You are correct, to some degree, but this is like saying that the invisible hand of the market will always find the right level. It will, but on occasion it causes a bit of discomfort to the silly little monkeys before it does.
I think the point that you are missing is that, rather than wait for everything to correct itself, perhaps we should be aware of the system we live in and proactively try to avoid painting ourselves into a corner in the first place. Because, accidentally causing a biosphere collapse or something similar can cause us a * few * inconveniences while mother nature figures out how to fill the vacuum.
Slashdot's moderating system awful, but it is the least awful solution to the problem of managing user generated content I have seen to date. (It is a tough problem, to be fair). There is still plenty of room for improvement though. 'Anon' posting for example, should probably just go away at this point, as the number of insightful posts by whistle-blowers and people who need discretion to be able to participate in a conversation are truly insignificant compared to the number of trolls and spammers.
The Internet is full of awful people with terrible ideas, and they all want to share them with you. Good luck moderating that....
This is probably where the saying, "All evil needs to triumph, is for good men to do nothing" is appropriate.
If the west doesn't draw a line in the sand and come down hard on Xi's ambitions, then I think you are 100% correct. And at the risk of turning this into yet another culture war thread between the left and right, I don't think that our current leader is capable of credibly resisting the Chinese government in any sort of meaningful fashion short of just emptying all the silos and hoping for the best. This is a situation that requires tact, wisdom, patience, and collaboration with allies.
True capitalism would have the airport auction off EVERY departure time on the schedule on a daily basis, thank you very much. Actual economies have "friction" which render them sub-optimal. And yes, government bureaucracy is a huge source of friction.
You are correct. True Capitalism would encourage one or two companies to purchase all the slots, and gouge travelers once it had a monopoly on the airport. Unregulated capitalism that only considers pure supply and demand generates its own friction. (In this case in the form of resistance to true competition) I could probably make a pretty solid claim that every sort of economic model has similar levels of overall friction, and that one of the interesting ways of comparing systems would be to analyze where that friction would lay.
AI weapons that autonomously decide to kill people are as disgusting and destabilizing as bioweapons,
Weapons that indiscriminately kill people are are terrible, and only made by the most deplorable, and dispic- wait, I go lost there, was I ranting about multi-stage boosted yield MIRV thermonuclear weapons, or robots with glocks?
I mean, lets put this in perspective here. We spent half of the last century trying to figure out more ways of incinerating major cities more efficiently, and a few assholes are worried that we are going to build the robot from short circuit?
Well stated.More over he does not have 150 billon to play with. Being that he wants to maintain (rigid) control over his company, he cannot sell most of his stock without risking losing that power. Further, that valuation is all just paper.Until he liquidates his position, his valuation will go up and down and follow the stock price. If Amazon stock tanks tomorrow, he is going to be quite a bit less rich. Finally, if / when he sells, dumping that much stock will lower the price, so he is going to have to take a long time to sell off, or accept that he isn't going to get 'full value' for his options. He could probably tank the price by himself just by putting all his stock on the market all at once.
That doesn't mean that he still isn't a rich bitch, though.Given that he has a strong track record in building companies, he could probably get a couple of hundred billion loaned to him by banks with his stock as collateral.If he wanted a 'Trump style' paper empire, he could buy many, many big companies with leveraged collateral, and pay back the interest with profits.He could become the worlds first trillionaire if he stopped fucking around with Amazon, and really pursued the goal.
Of course, who cares? At a certain point, its just numbers in a computer. He'll still be dead of cancer or a bad ticker in 50 years, and he cannot drink any more beer that you or I can in a single day. I kinda feel bad for him. He cannot go anywhere without an armed security escort. He will always have a huge number of people who dislike him, for no other reason than he has stupid piles of cash. In a way, hes trapped by his own success.
No one knew or cared WHAT you were, just WHO you were.
Actually, I always got the sense that nobody cared who you were, just that your ideas were good ones. In the early days of Slashdot, there were a lot of really smart people commenting on the stories with a lot of interesting insight to add. Now, every third post seems to be by an AC with a IQ of 80 who feels a need to share their opinion with the world. Articles about quantum computing end up degenerating into Hillary and Trump mud slinging fights. Oh, Intranets.....
The Internet really went downhill in the 90s when companies like AoL were trying to get everyone in the world online for $14.95 a month. Now the Internet is a pretty good reflection of humanity in general, and it shows.
The reason why Smart TV Makers want to spy on you is to sell ads. They are collecting all the info they can get, and selling it to third party companies that try to figure out what kind of stuff they can advertise to you that you will buy. Being able to collect demographic info is very valuable, as before this happened, the only data they had was stuff like Nielsen ratings and surveys. The more they know about their customers, the more they can sell targeted advertising and the more they make from it.
These TVs are just doing the same thing that websites have been for years, with one important exception: This isn't like a website collecting info, it is more akin to a internet provider watching all the http requests coming down the pipes, so they get to watch everything that is being done on the TV. (I'm sure that Internet providers would love to be able to sell PI directly to advertising agencies in the same way). It seems a little creepy, but I am not sure how much really personal info you can gleam out of knowing that someone watched 'Leave it to Beaver' reruns on a Tuesday afternoon. Probably a little more than you are comfortable with, but far less that an advertiser or the NSA would really like to know.
The margins on TVs are razor thin, so a chance to get a chunk of fat recurring advertising revue is impossible to pass up. When I say, impossible, I don't mean it in a figurative way. With the huge boost in profits from advertising, you can sell TVs at cost or even a loss, and easily drive competitors out of business. If you don't do this, your competitor will. These companies are banking on advertising revenue to carry them, a CFO literally told me this.
How do I know this? I worked for a TV maker for awhile. They know how much they make off you when you buy a TV, and how much per year you are worth for advertising dollars, and they announce it at quarterly meetings. I think they are far more scared of having a bad sales year than customer push back in the form of lawsuits. I can only imagine how Trump's threats of a trade war with China terrify them. You want scary? Go run a billion dollar business on super tight margins while it is being hit with heavy import tariffs.
Maybe I'm cynical... but I wouldn't be surprised if this was done on purpose to get people talking about the movie that otherwise no one would have heard of.
Ah, but by doing this, they have finally released a movie that won't get pirated. TAKE THAT, INTERWABZ PIRATES!
You're honestly saying that regular people - people full-time of families and jobs, who don't have ten grand to wager on a court case - should shoulder that sort of burden?
Using your real name works for you, but don't expect it to be the right solution for everyone.
And I think you just hit on one of the ideals that Americans should be striving for: The freedom of an individual to make a choice. Bruce has made the choice to become a public figure and stand up for what he believes in. Other people might make the choice you describe, and not reveal their real names because they cannot afford the time, money, or effort that it might cost them to be a public figure.
Neither choice is correct or incorrect, but what is important is that each person have that choice, and that it isn't decided by a private corporation or a government intent on spying on them for political or financial purposes.
Not really, game theory and visual recognition are two different things. The first has a specific solution that takes a ton of processing and machine learning can simplify this processing, the second is hard enough that humans can't even figure it out some times, much less train a machine learning program to a high degree of accuracy. Machine learning should reach this level but we have a lot of work (and $s) before it is there.
Go and Chess are good because we spent time and effort to make it easy. The computer doesn't have to figure out which pieces are on which spaces, because specially built boards or pieces are used - machine vision portion is off the table. Then they have massive databases that are optimally indexed with positions and patterns - search tree is radically pruned. We wouldn't be where we are today in machine learning with gaming AIs unless we spent time figuring out clever ways to simplify the problem. Why not use the same tricks for recycling?
Want to make it simple to sort EVERYTHING in a recycle bin? Pass a law that says you have to pay an extra 5% in taxes unless you put a QR code on all your packaging indicating its material composition. If you don't want to change your packaging, no problem, you are contributing money to have people hand sort recycling. If you put a QR code on packaging, machines will be able to scan and instantly identify what it is they are holding, and you get to avoid paying an extra tax.
A lot of effort has already been spent writing image recognition software that can read QR codes. Slap them on everything and let the robot sort em out.
If Musk realizes the BFR with full refueling it's pretty much the perfect asteroid defense, it should fit 5x Tsar Bomba and have roughly a 500MT yield while having the delta-v to actually deliver it. Maybe even more with a modern design, that one was just a rush job of many smaller bomb designs going off at once. Of course the power of 500 * 10^9 kg TNT isn't much against a dino killer estimated at 10^15 kg. That's one kilo of TNT to 2000 kg of rock, but should be enough to give it a nudge.
Exactly. You aren't really trying to fragment the rock (which could create a bigger problem), just give it a nudge. You might not even want to detonate in contact with the asteroid. The main idea is that multi stage thermonuclear weapons can be made really big without a lot more effort, and it is much more powerful, efficient, and cheaper than KE weapons.
A Castle Bravo class nuclear weapon + Saturn V class heavy lift rocket is doable and it is tech we already have. All we really need to do is keep looking up to spot problems before they get too close. It might turn out that the cold war nuclear weapons race is what saves humanity from a messy end.
1. kinetic impactor rockets loaded with payloads of simple Lunar dirt
Lunar soil is mass, but without a hard external jacket, it is going to crumble on impact and not behave like a rigid body. You probably want a inelastic collision to occur, not an elastic collision. Most space ships are made of very light material to save cost / fuel / delta V, it will be VERY expensive to ship vast quantities of 'bullets' to the moon with dense enough bodies that will not fragment on impact. The faster they are going when they hit, the harder it will be to keep them from shattering.
Moreover, the amount of energy that you can impart on an object will be limited to the amount of mass that you can accelerate. Why not just put a few nukes up on the moon? The cost will be a vast fraction of what your bullets will cost, and with boosted yield fission weapons, you can get truly ludicrous yields. 50 megatons? not enough? 100 megatons? Bigger? Not even a problem. The US and Soviet Union stopped testing 'big' weapons because they had figured out that it wasn't hard to make a bomb pretty much as big as you wanted, and there was no point beyond anything that leveled a whole city or destroyed an entire army group. You aren't going to get 100+ megatons of KE imparted on an incoming rock with chemical rockets anytime soon.
In fact, the only reason you would even need more than one up there (and not the thousands your idea requires) is because you want a few backups in case one is a dud. A (hypothetical) 500 megaton weapon would be just about the best way to nudge a rock in space into a new trajectory with existing tech.
There is also the additional benefit that it is a good way to decommission military weapons. So aside from the fact your idea probably just won't work, is incredibly expensive to build and maintain, and we already have vast amounts of nuclear weapons already built that are way more efficient in terms of energy deliverable, your idea isn't a bad one. I give you full points for a creative solution to the problem.
Moreover, I am going to place a heck of a lot more trust in the the nerds as NASA, over a ex-CTO, because...oh wait....they are ACTUAL fucking rocket scientists. I'm sure that Nathan is clever and all, but I don't see anything in his CV that suggests that he is anything more than an armchair quarterback with 'opinions'.
"Stuxnet was a game-changer because it opened people's eyes to the fact that a cyber event can actually result in physical damage," says Mark Weatherford, deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity in the National Protection Programs Directorate at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
...and this guy was a stupid tool if he didn't realize this sooner. There were viruses back in the 1980s that could cause physical damage to computers by parking the head on a spinning platter of a hard disk, or wrecking the monitor by setting the refresh rate to an unsupported value. And those sorts of things could be done to a computer that WASN'T hooked up to a uranium centrafuge.
Stuxnet might have opened the eyes up of the uninformed desk clowns, but programmers and security people knew this for decades.
The US didn't open this can of worms...it is hubris to think that every country in the world doesn't have smart people in intelligence working these sorts of plans 24/7. If Stuxnet wasn't done by the US / Israel / whoever did it, someone else would have in fairly short order. The Russians were meddling in US elections via the internet because nobody had tried it before. NK attacked Sony Pictures. EVERYBODY is experimenting right now to see what you can get away with before you catch a retaliatory nuke.
Furthermore, this is the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty more operations being run by ALL nation actors to steal, hack, destroy enemy information and infrastructure right now. Nobody is talking about it, because it is bad spy craft to talk about what you do and do not know. It cost pennys on the dollar to hack when you compare that with conventional military operations.
Apparently, while working on this project, they discovered why the Nazis shut down Bauhaus. One of the 'lost fonts' that was under development was Comic Sans.
Good point, but 'military grade' is widely understood (but vague term) that is used to describe weapons that aren't really useful unless you just want to cause carnage and destruction.
Grenade launchers, fully automatic weapons, crewed weapons, LAW rockets, cannons, Armor-piercing, incendiary, and explosive ammunition, mines and similar devices are probably fair to describe as military grade weaponry. Assault rifles are a bit more fuzzy, but mostly because lax laws have allowed them to proliferate as 'hunting rifles'.
Tommy guns were available via mail order catalogues in the 1920s to the public, but then later went on to be used by the army in ww2. Did the army call them Civilian Grade weapons? Any label you slap on something is going to be somewhat vague and fuzzy, because of the nature of people and language, but I think most people understand basically what military grade weapons means.
There are very niche use cases for semi-automatic rifles where special permits could be issued, but there's no reason they need to be generally available.
I found out a few years back that this is already the case. If you are a collector or historian type, you can get a permit to own fully automatic weaponry and other really dangerous(tm) stuff like ww2 machine guns, bazookas and the like. I think that there is a more rigorous background investigation involved, and it appears to more or less work, since you don't see people robbing banks or shooting up schools with Thompsons and SAWs.
I always thought that a good weapon permit process should follow a nice curve. The more dangerous a weapon is, the more hoops you have to jump through to own it. It could range from a BB gun purchase needing a Diver license check to make sure you are over age 16 to a M2.50 cal machine gun purchase requiring a 27 page form filled out in triplicate, a mental health exam, a criminal background check in every major nation, and a colon exam for good measure.
Owning a gun is a right, but is also a responsibility. We just need to make sure that only responsible people get the right.
Yeah, and don't forget Bully, NightTrap and the whole host of other controversial games that have been released over the years. The best was Doom, slammed for satanic and violent content when it was new. I'm sure that John Carmac is still crying in his Cheerios over all the money he lost out on because he made a game that was controversial.
This sort of thing is always an exercise in futility. I am all for reducing gun violence, but censorship isn't the answer. This game looks to be in pretty poor taste, given the current epidemic of gun violence, but it isn't going to help or hurt the issue by banning it. In fact, it seems pretty stupid to even waste time talking about it since it is distracting from the main issue of keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people.
If society thinks this game is a bad idea, it will not sell very well, problem solved. Valve isn't even really involved in the development of it, so don't go dragging them into the conversation.
The boy says to lead asshole: 'I'll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.' Proudly holding his AIR-15.
Here is the thing you don't get, despite your vitriolic towards anti-gun activists, I honestly and sincerely hope that nobody EVER takes a gun from your nephew 's cold dead hands. I hope that you and your nephew never becomes on of the thousands of Americans killed or injured in firearms accidents that occur each year. Hell, I hope the two of you celebrate your 100th birthday together.
I get that you enjoy owning and firing guns and the feeling of control it gives you, but you or he only need to make one mistake. Is it really worth it?
How does a school which charges $40,000/yr in tuition [rider.edu] end up cash-strapped?
Are you kidding? Have you walked through a university campus and looked around? All those huge, beautiful, buildings aren't going to cover themselves with ivy.
Well, actually, they are, but I think where you see where I am going with this.
Constructing a building costs millions. It is even more expensive when you make it look like some thing that you expect to see on a college campus. You have to build a lot of these, or students aren't going to show up. You have to hire a bunch of top academics. Some will be really expensive to retain. (Ai CS specialists yes, ancient Latin experts not so much). In order to keep them around, you have to give them whatever they need to do 'cutting edge' stuff. (Supercomputers, Lasers, and Libraries, oh my!). You don't have tens of millions in cash, so all these buildings you bough, you bought them on credit, so there are loans to be serviced. Also, you gotta pay people to keep them looking nice and in repair, as a bunch of snot nosed special little flowers try to shit all over them. (I saw one genius in the dorms where I went to school using the ceiling sprinkler pipes as monkey bars...)
And then you have to pay a few top administrators the big bucks, because they are essentially doing the work of a top level CEO, managing budgets, dealing with the press, inking deals with the private sector to get more funding and help to keep your research cutting edge, shaking down rich alumni, and keeping all the asylum inmates / students from killing each other.
All that 'free' money you get from the government? They don't just drive a dump truck up and empty it in your personal scrooge McDuck money bin. You have to jump through hoops to get it and employ a small army of accountants and office workers to do accounting and manage financial assistance programs, because the majority of students attending universities aren't named Gates or Zuckerberg.
hackathons are in fact insanely fun, an invaluable social outlet that helps form lasting friendships and establish professional contacts, and a great way to build teamwork skills, learn new things, and challenge your abilities.
Nope. Nope. Nope. No having fun. You are there to be exploited, and so called, 'fun' you had was just the sponsors tricking you into working harder.
At the end of the weekend, hundreds of highly polished, scalable, and very robust apps are ready for market, and the poor dumb coders are far too tired to see how much they have been exploited and used. Its all part of the plan. Why hackathons aren't running afoul of the emancipation proclamation is beyond me....
Slashdot Mirror
Ancestry, 23andMe and several other top genetic testing companies pledged on Tuesday TO STOP SHARING users' DNA data with others without consent.
Fixed that for you.
You are correct, to some degree, but this is like saying that the invisible hand of the market will always find the right level. It will, but on occasion it causes a bit of discomfort to the silly little monkeys before it does.
I think the point that you are missing is that, rather than wait for everything to correct itself, perhaps we should be aware of the system we live in and proactively try to avoid painting ourselves into a corner in the first place. Because, accidentally causing a biosphere collapse or something similar can cause us a * few * inconveniences while mother nature figures out how to fill the vacuum.
Slashdot's moderating system awful, but it is the least awful solution to the problem of managing user generated content I have seen to date. (It is a tough problem, to be fair). There is still plenty of room for improvement though. 'Anon' posting for example, should probably just go away at this point, as the number of insightful posts by whistle-blowers and people who need discretion to be able to participate in a conversation are truly insignificant compared to the number of trolls and spammers.
The Internet is full of awful people with terrible ideas, and they all want to share them with you. Good luck moderating that....
This is probably where the saying, "All evil needs to triumph, is for good men to do nothing" is appropriate.
If the west doesn't draw a line in the sand and come down hard on Xi's ambitions, then I think you are 100% correct. And at the risk of turning this into yet another culture war thread between the left and right, I don't think that our current leader is capable of credibly resisting the Chinese government in any sort of meaningful fashion short of just emptying all the silos and hoping for the best. This is a situation that requires tact, wisdom, patience, and collaboration with allies.
Taiwan is fucked.
True capitalism would have the airport auction off EVERY departure time on the schedule on a daily basis, thank you very much. Actual economies have "friction" which render them sub-optimal. And yes, government bureaucracy is a huge source of friction.
You are correct. True Capitalism would encourage one or two companies to purchase all the slots, and gouge travelers once it had a monopoly on the airport. Unregulated capitalism that only considers pure supply and demand generates its own friction. (In this case in the form of resistance to true competition) I could probably make a pretty solid claim that every sort of economic model has similar levels of overall friction, and that one of the interesting ways of comparing systems would be to analyze where that friction would lay.
Maybe next you can ban porn on the internet, because nobody wants that either.
You say 'bans', organized crime says 'profit centers'. Same thing, really.
AI weapons that autonomously decide to kill people are as disgusting and destabilizing as bioweapons,
Weapons that indiscriminately kill people are are terrible, and only made by the most deplorable, and dispic- wait, I go lost there, was I ranting about multi-stage boosted yield MIRV thermonuclear weapons, or robots with glocks?
I mean, lets put this in perspective here. We spent half of the last century trying to figure out more ways of incinerating major cities more efficiently, and a few assholes are worried that we are going to build the robot from short circuit?
GET YOUR FUCKING PRIORITIES STRAIGHT, IDIOTS!
Well stated.More over he does not have 150 billon to play with. Being that he wants to maintain (rigid) control over his company, he cannot sell most of his stock without risking losing that power. Further, that valuation is all just paper.Until he liquidates his position, his valuation will go up and down and follow the stock price. If Amazon stock tanks tomorrow, he is going to be quite a bit less rich. Finally, if / when he sells, dumping that much stock will lower the price, so he is going to have to take a long time to sell off, or accept that he isn't going to get 'full value' for his options. He could probably tank the price by himself just by putting all his stock on the market all at once.
That doesn't mean that he still isn't a rich bitch, though.Given that he has a strong track record in building companies, he could probably get a couple of hundred billion loaned to him by banks with his stock as collateral.If he wanted a 'Trump style' paper empire, he could buy many, many big companies with leveraged collateral, and pay back the interest with profits.He could become the worlds first trillionaire if he stopped fucking around with Amazon, and really pursued the goal.
Of course, who cares? At a certain point, its just numbers in a computer. He'll still be dead of cancer or a bad ticker in 50 years, and he cannot drink any more beer that you or I can in a single day. I kinda feel bad for him. He cannot go anywhere without an armed security escort. He will always have a huge number of people who dislike him, for no other reason than he has stupid piles of cash. In a way, hes trapped by his own success.
No one knew or cared WHAT you were, just WHO you were.
Actually, I always got the sense that nobody cared who you were, just that your ideas were good ones. In the early days of Slashdot, there were a lot of really smart people commenting on the stories with a lot of interesting insight to add. Now, every third post seems to be by an AC with a IQ of 80 who feels a need to share their opinion with the world. Articles about quantum computing end up degenerating into Hillary and Trump mud slinging fights. Oh, Intranets.....
The Internet really went downhill in the 90s when companies like AoL were trying to get everyone in the world online for $14.95 a month. Now the Internet is a pretty good reflection of humanity in general, and it shows.
The reason why Smart TV Makers want to spy on you is to sell ads. They are collecting all the info they can get, and selling it to third party companies that try to figure out what kind of stuff they can advertise to you that you will buy. Being able to collect demographic info is very valuable, as before this happened, the only data they had was stuff like Nielsen ratings and surveys. The more they know about their customers, the more they can sell targeted advertising and the more they make from it.
These TVs are just doing the same thing that websites have been for years, with one important exception: This isn't like a website collecting info, it is more akin to a internet provider watching all the http requests coming down the pipes, so they get to watch everything that is being done on the TV. (I'm sure that Internet providers would love to be able to sell PI directly to advertising agencies in the same way). It seems a little creepy, but I am not sure how much really personal info you can gleam out of knowing that someone watched 'Leave it to Beaver' reruns on a Tuesday afternoon. Probably a little more than you are comfortable with, but far less that an advertiser or the NSA would really like to know.
The margins on TVs are razor thin, so a chance to get a chunk of fat recurring advertising revue is impossible to pass up. When I say, impossible, I don't mean it in a figurative way. With the huge boost in profits from advertising, you can sell TVs at cost or even a loss, and easily drive competitors out of business. If you don't do this, your competitor will. These companies are banking on advertising revenue to carry them, a CFO literally told me this.
How do I know this? I worked for a TV maker for awhile. They know how much they make off you when you buy a TV, and how much per year you are worth for advertising dollars, and they announce it at quarterly meetings. I think they are far more scared of having a bad sales year than customer push back in the form of lawsuits. I can only imagine how Trump's threats of a trade war with China terrify them. You want scary? Go run a billion dollar business on super tight margins while it is being hit with heavy import tariffs.
Maybe I'm cynical... but I wouldn't be surprised if this was done on purpose to get people talking about the movie that otherwise no one would have heard of.
Ah, but by doing this, they have finally released a movie that won't get pirated. TAKE THAT, INTERWABZ PIRATES!
Using your real name works for you, but don't expect it to be the right solution for everyone.
And I think you just hit on one of the ideals that Americans should be striving for: The freedom of an individual to make a choice. Bruce has made the choice to become a public figure and stand up for what he believes in. Other people might make the choice you describe, and not reveal their real names because they cannot afford the time, money, or effort that it might cost them to be a public figure.
Neither choice is correct or incorrect, but what is important is that each person have that choice, and that it isn't decided by a private corporation or a government intent on spying on them for political or financial purposes.
Not really, game theory and visual recognition are two different things. The first has a specific solution that takes a ton of processing and machine learning can simplify this processing, the second is hard enough that humans can't even figure it out some times, much less train a machine learning program to a high degree of accuracy. Machine learning should reach this level but we have a lot of work (and $s) before it is there.
Go and Chess are good because we spent time and effort to make it easy. The computer doesn't have to figure out which pieces are on which spaces, because specially built boards or pieces are used - machine vision portion is off the table. Then they have massive databases that are optimally indexed with positions and patterns - search tree is radically pruned. We wouldn't be where we are today in machine learning with gaming AIs unless we spent time figuring out clever ways to simplify the problem. Why not use the same tricks for recycling?
Want to make it simple to sort EVERYTHING in a recycle bin? Pass a law that says you have to pay an extra 5% in taxes unless you put a QR code on all your packaging indicating its material composition. If you don't want to change your packaging, no problem, you are contributing money to have people hand sort recycling. If you put a QR code on packaging, machines will be able to scan and instantly identify what it is they are holding, and you get to avoid paying an extra tax.
A lot of effort has already been spent writing image recognition software that can read QR codes. Slap them on everything and let the robot sort em out.
If Musk realizes the BFR with full refueling it's pretty much the perfect asteroid defense, it should fit 5x Tsar Bomba and have roughly a 500MT yield while having the delta-v to actually deliver it. Maybe even more with a modern design, that one was just a rush job of many smaller bomb designs going off at once. Of course the power of 500 * 10^9 kg TNT isn't much against a dino killer estimated at 10^15 kg. That's one kilo of TNT to 2000 kg of rock, but should be enough to give it a nudge.
Exactly. You aren't really trying to fragment the rock (which could create a bigger problem), just give it a nudge. You might not even want to detonate in contact with the asteroid. The main idea is that multi stage thermonuclear weapons can be made really big without a lot more effort, and it is much more powerful, efficient, and cheaper than KE weapons.
A Castle Bravo class nuclear weapon + Saturn V class heavy lift rocket is doable and it is tech we already have. All we really need to do is keep looking up to spot problems before they get too close. It might turn out that the cold war nuclear weapons race is what saves humanity from a messy end.
1. kinetic impactor rockets loaded with payloads of simple Lunar dirt
Lunar soil is mass, but without a hard external jacket, it is going to crumble on impact and not behave like a rigid body. You probably want a inelastic collision to occur, not an elastic collision. Most space ships are made of very light material to save cost / fuel / delta V, it will be VERY expensive to ship vast quantities of 'bullets' to the moon with dense enough bodies that will not fragment on impact. The faster they are going when they hit, the harder it will be to keep them from shattering.
Moreover, the amount of energy that you can impart on an object will be limited to the amount of mass that you can accelerate. Why not just put a few nukes up on the moon? The cost will be a vast fraction of what your bullets will cost, and with boosted yield fission weapons, you can get truly ludicrous yields. 50 megatons? not enough? 100 megatons? Bigger? Not even a problem. The US and Soviet Union stopped testing 'big' weapons because they had figured out that it wasn't hard to make a bomb pretty much as big as you wanted, and there was no point beyond anything that leveled a whole city or destroyed an entire army group. You aren't going to get 100+ megatons of KE imparted on an incoming rock with chemical rockets anytime soon.
In fact, the only reason you would even need more than one up there (and not the thousands your idea requires) is because you want a few backups in case one is a dud. A (hypothetical) 500 megaton weapon would be just about the best way to nudge a rock in space into a new trajectory with existing tech.
There is also the additional benefit that it is a good way to decommission military weapons. So aside from the fact your idea probably just won't work, is incredibly expensive to build and maintain, and we already have vast amounts of nuclear weapons already built that are way more efficient in terms of energy deliverable, your idea isn't a bad one. I give you full points for a creative solution to the problem.
Well spoken.
Moreover, I am going to place a heck of a lot more trust in the the nerds as NASA, over a ex-CTO, because...oh wait....they are ACTUAL fucking rocket scientists. I'm sure that Nathan is clever and all, but I don't see anything in his CV that suggests that he is anything more than an armchair quarterback with 'opinions'.
"Stuxnet was a game-changer because it opened people's eyes to the fact that a cyber event can actually result in physical damage," says Mark Weatherford, deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity in the National Protection Programs Directorate at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
...and this guy was a stupid tool if he didn't realize this sooner. There were viruses back in the 1980s that could cause physical damage to computers by parking the head on a spinning platter of a hard disk, or wrecking the monitor by setting the refresh rate to an unsupported value. And those sorts of things could be done to a computer that WASN'T hooked up to a uranium centrafuge.
Stuxnet might have opened the eyes up of the uninformed desk clowns, but programmers and security people knew this for decades.
The US didn't open this can of worms...it is hubris to think that every country in the world doesn't have smart people in intelligence working these sorts of plans 24/7. If Stuxnet wasn't done by the US / Israel / whoever did it, someone else would have in fairly short order. The Russians were meddling in US elections via the internet because nobody had tried it before. NK attacked Sony Pictures. EVERYBODY is experimenting right now to see what you can get away with before you catch a retaliatory nuke.
Furthermore, this is the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty more operations being run by ALL nation actors to steal, hack, destroy enemy information and infrastructure right now. Nobody is talking about it, because it is bad spy craft to talk about what you do and do not know. It cost pennys on the dollar to hack when you compare that with conventional military operations.
Apparently, while working on this project, they discovered why the Nazis shut down Bauhaus. One of the 'lost fonts' that was under development was Comic Sans.
Good point, but 'military grade' is widely understood (but vague term) that is used to describe weapons that aren't really useful unless you just want to cause carnage and destruction.
Grenade launchers, fully automatic weapons, crewed weapons, LAW rockets, cannons, Armor-piercing, incendiary, and explosive ammunition, mines and similar devices are probably fair to describe as military grade weaponry. Assault rifles are a bit more fuzzy, but mostly because lax laws have allowed them to proliferate as 'hunting rifles'.
Tommy guns were available via mail order catalogues in the 1920s to the public, but then later went on to be used by the army in ww2. Did the army call them Civilian Grade weapons? Any label you slap on something is going to be somewhat vague and fuzzy, because of the nature of people and language, but I think most people understand basically what military grade weapons means.
I left the refrigerator door open in my hotel room while I was visiting China ten years back.
This is why your parents told you not to stand in front of the refrigerator with the door open....
There are very niche use cases for semi-automatic rifles where special permits could be issued, but there's no reason they need to be generally available.
.50 cal machine gun purchase requiring a 27 page form filled out in triplicate, a mental health exam, a criminal background check in every major nation, and a colon exam for good measure.
I found out a few years back that this is already the case. If you are a collector or historian type, you can get a permit to own fully automatic weaponry and other really dangerous(tm) stuff like ww2 machine guns, bazookas and the like. I think that there is a more rigorous background investigation involved, and it appears to more or less work, since you don't see people robbing banks or shooting up schools with Thompsons and SAWs.
I always thought that a good weapon permit process should follow a nice curve. The more dangerous a weapon is, the more hoops you have to jump through to own it. It could range from a BB gun purchase needing a Diver license check to make sure you are over age 16 to a M2
Owning a gun is a right, but is also a responsibility. We just need to make sure that only responsible people get the right.
Anyone remember when Postal came out?
Yeah, and don't forget Bully, NightTrap and the whole host of other controversial games that have been released over the years. The best was Doom, slammed for satanic and violent content when it was new. I'm sure that John Carmac is still crying in his Cheerios over all the money he lost out on because he made a game that was controversial.
This sort of thing is always an exercise in futility. I am all for reducing gun violence, but censorship isn't the answer. This game looks to be in pretty poor taste, given the current epidemic of gun violence, but it isn't going to help or hurt the issue by banning it. In fact, it seems pretty stupid to even waste time talking about it since it is distracting from the main issue of keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people.
If society thinks this game is a bad idea, it will not sell very well, problem solved. Valve isn't even really involved in the development of it, so don't go dragging them into the conversation.
The boy says to lead asshole: 'I'll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.' Proudly holding his AIR-15.
Here is the thing you don't get, despite your vitriolic towards anti-gun activists, I honestly and sincerely hope that nobody EVER takes a gun from your nephew 's cold dead hands. I hope that you and your nephew never becomes on of the thousands of Americans killed or injured in firearms accidents that occur each year. Hell, I hope the two of you celebrate your 100th birthday together.
I get that you enjoy owning and firing guns and the feeling of control it gives you, but you or he only need to make one mistake. Is it really worth it?
How does a school which charges $40,000/yr in tuition [rider.edu] end up cash-strapped?
Are you kidding? Have you walked through a university campus and looked around? All those huge, beautiful, buildings aren't going to cover themselves with ivy.
Well, actually, they are, but I think where you see where I am going with this.
Constructing a building costs millions. It is even more expensive when you make it look like some thing that you expect to see on a college campus. You have to build a lot of these, or students aren't going to show up. You have to hire a bunch of top academics. Some will be really expensive to retain. (Ai CS specialists yes, ancient Latin experts not so much). In order to keep them around, you have to give them whatever they need to do 'cutting edge' stuff. (Supercomputers, Lasers, and Libraries, oh my!). You don't have tens of millions in cash, so all these buildings you bough, you bought them on credit, so there are loans to be serviced. Also, you gotta pay people to keep them looking nice and in repair, as a bunch of snot nosed special little flowers try to shit all over them. (I saw one genius in the dorms where I went to school using the ceiling sprinkler pipes as monkey bars...)
And then you have to pay a few top administrators the big bucks, because they are essentially doing the work of a top level CEO, managing budgets, dealing with the press, inking deals with the private sector to get more funding and help to keep your research cutting edge, shaking down rich alumni, and keeping all the asylum inmates / students from killing each other.
All that 'free' money you get from the government? They don't just drive a dump truck up and empty it in your personal scrooge McDuck money bin. You have to jump through hoops to get it and employ a small army of accountants and office workers to do accounting and manage financial assistance programs, because the majority of students attending universities aren't named Gates or Zuckerberg.
It adds up quick.
hackathons are in fact insanely fun, an invaluable social outlet that helps form lasting friendships and establish professional contacts, and a great way to build teamwork skills, learn new things, and challenge your abilities.
Nope. Nope. Nope. No having fun. You are there to be exploited, and so called, 'fun' you had was just the sponsors tricking you into working harder.
At the end of the weekend, hundreds of highly polished, scalable, and very robust apps are ready for market, and the poor dumb coders are far too tired to see how much they have been exploited and used. Its all part of the plan. Why hackathons aren't running afoul of the emancipation proclamation is beyond me....
'elp! 'elp! He's bein' oppressed!