These are reasons why trucks aren't great full stop. A sensible country, looking to increased automation and energy efficiency, would put freight on an extensive, publicly owned, railway system - but that phrase is anathema to modern neoliberal governments.
Actually, no. We can send man back to the moon, and it will help. However, there is no reason why NASA has to do it all. Bigelow and SpaceX intend to be there by 2020.
They can intend all they like. All they do is manufacture hardware (and externalise a shitload of their R&D costs to NASA and its traditional contractors.) They don't fund missions themselves, and certainly couldn't fund a manned one to the Moon.
The problem is that neo-cons want the money to flow into their districts for a job's bill. We have WT like Shelby, Wolf, Hatch, Hutchinson, and my wonderful rep, Coffman, that are fighting against private space, even though it would cost us a FRACTION of the money to go to the moon, all because they want to flow the jobs to their areas.
So spending government money on space somehow prevents private companies from doing the same? WTF?
Those ppl are nearly as damaging as Snowden and Manning are to America.
The situation is the same in the UK, and I suspect most other western countries. This is something that has always bothered me, that I have never had the opportunity to learn these kinds of skills. Manufacturing is seen as inherently lower class than coding or services, something poor Chinese workers do in sweatshops for pennies, and I think we have recently started paying the price for such economic myopia.
Agreed. These gun-nut clowns are going to ruin 3D printing before it gets properly started, by giving corporations and their government puppets the perfect excuse to demonise the entire concept and launch a crackdown on distribution of the plans.
Worst of all despite their rhetoric haven't produced a decent firearm. I strongly suspect that the barrel of this gun is so short, and the cartridge small, because otherwise the thing would likely blow off your fingers. Material that is good for low power, home 3D printing (low melting point and/or soft) inherently makes a crappy material to make a gun barrel out of.
The amount of skill and equipment you need to gather to put together a Sten has been a barrier for them being home made for criminal purposes in the UK since WW2. If matters were as easy as you suggest, then our streets would be plagued by Sten-wielding chavs. The reality is that the UK is a largely gun-free culture, and this applies to criminals too. Pretty much every developed nation outside the US is a testament to how gun control is possible and can make society better.
3D printed guns *may* change that by reducing the skill and equipment you require in one place, and kept secret from the police. I'm hoping that they are overhyping things, and their gun is as likely to take off the shooters fingers as it is to harm the intended target. I don't want the morons who think this
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/01/us/kentucky-accidential-shooting/index.html
is "just an accident" to win
The CENTRE of the range of values we accept for the age of the universe has shifted, but it has done so well within the 1-sigma boundary of the previous measurement's errors. What has really changed is the error bar is now considerably smaller.
The entire Internet is failing its users; from hamfisted government website blocking, through disparate exploitative walled garden systems with arbitrary censorship, right up to defective-by-design always online games.
Its easy to say "don't by service/product X" but the problem is that service after service throws up the same problems, and many such services offer unique functionality that through either innovations that others haven't caught up on, or patents that prevent others from duplicating the functionality. Companies force you to either accept unreasonable terms or not partake in some of the services on offer. Other industries don't seem to get this kind of caveat emptor free pass (remember the lead in Chinese toys? Dodgy Romanian horse meat in burgers in the UK?) Ill not get started on the outrageous flouting of tax law by Internet businesses.
We need to move on from two polarised sides, greedy authoritarian government/corporate lockdown of computing one on and strident unyielding crypto-anarchism on the other. We need to work out what are the rights and responsibilities of business and users on the Internet, enshrine them in international treaties, and perhaps strengthen them with cryptographic methods.
There isn't much prospect of either a dronageddon or of a government crackdown, because the legislative response to drones is sufficiently obvious, effective and doesn't step on the toes of powerful people. One thing governments are generally pretty good at is regulating airspace.
I'd go even further, and say its not that unreasonable for the government to track drone usage by demanding you install a transponder and register it with them. Airspace is serious business.
Nobody is going to try and build an ARM-based supercomputer (or an AMD based one for that matter). Intel is pretty much the only game in town, despite a spirited challenge from Nvidia (GPUs require specialised code and aren't suitable for many tasks.) We target Intel chips with Intel compilers, and have no plans to do anything else.
This discussion ignores all this and assumes that the entire future is based on small, low power devices.
Because that would be hard, require intelligence and patience? Or maybe because growing food and teaching kids to read isn't as macho as firing off your home printed assault rifles into the air and yelling Glenn Beck quotes?
Check your sources. The Daily Mail is a borderline fascist tabloid gutter rag that oscillates between lying about immigrants and lying about what causes/prevents cancer.
It is the weak force. Both reactions (electron capture and beta emission) are mediated by the weak force. Yes, nuclear binding energy changes, but the key element here (Nickel) is almost at the top of the binding energy curve, so its fission and fusion reactions produce very little energy. By that description, the useful energy comes from beta emission: a high energy electron is emitted from the fertilized Nickel, and cannot escape the lattice, so deposits its kinetic energy as heat (or electricity, if you are clever http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaics )
3D printing is a potential threat to the economic order. It has the potential to cut out a huge number of middle men, and allow people to get a large portion of their material needs through sharing and inexpensive raw materials. This is good for the majority of the population, but bad for the gatekeepers of the current economy. Said gatekeepers want to make sure 3D printing is strangled in its grave (those that understand the threat it poses, at least)
And these stupid fucking gun nuts are giving them the government the EXACT pretext they need to achieve this. They are sacrificing our economic future to score some cheap libertarian points - and worst of all, because they are into 3D printing and presumably aware of the larger issues - are doing this on purpose.
I'm sorry I don't see how conservation of 4-momentum stops this being a purely fantastical device. Whilst the photons are moving at c, the object itself is practically stationary from the point of view of relativity. The device is in a velocity regime where relativistic mechanics simplifies to Newtonian mechanics - so even if you could formulate some way to get this working with 4-momenta (and I can't see immediately how you would do that) then it wouldn't matter. This is a crappy photon drive, or a pointless energy waste.
"mistake theory for reality?" FFS, how did this get modded Insightful?
The (intentional?) misunderstanding of the word "theory" as used in the context of science is the game that young Earth creationists play. A theory is not a guess, its not simply an idea, its a tried and tested description of how the Universe functions. Conservation of momentum isn't something you throw away because some charlatan claims, contrary to all reputable scientists and engineers, to have created a magic space drive.
You are displaying a startling level of anti-intellectualism which is normally associated with people pedaling healing crystals or homeopathy. Theoretical science is not invented ex nihilo by academics - it is tested against reality before anything even gets to be called a theory. You accuse scientists of complacency? You clearly have no understanding of the scientific world. It is PERFECTLY valid to dismiss this crank idea using theoretical arguments. If we couldn't do that, we would be constantly testing astrology. That is what theory is for - it makes predictions, and excludes certain possibilities. You don't seem to grasp how seriously this device would have to violate the laws of physics to work at all.
"Objectively false" is somewhat arrogant for someone who has failed to understand what I am saying. It does not matter what you think the moral case for property rights is - the reality of property rights is violence. We allow a democratic government to monopolise this form of violence so people don't murder each other over land (as was routine prior to the existence of the modern state.
The idea that dark matter is simply some fudge factor to make equations work is a massive oversimplification, and quite insulting to astrophysicists who you are basically accusing of not doing their job properly, and who you think can be second guessed by amateurs on Slashdot. Dark Matter is nothing like luminiferous ether, at all - and anybody making that comparison simply know nothing about the subject matter. There is strong evidence for actual matter out there (look up the "bullet cluster" for a start) - and repeated and sustained attempts in the literature to explain the kinematics of the universe as we observe it by altering the laws of gravity (MOND, TeVeS, and various other stuff) have so far failed to make a convincing case, despite having 30 years of being able to freely present and argue their case.
Feel free to continue making grand pronouncements about science based on your gut instinct though.
"logical principles that govern reality"? That is meaningless. Logic is a process of inference, and its ability to correctly derive principles depends solely on the assumptions it begins withs. Economics and politics are invented by humans, and have nothing to do with the principles that govern reality (i.e. physics) - the notion that does is an attempt to bolster a particular social model via a naturalistic fallacy.
You are a fool. OF COURSE the government defines property rights. If there is a dispute about who owns something, it goes through a court, rather than through a shootout. A world in which property rights are defined by individuals is a world where how much you have is a function of how much violence you are willing inflict on those around you. Mad Max basically.
There is a world of difference between 1) A person enforcing their own property claim themselves, and everyone else doing likewise and 2) a democratic government, maintaining a monopoly on force, arbitrating property claims. The latter might not be perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better than the Mad Max world that results from the former.
The 'free market' is not a real entity, its a social construct, and it can only exist where property rights are defined and defended - by government force. ALL property, patents or land, is created in this way. Its called enclosure (or inclosure, as it was spelt when this first happened to land in England.
What is going on here is entirely consisted with the 'free' market (quotes because I refuse to pass on the propagandistic notion that markets have anything to do with freedom) - it is in fact what has been going on since the very dawn of capitalism. You secure exclusive access to something by force (generally via a government, which markets cannot exist without) and then you sell it back to the people you have denied it to.
Slashdot Mirror
These are reasons why trucks aren't great full stop. A sensible country, looking to increased automation and energy efficiency, would put freight on an extensive, publicly owned, railway system - but that phrase is anathema to modern neoliberal governments.
They can intend all they like. All they do is manufacture hardware (and externalise a shitload of their R&D costs to NASA and its traditional contractors.) They don't fund missions themselves, and certainly couldn't fund a manned one to the Moon.
So spending government money on space somehow prevents private companies from doing the same? WTF?
Oh, you are one of those...
The situation is the same in the UK, and I suspect most other western countries. This is something that has always bothered me, that I have never had the opportunity to learn these kinds of skills. Manufacturing is seen as inherently lower class than coding or services, something poor Chinese workers do in sweatshops for pennies, and I think we have recently started paying the price for such economic myopia.
Agreed. These gun-nut clowns are going to ruin 3D printing before it gets properly started, by giving corporations and their government puppets the perfect excuse to demonise the entire concept and launch a crackdown on distribution of the plans.
Worst of all despite their rhetoric haven't produced a decent firearm. I strongly suspect that the barrel of this gun is so short, and the cartridge small, because otherwise the thing would likely blow off your fingers. Material that is good for low power, home 3D printing (low melting point and/or soft) inherently makes a crappy material to make a gun barrel out of.
One article from a tabloid is the best evidence you can come up with? Fucking gun nut moron.
The amount of skill and equipment you need to gather to put together a Sten has been a barrier for them being home made for criminal purposes in the UK since WW2. If matters were as easy as you suggest, then our streets would be plagued by Sten-wielding chavs. The reality is that the UK is a largely gun-free culture, and this applies to criminals too. Pretty much every developed nation outside the US is a testament to how gun control is possible and can make society better.
3D printed guns *may* change that by reducing the skill and equipment you require in one place, and kept secret from the police. I'm hoping that they are overhyping things, and their gun is as likely to take off the shooters fingers as it is to harm the intended target. I don't want the morons who think this http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/01/us/kentucky-accidential-shooting/index.html is "just an accident" to win
The CENTRE of the range of values we accept for the age of the universe has shifted, but it has done so well within the 1-sigma boundary of the previous measurement's errors. What has really changed is the error bar is now considerably smaller.
The entire Internet is failing its users; from hamfisted government website blocking, through disparate exploitative walled garden systems with arbitrary censorship, right up to defective-by-design always online games.
Its easy to say "don't by service/product X" but the problem is that service after service throws up the same problems, and many such services offer unique functionality that through either innovations that others haven't caught up on, or patents that prevent others from duplicating the functionality. Companies force you to either accept unreasonable terms or not partake in some of the services on offer. Other industries don't seem to get this kind of caveat emptor free pass (remember the lead in Chinese toys? Dodgy Romanian horse meat in burgers in the UK?) Ill not get started on the outrageous flouting of tax law by Internet businesses.
We need to move on from two polarised sides, greedy authoritarian government/corporate lockdown of computing one on and strident unyielding crypto-anarchism on the other. We need to work out what are the rights and responsibilities of business and users on the Internet, enshrine them in international treaties, and perhaps strengthen them with cryptographic methods.
There isn't much prospect of either a dronageddon or of a government crackdown, because the legislative response to drones is sufficiently obvious, effective and doesn't step on the toes of powerful people. One thing governments are generally pretty good at is regulating airspace.
What is wrong with tracking drone purchases?
I'd go even further, and say its not that unreasonable for the government to track drone usage by demanding you install a transponder and register it with them. Airspace is serious business.
Nobody is going to try and build an ARM-based supercomputer (or an AMD based one for that matter). Intel is pretty much the only game in town, despite a spirited challenge from Nvidia (GPUs require specialised code and aren't suitable for many tasks.) We target Intel chips with Intel compilers, and have no plans to do anything else.
This discussion ignores all this and assumes that the entire future is based on small, low power devices.
Because that would be hard, require intelligence and patience? Or maybe because growing food and teaching kids to read isn't as macho as firing off your home printed assault rifles into the air and yelling Glenn Beck quotes?
Check your sources. The Daily Mail is a borderline fascist tabloid gutter rag that oscillates between lying about immigrants and lying about what causes/prevents cancer.
It is the weak force. Both reactions (electron capture and beta emission) are mediated by the weak force. Yes, nuclear binding energy changes, but the key element here (Nickel) is almost at the top of the binding energy curve, so its fission and fusion reactions produce very little energy. By that description, the useful energy comes from beta emission: a high energy electron is emitted from the fertilized Nickel, and cannot escape the lattice, so deposits its kinetic energy as heat (or electricity, if you are clever http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaics )
We have based our economy on financial services rent seeking for years, its about the time we got international recognition in the IP trolling sector!
This.
3D printing is a potential threat to the economic order. It has the potential to cut out a huge number of middle men, and allow people to get a large portion of their material needs through sharing and inexpensive raw materials. This is good for the majority of the population, but bad for the gatekeepers of the current economy. Said gatekeepers want to make sure 3D printing is strangled in its grave (those that understand the threat it poses, at least)
And these stupid fucking gun nuts are giving them the government the EXACT pretext they need to achieve this. They are sacrificing our economic future to score some cheap libertarian points - and worst of all, because they are into 3D printing and presumably aware of the larger issues - are doing this on purpose.
I'm sorry I don't see how conservation of 4-momentum stops this being a purely fantastical device. Whilst the photons are moving at c, the object itself is practically stationary from the point of view of relativity. The device is in a velocity regime where relativistic mechanics simplifies to Newtonian mechanics - so even if you could formulate some way to get this working with 4-momenta (and I can't see immediately how you would do that) then it wouldn't matter. This is a crappy photon drive, or a pointless energy waste.
"mistake theory for reality?" FFS, how did this get modded Insightful?
The (intentional?) misunderstanding of the word "theory" as used in the context of science is the game that young Earth creationists play. A theory is not a guess, its not simply an idea, its a tried and tested description of how the Universe functions. Conservation of momentum isn't something you throw away because some charlatan claims, contrary to all reputable scientists and engineers, to have created a magic space drive.
You are displaying a startling level of anti-intellectualism which is normally associated with people pedaling healing crystals or homeopathy. Theoretical science is not invented ex nihilo by academics - it is tested against reality before anything even gets to be called a theory. You accuse scientists of complacency? You clearly have no understanding of the scientific world. It is PERFECTLY valid to dismiss this crank idea using theoretical arguments. If we couldn't do that, we would be constantly testing astrology. That is what theory is for - it makes predictions, and excludes certain possibilities. You don't seem to grasp how seriously this device would have to violate the laws of physics to work at all.
"Objectively false" is somewhat arrogant for someone who has failed to understand what I am saying. It does not matter what you think the moral case for property rights is - the reality of property rights is violence. We allow a democratic government to monopolise this form of violence so people don't murder each other over land (as was routine prior to the existence of the modern state.
The idea that dark matter is simply some fudge factor to make equations work is a massive oversimplification, and quite insulting to astrophysicists who you are basically accusing of not doing their job properly, and who you think can be second guessed by amateurs on Slashdot. Dark Matter is nothing like luminiferous ether, at all - and anybody making that comparison simply know nothing about the subject matter. There is strong evidence for actual matter out there (look up the "bullet cluster" for a start) - and repeated and sustained attempts in the literature to explain the kinematics of the universe as we observe it by altering the laws of gravity (MOND, TeVeS, and various other stuff) have so far failed to make a convincing case, despite having 30 years of being able to freely present and argue their case.
Feel free to continue making grand pronouncements about science based on your gut instinct though.
"logical principles that govern reality"? That is meaningless. Logic is a process of inference, and its ability to correctly derive principles depends solely on the assumptions it begins withs. Economics and politics are invented by humans, and have nothing to do with the principles that govern reality (i.e. physics) - the notion that does is an attempt to bolster a particular social model via a naturalistic fallacy.
You are a fool. OF COURSE the government defines property rights. If there is a dispute about who owns something, it goes through a court, rather than through a shootout. A world in which property rights are defined by individuals is a world where how much you have is a function of how much violence you are willing inflict on those around you. Mad Max basically.
There is a world of difference between 1) A person enforcing their own property claim themselves, and everyone else doing likewise and 2) a democratic government, maintaining a monopoly on force, arbitrating property claims. The latter might not be perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better than the Mad Max world that results from the former.
It has to do with enclosure and rent seeking.
1. Take something that is abundant and/or common, and fence it off so people can't get to it.
2. Sell access back to it to the people you closed off from it.
3. Profit
This is the very method by which capitalism was founded - and it continues to this day.
False.
The 'free market' is not a real entity, its a social construct, and it can only exist where property rights are defined and defended - by government force. ALL property, patents or land, is created in this way. Its called enclosure (or inclosure, as it was spelt when this first happened to land in England.
What is going on here is entirely consisted with the 'free' market (quotes because I refuse to pass on the propagandistic notion that markets have anything to do with freedom) - it is in fact what has been going on since the very dawn of capitalism. You secure exclusive access to something by force (generally via a government, which markets cannot exist without) and then you sell it back to the people you have denied it to.