Eastern culture values conformity and respect to each other (especially to elders and their beliefs) a lot more than respect for different ideas. If conformity is impossible, the eastern solution to incompatible belief systems is keeping silent about them.
I am atheist living in muslim country. I find it very difficult to defend my beliefs and not offend at the same time. If I chose to defend my beliefs it is usually seen a sign of mischief (which it in a sense is! I know I will offend people, so I can't claim not meaning ot offend.)
Seriously... People have been mocking religion for thousands of years, you don't see the Jews or Christians rioting and killing people every time someone pokes fun at God or Jesus. I'm not counting the middle ages here either.. just the last 200 or so years..
Part (only part) of the problem is the western people tend not to notice that the eastern concept of "respect" is quite different from western one. Eastern people are a lot less tolerant to not being respected, especially when their shared values not being respected. One is not supposed to chant "stick and stones" if he is not/his beliefs are not being respected. If he does so, he is implicitly accepting that he/his shared values are not being worthy of respect. This is a worldview I do not share, but it is as "wrong" as you might assume. It is just different. Killing people due to your prophet not being respected is, obviously, indefensible.
With free energy you can just use many heat pump in a cascade until at the final pump your coolant is pressurized molten metal and your heat exchanger is a mirrored dish at 5000K (or whatever.) Your heat sink is universe. If the spectrum is right, very little of the radiated energy will heat atmosphere. The only reason we don't radiate away our heat is because radiative heat transfer is very slow at low temperatures and using high temperatures is very inefficient.
It would be like magic, almost post-scarcity. Energy is *the* price setter. We tend to think raw materials and technology are more limiting, but actually more energy can substitute both raw materials and technology. For example, it is possible but energy inefficient to separate dilute chemicals.If energy is free, it would be possible to mine *everything* from waste and oceans. If you need a complex molecule, make an organic soup and separate useful stuff. If a certain production process has low yield, do not research ways to increase yield, instead increase capacity, separate, reuse. If farmland is not sufficient, use hydrophonic farms with artificial lightning and synthesized fertilizers. Need water, desalinate. Need water in the middle of Sahara, pump. Need cold air, condition. Make a dome over the a city o a desert; you don't need an impermeable dome if you don't mind using energy inefficiently...
Because many arguments comes from environmentalists, who frequently argue for human suffering if the alternative is environmental problems, rather than climate scientists. They cannot fathom just how much depended we are on current industry and how impossible it is to replace it with something even marginally less efficient without huge amount of human suffering.
Your calculation is correct only if you value your life and your choices as "nothing." For a moment, image that this might be your *only* life, you will be able to see that not being able to live as you wish is actually losing *everything.*
Life essence, alternative spelling of Chi? This is/. people, get you Qi straight:
Qi is a great lisp. It has a Turing complete, extensible type system and pattern matching like modern functional languages. It has a kernel called KI which is ported to classical lisps, clojure and javascript. Anything that has KI ported can be used for compilation of Qi compiler. The compiler generates code into host language and resulting code usually fast.
It is currently in great flux so I don't recommend actually using it. However it is an interesting language.
I got my units mixed up. Actually it is about $130 going up naked and around $2100 if you intend stick around a few days and return alive. But returning a profit after spending 60 billion dwarfs every other cost by a very comfortable margin. Tens of millions of space tourists and fully reusable spacecrafts are needed for energy costs to even matter.
It is more like $43 (where you live, I can't be bothered to look up electricity costs) once you factor in required KE for orbital insertation. Using Gemini figures, you need 1500 kgs for three days of supplies and a space capsule capable of reentry per person. So actually, it is around $700 in energy costs per person.
The Nuclear Game - An Essay on Nuclear Policy Making
When a country first acquires nuclear weapons it does so out of a very accurate perception that possession of nukes fundamentally changes it relationships with other powers. What nuclear weapons buy for a New Nuclear Power (NNP) is the fact that once the country in question has nuclear weapons, it cannot be beaten. It can be defeated, that is it can be prevented from achieving certain goals or stopped from following certain courses of action, but it cannot be beaten. It will never have enemy tanks moving down the streets of its capital, it will never have its national treasures looted and its citizens forced into servitude. The enemy will be destroyed by nuclear attack first. A potential enemy knows that so will not push the situation to the point where our NNP is on the verge of being beaten. In effect, the effect of acquiring nuclear weapons is that the owning country has set limits on any conflict in which it is involved. This is such an immensely attractive option that states find it irresistible.
Only later do they realize the problem. Nuclear weapons are so immensely destructive that they mean a country can be totally destroyed by their use. Although our NNP cannot be beaten by an enemy it can be destroyed by that enemy. Although a beaten country can pick itself up and recover, the chances of a country devastated by nuclear strikes doing the same are virtually non-existent. [This needs some elaboration. Given the likely scale and effects of a nuclear attack, its most unlikely that the everybody will be killed. There will be survivors and they will rebuild a society but it will have nothing in common with what was there before. So, to all intents and purposes, once a society initiates a nuclear exchange its gone forever]. Once this basic factor has been absorbed, the NNP makes a fundamental realization that will influence every move it makes from this point onwards. If it does nothing, its effectively invincible. If, however, it does something, there is a serious risk that it will initiate a chain of events that will eventually lead to a nuclear holocaust. The result of that terrifying realization is strategic paralysis.
With that appreciation of strategic paralysis comes an even worse problem. A non-nuclear country has a wide range of options for its forces. Although its actions may incur a risk of being beaten they do not court destruction. Thus, a non-nuclear nation can afford to take risks of a calculated nature. However,a nuclear-equipped nation has to consider the risk that actions by its conventional forces will lead to a situation where it may have to use its nuclear forces with the resulting holocaust. Therefore, not only are its strategic nuclear options restricted by its possession of nuclear weapons, so are its tactical and operational options. So we add tactical and operational paralysis to the strategic variety. This is why we see such a tremendous emphasis on the mechanics of decision making in nuclear powers. Every decision has to be thought through, not for one step or the step after but for six, seven or eight steps down the line.
We can see this in the events of the 1960s and 1970s, especially surrounding the Vietnam War. Every so often, the question gets asked "How could the US have won in Vietnam?" with a series of replies that include invading the North,extending the bombing to China and other dramatic escalations of the conflict. Now, it should be obvious why such suggestions could not, in the real world, be contemplated. The risk of ending up in a nuclear war was too great. For another example, note how the presence of nuclear weapons restricted and limited the tactical and operational options available to both sides in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In effect neither side could push the war to a final conclusion because to do so would bring
Actually free oxygen is a signiture of life because it readily combines with something else in almost all imaginable planetary conditions. That means, if any oxygen is detected, it must be continiously produced. It is impossible that some oxygen stayed there for millions of years. Of course when you have an more likely explanation for oxygen production, such as this case, life need not be the reason for it.
I can see the logic of using all organs of a suitable donor but few doctors who commented on this operation all said it is too ambitious. Which proved to be the case, he is dead now.
That works if liquidity is of no value to you, i.e. if you already have more money than you need. Even then you may fail to make more of it if you invest in wrong industry, country or currency. Or if anything really major occurs (like a big war or q deglobalisation trend or investor unfriendly new laws or huge hike in oil prices etc.) IMO, it doesn't make sense to invest into stock markets if you don't have any idea why the shares you buy/sell are worth more/less than they are priced at.
This suggests an easy fix, put moveable counterweights along the line. They are already needed for the elevator to function correctly (to prevent payload from changing CoG), using a bit more than needed would also solve the problem of failing of the cable near (very near) ground.
We have a FTIR control and analysis software that runs on Windows XP professional SP2 English. No other version would do. The idea of changing 50000$ FTIR because the OS its software uses is not supported anymore is a joke.
The passive system also depends on someone filling the water tank in the first place. What if they filled it but water leaked or evaporated? Imagine what would happen if they forget to connect pipes to the tank and inspectors forget to check for it. Obviously, nuclear power cannot be safe.
Perhaps someone who started using computers after OS/2 Warp and Windows 95 came around has a better idea of what a GUI working environment should look like compared to someone who have fond memories of ENIVAC? I am not that old but I can say with absolute certainity that my CP/M skills does not give me any edge in this discussion.
Not if the jug is at least 1 1/2 gallons and you drink it in a sufficiently short time (like an hour.) But tap water is only slightly less hazardous in that case.
We're talking about a massive oversupply of labor, which will drive wages down, harm living standards, and take a labor market that's already cutthroat competitive and make it even worse.
The living standard of an average worker is primarily defined by his economic output. Considering there is limited amount of time in a week to do work, this economic output reflects the efficiency of the economic environment the worker is in. Unless you believe efficiency of an average worker is reduced if people live longer, there is no reason to think their life standards will be lower. In fact I think exactly the opposite will happen. Higher average education, higher average experience and less unskilled youngsters in the job market will increase average efficiency.
Even the idea one could even implement a vacuum-tube machine capable of performing at 286-levels to me is a miracle in itself. 6502 maybe, but, to me, even the lowly 286 represents a level of sophistication I could not even imagine being implemented with vacuum-tube technology.
There is no miracle, as the machine is about 20 times slower than a 286 according to KIPS value in hamster_nz's sibling post. It is not gener
I am not an astrophysicist but red-shift shifts all absorption lines in the same proportion while preferentially absorbing blue light would not have such an effect.
So we wait for the next global disaster to wipe us all out in one swipe.
The problem with that logic is that space isn't salvation, it's the worst kind of global disaster 24/7 all year long with no air to breath and temperatures that will kill you in a matter of minutes.
If you somehow find a way to survive in space, you can just apply those same technologies to earth and will be save for any disaster imaginable.
That is exactly the point. For long term survival we need technologies that allows us to survive i otherwise hostile environments. Human colonization of space is a great way to research and prove such technologies. if the whole human population on Earth is dead when a planet wide disaster strikes, it wouldn't matter much whether or not we have a dozen survivors in space but a space colony almost ensures that that will never happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Eastern culture values conformity and respect to each other (especially to elders and their beliefs) a lot more than respect for different ideas. If conformity is impossible, the eastern solution to incompatible belief systems is keeping silent about them.
I am atheist living in muslim country. I find it very difficult to defend my beliefs and not offend at the same time. If I chose to defend my beliefs it is usually seen a sign of mischief (which it in a sense is! I know I will offend people, so I can't claim not meaning ot offend.)
Seriously... People have been mocking religion for thousands of years, you don't see the Jews or Christians rioting and killing people every time someone pokes fun at God or Jesus. I'm not counting the middle ages here either.. just the last 200 or so years..
Part (only part) of the problem is the western people tend not to notice that the eastern concept of "respect" is quite different from western one. Eastern people are a lot less tolerant to not being respected, especially when their shared values not being respected. One is not supposed to chant "stick and stones" if he is not/his beliefs are not being respected. If he does so, he is implicitly accepting that he/his shared values are not being worthy of respect. This is a worldview I do not share, but it is as "wrong" as you might assume. It is just different. Killing people due to your prophet not being respected is, obviously, indefensible.
With free energy you can just use many heat pump in a cascade until at the final pump your coolant is pressurized molten metal and your heat exchanger is a mirrored dish at 5000K (or whatever.) Your heat sink is universe. If the spectrum is right, very little of the radiated energy will heat atmosphere. The only reason we don't radiate away our heat is because radiative heat transfer is very slow at low temperatures and using high temperatures is very inefficient.
It would be like magic, almost post-scarcity. Energy is *the* price setter. We tend to think raw materials and technology are more limiting, but actually more energy can substitute both raw materials and technology. For example, it is possible but energy inefficient to separate dilute chemicals.If energy is free, it would be possible to mine *everything* from waste and oceans. If you need a complex molecule, make an organic soup and separate useful stuff. If a certain production process has low yield, do not research ways to increase yield, instead increase capacity, separate, reuse. If farmland is not sufficient, use hydrophonic farms with artificial lightning and synthesized fertilizers. Need water, desalinate. Need water in the middle of Sahara, pump. Need cold air, condition. Make a dome over the a city o a desert; you don't need an impermeable dome if you don't mind using energy inefficiently...
Because many arguments comes from environmentalists, who frequently argue for human suffering if the alternative is environmental problems, rather than climate scientists. They cannot fathom just how much depended we are on current industry and how impossible it is to replace it with something even marginally less efficient without huge amount of human suffering.
Your calculation is correct only if you value your life and your choices as "nothing." For a moment, image that this might be your *only* life, you will be able to see that not being able to live as you wish is actually losing *everything.*
Life essence, alternative spelling of Chi? This is /. people, get you Qi straight:
Qi is a great lisp. It has a Turing complete, extensible type system and pattern matching like modern functional languages. It has a kernel called KI which is ported to classical lisps, clojure and javascript. Anything that has KI ported can be used for compilation of Qi compiler. The compiler generates code into host language and resulting code usually fast.
It is currently in great flux so I don't recommend actually using it. However it is an interesting language.
I got my units mixed up. Actually it is about $130 going up naked and around $2100 if you intend stick around a few days and return alive.
But returning a profit after spending 60 billion dwarfs every other cost by a very comfortable margin. Tens of millions of space tourists and fully reusable spacecrafts are needed for energy costs to even matter.
It is more like $43 (where you live, I can't be bothered to look up electricity costs) once you factor in required KE for orbital insertation. Using Gemini figures, you need 1500 kgs for three days of supplies and a space capsule capable of reentry per person. So actually, it is around $700 in energy costs per person.
I am not the author. There are two follow-ups in the same thread:
http://homepage.mac.com/msb/163x/faqs/nuclear_warfare_102.html
http://homepage.mac.com/msb/163x/faqs/nuclear_warfare_103.html
I copy and paste without shame:
http://homepage.mac.com/msb/163x/faqs/nuclear_warfare_101.html
The Nuclear Game - An Essay on Nuclear Policy Making
When a country first acquires nuclear weapons it does so out of a very accurate perception that possession of nukes fundamentally changes it relationships with other powers. What nuclear weapons buy for a New Nuclear Power (NNP) is the fact that once the country in question has nuclear weapons, it cannot be beaten. It can be defeated, that is it can be prevented from achieving certain goals or stopped from following certain courses of action, but it cannot be beaten. It will never have enemy tanks moving down the streets of its capital, it will never have its national treasures looted and its citizens forced into servitude. The enemy will be destroyed by nuclear attack first. A potential enemy knows that so will not push the situation to the point where our NNP is on the verge of being beaten. In effect, the effect of acquiring nuclear weapons is that the owning country has set limits on any conflict in which it is involved. This is such an immensely attractive option that states find it irresistible.
Only later do they realize the problem. Nuclear weapons are so immensely destructive that they mean a country can be totally destroyed by their use. Although our NNP cannot be beaten by an enemy it can be destroyed by that enemy. Although a beaten country can pick itself up and recover, the chances of a country devastated by nuclear strikes doing the same are virtually non-existent. [This needs some elaboration. Given the likely scale and effects of a nuclear attack, its most unlikely that the everybody will be killed. There will be survivors and they will rebuild a society but it will have nothing in common with what was there before. So, to all intents and purposes, once a society initiates a nuclear exchange its gone forever]. Once this basic factor has been absorbed, the NNP makes a fundamental realization that will influence every move it makes from this point onwards. If it does nothing, its effectively invincible. If, however, it does something, there is a serious risk that it will initiate a chain of events that will eventually lead to a nuclear holocaust. The result of that terrifying realization is strategic paralysis.
With that appreciation of strategic paralysis comes an even worse problem. A non-nuclear country has a wide range of options for its forces. Although its actions may incur a risk of being beaten they do not court destruction. Thus, a non-nuclear nation can afford to take risks of a calculated nature. However,a nuclear-equipped nation has to consider the risk that actions by its conventional forces will lead to a situation where it may have to use its nuclear forces with the resulting holocaust. Therefore, not only are its strategic nuclear options restricted by its possession of nuclear weapons, so are its tactical and operational options. So we add tactical and operational paralysis to the strategic variety. This is why we see such a tremendous emphasis on the mechanics of decision making in nuclear powers. Every decision has to be thought through, not for one step or the step after but for six, seven or eight steps down the line.
We can see this in the events of the 1960s and 1970s, especially surrounding the Vietnam War. Every so often, the question gets asked "How could the US have won in Vietnam?" with a series of replies that include invading the North,extending the bombing to China and other dramatic escalations of the conflict. Now, it should be obvious why such suggestions could not, in the real world, be contemplated. The risk of ending up in a nuclear war was too great. For another example, note how the presence of nuclear weapons restricted and limited the tactical and operational options available to both sides in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In effect neither side could push the war to a final conclusion because to do so would bring
Actually free oxygen is a signiture of life because it readily combines with something else in almost all imaginable planetary conditions. That means, if any oxygen is detected, it must be continiously produced. It is impossible that some oxygen stayed there for millions of years. Of course when you have an more likely explanation for oxygen production, such as this case, life need not be the reason for it.
I can see the logic of using all organs of a suitable donor but few doctors who commented on this operation all said it is too ambitious. Which proved to be the case, he is dead now.
That works if liquidity is of no value to you, i.e. if you already have more money than you need. Even then you may fail to make more of it if you invest in wrong industry, country or currency. Or if anything really major occurs (like a big war or q deglobalisation trend or investor unfriendly new laws or huge hike in oil prices etc.) IMO, it doesn't make sense to invest into stock markets if you don't have any idea why the shares you buy/sell are worth more/less than they are priced at.
This suggests an easy fix, put moveable counterweights along the line. They are already needed for the elevator to function correctly (to prevent payload from changing CoG), using a bit more than needed would also solve the problem of failing of the cable near (very near) ground.
We have a FTIR control and analysis software that runs on Windows XP professional SP2 English. No other version would do. The idea of changing 50000$ FTIR because the OS its software uses is not supported anymore is a joke.
The passive system also depends on someone filling the water tank in the first place. What if they filled it but water leaked or evaporated? Imagine what would happen if they forget to connect pipes to the tank and inspectors forget to check for it. Obviously, nuclear power cannot be safe.
Perhaps someone who started using computers after OS/2 Warp and Windows 95 came around has a better idea of what a GUI working environment should look like compared to someone who have fond memories of ENIVAC? I am not that old but I can say with absolute certainity that my CP/M skills does not give me any edge in this discussion.
Not if the jug is at least 1 1/2 gallons and you drink it in a sufficiently short time (like an hour.) But tap water is only slightly less hazardous in that case.
We're talking about a massive oversupply of labor, which will drive wages down, harm living standards, and take a labor market that's already cutthroat competitive and make it even worse.
The living standard of an average worker is primarily defined by his economic output. Considering there is limited amount of time in a week to do work, this economic output reflects the efficiency of the economic environment the worker is in. Unless you believe efficiency of an average worker is reduced if people live longer, there is no reason to think their life standards will be lower. In fact I think exactly the opposite will happen. Higher average education, higher average experience and less unskilled youngsters in the job market will increase average efficiency.
He might have longjmped without setjmped.
Essentially, you want a trollbait. Katz is a successful bait, we'd all bite.
Even the idea one could even implement a vacuum-tube machine capable of performing at 286-levels to me is a miracle in itself. 6502 maybe, but, to me, even the lowly 286 represents a level of sophistication I could not even imagine being implemented with vacuum-tube technology.
There is no miracle, as the machine is about 20 times slower than a 286 according to KIPS value in hamster_nz's sibling post. It is not gener
I am not an astrophysicist but red-shift shifts all absorption lines in the same proportion while preferentially absorbing blue light would not have such an effect.
So we wait for the next global disaster to wipe us all out in one swipe.
The problem with that logic is that space isn't salvation, it's the worst kind of global disaster 24/7 all year long with no air to breath and temperatures that will kill you in a matter of minutes.
If you somehow find a way to survive in space, you can just apply those same technologies to earth and will be save for any disaster imaginable.
That is exactly the point. For long term survival we need technologies that allows us to survive i otherwise hostile environments. Human colonization of space is a great way to research and prove such technologies. if the whole human population on Earth is dead when a planet wide disaster strikes, it wouldn't matter much whether or not we have a dozen survivors in space but a space colony almost ensures that that will never happen.