Where exactly do you get the notion that people are still learning to write real algorithms in university ? Sure they get shown the result of algorithms. They might even get to implement a binary tree search algorithm (though without the memory allocation part that makes all the difference in real programming). But that's pretty much it.
The days of getting 2 years of education with only Maths + Scheme and C with at least 2 hours per day spent programming are over. Long over. I don't think these kids will be much worse than college or university graduates.
Let's hope they never find out that the difference between high school graduates in America and India is not all that different.
By your standards the democrats are in favor of restarting the holocaust, using hamas as the new nazis. After all, some are (just read dailykos for a bit).
And generally, none of them say anything when hamas makes statements about restarting the holocaust. And everytime anyone suggests that maybe hamas should be taught a lesson "democrats" (let's throw everyone in one basket like you so seem to enjoy) rant on and on about how "victimized" those poor genocidal maniacs are.
And let's not pretend that the lunatics of, say dailykos or democratic underground, don't know perfectly well that what they're saying about gazans is simply a lie.
What do you expect from the kind of geniuses that hold up signs saying "Keep Your Government Hands off My Medicare".
Sadly, realism.
It's like comparing aids and gonorrhea, but at least one is mostly curable. Furthermore, it's absolutely true that Obama's sabotaging medicare by expanding it. Here's the argument : we can't pay the rent for the smaller house, and Obama just forced us into a mansion (certainly it's priced like a mansion). Needless to say, this will merely lead to eviction.
He was convicted of what amounts to "dangerous teachings" after one of his students, Critias, destroyed the democratic Athenean state and imposed a tyranny... most say with the support of Socrates (including according to some sources Socrates himself).
Given that this was not his only student that tried to violently overthrow the city's government, one can certainly agree that his teachings certainly were dangerous, and that Socrates himself felt that he was entitled to rule as a tyrant over his fellow human beings, because he "understood the world". The prevalent view amongst Athene's orators and philosophers is that this failed violent takeover is what sealed his fate. Socrates had a reputation of being very open with his teachings, right up until the rise of the tyrants. In addition, he had a reputation for being very open with something else and the female population of Athens, which, I'm sure, did not play in his favor.
Of course, that sort of attitude is common amongst philosophers and too many other scientists even today. The childish "if everyone did what I say there would be world peace" feeling so prevalent amongst intelligentsia of all times... which has failed every state that tried to apply it rather spectacularly.
And of course that would stop them once the technology is in place.
For all of ten seconds.
It wouldn't just do that. Think about the enforcement mechanism that would be required to make this operate : all computers in the world would need to answer to a single, global command authority. This authority would immediately be used to "end piracy", for obvious reasons. Even unconnected operation would have to be subject to government approval (or else you could use that to sabotage the system when it gets reconnected).
And given that unless this is implemented globally, it would be a financial disaster. If the US implements this but China doesn't, that gives anyone else 2 major advantages : all spam income would go to them, all spam costs would go to the US. Furthermore, get 1 spy close to the kill switch, and... And God forbid we try to get other countries to cooperate with this. What will it take ? A global "the taiwanese king cannot be criticized" policy would seem to be required. And what about the "islam requires women cannot access the internet", a Saudi and Egyptian policy ? Doubtless the UN would consider that entirely reasonable and demand we become "culturally tolerant", you know just like you can no longer say that it was muslims who massacred americans in 2001, for the sole reason that "islam demands it", according to the terrorists themselves (and quite frankly when a barbarian is swinging an axe into your face shouting "you shouldn't have insulted...", you can generally assume he's not lying. The only correct reaction, of course, is to swing a bigger axe into his face)
And that's ignoring what happens when the first politician realizes he can hide that pesky little detail about him that he raped 3 girls a few years back (and 5 more since, but the FBI doesn't yet have that on record)...
Yes, and to further complicate matters, it is perspective dependent (1 cup of water is worth nothing to a drowning man and worth more than 5 tons of gold to a man stuck in a desert).
That's of course the basic problem of economics. It's, specifically, the problem economic systems (or more specifically "capitalism") try to solve. The big issue is simple : get it wrong for too long a time and the economy collapses, preventing production of everything, including food, housing, and other rather critical stuff.
Why ? Because if price is incorrect, you have a loop, which costs value and can be exploited, costing value to everyone (making sure that a normal person loses access to a certain amount of value he/she would otherwise have had). Either price is too low, promoting (potentially massive) hoarding, or price is too high, causing overproduction. In any "we control/regulate/... the price" system there are is no connection between how much you sell and how much your customers need.
Like the man said (thousands of years ago): "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.".
For the large majority of history, that man would have been wrong. Doing business on this premise between the end of the Roman Empire and the onset of the (very) late middle ages would have been a serious mistake.
And what makes you think Obambi wants to change anything in the first place ? Surely he's had the chance to end numerous "controversial" programs already. Take the drone strikes. They've intensified.
You know... it might even be... *gasp*... that there's a reason these programs exist.
Humans use recurrent neural networks, just like about all animals and quite a few insects. Now you can think what you want about neural networks, especially recurrent ones, which are far from well-understood, but :
They do not reason. Not at all. They predict and imitate.
We create a 4-dimensional approximation of the situation surrounding us (including parts of the future and past, which are -both- predicted inaccurately) and respond based on that. And how do we construct the response to a specific situation ? We imitate what we've seen others do.
At no point does the system worry about correctness, logic, or even statistics. We do not follow any manner of logic, except through imitation (notice how you can trace just about everything humans do -including maths- to a single (or at best a few) "fathers" of science. Algebra, the style of doing it that we all know, with long stories of logically valid proofs in a sequence can be traced back to one book, one teacher, one point in time where it started. Everything else is constructed by imitating the behavior pattern that produced that single book.
And a simple observation can put all our delusions of logical rationality aside : the fact that things have causes and consequences : it took fully developed human minds somewhere areound 170 000 years to realise that some things have causes and some things have consequences, and that they're connected. 170 000 years.
Tolerate the openly genocidal intolerant "victims" or be called a racist !
You know, just like in 1938.
Why can't we listen to the racist imperialists that want to kill the whole world for once ? You know, like Winston Churchill.
Of course, if we only acquiesce to the reasonable demands of muslims (such their demand the Jews give up the one real, armed, barrier standing between them and another holocaust), then surely they will leave us in peace and we'll all live happily ever after. Or this seems to be the prevailing logic for everything left of center in our society.
This research just a lot of buzzwords in one sentence. Cute : we can make high efficiency devices that take millions of dollars to make : great (except when millions, or even billions still aren't enough to make this "efficient" device : google "ITER"). If you want to make engineering efficient solar panels easier and cheaper, create a cheap low-electrical-resistence transparent material. The ones we have are just plain horrid.
A plasma field would be a great way to transmit really huge amounts of energy throughout the ship.
Here's how you would, using today's technology, stop a laser beam from hitting an object. You can't stop a laser beam permanently using any kind of matter (and a powerful enough beam you can't stop at all). So you need to deflect the impact.
So you create something around the ship for the beam to impact on, which would be a plasma cloud, because you can keep it in place using energy stored inside the ship. The laser beam would impact the plasma field (which has the nice property of having near-uniform spectrum : it would stop any frequency of beam). But of course the gas would heat up, become more difficult to control, and move out of the way of the beam.
However, the force the enemy laser beam would need to overcome is not the resistence of the gas surrounding the ship. It would need to dislodge the magnetic field holding the gas in place. In other words, as long as the ship is capable of holding the magnetic field in place, it won't be hit by the laser beam.
This is a huge advantage. Any form of matter is basically however strong that it is, however the magnetic field remains strong as long as you can keep electrons flowing a certain way, which is something you can achieve with your engines.
In other words, an impact on the shield will produce no impact on the ship, but a drag on the engines. As long as the engine keeps turning the ship is safe. This would work on just about any kind of particle, photons, protons, electrons, molecules, large object or whatever (insects have actually walked on these plasmas in laboratory conditions, and they've stopped milliwatt power laser beams). Destroying a satellite surrounded by such a field would be a real problem.
Similar fields are used in a very well known system to solve exactly this type of problem : the walls of ITER are not capable of resisting the heat of the matter that's inside them. So they need a shield that utterly minimizes plasma impacts on the walls of the reactor. This is done through a toroidal-shaped plasma field that is held in place by magnetic fields. And while iter as a whole doesn't work, these fields are capable of protecting the reactor walls from temperatures in excess of one million degrees, something no armor or any known kind of matter could do.
Of course there are inconsistencies. Due to the strength of the magnetic field, having any kind of metals inside the ship with the shields up would be a big no-no. Any metal object would instantly accelerate. Furthermore, while humans are capable of normal functioning in quite strong fields, this is not without limit. Also radio transmissions and any kind of electrical signals would experience interference (which wouldn't necessarily make them inoperable, after all, our AC power grid also produces massive amounts of 50 Hz interference, we simply design devices to not respond to this)
As to why control consoles need to be connected straight into the ships power systems, you got me. Something is going to explode as a result of shield impacts, but one would expect that to be the engine room, and the engines themselves.
Both the nazi's and the communists started out from the simple idea using the full power of the economy to the simple goal of caring for everybody, and ending suffering. Both could not admit they were wrong, to the point that they rather solved the problem the malthusian way (can't pay to care for people -> lower the numbers)
And they're just the "big" examples, there are lots of other little examples demonstrating the exact same thing.
This is, incidentally, in full agreement with what such trivial things like evolution theory say will happen. You can't care for everyone with finite resources. It is in direct contradiction with known science and it cannot work, not now, not ever. Population will never drop, and however deep birthrates drop that will just empower those whose birthrates don't drop, for whatever reason.
But that's not merely the depth of the socialist hypocrisy ("socialist", incidentally is a name that both Hitler and Stalin used for themselves, and so did Che "when entering a village, first, kill all doctors" Guevara, revered idol of the left)
The real gigantic hypocrisy comes from the idiocy that you claim that science "proves" you right, and conservatives wrong. Anyone with an actual relevant degree, who's had to study what happens to populations of every species in the wild... but you say otherwise. Someone who's got an actual degree even knows that this is a good thing, because he knows the alternative. If one species were to succeed in the socialist enterprise for even a moderate amount of time... well... google "grey goo disaster".
Do tell, ultranova, what do you suppose the chances are God will make an exception for your idiocy, that he did not make for the Soviets, Germans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cubans,... ?
We all know the answer : you think you are God and that you can just vote out the laws of nature. So did all the others. In fact, people have thought so since long before the first farao died. And you know what ? They still haven't risen from the dead, not even as the sun god they each thought they were. Do you think you will fare different ?
Of the mentioned actions, the acquisition of dictatorial power came first, then starting WWII, and when his centralized economy could not support either the war or the "medicinal camps" (they were originally intended as a cost-cutting measure for both "internal" national healthcare, and a cost-cutting measure for caring for POW's), he started the holocaust (first, in 1941, very carefully and slowly by executing permanently ill psychological patients, then voluntary euthanasia, then "voluntary" euthanasia (voluntary in legal theory), then outright murder ("involuntary" euthanasia doesn't really make sense), then euthanasia of anyone who couldn't work (cripples mainly, again starting with voluntary sterilization, ending in genocide). Eventually it was decreed that Jews and POWs would be euthanized as they could never be productive. They even made exceptions for Jews and other prisoners who had found a way to be "useful" (e.g. there were mining operations, printers, archival, railroad building, and even prisoners who spied for the Nazi's, all were given a free pass)
It was a decades-long evolution, a fall down a slippery slope, that lead to nazism, WWII and the holocaust. Nazism started with the same premise as communism : that they would care for each and every human being, especially the unemployed. Initially that meant higher taxes, more government control and nationalizing industries starting with education. And as it advanced, implemented things like free healthcare, massive raised of the minimum wage, the "right to study" (ie. the right to be paid for doing nothing for 4 years after finishing school).
Initially this was paid for by refusing to pay back old loans, and threathening military attack if new loans weren't extended to the nazi state, and when they finally attacked (the attack against Poland was brewing for at least 5 years, maybe even 15, when it finally happened. France, UK and other thought they could just negotiate their way to peace with nazi ideology. They were wrong, and dozens of millions of people that could have been protected died). It finally happned "coincidentally" when the nations of Europe could not take any more hits to their economy : they refused Hitler's new loans because their coffers were empty, and their taxes already killing the economy. But it was not enough to pay for "social justice", and of course no excuse could be accepted for this. Hitler took nearly all of the money of western europe to create a centrally-controlled utopia for the "German working man" (and his own cronies, of course), and he used up all of it in less than 15 years. He got a tiny extension by starting the holocaust (after 15 years deep in red ink, the theft associated with the holocaust made Nazi germany run a trade surplus for one year).
Nazi's were hugely popular, especially amongst students and other "young" people, worldwide, and among the unemployed. Even in America Nazi Germany enjoyed so much popularity politicians didn't dare to speak against Hitler openly until halfway into 1941. What happened in 1941 ? The love affair, the military alliance and economic cooperation between the communists and nazi's ended (mostly Stalin's doing), pitting the two camps that were once united against eachother. They would never recover.
I know everyone always wants what happened in WWII to be one bad apple that somehow managed to change western europe into hell on earth all by himself, but this is not, at all, how this went. "He" did not seek dictatorial power, he saw it as a necessity to create "social justice" in Germany. "He" didn't start WWII, or at least he did not do so without the agreement of a large majority of Germans and a strong and vocal minority everywhere in western europe, the middle east, the far east and even America. "He" did not start the holocaust, that was his healthcare ministry (one of the big surprises is that this really is the case, he did not actually know until after they had moved on to killing cripples. Ironically they started
Why not fine the actual owner of the computer that's causing the problem?
Great, except of course that it can only work by 1) bringing all IP address assignments under government control, down to the individual user (translation : goodbye p2p, for obvious reasons) 2) creating a world government that has enforcement capabilities in all internet-connected countries (translation : bye-bye piratebay, whereever you host, you get shot) 3) obviously since this method has zero use unless truly every country participates, what are we going to do ? Attack any non-compliant government ? Disconnect them ? 4) it provides a slippery slope : what if saudi arabia starts demanding no women connect to any machine in their country ? Now they have a way to enforce that.
Furthermore the only real security microsoft could possibly enter to guarantee no viruses is a simple "signed code only" policy (you know, like the iPhone). After that, microsoft has a security-justified veto over what software can run on windows machines.
Let's not propose cures that are far worse than the disease. This suggestion has about the same value as curing a painful toe by killing the patient.
Talking about weaknesses, why does this bill specify "the federal government" ? That's a hell of a lot of people that that sentence covered. Why aren't they giving this power to the military, say the newly created cyber command ?
Given who receives this power, one would think it is not -at all- meant to be used in "emergencies". And Obama doesn't trust the military (not that that wasn't obvious yet).
Well if it ever comes to choosing which humans to keep alive and which to kill, I'll make sure to put my vote in for killing you... because you'd do the same for me.
So what do we do then ? We all know our parents (or "babyboom generation") and their parents are responsible for the really excessive "borrowing" from nature. When they started, world population was less than 1.5 billion people. Worse : those 1.5 billion people lived a lot more efficiently than us (not that they knew, there just wasn't sufficient energy. Nothing makes a man quite so frugal as an empty wallet), so "efficiency" increases, barring getting nuclear fusion plants operational, aren't going to help us get above that 1.5 billion.
If this is true:
For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first.
Then we're about to lose 3 out of 4 people worldwide to genocide, war or hunger. Including 1 out of 2 Americans. But the countries that would be truly fucked in this case would be Europe and Africa.
What I don't get is how this can even get discussed ? Surely anything -anything- is preferable to losing the large majority of world population ? Add to that, the "sticky" question : who dies ? We all know how the question of "who dies" is going to be answered, since it's just the same as ever : with wars. If you lose, you get exterminated. If you don't fight, and are lucky enough not to get attacked, you starve to death. Anyone in favor of that ?
And before anyone says birth control, please remember "birth control" will only have real results in 50 years, and 90 or-so if birth control is done in a sustainable manner (meaning there is both an upper and a lower limit to how many babies we get to have). And even if you do compulsory birth control, who gets to have babies, and what do you do about "over the limit" babies ? Or perhaps more directly : how do you kill "over the limit" babies ?
Seems to me that unless you want every state world-wide to start it's own holocaust, you'd advocate the solution of funding every man with an idea about power generation. Funding it, not just through academia (who have a somewhat tarnished track record here), but more along the lines of : if a dog comes with a napkin with an idea, give him 1000$ for it and see where it goes.
The problem with that process is that it assumes 2 very big axioms : 1) the universe follows mathematical laws (and the implication that our idea of mathematics is correct, which is extremely unlikely since it's known to be flawed, specifically mathematics is not correct when dealing with the extremely large (ie. infinite or more), or the extremely small (ie. 1/infinite). The existence of real numbers, however, is dependant on a known-inconsistent axiom) 2) the laws are not chaotic (also a questionable assumption since many laws are chaotic, e.g. gravity is chaotic : you can make short term predictions very easily, but long-term predictions are utterly impossible for anyone except God (ie. you need to be omniscient), like climate, just google "3 body problem" for a demonstration)
Slashdot Mirror
Where exactly do you get the notion that people are still learning to write real algorithms in university ? Sure they get shown the result of algorithms. They might even get to implement a binary tree search algorithm (though without the memory allocation part that makes all the difference in real programming). But that's pretty much it.
The days of getting 2 years of education with only Maths + Scheme and C with at least 2 hours per day spent programming are over. Long over. I don't think these kids will be much worse than college or university graduates.
Let's hope they never find out that the difference between high school graduates in America and India is not all that different.
*sigh*
Am I getting old ?
By your standards the democrats are in favor of restarting the holocaust, using hamas as the new nazis. After all, some are (just read dailykos for a bit).
And generally, none of them say anything when hamas makes statements about restarting the holocaust. And everytime anyone suggests that maybe hamas should be taught a lesson "democrats" (let's throw everyone in one basket like you so seem to enjoy) rant on and on about how "victimized" those poor genocidal maniacs are.
And let's not pretend that the lunatics of, say dailykos or democratic underground, don't know perfectly well that what they're saying about gazans is simply a lie.
What do you expect from the kind of geniuses that hold up signs saying "Keep Your Government Hands off My Medicare".
Sadly, realism.
It's like comparing aids and gonorrhea, but at least one is mostly curable. Furthermore, it's absolutely true that Obama's sabotaging medicare by expanding it. Here's the argument : we can't pay the rent for the smaller house, and Obama just forced us into a mansion (certainly it's priced like a mansion). Needless to say, this will merely lead to eviction.
He was convicted of what amounts to "dangerous teachings" after one of his students, Critias, destroyed the democratic Athenean state and imposed a tyranny ... most say with the support of Socrates (including according to some sources Socrates himself).
Given that this was not his only student that tried to violently overthrow the city's government, one can certainly agree that his teachings certainly were dangerous, and that Socrates himself felt that he was entitled to rule as a tyrant over his fellow human beings, because he "understood the world". The prevalent view amongst Athene's orators and philosophers is that this failed violent takeover is what sealed his fate. Socrates had a reputation of being very open with his teachings, right up until the rise of the tyrants. In addition, he had a reputation for being very open with something else and the female population of Athens, which, I'm sure, did not play in his favor.
Of course, that sort of attitude is common amongst philosophers and too many other scientists even today. The childish "if everyone did what I say there would be world peace" feeling so prevalent amongst intelligentsia of all times ... which has failed every state that tried to apply it rather spectacularly.
42 is a dumb number. It's not even prime. It's not a perfect number. It's not a sum of 2 squares, not even of 2 cubes.
It's not even fucking uneven.
Bah, they should have picked a more interesting number, like 389.
And of course that would stop them once the technology is in place.
For all of ten seconds.
It wouldn't just do that. Think about the enforcement mechanism that would be required to make this operate : all computers in the world would need to answer to a single, global command authority. This authority would immediately be used to "end piracy", for obvious reasons. Even unconnected operation would have to be subject to government approval (or else you could use that to sabotage the system when it gets reconnected).
And given that unless this is implemented globally, it would be a financial disaster. If the US implements this but China doesn't, that gives anyone else 2 major advantages : all spam income would go to them, all spam costs would go to the US. Furthermore, get 1 spy close to the kill switch, and ... And God forbid we try to get other countries to cooperate with this. What will it take ? A global "the taiwanese king cannot be criticized" policy would seem to be required. And what about the "islam requires women cannot access the internet", a Saudi and Egyptian policy ? Doubtless the UN would consider that entirely reasonable and demand we become "culturally tolerant", you know just like you can no longer say that it was muslims who massacred americans in 2001, for the sole reason that "islam demands it", according to the terrorists themselves (and quite frankly when a barbarian is swinging an axe into your face shouting "you shouldn't have insulted ...", you can generally assume he's not lying. The only correct reaction, of course, is to swing a bigger axe into his face)
And that's ignoring what happens when the first politician realizes he can hide that pesky little detail about him that he raped 3 girls a few years back (and 5 more since, but the FBI doesn't yet have that on record) ...
Is not everything based on perceived value?
Yes, and to further complicate matters, it is perspective dependent (1 cup of water is worth nothing to a drowning man and worth more than 5 tons of gold to a man stuck in a desert).
That's of course the basic problem of economics. It's, specifically, the problem economic systems (or more specifically "capitalism") try to solve. The big issue is simple : get it wrong for too long a time and the economy collapses, preventing production of everything, including food, housing, and other rather critical stuff.
Why ? Because if price is incorrect, you have a loop, which costs value and can be exploited, costing value to everyone (making sure that a normal person loses access to a certain amount of value he/she would otherwise have had). Either price is too low, promoting (potentially massive) hoarding, or price is too high, causing overproduction. In any "we control/regulate/... the price" system there are is no connection between how much you sell and how much your customers need.
Like the man said (thousands of years ago): "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.".
For the large majority of history, that man would have been wrong. Doing business on this premise between the end of the Roman Empire and the onset of the (very) late middle ages would have been a serious mistake.
So the "hope and change" plan involves enforcing copyrights, with the purpose of increased drug use by college students ?
No wonder we voted for him.
And what makes you think Obambi wants to change anything in the first place ? Surely he's had the chance to end numerous "controversial" programs already. Take the drone strikes. They've intensified.
You know ... it might even be ... *gasp* ... that there's a reason these programs exist.
Humans use recurrent neural networks, just like about all animals and quite a few insects. Now you can think what you want about neural networks, especially recurrent ones, which are far from well-understood, but :
They do not reason. Not at all. They predict and imitate.
We create a 4-dimensional approximation of the situation surrounding us (including parts of the future and past, which are -both- predicted inaccurately) and respond based on that. And how do we construct the response to a specific situation ? We imitate what we've seen others do.
At no point does the system worry about correctness, logic, or even statistics. We do not follow any manner of logic, except through imitation (notice how you can trace just about everything humans do -including maths- to a single (or at best a few) "fathers" of science. Algebra, the style of doing it that we all know, with long stories of logically valid proofs in a sequence can be traced back to one book, one teacher, one point in time where it started. Everything else is constructed by imitating the behavior pattern that produced that single book.
And a simple observation can put all our delusions of logical rationality aside : the fact that things have causes and consequences : it took fully developed human minds somewhere areound 170 000 years to realise that some things have causes and some things have consequences, and that they're connected. 170 000 years.
Tolerate the openly genocidal intolerant "victims" or be called a racist !
You know, just like in 1938.
Why can't we listen to the racist imperialists that want to kill the whole world for once ? You know, like Winston Churchill.
Of course, if we only acquiesce to the reasonable demands of muslims (such their demand the Jews give up the one real, armed, barrier standing between them and another holocaust), then surely they will leave us in peace and we'll all live happily ever after. Or this seems to be the prevailing logic for everything left of center in our society.
Exactly
This research just a lot of buzzwords in one sentence. Cute : we can make high efficiency devices that take millions of dollars to make : great (except when millions, or even billions still aren't enough to make this "efficient" device : google "ITER"). If you want to make engineering efficient solar panels easier and cheaper, create a cheap low-electrical-resistence transparent material. The ones we have are just plain horrid.
A plasma field would be a great way to transmit really huge amounts of energy throughout the ship.
Here's how you would, using today's technology, stop a laser beam from hitting an object. You can't stop a laser beam permanently using any kind of matter (and a powerful enough beam you can't stop at all). So you need to deflect the impact.
So you create something around the ship for the beam to impact on, which would be a plasma cloud, because you can keep it in place using energy stored inside the ship. The laser beam would impact the plasma field (which has the nice property of having near-uniform spectrum : it would stop any frequency of beam). But of course the gas would heat up, become more difficult to control, and move out of the way of the beam.
However, the force the enemy laser beam would need to overcome is not the resistence of the gas surrounding the ship. It would need to dislodge the magnetic field holding the gas in place. In other words, as long as the ship is capable of holding the magnetic field in place, it won't be hit by the laser beam.
This is a huge advantage. Any form of matter is basically however strong that it is, however the magnetic field remains strong as long as you can keep electrons flowing a certain way, which is something you can achieve with your engines.
In other words, an impact on the shield will produce no impact on the ship, but a drag on the engines. As long as the engine keeps turning the ship is safe. This would work on just about any kind of particle, photons, protons, electrons, molecules, large object or whatever (insects have actually walked on these plasmas in laboratory conditions, and they've stopped milliwatt power laser beams). Destroying a satellite surrounded by such a field would be a real problem.
Similar fields are used in a very well known system to solve exactly this type of problem : the walls of ITER are not capable of resisting the heat of the matter that's inside them. So they need a shield that utterly minimizes plasma impacts on the walls of the reactor. This is done through a toroidal-shaped plasma field that is held in place by magnetic fields. And while iter as a whole doesn't work, these fields are capable of protecting the reactor walls from temperatures in excess of one million degrees, something no armor or any known kind of matter could do.
Of course there are inconsistencies. Due to the strength of the magnetic field, having any kind of metals inside the ship with the shields up would be a big no-no. Any metal object would instantly accelerate. Furthermore, while humans are capable of normal functioning in quite strong fields, this is not without limit. Also radio transmissions and any kind of electrical signals would experience interference (which wouldn't necessarily make them inoperable, after all, our AC power grid also produces massive amounts of 50 Hz interference, we simply design devices to not respond to this)
As to why control consoles need to be connected straight into the ships power systems, you got me. Something is going to explode as a result of shield impacts, but one would expect that to be the engine room, and the engines themselves.
Both the nazi's and the communists started out from the simple idea using the full power of the economy to the simple goal of caring for everybody, and ending suffering. Both could not admit they were wrong, to the point that they rather solved the problem the malthusian way (can't pay to care for people -> lower the numbers)
And they're just the "big" examples, there are lots of other little examples demonstrating the exact same thing.
This is, incidentally, in full agreement with what such trivial things like evolution theory say will happen. You can't care for everyone with finite resources. It is in direct contradiction with known science and it cannot work, not now, not ever. Population will never drop, and however deep birthrates drop that will just empower those whose birthrates don't drop, for whatever reason.
But that's not merely the depth of the socialist hypocrisy ("socialist", incidentally is a name that both Hitler and Stalin used for themselves, and so did Che "when entering a village, first, kill all doctors" Guevara, revered idol of the left)
The real gigantic hypocrisy comes from the idiocy that you claim that science "proves" you right, and conservatives wrong. Anyone with an actual relevant degree, who's had to study what happens to populations of every species in the wild ... but you say otherwise. Someone who's got an actual degree even knows that this is a good thing, because he knows the alternative. If one species were to succeed in the socialist enterprise for even a moderate amount of time ... well ... google "grey goo disaster".
Do tell, ultranova, what do you suppose the chances are God will make an exception for your idiocy, that he did not make for the Soviets, Germans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cubans, ... ?
We all know the answer : you think you are God and that you can just vote out the laws of nature. So did all the others. In fact, people have thought so since long before the first farao died. And you know what ? They still haven't risen from the dead, not even as the sun god they each thought they were. Do you think you will fare different ?
You should get things in order :
Of the mentioned actions, the acquisition of dictatorial power came first, then starting WWII, and when his centralized economy could not support either the war or the "medicinal camps" (they were originally intended as a cost-cutting measure for both "internal" national healthcare, and a cost-cutting measure for caring for POW's), he started the holocaust (first, in 1941, very carefully and slowly by executing permanently ill psychological patients, then voluntary euthanasia, then "voluntary" euthanasia (voluntary in legal theory), then outright murder ("involuntary" euthanasia doesn't really make sense), then euthanasia of anyone who couldn't work (cripples mainly, again starting with voluntary sterilization, ending in genocide). Eventually it was decreed that Jews and POWs would be euthanized as they could never be productive. They even made exceptions for Jews and other prisoners who had found a way to be "useful" (e.g. there were mining operations, printers, archival, railroad building, and even prisoners who spied for the Nazi's, all were given a free pass)
It was a decades-long evolution, a fall down a slippery slope, that lead to nazism, WWII and the holocaust. Nazism started with the same premise as communism : that they would care for each and every human being, especially the unemployed. Initially that meant higher taxes, more government control and nationalizing industries starting with education. And as it advanced, implemented things like free healthcare, massive raised of the minimum wage, the "right to study" (ie. the right to be paid for doing nothing for 4 years after finishing school).
Initially this was paid for by refusing to pay back old loans, and threathening military attack if new loans weren't extended to the nazi state, and when they finally attacked (the attack against Poland was brewing for at least 5 years, maybe even 15, when it finally happened. France, UK and other thought they could just negotiate their way to peace with nazi ideology. They were wrong, and dozens of millions of people that could have been protected died). It finally happned "coincidentally" when the nations of Europe could not take any more hits to their economy : they refused Hitler's new loans because their coffers were empty, and their taxes already killing the economy. But it was not enough to pay for "social justice", and of course no excuse could be accepted for this. Hitler took nearly all of the money of western europe to create a centrally-controlled utopia for the "German working man" (and his own cronies, of course), and he used up all of it in less than 15 years. He got a tiny extension by starting the holocaust (after 15 years deep in red ink, the theft associated with the holocaust made Nazi germany run a trade surplus for one year).
Nazi's were hugely popular, especially amongst students and other "young" people, worldwide, and among the unemployed. Even in America Nazi Germany enjoyed so much popularity politicians didn't dare to speak against Hitler openly until halfway into 1941. What happened in 1941 ? The love affair, the military alliance and economic cooperation between the communists and nazi's ended (mostly Stalin's doing), pitting the two camps that were once united against eachother. They would never recover.
I know everyone always wants what happened in WWII to be one bad apple that somehow managed to change western europe into hell on earth all by himself, but this is not, at all, how this went. "He" did not seek dictatorial power, he saw it as a necessity to create "social justice" in Germany. "He" didn't start WWII, or at least he did not do so without the agreement of a large majority of Germans and a strong and vocal minority everywhere in western europe, the middle east, the far east and even America. "He" did not start the holocaust, that was his healthcare ministry (one of the big surprises is that this really is the case, he did not actually know until after they had moved on to killing cripples. Ironically they started
So it is to save trees that environuts are against fusion power ? Or what ?
Is this a joke ?
Imagine if microsoft would say : you can only install microsoft-approved applications, but we include a webbrowser.
Would you call that free ?
thought so
Why not fine the actual owner of the computer that's causing the problem?
Great, except of course that it can only work by
1) bringing all IP address assignments under government control, down to the individual user (translation : goodbye p2p, for obvious reasons)
2) creating a world government that has enforcement capabilities in all internet-connected countries (translation : bye-bye piratebay, whereever you host, you get shot)
3) obviously since this method has zero use unless truly every country participates, what are we going to do ? Attack any non-compliant government ? Disconnect them ?
4) it provides a slippery slope : what if saudi arabia starts demanding no women connect to any machine in their country ? Now they have a way to enforce that.
Furthermore the only real security microsoft could possibly enter to guarantee no viruses is a simple "signed code only" policy (you know, like the iPhone). After that, microsoft has a security-justified veto over what software can run on windows machines.
Let's not propose cures that are far worse than the disease. This suggestion has about the same value as curing a painful toe by killing the patient.
Talking about weaknesses, why does this bill specify "the federal government" ? That's a hell of a lot of people that that sentence covered. Why aren't they giving this power to the military, say the newly created cyber command ?
Given who receives this power, one would think it is not -at all- meant to be used in "emergencies". And Obama doesn't trust the military (not that that wasn't obvious yet).
Given how often the river dried up a century ago, this does not seem like anything special. Perhaps they should have built the dam even bigger.
Well if it ever comes to choosing which humans to keep alive and which to kill, I'll make sure to put my vote in for killing you ... because you'd do the same for me.
So what do we do then ? We all know our parents (or "babyboom generation") and their parents are responsible for the really excessive "borrowing" from nature. When they started, world population was less than 1.5 billion people. Worse : those 1.5 billion people lived a lot more efficiently than us (not that they knew, there just wasn't sufficient energy. Nothing makes a man quite so frugal as an empty wallet), so "efficiency" increases, barring getting nuclear fusion plants operational, aren't going to help us get above that 1.5 billion.
If this is true :
For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first.
Then we're about to lose 3 out of 4 people worldwide to genocide, war or hunger. Including 1 out of 2 Americans. But the countries that would be truly fucked in this case would be Europe and Africa.
What I don't get is how this can even get discussed ? Surely anything -anything- is preferable to losing the large majority of world population ? Add to that, the "sticky" question : who dies ? We all know how the question of "who dies" is going to be answered, since it's just the same as ever : with wars. If you lose, you get exterminated. If you don't fight, and are lucky enough not to get attacked, you starve to death. Anyone in favor of that ?
And before anyone says birth control, please remember "birth control" will only have real results in 50 years, and 90 or-so if birth control is done in a sustainable manner (meaning there is both an upper and a lower limit to how many babies we get to have). And even if you do compulsory birth control, who gets to have babies, and what do you do about "over the limit" babies ? Or perhaps more directly : how do you kill "over the limit" babies ?
Seems to me that unless you want every state world-wide to start it's own holocaust, you'd advocate the solution of funding every man with an idea about power generation. Funding it, not just through academia (who have a somewhat tarnished track record here), but more along the lines of : if a dog comes with a napkin with an idea, give him 1000$ for it and see where it goes.
The problem with that process is that it assumes 2 very big axioms :
1) the universe follows mathematical laws (and the implication that our idea of mathematics is correct, which is extremely unlikely since it's known to be flawed, specifically mathematics is not correct when dealing with the extremely large (ie. infinite or more), or the extremely small (ie. 1/infinite). The existence of real numbers, however, is dependant on a known-inconsistent axiom)
2) the laws are not chaotic (also a questionable assumption since many laws are chaotic, e.g. gravity is chaotic : you can make short term predictions very easily, but long-term predictions are utterly impossible for anyone except God (ie. you need to be omniscient), like climate, just google "3 body problem" for a demonstration)