Doc: I'm sure that in 2085, plutonium is available at every corner drug store, but in 2007, it's a little hard to come by. Marty, I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you're stuck here. Marty: Whoa, whoa Doc, stuck here, I can't be stuck here, I got a life in 2007. I got a girl. Doc: Is she pretty?
> it's either work in a sweat shop for 10c a day, or work the fields till your back breaks or prosititue your body till you die from AIDS. i know which i'd pick.
> When we get to play with it, we will be convinced. Until then > I'll remain rather agnostic about it. Though the ability is > rather endless. I mean, it would be a revolution in computer > technology as well as little things like solar power collection, > UAV tech and other fun gadgets. I could see putting a broadcast > box on your house aiming up and having a fleet of little RC > helicopters flying around and doing security sweeps. If it pans > out, it will change the world.
Change the world indeed.. if it pans out:
There will be little fleets of black helicopters alright. You call them RC though I think the professional designation is UAV. The telescreens are already in place. The RFIDs are here to help us.
It's for your safety. We need to protect against terrorists. Oh, the 10,000 third-world nationals that snuck over the border last night? Those are just hard working, good-hearted people trying to make a living. Oh, and you're a bigot.
or, from another angle:
This would also make the stuff of great autonomous robotics. I personally welcome our forthcoming technological overlords.
Maybe if the USPS didn't feel the need to come up with a new stamp design every week (with all of the associated expenses), it wouldn't cost 41 CENTS to send a letter. I mean, it's a STAMP. It isn't a modern art masterpiece.
Yeah, because Mexico is such a great ally. The state owns and operates the oil reserves.
Who really wants to depend on Mexico for energy? Hell, they've got cartels there putting the heads of police on pikes outside the police stations. Meanwhile, the government is actively encouraging it's peasant/lower class to illegally invade the United States and is quick to raise international protest when we move to protect our border. Our own National Guard has even retreated from our own borders after being engaged by Mexican gunmen, believed to Mexican military.
And while most Americans couldn't tell you a damn thing about the Mexican-American War, most Mexicans remain bitter. We invaded Mexico, laid siege to Mexico City, and took over half her territory. We walloped them. They are paying us back through demographics so let's not finance their movement by a continued dependence on oil, if we can help it. And the suggestion that throwing money at Mexico will make those peasants stay home is a myth. That money will never reach the peasant indians.
Foreign oil is foreign oil. Shove billions of money at Mexico and we'll have some even nastier terrorists there.
Doesn't ultraviolet radiation/light ionize air and kill or seriously mutate living cells?
Imagine a beowulf of these things (like those stupid looking infrared leds for infrared-sensitive CCD/CMOS cameras), ionizing the air into which an electric current is conducted, igniting the ionized air into a plasma which can then be shaped with small electromagnets.
Isn't this essentially how the Deep Space 1 ion-drive propulsion works?
Gimme a few hundred thousand of these UV LEDs, some SPF999, and I'll be running this place in under a week.
One of the steps in the process of LEGALLY migrating to the United States of America is a health examination. With 5,000 illegal aliens crossing the southern border of my state every day (according to Tuscon Sector Border Patrol reports), we have a population of foreign nationals bypassing our first line of defense against the diseases that, despite being largely eradicated in the USA since the 1950s, continue to affect the third world to this day. Diseases such as tuberculosis are making a big comeback throughout the heartland of America, and especially in border regions.
So when these criminal aliens march down the streets of your city tomorrow demanding civil rights and other entitlements, remember that these people are putting you and your fellow citizens at risk. Not because they are all filthy disease carriers but simply because the kind of vaccination programs we have in place to control disease here don't exist in their country of origin. It would be one thing if this country closed it's borders and prevented new immigrants from moving here, but we _do_ have an established immigration process designed to prevent new immigrants from unknowingly importing a disease that will affect the lives of our citizens. With over 70 visitor and guest worker programs already on the books and immigration policies that enable you to become a legal resident on the path to citizenship within a few years, we should hold no sympathy for the illegal aliens who are now demanding special rights under the law.
Your basic rights are threatened by every foreign national who chooses to ignore our laws. These people threaten your rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Not only when they unknowingly carry in a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis, infecting you or your family, and destroying your dreams but also when increasing the burdens on your children's school district and vote to raise your property taxes beyond your ability to afford your own house.
Is it remotely possible that some of our theories or "laws" are incomplete or have exceptions? Is it possible to find a breakthrough technology or novel special case without temporarily suspending faith in so-called laws defined by error-prone human beings. I know that most of these laws have been tried and tested for a century or more but doesn't science allow for continued attacks of these laws? If they fail, they reinforce the theory and provide additional foundations for it's classification as a "law". But if no one ever tries, the understanding may be incomplete and we may be missing something big.
Nearly all the posts here seem to jump to the immediate conclusion that anything that breaks their mental model is the work of ignorant, certifiable kooks. How many of you have actually verified these laws? I'm sure some here have but I doubt the vast majority of people immediately saying "impossible" have ever. Did you learn your mental models from a book, from a teacher, from anecdotal evidence? Have you jumped to the conclusion that so many incredibly intelligent people have tried that they couldn't have possibly missed something, even considering our new understanding of additional, or previously unheard of magnitudes, of material properties like, say the magnetostriction that causes the giant magnetocaloric effect or the still unexplained energy anamolies when a material undergoes phase change? Have you ever walked around looking for your sunglasses that are on your head, the keys that are in your hand, or otherwise solved some puzzle that made you ask how you could have missed something so obvious on first examination?
I welcome these people who always question, form hypothesis, test, refactor, test, refactor, test, requestion, factor in new knowledge, etc. because even if they fail, they succeed by reinforcing our existing models. It's productive to play devil's advocate or to point out how existing laws suggest it is impossible, but don't be so close minded as to immediate reject the idea that anyone can ever discover something that requires a revision of our models of perception. Encourage the people, offer your knowledge that might lead them down the path of discovery or lead to reinforcement of existing dogma.
Unfortunately, Slashdot readers are more apt to cast scorn on the people who should be your ally. You want them to fail by giving up before even trying, not by trying and failing. This is certainly not the reaction I would have expected from a cabal of wannabe computer scientists. Despite what you may think, you are not the center of the universe and you don't have it all figured out.
Not that any of you will actually care to investigate the claims, but I downloaded and compiled the USPTO tiffs into a PDF and have made the patent available at http://outlawlabs.com:8000/US006246561.pdf.
What a twisted web we weave, when we practice to deceive.
> This comming from a guy who never read the comics.
That means nothing you say is relevant to the discussion of whether the movies should stick to the original plotlines. Let's see, Spider-man now has web glands instead of making the webbing himself. Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider who just happened to be loose at a museum instead of during the course of his own experimentation on arachnid radioactivity. I guess we couldn't have had that whole retarded scene in Spider-man 2 where he can't seem to get it up/out when trying to shoot his webbing; never would have happened in the comics. We're talking about 50 years of backstory that now is changed dramatically because Sam Raimi is a huge raging homo.
Once you change one thing here or there, you end up changing a ton of shit later on because it doesn't fit anymore.
Having Venom would be a travesty since it's unlikely the whole origin of the black suit symbiotic lifeform would be discussed or explained properly. Surely, the Fantastic Four movie that no one watched was a prelude to this but, no, Raimi will gay it up for joe six pack and his retarded son tbcpp so Spider-man 3 is among your "top three favorite movies".
Artificial atoms, as I understand it anyway, are exhibited when these wells/quantum dots are crafted to store electrons in certain configurations (modeling "orbital shells"/energy levels?). The quantum dot has then been shown to exhibit some properties of an element corresponding to that electron configuration.
Is there a connection somewhere here with the electron spin "flip" (whatever that means)? If you take an ordinary atom and add energy, the electrons jump/change to higher energy levels and when returning to a lower state emit the excess energy as a photon. This seems strangely coincidental.
I'm not a physicist and maybe I'm out of touch with current terminology/models of subatomics so don't be too harsh if my explanations seem naive.
On another note, I wonder if it's possible to model the unstable elements (112-118 and beyond) using this quantum dot approach. What fascinating properties might be exploited that would otherwise be impossible to tap due to their nearly instant decay.
Since volcanos emit massive quantities of greenhouse gases, shouldn't we make the volcanos sign the kyoto treaty too? All of the supposed benefits of the kyoto treaty could be wiped out in a single volcanic eruption.
It seems a bit arrogant to think that we can understand all of the variables involved in "global warming". So Florida had some hurricanes.. they had bad years in the 19th century too.
The Earth is a constantly changing system and trying to control it is an exercise in futility... or worse. If you want climate control, adjust your air conditioner thermostat or build space habitats and remove Earth from the equation.
Where are we going to put all these cured people? Face it, people need to die to make room for the new ones. We don't have the food, water, land, whatever for everyone to live to be 250 years old and have 50 kids.
In fact, we need to come up with some new diseases because the old standbys aren't really doing their job anymore.
If everyone is going to keep on keeping on, we need some living space.. say, the moon or mars or poland or something.
It is probably correlated to the orbit of Jupiter which is 11.86 earth years and the other planets to a lesser degree.
I would presume that like our moon creates tidal forces on our oceans, the planets create tidal forces on the sun's plasma and can stretch and tug on the sun and reduce the gravitational compression that fuses the fuel.
If one were to analyze the location of the planets at each solar maximum and minimum, you might find the events that cause the variance in solar periods.
But that's just an idea, I could be wrong. Let me know if you figure it out. I've seriously never looked.
"All you need is an old metal, 5-gallon pail, about $6 worth of fireclay, some sand, a junk auto heater fan with a coffee can shroud (or a vacuum cleaner), and this book to build a high temperature furnace."
You can use it to melt aluminum, zinc, and bronze which you can then pour/cast into sand molds. The nice thing is that you can assemble the lathe accurate to.001" or greater without needed precision parts, and learn a ton in the process.
Once you've done that, you can cast any other parts you want and machine them to your specifications for far cheaper than using this service. If you didn't make the part quite right, no worries, melt it down and recast it.
I'm planning to build this to machine parts of hobby sterling and steam engines and the ability to construct precision prototypes whenever I have an idea about something. No more tin cans, balsa wood, and RTV sealant! Yay.
I think it's far more likely that Christians will say "see, God is omnipotent and created life there too".
You've got a couple different types: the ones that believe the bible is the end all, be all, written word of the almighty God himself; and the ones who believe the bible is something of a history book, with some metaphorical science sprinkled in genesis and whatnot.
Your second group is likely to believe that the so-called God, in creating the heavens and earth, is responsible for our entire universe and any other life that may exist. The first group will tell you the Earth is 6,000 years old, dinosaurs never existed, and the rest of the universe has no life and is otherwise unimportant.
It's the first group that fights against the theory of evolution, but I think both groups (and me) are concerned about the ethical implications of stem cell and cloning research. I've heard that we no longer have to murder babies to harvest the stem cells -- something about taking it from umbilical cords. That's a good first step.
It's better to be extra careful when fiddling with the very keys to our existance. Does this mean this research shouldn't continue? No. But I'll be pretty pissed (until I'm dead), if some airhead in a lab makes a mistake and wipes out mankind.
Slashdot Mirror
Doc: I'm sure that in 2085, plutonium is available at every corner drug store, but in 2007, it's a little hard to come by. Marty, I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you're stuck here.
Marty: Whoa, whoa Doc, stuck here, I can't be stuck here, I got a life in 2007. I got a girl.
Doc: Is she pretty?
No! No! No! This sucker's electrical.
I just needed a nuclear reaction to generate the one point twenty one gigawatts of electricity.
WHATDIDIJUSTSAY???!
No! No! No! This sucker's electrical.
I just needed a nuclear reaction to generate the one point twenty one gigawatts of electricity.
ONE POINT TWENTY ONE GIGA VVATTS?!?!?!
> it's either work in a sweat shop for 10c a day, or work the fields till your back breaks or prosititue your body till you die from AIDS. i know which i'd pick.
So how much for a bj?
Why, so we can grant amnesty to any alien life form that can hitch a ride back to Earth?
Homeland security, pfft, what a joke.
Hey, is that the same Clifford Stoll that authored The Cuckoo's Egg or is that just the prevailing hairdo in California?
This woman put a lot of thought into it and made them.
http://www.kleinbottle.net/Morgan/index.htm
It's worth following all those links, even if they are in msword format. Too bad the e-mail address is no longer valid..
> When we get to play with it, we will be convinced. Until then
> I'll remain rather agnostic about it. Though the ability is
> rather endless. I mean, it would be a revolution in computer
> technology as well as little things like solar power collection,
> UAV tech and other fun gadgets. I could see putting a broadcast
> box on your house aiming up and having a fleet of little RC
> helicopters flying around and doing security sweeps. If it pans
> out, it will change the world.
Change the world indeed.. if it pans out:
There will be little fleets of black helicopters alright. You call
them RC though I think the professional designation is UAV. The
telescreens are already in place. The RFIDs are here to help us.
It's for your safety. We need to protect against terrorists. Oh,
the 10,000 third-world nationals that snuck over the border last
night? Those are just hard working, good-hearted people trying to
make a living. Oh, and you're a bigot.
or, from another angle:
This would also make the stuff of great autonomous robotics. I
personally welcome our forthcoming technological overlords.
Maybe if the USPS didn't feel the need to come up with a new stamp design every week (with all of the associated expenses), it wouldn't cost 41 CENTS to send a letter. I mean, it's a STAMP. It isn't a modern art masterpiece.
Yeah, because Mexico is such a great ally. The state owns and operates the oil reserves.
Who really wants to depend on Mexico for energy? Hell, they've got cartels there putting the heads of police on pikes outside the police stations. Meanwhile, the government is actively encouraging it's peasant/lower class to illegally invade the United States and is quick to raise international protest when we move to protect our border. Our own National Guard has even retreated from our own borders after being engaged by Mexican gunmen, believed to Mexican military.
And while most Americans couldn't tell you a damn thing about the Mexican-American War, most Mexicans remain bitter. We invaded Mexico, laid siege to Mexico City, and took over half her territory. We walloped them. They are paying us back through demographics so let's not finance their movement by a continued dependence on oil, if we can help it. And the suggestion that throwing money at Mexico will make those peasants stay home is a myth. That money will never reach the peasant indians.
Foreign oil is foreign oil. Shove billions of money at Mexico and we'll have some even nastier terrorists there.
Back in the old days, the people could still revolt as far as taxes are concerned.
Doesn't ultraviolet radiation/light ionize air and kill or seriously mutate living cells?
Imagine a beowulf of these things (like those stupid looking infrared leds for infrared-sensitive CCD/CMOS cameras), ionizing the air into which an electric current is conducted, igniting the ionized air into a plasma which can then be shaped with small electromagnets.
Isn't this essentially how the Deep Space 1 ion-drive propulsion works?
Gimme a few hundred thousand of these UV LEDs, some SPF999, and I'll be running this place in under a week.
Hrmph, maybe this is the 21st century after all.
One of the steps in the process of LEGALLY migrating to the United States of America is a health examination. With 5,000 illegal aliens crossing the southern border of my state every day (according to Tuscon Sector Border Patrol reports), we have a population of foreign nationals bypassing our first line of defense against the diseases that, despite being largely eradicated in the USA since the 1950s, continue to affect the third world to this day. Diseases such as tuberculosis are making a big comeback throughout the heartland of America, and especially in border regions.
So when these criminal aliens march down the streets of your city tomorrow demanding civil rights and other entitlements, remember that these people are putting you and your fellow citizens at risk. Not because they are all filthy disease carriers but simply because the kind of vaccination programs we have in place to control disease here don't exist in their country of origin. It would be one thing if this country closed it's borders and prevented new immigrants from moving here, but we _do_ have an established immigration process designed to prevent new immigrants from unknowingly importing a disease that will affect the lives of our citizens. With over 70 visitor and guest worker programs already on the books and immigration policies that enable you to become a legal resident on the path to citizenship within a few years, we should hold no sympathy for the illegal aliens who are now demanding special rights under the law.
Your basic rights are threatened by every foreign national who chooses to ignore our laws. These people threaten your rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Not only when they unknowingly carry in a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis, infecting you or your family, and destroying your dreams but also when increasing the burdens on your children's school district and vote to raise your property taxes beyond your ability to afford your own house.
Something to think about, anyway..
Heavier than air craft will never fly.
Is it remotely possible that some of our theories or "laws" are incomplete or have exceptions? Is it possible to find a breakthrough technology or novel special case without temporarily suspending faith in so-called laws defined by error-prone human beings. I know that most of these laws have been tried and tested for a century or more but doesn't science allow for continued attacks of these laws? If they fail, they reinforce the theory and provide additional foundations for it's classification as a "law". But if no one ever tries, the understanding may be incomplete and we may be missing something big.
Nearly all the posts here seem to jump to the immediate conclusion that anything that breaks their mental model is the work of ignorant, certifiable kooks. How many of you have actually verified these laws? I'm sure some here have but I doubt the vast majority of people immediately saying "impossible" have ever. Did you learn your mental models from a book, from a teacher, from anecdotal evidence? Have you jumped to the conclusion that so many incredibly intelligent people have tried that they couldn't have possibly missed something, even considering our new understanding of additional, or previously unheard of magnitudes, of material properties like, say the magnetostriction that causes the giant magnetocaloric effect or the still unexplained energy anamolies when a material undergoes phase change? Have you ever walked around looking for your sunglasses that are on your head, the keys that are in your hand, or otherwise solved some puzzle that made you ask how you could have missed something so obvious on first examination?
I welcome these people who always question, form hypothesis, test, refactor, test, refactor, test, requestion, factor in new knowledge, etc. because even if they fail, they succeed by reinforcing our existing models. It's productive to play devil's advocate or to point out how existing laws suggest it is impossible, but don't be so close minded as to immediate reject the idea that anyone can ever discover something that requires a revision of our models of perception. Encourage the people, offer your knowledge that might lead them down the path of discovery or lead to reinforcement of existing dogma.
Unfortunately, Slashdot readers are more apt to cast scorn on the people who should be your ally. You want them to fail by giving up before even trying, not by trying and failing. This is certainly not the reaction I would have expected from a cabal of wannabe computer scientists. Despite what you may think, you are not the center of the universe and you don't have it all figured out.
Not that any of you will actually care to investigate the claims, but I downloaded and compiled the USPTO tiffs into a PDF and have made the patent available at http://outlawlabs.com:8000/US006246561.pdf.
This has to be one of the best replies I've ever read. Nice post.
Just sell the child with the computer. So much for your biometrics.
What a twisted web we weave, when we practice to deceive.
> This comming from a guy who never read the comics.
That means nothing you say is relevant to the discussion of whether the movies should stick to the original plotlines. Let's see, Spider-man now has web glands instead of making the webbing himself. Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider who just happened to be loose at a museum instead of during the course of his own experimentation on arachnid radioactivity. I guess we couldn't have had that whole retarded scene in Spider-man 2 where he can't seem to get it up/out when trying to shoot his webbing; never would have happened in the comics. We're talking about 50 years of backstory that now is changed dramatically because Sam Raimi is a huge raging homo.
Once you change one thing here or there, you end up changing a ton of shit later on because it doesn't fit anymore.
Having Venom would be a travesty since it's unlikely the whole origin of the black suit symbiotic lifeform would be discussed or explained properly. Surely, the Fantastic Four movie that no one watched was a prelude to this but, no, Raimi will gay it up for joe six pack and his retarded son tbcpp so Spider-man 3 is among your "top three favorite movies".
So basically, shut the hell up..
These appear to be the same type of quantum dots used to create artificial atoms.
Artificial atoms, as I understand it anyway, are exhibited when these wells/quantum dots are crafted to store electrons in certain configurations (modeling "orbital shells"/energy levels?). The quantum dot has then been shown to exhibit some properties of an element corresponding to that electron configuration.
Is there a connection somewhere here with the electron spin "flip" (whatever that means)? If you take an ordinary atom and add energy, the electrons jump/change to higher energy levels and when returning to a lower state emit the excess energy as a photon. This seems strangely coincidental.
I'm not a physicist and maybe I'm out of touch with current terminology/models of subatomics so don't be too harsh if my explanations seem naive.
On another note, I wonder if it's possible to model the unstable elements (112-118 and beyond) using this quantum dot approach. What fascinating properties might be exploited that would otherwise be impossible to tap due to their nearly instant decay.
Neutron activated radioactive gold isotopes decay into mercury, not lead.
Since volcanos emit massive quantities of greenhouse gases, shouldn't we make the volcanos sign the kyoto treaty too? All of the supposed benefits of the kyoto treaty could be wiped out in a single volcanic eruption.
It seems a bit arrogant to think that we can understand all of the variables involved in "global warming". So Florida had some hurricanes.. they had bad years in the 19th century too.
The Earth is a constantly changing system and trying to control it is an exercise in futility... or worse. If you want climate control, adjust your air conditioner thermostat or build space habitats and remove Earth from the equation.
Where are we going to put all these cured people? Face it, people need to die to make room for the new ones. We don't have the food, water, land, whatever for everyone to live to be 250 years old and have 50 kids.
In fact, we need to come up with some new diseases because the old standbys aren't really doing their job anymore.
If everyone is going to keep on keeping on, we need some living space.. say, the moon or mars or poland or something.
It is probably correlated to the orbit of Jupiter which is 11.86 earth years and the other planets to a lesser degree.
I would presume that like our moon creates tidal forces on our oceans, the planets create tidal forces on the sun's plasma and can stretch and tug on the sun and reduce the gravitational compression that fuses the fuel.
If one were to analyze the location of the planets at each solar maximum and minimum, you might find the events that cause the variance in solar periods.
But that's just an idea, I could be wrong. Let me know if you figure it out. I've seriously never looked.
> What good is the latest nerve regeneration
> treatment when stem cells are illegal in the US.
*SMACK*
Stem cells are not illegal in the US. They just are no longer funded by the federal government.
There's nothing stopping you from researching them, Uncle Sam just isn't going to give you a meaty grant to do it.
I've been reading about how to build a Gingery Charcoal/Gas Foundary and homemade metal-cutting lathe. Today I finally ordered the books from Amazon.
.001" or greater without needed precision parts, and learn a ton in the process.
"All you need is an old metal, 5-gallon pail, about $6 worth of fireclay, some sand, a junk auto heater fan with a coffee can shroud (or a vacuum cleaner), and this book to build a high temperature furnace."
You can use it to melt aluminum, zinc, and bronze which you can then pour/cast into sand molds. The nice thing is that you can assemble the lathe accurate to
Once you've done that, you can cast any other parts you want and machine them to your specifications for far cheaper than using this service. If you didn't make the part quite right, no worries, melt it down and recast it.
I'm planning to build this to machine parts of hobby sterling and steam engines and the ability to construct precision prototypes whenever I have an idea about something. No more tin cans, balsa wood, and RTV sealant! Yay.
Lots of other people have websites chronicling their projects based on these books.
At any rate, my point was that Christians won't kill NASA when they find life on other planets.
I'm not a Christian but I know a lot of them.
I think it's far more likely that Christians will say "see, God is omnipotent and created life there too".
You've got a couple different types: the ones that believe the bible is the end all, be all, written word of the almighty God himself; and the ones who believe the bible is something of a history book, with some metaphorical science sprinkled in genesis and whatnot.
Your second group is likely to believe that the so-called God, in creating the heavens and earth, is responsible for our entire universe and any other life that may exist. The first group will tell you the Earth is 6,000 years old, dinosaurs never existed, and the rest of the universe has no life and is otherwise unimportant.
It's the first group that fights against the theory of evolution, but I think both groups (and me) are concerned about the ethical implications of stem cell and cloning research. I've heard that we no longer have to murder babies to harvest the stem cells -- something about taking it from umbilical cords. That's a good first step.
It's better to be extra careful when fiddling with the very keys to our existance. Does this mean this research shouldn't continue? No. But I'll be pretty pissed (until I'm dead), if some airhead in a lab makes a mistake and wipes out mankind.