Even sparrows hate the undead. Those zombies are going down.
"Next on AMC The Sqawking Dead"
Re:I Don't Understand the Conclusion
on
Terminator Sparrows?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It certainly looks like a pair of conflicting statements...did they never consider that they'd triggered an "Uncanny Valley" reaction in the sparrows and they were being aggressive towards the cyborg-zombie sparrow?
That was my reaction. The attack seemed disproportionally aggressive. Killing the competition isn't a normal reaction. It seems more like fear than aggression. Curious if that could end up being another intelligence test whether animals also deal with a form of Uncanny Valley reaction. It's not universal since I've seen animals being fairly accepting of robotic animals. Gorillas don't normally have an aggressive reaction to people in gorilla suits, Rick Baker's crew dealt with that first hand on Graystoke by mixing with wild gorillas. Birds are different and look for subtle cues so they may react more strongly to "wrong" behavior. Moving oddly might be perceived as diseased so a dangerous threat to the gene pool.
That's the whole proposal of a Dyson Sphere is to capture all of a sun's energy because it is limited. At present there are three primary sources of power, nuclear decay, solar and gravity. Nuclear decay has issues and it will run out one day whether it's several hundred or several thousands years. Solar is limited mostly by the Earth's surface area and cloud cover. Orbiting mirrors and collectors could potentially expand it in the future making it the only source that can be increased without off world mining. Gravity is the trickiest. It mostly takes the form of hydroelectric and wave power. Fossil fuels are just stored solar. Solar and the pull of the Moon creates most of the wind and wave power. There's also a few things like geothermal but there's been little progress in widely adopting it. Most sources of chemical energy require processing that uses other forms of energy. Fusion is a nice idea but a pipe dream for now. There is simply no unlimited source of energy that can meet all our needs so all it means is we need to use all sources wisely. All the article is saying is it's probably not possible to meet all our energy needs with wind power. In our history we've never met all our needs with one source so it's hardly a reason to abandon wind and the article doesn't propose it it simply says we should know the limits of wind power and not exceed them.
According to the article, they entire civilization was using Windows 8 right before it sunk. Their continental IT department tried to roll out touchscreens and then the whole place sank into the sea. Strange, but not unexpected.
Microsoft's blue screen of death was meant to honor all those that sank into the blue sea with no hope of survival.
How about this, we clean up the mess we already have before we go making new messes? Make it true of all industries from coal to nuclear as well as oil. The problem is the industries always manage to move on and leave us stuck with the bill. Hanford was mostly used for weapons production but I believe they also produced some of the first reactor fuel. Make the military take the money from their budget for the clean up before they are allowed to buy any new toys. It's like making a kid clean up his room before they watch TV. Just make everyone responsible for the messes they make and the problem goes away!
Is there any reason why we shouldn't reduce our current nuclear arsenal to something less than 1000 warheads, instead of replacing them with new ones? Can anyone think of a plausible situation where we would need 1000 nuclear warheads?
They actually are cannibalizing old ones to maintain the stockpile because we no longer have facilities to create new weapons and parts of the bombs degrade. It's one of the reasons both the US and Russia have been for reductions. I think the number of weapons is a third of what it was at the height of the Cold War.
So over it's service life it would cost roughly the same amount as putting solar panels on 40 million homes. One unneeded airplane that has yet to see a day of service. There's plenty of money to solve our problems it's all being wasted!
It's a little like saying if you just ignore all the Toyota thefts the number of cars stolen would go down. They are going for what's popular and easy to move. What's new?
It's a great topic but a poor example. The car was on loan for testing and a reviewer should not assume they have privacy rights for the obvious reason this story points out that the reviewer lied in the reviewer and was caught by the black box and it wasn't their car. Now if the reviewer had purchased the car things might have been different. Personally I dislike black boxes and we should always assume they are turned on since it can be done without our permission. An example being the police.
I spent a couple of years in Maine recently and I can tell you DEET mostly just pissed them off. I grew up in Michigan and I've had a lot of experience over the years with Mosquitoes. The ones in Maine are more aggressive. If you walked in the woods with DEET on it was like wearing a coat of mosquitoes. They didn't like lighting but some did. I think it was akin to having Mace sprayed in your eyes while you ate. If you're hungry enough you tough it out. I can tell you black flies thought DEET was Channel #5. For mosquitpes try catnip oil. It's a nontoxic irritant although you may have to pry the neighborhood cats off you.
The process as pointed out is poorly understood. The anti-neutrinos got my attention. Not sure if they are theorizing their prescience or that they had been detected? They've known for a while now that lightning produces antimatter so there is reason to believe the process can work especially if they are getting anti-neutrinos. Also ionizing radiation is a lot easier to deal with although the need of shielding means you probably won't run a car with one, back to charging batteries. Excellent point about daughter products though. We don't want a new source of lung cancer from our home reactors. Radon is easy enough to shield from so I'm sure the daughter products can be addressed although it'd be a concern when servicing one of the reactors.
Cold Fusion sounds like snake oil but low energy fusion potentially could be real. People can debate energy and gamma releases all they want but for me if they are finding copper where there wasn't copper before the only way for that to happen is some form of fusion. The beauty of the system is if it works you just have to shield from the gamma release while the reactor is operating. Shutting off the reactor stops the release of gamma radiation. The bi-product when you reprocess the core is copper, a useful element. The problem seems to be creating stable reproducable conditions for a process that's poorly understood. Ironically they may be closer to LENR as an energy source even though hot fusion is far better understood. This could be one of those eureka moments when science changes through a single discovery. People forget such things were commonplace in the 1800s up through the early 1900s. Now the eureka discoveries have to come from more obscure things like LENR since most obvious discoveries have been made.
For a fuel that requires little or no processing it's extremely energy dense. Ultimately the problem wouldn't be with the process but the budget minded power companies. There's a reason "clean coal" is like bigfoot, largely a myth. Clean coal would cost more money reducing profits. It's the reason the industry doesn't remove mercury and coal dust from the exhaust, reduced profits. They even had a government mandate and the still waited until the deadline and are now saying it's too hard. The process can trap 99% of the CO2, the trick is keeping the power companies from not releasing it into the atmosphere to save money. White Diesel is a great source of fuel and second only to natural gas for being a clean fossil fuel but it involves stripping of the CO2 and you are faced with the same problem. Sequestration isn't as simple as it sounds. Compressing huge amounts of CO2 gas takes energy and the underground storage areas don't tend to be near power plants. When you start burning more coal just to store the CO2 from the last batch the efficiency goes way down. If the existing plants had been positioned and built with all this in mind we wouldn't have all these problems. Now there are no cheap and easy solutions. Personally I prefer using algae or greenhouses to store the CO2. Try this approach, pump the CO2 into large cheap greenhouses that grow Kenaf, it's related to hemp but totally legal and interchangeable with industrial hemp. Use as much as industry needs for fiber and seed oil then turn the rest into biochar, a good one to read up on if you aren't familiar. The char can be mixed with farmland improving the soil and it'll absorb the excess fertilizer reducing run off and reducing the amount needed to grow food. The carbon is stored for thousands of years, if not millions. The power companies get to make extra money off the Kenaf and they greatly reduce the CO2 and mercury released. The Mercury will get trapped in the char and the CO2 will be stored as solid carbon. These days they try to solve everything with technology when mother nature has been doing it for billions of years.
That was my first reaction. The difference is it also cools the plastic which is different if you are familiar with hot glue guns but it is essentially a hot glue gun.
Blue states happy, Red state unhappy. Kind of mirrors their politics. I plan to retire in Maine and I always found it laid back. Hard to be unhappy when you have a beer in hand and a lobster boiling for dinner. A northern version of Jimmie Buffet.
It just shows how desperate some of our leaders are to spy on average citizens. I've yet to hear a compelling reason to do it other than spying on average Americans. Do they really expect to find an Al Qaeda training camp in some one's backyard? What they'll find is some one's pot plants and that new garage you failed to get a permit for. This has always been about spying on average citizens. It's like back boxes in all our cars "for our own good". You know the ones they don't need a court order to access? Increasingly in this country we are considered guilty until proven innocent. What value is the Constitution when the government ignores it at will? We're protected form unreasonable search and seizure but what passes for unreasonable when they can seize your property without due process and spy on you in your backyard without warrant. We have no rights!
It wasn't that long ago the first planets were found and now they are detecting ones around the size of the Earth's Moon. Imaging Earth sized planets will be the big breakthrough. There's talk of imaging planets similar to space shots of the Earth and other planets but I have my doubts I'll live to see that. It's not the technology it's the investment that would need to be made. Humans walking on Mars and a detailed photo of a distant planet would be the two I hope to live to see.
The problem is companies are more and more using broad range patents to control whole industries. That is NOT how patents are meant to be used. I don't want to see a limiting so much as a modification and redirection. Notice many of these patents are from the 90s and even 80s or before. Some of them are not based on a product so much as an antiscipation of a need to they file an offensive/defensive patent then they wait until alot of major companies are using the process and rack up big profits then they sue. Two simple cures, if they really do have a product give them three years to develop it so most of these troll patents would have expired. I'm talking patents on methods and other broad range patents like gestures and such. Also force them to file within 12 months of a competing product being release. That would kill off these massive lawsuits for 5 to 10 years of infringement before they even filed. Better yet force them to file a cease and desist and give the company 6 to 12 months to stop infringing then if the company fails to comply they can sue to day one. I'm guessing the vast majority of companies had no idea they were infringing and most would make the needed changes to avoid the lawsuit. The current system encourages greed by allowing the patent holder to wait years before filing against a company. This actually prevents the company from stopping the infringement since they aren't made aware of the problem. The system doesn't need to be scrapped it needs to be fixed and reasonable rules and limitations brought in.
In a perfect world maybe. Anyone that tries to sue will have to prove Monstano did it then take on an army of lawyers. Remember Monsanto has been getting away with contaminating crops for years and even successfully sued the victims. Until the courts get more educated the odds are Monsanto will continue to win. In our system the big stick general wins and Monsanto comes bearing nukes. Even if they win a few cases odds are Monsanto will only have to pay the losses. At worse tens of thousands maybe a few hundred thousand? We're talking billions in seed sales. A few lost cases would barely show up on their balance sheets.
And in the third world where many can't aford Monsanto seeds they get to starve when the next years seeds fail to germinate. On the plus side Monstano will increase profits.
The main push for 3D movies hasn't been audience demand but a means to prevent people from shooting the theater screens to pirate. That isn't an issue for computer monitors so there's no real advantage. For a 3D environment Apple does have Core Animation which performs those functions but it's a lot of coding to make it work. They have some cool examples of 3D databases but until it's user friendly I don't see many applications using it. I can see it a fun way to rifle through image files and some of the new Mac interfaces use it for things like flip books for viewing items. I don't see a driving need for most applications. It's already hard enough searching for files since everyone both Microsoft and Apple decided to hide more and more files for our own good. It's still quicker and easier to do a search string than spinning file trees in 3D.
Slashdot Mirror
Even sparrows hate the undead. Those zombies are going down.
"Next on AMC The Sqawking Dead"
It certainly looks like a pair of conflicting statements...did they never consider that they'd triggered an "Uncanny Valley" reaction in the sparrows and they were being aggressive towards the cyborg-zombie sparrow?
That was my reaction. The attack seemed disproportionally aggressive. Killing the competition isn't a normal reaction. It seems more like fear than aggression. Curious if that could end up being another intelligence test whether animals also deal with a form of Uncanny Valley reaction. It's not universal since I've seen animals being fairly accepting of robotic animals. Gorillas don't normally have an aggressive reaction to people in gorilla suits, Rick Baker's crew dealt with that first hand on Graystoke by mixing with wild gorillas. Birds are different and look for subtle cues so they may react more strongly to "wrong" behavior. Moving oddly might be perceived as diseased so a dangerous threat to the gene pool.
That's the whole proposal of a Dyson Sphere is to capture all of a sun's energy because it is limited. At present there are three primary sources of power, nuclear decay, solar and gravity. Nuclear decay has issues and it will run out one day whether it's several hundred or several thousands years. Solar is limited mostly by the Earth's surface area and cloud cover. Orbiting mirrors and collectors could potentially expand it in the future making it the only source that can be increased without off world mining. Gravity is the trickiest. It mostly takes the form of hydroelectric and wave power. Fossil fuels are just stored solar. Solar and the pull of the Moon creates most of the wind and wave power. There's also a few things like geothermal but there's been little progress in widely adopting it. Most sources of chemical energy require processing that uses other forms of energy. Fusion is a nice idea but a pipe dream for now. There is simply no unlimited source of energy that can meet all our needs so all it means is we need to use all sources wisely. All the article is saying is it's probably not possible to meet all our energy needs with wind power. In our history we've never met all our needs with one source so it's hardly a reason to abandon wind and the article doesn't propose it it simply says we should know the limits of wind power and not exceed them.
According to the article, they entire civilization was using Windows 8 right before it sunk. Their continental IT department tried to roll out touchscreens and then the whole place sank into the sea. Strange, but not unexpected.
Microsoft's blue screen of death was meant to honor all those that sank into the blue sea with no hope of survival.
How about this, we clean up the mess we already have before we go making new messes? Make it true of all industries from coal to nuclear as well as oil. The problem is the industries always manage to move on and leave us stuck with the bill. Hanford was mostly used for weapons production but I believe they also produced some of the first reactor fuel. Make the military take the money from their budget for the clean up before they are allowed to buy any new toys. It's like making a kid clean up his room before they watch TV. Just make everyone responsible for the messes they make and the problem goes away!
"Clean, safe and .too cheap to meter!"
Is there any reason why we shouldn't reduce our current nuclear arsenal to something less than 1000 warheads, instead of replacing them with new ones? Can anyone think of a plausible situation where we would need 1000 nuclear warheads?
They actually are cannibalizing old ones to maintain the stockpile because we no longer have facilities to create new weapons and parts of the bombs degrade. It's one of the reasons both the US and Russia have been for reductions. I think the number of weapons is a third of what it was at the height of the Cold War.
So over it's service life it would cost roughly the same amount as putting solar panels on 40 million homes. One unneeded airplane that has yet to see a day of service. There's plenty of money to solve our problems it's all being wasted!
It's a little like saying if you just ignore all the Toyota thefts the number of cars stolen would go down. They are going for what's popular and easy to move. What's new?
It's a great topic but a poor example. The car was on loan for testing and a reviewer should not assume they have privacy rights for the obvious reason this story points out that the reviewer lied in the reviewer and was caught by the black box and it wasn't their car. Now if the reviewer had purchased the car things might have been different. Personally I dislike black boxes and we should always assume they are turned on since it can be done without our permission. An example being the police.
I spent a couple of years in Maine recently and I can tell you DEET mostly just pissed them off. I grew up in Michigan and I've had a lot of experience over the years with Mosquitoes. The ones in Maine are more aggressive. If you walked in the woods with DEET on it was like wearing a coat of mosquitoes. They didn't like lighting but some did. I think it was akin to having Mace sprayed in your eyes while you ate. If you're hungry enough you tough it out. I can tell you black flies thought DEET was Channel #5. For mosquitpes try catnip oil. It's a nontoxic irritant although you may have to pry the neighborhood cats off you.
As if millions of gamers let out a collective sigh of relief.
The process as pointed out is poorly understood. The anti-neutrinos got my attention. Not sure if they are theorizing their prescience or that they had been detected? They've known for a while now that lightning produces antimatter so there is reason to believe the process can work especially if they are getting anti-neutrinos. Also ionizing radiation is a lot easier to deal with although the need of shielding means you probably won't run a car with one, back to charging batteries. Excellent point about daughter products though. We don't want a new source of lung cancer from our home reactors. Radon is easy enough to shield from so I'm sure the daughter products can be addressed although it'd be a concern when servicing one of the reactors.
Cold Fusion sounds like snake oil but low energy fusion potentially could be real. People can debate energy and gamma releases all they want but for me if they are finding copper where there wasn't copper before the only way for that to happen is some form of fusion. The beauty of the system is if it works you just have to shield from the gamma release while the reactor is operating. Shutting off the reactor stops the release of gamma radiation. The bi-product when you reprocess the core is copper, a useful element. The problem seems to be creating stable reproducable conditions for a process that's poorly understood. Ironically they may be closer to LENR as an energy source even though hot fusion is far better understood. This could be one of those eureka moments when science changes through a single discovery. People forget such things were commonplace in the 1800s up through the early 1900s. Now the eureka discoveries have to come from more obscure things like LENR since most obvious discoveries have been made.
If something can be done on a small scale, it can be done better on a large scale This is why we have power stations.
... and brothels?
In this country we call a large scale whore house Congress.
For a fuel that requires little or no processing it's extremely energy dense. Ultimately the problem wouldn't be with the process but the budget minded power companies. There's a reason "clean coal" is like bigfoot, largely a myth. Clean coal would cost more money reducing profits. It's the reason the industry doesn't remove mercury and coal dust from the exhaust, reduced profits. They even had a government mandate and the still waited until the deadline and are now saying it's too hard. The process can trap 99% of the CO2, the trick is keeping the power companies from not releasing it into the atmosphere to save money. White Diesel is a great source of fuel and second only to natural gas for being a clean fossil fuel but it involves stripping of the CO2 and you are faced with the same problem. Sequestration isn't as simple as it sounds. Compressing huge amounts of CO2 gas takes energy and the underground storage areas don't tend to be near power plants. When you start burning more coal just to store the CO2 from the last batch the efficiency goes way down. If the existing plants had been positioned and built with all this in mind we wouldn't have all these problems. Now there are no cheap and easy solutions. Personally I prefer using algae or greenhouses to store the CO2. Try this approach, pump the CO2 into large cheap greenhouses that grow Kenaf, it's related to hemp but totally legal and interchangeable with industrial hemp. Use as much as industry needs for fiber and seed oil then turn the rest into biochar, a good one to read up on if you aren't familiar. The char can be mixed with farmland improving the soil and it'll absorb the excess fertilizer reducing run off and reducing the amount needed to grow food. The carbon is stored for thousands of years, if not millions. The power companies get to make extra money off the Kenaf and they greatly reduce the CO2 and mercury released. The Mercury will get trapped in the char and the CO2 will be stored as solid carbon. These days they try to solve everything with technology when mother nature has been doing it for billions of years.
So Sprint users are supposed to go back to smoke signals and semaphore flags?
It's the damned metric +/- that causes all the confusion.
All that for a hot glue gun?
That was my first reaction. The difference is it also cools the plastic which is different if you are familiar with hot glue guns but it is essentially a hot glue gun.
Blue states happy, Red state unhappy. Kind of mirrors their politics. I plan to retire in Maine and I always found it laid back. Hard to be unhappy when you have a beer in hand and a lobster boiling for dinner. A northern version of Jimmie Buffet.
It just shows how desperate some of our leaders are to spy on average citizens. I've yet to hear a compelling reason to do it other than spying on average Americans. Do they really expect to find an Al Qaeda training camp in some one's backyard? What they'll find is some one's pot plants and that new garage you failed to get a permit for. This has always been about spying on average citizens. It's like back boxes in all our cars "for our own good". You know the ones they don't need a court order to access? Increasingly in this country we are considered guilty until proven innocent. What value is the Constitution when the government ignores it at will? We're protected form unreasonable search and seizure but what passes for unreasonable when they can seize your property without due process and spy on you in your backyard without warrant. We have no rights!
It wasn't that long ago the first planets were found and now they are detecting ones around the size of the Earth's Moon. Imaging Earth sized planets will be the big breakthrough. There's talk of imaging planets similar to space shots of the Earth and other planets but I have my doubts I'll live to see that. It's not the technology it's the investment that would need to be made. Humans walking on Mars and a detailed photo of a distant planet would be the two I hope to live to see.
The problem is companies are more and more using broad range patents to control whole industries. That is NOT how patents are meant to be used. I don't want to see a limiting so much as a modification and redirection. Notice many of these patents are from the 90s and even 80s or before. Some of them are not based on a product so much as an antiscipation of a need to they file an offensive/defensive patent then they wait until alot of major companies are using the process and rack up big profits then they sue. Two simple cures, if they really do have a product give them three years to develop it so most of these troll patents would have expired. I'm talking patents on methods and other broad range patents like gestures and such. Also force them to file within 12 months of a competing product being release. That would kill off these massive lawsuits for 5 to 10 years of infringement before they even filed. Better yet force them to file a cease and desist and give the company 6 to 12 months to stop infringing then if the company fails to comply they can sue to day one. I'm guessing the vast majority of companies had no idea they were infringing and most would make the needed changes to avoid the lawsuit. The current system encourages greed by allowing the patent holder to wait years before filing against a company. This actually prevents the company from stopping the infringement since they aren't made aware of the problem. The system doesn't need to be scrapped it needs to be fixed and reasonable rules and limitations brought in.
In a perfect world maybe. Anyone that tries to sue will have to prove Monstano did it then take on an army of lawyers. Remember Monsanto has been getting away with contaminating crops for years and even successfully sued the victims. Until the courts get more educated the odds are Monsanto will continue to win. In our system the big stick general wins and Monsanto comes bearing nukes. Even if they win a few cases odds are Monsanto will only have to pay the losses. At worse tens of thousands maybe a few hundred thousand? We're talking billions in seed sales. A few lost cases would barely show up on their balance sheets.
And in the third world where many can't aford Monsanto seeds they get to starve when the next years seeds fail to germinate. On the plus side Monstano will increase profits.
The main push for 3D movies hasn't been audience demand but a means to prevent people from shooting the theater screens to pirate. That isn't an issue for computer monitors so there's no real advantage. For a 3D environment Apple does have Core Animation which performs those functions but it's a lot of coding to make it work. They have some cool examples of 3D databases but until it's user friendly I don't see many applications using it. I can see it a fun way to rifle through image files and some of the new Mac interfaces use it for things like flip books for viewing items. I don't see a driving need for most applications. It's already hard enough searching for files since everyone both Microsoft and Apple decided to hide more and more files for our own good. It's still quicker and easier to do a search string than spinning file trees in 3D.