might just get yourself branded an ageist!
I don't have any doubt about the real motivations behind this, but I have to wonder...
How do the politicians pushing bills like this present them as anything but pure greed and cronyism with a straight face? I mean, I really can't come up with even a plausible cover story to make this more palatable. Even the old standby of "protecting jobs" doesn't fly, because someone still needs to run the networks, and seriously, how do you sell "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company" as a private entity worth protecting?
Then again, maybe the politicians just don't even bother trying to have a cover story anymore, because they know we already consider them all nothing but self-serving asshats, yet the majority will still vote them back into office again and again and again.
"Bomber crew" ain't quite the same thing as "human bunker furniturey".
I do not think that you understand what the job is.
Hmm, I think I have a pretty good idea. Take someone who - by definition of willingness to complete their duties - counts as a complete sociopath... Then expect them to give two shits about "integrity" on the test that gives them a job with essentially no duties other than wait for a message that will never come?
Cry me a river. I'll thank every poor bastard who actually served our country to keep me safe, but these ain't them.
Some jobs require performance of a very high standard.
This ain't one of 'em. "Wait in a bunker for three days at a time, for an order that will never come". Woo-hoo, now that right there takes some serious best-of-the-bestness!
Go old-school and crush the cheaters in an exemplary manner.
Meh. Cheating to a get a job that anyone with an ounce of motivation would do their damnedest to avoid? Let 'em have it, keep them out of better jobs, and get rid of the stupid test. Anyone that wants to spend 20 years in a bunker sleeping in shifts deserves what they get.
"I know, let's set up a tip service that's totally unrelated to what you're tipping for, has no input from the people you're tipping and provides the tips in a currency that half the recipients either won't want or don't care about"
If only people from your local area want to tip you - Great! You have it absolutely right, just do it in the local currency.
Not too many people want to pay their bank's BS foreign exchange fees to leave (the equivalent of) a dollar in the tip jar, though, nor do most people want to get tips in 27 different currencies.
BitCoin makes a nice compromise that eliminates most of the problems of dealing with a global market that old-school government-issued currencies and their authorized middle-men just can't compete with.
That said, others have already pointed out the biggest problem here... $136 for the single biggest name in Open Source (even before RMS, I dare say)??? Just... Wow. I wouldn't bother giving out my contact info to collect such a pittance either.
OR! Does this Slashdot FP itself count as a social engineering attack by Naoki Hiroshima to pressure GoDaddy/Twitter/Paypal/SomeoneElseEntirely into submission, possibly for the stated purpose (control of @N), or for something seemingly unrelated but actually useful?
I kid, of course... I have no reason to doubt the story as given. I do find it odd that someone would actually break the law (at the very minimum, identity theft and extortion) in such a contrived chain of events... Just to gain control of something they won't even realistically get to use (can you imagine trying to use @N for the next few months through the massive volume of hate-tweets it will get?)
You mean, "How much longer it will take", since this has nothing to do with Bitcoin except as a buzzword tangentially related to the case, and has no bearing on the current or future viability of Bitcoin as a currency.
You would have heard the exact same story if he had helped Silk Road exchange Yen for Dollars... Well, except that you wouldn't have heard of it because run-of-the-mill laundering doesn't make the news, but HURP BITCOIN DURP!
"Sorry, matter of national security. No, you can't see the evidence against you. No, we don't have to physically present you to the court to stand trial".
And if you disagree with that... Better stay out of sight of the sky 24/7 or we might spot you "associating" with a terrorist leader and you know how that collateral drone damage works on you and your whole village... Er, neighborhood.
Dear mods: This doesn't count as "funny" (quite the opposite), but rather, "insightful".
US case law pretty much accepts that as a de facto standard - In the absence of staggeringly overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the guy gets screwed while the woman gets whatever she asks for.
First, a disclaimer: Yes, I understand that the "cloud" means nothing more than playing Buzzword Bingo with the same old crap hosted by someone else, with a shiny new billing model that lets the service providers rub their hands while cackling with glee over all the idiot CEOs out there willing to pay more for what they don't recognize as the same ol'.
That said, if your resume says you've worked in the trenches with VPSs and hosted solutions, you can expect the HR drone's eyes to glaze over because it doesn't match any of the buzzwords on their pre-screening checklist. If, however, you say that you've "Deployed critical corporate assets to the Azure cloud", well now, you may well have yourself a job!
Just make sure when you actually get to interview with a real IT manager, you know the difference between the PR bullshit and reality; the pain of trying to integrate between different "clouds" you don't control; how to code in C# and Javascript and SQL. The rest just gets you in the door, you still need to do the same old job as ever.
the trend lines are running strongly against an all white male geek elite.
Who said anything about all white and all male, except CollegeBoard trying to spread FUD?
This is the technocratic argument that has always haunted the geek elite --- and Heinlein pinned it's pelt to the wall in 1940.
Erm, that story ends with the technological elites winning (minus one megalomaniacal engineer). If anything, that story damns the labor unions, not the technological elites. And beyond that, Reagan demonstrated that yes, we will simply send The Guild packing, and damn the consequences.
When an elite becomes too arrogant, too powerful, its power is broken.
Perhaps your error lies in your choice of the word "technocratic"... I didn't say geeks should rule the world - I don't even think most would want to. I only claimed they couldn't become a marginalized minority as long as society as a whole needs something from them.
Going back to your example of "The Roads Must Roll", the story makes a point of stressing that pretty much anyone can do that job: "D'yuh have to be a cadet in a funny little hat before you can learn to wipe a bearing, or jack down a rotor?". Any engineer could wipe down a bearing; your over-20 bagger at the local supermarket most likely can't write a device driver.
It just boggles the mind how eager everyone is to go along with NASA's hype about the mission, to the point here of giving time here to the event of a rock getting popped up in the air by the Rover and landing upside down.
In fairness, people got almost as excited by a tunnel boring machine in Seattle hitting a forgotten pipe.
From religion to aliens to ghost-hunters, people just want to find something that suggests that, in this mind-bogglingly large universe, our species doesn't count as the sole intelligence.
On the one hand, that would technically make us really quite special - Unique, even. On the other, it makes us special to nobody and nothing except ourselves. And our dogs, but I don't think they'll do any better than we will when our sun eventually goes nova.
So yeah, spooky rocks. I'll take obsessing about that, over going home and slowly drinking myself to death day after day for 40 years until society has no more use for my body and they let me "enjoy" my final arthritis-ridden decade.
The geek may be well on the way to be as marginalized by a minority and aging white population as the GOP.
Funny thing about "minorities"...
When a small percentage of the population has nothing particularly special to offer the rest of the population, we worry about them becoming marginalized and ignored, possibly even subject to prejudice.
When a small percentage of the population has something that everyone wants, something that most people don't have the capacity to get for themselves, and especially something that others can't take by force - We call them "elites", not "minorities".
Now, that said, I have no doubt that some day - probably within my lifetime, though hopefully not before I retire - computer programming will become a task best performed by computers themselves. At that point, this particular elite may well lose their status; until then, if you want your Twitter and your Facebook and your GMail and your YouTube and your MineCraft and your online porn, you will pay the IT elites pretty much whatever they ask for.
teens reach about adult accident rates after 1000 hours behind the wheel. I'd expect them to retain a 'stupid teen' premium.
It takes a looong time for a non-professional driver to rack up 1000 hours. So by the time a new 16YO driver reaches that threshold, they quite likely no longer count as a "teen".
Even as an adult with an hour commute to and from work, it takes me around two full years to reach 1000 hours. And I didn't drive anywhere near that much as a teen - Ten minutes to and from school (only 180 days a year), and maybe an hour of aimless driving each weekend day and one or two summer weekdays.
Are there even enough BTC exchanges out there to actually convert that much BTC into USD?
The BTC economy has a market cap equivalent to USD 11.5 billion. Whether or not the economy can cover that trade doesn't present a problem.
As the more interesting problem, only a fraction of that value ties back to actual USD. CNY has a much bigger contribution to that total value, along with German Euros (oh, like the EU has any other kind right now?;) ) and a wide basket of other players outside the US.
Will the US Government accept its change in Yuan? XD
Probably a good idea to start stocking up now anyway, since the asshats in DC seem dead set on running our own economy into the dirt.
This doesn't electrolyze water into H and O. It acts as a semipermeable membrane that allows gas exchange between the air inside and the water outside. So you don't get "pure" O2, you get more-or-less normal air.
You have a higher partial pressure of CO2 inside, so it selectively moves out; Similarly, you have a lower partial pressure of O2 inside, so it moves in. Only the inconvenience of having enough surface area prevented something like this before - You need on the order of 70m^2, with sufficient movement of both the water and air to make something like this viable. Apparently nanotech has advanced to the point where we can pack that into a pair of 2x8 inch tubes.
We are not all scientists. Furthermore, we are not all hard science scientists. And there is meaning there. Why you gotta hate?
The author of TFA does claim that label. And, in an way oddly apropos to his premise, we ascribe to him the style and clarity of thinking that goes along with that label.
Essentially you could do it with two, but 4 gives you the redundancy needed.
I'll see your two, and raise you to "one".
A single satellite just a few million miles above (or below) the orbital plane of our solar system will always have line-of-sight to both Earth and Mars (and also to Jupiter and Venus, as a bonus). Even our own relatively huge moon won't occlude that.
Of course, "uninterrupted" has problems other than actual occlusion by a planet/sun/moon. CMEs could always knock out communications no matter how much redundancy we put in place; and you need to factor in a wide range of latencies - A hair over three minutes at opposition, but up to a whopping 22 minutes at apheliion (actually, 1337 seconds, for a funny coincidence).
They actually don't give a fuck, and overtly support corporate supply chain convenience and incrementally cheaper gizmos made possible by a brutal slow-burn conflict substantially driven and financed by access to mineral resources in the area. That point of view is pretty fucked up.
Not entirely a fair assessment of the situation. I don't support corporate profits over human lives - Quite the opposite, actually; I fall to pretty much the opposite extreme of thinking we should ban the entire concept of "incorporation" altogether!
I don't like the fact that people die for my toys. But put bluntly, I can't do a goddamned thing about it. Even if we stop pumping money into these mineral-rich areas, they will continue to murder each other over the scarce human-life-supporting resources available. Their colonization by "civilization" merely gave them better tools to kill each other off.
But put bluntly, I (and I don't think I commit a fallacy to attribute this same feeling to the majority) have "horror fatigue" thanks to just how fucking awful of a world we live in. I hear on a daily basis about sex slaves and 3rd world orphans making my clothes and Bhopal-like events and y'know, after a while you need to either say "meh, save yourselves", or drop out of society altogether and become an organic farmer on a few acres in the middle of nowhere (and still feel at least a bit bad about having the "luxury" of fertile ground and relatively stable rainfall).
Slashdot Mirror
Now a group from UC Berkeley and IBM's Watson Research Lab says it has a found a classical algorithm that explains the results just as well, or even better, than quantum annealing.
So we have two possibilities here:
1) D-Wave has built a device that at least theoretically can exist, which works more-or-less as advertised, or
2) D-Wave came up with a previously unknown solution to a class of computationally difficult problems, and would rather fleece a handful of investors than simply profit legitimately from their discovery.
Perhaps most importantly, the discovery of this new algorithm (which D-Wave's offerings predate) that "looks" like quantum performance on a specific task doesn't prove the D-Wave doing it one way or another. It just means we need a better test for quantum computing.
TFA's assertion of difficulty aside, I don't really get the problem with proving a quantum computer: "On a quantum computer, to factor an integer N, Shor's algorithm runs in polynomial time (the time taken is polynomial in log N, which is the size of the input).[1] Specifically it takes time O((log N)3), demonstrating that the integer factorization problem can be efficiently solved on a quantum computer and is thus in the complexity class BQP. This is substantially faster than the most efficient known classical factoring algorithm, the general number field sieve, which works in sub-exponential time â" about O(e1.9 (log N)1/3 (log log N)2/3)".
So this seems like a no-brainer - Does integer factorization scale in polynomial or subexponential time on a D-Wave?
Actually it is more political than you imagine. KDE was not pure (L)GPL, it had dual licencing for money etc. It was the biggest FUD ever pulled successfully, even Microsoft failed to do something in this scale.
And here, you make the mistake most FOSS advocates make - You actually believe (or at least, "care about") what you just said.
I like open source. I use open source. I've rolled my own kernels, I've even modified them to fix an early broken multi-PCI bus enumeration routine. And yet...
I don't give the least fuck about the "purity" of your license. I'll pirate Windows if it works better than Gnome, for all I care, though of course I (and most people) would far, far prefer to stay legal. So if KDE has only a hint of "IP" taint, vs the abomination that we call "Gnome", hey, y'know, KDE does what I want better, so I use it.
And that last point doesn't just apply to Linux. Microsoft would do well to learn it themselves - I don't care in the least about price or legality or what "other" platforms it works well on... I just care that my desktop OS behaves like I expect, and lets me do what I want to do.
The reality is that physical damage in the aging brain can be seen, low memory recovery and basic IQ can be measured.
Whoah, careful there! Modern academia doesn't allow researchers to admit such ideas as "IQ" even exist anymore.
Despite the fact that you have a near perfect correlation between "big number = scary-smary" and "small number = catches flies with open mouth", instead we have to consider nuances... Like how your brain surgeon might not do well on formal tests, but since he stayed inside the lines when coloring in the anterior cingulate gyrus, we gave him a first place trophy (though the whole class got one of those, of course) and traded his crayon for a scalpel.
Then you go talking about measurable damage like amyloid plaques, and you might just get yourself branded an ageist!
I don't have any doubt about the real motivations behind this, but I have to wonder...
How do the politicians pushing bills like this present them as anything but pure greed and cronyism with a straight face? I mean, I really can't come up with even a plausible cover story to make this more palatable. Even the old standby of "protecting jobs" doesn't fly, because someone still needs to run the networks, and seriously, how do you sell "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company" as a private entity worth protecting?
Then again, maybe the politicians just don't even bother trying to have a cover story anymore, because they know we already consider them all nothing but self-serving asshats, yet the majority will still vote them back into office again and again and again.
So, he had to sit on a runway for 3 days
"Bomber crew" ain't quite the same thing as "human bunker furniturey".
I do not think that you understand what the job is.
Hmm, I think I have a pretty good idea. Take someone who - by definition of willingness to complete their duties - counts as a complete sociopath... Then expect them to give two shits about "integrity" on the test that gives them a job with essentially no duties other than wait for a message that will never come?
Cry me a river. I'll thank every poor bastard who actually served our country to keep me safe, but these ain't them.
Some jobs require performance of a very high standard.
This ain't one of 'em. "Wait in a bunker for three days at a time, for an order that will never come". Woo-hoo, now that right there takes some serious best-of-the-bestness!
Go old-school and crush the cheaters in an exemplary manner.
Meh. Cheating to a get a job that anyone with an ounce of motivation would do their damnedest to avoid? Let 'em have it, keep them out of better jobs, and get rid of the stupid test. Anyone that wants to spend 20 years in a bunker sleeping in shifts deserves what they get.
"I know, let's set up a tip service that's totally unrelated to what you're tipping for, has no input from the people you're tipping and provides the tips in a currency that half the recipients either won't want or don't care about"
If only people from your local area want to tip you - Great! You have it absolutely right, just do it in the local currency.
Not too many people want to pay their bank's BS foreign exchange fees to leave (the equivalent of) a dollar in the tip jar, though, nor do most people want to get tips in 27 different currencies.
BitCoin makes a nice compromise that eliminates most of the problems of dealing with a global market that old-school government-issued currencies and their authorized middle-men just can't compete with.
That said, others have already pointed out the biggest problem here... $136 for the single biggest name in Open Source (even before RMS, I dare say)??? Just... Wow. I wouldn't bother giving out my contact info to collect such a pittance either.
OR! Does this Slashdot FP itself count as a social engineering attack by Naoki Hiroshima to pressure GoDaddy/Twitter/Paypal/SomeoneElseEntirely into submission, possibly for the stated purpose (control of @N), or for something seemingly unrelated but actually useful?
I kid, of course... I have no reason to doubt the story as given. I do find it odd that someone would actually break the law (at the very minimum, identity theft and extortion) in such a contrived chain of events... Just to gain control of something they won't even realistically get to use (can you imagine trying to use @N for the next few months through the massive volume of hate-tweets it will get?)
Citation required.
Seriously? Googling for "HSBC laundering iran" turns up about a billion hits.
But yes, technically, the burden of proof rests on the one making the claim, so, here, try this one
HSBC paid fines equal to 5 weeks of total corporate profits
Remind me again how many weeks of "corporate profits" equals one fucking human life?
Hint: If your answer doesn't throw a division-by-zero exception, you've missed the point.
/ And make no mistake, I put a pretty damned low value on human life - This planet has a heck of a lot of us!
I just wonder how it took so long.
You mean, "How much longer it will take", since this has nothing to do with Bitcoin except as a buzzword tangentially related to the case, and has no bearing on the current or future viability of Bitcoin as a currency.
You would have heard the exact same story if he had helped Silk Road exchange Yen for Dollars... Well, except that you wouldn't have heard of it because run-of-the-mill laundering doesn't make the news, but HURP BITCOIN DURP!
Cute, but did HSBC: Conspire to launder money? Willfully fail to file Suspicious Activity Reports(SAR)?
Yes, actually, they did; and further, they actively conspired with Iran to circumvent international sanctions.
And yet, we don't see any of their executives behind bars as a result...
"Sorry, matter of national security. No, you can't see the evidence against you. No, we don't have to physically present you to the court to stand trial".
And if you disagree with that... Better stay out of sight of the sky 24/7 or we might spot you "associating" with a terrorist leader and you know how that collateral drone damage works on you and your whole village... Er, neighborhood.
"So you know how we swore up and down for years that we didn't intentionally weaken Windows encryption for the NSA? Yeah, about that..."
Dear mods: This doesn't count as "funny" (quite the opposite), but rather, "insightful".
US case law pretty much accepts that as a de facto standard - In the absence of staggeringly overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the guy gets screwed while the woman gets whatever she asks for.
First, a disclaimer: Yes, I understand that the "cloud" means nothing more than playing Buzzword Bingo with the same old crap hosted by someone else, with a shiny new billing model that lets the service providers rub their hands while cackling with glee over all the idiot CEOs out there willing to pay more for what they don't recognize as the same ol'.
That said, if your resume says you've worked in the trenches with VPSs and hosted solutions, you can expect the HR drone's eyes to glaze over because it doesn't match any of the buzzwords on their pre-screening checklist. If, however, you say that you've "Deployed critical corporate assets to the Azure cloud", well now, you may well have yourself a job!
Just make sure when you actually get to interview with a real IT manager, you know the difference between the PR bullshit and reality; the pain of trying to integrate between different "clouds" you don't control; how to code in C# and Javascript and SQL. The rest just gets you in the door, you still need to do the same old job as ever.
the trend lines are running strongly against an all white male geek elite.
Who said anything about all white and all male, except CollegeBoard trying to spread FUD?
This is the technocratic argument that has always haunted the geek elite --- and Heinlein pinned it's pelt to the wall in 1940.
Erm, that story ends with the technological elites winning (minus one megalomaniacal engineer). If anything, that story damns the labor unions, not the technological elites. And beyond that, Reagan demonstrated that yes, we will simply send The Guild packing, and damn the consequences.
When an elite becomes too arrogant, too powerful, its power is broken.
Perhaps your error lies in your choice of the word "technocratic"... I didn't say geeks should rule the world - I don't even think most would want to. I only claimed they couldn't become a marginalized minority as long as society as a whole needs something from them.
Going back to your example of "The Roads Must Roll", the story makes a point of stressing that pretty much anyone can do that job: "D'yuh have to be a cadet in a funny little hat before you can learn to wipe a bearing, or jack down a rotor?". Any engineer could wipe down a bearing; your over-20 bagger at the local supermarket most likely can't write a device driver.
It just boggles the mind how eager everyone is to go along with NASA's hype about the mission, to the point here of giving time here to the event of a rock getting popped up in the air by the Rover and landing upside down.
In fairness, people got almost as excited by a tunnel boring machine in Seattle hitting a forgotten pipe.
From religion to aliens to ghost-hunters, people just want to find something that suggests that, in this mind-bogglingly large universe, our species doesn't count as the sole intelligence.
On the one hand, that would technically make us really quite special - Unique, even. On the other, it makes us special to nobody and nothing except ourselves. And our dogs, but I don't think they'll do any better than we will when our sun eventually goes nova.
So yeah, spooky rocks. I'll take obsessing about that, over going home and slowly drinking myself to death day after day for 40 years until society has no more use for my body and they let me "enjoy" my final arthritis-ridden decade.
The geek may be well on the way to be as marginalized by a minority and aging white population as the GOP.
Funny thing about "minorities"...
When a small percentage of the population has nothing particularly special to offer the rest of the population, we worry about them becoming marginalized and ignored, possibly even subject to prejudice.
When a small percentage of the population has something that everyone wants, something that most people don't have the capacity to get for themselves, and especially something that others can't take by force - We call them "elites", not "minorities".
Now, that said, I have no doubt that some day - probably within my lifetime, though hopefully not before I retire - computer programming will become a task best performed by computers themselves. At that point, this particular elite may well lose their status; until then, if you want your Twitter and your Facebook and your GMail and your YouTube and your MineCraft and your online porn, you will pay the IT elites pretty much whatever they ask for.
teens reach about adult accident rates after 1000 hours behind the wheel. I'd expect them to retain a 'stupid teen' premium.
It takes a looong time for a non-professional driver to rack up 1000 hours. So by the time a new 16YO driver reaches that threshold, they quite likely no longer count as a "teen".
Even as an adult with an hour commute to and from work, it takes me around two full years to reach 1000 hours. And I didn't drive anywhere near that much as a teen - Ten minutes to and from school (only 180 days a year), and maybe an hour of aimless driving each weekend day and one or two summer weekdays.
Are there even enough BTC exchanges out there to actually convert that much BTC into USD?
;) ) and a wide basket of other players outside the US.
The BTC economy has a market cap equivalent to USD 11.5 billion. Whether or not the economy can cover that trade doesn't present a problem.
As the more interesting problem, only a fraction of that value ties back to actual USD. CNY has a much bigger contribution to that total value, along with German Euros (oh, like the EU has any other kind right now?
Will the US Government accept its change in Yuan? XD
Probably a good idea to start stocking up now anyway, since the asshats in DC seem dead set on running our own economy into the dirt.
This doesn't electrolyze water into H and O. It acts as a semipermeable membrane that allows gas exchange between the air inside and the water outside. So you don't get "pure" O2, you get more-or-less normal air.
You have a higher partial pressure of CO2 inside, so it selectively moves out; Similarly, you have a lower partial pressure of O2 inside, so it moves in. Only the inconvenience of having enough surface area prevented something like this before - You need on the order of 70m^2, with sufficient movement of both the water and air to make something like this viable. Apparently nanotech has advanced to the point where we can pack that into a pair of 2x8 inch tubes.
We are not all scientists. Furthermore, we are not all hard science scientists. And there is meaning there. Why you gotta hate?
The author of TFA does claim that label. And, in an way oddly apropos to his premise, we ascribe to him the style and clarity of thinking that goes along with that label.
Funny, I wonder if that would annoy him.
Essentially you could do it with two, but 4 gives you the redundancy needed.
I'll see your two, and raise you to "one".
A single satellite just a few million miles above (or below) the orbital plane of our solar system will always have line-of-sight to both Earth and Mars (and also to Jupiter and Venus, as a bonus). Even our own relatively huge moon won't occlude that.
Of course, "uninterrupted" has problems other than actual occlusion by a planet/sun/moon. CMEs could always knock out communications no matter how much redundancy we put in place; and you need to factor in a wide range of latencies - A hair over three minutes at opposition, but up to a whopping 22 minutes at apheliion (actually, 1337 seconds, for a funny coincidence).
They actually don't give a fuck, and overtly support corporate supply chain convenience and incrementally cheaper gizmos made possible by a brutal slow-burn conflict substantially driven and financed by access to mineral resources in the area. That point of view is pretty fucked up.
Not entirely a fair assessment of the situation. I don't support corporate profits over human lives - Quite the opposite, actually; I fall to pretty much the opposite extreme of thinking we should ban the entire concept of "incorporation" altogether!
I don't like the fact that people die for my toys. But put bluntly, I can't do a goddamned thing about it. Even if we stop pumping money into these mineral-rich areas, they will continue to murder each other over the scarce human-life-supporting resources available. Their colonization by "civilization" merely gave them better tools to kill each other off.
But put bluntly, I (and I don't think I commit a fallacy to attribute this same feeling to the majority) have "horror fatigue" thanks to just how fucking awful of a world we live in. I hear on a daily basis about sex slaves and 3rd world orphans making my clothes and Bhopal-like events and y'know, after a while you need to either say "meh, save yourselves", or drop out of society altogether and become an organic farmer on a few acres in the middle of nowhere (and still feel at least a bit bad about having the "luxury" of fertile ground and relatively stable rainfall).