You can already take a crap vodka for pennies an ounce, literally filter the crap out of it, and for a quarter the price of the expensive spud juice, produce a vodka that is easily comparable to one of the high end brands. Sounds to me like an excuse for printing money???
I'm sorry, but its clear you haven't been paying attention to the latest developments in synthetic brains. Huge moves have been made in the last couple years and a human equivalent neural network just isn't that far away. Once someone does a particularly good job of encoding the wetware and producing a sentient, intelligent being in silicon that can be copied at will, and enhanced by its own kind, the business end of the intelligence curve in AI will rise asymptotically. That and tell me how you would perceive an intelligence as great as your own, but 10,000 times faster. Literally able to brute force any deductive process before you could wrap your head around the problem. That would be just as superhuman as an effective IQ of 1,000,000.
When such an intelligence is virtually free software, and the hardware to implement that on is available for just a few dollars, the entire human work force will be obsolete. The only people left in the work force will be those of us who are so heavily augmented it would be fair to call them a different species.
The remainder could become wards of the state, providing basic needs for life with an opportunity to compete in human endeavors, all the while subsidized by taxing our digital brethren. However, that would require the vanishingly few super wealthy today relinquishing their grip on the economy and giving up their self obsessed and greedy ways. I don't see that happening without a certain amount of friction and dislocation. Nonetheless, the current system of economics and politics like our environmental processes are utterly unsustainable. The current system will shatter and if we don't replace it with a system that is more humane, caring and compassionate than the current one, then the end of humanity as we know it is just in sight.
There are records. Check into the massive deposits of limestone all over the planet. This was the sequestering of CO2 by zooplankton that grew shells, died, became chalk and then were compressed and heating over time into limestone and marble. Think Carbonates. That's were a bunch of the CO2 went.
Today we have a huge opportunity to use carbon for all kinds of interesting purposes. We also have some very promising technologies to sequester it from the atmosphere. A U.S. university wants to be able to create graphene sheets up to a Km wide. Processors build of diamond. Diamond and fullerenes used in construction, mechanical engineering, even whole new technologies built on super hard materials. We just need to get on with it and develop sequestering technology so we can kill both birds with one stone.
You can't build a quantum computer here because we're a simulation already running in another quantum computer and there isn't enough resolution in the simulation's space time manifold to support the necessary function of another quantum computer. Duh!
Actually that's too bad about the perception support has. The DotCom Crash changed the complexion of support forever. I say this having done both IT and support, All the "MacJobs" now pretty much live in Mumbai. A support job in the U.S. these days is more often then not a tier 2 or higher position that requires being a technical Swiss army knife, and someone who can pretty much be assured, will also support/work with sales engineers, QA, beta testing and development.
You're probably right that its not the best thing to come straight out of college doing (save its the only job available), however IT provided its a little more challenging than updating anti-virus and managing users in Active Directory, can be a great first job. Just make certain you let your employer understand, you need to have the chance to really dig into the network and systems so you can get a chance to both understand them, and supply the company with a solid map of their resources. You'll make a friend and get to continue growing new and potentially useful skill sets.
There are some several good reasons to look at an asteroid as a first choice. Of course, the best reason to pick the moon is that its only 250,000 miles away, and if anything goes wrong you have even odds of getting home without it ending posthumously. That's why heavy, heavy robotic applications must be first. Build robots that can collect solar power, mine ore, sinter ceramics, build more robots, extract water, air, and organics. Most of all construct living spaces under enough material to protect from radiation and huge temperature extremes. Once you have a functioning self replicating robot swarm building safe habitats including rotation to simulate gravity, you now have an effective ferry, with a shallow gravity well, capable of transporting significant loads to and from mars and the asteroid belt, which contains riches beyond measure.
Every large asteroid in the inner solar system should have a human population on it.
I'm pretty sure a bright hominid noticed that female mammals lactate (starting with Mom and then his wife as she fed his progeny.) It doesn't take any imagination to presume he did a little taste testing first with his wife... found it Hhhmmmm? Not bad. Then tried collecting the milk of cows, goats, sheep, probably anything that wouldn't bite his hand off when he tried to milk it (namely herbivores for the most part, Ogg likes the wolf milk but has a hard time drinking it from his left stump.)
The real kick was when he found out you could add things to milk to get cheese (the curdling agent is called rennet and you're better off not knowing what the most common rennets are), which was a tremendously more concentrated food, and would easily store for weeks, months, even years. That and with dozens of different ingredients and hundreds of different bacteria and molds to choose from, there was a endless supply of vastly different colors, flavors, and textures to make cheese into.
Can you make pidgeon cheese and is it good on a burger?
First of all that's K, so we're talking about 1F to 2F. Temperature distribution is chaotic with a tremendous concentration of heat going to the highest and lowest latitudes. The temperature change there could be 4F to 6F. That is sufficient to finish off the polar caps and the permafrost releasing countless billions of tons of methane into the atmosphere and remember that as greenhouse gases go, methane though shorter lived than CO2 is about 20 times more efficient as a greenhouse gas. The point here, is that this system has abundant feedback loops and is self regulating... until you exceed its capacity. Then you break and all bets are off. Screwing with the one and only life support system you have trying to see how far you can screw with it it tantamount to the thought experiment of removing rivets from a plane in flight to find out at what point the plane falls out of the sky.
Only we're doing it for real and if we succeed in crashing it, we all die and take out virtually all higher vertebrates while we're at it. What possible gain can you imagine that would justify that kind of downside. I'm sorry this is the worst possible mix of hubris, arrogance and self serving stupidity. I simply don't get it. We went to moon on a friggin' dare. Are so spineless and without moral fortitude that we are unwilling or incapable of cleaning up our mess, implementing a long term workable solution, and enjoying the good life as we pursue what's next?
Wow... this is just.. never mind. Okay for those of you for whom science wasn't your primary interest, a quick refresher. First there's a phenomenon. You observe it. Then you come up with a theory to explain it. Next you create an experiment to test your theory. You collect data. You compare the resulting data with the prediction(s) your theory makes, and you determine whether or not your theory accurately describes the phenomenon. Rinse and Repeat several billions of times until you've pretty much explained most of the universe we currently live in.
A scientist isn't just a geek sitting around hoarding his data like King Croesus did gold and they don't just pull interpretations out of their rear ends. Look above. They make theories first, and then test them against data. Clearly you have a poor grasp of what scientist do or why their work is more inherently valid from a purely physical reference than let's say the work of Pat Robertson or Orin Hatch or the CEO of Exxon/Mobil.
See science isn't (or at least shouldn't be) just a collection of beliefs or opinions, and when it is, it is by definition, bad science. There is rigor to the method, and the goal is to achieve truth even if and when it crushes your theory, in fact especially when it crushes your theory. By the way, folks at least bother to google or wikipedia just a little bit. It would be nice to see posts that weren't just impromptu brain farts, like, I don't know, and informed opinion. If the environmental scientists were the only ones talking, it would be significant, but scientist from virtually every field of scientist are making contributions to the larger conversation of global climate change and now doctors, economists, geologist, meteorologists, chemists, biologists, sociologist, ecologists and computer scientists are saying important things about climate change as each adds new pieces to the puzzle. This is not a conversation anyone with an IQ over 80 can ignore anymore. To do so flies in the face of both common sense, and any serious grounding in reality. No matter how much you believe your warm and fuzzy lord will protect you from climate change, I'm here to let you know as kindly as I can, you're gonna sweat just like the rest.
The problem is complicated. Tens of thousands of scientists working in hundreds of different disciplines from experts in plant reproduction to experts in satellite imaging have added pieces to puzzle. Things are accelerating much faster than expected (in most areas and slower than expected in others, remember I said its complicated.) We now have literally more data than we know what to do with, but as we sift through it, the patterns are becoming clearer and clearer.
The polar regions will be hit hardest by warming.
Billions of people worldwide will face water shortages as glaciers vanish and famines when glacier fed waters stop irrigating crops.
Loss of arable land and viable living space will put increasing pressure on growing populations, and fixed national borders will make migration virtually impossible
Changes in ocean chemistry are already causing die offs and increasing blooms of jellyfish, and will probably fuel a mass extinction of key fish populations we rely on today for food.
Forests around the world will experience drought and burn off, resulting in significant loss of plant base carbon sequestration further exacerbating the problem
Increases average temperatures will increase the decomposition of plant matter release increasing amounts of CO2 and methane both greenhouse gases and further exacerbating climate change.
There are thousand of simple facts, including rising sea levels, enhanced storms, enhanced flood/drought occurrence and the spread of tropical diseases. In fact we're seeing all these things right now (check the stats for the last 130 years, its all right there.) Look at trends not instances. The water was muddied by pandering spin doctors working for global fossil fuel interests. There has been an endless campaign of FUD and deception designed to allow billionaires the right to continue pillaging the environment without personal cost. Scientists are primarily interests in exposing the truth. Yes there are exceptions, but I would trust a scientist hands down before I trusted an industrialist. For every point of contention the business folks point at, I'm seeing 10,000 points that nobody can argue with. The bible had a phrase "Straining the gnat and swallowing the camel...".
The fact it has become politicized demands that we get clear that people are willing to continue to block all meaningful action by obfuscation. It it well past time to take meaningful action for cleaning up our mess and preserving a world worth bequeathing to our children.
There comes a time when a group of people do something so loopy, so profoundly bizarre and purely inane, that nothing you can say or do will in any way impact them socially. They have already gone someplace you can only point a finger at, and stare gobsmacked. How would you even attempt to mock or parody such behavior? Perhaps they'll release a calendar, Pamela Anderson squatting in a kitty litter box? Betty White and a TJ Donkey? Ow!!! My head hurts. I think I'll go lay down now.
There was a time that the borg face was well earned. Microsoft at one time had a reputation for dirty deeds done cheap (a lot of behind the scenes Machiavellian manipulations and orchestrations designed to kill off competitors, real and perceived.) Bill had a reputation for being ruthless, and Microsoft had a penchant for partnering with other companies duplicating their core technology then burying them.
I applaud Bill for getting religion and looking to polish up his karma, being a humanitarian beats being a corporate hit man. That said, M$ is nowhere near the threat they use to be. They have solid competition on every front, and though Windows 8 may finally get them in the budding phone and tablet market, its going to be a long tough slog, and I wouldn't hold my breath. If I was going to put a borg face on anyone these days it would be Larry Ellison. Talk about assimilation and an ego with its own zip code.
I kinda like this image of Steve Balmer for the new Microsoft logo. Perhaps with little dark shades doing the Ray Charles/Stevie Wonder head tilt. Or better yet, a paper captains hat. Something rowdy without being too mean spirited.
Dude get a clue, hell, rent one, they're cheap, its the 21rst century... I figure kindergarteners have heard about space-time, if that's your signal for condescending you seriously need to consider a few night courses. The ideas proffered have been common conversations for magazines and science programs from PBS to the Discovery Channel (you do know how to read... yes?) If this is what passes for pedantic in your eyes, then I'm afraid it says a lot more about you than it does about me. As for being a charlatan, for the love o' Jebus go Google something (anything) before venting such profound ignorance.
I'm sorry you missed the point of what I was saying, that human beings and seagulls both belong. That the problem isn't seagulls and never has been. That all life can and should be respected and that people need to take responsibility for the stupid, shitty, shoddy crap they inflict on the planet and one another. If I wasn't laughing it was because this is one of the biggest threats we'll face this century. Diseases that we made indestructible because some idiot thought it might increase the yield of his cattle herd by 0.04%. Please, feel free, I'd love to hear a good resistant infection joke. Heard the one about the guy walking down the street with the red, running, pustulent sores? Yeah, I didn't think so.
Both comments are equally ignorant. It is arguable that we are the universe attempting to understand itself. That is perhaps one of the highest possible destinies of space time. That said, most human beings barely aspire to know more than which way to put their underwear on (that and how to mate, endlessly.) We only hate seagulls and rats because they are intelligent and are successful in human shaped environments.
Let's get clear about this. The existence of resistant bacteria is the result of indiscriminate use of antibiotics by lazy, greedy, self serving aggro-businesses and government regulatory bodies with neither the power nor the mandate to protect our local (let alone global) environment from vast degradation by multinational corporations. This is just one more item on a list that now more than anything else resembles one of those giant cheese wheels of toilet paper unrolled. Blaming birds for this is like blaming rats for the black death in Europe. Europeans killed all the cats and old ladies because they thought they were in league with the devil. They lived in places of extreme crowding and pitiful sanitation. The rats overpopulated, the rat fleas bit both humans and rats and both became reservoirs for plague. In the end 1 in 3 people died and it was people who hand made a disaster through ignorance, superstition and acting against their own best interest. Wow, things haven't really changed all that much in 500 years.
I'm sorry but moral relativism and decay is the friggin hallmark of this entire debacle. Let's do this by the numbers;
1. When the Clinton staff was leaving the White House they made a passionate plea to the incoming administration to keep an eagle eye on Bin-laden because they has solid intell that he was up to something ugly. Instead the Bush Administration lead by Dick Cheney spent the next 9 month trying desperately to start a new umbrella missile defense initiative so he could get a bunch of no bid contracts for Halliburton.
2. Our nation has always had strict rules for managing flights that are no been in proper communication up to and including scrambling jets to intercept a jet that hasn't been in communication for more than 10 minutes. Shortly before 9/11 Rumsfeld was put in charge of nations air security and planse could not be scrambled without his say so. He was unavailable to have the jets scrambled until well after the attacks. There is a solid case here for at least criminal negligence, and strong hints at something much worse.
3. Upon the certain attribution of the attack on Al Queda, The Bush Administration, lead by Dick Cheney, began beating a drum to invade Iraq, a country without a single member of Al Queda in its borders, whose only justification for invasion was to pillage their oil resources and provide Dick Cheney an endless supply of no bid contracts for Halliburton. To quote Dick Cheney, when asked why weren't pursuing Bin Laden where he and Al Queda lived (Afghanistan), his response was "There are no good targets in Afghanistan, we're going after Hussein instead."
4. The only justification the Bush Administration could come up with for this insane misadventure, was that Saddam had yellow cake uranium and was a threat to US security (and we were all scared as hell after 9/11.) One of the top experts in the world was sent to determine if the threat had any validity, and when he came back and informed The Bush Administration, the CIA, the FBI and finally when nobody else would listen the Washington Post that there was exactly zero credible threat. The Bush Administration outed his wife as a CIA agent (this was tied back to Karl (Turd Blossom) Rove. This single act clearly qualifies legally as an act of treason.
5. When ex-general Colin Powell, one of the finest and most decorated and respected soldiers to come out of the first Gulf War informed the Bush Administration that the first president Bush's was wise for leaving Iraq alone, and that if "We broke it we'd have to buy i." with innocent Iraqi lives and the lives of our young soldiers, the men in charge of the Bush Administration cut him out of the decision making, and ultimately out of the cabinet altogether.
6. The in the name of national security, they gutted the Bill of Rights, eliminated Habeus Corpus, legalized no warrant wire taps and domestic espionage on a scale never before seen in this country, discarded the Geneva Convention and allowed torture as an allowable means of extracting information and in general just crapped on pretty much everything that distinguished our culture as something worth preserving. By the way if you saw 60 Minutes this evening you'd discover that one of the best CIA interrogators we have in the middle east stated for the record that the Bush Administration just plain lied when it said that torture produced even a single useable piece of information, and he clearly explained why it would always fail to do so in the middle east.
See I don't defend Saddam Hussein, because the man was a vomitous waste of human protein. I just say that bombing the crap out of innocent civilians and getting 10,000 of our best and brightest brought home in body bag, while turning their country into a toxic cesspool in the name of oil and greed and personal self indulgence rates as one of the most heinous things this country has been involved in, in the last 100 years, and we've been involved in some pretty disgusting business. It took Obama what, 3 years to nail Bin Laden? Iraq is still b
Its worse than that. A company orders 10,000 units of product X. You have to manufacture 11,000 units to account for "spoilage" loss, damage in shipment, and the occasional snatch off the freighter to take home to friends and family. The result is you end up with 800 extra at the end of shipment so you either convince the buyer to also purchase the surplus or you sell them to someone who will put a cheapo label on it and sell at wholesale prices.
In fact, if you can discover the path of production, its one of the very best ways to get a great deal. I picked up a $1,700 guitar, for $150 and the only difference was minor changes in the scroll work to hide the intended brand, and less expensive hardware. Spent a couple hundred on superior hardware and had an exceptional instrument worth over five times what I paid for it.
The mistake here was trying to get top dollar as a counterfeit. Now a days with the draconian laws that corporations have gotten passed, its a wonder its not a capital offense.
Look at the planets in our own solar system. The gas giants and actually good models for stars forming in a collapsing solar nebula. We have Jupiter rich in all kinds of elements, with each planet becoming less enriched as you move out to Neptune which is almost entirely helium and hydrogen. There are all kinds of effects that may be part of close interaction with other large planets, The relative position of the planet and its development in the young stellar nebula that determined what elements would be abundant and which would be rare. Not the relative abundance of heavier elements as you get closer to the sun. Imagine also the impact of the young sun first turning on and pushing its birth nebula away and all that hydrogen and helium freezing out there in the Oort Cloud.
Stars most often form in large nebulae in clusters, that is they form alone. Imagine a super massive star like Eta Carina forming, a star more than 100 time larger than our sun, blasting its nebula away and concentrating vast amounts of hydrogen and helium separated from heavier elements. Imaging other new young stars in a large nebula interacting gravitationally with dwarf stars and gas giants, possibly robbing them of heavy elements or at least concentrating heavier elements away from where the star formed. Star formation is a complicated process and we are just now getting some clue as to how complicated planet formation is, we still don't have the foggiest idea of what can happen to a star in its developing phases.
This star is certainly rare, however I would dare guess that anything that can happen to a star in a universe with hundreds of billions of stars in a galaxy, and hundred of billions or even trillions of galaxies in the universe has or will happen, and that we haven't even scratched the surface of what is weird or rare. The universe is a busy place, and we've only had eyes to see it for a paltry few decades.
You wouldn't mine a star, well you might mine a black dwarf or cold neutron star, provided you had a means for landing then taking off from a gravity well hundreds to millions of times stronger/deeper than the earth's. For stars still in the active process of fusion, there simply isn't any form of matter that wouldn't immediately evaporate and ionize into plasma. Your only possible way to work on mining a star would be to create some kind of force field powered by the star itself, that somehow isolated you from the stars plasma and radiation such that you would be able to access the matter of the star without being consumed in its nuclear fire.
Thinking about it and the shear difficulty involved in mining a star, it would be many orders of magnitude easier to collect the solar wind and mine that for hydrogen. Then fuse it to make your helium and get some energy while you're at it.
Of course, If you were going to mine helium and hydrogen, you would be far more likely to succeed by doing quick skips into then out of a gas giant's atmosphere, this too would be a dangerous and turbulent process, but at least there is some tiny fraction of a percent possibility for success.
The only thing you could meaningfully do with a star is mine its energy and gravity well... "Can you say Dyson Sphere?"
Makes one wonder if there is a less toxic way to attain the same effect? Definitely an ice breaker at parties! On the flip side, adding this concoction to embalming fluid would almost certainly make for exciting funerals!!!
When you "Blend" a mouse, you are typically doing some kind of chemical or cellular assay (depending on the level of blending you may be looking at whole cells, but more than likely you're looking at chemistry, genetic material or sub cellular organelles.) Making a Frappe' of Mr. Muscus, really makes doing other testing difficult to impossible and adding large amounts of oxygen to disrupted tissues damages delicate cellular chemistry, ultimately ruining your research. So when you make mouse soup, it should as much as possible be sans frothy head.
Charity doesn't fix underlying problems any more than antibiotics fix underlying systemic failure that lead to life threatening infections. However, if you don't provide the antibiotics, the patient dies. Hundreds of millions of people are alive today because of people who were generous enough to help those who could not help themselves, and that help includes money, time, labor, and the essentials of life. To be clear, I'm not talking about cultural failures, I'm talking about disasters (some natural, many man-made.) From Catrina to the Indonesian Tsunami, from Haiti to the devastating earthquakes in China and Japan, we've helped those who were in no position to help themselves, and these are true acts of charity. This is distinct from assuaging a guilty conscience by giving a bum a buck, who will promptly drink a dollars worth of rot-gut. That buck honors neither giver nor the receiver.
So if you are saying that saving those in need is pointless because it doesn't address the real problem, I would counter, save the people in need, then by all means, address the real problem. That doesn't mean let millions die a horrible unnecessary death. Of course you might be more of the mind "If [the poor] would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population" -- Ebenezer Scrooge.
Steve's lack of philanthropic endeavor paints a picture of a man more interested in himself than others. Absolutely not a crime, its not even evil per se'. Its just small.
Our society it predicated on making a mark on the universe. We are obsessed with painting the scenery with our big fat egos. Its kind of sad and pathetic. You don't see astronomers with ego issues for the most part, because they have a fair sense of man's importance in the big picture. Until we get over ourselves (as individual selves), our focus won't be contributing to a future worth living in for human beings, and with 7,000,000,000 on the planet now, perhaps its a good time to make this shift while there still is a future left for human beings. As for Steve, good run, you did some amazing things. You also did some heinous things. All in all, you deserve the great respect of a man with a vision and the courage to see it through. God speed.
Why to people pay more far a car with a prestigious name as opposed to a better vehicle? There is absolutely an aspect of fashion and style in Apple's products, they planned it that way. You pay the premium, because they told you to have an Apple you must. People are a little crazy that way.
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You can already take a crap vodka for pennies an ounce, literally filter the crap out of it, and for a quarter the price of the expensive spud juice, produce a vodka that is easily comparable to one of the high end brands. Sounds to me like an excuse for printing money???
I'm sorry, but its clear you haven't been paying attention to the latest developments in synthetic brains. Huge moves have been made in the last couple years and a human equivalent neural network just isn't that far away. Once someone does a particularly good job of encoding the wetware and producing a sentient, intelligent being in silicon that can be copied at will, and enhanced by its own kind, the business end of the intelligence curve in AI will rise asymptotically. That and tell me how you would perceive an intelligence as great as your own, but 10,000 times faster. Literally able to brute force any deductive process before you could wrap your head around the problem. That would be just as superhuman as an effective IQ of 1,000,000.
When such an intelligence is virtually free software, and the hardware to implement that on is available for just a few dollars, the entire human work force will be obsolete. The only people left in the work force will be those of us who are so heavily augmented it would be fair to call them a different species.
The remainder could become wards of the state, providing basic needs for life with an opportunity to compete in human endeavors, all the while subsidized by taxing our digital brethren. However, that would require the vanishingly few super wealthy today relinquishing their grip on the economy and giving up their self obsessed and greedy ways. I don't see that happening without a certain amount of friction and dislocation. Nonetheless, the current system of economics and politics like our environmental processes are utterly unsustainable. The current system will shatter and if we don't replace it with a system that is more humane, caring and compassionate than the current one, then the end of humanity as we know it is just in sight.
There are records. Check into the massive deposits of limestone all over the planet. This was the sequestering of CO2 by zooplankton that grew shells, died, became chalk and then were compressed and heating over time into limestone and marble. Think Carbonates. That's were a bunch of the CO2 went.
Today we have a huge opportunity to use carbon for all kinds of interesting purposes. We also have some very promising technologies to sequester it from the atmosphere. A U.S. university wants to be able to create graphene sheets up to a Km wide. Processors build of diamond. Diamond and fullerenes used in construction, mechanical engineering, even whole new technologies built on super hard materials. We just need to get on with it and develop sequestering technology so we can kill both birds with one stone.
You can't build a quantum computer here because we're a simulation already running in another quantum computer and there isn't enough resolution in the simulation's space time manifold to support the necessary function of another quantum computer. Duh!
Actually that's too bad about the perception support has. The DotCom Crash changed the complexion of support forever. I say this having done both IT and support, All the "MacJobs" now pretty much live in Mumbai. A support job in the U.S. these days is more often then not a tier 2 or higher position that requires being a technical Swiss army knife, and someone who can pretty much be assured, will also support/work with sales engineers, QA, beta testing and development.
You're probably right that its not the best thing to come straight out of college doing (save its the only job available), however IT provided its a little more challenging than updating anti-virus and managing users in Active Directory, can be a great first job. Just make certain you let your employer understand, you need to have the chance to really dig into the network and systems so you can get a chance to both understand them, and supply the company with a solid map of their resources. You'll make a friend and get to continue growing new and potentially useful skill sets.
Make a phone pad like the number line on the top of my keyboard... all digits straight in a row... duh!
There are some several good reasons to look at an asteroid as a first choice. Of course, the best reason to pick the moon is that its only 250,000 miles away, and if anything goes wrong you have even odds of getting home without it ending posthumously. That's why heavy, heavy robotic applications must be first. Build robots that can collect solar power, mine ore, sinter ceramics, build more robots, extract water, air, and organics. Most of all construct living spaces under enough material to protect from radiation and huge temperature extremes. Once you have a functioning self replicating robot swarm building safe habitats including rotation to simulate gravity, you now have an effective ferry, with a shallow gravity well, capable of transporting significant loads to and from mars and the asteroid belt, which contains riches beyond measure.
Every large asteroid in the inner solar system should have a human population on it.
I'm pretty sure a bright hominid noticed that female mammals lactate (starting with Mom and then his wife as she fed his progeny.) It doesn't take any imagination to presume he did a little taste testing first with his wife... found it Hhhmmmm? Not bad. Then tried collecting the milk of cows, goats, sheep, probably anything that wouldn't bite his hand off when he tried to milk it (namely herbivores for the most part, Ogg likes the wolf milk but has a hard time drinking it from his left stump.)
The real kick was when he found out you could add things to milk to get cheese (the curdling agent is called rennet and you're better off not knowing what the most common rennets are), which was a tremendously more concentrated food, and would easily store for weeks, months, even years. That and with dozens of different ingredients and hundreds of different bacteria and molds to choose from, there was a endless supply of vastly different colors, flavors, and textures to make cheese into.
Can you make pidgeon cheese and is it good on a burger?
Oh, and not all of the U.S., just it's corporations...
First of all that's K, so we're talking about 1F to 2F. Temperature distribution is chaotic with a tremendous concentration of heat going to the highest and lowest latitudes. The temperature change there could be 4F to 6F. That is sufficient to finish off the polar caps and the permafrost releasing countless billions of tons of methane into the atmosphere and remember that as greenhouse gases go, methane though shorter lived than CO2 is about 20 times more efficient as a greenhouse gas. The point here, is that this system has abundant feedback loops and is self regulating... until you exceed its capacity. Then you break and all bets are off. Screwing with the one and only life support system you have trying to see how far you can screw with it it tantamount to the thought experiment of removing rivets from a plane in flight to find out at what point the plane falls out of the sky.
Only we're doing it for real and if we succeed in crashing it, we all die and take out virtually all higher vertebrates while we're at it. What possible gain can you imagine that would justify that kind of downside. I'm sorry this is the worst possible mix of hubris, arrogance and self serving stupidity. I simply don't get it. We went to moon on a friggin' dare. Are so spineless and without moral fortitude that we are unwilling or incapable of cleaning up our mess, implementing a long term workable solution, and enjoying the good life as we pursue what's next?
Wow... this is just.. never mind. Okay for those of you for whom science wasn't your primary interest, a quick refresher. First there's a phenomenon. You observe it. Then you come up with a theory to explain it. Next you create an experiment to test your theory. You collect data. You compare the resulting data with the prediction(s) your theory makes, and you determine whether or not your theory accurately describes the phenomenon. Rinse and Repeat several billions of times until you've pretty much explained most of the universe we currently live in.
A scientist isn't just a geek sitting around hoarding his data like King Croesus did gold and they don't just pull interpretations out of their rear ends. Look above. They make theories first, and then test them against data. Clearly you have a poor grasp of what scientist do or why their work is more inherently valid from a purely physical reference than let's say the work of Pat Robertson or Orin Hatch or the CEO of Exxon/Mobil.
See science isn't (or at least shouldn't be) just a collection of beliefs or opinions, and when it is, it is by definition, bad science. There is rigor to the method, and the goal is to achieve truth even if and when it crushes your theory, in fact especially when it crushes your theory. By the way, folks at least bother to google or wikipedia just a little bit. It would be nice to see posts that weren't just impromptu brain farts, like, I don't know, and informed opinion. If the environmental scientists were the only ones talking, it would be significant, but scientist from virtually every field of scientist are making contributions to the larger conversation of global climate change and now doctors, economists, geologist, meteorologists, chemists, biologists, sociologist, ecologists and computer scientists are saying important things about climate change as each adds new pieces to the puzzle. This is not a conversation anyone with an IQ over 80 can ignore anymore. To do so flies in the face of both common sense, and any serious grounding in reality. No matter how much you believe your warm and fuzzy lord will protect you from climate change, I'm here to let you know as kindly as I can, you're gonna sweat just like the rest.
The problem is complicated. Tens of thousands of scientists working in hundreds of different disciplines from experts in plant reproduction to experts in satellite imaging have added pieces to puzzle. Things are accelerating much faster than expected (in most areas and slower than expected in others, remember I said its complicated.) We now have literally more data than we know what to do with, but as we sift through it, the patterns are becoming clearer and clearer.
The polar regions will be hit hardest by warming.
Billions of people worldwide will face water shortages as glaciers vanish and famines when glacier fed waters stop irrigating crops.
Loss of arable land and viable living space will put increasing pressure on growing populations, and fixed national borders will make migration virtually impossible
Changes in ocean chemistry are already causing die offs and increasing blooms of jellyfish, and will probably fuel a mass extinction of key fish populations we rely on today for food.
Forests around the world will experience drought and burn off, resulting in significant loss of plant base carbon sequestration further exacerbating the problem
Increases average temperatures will increase the decomposition of plant matter release increasing amounts of CO2 and methane both greenhouse gases and further exacerbating climate change.
There are thousand of simple facts, including rising sea levels, enhanced storms, enhanced flood/drought occurrence and the spread of tropical diseases. In fact we're seeing all these things right now (check the stats for the last 130 years, its all right there.) Look at trends not instances. The water was muddied by pandering spin doctors working for global fossil fuel interests. There has been an endless campaign of FUD and deception designed to allow billionaires the right to continue pillaging the environment without personal cost. Scientists are primarily interests in exposing the truth. Yes there are exceptions, but I would trust a scientist hands down before I trusted an industrialist. For every point of contention the business folks point at, I'm seeing 10,000 points that nobody can argue with. The bible had a phrase "Straining the gnat and swallowing the camel...".
The fact it has become politicized demands that we get clear that people are willing to continue to block all meaningful action by obfuscation. It it well past time to take meaningful action for cleaning up our mess and preserving a world worth bequeathing to our children.
Or petting the puss, or spanking the monkey...
There comes a time when a group of people do something so loopy, so profoundly bizarre and purely inane, that nothing you can say or do will in any way impact them socially. They have already gone someplace you can only point a finger at, and stare gobsmacked. How would you even attempt to mock or parody such behavior? Perhaps they'll release a calendar, Pamela Anderson squatting in a kitty litter box? Betty White and a TJ Donkey? Ow!!! My head hurts. I think I'll go lay down now.
There was a time that the borg face was well earned. Microsoft at one time had a reputation for dirty deeds done cheap (a lot of behind the scenes Machiavellian manipulations and orchestrations designed to kill off competitors, real and perceived.) Bill had a reputation for being ruthless, and Microsoft had a penchant for partnering with other companies duplicating their core technology then burying them.
I applaud Bill for getting religion and looking to polish up his karma, being a humanitarian beats being a corporate hit man. That said, M$ is nowhere near the threat they use to be. They have solid competition on every front, and though Windows 8 may finally get them in the budding phone and tablet market, its going to be a long tough slog, and I wouldn't hold my breath. If I was going to put a borg face on anyone these days it would be Larry Ellison. Talk about assimilation and an ego with its own zip code.
I kinda like this image of Steve Balmer for the new Microsoft logo. Perhaps with little dark shades doing the Ray Charles/Stevie Wonder head tilt. Or better yet, a paper captains hat. Something rowdy without being too mean spirited.
Dude get a clue, hell, rent one, they're cheap, its the 21rst century... I figure kindergarteners have heard about space-time, if that's your signal for condescending you seriously need to consider a few night courses. The ideas proffered have been common conversations for magazines and science programs from PBS to the Discovery Channel (you do know how to read... yes?) If this is what passes for pedantic in your eyes, then I'm afraid it says a lot more about you than it does about me. As for being a charlatan, for the love o' Jebus go Google something (anything) before venting such profound ignorance.
I'm sorry you missed the point of what I was saying, that human beings and seagulls both belong. That the problem isn't seagulls and never has been. That all life can and should be respected and that people need to take responsibility for the stupid, shitty, shoddy crap they inflict on the planet and one another. If I wasn't laughing it was because this is one of the biggest threats we'll face this century. Diseases that we made indestructible because some idiot thought it might increase the yield of his cattle herd by 0.04%. Please, feel free, I'd love to hear a good resistant infection joke. Heard the one about the guy walking down the street with the red, running, pustulent sores? Yeah, I didn't think so.
Both comments are equally ignorant. It is arguable that we are the universe attempting to understand itself. That is perhaps one of the highest possible destinies of space time. That said, most human beings barely aspire to know more than which way to put their underwear on (that and how to mate, endlessly.) We only hate seagulls and rats because they are intelligent and are successful in human shaped environments.
Let's get clear about this. The existence of resistant bacteria is the result of indiscriminate use of antibiotics by lazy, greedy, self serving aggro-businesses and government regulatory bodies with neither the power nor the mandate to protect our local (let alone global) environment from vast degradation by multinational corporations. This is just one more item on a list that now more than anything else resembles one of those giant cheese wheels of toilet paper unrolled. Blaming birds for this is like blaming rats for the black death in Europe. Europeans killed all the cats and old ladies because they thought they were in league with the devil. They lived in places of extreme crowding and pitiful sanitation. The rats overpopulated, the rat fleas bit both humans and rats and both became reservoirs for plague. In the end 1 in 3 people died and it was people who hand made a disaster through ignorance, superstition and acting against their own best interest. Wow, things haven't really changed all that much in 500 years.
I'm sorry but moral relativism and decay is the friggin hallmark of this entire debacle. Let's do this by the numbers;
1. When the Clinton staff was leaving the White House they made a passionate plea to the incoming administration to keep an eagle eye on Bin-laden because they has solid intell that he was up to something ugly. Instead the Bush Administration lead by Dick Cheney spent the next 9 month trying desperately to start a new umbrella missile defense initiative so he could get a bunch of no bid contracts for Halliburton.
2. Our nation has always had strict rules for managing flights that are no been in proper communication up to and including scrambling jets to intercept a jet that hasn't been in communication for more than 10 minutes. Shortly before 9/11 Rumsfeld was put in charge of nations air security and planse could not be scrambled without his say so. He was unavailable to have the jets scrambled until well after the attacks. There is a solid case here for at least criminal negligence, and strong hints at something much worse.
3. Upon the certain attribution of the attack on Al Queda, The Bush Administration, lead by Dick Cheney, began beating a drum to invade Iraq, a country without a single member of Al Queda in its borders, whose only justification for invasion was to pillage their oil resources and provide Dick Cheney an endless supply of no bid contracts for Halliburton. To quote Dick Cheney, when asked why weren't pursuing Bin Laden where he and Al Queda lived (Afghanistan), his response was "There are no good targets in Afghanistan, we're going after Hussein instead."
4. The only justification the Bush Administration could come up with for this insane misadventure, was that Saddam had yellow cake uranium and was a threat to US security (and we were all scared as hell after 9/11.) One of the top experts in the world was sent to determine if the threat had any validity, and when he came back and informed The Bush Administration, the CIA, the FBI and finally when nobody else would listen the Washington Post that there was exactly zero credible threat. The Bush Administration outed his wife as a CIA agent (this was tied back to Karl (Turd Blossom) Rove. This single act clearly qualifies legally as an act of treason.
5. When ex-general Colin Powell, one of the finest and most decorated and respected soldiers to come out of the first Gulf War informed the Bush Administration that the first president Bush's was wise for leaving Iraq alone, and that if "We broke it we'd have to buy i." with innocent Iraqi lives and the lives of our young soldiers, the men in charge of the Bush Administration cut him out of the decision making, and ultimately out of the cabinet altogether.
6. The in the name of national security, they gutted the Bill of Rights, eliminated Habeus Corpus, legalized no warrant wire taps and domestic espionage on a scale never before seen in this country, discarded the Geneva Convention and allowed torture as an allowable means of extracting information and in general just crapped on pretty much everything that distinguished our culture as something worth preserving. By the way if you saw 60 Minutes this evening you'd discover that one of the best CIA interrogators we have in the middle east stated for the record that the Bush Administration just plain lied when it said that torture produced even a single useable piece of information, and he clearly explained why it would always fail to do so in the middle east.
See I don't defend Saddam Hussein, because the man was a vomitous waste of human protein. I just say that bombing the crap out of innocent civilians and getting 10,000 of our best and brightest brought home in body bag, while turning their country into a toxic cesspool in the name of oil and greed and personal self indulgence rates as one of the most heinous things this country has been involved in, in the last 100 years, and we've been involved in some pretty disgusting business. It took Obama what, 3 years to nail Bin Laden? Iraq is still b
Its worse than that. A company orders 10,000 units of product X. You have to manufacture 11,000 units to account for "spoilage" loss, damage in shipment, and the occasional snatch off the freighter to take home to friends and family. The result is you end up with 800 extra at the end of shipment so you either convince the buyer to also purchase the surplus or you sell them to someone who will put a cheapo label on it and sell at wholesale prices.
In fact, if you can discover the path of production, its one of the very best ways to get a great deal. I picked up a $1,700 guitar, for $150 and the only difference was minor changes in the scroll work to hide the intended brand, and less expensive hardware. Spent a couple hundred on superior hardware and had an exceptional instrument worth over five times what I paid for it.
The mistake here was trying to get top dollar as a counterfeit. Now a days with the draconian laws that corporations have gotten passed, its a wonder its not a capital offense.
Look at the planets in our own solar system. The gas giants and actually good models for stars forming in a collapsing solar nebula. We have Jupiter rich in all kinds of elements, with each planet becoming less enriched as you move out to Neptune which is almost entirely helium and hydrogen. There are all kinds of effects that may be part of close interaction with other large planets, The relative position of the planet and its development in the young stellar nebula that determined what elements would be abundant and which would be rare. Not the relative abundance of heavier elements as you get closer to the sun. Imagine also the impact of the young sun first turning on and pushing its birth nebula away and all that hydrogen and helium freezing out there in the Oort Cloud.
Stars most often form in large nebulae in clusters, that is they form alone. Imagine a super massive star like Eta Carina forming, a star more than 100 time larger than our sun, blasting its nebula away and concentrating vast amounts of hydrogen and helium separated from heavier elements. Imaging other new young stars in a large nebula interacting gravitationally with dwarf stars and gas giants, possibly robbing them of heavy elements or at least concentrating heavier elements away from where the star formed. Star formation is a complicated process and we are just now getting some clue as to how complicated planet formation is, we still don't have the foggiest idea of what can happen to a star in its developing phases.
This star is certainly rare, however I would dare guess that anything that can happen to a star in a universe with hundreds of billions of stars in a galaxy, and hundred of billions or even trillions of galaxies in the universe has or will happen, and that we haven't even scratched the surface of what is weird or rare. The universe is a busy place, and we've only had eyes to see it for a paltry few decades.
You wouldn't mine a star, well you might mine a black dwarf or cold neutron star, provided you had a means for landing then taking off from a gravity well hundreds to millions of times stronger/deeper than the earth's. For stars still in the active process of fusion, there simply isn't any form of matter that wouldn't immediately evaporate and ionize into plasma. Your only possible way to work on mining a star would be to create some kind of force field powered by the star itself, that somehow isolated you from the stars plasma and radiation such that you would be able to access the matter of the star without being consumed in its nuclear fire.
Thinking about it and the shear difficulty involved in mining a star, it would be many orders of magnitude easier to collect the solar wind and mine that for hydrogen. Then fuse it to make your helium and get some energy while you're at it.
Of course, If you were going to mine helium and hydrogen, you would be far more likely to succeed by doing quick skips into then out of a gas giant's atmosphere, this too would be a dangerous and turbulent process, but at least there is some tiny fraction of a percent possibility for success.
The only thing you could meaningfully do with a star is mine its energy and gravity well... "Can you say Dyson Sphere?"
Makes one wonder if there is a less toxic way to attain the same effect? Definitely an ice breaker at parties! On the flip side, adding this concoction to embalming fluid would almost certainly make for exciting funerals!!!
When you "Blend" a mouse, you are typically doing some kind of chemical or cellular assay (depending on the level of blending you may be looking at whole cells, but more than likely you're looking at chemistry, genetic material or sub cellular organelles.) Making a Frappe' of Mr. Muscus, really makes doing other testing difficult to impossible and adding large amounts of oxygen to disrupted tissues damages delicate cellular chemistry, ultimately ruining your research. So when you make mouse soup, it should as much as possible be sans frothy head.
Charity doesn't fix underlying problems any more than antibiotics fix underlying systemic failure that lead to life threatening infections. However, if you don't provide the antibiotics, the patient dies. Hundreds of millions of people are alive today because of people who were generous enough to help those who could not help themselves, and that help includes money, time, labor, and the essentials of life. To be clear, I'm not talking about cultural failures, I'm talking about disasters (some natural, many man-made.) From Catrina to the Indonesian Tsunami, from Haiti to the devastating earthquakes in China and Japan, we've helped those who were in no position to help themselves, and these are true acts of charity. This is distinct from assuaging a guilty conscience by giving a bum a buck, who will promptly drink a dollars worth of rot-gut. That buck honors neither giver nor the receiver.
So if you are saying that saving those in need is pointless because it doesn't address the real problem, I would counter, save the people in need, then by all means, address the real problem. That doesn't mean let millions die a horrible unnecessary death. Of course you might be more of the mind "If [the poor] would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population" -- Ebenezer Scrooge.
Steve's lack of philanthropic endeavor paints a picture of a man more interested in himself than others. Absolutely not a crime, its not even evil per se'. Its just small.
Our society it predicated on making a mark on the universe. We are obsessed with painting the scenery with our big fat egos. Its kind of sad and pathetic. You don't see astronomers with ego issues for the most part, because they have a fair sense of man's importance in the big picture. Until we get over ourselves (as individual selves), our focus won't be contributing to a future worth living in for human beings, and with 7,000,000,000 on the planet now, perhaps its a good time to make this shift while there still is a future left for human beings. As for Steve, good run, you did some amazing things. You also did some heinous things. All in all, you deserve the great respect of a man with a vision and the courage to see it through. God speed.
Why to people pay more far a car with a prestigious name as opposed to a better vehicle? There is absolutely an aspect of fashion and style in Apple's products, they planned it that way. You pay the premium, because they told you to have an Apple you must. People are a little crazy that way.