There are effectively an unlimited supply of large heavy rocks on the ground up there.
Would you say that being at the top of that well has military value over those at the bottom of the well? You can drop rocks on them all day long, for just about zero energy.
Bottom of the well = earth, top of the well = the moon, rocks = moon rocks.
Yessir, being on the moon would be great if you wanted to rule the earth with an iron heel.
And no, it wouldn't necessarily be possible to detect a moon launch as people here have boldly stated. Due to the low gravity well, such things could be done very quietly (or on the backside!) and with a minimum of absorbative coating on the rock, you could probably slip under the radar until it was far too late to do anything about it, apart from evacuate the doomed city. Maybe some of the richest nations in the world have the resources to scan rigorously enough to do this, but certainly not the vast majority.
And even if you did detect it, you wouldn't know exactly where it's going to end up. Attitude jets on the back of the rock could retarget that sucker until very late in the trajectory. You could put 5 rocks into space and tell someone they've got 3 days to meet your demands or you'll level 6 random cities. If they pay up, you just veer the rocks into space and no harm done.
Mammals aren't particularly efficient. In fact it's damned expensive to keep our homeostatic mechanisms in place.
It's worth it of course, active temperature regulation lets us stay awake during the night and has let our neurons become more delicately tuned (and therefore we're smarter than cold blooded critters).
But it's a mistake to assume that we're more efficient from an energy perspective. You spend a huge chunk of you caloric input keeping your extremeties warm, and your brain cool. It's like your own personal environment suit built into your body. Lots of advantages, but very expensive to operate.
Now maybe their extreme size made dinosaurs less efficient, but I tend to think it's that being cold blooded they are less resistant to climactic change. A period of dynamic weather, with patterns changing faster than migration could handle, would tend to be very bad for anything cold blooded.
Also consider, before warm blooded things came about, nighttime must have been very safe and quiet in large areas of the world. All of a sudden warm blooded critters arrive on the scene and find this amazing niche, namely eating sleeping dinosaurs at night:)
Once current flows, as in an arc of this type, the metal will heat up very rapidly and could easily burn paper. I suspect uneven radiation (or even minute flaws) of the metal strips in the bills caused arcing between them, which burned through the paper.
More likely: They had the bills in a stack and voltage irregularities developed between strips in different bills.
No matter how much training a soldier receives, when real bullets start whizzing over their heads all that "it's a game" crap goes right out the window. The primitive brain will continue to know the difference between real and virtual until we move to total immersion.
The easier way to get soldiers to think it's a game is not to train them ahead of time, but to build a shell around them that distances them from the real sensory input. Power armor, heavily enhanced vision, etc. You put a barrier between them and the reality of the situation and now the primitive fear responses have a harder time figuring out how close to death you are.
The difference is that there's no good reason to use neurons. You could accomplish the same thing with silicon models of neurons. The only problem is that we don't know exactly how to model them yet.
The precise properties of individual Neurons are unpredictable and highly variable. Worse, they require constant life support just to stay alive. A 5 minute power interruption to your neural CPU and it's time to go shopping for a new one. You would certainly not want to build a practical computing tool out of them.
Neural computing will remain the domain of highly specialized research into AI and neural computing forever. We may develop neural analogs using nanotech or some other gee-whiz tech, but they will not be true neurons.
What an awful idea, it's just another expensive way for modern cars to stop working, as if they need one. I can't imagine such technology would be reliable over the long term, and in different weather/environmental conditions. "No sorry, can't drive today, it's too humid/dry/cold/hot."
I predict $500 repair bills for replacing $5 chemical sensor elements. I also imagine refit kits available on the internet to disable these things, or to store up sober breaths (& later reheat/hydrate them) to be used later.
I'm sure it'll reduce drunk driving, but sometimes the cure is worse than the problem. I don't want to be stranded on the motorway at negative -10 degrees farenheit because my breathalyzer is broken.
I think the US will finally have reached the end-state of its current decline into lunacy when everyone is implanted into an environmentally sealed, armored chamber at birth. We'll become the land of the bubble people. Noone can do anything, but our lifespans are.4 years higher so it's worth it.
There was a day when hollywood was populated by people's who's job was to make good movies, not money. So I'll villify them all day long because they're not there to do art, they're there because they smell a fast way to a cozy lifestyle.
One can imagine a future in which such "vigilante" retribution towards companies that are generally perceived to be behaving badly is a significant factor in determining corporate policy.
i.e. Well, if we do , the courts will let us, but the virus community will hit us hard on release day, with consequent profit losses from failed registrations.
Nuclear power could be so much better, so much more tightly integrated into our lives and industry, even in those countries that have adopted it more heavily.
We could have, for example, small, self contained nuclear generators that could power a remote town in Alaska without running in costly wires. Or perhaps even nuclear AA batteries.
Developing these things very safely is within our grasp but hard to find money for (and even harder to find a market for).
I dont believe in brand loyalty. Cause no company has believed in customer loyalty.
On the contrary, many smouldering corpses of the Dotcom era believed precisely that. The idea was to piss money to get customers who would then stick around when you changed from a free to a pay service.
I don't believe in brand loyalty either, but it's not because of any moralistic judgements about the failings of companies, it's simply because no company deserves my money today unless they earned it today. That's the cornerstone of capitalism right there.
But in the Trek verse it has changed for humans. There's no more money, there's no more hunger or physical wants, and for the most part the human government is a big peaceful teddy bear that bends over backwards to help out the rest of the universe unless in very dire straits.
It's a highly sanitized view of human nature, us as we'd like to be, not us as we most likely will be (if the last 6000 years are any indication).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't what their definition of spyware is, but I'd be amazed if it was fewer than one in three.
I would have guessed one in two.
Here's an analogy.
You're standing at the bottom of a well.
50 feet above you is the rim of the well.
There are effectively an unlimited supply of large heavy rocks on the ground up there.
Would you say that being at the top of that well has military value over those at the bottom of the well? You can drop rocks on them all day long, for just about zero energy.
Bottom of the well = earth, top of the well = the moon, rocks = moon rocks.
Yessir, being on the moon would be great if you wanted to rule the earth with an iron heel.
And no, it wouldn't necessarily be possible to detect a moon launch as people here have boldly stated. Due to the low gravity well, such things could be done very quietly (or on the backside!) and with a minimum of absorbative coating on the rock, you could probably slip under the radar until it was far too late to do anything about it, apart from evacuate the doomed city. Maybe some of the richest nations in the world have the resources to scan rigorously enough to do this, but certainly not the vast majority.
And even if you did detect it, you wouldn't know exactly where it's going to end up. Attitude jets on the back of the rock could retarget that sucker until very late in the trajectory. You could put 5 rocks into space and tell someone they've got 3 days to meet your demands or you'll level 6 random cities. If they pay up, you just veer the rocks into space and no harm done.
Mammals aren't particularly efficient. In fact it's damned expensive to keep our homeostatic mechanisms in place.
:)
It's worth it of course, active temperature regulation lets us stay awake during the night and has let our neurons become more delicately tuned (and therefore we're smarter than cold blooded critters).
But it's a mistake to assume that we're more efficient from an energy perspective. You spend a huge chunk of you caloric input keeping your extremeties warm, and your brain cool. It's like your own personal environment suit built into your body. Lots of advantages, but very expensive to operate.
Now maybe their extreme size made dinosaurs less efficient, but I tend to think it's that being cold blooded they are less resistant to climactic change. A period of dynamic weather, with patterns changing faster than migration could handle, would tend to be very bad for anything cold blooded.
Also consider, before warm blooded things came about, nighttime must have been very safe and quiet in large areas of the world. All of a sudden warm blooded critters arrive on the scene and find this amazing niche, namely eating sleeping dinosaurs at night
Once current flows, as in an arc of this type, the metal will heat up very rapidly and could easily burn paper. I suspect uneven radiation (or even minute flaws) of the metal strips in the bills caused arcing between them, which burned through the paper.
More likely: They had the bills in a stack and voltage irregularities developed between strips in different bills.
This whole article is so damned stupid.
In the meanwhile, we can all spread the word, discuss, debate and brainstorm every nook and cranny of the program here on Slashdot
/. comments are going to be a key role in the development of this technology.
Yes, I'm sure
I wonder how they'll cite us in the papers they publish?
No matter how much training a soldier receives, when real bullets start whizzing over their heads all that "it's a game" crap goes right out the window. The primitive brain will continue to know the difference between real and virtual until we move to total immersion.
The easier way to get soldiers to think it's a game is not to train them ahead of time, but to build a shell around them that distances them from the real sensory input. Power armor, heavily enhanced vision, etc. You put a barrier between them and the reality of the situation and now the primitive fear responses have a harder time figuring out how close to death you are.
Take that hard drive out and scrub it with a brillo pad.
A better name for this project might be Flash Petri Dish.
It was a ruttin' Office Space quote, were you people all lobotomized today?
Yes it's horrible, this idea.
The difference is that there's no good reason to use neurons. You could accomplish the same thing with silicon models of neurons. The only problem is that we don't know exactly how to model them yet.
Yes, I meant to add that as well (it came out of my fingers as "neural computing" instead of "neural interfaces")
But that's a far cry from being the future of computing, which implies that we'll use biological neural tissue instead of fabricated CPU's.
This is certainly not the future of computing!
The precise properties of individual Neurons are unpredictable and highly variable. Worse, they require constant life support just to stay alive. A 5 minute power interruption to your neural CPU and it's time to go shopping for a new one. You would certainly not want to build a practical computing tool out of them.
Neural computing will remain the domain of highly specialized research into AI and neural computing forever. We may develop neural analogs using nanotech or some other gee-whiz tech, but they will not be true neurons.
What an awful idea, it's just another expensive way for modern cars to stop working, as if they need one. I can't imagine such technology would be reliable over the long term, and in different weather/environmental conditions. "No sorry, can't drive today, it's too humid/dry/cold/hot."
.4 years higher so it's worth it.
I predict $500 repair bills for replacing $5 chemical sensor elements. I also imagine refit kits available on the internet to disable these things, or to store up sober breaths (& later reheat/hydrate them) to be used later.
I'm sure it'll reduce drunk driving, but sometimes the cure is worse than the problem. I don't want to be stranded on the motorway at negative -10 degrees farenheit because my breathalyzer is broken.
I think the US will finally have reached the end-state of its current decline into lunacy when everyone is implanted into an environmentally sealed, armored chamber at birth. We'll become the land of the bubble people. Noone can do anything, but our lifespans are
Those Link farms were starting to sweat a bit about increasing the scale of their operations by another factor of 10.
It's not a tumor!
There was a day when hollywood was populated by people's who's job was to make good movies, not money. So I'll villify them all day long because they're not there to do art, they're there because they smell a fast way to a cozy lifestyle.
There should have been a "insert bad thing" in that last line, but I stupidly created an html tag by using >
One can imagine a future in which such "vigilante" retribution towards companies that are generally perceived to be behaving badly is a significant factor in determining corporate policy.
i.e. Well, if we do , the courts will let us, but the virus community will hit us hard on release day, with consequent profit losses from failed registrations.
Comparing this outsourcing with English imperialism is far off the mark. The two aren't even vaguely similar.
And you've got a lot of nerve telling people they should be ashamed of taking jobs that feed their children.
Nuclear power could be so much better, so much more tightly integrated into our lives and industry, even in those countries that have adopted it more heavily.
We could have, for example, small, self contained nuclear generators that could power a remote town in Alaska without running in costly wires. Or perhaps even nuclear AA batteries.
Developing these things very safely is within our grasp but hard to find money for (and even harder to find a market for).
Mod Parent Up.
Take THAT Mars!
earth pwned u
That's genius. Much as I hate spammers, I have to admire this very clever solution.
I dont believe in brand loyalty. Cause no company has believed in customer loyalty.
On the contrary, many smouldering corpses of the Dotcom era believed precisely that. The idea was to piss money to get customers who would then stick around when you changed from a free to a pay service.
I don't believe in brand loyalty either, but it's not because of any moralistic judgements about the failings of companies, it's simply because no company deserves my money today unless they earned it today. That's the cornerstone of capitalism right there.
But in the Trek verse it has changed for humans. There's no more money, there's no more hunger or physical wants, and for the most part the human government is a big peaceful teddy bear that bends over backwards to help out the rest of the universe unless in very dire straits.
It's a highly sanitized view of human nature, us as we'd like to be, not us as we most likely will be (if the last 6000 years are any indication).