what makes anyone think the programming of quantum monstrosities will be any easier than it is today?
It won't, of course, but will enable solving problems you cannot (unless P=NP...) solve today.
As an example, look at SAT, all you have to know is wether there _IS_ an input satisfying a certain circuit. By running all the possible options in parallel, and measuring only the outcome, you'll have the answer; this is enough to solve all and any NP problem.
(of course, this is all still theory in it's infancy; possible future practice involves a lot of dirty details involving coherency, purity, quantum measurement theory, control and measurement of nanoscopic properties, and more.)
So, with quantum, you can explore a billion alternative pathways at a time. Great. How do you ever make a decision? And, once made, how do you keep from making (optimally) half of those pathways irrelevant at each step?
The decision for each pathway in paralel is made using logical circuits, similarly to today's logical machinery. The difference is you now manipulate complex probability amplitudes instead of measureable real (\in R) properies.
As for your second statement, I don't understand it; the purpose (in fact, the meaning) of a decision is to remove a significant portion of the pathways; why is that bad ?
Computing is about making decisions, quantum computing is about making an exponential number of decisions in parallel , using our current understanding of the quantum nature. This current understanding may be somehow wrong or inadequate; or it could very well be that the practical aspects of QC will render it impractical. But all these are not a reason not to try; quite the oppposite - we may even learn a thing or three about nature or engineering.
Yeah, right. Big breakthrough.
I don't understand your sarcasm (or credentials for making it). Can you think of a bigger breakthrough currently in the works in C.S. ?
The only radicaly different, as in 'different axioms' different, approaches to C.S. I've come accross are quantum computing and molecular (as with using DNA to solve NP-hard problems) computing:
Both, if ever implemented, will not only increase our capabilities, but will also change (actually have somewhat changed) our conception of what calculation actually is.
In fact, quantum computing has evolved from trying to apply different laws and axioms (quantum laws) to computer science.
Now that is what I call the "cutting Edge" of science.
The problem with ethics, is that they are not very concrete.
The problem with anything hard, is that we don't quite know what we should do...
Its a set of beliefs, which have no factual or logical basis, but we hold on to them, because without them, society would degenerate into a quagmire of hedonism. Thus arguing that something is unethical is really just an emotional plea, but has no logical basis.
You have a contradiction there: 1) you claim that ethics has a beneficial affect on society.
This is not just an emotional claim; it is a pragmatic consideration. 2) you say that claiming soemthing is unethical is just emotional, but has no s/logical/practical/ basis.
This means that there are no pragmatic implications to ethical decisions.
As far as I see it, these are contradicting sayings. (and BTW, please lookup "logical", you keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means...)
In the case of GM people, there is not enough of a consensus as to what is "right" and "wrong" for it be very clear cut.
Which is exactly my above point about unknowns; the fact there are currently no guidelines does not mean we shouldn't forge new ones, extending and modifying old ethical principles.
For you to claim to be pro-ethics is really just a fallacious ploy to try and argue from the moral high-ground.
Then perhaps you misunderstood me, being pro-ethics does not mean one shouldn't modify his ethics, or accept someone else's oppinions.
It is just a pragmatic approach to social norms; a society w/o (dynamic) social norms will degenerate. It does not specificly determine what those norms should be.
I think your perspective on this is to narrow. probably so, as I live in the present, not the projected future...
As an example... snipped "diverse outside preference" argument... Neither of these perspectives has lead, or will lead to a monoculture
No, these probably won't.
But let me rephrase an hypothesis so:
Today's evolutionary transport processes are diffusive. This means that they take a high number of generations and do not retain "purity", in that the beneficial changes are subject to much recombinations (great rejoice) and changes along the way. The system has the time and the means (through sexual procreation) to equilibrate.
In other words, passage of information is both slow and inherently imprecise, which increases population variance.
In a GM population, passage of information would be almost instantaneous, a matter of a generation or two, and would be precise, which means that a truly beneficial gene cobmination will be copied exactly.
To take some statistical physics terms: A world with GM may be a world like a ferromagnet at T=0: constantly on a critical point, the population (like the magnet's spins) reacting in an uniform, abrupt, non diffusive manner.
In terms of variance, such a world, at any given generation, will have a much lower variance than the current product of the slower evolutionary diffusion processes. Thus it will be more vulnerable.
Well, if a person cannot alter his/her genes because it will be inherited, then it follows that adults should not be allowed to do ANYTHING that would cause genetic damage. Such as working in a nuclear power plant, getting x-rayed, and so on...
This is not so far fetched. I know that in my country there was a debate as to wether soldiers in combat positions should give sperm for safe-keeping, so that, should something happen to their crown jewels, they would still be able to procreate.
I belive your point should at the very least be applied on a voluntary base: every worker in a potentially mutagenic profession should give sprem/ova (actually, IANAB, but IIRC sperm regenrates, so this is much more of a problem for women) for safe-keeping, so that she would at least have the choice as to using more damage-free DNA.
Should usage of this by parents be compulsory or not ? I'm not sure, perhaps it should, but I would say that in this case, you'll probably catch more flies with honey, i.e., with economic motivations, than with punishments.
Careful there, you live in a world of single mothers and laws allowing people to drop their children off at the local fire station.
I do not support any law which allows "droping children off" anywhere.
I definately do belive parents should have obligations towards their children.
To claim that some scientist has some vague obligation to the child when even parents don't, is a little skewed.
Again, I belive one should have responsibility for one's _human_ creations.
Now, if you're saying that the scientist should be responsible for medical bills for the child should something go wrong, that would be understandable.
I think even the current ethics regarding experiments in humans go way beyond medical bills. I value creating children as something much more binding than a medical experiment.
First, you are assuming improving our faults will result in a monoculture
I am not assuming, but projecting: If a certain gene-combination improves inteligence (of whatever metric used at the time...) then I find it highly unlikely that most (responsible, caring) parents will not wish for their child to have that combination; the result, genetically wize, will be a monoculture in terms of that gene combination.
Lack of knowledge? The very improvements we make may allow for better reasoning, thinking, and memorization.
At a potential horrible price for the "failed experiments". It is an unwize investor who looks only at the projected return, neglecting the costs and ethics.
Again, as I said in other posts, I am not all pro or con GM, but I am pro ethics. It is a system which enables the decision-makers (Doctors, Scientists, Engineers...) to interact with society in a positive manner.
Ethics? Too much empahasis is put on poor judgements regarding ethics.
Being pro ethics does not necessitate being pro poor judgements...
Why is GM'ing unethical? Is getting rid of cancer in people through GM unethical? I would say it would be unethical to NOT use this technology.
Read my other posts regarding this and regular medical treatments. The world, alas, is not black and white.
This whole post is a troll...
My post held a subset of my opinions, in response to a parent-post's chalenge. I do believe it was neither OT, nor exceptionally inflamatory, considering the volatile subject of the discussion. Let every reader make his own opinion.
Remember that gene therapy is somatic genetic modification. It is, in fact, a method to alter someones genetic code to improve them. Are you against that?
Asking "are you against GM ?" is like asking "are you always for or against medical treatments?", it is too wide a question.
This depends on the medical situation, other ethical situations, etc.
These bubble-boys had a severe, life threatening situation. Of course, the ethical considerations in their case are different than for normal people.
I am not alway pro or con GM, but I am pro-ethics, and against running away from decisions because they are tough on one side, or running towards decisions, neglecting consequences to self and society, because they are sexy to researchers on the other side.
How about improving on ourselves?... what if we could modify adults with new genes? Would that be ok?
I guess that depends on wether the changes are inherited to our children. If so, it is experimentation on the not-yet-born, and the complications I raised (and others) apply.
If not, than this is like ordinary therapy, and the usual ethics (Helsinki Comitee) should apply.
Personally, I'm all for it. I *want* to modify myself, especially since any modifications to me as an adult could be undone if I changed my mind later.
This is a dangerous assumption to make. There is a reason for conservatism in medicine; there is no "magic undo", yet.
Re:Improve upon our faults. OCing the Human Brain?
on
The Rights of GM Humans
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Of course you could probably accomplish the same thing by sterilizing everybody who goes to football games
Female-only procreation is still unimplemented.
Re:Improve upon our faults. OCing the Human Brain?
on
The Rights of GM Humans
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Whats wrong with improving upon our faults?
monoculture vulnerability ?
lack of knowledge ?
and, most importantly, the ethics of performing experiments in humans ? (after all, there can be no more extreme experiment than tayloring an organism)
Remember, in order ot improve, you need to learn, and make a lot of mistakes. These poor mistakes will breath, live, love, laugh and hurt. Do you not, as the originating scientist, have an ethical obligation to these resulting future persons ? What will you do, debug and reboot them ?
I'm not saying this as a christian (I'm not), or as a person who totaly opposes eugenics (I'm not that either) but as a person who believes a measure of ethics is important.
It is not the slightest bit reasonable ever for a company to be able to control how you use their product after you have given them money in return for the right of such use.
Not to control how you use it directly, of course, but it's definately reasonable to control the limits of their own waranty and support.
E.g., If I were to sell you an screwdriver, It is reasonable for me to warn you not to shove it up your nose, and to decline any support or waranty in such a case.
Of course, you paid for it, so you can do whatever you like with it.
Yeah lean meat is good; fish (particularly oily fish) is as good or better
Only problem is that fish tend to rot and hide it very well (merchants often pour sea-water on fish to hide the smells of decay), they also absorb polution better than plants.
If you eat fish or other sea-food, better buy it alive and have the butcher kill it for you; it won't solve the polution problem, but at least you'll know it's fresh.
1) having seen these buldosers, and driven an armored vehicle myself, I can tell you that indeed they are not safe to be around, let alone waltz in front of. In fact, they are the cause of accidents even when no-one is acting like an idiot.
2) Gaza is a warzone. There is nothing that would satisfy the paletinian snipers more than to have the israeli soldiers leave the safety of their vehicles in order to drag hostile people to safety. A lot of israeli soldiers will get killed. Although Ms. Corrie perhaps would have liked that, I doubt if they or their families would.
So, this amounts to a person recklessly endangering herself and Israeli soldiers, when she knows that should anyone treat her as a non-combatant, he would probably get killed.
3) The article sais that the buldoser drove over Ms Corrie twice. However, this is glaringly a lie; she was evacuated to a hospital, but when 9 tons go over a person, let alone twice, there is nothing but pulp left to evacuate.
4) So yes, perhaps the israeli policies (or lack of...) should be contested, but the treatment of Ms. Corrie's story seems to me nothing more than irrelevant, morbid, propoganda.
That zmachine looks COMPLETELY like the lab at the beginning of Halflife
Actually, I wouldn't be at all surprized if some graphical maker of HL actually saw this, or some similar picture sometime (such pictures have been around for quite a while.)
Science-fiction and science usually interact heavily...
probelm is, I don't see any coceivable way phase two could be realized.
The reason being, you need a LOT of energy to confine and heat the plasma. as a rule of thumb, more energy => larger systems (it's no coincidence that sandia's Z is such a monster; I know, I work on a smaller Z-Pinch machine myself ). and then there's the problem of harnessing the energy, which increases the system's size even more.
No, large, central fusion generators providing energy for electric grids, or small fuel-cells seems much more plausible.
Well, I'm a plasma-physics grad-student. Good or bad, I'll try to answer, just remember, like every physicist, I may be totally wrong...
The Z-pinch+hohlraum (==shell radiation) method is a hybrid method:
use magnetic confinement (Z-pinch) to create an X-ray source for a symetric X-ray wave (resonated from a spherical chamber) which will create inertical confinement.
using any of the other ICF methods (laser, ion-beam) will just create initial asymetries which will cause instabilities: defying the original purpose of the symetric hohlraum...
Using muons (which was quite a cool idea, IMHO) seems dubious for several reasons: 1) Muons are energetically expensive, and they (half-) live for just 2.2 microsecond. you need to time them just right. 2) you need to seed just the middle of the pellet, because most of the pellet mass is in the exploding outer shell. I see no clear way to do that. 3) (and this is one of the major reasons muon catalyzed fusion was abandoned in the eighties) muons tend to stick to the energetic helium "ash" neucleus, and so are lost. It will probably take many collisions for them to "unstick" from the helium, and by that time they may decay.
Oh, for me, I wanted to learn, alright, that's why I was in the middle of my C.S./Math B.Sc. and scrambling for every bit of spare time to use for reading books with a lot of greek letters, programming, eating and sleeping. In that order of importance.
Slackware was a disaster then for me as well. It took 2..3 weeks from my semester. The lucky thing was it took'em from the beginning of the semester, or I would have given up on linux, and gone back to work on the university's sunoses. As it was, I switched to redhat and was able to actually work on the things that counted.
The Right Way to use linux ... is dependent on context and needs.
Consider the terrain in southern Iraq. A few tens of metres (or less) is the difference between fording a river with your tank, and getting bogged down in marshland
In such a terrain, armored forces are much less effective anyway. AFAIK, deploying tanks in a marshland is a problematic decision.
... Even worse, few metres can mean the difference between a clear lane through a minefield, and straying into an uncleared area
Again, I was not in the US army, but AFAIK, when combat-engineers create a clear-lane, they mark the cleared teritory well. This means that no tank-commander should rely on GPS for avoiding minefields. Perhaps the US doctrine is different.
Tanks may look clumsy, but they still require precision handling.
Agreed, but precision handling does not neccessarily mean navigating relying on military GPS's precision.
Mobile field artillery needs as good precision as possible. If you rely on GPS and fire dozens of huge grenades (or unguided rockets) hundreds of meters off the target, you'll probably wipe out more friendly forces than enemies.
Not completely true, see next section. And I was definately reffering to camouflaged non mobile artillery, assuming that the mobile ones will get wiped out.
If you think it is not hard, consider this:... If you mess up the settings by a few centimeters, the aim will be off by a lot in the other end.
The important thing is the accuracy in the firing angles , not so much as the accuracy in the position of the tool itself. This can be overcome in simple ways w/o a GPS.
There's some fancy optics and a lot of mathematics involved to get it right.
Not so fancy math, though. A bit of geodesics and some really simple balistics. Effects of air-resistance and meteorology are the tougher parts, IMHO.
I should know since I've fired maybe a hundred grenades using a 122mm field howitzer, very similar to the models used by Iraq:
I've also been in the artillery. Though probably not the same army.
Slashdot Mirror
what makes anyone think the programming of quantum monstrosities will be any easier than it is today?
...) solve today.
It won't, of course, but will enable solving problems you cannot (unless P=NP
As an example, look at SAT, all you have to know is wether there _IS_ an input satisfying a certain circuit.
By running all the possible options in parallel, and measuring only the outcome, you'll have the answer; this is enough to solve all and any NP problem.
(of course, this is all still theory in it's infancy; possible future practice involves a lot of dirty details involving coherency, purity, quantum measurement theory, control and measurement of nanoscopic properties, and more.)
So, with quantum, you can explore a billion alternative pathways at a time. Great. How do you ever make a decision? And, once made, how do you keep from making (optimally) half of those pathways irrelevant at each step?
The decision for each pathway in paralel is made using logical circuits, similarly to today's logical machinery. The difference is you now manipulate complex probability amplitudes instead of measureable real (\in R) properies.
As for your second statement, I don't understand it; the purpose (in fact, the meaning) of a decision is to remove a significant portion of the pathways; why is that bad ?
Computing is about making decisions, quantum computing is about making an exponential number of decisions in parallel , using our current understanding of the quantum nature. This current understanding may be somehow wrong or inadequate; or it could very well be that the practical aspects of QC will render it impractical. But all these are not a reason not to try; quite the oppposite - we may even learn a thing or three about nature or engineering.
Yeah, right. Big breakthrough.
I don't understand your sarcasm (or credentials for making it). Can you think of a bigger breakthrough currently in the works in C.S. ?
The only radicaly different, as in 'different axioms' different, approaches to C.S. I've come accross are quantum computing and molecular (as with using DNA to solve NP-hard problems) computing:
Both, if ever implemented, will not only increase our capabilities, but will also change (actually have somewhat changed) our conception of what calculation actually is.
In fact, quantum computing has evolved from trying to apply different laws and axioms (quantum laws) to computer science.
Now that is what I call the "cutting Edge" of science.
Note to such: if you think you're a crazy genius, recall that the former outnumber the latter by about 400 to 1
That's about a 3-4 orders of magnitude understatement, at least
The problem with ethics, is that they are not very concrete.
...
...)
The problem with anything hard, is that we don't quite know what we should do
Its a set of beliefs, which have no factual or logical basis, but we hold on to them, because without them, society would degenerate into a quagmire of hedonism. Thus arguing that something is unethical is really just an emotional plea, but has no logical basis.
You have a contradiction there:
1) you claim that ethics has a beneficial affect on society.
This is not just an emotional claim; it is a pragmatic consideration.
2) you say that claiming soemthing is unethical is just emotional, but has no s/logical/practical/ basis.
This means that there are no pragmatic implications to ethical decisions.
As far as I see it, these are contradicting sayings. (and BTW, please lookup "logical", you keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means
In the case of GM people, there is not enough of a consensus as to what is "right" and "wrong" for it be very clear cut.
Which is exactly my above point about unknowns; the fact there are currently no guidelines does not mean we shouldn't forge new ones, extending and modifying old ethical principles.
For you to claim to be pro-ethics is really just a fallacious ploy to try and argue from the moral high-ground.
Then perhaps you misunderstood me, being pro-ethics does not mean one shouldn't modify his ethics, or accept someone else's oppinions.
It is just a pragmatic approach to social norms; a society w/o (dynamic) social norms will degenerate. It does not specificly determine what those norms should be.
I think your perspective on this is to narrow. ...
... snipped "diverse outside preference" argument ... Neither of these perspectives has lead, or will lead to a monoculture
probably so, as I live in the present, not the projected future
As an example
No, these probably won't.
But let me rephrase an hypothesis so:
Today's evolutionary transport processes are diffusive. This means that they take a high number of generations and do not retain "purity", in that the beneficial changes are subject to much recombinations (great rejoice) and changes along the way. The system has the time and the means (through sexual procreation) to equilibrate.
In other words, passage of information is both slow and inherently imprecise, which increases population variance.
In a GM population, passage of information would be almost instantaneous, a matter of a generation or two, and would be precise, which means that a truly beneficial gene cobmination will be copied exactly.
To take some statistical physics terms: A world with GM may be a world like a ferromagnet at T=0: constantly on a critical point, the population (like the magnet's spins) reacting in an uniform, abrupt, non diffusive manner.
In terms of variance, such a world, at any given generation, will have a much lower variance than the current product of the slower evolutionary diffusion processes. Thus it will be more vulnerable.
Well, if a person cannot alter his/her genes because it will be inherited, then it follows that adults should not be allowed to do ANYTHING that would cause genetic damage. Such as working in a nuclear power plant, getting x-rayed, and so on...
This is not so far fetched. I know that in my country there was a debate as to wether soldiers in combat positions should give sperm for safe-keeping, so that, should something happen to their crown jewels, they would still be able to procreate.
I belive your point should at the very least be applied on a voluntary base: every worker in a potentially mutagenic profession should give sprem/ova (actually, IANAB, but IIRC sperm regenrates, so this is much more of a problem for women) for safe-keeping, so that she would at least have the choice as to using more damage-free DNA.
Should usage of this by parents be compulsory or not ? I'm not sure, perhaps it should, but I would say that in this case, you'll probably catch more flies with honey, i.e., with economic motivations, than with punishments.
Careful there, you live in a world of single mothers and laws allowing people to drop their children off at the local fire station.
I do not support any law which allows "droping children off" anywhere.
I definately do belive parents should have obligations towards their children.
To claim that some scientist has some vague obligation to the child when even parents don't, is a little skewed.
Again, I belive one should have responsibility for one's _human_ creations.
Now, if you're saying that the scientist should be responsible for medical bills for the child should something go wrong, that would be understandable.
I think even the current ethics regarding experiments in humans go way beyond medical bills.
I value creating children as something much more binding than a medical experiment.
First, you are assuming improving our faults will result in a monoculture
...) to interact with society in a positive manner.
...
I am not assuming, but projecting: If a certain gene-combination improves inteligence (of whatever metric used at the time...) then I find it highly unlikely that most (responsible, caring) parents will not wish for their child to have that combination; the result, genetically wize, will be a monoculture in terms of that gene combination.
Lack of knowledge? The very improvements we make may allow for better reasoning, thinking, and memorization.
At a potential horrible price for the "failed experiments". It is an unwize investor who looks only at the projected return, neglecting the costs and ethics.
Again, as I said in other posts, I am not all pro or con GM, but I am pro ethics. It is a system which enables the decision-makers (Doctors, Scientists, Engineers
Ethics? Too much empahasis is put on poor judgements regarding ethics.
Being pro ethics does not necessitate being pro poor judgements
Why is GM'ing unethical? Is getting rid of cancer in people through GM unethical? I would say it would be unethical to NOT use this technology.
Read my other posts regarding this and regular medical treatments. The world, alas, is not black and white.
This whole post is a troll...
My post held a subset of my opinions, in response to a parent-post's chalenge. I do believe it was neither OT, nor exceptionally inflamatory, considering the volatile subject of the discussion. Let every reader make his own opinion.
Remember that gene therapy is somatic genetic modification. It is, in fact, a method to alter someones genetic code to improve them. Are you against that?
Asking "are you against GM ?" is like asking "are you always for or against medical treatments?", it is too wide a question.
This depends on the medical situation, other ethical situations, etc.
These bubble-boys had a severe, life threatening situation. Of course, the ethical considerations in their case are different than for normal people.
I am not alway pro or con GM, but I am pro-ethics, and against running away from decisions because they are tough on one side, or running towards decisions, neglecting consequences to self and society, because they are sexy to researchers on the other side.
How about improving on ourselves? ... what if we could modify adults with new genes? Would that be ok?
I guess that depends on wether the changes are inherited to our children.
If so, it is experimentation on the not-yet-born, and the complications I raised (and others) apply.
If not, than this is like ordinary therapy, and the usual ethics (Helsinki Comitee) should apply.
Personally, I'm all for it. I *want* to modify myself, especially since any modifications to me as an adult could be undone if I changed my mind later.
This is a dangerous assumption to make. There is a reason for conservatism in medicine; there is no "magic undo", yet.
Of course you could probably accomplish the same thing by sterilizing everybody who goes to football games
Female-only procreation is still unimplemented.
Whats wrong with improving upon our faults?
monoculture vulnerability ?
lack of knowledge ?
and, most importantly, the ethics of performing experiments in humans ? (after all, there can be no more extreme experiment than tayloring an organism)
Remember, in order ot improve, you need to learn, and make a lot of mistakes. These poor mistakes will breath, live, love, laugh and hurt. Do you not, as the originating scientist, have an ethical obligation to these resulting future persons ? What will you do, debug and reboot them ?
I'm not saying this as a christian (I'm not), or as a person who totaly opposes eugenics (I'm not that either) but as a person who believes a measure of ethics is important.
It is not the slightest bit reasonable ever for a company to be able to control how you use their product after you have given them money in return for the right of such use.
.
Not to control how you use it directly, of course, but it's definately reasonable to control the limits of their own waranty and support
E.g., If I were to sell you an screwdriver, It is reasonable for me to warn you not to shove it up your nose, and to decline any support or waranty in such a case.
Of course, you paid for it, so you can do whatever you like with it.
but do you seriously believe that
A pound of flesh: no more, no less.
Well, anywhere where even the most basic consumer protection laws exist (= everywhere outside the USA)
...
Everywhere ? like, worse than Ethiopia, Romania, Lebanon, Argentina ?
IANA expert, but AFAIK, consumer status in the US is much better than anywhere else except, perhaps, some parts of western europe.
Not that it's always good enough, or even mediocre in the US, but you can be merry, as most of the world is in a deeper shithouse
Yeah lean meat is good; fish (particularly oily fish) is as good or better
Only problem is that fish tend to rot and hide it very well (merchants often pour sea-water on fish to hide the smells of decay), they also absorb polution better than plants.
If you eat fish or other sea-food, better buy it alive and have the butcher kill it for you; it won't solve the polution problem, but at least you'll know it's fresh.
I've actually read most of the above link.
Natuarally, it is extremely biased.
However, I have several remarks:
1) having seen these buldosers, and driven an armored vehicle myself, I can tell you that indeed they are not safe to be around, let alone waltz in front of. In fact, they are the cause of accidents even when no-one is acting like an idiot.
2) Gaza is a warzone. There is nothing that would satisfy the paletinian snipers more than to have the israeli soldiers leave the safety of their vehicles in order to drag hostile people to safety. A lot of israeli soldiers will get killed. Although Ms. Corrie perhaps would have liked that, I doubt if they or their families would.
So, this amounts to a person recklessly endangering herself and Israeli soldiers, when she knows that should anyone treat her as a non-combatant, he would probably get killed.
3) The article sais that the buldoser drove over Ms Corrie twice. However, this is glaringly a lie; she was evacuated to a hospital, but when 9 tons go over a person, let alone twice, there is nothing but pulp left to evacuate.
4) So yes, perhaps the israeli policies (or lack of
That zmachine looks COMPLETELY like the lab at the beginning of Halflife
...
Actually, I wouldn't be at all surprized if some graphical maker of HL actually saw this, or some similar picture sometime (such pictures have been around for quite a while.)
Science-fiction and science usually interact heavily
An answer, should you have bothered to look it up, is here
probelm is, I don't see any coceivable way phase two could be realized.
The reason being, you need a LOT of energy to confine and heat the plasma. as a rule of thumb, more energy => larger systems (it's no coincidence that sandia's Z is such a monster; I know, I work on a smaller Z-Pinch machine myself ). and then there's the problem of harnessing the energy, which increases the system's size even more.
No, large, central fusion generators providing energy for electric grids, or small fuel-cells seems much more plausible.
Well, I'm a plasma-physics grad-student. Good or bad, I'll try to answer, just remember, like every physicist, I may be totally wrong
The Z-pinch+hohlraum (==shell radiation) method is a hybrid method:
use magnetic confinement (Z-pinch) to create an X-ray source for a symetric X-ray wave (resonated from a spherical chamber) which will create inertical confinement.
using any of the other ICF methods (laser, ion-beam) will just create initial asymetries which will cause instabilities: defying the original purpose of the symetric hohlraum
Using muons (which was quite a cool idea, IMHO) seems dubious for several reasons:
1) Muons are energetically expensive, and they (half-) live for just 2.2 microsecond. you need to time them just right.
2) you need to seed just the middle of the pellet, because most of the pellet mass is in the exploding outer shell. I see no clear way to do that.
3) (and this is one of the major reasons muon catalyzed fusion was abandoned in the eighties) muons tend to stick to the energetic helium "ash" neucleus, and so are lost. It will probably take many collisions for them to "unstick" from the helium, and by that time they may decay.
-- HTH
Add some entropy to your life; write drunk
But would writing drunk increase or decrease entropy overall ?
Provided, of course, you do want to learn :P
... is dependent on context and needs.
Oh, for me, I wanted to learn, alright, that's why I was in the middle of my C.S./Math B.Sc. and scrambling for every bit of spare time to use for reading books with a lot of greek letters, programming, eating and sleeping. In that order of importance.
Slackware was a disaster then for me as well. It took 2..3 weeks from my semester. The lucky thing was it took'em from the beginning of the semester, or I would have given up on linux, and gone back to work on the university's sunoses. As it was, I switched to redhat and was able to actually work on the things that counted.
The Right Way to use linux
Consider the terrain in southern Iraq. A few tens of metres (or less) is the difference between fording a river with your tank, and getting bogged down in marshland
... Even worse, few metres can mean the difference between a clear lane through a minefield, and straying into an uncleared area
In such a terrain, armored forces are much less effective anyway. AFAIK, deploying tanks in a marshland is a problematic decision.
Again, I was not in the US army, but AFAIK, when combat-engineers create a clear-lane, they mark the cleared teritory well. This means that no tank-commander should rely on GPS for avoiding minefields. Perhaps the US doctrine is different.
Tanks may look clumsy, but they still require precision handling.
Agreed, but precision handling does not neccessarily mean navigating relying on military GPS's precision.
Mobile field artillery needs as good precision as possible. If you rely on GPS and fire dozens of huge grenades (or unguided rockets) hundreds of meters off the target, you'll probably wipe out more friendly forces than enemies.
... If you mess up the settings by a few centimeters, the aim will be off by a lot in the other end.
Not completely true, see next section. And I was definately reffering to camouflaged non mobile artillery, assuming that the mobile ones will get wiped out.
If you think it is not hard, consider this:
The important thing is the accuracy in the firing angles , not so much as the accuracy in the position of the tool itself. This can be overcome in simple ways w/o a GPS.
There's some fancy optics and a lot of mathematics involved to get it right.
Not so fancy math, though. A bit of geodesics and some really simple balistics. Effects of air-resistance and meteorology are the tougher parts, IMHO.
I should know since I've fired maybe a hundred grenades using a 122mm field howitzer, very similar to the models used by Iraq:
I've also been in the artillery. Though probably not the same army.