A Matrioshka Brain decloaking (tilting the orbiting computronium so it is parallel to the direction of star-to-earth line of sight rather then perpendicular) would fit the bill. But if it has disappeared again they need to go looking for it with their best IR telescopes and I suspect the observing time committees aren't going to be in a rush to approve time to look for a Matrioshka Brain.:-(
Physicists, and to a lesser extent astronomers, have a real problem starting with the assumption that the universe may be populated by species which have evolved there technology and intelligence to the limits allowed by physical laws...
What about those of us who have never played a computer game (Duke em whatever we could care less). I would have thought that the moderators at/. would approve topics of significance.
If people subjected to RIAA suits were simply willing to declare bankruptcy this whole adventure would be a no-op. "You want to fine me" Here is my bankruptcy filing. Indeed if most file sharers were willing to follow this model it would probably overwhelm the legal system. A bankruptcy filing is erased from ones record in 10 years. So why bother about it?
They can only take you to the limit over what you care about. Choose not to care about it.
Perhaps for the same reason that we dig up ancient civilizations. In part curiosity.
The main point being that if they can run simulations which are reasonably accurate then there is much less interest in coming here to dig us up. A trip to a distant part of the galaxy is much more expensive than changing the parameters of a simulation and running it forward for a period to see what happens. They can not only be "us" -- they can be many instances of "us".
Intelligent species, esp. intelligent species with tool and machine making capabilities have control over their destiny. Evolution moves from environmental determination to self-determination. We have yet to really wrestle with that. Those who understand molecular biology, transhumanism, the end points of Moore's Law and molecular nanotechnology have some grasp of where species can go (or as you point out choose not to go).
But the Earth evolved for several billion years without any significant life, then went through several significant shifts, esp. in the last few hundred million years, then developed some intelligent species, then developed intelligent tool making species that could take control of their own destiny (why not find a way to dedicate all the computer resources to finding NEOs rather than aliens?) I do not see such intelligent tool making species that have overcome the odds deciding to go "gracefully" "green" and return the planet and the solar system back to a "natural" state. And so long as you allow people "free will" there will be those of us who will push for healthier, longer lives, with "matter as software" where we, rather than nature and our environment dictate our destiny.
If you evolve to the limits that physics allows, ones longevity is measured in hundreds of billions to trillions of years -- much older than our universe now is. The reason for doing this is the most simple and natural one that can be imagined -- simple survival. Species that for one reason or another choose not to survive will not be detected.
Whether it is true now (and Lineweaver's work on the fact that a majority of the "Earth's" in our galaxy are much older than ours and therfore it may be) or not -- simple logic suggests that the dominant life forms are (or will be) those which have engineered solutions to living the longest and reducing the risks to their survival to a minimum (i.e. survival of the fittest).
Species whose candles burn brightly for a short time (say a few thousand years, as ours has done thus far) are unlikely to be detected because of the f_c and L parameters of the Drake equation. Properly rewritten the equation would account for "How long an intelligent species chooses to survive".
SETI, as primarily currently pursued, is unlikely to find anything. I sum up my perspective, "We don't talk to nematodes and *they* don't talk to us." It is useful to consider the difference in intellectual capacity between humans and nematodes is far less than that between Matrioshka Brains and us.
Most advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are going to be far far ahead of us. At the point where they have constructed Matrioshka Brains. The intellectual capacity of an MBrain is roughly a trillion trillion times that of a human brain. They can simulate the history of entire humanities in seconds. We are simply not of interest to them.
There are 3 ways to detect MBrains. 1. Stellar occultations (similar to some of the exoplanet searches now being done). 2. Gravitational microlensing studies (also being done). 3. Large scale mid-to-far IR surveys looking for bright IR objects that do not appear to be visible (not being done because our far IR detectors are extremely poor and not particularly sensitive; and they must be operated from space so they are $$$).
The observant will note that none of these involve using computer cycles for the analysis of radio wave noise. The astronomer geeks will notice that long term backyard surveys searching for exoplanets using variations in stellar brightness might either capture candidate stars with exoplanets or perhaps an occasional gravitational microlensing event or maybe an MBrain traveling through the galaxy on its way to the nearest carbon white dwarf star (because they need more carbon for extreme nanotech) or a stellar gas nebula for a fueling pit stop. The extremely astute might notice that should sufficient numbers of these be discovered then there might be another explanation for all of the "dark matter" which doesn't result from the physics of the universe but from the natural activities of intelligent life. (Perhaps making the theoretical physicists extremely unhappy.)
It is also the case that to scan large fields of stars for variations in brightness and separating the normal variable stars from those which are "unusual" would not be a small use of ones spare computer time.
Technology capabilities will determine its fate
on
Floating Cities On Venus
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
At the time you have the technological capabilities to start building cities that float in the atmosphere of Venus, one is probably well into the era of molecular nanotechology. That means one probably already has restrictions on the removal of CO2 from the Earth's atmosphere (don't want to kill all the plants, cyanobacteria, plankton, fish, etc.) and one is well along on stripping the ice-caps from Mars and the atmosphere of Venus of the easily available carbon. This is because carbon availability becomes a limiting resource and of significant concern in the nanotech era.
Depending upon how much carbon is stripped from the atmosphere of Venus, one doesn't have the hellish temperature problem which exists now and it can be made quite comfortable on the surface. The magnetic field problem and lack of water are more significant problems and one may need to consider a phase of planetary comet bombardment to replenish the water. And unless means are developed to restart core circulation to beef up the magnetic field one is facing the problem of a very dry planet (all water circulating in pipes rather than streams or rivers). Though one could speculate as to whether sufficient particle accelerators could be developed to split the available C or O back into H so one could maintain the atmospheric H2O content even with a solar wind stripping away the H.
Now, of course if one has the capabilities to play with planets and the solar system as a whole like this, as I discuss in my chapter in "Year Million", then one is also likely to have the resources which can dismantle the whole planet, presumably to contribute to the construction of our solar system's Matrioshka Brain. Now whether to use the material in Venus for this purpose, or whether to turn it into a water world with lots of islands upon which many different evolutionary scenarios are played out (using real matter as the computronium for evolution). [For those of you who don't see this, think hundreds of thousands to millions of independent "Jurassic Park"s] is going to be one of the fierce debates we have later in this century or perhaps the next one.
Ok, my bad for not check your profile. But IMO, the major problem regarding nuclear waste is the long-lived isotopes present at low abundances in either the fuel rods due to nuclear fission (rather than neutron breeder reactions) and the nuclear waste which will come from reactor dismantlement.
To separate out the low abundance but long lived and high dangerous isotopes will benefit from molecular nanotechnology. (As you point out, you are a particle physicist and likely do not personally know Eric Drexler, Ralph Merkle, Robert Freitas and Josh Hall). So you might be as ill-equipped to comment on the topic as I am ill-equipped to comment on the difference between the bottom quark and the top quark. Though I will point out that nanotechnology was largely envisioned by the rather famous particle physicist Richard Feynman.
The fuel rod problem will sooner or later be dealt with fuel rod reprocessing as France and Russia now do. It is simple stupidity that it is not being adopted by the U.S. at this time. Economic considerations and the eventual exhaustion of inexpensive uranium resources will change that mentality. IMO, the lifetime of unreprocessed fuel rods is less than 100 years. If that is an accurate assessment then much of the problem of storing such fuel rods in Nevada becomes moot and the problem should focus on how one makes long lived radioactive (and dangerous) isotopes non-radioactive at lowest cost. I am under the impression that several proposals related to this have been worked on at Los Alamos and Sandia and we are in the midst of political stalemates not technical show stoppers.
The idea is right, the execution is problematic. You need to go study a bit more nuclear physics. Breeder reactors only breed plutonium when fueled primarily with U-238 or Th-232. They are not what much of our nuclear waste is composed of. Much, particularly of the higher volume of nuclear waste, is (or will be) composed of decomissioned reactor materials (cement, steel, etc.). The spent nuclear fuel rods are supposed (or can be) reprocessed to separate them into specific isotopes which can be reconstituted into safe nuclear fuel.
It significantly helps if we get "real" molecular nanotechnology (hopefully in 20-40 years), as that allows "single-proton massometers" (Nanomedicine Vol. 1, Sec. 4.4.3) to be manufactured. Highly parallel arrays of these would allow the complete inexpensive separation of radioactive matter streams (as mass-spec machines currently allow at a somewhat higher cost) which in turn would allow highly precise breeding of specific isotopic matter streams using proton or neutron beams (rather than breeder reactors which tend to scare people).
There is no reason that a mixture of radioactive and non-radioactive atoms (nuclear "waste") cannot be separated out and manipulated into an entirely non-radioactive set of isotopes. If we are clever enough about it (and energy is in short supply) we may be able to cost effectively do this such that more energy can be produced from the outputs than is consumed to manipulate the inputs.
I bought a very expensive high end cell phone in 1999, just before the Y2K "disaster" was supposed to happen. Then I had to buy a 2nd one because it didn't work in Moscow. I've never had my U.S enabled phone activated because why do I need it? Where is the anthropology about people who have no use for being callable 24/7?
There are such things as email, message recording machines (or telco company equivalent options). Why do people need to be available 24/7? Where is the study about people who have no phone at all? (I.e. no cell, no skype, no Ccomcast, no Verizon, etc.) People that if you want to talk to them you actually have to walk or drive up to their house. Now that would be an interesting study.
I've had older systems running Linux and they run just fine after 5+ years. The problem is older systems running Windows, having to run increasingly complex virus detection or windows update programs. If Windows had followed KISS and Open Source principles, it is doubtful that they would have such problems.
Ever since the Pentium Pro came out one had real chips that could be used for real computers. I was running dual processor PP systems as far back as something like 1997 and I suspect I could still be using them effectively today. Though I would probably switch to more integrated AMD multi-core chip & integrated graphics designs.
The problem isn't in your hardware. Its the operating system. If you dumped Windows and upgraded to a Linux OS, e.g. Ubuntu you might find that your system worked just fine.
Shouldn't the moral of this story be, "Use Windows and risk losing your job."
There may be stories about viruses infecting Linux systems, but I've never had a problem (except with the random attempts from around the world trying to break into my telnet or ftp servers.) But so long as one keeps those locked down to specific IP addresses then the only problem one has to deal with is SPAM being routed through ones machine.
Though the "untitled frames"/"windows unexpectedly destroyed bug (#263160), which has been present for perhaps 3+ years is still present.
As are a host of other problems. Including a lack of catching memory allocation failures, a lack of handling large numbers of tabs (which use Javascript), and extremely slow restart times if one is restarting a large session (lots of windows and tabs).
I believe this was just an attempt to push a new release out the door without sufficient attention to quality control. If I were in charge of the Mozilla organization, I would have serious questions about continuing to employ the managers of the project.
(And I'm not just some know nothing idiot spouting off. I was the Unix Product Development manager at Oracle Corporation from 1982-1987.)
The saddest part of the deaths of recent people from Tim Russet to Cyd Charisse is that they were entirely unnecessary. We have the cryonics preservation technology to ensure that although they may be dead from a technical standpoint -- viewing them as permanently dead is open to question. We need a restructuring of how we think about "death" and it probably requires re-educating every physician in the country.
You are not "dead" until all the information in your body has been converted to an unrecoverable state.
Until it becomes clear that exploring space with humans as they are currently constructed is stupid then the entire "space exploration" process makes no sense.
We did not evolve to go there or live there and until we are redesigned to meet the environmental requirements we should not be there.
The bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans had a better desgin spec than Homo sapiens. Someone should knock that concept into the candidates for presidency and administrators at NASA.
Of course the people scoring this message as troll/off-topic are unlikely to have seen the Frontline episode (which I think was made last year but was repeated last night on cable) documenting how hard the current administration worked to bury perspectives in the EPA and NASA on these topics. Now, if they will sabotage their own appointed administrators and the scientists who are paid to give informed, presumably rational opinions, then how much of a stretch is it to think they will make an effort to bias the minds of trainees at the "US Defense Intelligence Agency"? As we know that organization has done a swell job over the last 5+ years... (sarcasm intended).
And believe it or not I was initially in favor of going into Iraq because I bought the arguments. That will teach me to trust politicians.
Of course a more interesting question is whether there are sub-plots in these games that teach that an addiction to oil and coal are good and that the science with respect to the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere and its probable contribution to global warming is still "unclear".
Regarding heart disease... If one leaves out those aspects of the disease which may be caused by specific genetic mutations the answer is no. Most heart disease is caused by poor diet, lack of exercise and an immune system which evolved under prehistoric conditions where food was not as abundant (or as fatty) and exercise was a requirement for survival.
Heart disease is one area you can generally attribute to a genetic program not designed for the era we live in rather than specific defects (or accumulated defects) which result in protein misfolding.
Actually this is a grossly incomplete statement. Due to the fact that the process of Non-homologous End Joining (NHEJ) repair of DNA double strand breaks involves the exonuclease (DNA end-eating) proteins WRN and DCLRE1C (Artemis), the repair of double strand breaks corrupts the genome via microdeletions. Microdeletions can result in frameshift mutations which can of course result in protein mis-folding. The accumulation of these frameshift mutations and misfolded proteins over the lifespan of cells has downstream consequences including less efficient or improper cell function (cancer or aging) as well as the induction of apoptosis (managed cell death) -- more aging.
Thus the fundamental processes which will terminate most of our lives are related to mis-folded proteins. It is not limited to the less common "mad cow disease" (which few humans need to worry about) or even Alzheimer's (which more humans should be worried about as research funding is failing to keep pace with either inflation or the growth rate in people afflicted with the disease) [1].
(If any of these concepts are unfamiliar, the wikipedia discussions of the topics are not too bad.)
1. One could get into a long discussion as to whether or not to consider Alzheimer's a protein folding disease. I happen to be of the opinion that any disease involving the accumulation of molecules that are not present in "normal" cells is leaning in that direction.
If it were only my reasoning, I might be more willing to take the easy way out and say all masses orbiting other stars are dead planets. But doing so screams of requiring a good explanation for why we are the first and/or only advanced technological civilization in our galaxy. Without some of those on the table the puzzle seems to be missing missing more than a few pieces.
I don't disagree other than from the perspective that Lineweaver's argument says we are the "young kids on the block". You have physicists scratching their heads left and right trying to explain another observation "dark matter" when that is what you would have lots of if advanced civilizations simply converted their stars to Matrioshka Brains (complex Dyson Shells). But doing so would involve many civilizations far more advanced than we are and the physicists don't want to go there... (lets make up some magical new form of matter instead...).
Life is possible, we are here. We have good predictions for what our capabilities will be once we have robust molecular nanotechnology (and that includes taking the sun dark to external observers). And it is even possible at a slower rate without molecular nanotechnology (we are doing it now). Can they physicists make an argument that all of the planets they are finding are "dead"? That life on them can never develop? (I'll admit its tough on the planets we are currently finding but they are smoking guns for more hospitable planets.)
The scientists are failing to plug reasonable values into the "t" variable of the equation which would allow one to document the complete life history of such planets -- when you do that one may find that many of them have reached stages far beyond our current limited evolutionary state.
Slashdot Mirror
A Matrioshka Brain decloaking (tilting the orbiting computronium so it is parallel to the direction of star-to-earth line of sight rather then perpendicular) would fit the bill. But if it has disappeared again they need to go looking for it with their best IR telescopes and I suspect the observing time committees aren't going to be in a rush to approve time to look for a Matrioshka Brain. :-(
Physicists, and to a lesser extent astronomers, have a real problem starting with the assumption that the universe may be populated by species which have evolved there technology and intelligence to the limits allowed by physical laws...
Why on earth would I want to try it under wine or on a VM?
Esp. when I've got multiple browsers (Firefox, Mozilla, Epiphany, Galeon) already installed under Linux and running fine (in native mode).
You sound like a Microsoft plant. If Microsoft were serious about pushing IE they would make it run on Linux in native mode.
But hey, that might slice into their operating system monopoly so maybe not such a good idea.
What about those of us who have never played a computer game (Duke em whatever we could care less). I would have thought that the moderators at /. would approve topics of significance.
I guess I was wrong.
If people subjected to RIAA suits were simply willing to declare bankruptcy this whole adventure would be a no-op. "You want to fine me" Here is my bankruptcy filing. Indeed if most file sharers were willing to follow this model it would probably overwhelm the legal system. A bankruptcy filing is erased from ones record in 10 years. So why bother about it?
They can only take you to the limit over what you care about. Choose not to care about it.
Perhaps for the same reason that we dig up ancient civilizations. In part curiosity.
The main point being that if they can run simulations which are reasonably accurate then there is much less interest in coming here to dig us up. A trip to a distant part of the galaxy is much more expensive than changing the parameters of a simulation and running it forward for a period to see what happens. They can not only be "us" -- they can be many instances of "us".
Robert
Intelligent species, esp. intelligent species with tool and machine making capabilities have control over their destiny. Evolution moves from environmental determination to self-determination. We have yet to really wrestle with that. Those who understand molecular biology, transhumanism, the end points of Moore's Law and molecular nanotechnology have some grasp of where species can go (or as you point out choose not to go).
But the Earth evolved for several billion years without any significant life, then went through several significant shifts, esp. in the last few hundred million years, then developed some intelligent species, then developed intelligent tool making species that could take control of their own destiny (why not find a way to dedicate all the computer resources to finding NEOs rather than aliens?) I do not see such intelligent tool making species that have overcome the odds deciding to go "gracefully" "green" and return the planet and the solar system back to a "natural" state. And so long as you allow people "free will" there will be those of us who will push for healthier, longer lives, with "matter as software" where we, rather than nature and our environment dictate our destiny.
If you evolve to the limits that physics allows, ones longevity is measured in hundreds of billions to trillions of years -- much older than our universe now is. The reason for doing this is the most simple and natural one that can be imagined -- simple survival. Species that for one reason or another choose not to survive will not be detected.
Whether it is true now (and Lineweaver's work on the fact that a majority of the "Earth's" in our galaxy are much older than ours and therfore it may be) or not -- simple logic suggests that the dominant life forms are (or will be) those which have engineered solutions to living the longest and reducing the risks to their survival to a minimum (i.e. survival of the fittest).
Species whose candles burn brightly for a short time (say a few thousand years, as ours has done thus far) are unlikely to be detected because of the f_c and L parameters of the Drake equation. Properly rewritten the equation would account for "How long an intelligent species chooses to survive".
SETI, as primarily currently pursued, is unlikely to find anything. I sum up my perspective, "We don't talk to nematodes and *they* don't talk to us." It is useful to consider the difference in intellectual capacity between humans and nematodes is far less than that between Matrioshka Brains and us.
Most advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are going to be far far ahead of us. At the point where they have constructed Matrioshka Brains. The intellectual capacity of an MBrain is roughly a trillion trillion times that of a human brain. They can simulate the history of entire humanities in seconds. We are simply not of interest to them.
There are 3 ways to detect MBrains.
1. Stellar occultations (similar to some of the exoplanet searches now being done).
2. Gravitational microlensing studies (also being done).
3. Large scale mid-to-far IR surveys looking for bright IR objects that do not appear to be visible (not being done because our far IR detectors are extremely poor and not particularly sensitive; and they must be operated from space so they are $$$).
The observant will note that none of these involve using computer cycles for the analysis of radio wave noise. The astronomer geeks will notice that long term backyard surveys searching for exoplanets using variations in stellar brightness might either capture candidate stars with exoplanets or perhaps an occasional gravitational microlensing event or maybe an MBrain traveling through the galaxy on its way to the nearest carbon white dwarf star (because they need more carbon for extreme nanotech) or a stellar gas nebula for a fueling pit stop. The extremely astute might notice that should sufficient numbers of these be discovered then there might be another explanation for all of the "dark matter" which doesn't result from the physics of the universe but from the natural activities of intelligent life. (Perhaps making the theoretical physicists extremely unhappy.)
It is also the case that to scan large fields of stars for variations in brightness and separating the normal variable stars from those which are "unusual" would not be a small use of ones spare computer time.
At the time you have the technological capabilities to start building cities that float in the atmosphere of Venus, one is probably well into the era of molecular nanotechology. That means one probably already has restrictions on the removal of CO2 from the Earth's atmosphere (don't want to kill all the plants, cyanobacteria, plankton, fish, etc.) and one is well along on stripping the ice-caps from Mars and the atmosphere of Venus of the easily available carbon. This is because carbon availability becomes a limiting resource and of significant concern in the nanotech era.
Depending upon how much carbon is stripped from the atmosphere of Venus, one doesn't have the hellish temperature problem which exists now and it can be made quite comfortable on the surface. The magnetic field problem and lack of water are more significant problems and one may need to consider a phase of planetary comet bombardment to replenish the water. And unless means are developed to restart core circulation to beef up the magnetic field one is facing the problem of a very dry planet (all water circulating in pipes rather than streams or rivers). Though one could speculate as to whether sufficient particle accelerators could be developed to split the available C or O back into H so one could maintain the atmospheric H2O content even with a solar wind stripping away the H.
Now, of course if one has the capabilities to play with planets and the solar system as a whole like this, as I discuss in my chapter in "Year Million", then one is also likely to have the resources which can dismantle the whole planet, presumably to contribute to the construction of our solar system's Matrioshka Brain. Now whether to use the material in Venus for this purpose, or whether to turn it into a water world with lots of islands upon which many different evolutionary scenarios are played out (using real matter as the computronium for evolution). [For those of you who don't see this, think hundreds of thousands to millions of independent "Jurassic Park"s] is going to be one of the fierce debates we have later in this century or perhaps the next one.
Ok, my bad for not check your profile. But IMO, the major problem regarding nuclear waste is the long-lived isotopes present at low abundances in either the fuel rods due to nuclear fission (rather than neutron breeder reactions) and the nuclear waste which will come from reactor dismantlement.
To separate out the low abundance but long lived and high dangerous isotopes will benefit from molecular nanotechnology. (As you point out, you are a particle physicist and likely do not personally know Eric Drexler, Ralph Merkle, Robert Freitas and Josh Hall). So you might be as ill-equipped to comment on the topic as I am ill-equipped to comment on the difference between the bottom quark and the top quark. Though I will point out that nanotechnology was largely envisioned by the rather famous particle physicist Richard Feynman.
The fuel rod problem will sooner or later be dealt with fuel rod reprocessing as France and Russia now do. It is simple stupidity that it is not being adopted by the U.S. at this time. Economic considerations and the eventual exhaustion of inexpensive uranium resources will change that mentality. IMO, the lifetime of unreprocessed fuel rods is less than 100 years. If that is an accurate assessment then much of the problem of storing such fuel rods in Nevada becomes moot and the problem should focus on how one makes long lived radioactive (and dangerous) isotopes non-radioactive at lowest cost. I am under the impression that several proposals related to this have been worked on at Los Alamos and Sandia and we are in the midst of political stalemates not technical show stoppers.
The idea is right, the execution is problematic. You need to go study a bit more nuclear physics. Breeder reactors only breed plutonium when fueled primarily with U-238 or Th-232. They are not what much of our nuclear waste is composed of. Much, particularly of the higher volume of nuclear waste, is (or will be) composed of decomissioned reactor materials (cement, steel, etc.). The spent nuclear fuel rods are supposed (or can be) reprocessed to separate them into specific isotopes which can be reconstituted into safe nuclear fuel.
It significantly helps if we get "real" molecular nanotechnology (hopefully in 20-40 years), as that allows "single-proton massometers" (Nanomedicine Vol. 1, Sec. 4.4.3) to be manufactured. Highly parallel arrays of these would allow the complete inexpensive separation of radioactive matter streams (as mass-spec machines currently allow at a somewhat higher cost) which in turn would allow highly precise breeding of specific isotopic matter streams using proton or neutron beams (rather than breeder reactors which tend to scare people).
There is no reason that a mixture of radioactive and non-radioactive atoms (nuclear "waste") cannot be separated out and manipulated into an entirely non-radioactive set of isotopes. If we are clever enough about it (and energy is in short supply) we may be able to cost effectively do this such that more energy can be produced from the outputs than is consumed to manipulate the inputs.
I bought a very expensive high end cell phone in 1999, just before the Y2K "disaster" was supposed to happen. Then I had to buy a 2nd one because it didn't work in Moscow. I've never had my U.S enabled phone activated because why do I need it? Where is the anthropology about people who have no use for being callable 24/7?
There are such things as email, message recording machines (or telco company equivalent options). Why do people need to be available 24/7? Where is the study about people who have no phone at all? (I.e. no cell, no skype, no Ccomcast, no Verizon, etc.) People that if you want to talk to them you actually have to walk or drive up to their house. Now that would be an interesting study.
I've had older systems running Linux and they run just fine after 5+ years. The problem is older systems running Windows, having to run increasingly complex virus detection or windows update programs. If Windows had followed KISS and Open Source principles, it is doubtful that they would have such problems.
Ever since the Pentium Pro came out one had real chips that could be used for real computers. I was running dual processor PP systems as far back as something like 1997 and I suspect I could still be using them effectively today. Though I would probably switch to more integrated AMD multi-core chip & integrated graphics designs.
The problem isn't in your hardware. Its the operating system. If you dumped Windows and upgraded to a Linux OS, e.g. Ubuntu you might find that your system worked just fine.
Shouldn't the moral of this story be, "Use Windows and risk losing your job."
There may be stories about viruses infecting Linux systems, but I've never had a problem (except with the random attempts from around the world trying to break into my telnet or ftp servers.) But so long as one keeps those locked down to specific IP addresses then the only problem one has to deal with is SPAM being routed through ones machine.
Though the "untitled frames"/"windows unexpectedly destroyed bug (#263160), which has been present for perhaps 3+ years is still present.
As are a host of other problems. Including a lack of catching memory allocation failures, a lack of handling large numbers of tabs (which use Javascript), and extremely slow restart times if one is restarting a large session (lots of windows and tabs).
I believe this was just an attempt to push a new release out the door without sufficient attention to quality control. If I were in charge of the Mozilla organization, I would have serious questions about continuing to employ the managers of the project.
(And I'm not just some know nothing idiot spouting off. I was the Unix Product Development manager at Oracle Corporation from 1982-1987.)
The saddest part of the deaths of recent people from Tim Russet to Cyd Charisse is that they were entirely unnecessary. We have the cryonics preservation technology to ensure that although they may be dead from a technical standpoint -- viewing them as permanently dead is open to question. We need a restructuring of how we think about "death" and it probably requires re-educating every physician in the country.
You are not "dead" until all the information in your body has been converted to an unrecoverable state.
Until it becomes clear that exploring space with humans as they are currently constructed is stupid then the entire "space exploration" process makes no sense.
We did not evolve to go there or live there and until we are redesigned to meet the environmental requirements we should not be there.
The bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans had a better desgin spec than Homo sapiens. Someone should knock that concept into the candidates for presidency and administrators at NASA.
Does this have any relevance with people who have Javacript disbabled for most web sites?
If you allow people to run programs on your computer you are asking for trouble. Unfortunately most people are unaware of this,
And when will this actually contribute to making the world a better place?
Of course the people scoring this message as troll/off-topic are unlikely to have seen the Frontline episode (which I think was made last year but was repeated last night on cable) documenting how hard the current administration worked to bury perspectives in the EPA and NASA on these topics. Now, if they will sabotage their own appointed administrators and the scientists who are paid to give informed, presumably rational opinions, then how much of a stretch is it to think they will make an effort to bias the minds of trainees at the "US Defense Intelligence Agency"? As we know that organization has done a swell job over the last 5+ years... (sarcasm intended).
And believe it or not I was initially in favor of going into Iraq because I bought the arguments. That will teach me to trust politicians.
Of course a more interesting question is whether there are sub-plots in these games that teach that an addiction to oil and coal are good and that the science with respect to the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere and its probable contribution to global warming is still "unclear".
Regarding heart disease... If one leaves out those aspects of the disease which may be caused by specific genetic mutations the answer is no. Most heart disease is caused by poor diet, lack of exercise and an immune system which evolved under prehistoric conditions where food was not as abundant (or as fatty) and exercise was a requirement for survival.
Heart disease is one area you can generally attribute to a genetic program not designed for the era we live in rather than specific defects (or accumulated defects) which result in protein misfolding.
Actually this is a grossly incomplete statement. Due to the fact that the process of Non-homologous End Joining (NHEJ) repair of DNA double strand breaks involves the exonuclease (DNA end-eating) proteins WRN and DCLRE1C (Artemis), the repair of double strand breaks corrupts the genome via microdeletions. Microdeletions can result in frameshift mutations which can of course result in protein mis-folding. The accumulation of these frameshift mutations and misfolded proteins over the lifespan of cells has downstream consequences including less efficient or improper cell function (cancer or aging) as well as the induction of apoptosis (managed cell death) -- more aging.
Thus the fundamental processes which will terminate most of our lives are related to mis-folded proteins. It is not limited to the less common "mad cow disease" (which few humans need to worry about) or even Alzheimer's (which more humans should be worried about as research funding is failing to keep pace with either inflation or the growth rate in people afflicted with the disease) [1].
(If any of these concepts are unfamiliar, the wikipedia discussions of the topics are not too bad.)
1. One could get into a long discussion as to whether or not to consider Alzheimer's a protein folding disease. I happen to be of the opinion that any disease involving the accumulation of molecules that are not present in "normal" cells is leaning in that direction.
If it were only my reasoning, I might be more willing to take the easy way out and say all masses orbiting other stars are dead planets. But doing so screams of requiring a good explanation for why we are the first and/or only advanced technological civilization in our galaxy. Without some of those on the table the puzzle seems to be missing missing more than a few pieces.
I don't disagree other than from the perspective that Lineweaver's argument says we are the "young kids on the block". You have physicists scratching their heads left and right trying to explain another observation "dark matter" when that is what you would have lots of if advanced civilizations simply converted their stars to Matrioshka Brains (complex Dyson Shells). But doing so would involve many civilizations far more advanced than we are and the physicists don't want to go there... (lets make up some magical new form of matter instead...).
Life is possible, we are here. We have good predictions for what our capabilities will be once we have robust molecular nanotechnology (and that includes taking the sun dark to external observers). And it is even possible at a slower rate without molecular nanotechnology (we are doing it now). Can they physicists make an argument that all of the planets they are finding are "dead"? That life on them can never develop? (I'll admit its tough on the planets we are currently finding but they are smoking guns for more hospitable planets.)
The scientists are failing to plug reasonable values into the "t" variable of the equation which would allow one to document the complete life history of such planets -- when you do that one may find that many of them have reached stages far beyond our current limited evolutionary state.