If you can't scale this up to eyeglass size, why not just replace your *whole* lens with one of these.
Anchoring it would be a heck of a problem. The repeated accelerations whenever you move your eye would put quite a bit of stress on whatever attachment you use to bind this lens to the eye. I'd be concerned about doing damage to the rest of the eye.
Then you get into the question of powering the device. Hiding a battery in your eyeball is just not on--I don't think--and an external power source would need to have wires...how do you get power to the front of the eye? Note again that they eye moves. Also, you still have to blink.
I'm not saying it's impossible--but we're a long, long way from implanting a device like this.
Re:Eh, what's this 90 minute nonsense?
on
Meet the Nasalnaut
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· Score: 2, Informative
So, we're supposed to believe that because the sun rises and sets every 90 minutes things smell differently?
Yep. The internal temperature is mostly constant, yes, but not perfectly so. There are parts of the Shuttle that are less-than-perfectly insulated, and there are areas that are exposed to sunlight through windows. All of those areas are going to expand and contract during the day/night cycle. That expansion and contraction will squeeze objects like a sponge on a microscopic scale, resulting in much more rapid outgassing than you see under most conditions on earth.
Day/night cycle aside, smell is a much bigger problem just because it's a confined space with lots of people and equipment...and you can't open the windows.
Noise is probably a much bigger issue. In the quietness of space the soft whir of a fan in the ventelation system will sound like a 747.
The astronauts don't get to hear the silence of space. They're aboard a small and very active spacecraft. In addition to the noise from the air handlers, there's going to be all kinds of sound just from the other astronauts doing experiments, preparing equipment, and chatting. I'd be quite surprised if most of them didn't wear earplugs to sleep.
My university has online fulltext access to 1635 different journals and preprints--whose names start with the letter 'A'. (A&G Information Services to Azerbaijan International). As of April 2003, they licensed 19375 electronic serials; we've probably cleared twenty thousand now. (There's another thirty thousand serials in dead tree form, though some of those are duplicated in several locations, and some overlap with the electronic periodicals.)
The vast majority of these electronic subscriptions are accessible to students from their home computers through some sort of proxy. Unlike a physical library, we can make essentially unlimited concurrent use of most of the resources. For a large university with a substantial population of graduate students doing research, desktop access to a large number of journals is virtually indispensible.
For a music-oriented college, I can see the benefits of a readily-accessible online music service. Is Napster the best choice? Who knows. Should it be dismissed out of hand as a waste? I don't think that's fair.
Why the hell was someone carrying around $1000, mostly in 20s, in their wallet?
And yet you're on Slashdot...
I was carrying around just shy of a thousand dollars in cash last summer when I bought parts to assemble a new computer. The shop I bought from charges an extra three percent if you use a credit card, because that's roughly what the bank charges the store to process the transaction.
A lot of shops won't accept hundred-dollar notes due to fear of counterfeits, and some of the local fast-food establishments have stopped taking fifties. So carrying around a thousand dollars in twenties, though a rare occurrence, isn't necessarily completely insane.
The race is on! Will I get the file before the server dies?!?
Old joke:
A statistician and his friend are flying aboard a 747 from London to New York. An hour or so out of La Guardia, the captain comes on to the loudspeakers.
"Folks, I'm just letting you know that we've lost an engine. There's nothing to worry about; we've got three more. However, we've lost a bit of airspeed, so our revised ETA is in two hours."
The pair shrugged off the announcement and settled back in their seats. A few minutes later they heard a loud bang, and the captain once again addressed the passengers.
"Hello folks, this is your Captain speaking. That little noise was our number three engine. No worries, we still have two more. But we're down a bit more speed, so we'll be at La Guardia in four hours."
The statistician grew contemplative, while his friend started to get a bit nervous. Wouldn't you know it, but there was a thump, and the captain once again came on the air. He started to sound a bit anxious this time around...
"Uh, folks...we seem to have lost the number one engine. I'm afraid it's going to take us another six and a half hours to make New York."
With that, the statistician's companion started fidgeting obsessively. The statistician turned to him and said,
"Yeah, I know how you feel. If we lose that last engine, we'll never land."
"
Let me know when they find some sort of bacteria or micro-organism. Water... pffffft.
Read the articles again. We've known for years that water is present on Mars. What's interesting here is evidence of liquid water, at or near the surface.
Why is this interesting? It's much easier to do biochemistry in liquid water than in the solid stuff. If nothing else, reactions can proceed more rapidly. So finding liquid water is a plausible first step towards finding life on Mars. It's not necessarily required, and its presence is no guarantee of life, but it's not a bad place to start.
But it seems so perverse. There is such a huge waste of life and resources going on all around us. Nothing we ever find on Mars will be remotely as interesting as - say - a bucket of seawater from any corner of the world's oceans.
Maybe, maybe not. An actual living organism from Mars would be tremendously interesting, simply because it did evolve somewhere else. We'd get to see an evolutionary 'what-if' question answered.
Looking at the differences--and similarities--between terrestrial and Martian organisms could be incredibly illuminating. Looking only at Earth life, and Earth fossils, and Earth biochemistry is like examining in detail one grandmaster chess match. Interesting, challenging, surprising, and complex...but it doesn't explore all the aspects of the game.
Life on other worlds would be an opportunity to examine another game. The rules (physics) are the same for everyone, but the game is different each time you play.
Mind you, I agree that we're not doing a great job of managing the diversity of life we have here on Earth. I am utterly gobsmacked at all the useful compounds extracted so far from extremophilic organisms. Then again, Martian life would be the utimate extremophiles--near vacuum, hard radiation...very impressive.
f a site exposes an RSS feed, and 50,000 people subscribe to that feed and refresh that feed every 10 minutes, you get 3mil requests for that feed per hour, you can do the math yourself how much bandwith that consumes if the feed is larger than a couple of bytes.
When--as instructed--I do the math myself, that comes out to 300,000 feeds. Cheers.:D
Not that I disagree with the parent's basic point, though some of the bandwidth concerns are lightened by (use of and readers that recognize) 304 Modified headers, ETags, and If-Modified-Since headers.
Re:1/625 possibility of being destroyed in 2031
on
Space Elevators Going Up
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Instead of a fixed cable that has to support it's own weight, how about a large satellite or space station in geo-syncronous orbit, with 2 cables, one that comes down to earth and one that goes the opposite direction into space as a counter balance.
Well, for one thing, that is a cable that has to support its own weight. You're still projecting an elevator cable from geosynchronous orbit down to the surface of the earth--actually, this suggestion just does it twice.
Not that that is a bad thing in and of itself--if the cables are a sufficient distance apart, the odds that both of them will be taken down by the Leonids should be on the order of (1/625)^2, or less than 1 in a hundred thousand. I'd be inclined to make the first project of each new cable to come online be the construction of another cable. In addition to rapidly increasing our cargo capacity, such a strategy would make the repair and replacement of damaged cables much easier.
However, winding the cables back up would be a nontrivial task, and very likely impossible*. These aren't going to be ribbons of fixed width, or cylinders of constant diameter. The cable would have to be much thicker near the top--where it would have to support its entire weight--and taper to a very narrow structure at the earth end. Constructing it would be hard enough--reliably winding it in and out...I shudder to think.
*Okay, not impossible--but the risk of damage to the cables on winding would be greater than the risk of leaving them in place. We've got a cable forty thousand kilometers long. Pull steadily on one end--what happens? You start winding in, and the far end doesn't move. It's forty million meters away--it doesn't know you did anything. The cable stretches. A ripple of tension runs along millions of meters of cable. Eventually, the cable snaps, or you whip the far end toward you waaaay faster than you want to. It's a brutally complex (and probably chaotic) system,and it's a scale of problem we have no experience with. Oh, and while I'm on about this, I should observe that pulling up 650 tons of cable to an unanchored space station could cause some problems, too...if you do it wrong, then you just pull your geosynchronous station down. Oops. Credit to Arthur C. Clarke and The Fountains of Paradise for this observation; any errors in paraphrasing are mine.
The most economical way by far (factor of 1000 or so) to build the *second* space elevator is to use the first one to lift the components. This provides a very simple way to lock out the competition: refuse to lift their CNT ribbon.
But a space elevator isn't an operating system or a software suite. It doesn't have to be interoperable with other space elevators in the manner of networked computers. Nor is it like a railway--there are no fixed right-of-ways. There's no limit on the number of tracks to space that can be built. (At least, not that we have to worry about in the next few decades.)
The owner of the first elevator can prevent other people from building a second elevator for less money than he can by refusing to lift their ribbon...but he can't keep them from doing it for the same price as it cost to put the first one up. You can bet that national governments not on friendly terms with the first owner will immediately band together to invest in their own elevator. Actually, they'll likely start a crash program as soon as it looks like the first elevator might be built. Remember--building the second elevator will be a lot faster and cheaper than building the first one, just because we'll already know not only how to do it, but that it can be done.
Heck, you never know. Maybe the elevator will be put under the control of an international non-profit organization. Maybe everyone will get along. Maybe the freight charges will be reasonable. Now I'm just dreaming...
How is this at all relevent? So I lend it to a person who then decides to put small children in a blender for lunch...
My point is only that it's not unreasonable for the police to use the licence plate number from the car to try to identify the owner...
I certainly haven't commited a crime of driving through a toll without paying, if I wasn't at the time driving. If there is a law on the books saying you can be fined if yourself, an acquaintance, or an acquaintance of an acquaintance goes through a toll without paying, that's a different issue.
I can't speak to statutes in your jurisdiction. Many places do have those rules on the books--the owner of the car is responsible for the tolls. In Ontario, the 407 toll highway has no tollbooths. A camera scans your license plate on the on-ramp, and then sends a bill automatically to whomever has registered the plates.
If your car is parked illegally and the city tows it, you still have to pay the fine, even if it was someone else that double parked. (You're welcome to try and recover the money from that third party if you wish, but the city and police won't get involved unless the car had been stolen.)
Here's another example: We have several toll roads where I live. I sold my car a few years back; in Texas, the tags go with the car. So of course,the lowlife I sold my vehicle to decide to rack up several hundred dollars in fines for running the toll gates. The toll authority issued me a civil fine of several hundred dollars based on photographs of the rear license plate of the vehicle! Had I not been able to prove that the vehicle was in fact sold (I had a bill of sale), I would have been held liable for the fines.
I don't know if this is one that we should be bothered by.
"Officer! I didn't run those toll gates! It wasn't me driving the car!"
Was the car stolen? You reported that, right?
Did you sell it? You have a bill of sale, right? You reported that sale as appropriate on your taxes, right?
The guy you lent the car to ran the toll gates? Gee, maybe you should think about whom you lend your car to, shouldn't you?
With respect to the lowlife who skipped the tolls, the problem isn't the license plate cameras. It's the identity theft perpetrated by the guy who bought your car and failed to register the tags in his name.
Cancer is such an odd condition. I honestly believe cancer isn't directly caused by one simple situation. So many variables can go into it. Smoking may cause cancer, but I believe smoking doesn't -- it is only a risk factor.
Not a bad idea, but a poor choice of example. Smoking does demonstrably cause cancer. Recent research has identified the specific mutations to tumour-suppressing genes cause by chemicals in cigarette smoke(1). (There are very likely additional mechanisms by which smoking also causes cancer.)
Granted, it's a stochastic process. Regular exposure to cigarette smoke (or most other carcinogens) will not guarantee that you get cancer. Cumulative exposure just increases your risk, since mutations are a random process. Does smoking cause cancer in everyone who smokes? Certainly not. Is smoking a cause of cancer? Definitely. Calling it a 'risk factor' rather than a 'cause' is a copout. It's akin to saying that Russian Roulette doesn't cause gunshot wounds because only some people get shot.
If IBM had strong indications that a statistically significant number of their employees were developing unusual medical conditions, or they knew that their employees were working with compounds strongly suspected of causing health problems, that should have triggered some red flags for them. (I'm not saying that they did or did not have such knowledge. On reading the linked articles, the two cases listed could well have been flukes, and the jury decision was likely correct.)
(1): Denissenko MF, Pao A, Tang M, Pfeifer GP. "Preferential formation of benzo[a]pyrene adducts at lung cancer mutational hotspots in P53." Science. 274(5286):430-2. Oct 18, 1996.
But how often will one of these things be in the right place at the right time? You would need hundreds if not thousands sitting and digging and waiting their turn.
As another poster has pointed out, a freely rotating body not experiencing a significant tidal force (our asteroid) will only be rotating about one axis. Unless you're deliberately placing the launcher in a stupid location, it should be able to fire usefully at least fifty percent of the time. If you want to fire rocks along its axis of rotation, then bonus--you can fire all the time.
Of course, the launcher won't necessarily be precisely aligned with the center of mass of the asteroid, so a small torque will be applied with each launch. Nevertheless, these are rocket scientists--they're used to this stuff. An undergraduate education in physics is sufficient to figure out where you need to toss the rocks, and when. The hard problem is soft-landing the launchers on the rock and getting them to work happily and autonomously.
How much will these things weigh? With a nuke generator, and drilling and launching equipment to handle a pound of rock at a time over and over, say 1000 pounds max.
If that thing isn't going to get the chance to launch 1000 one pound chuncks of rock, due to not being pointed in the right direction often enough, you'd do better to slam the things into the rock to try to move it.
We're looking at change in momentum here, which is mass times velocity. It will take decidedly fewer stones tossed off if they can each be launched at extremely great velocity...on the other hand, you get quite a bit of 'free' relative velocity if you throw things head-on at the asteroid. It's an interesting point. Perhaps something to be looked at on a case-by-case basis. It depends quite a bit on which way you want to be applying the delta-v.
I am also intrigued by the parent's notion of maintaining a supply of asteroid killers at L-4...though I'm a bit concerned that someone might be tempted to misuse those stones.
Re:Search engine spam is the key...
on
Search Beyond Google
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· Score: 3, Informative
I'm surprised (in retrospect) that it took so many years for so-called ``google-whacking'' to emerge.
A Googlewhack is a two-word Google query that returns exactly one result.
The term you're looking for is probably Googlebombing, which refers to deliberately placing keywords and links on multiple domains to boost a site's PageRank. Originally, Googlebombs were pranks or in good fun, like a search for weapons of mass destruction.
Now "Googlebombing" is being expanded by some to include manipulating PageRanks for commercial ends. I'll leave it to the armchair etymologists of Slashdot to decide if that is a correct use of the term.
The UN isn't just USA but the United Nations made up of well over 100 countries. Much bigger field to influence.
To influence US policy you need to buy at most a couple of hundred Representatives and Senators. Actually, you can often get away with buying members of an appropriate committee, which may only be ten or twenty people.
To influence UN policy you need to buy at most a couple of hundred diplomats and aides. Actually, you can get wway with buying members of an appropriate committee, which may only be ten or twenty people.
In addition, many of those UN representatives will come from countries where private bodies regularly (ahem) influence public officials, and it's considered part of doing business. Outright bribery may be more socially acceptable. In the United States, at least bribery usually takes place with a nod (sometimes a wink as well...) towards the notion of plausible deniability.
Unlucky me, I fell in Geocities' good graces and was welcomed by an auto-playing sound file.
Yet another reason I browse with Opera: hit F12 and uncheck "Enable embedded audio". Uncheck "Enable GIF animation", "Enable Java", and "Enable plugins", while you're at it.
For those who are wondering, it's German, and correctly spelled Gewurztraminer. (Strictly speaking proper German calls for an umlaut on the u, but English speakers can get away without it.) The name comes from the village of Temeno in Italy (Tramin in German) where the grape's ancestors were first grown. The original Traminer grape was tweaked through selective breeding around 1870 to give it more flavour, and so Gewurztraminer was born. "Gewurztraminer" translates approximately as "spiced/spicy [grape] from Tramin".
Incidentally, do you have a reference for that case study? I'd be interested.
So basically what you're saying is you're fine with being guilty of tax evasion until you prove yourself innocent.
No, that's not an accurate statement. Presumably criminal charges of tax evasion would proceed under the new system exactly as they do now. The federal or state revenue agency would provide information on the case to a prosecutor, who would then present the evidence to judge. After having an opportunity to present a defense, a judge (or jury) would decide whether or not tax evasion had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. That's how it works now, and I don't see anything here that would change that.
Under the new system, as under the present one, criminal prosecution is generally a last resort. Your quarrel seems to be with the administration of the civil side of the system. What has changed, exactly?
The Revenue Department already keeps electronic copies of your return, looking for items that raise flags (lawyers earning $20,000 per year; lots of dependents that didn't appear in previous years, etc.) If unusual stuff shows up, the state may ask for supporting documentation. This isn't new. Most (if not all) taxation systems that require returns to be filed don't exhaustively check every datum submitted--they do spot checks at random and where suspicious data appear. Would it be reasonable to expect the government to take at our word everything that appears on tax returns? If there was no checking, there would be significantly more cheating, would there not?
By integrating information from other databases it becomes possible for the government to more precisely target those spot checks. People with accurate returns are less likely to be questioned; spot checks and audits will be more likely to uncover errors in returns. This is what the new system does. To address your concerns:
The system is entirely public
Currently, only public databases have been integrated. There is discussion about adding in private databases like Dun & Bradstreet--a storehouse of information about private corporations. Access to some private databases would concern me, to others would not. Anybody can get information from D&B just by coughing up some cash--I don't think government access to it would be an invasion of privacy. The use of credit records might be more of a gray area, and one where the State would have to tread lightly.
The system is accurate...and... The system is correctable
We'd all like the taxation system to be perfectly accurate on the first go-round. It's not going to happen. People will lose paperwork (both private individuals and the government) there will be typos, taxpayers will make errors in filling out documents.
When incongruities arise between the views of the Revenue Department and the individual taxpayer, one doesn't (or shouldn't) immediately get thrown in jail. I would expect to receive a notice in the mail, "Dr. Mr. Smith. Please provide a receipt for charitable deduction X in amount Y, or you will be assessed additional tax Z", or a phone call, "Mr. Smith, the Electric Company has indicated that your business paid them two thousand dollars for electricity last year, but you have claimed six thousand. Can you explain this discrepancy?"
If they send round the SWAT team without asking first, then there's a problem, but I expect that they'll ask before they shoot. Dead men don't generate quite so much tax revenue.
The system is transparent - I should have the right to know what will cause me to be audited.
Well, no. There's the obvious--you can expect to draw interest if you have a six-million-dollar home and a twenty-thousand-dollar per year income. You might get audited if you take advantage of creative tax shelters. You'll probably be looking at an audit if you're working as a waiter but don't declare any income from tips. But guess what--revenue agencies audit some people completely at random. Even if you do
So what? Your grandma gets investigated. She has nothing to hide. So after months of jumping through hoops and being accused of all kinds of thing she finally provides enough documentation to call off the hounds.
Most taxation systems operate on the honour system more or less. Consequently, you have to be able to back up claims you make on your return with paperwork. I live in Canada, and there's a number of different slips and receipts that I'm required to retain for my records--but not file with my return--in the event that I'm audited.
In the last few years, I've received a request for more documentation from the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency (loosely analogous to the IRS in the States). I mailed them a copy of the appropriate slip, and they went away. It cost me a half hour or so, but it wasn't particularly onerous.
My employer incorrectly prepared a slip (a T4, which IIRC is like a W-2 in the States) for me last year. Getting my employer to fix the slip was actually significantly more trouble than getting the government to refund the tax that I had been made to overpay.
Why is there a presumption that the government will hound you mercilessly if they want to do a spot check on your tax return? And why is it unreasonable to expect the government to look more closely at your return if you do things that set off alarm bells? It would be a ridiculous waste of time and money to go over every tax return with a fine-toothed comb. Why not use information at their disposal to better target those spot checks?
The law already says that buyers should be paying sales tax, but it's so silly that most people never do. This software could start enforcing that, creating a huge burden on everyone. Quite unfortunate.
Yep. It's too bad that you would have to pay the same sales tax on an item you buy online as you would pay on every other item you buy in a bricks and mortar store.
Why is it silly to expect people to obey the law when they buy products online? How is this a huge burden?
There are various social and economic arguments that can be applied against all sales taxes, but I'm having trouble seeing why a purchase made online should be a special exception when all other purchases are taxed.
Talk about a "shrinking" economy. How durable is this plastic money? Even credit cards can have a hard life (new card already has scratch marks on it).
On the other hand, 'paper' money has a limited half-life in circulation, too. Bills that receive hard use are regularly pulled by banks and replaced after a few months. This problem is eased somewhat in places (Australia, Canada, EU) that have larger-denomination coins. (Americans--look at your one-dollar bills--note the degree of wear versus the other bills in your wallet.) If I remember correctly, one-dollar bills last three to six months in circulation; fifty-dollar bills will survive a couple of years or more.
If you're so pissed off that Internet email allows unsolicited messages to be delivered to you then you can choose to not participate. If, on the other hand, you choose to participate in a messaging system that you know permits -- at the protocol level -- unsolicited messages, well, you've got to accept the fact that you might get a few of those messages.
I should know better than to reply to an anonymous coward, but here we go.
If you would like a direct analogy that is exactly on point, here it is: laws already exist banning junk faxes. These laws have gotten the thumbs-up from courts, despite advertisers trying to raise First Amendment questions.
The receiver of the message necessarily bears some of the cost of the message--toner, paper, temporary loss of use of the line for fax machines; connection and bandwidth charges for spam.
The First Amendment rights of others end when they start charging me (directly or otherwise) so they can express themselves. The First Amendment guarantees one the right to speak--it doesn't guarantee that I will pay to listen.
Slashdot Mirror
Anchoring it would be a heck of a problem. The repeated accelerations whenever you move your eye would put quite a bit of stress on whatever attachment you use to bind this lens to the eye. I'd be concerned about doing damage to the rest of the eye.
Then you get into the question of powering the device. Hiding a battery in your eyeball is just not on--I don't think--and an external power source would need to have wires...how do you get power to the front of the eye? Note again that they eye moves. Also, you still have to blink.
I'm not saying it's impossible--but we're a long, long way from implanting a device like this.
Yep. The internal temperature is mostly constant, yes, but not perfectly so. There are parts of the Shuttle that are less-than-perfectly insulated, and there are areas that are exposed to sunlight through windows. All of those areas are going to expand and contract during the day/night cycle. That expansion and contraction will squeeze objects like a sponge on a microscopic scale, resulting in much more rapid outgassing than you see under most conditions on earth.
Day/night cycle aside, smell is a much bigger problem just because it's a confined space with lots of people and equipment...and you can't open the windows.
Noise is probably a much bigger issue. In the quietness of space the soft whir of a fan in the ventelation system will sound like a 747.
The astronauts don't get to hear the silence of space. They're aboard a small and very active spacecraft. In addition to the noise from the air handlers, there's going to be all kinds of sound just from the other astronauts doing experiments, preparing equipment, and chatting. I'd be quite surprised if most of them didn't wear earplugs to sleep.
Yep.
My university has online fulltext access to 1635 different journals and preprints--whose names start with the letter 'A'. (A&G Information Services to Azerbaijan International). As of April 2003, they licensed 19375 electronic serials; we've probably cleared twenty thousand now. (There's another thirty thousand serials in dead tree form, though some of those are duplicated in several locations, and some overlap with the electronic periodicals.)
The vast majority of these electronic subscriptions are accessible to students from their home computers through some sort of proxy. Unlike a physical library, we can make essentially unlimited concurrent use of most of the resources. For a large university with a substantial population of graduate students doing research, desktop access to a large number of journals is virtually indispensible.
For a music-oriented college, I can see the benefits of a readily-accessible online music service. Is Napster the best choice? Who knows. Should it be dismissed out of hand as a waste? I don't think that's fair.
And yet you're on Slashdot...
I was carrying around just shy of a thousand dollars in cash last summer when I bought parts to assemble a new computer. The shop I bought from charges an extra three percent if you use a credit card, because that's roughly what the bank charges the store to process the transaction.
A lot of shops won't accept hundred-dollar notes due to fear of counterfeits, and some of the local fast-food establishments have stopped taking fifties. So carrying around a thousand dollars in twenties, though a rare occurrence, isn't necessarily completely insane.
Old joke:
Let me know when they find some sort of bacteria or micro-organism. Water ... pffffft.
Read the articles again. We've known for years that water is present on Mars. What's interesting here is evidence of liquid water, at or near the surface.
Why is this interesting? It's much easier to do biochemistry in liquid water than in the solid stuff. If nothing else, reactions can proceed more rapidly. So finding liquid water is a plausible first step towards finding life on Mars. It's not necessarily required, and its presence is no guarantee of life, but it's not a bad place to start.
Maybe, maybe not. An actual living organism from Mars would be tremendously interesting, simply because it did evolve somewhere else. We'd get to see an evolutionary 'what-if' question answered.
Looking at the differences--and similarities--between terrestrial and Martian organisms could be incredibly illuminating. Looking only at Earth life, and Earth fossils, and Earth biochemistry is like examining in detail one grandmaster chess match. Interesting, challenging, surprising, and complex...but it doesn't explore all the aspects of the game.
Life on other worlds would be an opportunity to examine another game. The rules (physics) are the same for everyone, but the game is different each time you play.
Mind you, I agree that we're not doing a great job of managing the diversity of life we have here on Earth. I am utterly gobsmacked at all the useful compounds extracted so far from extremophilic organisms. Then again, Martian life would be the utimate extremophiles--near vacuum, hard radiation...very impressive.
When--as instructed--I do the math myself, that comes out to 300,000 feeds. Cheers. :D
Not that I disagree with the parent's basic point, though some of the bandwidth concerns are lightened by (use of and readers that recognize) 304 Modified headers, ETags, and If-Modified-Since headers.
Well, for one thing, that is a cable that has to support its own weight. You're still projecting an elevator cable from geosynchronous orbit down to the surface of the earth--actually, this suggestion just does it twice.
Not that that is a bad thing in and of itself--if the cables are a sufficient distance apart, the odds that both of them will be taken down by the Leonids should be on the order of (1/625)^2, or less than 1 in a hundred thousand. I'd be inclined to make the first project of each new cable to come online be the construction of another cable. In addition to rapidly increasing our cargo capacity, such a strategy would make the repair and replacement of damaged cables much easier.
However, winding the cables back up would be a nontrivial task, and very likely impossible*. These aren't going to be ribbons of fixed width, or cylinders of constant diameter. The cable would have to be much thicker near the top--where it would have to support its entire weight--and taper to a very narrow structure at the earth end. Constructing it would be hard enough--reliably winding it in and out...I shudder to think.
*Okay, not impossible--but the risk of damage to the cables on winding would be greater than the risk of leaving them in place. We've got a cable forty thousand kilometers long. Pull steadily on one end--what happens? You start winding in, and the far end doesn't move. It's forty million meters away--it doesn't know you did anything. The cable stretches. A ripple of tension runs along millions of meters of cable. Eventually, the cable snaps, or you whip the far end toward you waaaay faster than you want to. It's a brutally complex (and probably chaotic) system,and it's a scale of problem we have no experience with. Oh, and while I'm on about this, I should observe that pulling up 650 tons of cable to an unanchored space station could cause some problems, too...if you do it wrong, then you just pull your geosynchronous station down. Oops. Credit to Arthur C. Clarke and The Fountains of Paradise for this observation; any errors in paraphrasing are mine.
But a space elevator isn't an operating system or a software suite. It doesn't have to be interoperable with other space elevators in the manner of networked computers. Nor is it like a railway--there are no fixed right-of-ways. There's no limit on the number of tracks to space that can be built. (At least, not that we have to worry about in the next few decades.)
The owner of the first elevator can prevent other people from building a second elevator for less money than he can by refusing to lift their ribbon...but he can't keep them from doing it for the same price as it cost to put the first one up. You can bet that national governments not on friendly terms with the first owner will immediately band together to invest in their own elevator. Actually, they'll likely start a crash program as soon as it looks like the first elevator might be built. Remember--building the second elevator will be a lot faster and cheaper than building the first one, just because we'll already know not only how to do it, but that it can be done.
Heck, you never know. Maybe the elevator will be put under the control of an international non-profit organization. Maybe everyone will get along. Maybe the freight charges will be reasonable. Now I'm just dreaming...
My point is only that it's not unreasonable for the police to use the licence plate number from the car to try to identify the owner...
I certainly haven't commited a crime of driving through a toll without paying, if I wasn't at the time driving. If there is a law on the books saying you can be fined if yourself, an acquaintance, or an acquaintance of an acquaintance goes through a toll without paying, that's a different issue.
I can't speak to statutes in your jurisdiction. Many places do have those rules on the books--the owner of the car is responsible for the tolls. In Ontario, the 407 toll highway has no tollbooths. A camera scans your license plate on the on-ramp, and then sends a bill automatically to whomever has registered the plates.
If your car is parked illegally and the city tows it, you still have to pay the fine, even if it was someone else that double parked. (You're welcome to try and recover the money from that third party if you wish, but the city and police won't get involved unless the car had been stolen.)
I don't know if this is one that we should be bothered by.
"Officer! I didn't run those toll gates! It wasn't me driving the car!"
Was the car stolen? You reported that, right?
Did you sell it? You have a bill of sale, right? You reported that sale as appropriate on your taxes, right?
The guy you lent the car to ran the toll gates? Gee, maybe you should think about whom you lend your car to, shouldn't you?
With respect to the lowlife who skipped the tolls, the problem isn't the license plate cameras. It's the identity theft perpetrated by the guy who bought your car and failed to register the tags in his name.
Not a bad idea, but a poor choice of example. Smoking does demonstrably cause cancer. Recent research has identified the specific mutations to tumour-suppressing genes cause by chemicals in cigarette smoke(1). (There are very likely additional mechanisms by which smoking also causes cancer.)
Granted, it's a stochastic process. Regular exposure to cigarette smoke (or most other carcinogens) will not guarantee that you get cancer. Cumulative exposure just increases your risk, since mutations are a random process. Does smoking cause cancer in everyone who smokes? Certainly not. Is smoking a cause of cancer? Definitely. Calling it a 'risk factor' rather than a 'cause' is a copout. It's akin to saying that Russian Roulette doesn't cause gunshot wounds because only some people get shot.
If IBM had strong indications that a statistically significant number of their employees were developing unusual medical conditions, or they knew that their employees were working with compounds strongly suspected of causing health problems, that should have triggered some red flags for them. (I'm not saying that they did or did not have such knowledge. On reading the linked articles, the two cases listed could well have been flukes, and the jury decision was likely correct.)
(1): Denissenko MF, Pao A, Tang M, Pfeifer GP. "Preferential formation of benzo[a]pyrene adducts at lung cancer mutational hotspots in P53." Science. 274(5286):430-2. Oct 18, 1996.
As another poster has pointed out, a freely rotating body not experiencing a significant tidal force (our asteroid) will only be rotating about one axis. Unless you're deliberately placing the launcher in a stupid location, it should be able to fire usefully at least fifty percent of the time. If you want to fire rocks along its axis of rotation, then bonus--you can fire all the time.
Of course, the launcher won't necessarily be precisely aligned with the center of mass of the asteroid, so a small torque will be applied with each launch. Nevertheless, these are rocket scientists--they're used to this stuff. An undergraduate education in physics is sufficient to figure out where you need to toss the rocks, and when. The hard problem is soft-landing the launchers on the rock and getting them to work happily and autonomously.
How much will these things weigh? With a nuke generator, and drilling and launching equipment to handle a pound of rock at a time over and over, say 1000 pounds max.
If that thing isn't going to get the chance to launch 1000 one pound chuncks of rock, due to not being pointed in the right direction often enough, you'd do better to slam the things into the rock to try to move it.
We're looking at change in momentum here, which is mass times velocity. It will take decidedly fewer stones tossed off if they can each be launched at extremely great velocity...on the other hand, you get quite a bit of 'free' relative velocity if you throw things head-on at the asteroid. It's an interesting point. Perhaps something to be looked at on a case-by-case basis. It depends quite a bit on which way you want to be applying the delta-v.
I am also intrigued by the parent's notion of maintaining a supply of asteroid killers at L-4...though I'm a bit concerned that someone might be tempted to misuse those stones.
A Googlewhack is a two-word Google query that returns exactly one result.
The term you're looking for is probably Googlebombing, which refers to deliberately placing keywords and links on multiple domains to boost a site's PageRank. Originally, Googlebombs were pranks or in good fun, like a search for weapons of mass destruction.
Now "Googlebombing" is being expanded by some to include manipulating PageRanks for commercial ends. I'll leave it to the armchair etymologists of Slashdot to decide if that is a correct use of the term.
To influence US policy you need to buy at most a couple of hundred Representatives and Senators. Actually, you can often get away with buying members of an appropriate committee, which may only be ten or twenty people.
To influence UN policy you need to buy at most a couple of hundred diplomats and aides. Actually, you can get wway with buying members of an appropriate committee, which may only be ten or twenty people.
In addition, many of those UN representatives will come from countries where private bodies regularly (ahem) influence public officials, and it's considered part of doing business. Outright bribery may be more socially acceptable. In the United States, at least bribery usually takes place with a nod (sometimes a wink as well...) towards the notion of plausible deniability.
Yet another reason I browse with Opera: hit F12 and uncheck "Enable embedded audio". Uncheck "Enable GIF animation", "Enable Java", and "Enable plugins", while you're at it.
Cheers!
Because people can't pronounce Gewurtztraminer ...
Hell, they can't even spell it. :D
For those who are wondering, it's German, and correctly spelled Gewurztraminer. (Strictly speaking proper German calls for an umlaut on the u, but English speakers can get away without it.) The name comes from the village of Temeno in Italy (Tramin in German) where the grape's ancestors were first grown. The original Traminer grape was tweaked through selective breeding around 1870 to give it more flavour, and so Gewurztraminer was born. "Gewurztraminer" translates approximately as "spiced/spicy [grape] from Tramin".
Incidentally, do you have a reference for that case study? I'd be interested.
No, that's not an accurate statement. Presumably criminal charges of tax evasion would proceed under the new system exactly as they do now. The federal or state revenue agency would provide information on the case to a prosecutor, who would then present the evidence to judge. After having an opportunity to present a defense, a judge (or jury) would decide whether or not tax evasion had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. That's how it works now, and I don't see anything here that would change that.
Under the new system, as under the present one, criminal prosecution is generally a last resort. Your quarrel seems to be with the administration of the civil side of the system. What has changed, exactly?
The Revenue Department already keeps electronic copies of your return, looking for items that raise flags (lawyers earning $20,000 per year; lots of dependents that didn't appear in previous years, etc.) If unusual stuff shows up, the state may ask for supporting documentation. This isn't new. Most (if not all) taxation systems that require returns to be filed don't exhaustively check every datum submitted--they do spot checks at random and where suspicious data appear. Would it be reasonable to expect the government to take at our word everything that appears on tax returns? If there was no checking, there would be significantly more cheating, would there not?
By integrating information from other databases it becomes possible for the government to more precisely target those spot checks. People with accurate returns are less likely to be questioned; spot checks and audits will be more likely to uncover errors in returns. This is what the new system does. To address your concerns:
The system is entirely public
Currently, only public databases have been integrated. There is discussion about adding in private databases like Dun & Bradstreet--a storehouse of information about private corporations. Access to some private databases would concern me, to others would not. Anybody can get information from D&B just by coughing up some cash--I don't think government access to it would be an invasion of privacy. The use of credit records might be more of a gray area, and one where the State would have to tread lightly.
The system is accurate...and... The system is correctable
We'd all like the taxation system to be perfectly accurate on the first go-round. It's not going to happen. People will lose paperwork (both private individuals and the government) there will be typos, taxpayers will make errors in filling out documents.
When incongruities arise between the views of the Revenue Department and the individual taxpayer, one doesn't (or shouldn't) immediately get thrown in jail. I would expect to receive a notice in the mail, "Dr. Mr. Smith. Please provide a receipt for charitable deduction X in amount Y, or you will be assessed additional tax Z", or a phone call, "Mr. Smith, the Electric Company has indicated that your business paid them two thousand dollars for electricity last year, but you have claimed six thousand. Can you explain this discrepancy?"
If they send round the SWAT team without asking first, then there's a problem, but I expect that they'll ask before they shoot. Dead men don't generate quite so much tax revenue.
The system is transparent - I should have the right to know what will cause me to be audited.
Well, no. There's the obvious--you can expect to draw interest if you have a six-million-dollar home and a twenty-thousand-dollar per year income. You might get audited if you take advantage of creative tax shelters. You'll probably be looking at an audit if you're working as a waiter but don't declare any income from tips. But guess what--revenue agencies audit some people completely at random. Even if you do
Most taxation systems operate on the honour system more or less. Consequently, you have to be able to back up claims you make on your return with paperwork. I live in Canada, and there's a number of different slips and receipts that I'm required to retain for my records--but not file with my return--in the event that I'm audited.
In the last few years, I've received a request for more documentation from the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency (loosely analogous to the IRS in the States). I mailed them a copy of the appropriate slip, and they went away. It cost me a half hour or so, but it wasn't particularly onerous.
My employer incorrectly prepared a slip (a T4, which IIRC is like a W-2 in the States) for me last year. Getting my employer to fix the slip was actually significantly more trouble than getting the government to refund the tax that I had been made to overpay.
Why is there a presumption that the government will hound you mercilessly if they want to do a spot check on your tax return? And why is it unreasonable to expect the government to look more closely at your return if you do things that set off alarm bells? It would be a ridiculous waste of time and money to go over every tax return with a fine-toothed comb. Why not use information at their disposal to better target those spot checks?
Yep. It's too bad that you would have to pay the same sales tax on an item you buy online as you would pay on every other item you buy in a bricks and mortar store.
Why is it silly to expect people to obey the law when they buy products online? How is this a huge burden?
There are various social and economic arguments that can be applied against all sales taxes, but I'm having trouble seeing why a purchase made online should be a special exception when all other purchases are taxed.
iTunes has been around for a year and a bit. Never is a long time.
On the other hand, 'paper' money has a limited half-life in circulation, too. Bills that receive hard use are regularly pulled by banks and replaced after a few months. This problem is eased somewhat in places (Australia, Canada, EU) that have larger-denomination coins. (Americans--look at your one-dollar bills--note the degree of wear versus the other bills in your wallet.) If I remember correctly, one-dollar bills last three to six months in circulation; fifty-dollar bills will survive a couple of years or more.
Q: Can you change a thirteen?
A: Sure. Would you like a seven and a six, or three threes and a four?
I should know better than to reply to an anonymous coward, but here we go.
If you would like a direct analogy that is exactly on point, here it is: laws already exist banning junk faxes. These laws have gotten the thumbs-up from courts, despite advertisers trying to raise First Amendment questions.
The receiver of the message necessarily bears some of the cost of the message--toner, paper, temporary loss of use of the line for fax machines; connection and bandwidth charges for spam.
The First Amendment rights of others end when they start charging me (directly or otherwise) so they can express themselves. The First Amendment guarantees one the right to speak--it doesn't guarantee that I will pay to listen.