Problem : Private utility companies (and government agencies, honestly) each operating their independent nuclear fiefdoms can bribe, lawyer, and lie their way out of running a reactor responsibly. As you may be aware, they are not liable if a catastrophe actually happens, and each reactor is again, unique so unless you are an expert on a particular plant a regulator cannot know if it is ACTUALLY safe. The reactors in Fukishima had numerous containment failures that the party line from General Electric said was impossible (but other engineers showed could happen 20 years ago)
Guess who the Japanese regulators chose to believe?
Well, if the modular reactors are built in such a way that no matter what, the module cannot leak the hot fuel into the environment (by using much lower density reactor cores so they cannot melt through containment), buried in the ground, the modules are located in an unpopulated area, and the factory that makes the modules is watched by government regulators like a hawk...
Just MAYBE nuclear could be a viable option and we wouldn't have any more nasty incidents.
Then again, who am I kidding. How can you engineer something to work for 50+ years, contain metric tons of extremely energetic fission fuel, never break no matter what maintenance steps are skipped, and never fail even in completely unforseeable ways (like a huge wall of water slamming into the plant, or terrorists planting a truck bomb right next to the reactor, etc)
You can't. And, for every dollar of actual economic or health damages, you have a million dollars of psychological damage in the minds of the general public.
This is why when I hear about Fukishima, I asked all the engineering students at my school if they planned to switch majors.
Also, capitalism requires that said rational actors usually suffer the negative consequences when an action they choose goes wrong.
However, for things that are not a direct negative consequence to the actor (for instance, technically Tepco does not own most of the land that it contaminated, so if there were no government, it would not suffer the majority of the damages) a government is required to make those negative externalities stick to the culprit causing them.
However, governments can in some cases be terribly corrupt, and the corporations can de facto bribe their way out of trouble. This happen in the United States on a routine basis, just not as overtly as it happens in, say, Somalia. (because the legal system in the United States is heavily slanted towards the side of a case with the more skilled, and more expensive, attorneys) Also, in the U.S. legal system, a final decision on a case can be delayed for 3-15 years, at a minimum.
Well, if he'd reported right away (as in the moment he found it missing) I'm not even sure he would have committed a crime of any sort. Perhaps he should have locked the notebook in a safe before letting her in the room, but anyone can slip up and make a mistake (especially when thinking of getting some from a beautiful women).
However, his second huge mistake was admitting that she took it. It would have been simpler to maintain that he didn't know how he lost the notebook, and less likely to get him in trouble.
Thanks to declassified files and leaked files from the former Soviets, it is possible to figure exactly how the Soviets usually stole their secrets.
It would be very interesting to analyze how often they stole information via technical means (tapping phones, intercepting transmissions, etc) vs. human intel means (sending Anna Chapmen to coach you into giving it all up)
I have a sneaky suspicion that more than 90% of the time, the Russians/Soviets succeed with human intel. Heck, if I knew top secret information, and Anna Chapman came after me with the goal of convincing me to give it all up, I'm not sure how long I could hold out under her interrogation...
Man, with the NSA's latest spy satellites, they could have totally counted the fleas and lice infesting the fur of those emepror penguins! Probably give them all prostate exams at the same time!
Rant off...I just hate how everyone out there assumes that since it's the NSA paying for the satellites, they must somehow have sensors so good as to evade basic equations for the resolving power of a lens. Not to mentioned the fundamental problem that the more the satellite can zoom in on an area and resolve details, the smaller the area that it can be scanning simultaneously. So, even if the satellite could see the fleas on a penguin, it would only be able to view a few penguins at a time at that resolution and it would take it years to count a million of them.
This is why there are probably not satellites watching you right now, personally, even if the government had the technological ability to track you this way.
The obvious comes from a simple analysis of motives. Imagine you are the leader of the North Koreans. Life is pretty good (for you). But you're among one of the few remaining world dictators in a country that is civilized. (obviously, a lawless wasteland like many of the African countries hardly counts)
You're well aware that the West has put an end to your compatriots, through invasions by force or with mass media. How do you ensure your security?
The answer couldn't be any more obvious. If you had just ONE functioning nuclear warhead, and a credible delivery vehicle, you could make a credible threat sufficient to ensure that no world power would EVER invade you. No one is going to risk an attack if there's even a 10% chance that your weapon would work and kill a million people.
How so? It's not like there would be anything new to learn. More than likely, the capsule was a poorly designed, cobbled together collection of components, with most of the designs stolen imperfectly from russian and chinese sources. Maybe U.S. sources.
The point is, a great artist isn't going to learn anything by going to a kindergarden art class and watching 6 year olds scribble with crayons. Nor are the engineers at Lockheed Martin likely to learn much, either.
As for the purpose of the capsule : obviously it's intended to deliver a nuclear bomb. Again, nothing new there. Obviously once the North Koreans have such a capability, they won't have to worry about being invaded.
Out of all the things the cops could do with their spare time (and I assume a small amount of public resources), I'd say that I fully agree with this one. They helped somebody out, got to practice obviously useful forensics skills, and they were practical actual science. No one told them what the words on the pages were supposed to say, they had to figure them out (with help from the author, perhaps)
So are you saying it was a different number of people murdered?
Would it realistically make any difference if it were 1 million or 10 million instead of 6 million? I mean, no matter how you look at it, unless you simply deny the camps existing at all, a huge number of people were killed.
Do I have to speak your language? Or will I be able to find an "americatown" ghetto with street signs in english and mcdonalds and taco bell to live in...
These guys are Indians used to living in harmony with nature because on this planet, the "gods" they pray to are an actual tangible entity that controls nature. They aren't going to know military strategy either, to them, a frontal assault might make sense. In nature, when males vie for dominance, they usually make a lot of noise and "frontally assault" the other male.
And so the way the story goes, the natives are about to get slaughtered when it turns out that the "gods" the natives worship are not an intangible entity at all (look up ghost dancers for the historical parallel) but in fact some kind of planetary defense system.
He made a movie that had a lot of elements that the masses enjoy. (action, etc)
He created a sci fi world with at least some effort at plausibility. (not all of it, but some details were there, for instance Jake suffering muscle weakness after prolonged time in the tank)
The reason the "indians" won was because the entire planet was a biological entity that could defend itself, by mobilizing all resources against the human invaders. It was never actually an underdog story : the planet has vastly superior technology and numbers to the human invaders (the brain transfers shown at the end of the movie were obviously extremely high tech), but the humans couldn't perceive it.
Anyways, sure it ripped stuff off, but compare it to the competition. And, the film did use some of the best visual effects ever seen. Stop being a snob : would you rather all movies were some low budget indie film that tries to "make a point" but it's hard to figure out what it is because the movie was made in someone's garage? To make a movie with an enormous budget, an enormous number of people have to watch it, and you have to make the story accessible to them.
Cool visions, alas, physics is a bitch. Superconductors do not have limitless current capacities/cross sectional area, and the higher temperature ones tend to have lower limits.
Not saying we couldn't do it, but the cables don't need to be thin as a pencil.
For that matter, they don't need to work at room temperature, either. There are commercial application using liquid nitrogen cooled superconductors for hot spots in the power grid.
Put this into your "without doing the calculations" claptrap.
Just think for a moment. Ok, so there is not enough petroleum on the planet to put everyone into near earth orbit. But, that isn't the only way. ENERGY is what is needed. How might you get enough energy?
1. Massive solar arrays in space. These arrays could have more surface area than the planet, and generate electricity 24/7. 2. Thorium and Uranium Breeder Reactors 3. Covering the earth with solar panels 4. ??? Fusion???
The first 3 are solid, there's absolutely no convincing argument that can state that these are more than hard engineering problems. They are absolutely achievable, and we have proofs of concept for all 3.
How do you use that energy to get to space?
1. Synthesize chemical rocket propellant from H20 or with CO2 to make synthetic kerosene. 2. Mass drivers to launch the payloads out of a gun. 3. Chemically fired mass drivers using hydrogen gas 4. Laser Launch 5. ??? Space Elevator ???
Well, ok, this is an awful lot of aerospace hardware to build to actually move 6 billion and counting folks. Plus their pets. How could you ever manufacture enough spacecraft and vehicles to do this for a cost that could be paid?
Just come up with a new financial scheme. Bonus points if it uses PDEs or quants heavily. While I'm sure some vague law would cover it, as long as you have sufficient legal protection you'll just have to pay a fine that is less than your profits when you get caught.
I'm a little stuck between the definitions of atheist and agnostic.
I thought that atheists were people who have faith (aka a belief absent of evidence) that all religion is wrong and there is definitely not a god. They are 100% certain this is true, having faith that it must be true.
Agnostics realize that there may or may not be a god, and that the question is unanswerable with present evidence. All or no religions could be true, but without further evidence nothing can be concluded.
Hypothetically if supernatural entities stated interfering with our world right in front of our faces, atheists would continue to have faith that God and supernatural entities cannot be real, therefore some natural process must be causing what they are observing. Agnostics would take the new evidence and realize that supernatural entities are in fact quite obviously real.
The evil here is entropy, god, or evolution. One or more of the three has caused the lady's genetic code to have serious flaws, causing her body to decay as time passes rather than maintaining itself in good working order. If that evil were defeated (which will require the efforts of many brave and brilliant scientists) then the old lady wouldn't need help, and no one would know she was old because she'd probably look like women we consider supermodels today.
I don't think the implant approach is a bad one, per say, I just think it is inherently more difficult. Anyways, one other thing to note : one little known research finding that underpin a lot of assumptions is that current analysis shows that the brain operates just above the noise floor. There's a LOT of interference from various sources, and the cells themselves do not emit signals much above this threshold. There are also routine hardware glitches and faults, where neurons fails to fire when they should have and so forth.
Currently, it is thought that the reason the brain works is that multiple neurons are assigned to each important circuit, causing major decisions made by the brain to be determined by consensus.
So if you made a neural mapping of someone that was NOT quite atomically perfect : the atom bonding was just a matter of guesses, and in some cases the map was wrong, it might not matter. If your emulation engine for simulating each neuron, based on variables calculated by counting the presence of various protein structures at each synapse was merely 90 or 99% accurate, it might not matter either.
More than likely, close enough is good enough, and you would have created a sentient entity that could be taught and built upon.
Once said entity surpassed human ability levels at science and engineering, it could be used to improve the brain scanning technology so that revision 2.0 was a more faithful representation of the original person.
I think the opposite approach. I think the implant approach is nearly impossible. Interfacing with an operating machine is very, very difficult for a lot of reasons.
As for determining bonding : who cares? Most of the time, simple proximity and known bonding rules would let you guess which way the bonds were formed. You do not need to know exact positioning of electrons, just nuclei. The reason is because the brain as an electronic system has a noise floor just like any other device, and minor bonding details are way, way, way below the noise floor.
1. In other posts, I address this. This is a solvable problem, there's ways to make the ice not destroy anything. There's special synthetic ice inhibitors that cap off growing crystals, for one thing.
2. Redesign : yes. Obviously.
3. Interstellar radiation can be handled with redundant circuitry, checksums, self repair, etc. It can be made so statistically unlikely that an unrecoverable error will occur (assuming the physical hardware is more or less intact and/or a minimum number of redundant subunits survive) that it will not happen before the universe ends.
Slashdot Mirror
Problem : Private utility companies (and government agencies, honestly) each operating their independent nuclear fiefdoms can bribe, lawyer, and lie their way out of running a reactor responsibly. As you may be aware, they are not liable if a catastrophe actually happens, and each reactor is again, unique so unless you are an expert on a particular plant a regulator cannot know if it is ACTUALLY safe. The reactors in Fukishima had numerous containment failures that the party line from General Electric said was impossible (but other engineers showed could happen 20 years ago)
Guess who the Japanese regulators chose to believe?
Well, if the modular reactors are built in such a way that no matter what, the module cannot leak the hot fuel into the environment (by using much lower density reactor cores so they cannot melt through containment), buried in the ground, the modules are located in an unpopulated area, and the factory that makes the modules is watched by government regulators like a hawk...
Just MAYBE nuclear could be a viable option and we wouldn't have any more nasty incidents.
Then again, who am I kidding. How can you engineer something to work for 50+ years, contain metric tons of extremely energetic fission fuel, never break no matter what maintenance steps are skipped, and never fail even in completely unforseeable ways (like a huge wall of water slamming into the plant, or terrorists planting a truck bomb right next to the reactor, etc)
You can't. And, for every dollar of actual economic or health damages, you have a million dollars of psychological damage in the minds of the general public.
This is why when I hear about Fukishima, I asked all the engineering students at my school if they planned to switch majors.
Also, capitalism requires that said rational actors usually suffer the negative consequences when an action they choose goes wrong.
However, for things that are not a direct negative consequence to the actor (for instance, technically Tepco does not own most of the land that it contaminated, so if there were no government, it would not suffer the majority of the damages) a government is required to make those negative externalities stick to the culprit causing them.
However, governments can in some cases be terribly corrupt, and the corporations can de facto bribe their way out of trouble. This happen in the United States on a routine basis, just not as overtly as it happens in, say, Somalia. (because the legal system in the United States is heavily slanted towards the side of a case with the more skilled, and more expensive, attorneys) Also, in the U.S. legal system, a final decision on a case can be delayed for 3-15 years, at a minimum.
He wasn't, other than losing his clearance.
I'm saying that either he should have
1. done the right thing right away
or
2. Forget it ever happened, and never mention it to anyone
Taking option 3 just screwed himself and his family.
Well, if he'd reported right away (as in the moment he found it missing) I'm not even sure he would have committed a crime of any sort. Perhaps he should have locked the notebook in a safe before letting her in the room, but anyone can slip up and make a mistake (especially when thinking of getting some from a beautiful women).
However, his second huge mistake was admitting that she took it. It would have been simpler to maintain that he didn't know how he lost the notebook, and less likely to get him in trouble.
Thanks to declassified files and leaked files from the former Soviets, it is possible to figure exactly how the Soviets usually stole their secrets.
It would be very interesting to analyze how often they stole information via technical means (tapping phones, intercepting transmissions, etc) vs. human intel means (sending Anna Chapmen to coach you into giving it all up)
I have a sneaky suspicion that more than 90% of the time, the Russians/Soviets succeed with human intel. Heck, if I knew top secret information, and Anna Chapman came after me with the goal of convincing me to give it all up, I'm not sure how long I could hold out under her interrogation...
Man, with the NSA's latest spy satellites, they could have totally counted the fleas and lice infesting the fur of those emepror penguins! Probably give them all prostate exams at the same time!
Rant off...I just hate how everyone out there assumes that since it's the NSA paying for the satellites, they must somehow have sensors so good as to evade basic equations for the resolving power of a lens. Not to mentioned the fundamental problem that the more the satellite can zoom in on an area and resolve details, the smaller the area that it can be scanning simultaneously. So, even if the satellite could see the fleas on a penguin, it would only be able to view a few penguins at a time at that resolution and it would take it years to count a million of them.
This is why there are probably not satellites watching you right now, personally, even if the government had the technological ability to track you this way.
The obvious comes from a simple analysis of motives. Imagine you are the leader of the North Koreans. Life is pretty good (for you). But you're among one of the few remaining world dictators in a country that is civilized. (obviously, a lawless wasteland like many of the African countries hardly counts)
You're well aware that the West has put an end to your compatriots, through invasions by force or with mass media. How do you ensure your security?
The answer couldn't be any more obvious. If you had just ONE functioning nuclear warhead, and a credible delivery vehicle, you could make a credible threat sufficient to ensure that no world power would EVER invade you. No one is going to risk an attack if there's even a 10% chance that your weapon would work and kill a million people.
Or writes their bomb threat on a pad of paper, tears the top sheet off, and mails it. Or mails in a ransom note. Etc.
How so? It's not like there would be anything new to learn. More than likely, the capsule was a poorly designed, cobbled together collection of components, with most of the designs stolen imperfectly from russian and chinese sources. Maybe U.S. sources.
The point is, a great artist isn't going to learn anything by going to a kindergarden art class and watching 6 year olds scribble with crayons. Nor are the engineers at Lockheed Martin likely to learn much, either.
As for the purpose of the capsule : obviously it's intended to deliver a nuclear bomb. Again, nothing new there. Obviously once the North Koreans have such a capability, they won't have to worry about being invaded.
Out of all the things the cops could do with their spare time (and I assume a small amount of public resources), I'd say that I fully agree with this one. They helped somebody out, got to practice obviously useful forensics skills, and they were practical actual science. No one told them what the words on the pages were supposed to say, they had to figure them out (with help from the author, perhaps)
So are you saying it was a different number of people murdered?
Would it realistically make any difference if it were 1 million or 10 million instead of 6 million? I mean, no matter how you look at it, unless you simply deny the camps existing at all, a huge number of people were killed.
Do I have to speak your language? Or will I be able to find an "americatown" ghetto with street signs in english and mcdonalds and taco bell to live in...
These guys are Indians used to living in harmony with nature because on this planet, the "gods" they pray to are an actual tangible entity that controls nature. They aren't going to know military strategy either, to them, a frontal assault might make sense. In nature, when males vie for dominance, they usually make a lot of noise and "frontally assault" the other male.
And so the way the story goes, the natives are about to get slaughtered when it turns out that the "gods" the natives worship are not an intangible entity at all (look up ghost dancers for the historical parallel) but in fact some kind of planetary defense system.
He made a movie that had a lot of elements that the masses enjoy. (action, etc)
He created a sci fi world with at least some effort at plausibility. (not all of it, but some details were there, for instance Jake suffering muscle weakness after prolonged time in the tank)
The reason the "indians" won was because the entire planet was a biological entity that could defend itself, by mobilizing all resources against the human invaders. It was never actually an underdog story : the planet has vastly superior technology and numbers to the human invaders (the brain transfers shown at the end of the movie were obviously extremely high tech), but the humans couldn't perceive it.
Anyways, sure it ripped stuff off, but compare it to the competition. And, the film did use some of the best visual effects ever seen. Stop being a snob : would you rather all movies were some low budget indie film that tries to "make a point" but it's hard to figure out what it is because the movie was made in someone's garage? To make a movie with an enormous budget, an enormous number of people have to watch it, and you have to make the story accessible to them.
Cool visions, alas, physics is a bitch. Superconductors do not have limitless current capacities/cross sectional area, and the higher temperature ones tend to have lower limits.
Not saying we couldn't do it, but the cables don't need to be thin as a pencil.
For that matter, they don't need to work at room temperature, either. There are commercial application using liquid nitrogen cooled superconductors for hot spots in the power grid.
Put this into your "without doing the calculations" claptrap.
Just think for a moment. Ok, so there is not enough petroleum on the planet to put everyone into near earth orbit. But, that isn't the only way. ENERGY is what is needed. How might you get enough energy?
1. Massive solar arrays in space. These arrays could have more surface area than the planet, and generate electricity 24/7.
2. Thorium and Uranium Breeder Reactors
3. Covering the earth with solar panels
4. ??? Fusion???
The first 3 are solid, there's absolutely no convincing argument that can state that these are more than hard engineering problems. They are absolutely achievable, and we have proofs of concept for all 3.
How do you use that energy to get to space?
1. Synthesize chemical rocket propellant from H20 or with CO2 to make synthetic kerosene.
2. Mass drivers to launch the payloads out of a gun.
3. Chemically fired mass drivers using hydrogen gas
4. Laser Launch
5. ??? Space Elevator ???
Well, ok, this is an awful lot of aerospace hardware to build to actually move 6 billion and counting folks. Plus their pets. How could you ever manufacture enough spacecraft and vehicles to do this for a cost that could be paid?
See Nanotechnology, Molecular Manufacturing.
By the standards of the physical universe, "room temperature" is pretty arbitrary. For a spacecraft, keeping superconductors cold is reasonably easy.
Just come up with a new financial scheme. Bonus points if it uses PDEs or quants heavily. While I'm sure some vague law would cover it, as long as you have sufficient legal protection you'll just have to pay a fine that is less than your profits when you get caught.
I'm a little stuck between the definitions of atheist and agnostic.
I thought that atheists were people who have faith (aka a belief absent of evidence) that all religion is wrong and there is definitely not a god. They are 100% certain this is true, having faith that it must be true.
Agnostics realize that there may or may not be a god, and that the question is unanswerable with present evidence. All or no religions could be true, but without further evidence nothing can be concluded.
Hypothetically if supernatural entities stated interfering with our world right in front of our faces, atheists would continue to have faith that God and supernatural entities cannot be real, therefore some natural process must be causing what they are observing. Agnostics would take the new evidence and realize that supernatural entities are in fact quite obviously real.
The evil here is entropy, god, or evolution. One or more of the three has caused the lady's genetic code to have serious flaws, causing her body to decay as time passes rather than maintaining itself in good working order. If that evil were defeated (which will require the efforts of many brave and brilliant scientists) then the old lady wouldn't need help, and no one would know she was old because she'd probably look like women we consider supermodels today.
I don't think the implant approach is a bad one, per say, I just think it is inherently more difficult. Anyways, one other thing to note : one little known research finding that underpin a lot of assumptions is that current analysis shows that the brain operates just above the noise floor. There's a LOT of interference from various sources, and the cells themselves do not emit signals much above this threshold. There are also routine hardware glitches and faults, where neurons fails to fire when they should have and so forth.
Currently, it is thought that the reason the brain works is that multiple neurons are assigned to each important circuit, causing major decisions made by the brain to be determined by consensus.
So if you made a neural mapping of someone that was NOT quite atomically perfect : the atom bonding was just a matter of guesses, and in some cases the map was wrong, it might not matter. If your emulation engine for simulating each neuron, based on variables calculated by counting the presence of various protein structures at each synapse was merely 90 or 99% accurate, it might not matter either.
More than likely, close enough is good enough, and you would have created a sentient entity that could be taught and built upon.
Once said entity surpassed human ability levels at science and engineering, it could be used to improve the brain scanning technology so that revision 2.0 was a more faithful representation of the original person.
I think the opposite approach. I think the implant approach is nearly impossible. Interfacing with an operating machine is very, very difficult for a lot of reasons.
As for determining bonding : who cares? Most of the time, simple proximity and known bonding rules would let you guess which way the bonds were formed. You do not need to know exact positioning of electrons, just nuclei. The reason is because the brain as an electronic system has a noise floor just like any other device, and minor bonding details are way, way, way below the noise floor.
They don't have to, if they actually found other life they'd probably preserve it.
1. In other posts, I address this. This is a solvable problem, there's ways to make the ice not destroy anything. There's special synthetic ice inhibitors that cap off growing crystals, for one thing.
2. Redesign : yes. Obviously.
3. Interstellar radiation can be handled with redundant circuitry, checksums, self repair, etc. It can be made so statistically unlikely that an unrecoverable error will occur (assuming the physical hardware is more or less intact and/or a minimum number of redundant subunits survive) that it will not happen before the universe ends.
Or you could just build 2, you know, to have someone to talk to.