Here's what a rational, realistic analysis of tech progression would expect. GIVEN that life on earth can self replicate itself and use a huge range of molecules for fuel, it seems obvious that more sophisticated life is possible than already exists. Our star exhausts enormous amounts of free energy into space every second. Thus, one would expect that some day, perhaps next century or thousands of years from now, we will develop more sophisticated life that can use ALL of the matter in our solar system (rather than just a narrow range in the biosphere) and will use solar energy to rapidly convert all matter into parts of this life. This expectation is known as the singularity, and generally is assumed to require both artificial intelligence and molecular manufacturing (nanotechnology) to take place. There are plausible reasons to think that this event might happen in this century.
Well, if this is GOING to happen, and one would expect other intelligent life to do the same, and to eventually reach the same point. Then why don't we see the evidence of this out in space? Most of the stars should be missing, radiating mostly in the infrared. There should be a cacophony of data transmission between stars, although we might not be able to detect this. There should be other evidence of lively interstellar civilizations.
Theories :
1. The singularity is not physically possible. That means, of course, that our theories of physics are massively wrong as well, and that all our assumptions about intelligent life are as well.
2. Every single intelligent civilization self destructs. This also seems ludicrous...even if it happens some times, there should at least be remnants.
3. We are the first within our region of space. It took life on this planet ~3 billion years to get to this point, and many billions of years for this planet to form with the elements it has. The universe is only ~13 billion years old. Possible...
4. Technology can do even more than we assume. Maybe you don't actually need to surround stars with solar collectors to get energy...And our neighbors obey the prime directive...
And so forth. The number of possible theories is infinite, the number of probable theories large.
Google for it. Basically, "fractional lending" means that reserve ratio thing where a system of banks can lend out more money than they actually have in their vaults. Often 10 times more. If every dollar has to be backed by a tiny amount of gold, that isn't possible.
You know, there is a (small amount) of hope. The human body is a collection of machinery that is repairable, in theory, but it would take technology that is more complex than anything we have today. (but nothing violating any laws of physics)
You just have to get your body to a future point where the technology to fix it and rebuild it back to the original specs (a adult in their 20s) exists. Have yourself frozen cryogenically or something.
There's no guarantee of success, but several folks with Phds and M.D.s who understands the technology involved estimate the chances of success at somewhere between 10 and 70 percent, depending on assumptions. Ain't the same hope as an invisible sky man, but this hope is based on a physical process in the real world possibly succeeding.
The actual SNES/NES/gameboy consoles had data structures in memory for storing individual sprites. You'd want to have your algorithm somehow correlate individual data structures with onscreen elements so that it would know what each discrete sprite was.
What stops the Feds from simply claiming anyone they want to investigate is a "suspected terrorist" and doing all the snooping they want. Suppose the Feds simply declare that due to "secret" information, they believe that someone is a "suspected terrorist". They tap his phone, bug his car, break into his email accounts...and discover that John Doe buys personal use quantities of prescription pain meds without a prescription. (but is not a terrorist). Or some other low-end crime.
Can the Feds put John Doe into prison based on this information?
Has it ever once occurred to you that there is a hard, cold reality outside of whatever "politically correct" bullshit you like to think about. Sure, millions of Americans think that population control is wrong. Mostly for religious reasons.
But even if every human being on the planet were opposed to it, there is a REALITY we live in. And in that reality, there is finite living space, farmland, and resources available for a given level of technology. (granted, technology gradually lifts the limits but populations grow EXPONENTIALLY if unconstrained)
What other solution is available to China? By stopping their population from growing too fast, they don't exceed their living space which WOULD eventually result in deaths from starvation and wars as the starving populations fight it out for the remaining food.
Go look at Africa to see what happens when there's no control.
Well, the surgery to replace a pacemaker can ALSO kill a patient. So it's not quite that simple..."common sense" that tells us to avoid one risk in favor of another worse risk leads us astray.
For example, right after 9/11, "common sense" told the general public that it would be a better idea to drive than to risk flying on a jetline that might be hijacked by Arab zealots. Several thousand people died as a result of following their gut common sense instinct.
In medical devices, there is the same problem. The way the legal system works, you get blamed if your device fails and hurts someone...even if device is preventing an EVEN WORSE risk. You don't get any credit for the saves.
Another example that relates back to cars : if we made robot cars that were 10 times safer, lots of people would live who would otherwise die in a car wreck. But the manufacturers would be sued to oblivion because the 1 in 10 fatalities caused by the robot failing would be COMPLETELY blamed on the manufacturer (since there is no human driver to blame). The only way robot cars could ever work if government simply made it illegal to sue a robot car manufacturer, and instead gave people the right to fixed compensation per death. (~3 million dollars is about right)
I'm a biomedical engineering student in my last year of school. This idea is a non-starter. Regardless if the turbine could be redesigned to be more efficient, even the POSSIBILITY of a clot forming and causing the patient to develop a PE means it's never going to happen.
And there are more subtle effects than mere clots that happen when you put a medical device in contact with blood. Current technology does not have any solution for these problems, and has failed to find a fully blood compatible material for 40 years.
A much easier idea would be to make pacemakers rechargeable via electromagnetic induction. I asked one of the St. Jude reps why we don't do it this way, and the reason has to do with legal reasons : the non rechargeable pacemakers are less likely to fail and kill a patient.
And power output density. A fueled nuclear reactor has enormous amounts of energy stored in it, but the reactor can only safely release a small amount of energy at a time. Thus, the power developed is low relative to the weight of the reactor + turbines + shielding + safety equipment. That's just fine for land based, or even for a ship or submarine, but a serious problem for an aircraft.
Yes, there were experimental nuclear engines being developed for a robot bomber. The way they got around the shielding problem was there wasn't any - anyone on the ground would be exposed to the gamma ray flux from an unshielded nuclear reaction. Thus, the bomber wouldn't even need to drop it's nuclear payload...it could theoretically fly around in a loop and kill many people.
They did go so far as to build an actual prototype engine and test it on the ground somewhere. I'm going to go read up on it after I finish this post.
And for a spacecraft already in orbit, the shielding problem is solvable because you put the nuclear reactor out on a long pole, and only use a very small shield that creates a shadow that the main body of spacecraft stays in.
Anyways, no one is building fission fueled jetliners anytime soon or ever. And why would you want to? Suppose we had really cheap fission reactors in huge quantities, or we had cheap fusion. It would still be much simpler to leave the reactors on the ground and use the cheap energy produced to make jet fuel synthetically.
Aircraft require more high density energy than any other thing humans do (besides spacecraft). Getting off the ground with any significant amount of cargo and traveling at a useful speed of several hundred knots requires many gigajoules of energy. Only fossil fuels have that kind of energy density and power output : even nuclear is too darn heavy compared to jet fuel.
In the long run, eventually we'll run out of recoverable fossil fuel. There'll still be plenty of it in the ground, but the energy cost to remove one barrel of oil will be too high for it to be economically feasible. (if it took 1/2 or 1/3 a barrel of oil in energy to recover one barrel of output, it would probably not even be worth it).
At that point, we'll have to convert all our cars and trucks to electrically driven vehicles : not from batteries, but from wires above or in the road (or both). Robotic vehicles that grab onto an overhead wire and a rail in the pavement at the same time on the straight aways, switching to ultra-capacitors when they change lanes or make turns is what I am thinking of.
We'll power everything with nuclear or vast arrays of solar and wind. And for airplanes, we'll have to make jet fuel synthetically from coal or even from CO2 extracted right from the air.
Everything I just named already exists. Some of the engineering details have not been worked out, but it's just a matter of money. So don't panic, the Western world will be fine.
How do you propose to make one smaller? Certain physics and engineering constraints are very hard to overcome without technology radically more advanced than anything humans can make today. Right now, hydrocarbon fuels are the most dense fuel sources we have for small high energy output systems (nuclear doesn't work on a small scale). And right now, it's much more efficient to use a high bypass turbofan instead of a pure hot exhaust jet. Once you pick an engine powerful enough to pick up the jetpack user + itself + fuel + frame and control systems...that's what you end up with. Something that is pretty huge and can't really be worn on someone's back.
Rocket belts have flight times measured in seconds, so using a turbofan is a gigantic improvement.
Can _ANY_ technology lead to a jetpack like you are desiring? Yes, ofc. But we're talking nuclear energy or a battery fabricated using atomically precise manufacturing, extremely high power densities, and it's still going to make a huge amount of noise because you're moving enough air to support your own weight. And actually said high technology jetpack would probably use nanotechnology and be composed of millions of moving parts that can assemble themselves into something that looks like the Martin Jetpack but then compact itself back down into something backpack sized when shut down. Think 'transformers'. All the parts would be diamondroid and carbon nanotubes and other exotic materials to get the weight down to something a human being could carry.
Anyways, you can save all you want, that kind of tech is unlikely to show up for 50-100 years or more.
It is. From people who have used the service : when you "rent" a movie from them, you see the output of an actual DVD player in a warehouse somewhere, connected via some type of standard output cable to a server that digitizes the stream and compresses and sends it to you. The player app allows you to send remote commands to this player just like pressing a remote control. You can't skip the commercials at the beginning or FBI warnings.
Zediva is doing the best they can to provide their service in a way they think might be legal.
If you go idle for more than an hour, your player/dvd combo that you rented is reset and made available for someone else to use. This is the big difference that hurts the MPAA. With Netflix, if you rent that DVD that Netflix paid about $10-$15 for, you will have it in your possession or it will be in the mail for days. No one else can rent it then. If you go to RedBox, you will have it for up to 24 hours AND due to the fragmentary nature of the kiosks there will be a lot of disks in a RedBox machine sitting idle.
Zediva eliminates this, so they have to buy a fraction of the DVDs of Netflix and Redbox. We can argue technicalities all day but it does give the people making the movies less money. In the long run, that is bad for the movie industry.
Let's suppose I want to go from Houston to Austin. I just get in my car, and from my driveway to my destination takes ~3 hours. (assuming I don't try to travel during rush hours, or I start at the outskirts of Houston)
This 160 mile journey consumes about $21 of fuel each way (28 mpg) plus about that in depreciation and future repairs on my car. So $40, each way. If I want to go somewhere else in Austin I could just drive there in a few minutes.
Suppose a high speed train line existed between Houston and Austin. Would it make sense? First of all, Houston is 60 miles across. I would need to take a 20 or 30 mile journey just to get to the starting point for the high speed train. I'd have to wait on a bus (15 minutes +), ride a bus (average speed 30 mph), and get to the station. Most likely a high speed train would not run more than every 15 to 30 minutes, so I have to wait for a train. If I use a taxi at any point in this journey to save time, the cost goes up enormously, I might note. How much is a high speed train ticket? No idea, but I have a feeling I wouldn't save money.
So after waiting on a bus to get to the train station (~1 hour), waiting for the train (lets say 30 minutes), I start on the journey. Suppose the train goes 200mph, and including speed up and slowdown takes 1 hour. Ok, so I am there. Now I do the same thing in reverse to reach my destination : several buses. Another hour gone.
So this trip has taken more time, even in a best case scenario. And at my destination, I don't have anything I couldn't carry with me. No large toolkit or a lot of supplies or anything large.
If my labor is worth $20/hour (a livable wage in USA), the extra time I had to waste destroys any money I saved.
For longer distances, planes of course rule the trip..even with TSA goons slowing everything down. For shorter distances, it's even more in favor of cars.
Conclusion : the reason high speed trains won't work is because there is no way to get to the train station that won't waste more time than just driving to your destination.
But that's just it. You can't go down the street to Walmart for some groceries without a car. Even if there were buses, they are full of just anyone - including scary people that the American public has been conditioned to fear. (yes, I know rationally that that scraggy guy who smells funny is probably not an axe murderer or rapist...but does a woman bringing her 2 kids know that? This is why no one rides the buses unless they can't afford anything else)
And we've spent uncountable amounts of money creating a whole country based on cars. Sure, if most people lived in multi-story apartment dwellings, you could drastically reduce the residential land areas of a city and the number of starting points and destinations for a bus or train network. The suburb didn't exist before the car. All that sunk money - all those streets and all those houses - represent a cost that cannot be thrown away. America is a rich country, but even America couldn't afford to demolish all it's existing infrastructure in favor of public transit using conventional technology.
Hence my robot taxi idea. Robot cars cannot function with known software methods if other human drivers and pedestrians are allowed onto the roadways. But if we surrounded every roadway used by the robot taxi network with fences (including a barrier on top), with automatic sliding doors at boarding/disembarking points, we could use robotic cars with conventional software driving them. The roads would all be explicitly marked with RFID tags in the pavement, a special material would mark the lanes that would be easily to detect by the car's sensors, and every vehicle on the road would have several markings on the front, back, and sides to make them easy to detect. So each vehicle would know exactly where it was, the distance to the nearest car, and so forth. A single chip solution would run all of the software (with a redundant system on a chip or two checking for errors).
So if you lived on a little used side street, the nearest stop might be down the street a bit. If you wanted to go shopping, you'd request the car that picks you up to have room for a shopping cart. (you'd either bring your cart from home or rent one from the store). If you didn't feel like walking, you could ride a motorized wheelchair right to the pickup point and summon a taxi that was designed for it. Multiple private firms would be in charge of the interior fixtures and cleaning of the robot taxis, so there would be differing grades of service - from a leather lined 'executive class' robo taxi that the supplier has cleaned between each passenger to a vinyl lined 'economy class' taxi that is cheap.
You'd specify your destination ahead of time, and the transit routing computer would make sure there was space for your entire trip on each segment of road at that future moment in time. (for example, if a 1 mile segment of road had the capacity to hold 500 vehicles between 5:05 and 5:07 it would increment the number of vehicles allocated to that segment by 1). If there was no possible route that you could take that would not delay other riders, you would be offered a car pool option or charged a higher rate. If you had a medical emergency you could get priority routing straight to a hospital.
So if you look at the article, doing it this way does NOT eliminate the track. There's still a complex track that the train runs in - that U shaped concrete trough that you can look at in TFA. The walls of the trough prevent gusts of wind from shoving the train around. The control system would have to be extremely precise, and able to react very quickly to events like a big gust of wind. I would guess the 'train' car has wheels.
Advantages - the track doesn't have coils or magnets in it. But one glance reveals that it's still an extremely expensive, complex effort to build the track - probably millions of dollars per mile.
Disadvantages : in every respect, it's still a high speed train. The ground effect trick is to achieve faster speeds without magnets, that's all. If you board one of these, you have to be going to a specific destination all the other riders are going to. Every stop slows it all down. Most of the time you save on one of these you lose due to waiting to board the train, walking to the train, etc. And you're crowded in with the public.
And while you eliminate the need for coils in the track, you have to use even MORE concrete and steel to make the cage visible in TFA, and you now need an extremely high performance control system in the train that needs to work for the train to not crash.
In short, it's a terrible idea. What we need are cheap robotically controlled cars that run on a switching network that go from starting point directly to individual destination. These cars don't even need to be all that fast, and could use conventional technology (except perhaps using capacitor banks and frequent charging points or something...but conventional tires, road, etc...we'd use the road network we already have and install fencing and barricades and bridges so no pedestrians can ever enter the streets)
Because hacking one is super hard. And there's no reason, in principle, you couldn't create a VM that is hack-proof. And how will the hacker even know if the server he is trying to hack is encapsulated in a VM, anyway?
Anyways, if the FBI had been monitoring Brad Cooper, they could have just pulled the records tracking where his car was, and show if he actually drove it to the site his wife's body was found or not. If he did it, there wouldn't have been an expensive trial, and if he were innocent, then he wouldn't have been indicted. Well, maybe. I suppose the Cary police department would just say that Brad "must have" hacked the FBI tracking device or used a GPS jammer...because he technically knew how to do such a thing....even if they never actually found the tools he used to do this.
So basically the FBI can put one of these on anyone it wants, anywhere. Are you part of a group that it doesn't like? Even if there's no evidence whatsoever that anyone in that group has ever committed a serious crime? Then they can and will follow you around for years with one of these.
On the bright side (there is one), at least if you ever are prosecuted you can show your whereabouts pretty easily. Nearly every one of us here routinely spends many hours of the day, at home asleep or watching TV or something. There's no evidence at all to show you were there except for the word of family members, which juries routinely ignore. Thus, if someone you dislike is murdered, bam you're a suspect and you have no proof of your innocence.
As it turns out, you DO need to prove your innocence. "Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't mean anything if they can show 'circumstantial' evidence that indicates that you had the means (as in you had a pair of hands), the motive (you hated the victim because they did something bad to you) and the opportunity (you COULD have gotten to the victim in the time window indicated, and you don't have any proof you didn't. You know, no proof other than dozens of witnesses or whatever. No actual proof, like phone records that you have proof you didn't fake, etc).
This guy has the death penalty by the slow option : automatic life w/o parole. He has to prove his innocence to ever get out....and it's a totally different matter to prove you couldn't, by any possible means, have committed a crime vs. showing that you did.
Seriously, how can a hacker get into a computer system run by someone who KNOWS that hackers are after them? Hacks of major sites can be explained by the fact that major organizations (like Sony, etc) have many individual members and tons of bureaucratic incompetence. But you read about the hackers that exchanged stolen credit cards on various forums hacking EACH OTHER's websites, deleting all userdata #@#!, and thus forcing all the members of the site onto a competing site.
So, one would expect that Anonymous would make sure their own servers were hack-proof. Couldn't you trivially make something hack proof by running the server in a VM, and using a hardware authentication system for accessing the server that runs the VMs? How are hackers going to get past a measure like that? The server that deals with the outside world is sandboxed, and they can't crack your password to the management system because it changes every minute.
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Thermodynamics dictates that there must be some waste heat. Although...theoretically..since T cold is 3 kelvin....it might be VERY small.
Uhh..nuclear....
I mean, it may be dirty, and it may have some nasty problems..but it DOES WORK. And there's more of it than we can use...
Here's what a rational, realistic analysis of tech progression would expect. GIVEN that life on earth can self replicate itself and use a huge range of molecules for fuel, it seems obvious that more sophisticated life is possible than already exists. Our star exhausts enormous amounts of free energy into space every second. Thus, one would expect that some day, perhaps next century or thousands of years from now, we will develop more sophisticated life that can use ALL of the matter in our solar system (rather than just a narrow range in the biosphere) and will use solar energy to rapidly convert all matter into parts of this life. This expectation is known as the singularity, and generally is assumed to require both artificial intelligence and molecular manufacturing (nanotechnology) to take place. There are plausible reasons to think that this event might happen in this century.
Well, if this is GOING to happen, and one would expect other intelligent life to do the same, and to eventually reach the same point. Then why don't we see the evidence of this out in space? Most of the stars should be missing, radiating mostly in the infrared. There should be a cacophony of data transmission between stars, although we might not be able to detect this. There should be other evidence of lively interstellar civilizations.
Theories :
1. The singularity is not physically possible. That means, of course, that our theories of physics are massively wrong as well, and that all our assumptions about intelligent life are as well.
2. Every single intelligent civilization self destructs. This also seems ludicrous...even if it happens some times, there should at least be remnants.
3. We are the first within our region of space. It took life on this planet ~3 billion years to get to this point, and many billions of years for this planet to form with the elements it has. The universe is only ~13 billion years old. Possible...
4. Technology can do even more than we assume. Maybe you don't actually need to surround stars with solar collectors to get energy...And our neighbors obey the prime directive...
And so forth. The number of possible theories is infinite, the number of probable theories large.
Google for it. Basically, "fractional lending" means that reserve ratio thing where a system of banks can lend out more money than they actually have in their vaults. Often 10 times more. If every dollar has to be backed by a tiny amount of gold, that isn't possible.
You know, there is a (small amount) of hope. The human body is a collection of machinery that is repairable, in theory, but it would take technology that is more complex than anything we have today. (but nothing violating any laws of physics)
You just have to get your body to a future point where the technology to fix it and rebuild it back to the original specs (a adult in their 20s) exists. Have yourself frozen cryogenically or something.
There's no guarantee of success, but several folks with Phds and M.D.s who understands the technology involved estimate the chances of success at somewhere between 10 and 70 percent, depending on assumptions. Ain't the same hope as an invisible sky man, but this hope is based on a physical process in the real world possibly succeeding.
The actual SNES/NES/gameboy consoles had data structures in memory for storing individual sprites. You'd want to have your algorithm somehow correlate individual data structures with onscreen elements so that it would know what each discrete sprite was.
What stops the Feds from simply claiming anyone they want to investigate is a "suspected terrorist" and doing all the snooping they want. Suppose the Feds simply declare that due to "secret" information, they believe that someone is a "suspected terrorist". They tap his phone, bug his car, break into his email accounts...and discover that John Doe buys personal use quantities of prescription pain meds without a prescription. (but is not a terrorist). Or some other low-end crime.
Can the Feds put John Doe into prison based on this information?
Has it ever once occurred to you that there is a hard, cold reality outside of whatever "politically correct" bullshit you like to think about. Sure, millions of Americans think that population control is wrong. Mostly for religious reasons.
But even if every human being on the planet were opposed to it, there is a REALITY we live in. And in that reality, there is finite living space, farmland, and resources available for a given level of technology. (granted, technology gradually lifts the limits but populations grow EXPONENTIALLY if unconstrained)
What other solution is available to China? By stopping their population from growing too fast, they don't exceed their living space which WOULD eventually result in deaths from starvation and wars as the starving populations fight it out for the remaining food.
Go look at Africa to see what happens when there's no control.
Well, the surgery to replace a pacemaker can ALSO kill a patient. So it's not quite that simple..."common sense" that tells us to avoid one risk in favor of another worse risk leads us astray.
For example, right after 9/11, "common sense" told the general public that it would be a better idea to drive than to risk flying on a jetline that might be hijacked by Arab zealots. Several thousand people died as a result of following their gut common sense instinct.
In medical devices, there is the same problem. The way the legal system works, you get blamed if your device fails and hurts someone...even if device is preventing an EVEN WORSE risk. You don't get any credit for the saves.
Another example that relates back to cars : if we made robot cars that were 10 times safer, lots of people would live who would otherwise die in a car wreck. But the manufacturers would be sued to oblivion because the 1 in 10 fatalities caused by the robot failing would be COMPLETELY blamed on the manufacturer (since there is no human driver to blame). The only way robot cars could ever work if government simply made it illegal to sue a robot car manufacturer, and instead gave people the right to fixed compensation per death. (~3 million dollars is about right)
I'm a biomedical engineering student in my last year of school. This idea is a non-starter. Regardless if the turbine could be redesigned to be more efficient, even the POSSIBILITY of a clot forming and causing the patient to develop a PE means it's never going to happen.
And there are more subtle effects than mere clots that happen when you put a medical device in contact with blood. Current technology does not have any solution for these problems, and has failed to find a fully blood compatible material for 40 years.
A much easier idea would be to make pacemakers rechargeable via electromagnetic induction. I asked one of the St. Jude reps why we don't do it this way, and the reason has to do with legal reasons : the non rechargeable pacemakers are less likely to fail and kill a patient.
And power output density. A fueled nuclear reactor has enormous amounts of energy stored in it, but the reactor can only safely release a small amount of energy at a time. Thus, the power developed is low relative to the weight of the reactor + turbines + shielding + safety equipment. That's just fine for land based, or even for a ship or submarine, but a serious problem for an aircraft.
Yes, there were experimental nuclear engines being developed for a robot bomber. The way they got around the shielding problem was there wasn't any - anyone on the ground would be exposed to the gamma ray flux from an unshielded nuclear reaction. Thus, the bomber wouldn't even need to drop it's nuclear payload...it could theoretically fly around in a loop and kill many people.
They did go so far as to build an actual prototype engine and test it on the ground somewhere. I'm going to go read up on it after I finish this post.
And for a spacecraft already in orbit, the shielding problem is solvable because you put the nuclear reactor out on a long pole, and only use a very small shield that creates a shadow that the main body of spacecraft stays in.
Anyways, no one is building fission fueled jetliners anytime soon or ever. And why would you want to? Suppose we had really cheap fission reactors in huge quantities, or we had cheap fusion. It would still be much simpler to leave the reactors on the ground and use the cheap energy produced to make jet fuel synthetically.
Aircraft require more high density energy than any other thing humans do (besides spacecraft). Getting off the ground with any significant amount of cargo and traveling at a useful speed of several hundred knots requires many gigajoules of energy. Only fossil fuels have that kind of energy density and power output : even nuclear is too darn heavy compared to jet fuel.
In the long run, eventually we'll run out of recoverable fossil fuel. There'll still be plenty of it in the ground, but the energy cost to remove one barrel of oil will be too high for it to be economically feasible. (if it took 1/2 or 1/3 a barrel of oil in energy to recover one barrel of output, it would probably not even be worth it).
At that point, we'll have to convert all our cars and trucks to electrically driven vehicles : not from batteries, but from wires above or in the road (or both). Robotic vehicles that grab onto an overhead wire and a rail in the pavement at the same time on the straight aways, switching to ultra-capacitors when they change lanes or make turns is what I am thinking of.
We'll power everything with nuclear or vast arrays of solar and wind. And for airplanes, we'll have to make jet fuel synthetically from coal or even from CO2 extracted right from the air.
Everything I just named already exists. Some of the engineering details have not been worked out, but it's just a matter of money. So don't panic, the Western world will be fine.
...Can't happen. Some engineering constraints we have nothing available to overcome them with.
How do you propose to make one smaller? Certain physics and engineering constraints are very hard to overcome without technology radically more advanced than anything humans can make today. Right now, hydrocarbon fuels are the most dense fuel sources we have for small high energy output systems (nuclear doesn't work on a small scale). And right now, it's much more efficient to use a high bypass turbofan instead of a pure hot exhaust jet. Once you pick an engine powerful enough to pick up the jetpack user + itself + fuel + frame and control systems...that's what you end up with. Something that is pretty huge and can't really be worn on someone's back.
Rocket belts have flight times measured in seconds, so using a turbofan is a gigantic improvement.
Can _ANY_ technology lead to a jetpack like you are desiring? Yes, ofc. But we're talking nuclear energy or a battery fabricated using atomically precise manufacturing, extremely high power densities, and it's still going to make a huge amount of noise because you're moving enough air to support your own weight. And actually said high technology jetpack would probably use nanotechnology and be composed of millions of moving parts that can assemble themselves into something that looks like the Martin Jetpack but then compact itself back down into something backpack sized when shut down. Think 'transformers'. All the parts would be diamondroid and carbon nanotubes and other exotic materials to get the weight down to something a human being could carry.
Anyways, you can save all you want, that kind of tech is unlikely to show up for 50-100 years or more.
It is. From people who have used the service : when you "rent" a movie from them, you see the output of an actual DVD player in a warehouse somewhere, connected via some type of standard output cable to a server that digitizes the stream and compresses and sends it to you. The player app allows you to send remote commands to this player just like pressing a remote control. You can't skip the commercials at the beginning or FBI warnings.
Zediva is doing the best they can to provide their service in a way they think might be legal.
If you go idle for more than an hour, your player/dvd combo that you rented is reset and made available for someone else to use. This is the big difference that hurts the MPAA. With Netflix, if you rent that DVD that Netflix paid about $10-$15 for, you will have it in your possession or it will be in the mail for days. No one else can rent it then. If you go to RedBox, you will have it for up to 24 hours AND due to the fragmentary nature of the kiosks there will be a lot of disks in a RedBox machine sitting idle.
Zediva eliminates this, so they have to buy a fraction of the DVDs of Netflix and Redbox. We can argue technicalities all day but it does give the people making the movies less money. In the long run, that is bad for the movie industry.
You can buy a real jetpack here : http://martinjetpack.com/
They are about 100 grand and fly for a good half hour.
Let's suppose I want to go from Houston to Austin. I just get in my car, and from my driveway to my destination takes ~3 hours. (assuming I don't try to travel during rush hours, or I start at the outskirts of Houston)
This 160 mile journey consumes about $21 of fuel each way (28 mpg) plus about that in depreciation and future repairs on my car. So $40, each way. If I want to go somewhere else in Austin I could just drive there in a few minutes.
Suppose a high speed train line existed between Houston and Austin. Would it make sense? First of all, Houston is 60 miles across. I would need to take a 20 or 30 mile journey just to get to the starting point for the high speed train. I'd have to wait on a bus (15 minutes +), ride a bus (average speed 30 mph), and get to the station. Most likely a high speed train would not run more than every 15 to 30 minutes, so I have to wait for a train. If I use a taxi at any point in this journey to save time, the cost goes up enormously, I might note. How much is a high speed train ticket? No idea, but I have a feeling I wouldn't save money.
So after waiting on a bus to get to the train station (~1 hour), waiting for the train (lets say 30 minutes), I start on the journey. Suppose the train goes 200mph, and including speed up and slowdown takes 1 hour. Ok, so I am there. Now I do the same thing in reverse to reach my destination : several buses. Another hour gone.
So this trip has taken more time, even in a best case scenario. And at my destination, I don't have anything I couldn't carry with me. No large toolkit or a lot of supplies or anything large.
If my labor is worth $20/hour (a livable wage in USA), the extra time I had to waste destroys any money I saved.
For longer distances, planes of course rule the trip..even with TSA goons slowing everything down. For shorter distances, it's even more in favor of cars.
Conclusion : the reason high speed trains won't work is because there is no way to get to the train station that won't waste more time than just driving to your destination.
But that's just it. You can't go down the street to Walmart for some groceries without a car. Even if there were buses, they are full of just anyone - including scary people that the American public has been conditioned to fear. (yes, I know rationally that that scraggy guy who smells funny is probably not an axe murderer or rapist...but does a woman bringing her 2 kids know that? This is why no one rides the buses unless they can't afford anything else)
And we've spent uncountable amounts of money creating a whole country based on cars. Sure, if most people lived in multi-story apartment dwellings, you could drastically reduce the residential land areas of a city and the number of starting points and destinations for a bus or train network. The suburb didn't exist before the car. All that sunk money - all those streets and all those houses - represent a cost that cannot be thrown away. America is a rich country, but even America couldn't afford to demolish all it's existing infrastructure in favor of public transit using conventional technology.
Hence my robot taxi idea. Robot cars cannot function with known software methods if other human drivers and pedestrians are allowed onto the roadways. But if we surrounded every roadway used by the robot taxi network with fences (including a barrier on top), with automatic sliding doors at boarding/disembarking points, we could use robotic cars with conventional software driving them. The roads would all be explicitly marked with RFID tags in the pavement, a special material would mark the lanes that would be easily to detect by the car's sensors, and every vehicle on the road would have several markings on the front, back, and sides to make them easy to detect. So each vehicle would know exactly where it was, the distance to the nearest car, and so forth. A single chip solution would run all of the software (with a redundant system on a chip or two checking for errors).
So if you lived on a little used side street, the nearest stop might be down the street a bit. If you wanted to go shopping, you'd request the car that picks you up to have room for a shopping cart. (you'd either bring your cart from home or rent one from the store). If you didn't feel like walking, you could ride a motorized wheelchair right to the pickup point and summon a taxi that was designed for it. Multiple private firms would be in charge of the interior fixtures and cleaning of the robot taxis, so there would be differing grades of service - from a leather lined 'executive class' robo taxi that the supplier has cleaned between each passenger to a vinyl lined 'economy class' taxi that is cheap.
You'd specify your destination ahead of time, and the transit routing computer would make sure there was space for your entire trip on each segment of road at that future moment in time. (for example, if a 1 mile segment of road had the capacity to hold 500 vehicles between 5:05 and 5:07 it would increment the number of vehicles allocated to that segment by 1). If there was no possible route that you could take that would not delay other riders, you would be offered a car pool option or charged a higher rate. If you had a medical emergency you could get priority routing straight to a hospital.
It would fly over it or you'd punch a hole in the thin aluminum fuselage of the traincraft.
So if you look at the article, doing it this way does NOT eliminate the track. There's still a complex track that the train runs in - that U shaped concrete trough that you can look at in TFA. The walls of the trough prevent gusts of wind from shoving the train around. The control system would have to be extremely precise, and able to react very quickly to events like a big gust of wind. I would guess the 'train' car has wheels.
Advantages - the track doesn't have coils or magnets in it. But one glance reveals that it's still an extremely expensive, complex effort to build the track - probably millions of dollars per mile.
Disadvantages : in every respect, it's still a high speed train. The ground effect trick is to achieve faster speeds without magnets, that's all. If you board one of these, you have to be going to a specific destination all the other riders are going to. Every stop slows it all down. Most of the time you save on one of these you lose due to waiting to board the train, walking to the train, etc. And you're crowded in with the public.
And while you eliminate the need for coils in the track, you have to use even MORE concrete and steel to make the cage visible in TFA, and you now need an extremely high performance control system in the train that needs to work for the train to not crash.
In short, it's a terrible idea. What we need are cheap robotically controlled cars that run on a switching network that go from starting point directly to individual destination. These cars don't even need to be all that fast, and could use conventional technology (except perhaps using capacitor banks and frequent charging points or something...but conventional tires, road, etc...we'd use the road network we already have and install fencing and barricades and bridges so no pedestrians can ever enter the streets)
Because hacking one is super hard. And there's no reason, in principle, you couldn't create a VM that is hack-proof. And how will the hacker even know if the server he is trying to hack is encapsulated in a VM, anyway?
Anyways, if the FBI had been monitoring Brad Cooper, they could have just pulled the records tracking where his car was, and show if he actually drove it to the site his wife's body was found or not. If he did it, there wouldn't have been an expensive trial, and if he were innocent, then he wouldn't have been indicted. Well, maybe. I suppose the Cary police department would just say that Brad "must have" hacked the FBI tracking device or used a GPS jammer...because he technically knew how to do such a thing....even if they never actually found the tools he used to do this.
So basically the FBI can put one of these on anyone it wants, anywhere. Are you part of a group that it doesn't like? Even if there's no evidence whatsoever that anyone in that group has ever committed a serious crime? Then they can and will follow you around for years with one of these.
On the bright side (there is one), at least if you ever are prosecuted you can show your whereabouts pretty easily. Nearly every one of us here routinely spends many hours of the day, at home asleep or watching TV or something. There's no evidence at all to show you were there except for the word of family members, which juries routinely ignore. Thus, if someone you dislike is murdered, bam you're a suspect and you have no proof of your innocence.
As it turns out, you DO need to prove your innocence. "Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't mean anything if they can show 'circumstantial' evidence that indicates that you had the means (as in you had a pair of hands), the motive (you hated the victim because they did something bad to you) and the opportunity (you COULD have gotten to the victim in the time window indicated, and you don't have any proof you didn't. You know, no proof other than dozens of witnesses or whatever. No actual proof, like phone records that you have proof you didn't fake, etc).
I'm referring to this trial, btw : http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/story?section=news/local&id=8116945
This guy has the death penalty by the slow option : automatic life w/o parole. He has to prove his innocence to ever get out....and it's a totally different matter to prove you couldn't, by any possible means, have committed a crime vs. showing that you did.
Seriously, how can a hacker get into a computer system run by someone who KNOWS that hackers are after them? Hacks of major sites can be explained by the fact that major organizations (like Sony, etc) have many individual members and tons of bureaucratic incompetence. But you read about the hackers that exchanged stolen credit cards on various forums hacking EACH OTHER's websites, deleting all userdata #@#!, and thus forcing all the members of the site onto a competing site.
So, one would expect that Anonymous would make sure their own servers were hack-proof. Couldn't you trivially make something hack proof by running the server in a VM, and using a hardware authentication system for accessing the server that runs the VMs? How are hackers going to get past a measure like that? The server that deals with the outside world is sandboxed, and they can't crack your password to the management system because it changes every minute.
uh...try 98 cents a watt. You fail.