The problem with the spaceship thesis is that it runs afoul the falsification principle of Science: "We don't know what it is, so lets blame the Little Green Men."
Little green men are falsifiable too. Aliens are quite likely to actually exist. Quite a few scientists believe that we are probably not the only intelligent species in the Milky Way. The idea that Oumuamua might be an artifact of some kind is very falsifiable. We could chase the thing down and take a look. We could send back photos of its surface from 10 feet away. It is only attitudes like yours that make us unlikely to ever try.
So 'by working scientists for working scientists' is what you are saying? If you don't work in a scientific field then all of the mysteries of the universe must remain a mystery, huh? If you don't publish something in a way that normal people can read then you aren't really publishing at all.
Not sure if serious. According to my calculations a spaceship could get here from another star system in as little as something like 5 years. Where are you getting hundreds of thousands from? Let me see your math.
Sigh. This is so obviously the bigger stores hiring lobbyists and bribing the government to get rid of their competition. Poor people do not have a choice. They can only buy what they can afford and they (we) can afford almost nothing at all. For those who don't understand go try to live on $20 for a whole week. Just one $20 bill. Then see how often you shop at Whole Foods and notice what you do buy if you are there. Hint, it won't be the salmon or the Manchego cheese. Rich people who lecture poor people about how their diet isn't healthy should be lined up against a wall and shot. End of problem. Or just kill all the poor. I think many of these corporations would be in favor of that.
Only VPNs that specialize in geo-unblocking are useful for this. Most VPNs are just too easy to detect and block. The VPN has to actually be willing to engage in a cat and mouse game which is no doubt expensive. I think it won't be too long before the arms race escalates enough that the sorts of servers most VPNs use now will be useless. Only genuine consumer ISP IP addresses will be accepted by the 1/3 of the internet that geoblocks. I can only hope that at least some VPNs will be able to make a deal with ISPs for some of their addresses so that VPN blocking tech truly won't be able to tell the difference.
A lot of the internet is already off limits in many poor countries if you don't use a VPN. It has become common practice it seems to basically just whitelist rich North American and European and Asian countries and just geoblock everyone else. A truly sad turn of events. I just noticed that any web site that uses Amazon AWS requires a VPN for me to download from or browse and of course there is no warning message. It just fails silently.
I can't use AirBnB because it requires me to photograph my passport but it never accepts the result. It rejects the passport image every single time I try it. Maybe it requires a $700 phone camera. My phone only cost $160. I wonder how many potential customers they have lost because their phone is not a high end flagship with a Leica lens.
Yes there may be some big changes, but almost certainly not in your lifetime. Smart people have been trying to figure out how to make intelligent machines for decades and conceptually not much has changed. How old are you btw?
Real AI, as in an artificial human brain equivalent, is probably centuries or even millennia away. After we can make ourselves more intelligent and upload consciousness into an electronic device and plug a coprocessor into a socket in our neck then maybe we will be able to create an artificial brain that is better than the real one. None of that will happen in our lifetimes though. Maybe it will be a thing for your great great great grandchildren.
Yes the real problem is that we don't really know how brains work and we cannot even really imagine a path to knowing how they work. One possible path I can imagine is through understanding how to read DNA. If we can figure out the DNA language well enough to build our own life-machines from scratch just by writing or rewriting the low level code then we may be able to understand everything that brains do by studying the blueprints. If we study the differences between human brains and mouse brains at the design level we may be able to figure out how to actually design more intelligent brains at the blueprint level and then maybe we will see some fundamental principle behind brain intelligence that we just aren't seeing now.
It is important to remind ourselves just how ambitious building an artificial brain analogue really is. It is probably harder than actually designing a more intelligent animal than a human because it requires us to do more than just amplify the differences that we observe between ordinary animal brains and our weird human brains that allow us to build nuclear submarines and radio telescopes and computers and robots. Basically we are trying to build something that is better than a human brain because at the very least it would be far more durable and long lasting and would likely be better in other ways as well. Because it's easier we may be better off first increasing the intelligence of our species via DNA hacking and then attacking the problem of building something better than a human brain with our newly increased intelligence.
Once we properly understand how brains do intelligence we may also be able to upload ourselves into brain simulators and live forever as robots or computers. Direct human brain to computer interfaces may also be easier than true AI and may come first. Our species tends to depend on a small percentage of unusually intelligent and ambitious individuals and if we can amplify their intelligence and if they can live essentially forever by uploading them...well I think that should certainly help with hard problems like true AI.
Another point is that understanding how brains do intelligence may turn out to be a kind of singularity because we may find a kind of Moore's law for real brains that is a lot more forgiving than for silicon and we may be able to design animals or robots that are far, far more intelligent than we are. If that happens our descendants may look back at us the way we might look at monkeys or dogs and they would probably be able to create even more intelligent animals and machines and machine-animals who would in turn be far more intelligent than their creators.
In what world does closing the bridge until that person is off the structure not seem like the normal response?
The more sensible one that your parents grew up in. The one before 'out of an abundance of caution' became a thing. When more sensible people balanced public safety with public inconvenience and did not always shut down entire cities or highways or airports because an unplanned paper airplane was launched.
Everyone is so afraid now. Is it the fault of the helicopter parents who raised the current generation who never let the kids play out of their sight? Now those same overprotected kids have grown up and apply the same principles to everything they do. Shutting down an entire bridge because of a little buzzing toy that was of no threat to anyone is ridiculous and cowardly.
If what the guy did was illegal the cops could be waiting for him and just arrest him when he comes down. That's what would have happened up to the early 80s. Traffic may have still slowed a bit because of the police presence but it wouldn't have stopped. That would have been a more balanced and sensible solution. There was no reason to believe that man was a threat to anyone.
I was hoping to see a link to sunscreen testing that showed for some strange reason...but there is probably some fragment of truth to the author's strange assertion. The best sunscreens use minerals like zinc or iron to physically block the UV and I havent seen mineral based formulations that are thin enough to spray. I wonder if she was paid to make that comment by shady, cream based sunscreen manufacturers
The effects of asteroid weapons strongly depend on the size class and mass (see appendix C). If they are small enough they can even be tactical rather than strategic. For dinosaur killer sizes (1km+ diameter) nuclear winter would probably be the least of our concerns. Moving such large objects at asteroid belt distances may be difficult. Although presumably you could just let your propulsion system run for years with the object making a closer pass to the earth with each revolution. Using a comet instead might allow starting the diversion much farther from the earth if such close passes are a concern.
Another possibility if you have a long term propulsion system would be accelerating a small iron core meteorite or just a piece of tungsten to relativistic speeds. It might take years or decades, but a relativistic kinetic energy weapon is a strategic weapon even beyond most dinosaur killer sized asteroids. It takes about a year to reach say 0.95c at a constant acceleration of 1g, but probably the propulsion system would be relatively weak and not nearly 1g for a mass large enough to be used as a strategic weapon or planet killer.
The space force is not quite as crazy an idea as it first seems. There is a lot of potential for developing strategic weapons that greatly outclass hydrogen bombs. Almost everyone has hydrogen bombs these days. If the US could demonstrate a practical Relativistic Kill Vehicle by say turning Mercury (the planet) into plasma the US might finally get some respect and would not be made fun of so often by European smarty-pants who think we are all a bunch of retarded redneck religous nutjobs who cannot even speak English properly. We hate being laughed at and we are constantly being laughed at these days. This will show them.
Whichever nation is the first to militarize space will be able to drop rocks on any other launch facilities and maintain space dominance. Whoever controls space controls the planet. Collect and drop rocks from orbiting space stations or Lagrange point stations. Delta-v propulsion robots could change the orbit of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter to collide with enemies. We could mass produce such robots on a Ceres military base and have them seek out every asteroid in the belt around the right size to weaponize. Or a military base on the moon could launch rock after rock after rock at targets on earth as in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Imagine say 50,000 weaponized asteroids in the belt just waiting for the right command. A hydrogen bomb can destroy a city, but a properly aimed asteroid or swarm of asteroids can destroy entire countries or even continents. It really is the next logical step for strategic weapons. Probably you'd want to get the orbits pretty close to earth so that you could change their orbits to collide with less notice. I could imagine entire wars fought solely from the asteroid belt. No need for soldiers or even armed robots on earth when you can just redirect asteroids from the belt and wait a few months. Coastal cities could be tsunamied. Conventional military forces would be no match for the elite space cadets in the space force.
The waste can often be re-used as fuel again given the right sort of nuclear plants. Ultimately we should nearly always be reprocessing and we should be going more with CANDU-like plants that can run from U-238.
Anyway as others have pointed out the waste is a lot less dangerous than many other chemicals that you never worry about. It's too bad that nuclear generators have such a bad PR problem because it truly is undeserved. It's the only practical way to generate electricity without putting more CO2 into the air.
Bad people tend to become cops or criminals (or DMV employees). The rest of us just try to survive with varying degrees of selfishness and empathy. Where I live now almost no one has empathy for anyone who isn't a family member and often not even then. After living in such an environment for a few years I have become used to it and I try my best to reduce my empathy for them as well. It depends a lot on the culture/country surprisingly. In some places people are really nice to each other. In others not so much. Of course if you have never left your home country except for short vacations you may not realize this.
Some people really enjoy hurting other people to a degree that is almost sexual (law enforcement particularly in the US). Others just don't care if they hurt other people. Some people, often female people, have very strong feelings of empathy toward others. Having seen mean but ultimately cowardly bullies grow up to be cops in the US I can sense those kinds of souls just by looking at them for a few minutes. It is just so clear that they are mean and stupid and sadistic and will never be anything else. It is written all over their pig-faces. Everything that they are is all about that: hurting and controlling and dominating others. I really think they were born that way and will die that way. That is why I never fully trusted the results of this experiment. It just didn't reflect what I have observed of human behavior over many years. Yes many humans are bad people but we are not interchangeable. Some people are born to be guards and torturers. Others can only ever be a prisoner and could not accept the other role at all.
Do you ever miss punch cards? I would like to have a device that punches holes in cards. Such cool tech. Would be great for a bitcoin wallet that can be locked in a safe.
Watch the black mirror episode Metalhead and imagine the robot dogs to have this technology. No point in hiding in a house then. May as well just surrender to the inevitable and present ones neck. Something like this can make most forms of cover irrelevant. This will also be helpful to American chickenhawk cops who want to kill without any risk to themselves.
Proxima Centauri is 4.25 ly from earth. So with an ideal power source we could get there in just 5 years at close to C, 10 years at 0.5C, 20 years at 0.25C and 40 years at 0.125C. This last speed is the only one that is (close to) a theoretical possibility for us right now (nuclear pulse or fission fragment among others), but that is only because we don't have a viable space drive yet.
Where's the math to back up your statements? There is nothing in Einstein's equations that limits us from traveling to other nearby stars. Einstein does limit us from traveling to stars more than say 20-30 light years away in a single human lifetime, but there are a lot of stars within 30 light years. Including Gliese 581.
For the rest we would need generation ships which isn't a terribly big deal. Light speed is not really the problem. The problem is how to continuously accelerate a spacecraft long enough to get to high relativistic speeds.
CO2 is harmful apparently even at 600ppm in terms of clear thinking. CFCs are delicious though. I am drinking a cocktail of 1 part chlorodifluoromethane (HCFC22) to 3 parts cranberry juice with a splash of seltzer and it is yummy. No adverse affects afaict aside from brain death.
Interesting calculations. I guess an RTG would be a lot more practical in comparison when betavoltaics are scaled up. If someone can even scale them up. I don't know if that is practical.
Yeah I noticed that they were measuring the output in microAmps. I don't have anything that can run on something like 60 uA. Load capacity is always the problem with betavoltaics. I wonder how hard it would be to put a million of these in parallel though. That could make for a very interesting battery depending on the size and weight involved.
When did natural gas get so cheap and why are we all so sure it will stay that way forever? If the coal plants are not needed in a particular area then I guess they can be shut down while natural gas is still cheaper, but in a few years they may have to be started up again if/when natural gas gets expensive again.
Yeah I have also decided to jump ship now that Mozilla has basically dropped the customization that made Firefox Firefox. If they had dumped the XUL system for being too insecure and had replaced it with something more advanced and powerful I would have been cool with it. Well except for yet again proving to extension developers how little their work is valued by making all of their hard work obsolete. The problem is they replaced the old system with Chrome's weaker system that doesn't let extension developers do much at all. I mean I get that they are financed by Google, but I don't see the point of a browser that is basically a Chrome clone. To me Quantum isn't really Firefox at all anymore.
Unfortunately some of the most important security extension developers are dumping the XUL extensions now I guess because they think the Palemoon/Waterfox userbase is too small to support. NoScript and uMatrix/uBlock and httpseverywhere are a few examples. With the XUL browser forks we will be stuck with unmaintained versions of things like NoScript. We will have to wait to see if we get people willing to maintain those important extensions for the legacy Firefox XUL browsers like Pale Moon. Hopefully someone will because pre-Quantum Firefox really is so much better than any other browser when it comes to customization. Hopefully NoScript 5.1.8.5 will continue to work for a long time, but eventually someone is going to start having to keep it updated for current threats. Although for simple active script whitelisting it may be okay for years. As far as security updates and keeping up with web standards we will have to wait and see. Hopefully both projects will manage well enough by basically monitoring the corporate browser security updates.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with the spaceship thesis is that it runs afoul the falsification principle of Science: "We don't know what it is, so lets blame the Little Green Men."
Little green men are falsifiable too. Aliens are quite likely to actually exist. Quite a few scientists believe that we are probably not the only intelligent species in the Milky Way. The idea that Oumuamua might be an artifact of some kind is very falsifiable. We could chase the thing down and take a look. We could send back photos of its surface from 10 feet away. It is only attitudes like yours that make us unlikely to ever try.
So 'by working scientists for working scientists' is what you are saying? If you don't work in a scientific field then all of the mysteries of the universe must remain a mystery, huh? If you don't publish something in a way that normal people can read then you aren't really publishing at all.
Not sure if serious. According to my calculations a spaceship could get here from another star system in as little as something like 5 years. Where are you getting hundreds of thousands from? Let me see your math.
Sigh. This is so obviously the bigger stores hiring lobbyists and bribing the government to get rid of their competition. Poor people do not have a choice. They can only buy what they can afford and they (we) can afford almost nothing at all. For those who don't understand go try to live on $20 for a whole week. Just one $20 bill. Then see how often you shop at Whole Foods and notice what you do buy if you are there. Hint, it won't be the salmon or the Manchego cheese. Rich people who lecture poor people about how their diet isn't healthy should be lined up against a wall and shot. End of problem. Or just kill all the poor. I think many of these corporations would be in favor of that.
Only VPNs that specialize in geo-unblocking are useful for this. Most VPNs are just too easy to detect and block. The VPN has to actually be willing to engage in a cat and mouse game which is no doubt expensive. I think it won't be too long before the arms race escalates enough that the sorts of servers most VPNs use now will be useless. Only genuine consumer ISP IP addresses will be accepted by the 1/3 of the internet that geoblocks. I can only hope that at least some VPNs will be able to make a deal with ISPs for some of their addresses so that VPN blocking tech truly won't be able to tell the difference.
A lot of the internet is already off limits in many poor countries if you don't use a VPN. It has become common practice it seems to basically just whitelist rich North American and European and Asian countries and just geoblock everyone else. A truly sad turn of events. I just noticed that any web site that uses Amazon AWS requires a VPN for me to download from or browse and of course there is no warning message. It just fails silently.
I can't use AirBnB because it requires me to photograph my passport but it never accepts the result. It rejects the passport image every single time I try it. Maybe it requires a $700 phone camera. My phone only cost $160. I wonder how many potential customers they have lost because their phone is not a high end flagship with a Leica lens.
Yes there may be some big changes, but almost certainly not in your lifetime. Smart people have been trying to figure out how to make intelligent machines for decades and conceptually not much has changed. How old are you btw?
Real AI, as in an artificial human brain equivalent, is probably centuries or even millennia away. After we can make ourselves more intelligent and upload consciousness into an electronic device and plug a coprocessor into a socket in our neck then maybe we will be able to create an artificial brain that is better than the real one. None of that will happen in our lifetimes though. Maybe it will be a thing for your great great great grandchildren.
Yes the real problem is that we don't really know how brains work and we cannot even really imagine a path to knowing how they work. One possible path I can imagine is through understanding how to read DNA. If we can figure out the DNA language well enough to build our own life-machines from scratch just by writing or rewriting the low level code then we may be able to understand everything that brains do by studying the blueprints. If we study the differences between human brains and mouse brains at the design level we may be able to figure out how to actually design more intelligent brains at the blueprint level and then maybe we will see some fundamental principle behind brain intelligence that we just aren't seeing now.
It is important to remind ourselves just how ambitious building an artificial brain analogue really is. It is probably harder than actually designing a more intelligent animal than a human because it requires us to do more than just amplify the differences that we observe between ordinary animal brains and our weird human brains that allow us to build nuclear submarines and radio telescopes and computers and robots. Basically we are trying to build something that is better than a human brain because at the very least it would be far more durable and long lasting and would likely be better in other ways as well. Because it's easier we may be better off first increasing the intelligence of our species via DNA hacking and then attacking the problem of building something better than a human brain with our newly increased intelligence.
Once we properly understand how brains do intelligence we may also be able to upload ourselves into brain simulators and live forever as robots or computers. Direct human brain to computer interfaces may also be easier than true AI and may come first. Our species tends to depend on a small percentage of unusually intelligent and ambitious individuals and if we can amplify their intelligence and if they can live essentially forever by uploading them...well I think that should certainly help with hard problems like true AI.
Another point is that understanding how brains do intelligence may turn out to be a kind of singularity because we may find a kind of Moore's law for real brains that is a lot more forgiving than for silicon and we may be able to design animals or robots that are far, far more intelligent than we are. If that happens our descendants may look back at us the way we might look at monkeys or dogs and they would probably be able to create even more intelligent animals and machines and machine-animals who would in turn be far more intelligent than their creators.
In what world does closing the bridge until that person is off the structure not seem like the normal response?
The more sensible one that your parents grew up in. The one before 'out of an abundance of caution' became a thing. When more sensible people balanced public safety with public inconvenience and did not always shut down entire cities or highways or airports because an unplanned paper airplane was launched.
Everyone is so afraid now. Is it the fault of the helicopter parents who raised the current generation who never let the kids play out of their sight? Now those same overprotected kids have grown up and apply the same principles to everything they do. Shutting down an entire bridge because of a little buzzing toy that was of no threat to anyone is ridiculous and cowardly.
If what the guy did was illegal the cops could be waiting for him and just arrest him when he comes down. That's what would have happened up to the early 80s. Traffic may have still slowed a bit because of the police presence but it wouldn't have stopped. That would have been a more balanced and sensible solution. There was no reason to believe that man was a threat to anyone.
I was hoping to see a link to sunscreen testing that showed for some strange reason...but there is probably some fragment of truth to the author's strange assertion. The best sunscreens use minerals like zinc or iron to physically block the UV and I havent seen mineral based formulations that are thin enough to spray. I wonder if she was paid to make that comment by shady, cream based sunscreen manufacturers
The effects of asteroid weapons strongly depend on the size class and mass (see appendix C). If they are small enough they can even be tactical rather than strategic. For dinosaur killer sizes (1km+ diameter) nuclear winter would probably be the least of our concerns. Moving such large objects at asteroid belt distances may be difficult. Although presumably you could just let your propulsion system run for years with the object making a closer pass to the earth with each revolution. Using a comet instead might allow starting the diversion much farther from the earth if such close passes are a concern.
Another possibility if you have a long term propulsion system would be accelerating a small iron core meteorite or just a piece of tungsten to relativistic speeds. It might take years or decades, but a relativistic kinetic energy weapon is a strategic weapon even beyond most dinosaur killer sized asteroids. It takes about a year to reach say 0.95c at a constant acceleration of 1g, but probably the propulsion system would be relatively weak and not nearly 1g for a mass large enough to be used as a strategic weapon or planet killer.
The space force is not quite as crazy an idea as it first seems. There is a lot of potential for developing strategic weapons that greatly outclass hydrogen bombs. Almost everyone has hydrogen bombs these days. If the US could demonstrate a practical Relativistic Kill Vehicle by say turning Mercury (the planet) into plasma the US might finally get some respect and would not be made fun of so often by European smarty-pants who think we are all a bunch of retarded redneck religous nutjobs who cannot even speak English properly. We hate being laughed at and we are constantly being laughed at these days. This will show them.
I think you had better read ahead in the novels. I know Trump did.
Whichever nation is the first to militarize space will be able to drop rocks on any other launch facilities and maintain space dominance. Whoever controls space controls the planet. Collect and drop rocks from orbiting space stations or Lagrange point stations. Delta-v propulsion robots could change the orbit of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter to collide with enemies. We could mass produce such robots on a Ceres military base and have them seek out every asteroid in the belt around the right size to weaponize. Or a military base on the moon could launch rock after rock after rock at targets on earth as in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Imagine say 50,000 weaponized asteroids in the belt just waiting for the right command. A hydrogen bomb can destroy a city, but a properly aimed asteroid or swarm of asteroids can destroy entire countries or even continents. It really is the next logical step for strategic weapons. Probably you'd want to get the orbits pretty close to earth so that you could change their orbits to collide with less notice. I could imagine entire wars fought solely from the asteroid belt. No need for soldiers or even armed robots on earth when you can just redirect asteroids from the belt and wait a few months. Coastal cities could be tsunamied. Conventional military forces would be no match for the elite space cadets in the space force.
Spengler: You have no chance to survive. Make your time!
Judge: Yawn. lolwhat? omgwtfbbq. Next case!
Love grsec, but Spengler is such a prick.
The waste can often be re-used as fuel again given the right sort of nuclear plants. Ultimately we should nearly always be reprocessing and we should be going more with CANDU-like plants that can run from U-238.
Anyway as others have pointed out the waste is a lot less dangerous than many other chemicals that you never worry about. It's too bad that nuclear generators have such a bad PR problem because it truly is undeserved. It's the only practical way to generate electricity without putting more CO2 into the air.
Bad people tend to become cops or criminals (or DMV employees). The rest of us just try to survive with varying degrees of selfishness and empathy. Where I live now almost no one has empathy for anyone who isn't a family member and often not even then. After living in such an environment for a few years I have become used to it and I try my best to reduce my empathy for them as well. It depends a lot on the culture/country surprisingly. In some places people are really nice to each other. In others not so much. Of course if you have never left your home country except for short vacations you may not realize this.
Some people really enjoy hurting other people to a degree that is almost sexual (law enforcement particularly in the US). Others just don't care if they hurt other people. Some people, often female people, have very strong feelings of empathy toward others. Having seen mean but ultimately cowardly bullies grow up to be cops in the US I can sense those kinds of souls just by looking at them for a few minutes. It is just so clear that they are mean and stupid and sadistic and will never be anything else. It is written all over their pig-faces. Everything that they are is all about that: hurting and controlling and dominating others. I really think they were born that way and will die that way. That is why I never fully trusted the results of this experiment. It just didn't reflect what I have observed of human behavior over many years. Yes many humans are bad people but we are not interchangeable. Some people are born to be guards and torturers. Others can only ever be a prisoner and could not accept the other role at all.
Do you ever miss punch cards? I would like to have a device that punches holes in cards. Such cool tech. Would be great for a bitcoin wallet that can be locked in a safe.
Watch the black mirror episode Metalhead and imagine the robot dogs to have this technology. No point in hiding in a house then. May as well just surrender to the inevitable and present ones neck. Something like this can make most forms of cover irrelevant. This will also be helpful to American chickenhawk cops who want to kill without any risk to themselves.
Proxima Centauri is 4.25 ly from earth. So with an ideal power source we could get there in just 5 years at close to C, 10 years at 0.5C, 20 years at 0.25C and 40 years at 0.125C. This last speed is the only one that is (close to) a theoretical possibility for us right now (nuclear pulse or fission fragment among others), but that is only because we don't have a viable space drive yet.
Where's the math to back up your statements? There is nothing in Einstein's equations that limits us from traveling to other nearby stars. Einstein does limit us from traveling to stars more than say 20-30 light years away in a single human lifetime, but there are a lot of stars within 30 light years. Including Gliese 581.
For the rest we would need generation ships which isn't a terribly big deal. Light speed is not really the problem. The problem is how to continuously accelerate a spacecraft long enough to get to high relativistic speeds.
CO2 is harmful apparently even at 600ppm in terms of clear thinking. CFCs are delicious though. I am drinking a cocktail of 1 part chlorodifluoromethane (HCFC22) to 3 parts cranberry juice with a splash of seltzer and it is yummy. No adverse affects afaict aside from brain death.
Interesting calculations. I guess an RTG would be a lot more practical in comparison when betavoltaics are scaled up. If someone can even scale them up. I don't know if that is practical.
Yeah I noticed that they were measuring the output in microAmps. I don't have anything that can run on something like 60 uA. Load capacity is always the problem with betavoltaics. I wonder how hard it would be to put a million of these in parallel though. That could make for a very interesting battery depending on the size and weight involved.
Collapsed in what way? Do you mean physically? You sat on it? Maybe try not to sit on delicate software in the future.
When did natural gas get so cheap and why are we all so sure it will stay that way forever? If the coal plants are not needed in a particular area then I guess they can be shut down while natural gas is still cheaper, but in a few years they may have to be started up again if/when natural gas gets expensive again.
Yeah I have also decided to jump ship now that Mozilla has basically dropped the customization that made Firefox Firefox. If they had dumped the XUL system for being too insecure and had replaced it with something more advanced and powerful I would have been cool with it. Well except for yet again proving to extension developers how little their work is valued by making all of their hard work obsolete. The problem is they replaced the old system with Chrome's weaker system that doesn't let extension developers do much at all. I mean I get that they are financed by Google, but I don't see the point of a browser that is basically a Chrome clone. To me Quantum isn't really Firefox at all anymore.
Unfortunately some of the most important security extension developers are dumping the XUL extensions now I guess because they think the Palemoon/Waterfox userbase is too small to support. NoScript and uMatrix/uBlock and httpseverywhere are a few examples. With the XUL browser forks we will be stuck with unmaintained versions of things like NoScript. We will have to wait to see if we get people willing to maintain those important extensions for the legacy Firefox XUL browsers like Pale Moon. Hopefully someone will because pre-Quantum Firefox really is so much better than any other browser when it comes to customization. Hopefully NoScript 5.1.8.5 will continue to work for a long time, but eventually someone is going to start having to keep it updated for current threats. Although for simple active script whitelisting it may be okay for years. As far as security updates and keeping up with web standards we will have to wait and see. Hopefully both projects will manage well enough by basically monitoring the corporate browser security updates.