Too much partisanship for enough folks to approve of that idea. What I think is more likely is, Tesla will soon be offering a line of rocket-powered cars....
The rescinding of net neutrality won't stop anyone from posting biased stuff, and therefore Pai's excuse regarding Twitter is utterly worthless. Also, note that because net neutrality has existed, there was nothing Twitter (or any other biased source) could do to prevent negative feedback from arriving. You can bet that if net neutrality is rescinded, biased sources will be happy to prevent unwelcome feedback from arriving.
That's not what the other poster meant. One of the recent revisions/extensions of copyright law was called the "Mickey Mouse Law", because it allowed Disney to keep MM under copyright, instead of that character getting liberated into the public domain.
Regarding the other issue, of companies streaming content with fees, an alternative that works is advertising. Major networks like ABC and NBC and CBS and Fox all offer their broadcast programs on the internet for some weeks after the broadcast, and those streamed programs are interspersed with advertisements, just like the broadcasts. When we think about ancient TV programs that are still in syndication, broadcast still with interspersed commercials, it should be obvious that any content-production company should be able to offer its content via streaming practically forever (well, at least until it finally enters the public domain), if it always added some interspersed advertising. The companies would never need to charge viewers fees, but their programs would still be making money. And only the most die-hard of pirates would insist they have some kind of right to view commercial-free content.. Most folks are used to commercials, after all!
It looks to me like they finally figured out a small part of something I wrote about more than a decade ago. Too bad I couldn't afford to patent it....
It's the vote-counting systems that need to be secured more than the actual voting machines. Some of those voting machines are not networked; they merely put data onto a data-transfer stick/card/chip, which is carried to another machine that supposedly accumulates the data as individual sticks are plugged into it. Obviously such vote-counting machines can be prime targets for remote hackers --change the accumulated data, change the outcome of the voting process.
As far as I'm concerned, they don't make ebooks to be as user-friendly as regular books. I want a folding two-page ebook, that I can hold in both hands just like a regular book. The "next page" button would do the equivalent of flipping a regular-book-page, thus showing two new pages on the two-page ebook. Then the ebook can be advantageous by being thinner and lighter than the regular book (because many such books have quite-large numbers of pages). The ebook obviously needs a light-powered low-power display; I THINK that the "IMOD" display can be layered over the top of a solar-cell layer, and if so, the net result would be an ebook such that if you have enough light to see it, then you have enough light to use it (just like a regular book).
Anonymous or not, I like buying Amazon gift cards with cash, and then applying those cards to my account. It entirely avoids all risk associated with exposing one's credit-card or debit-card numbers to middlemen money-changers.
There is a MUCH bigger issue here than what someone might do with external computerized enhancements to the brain. Remember how just about everything is connected to the Internet? And how the Internet remembers everything? This means your thoughts will be recorded. And the Thought Police will arrive soon after....
Some relevant adages:
"Fore-warned is fore-armed." --things don't have to get worse.
"Too much of any good thing is always a bad thing." --the essence of how tech can make things worse.
"Use it or lose it!" --your brain, that is....
It is possible that the employers are confusing arrogance for competence. Recently I had a somewhat generic insight into an old old adage, "Power corrupts" --and that insight came in two parts.
The first part is that "power" doesn't have to be political to be corruptive. Money is power, for example. Knowledge is power, for another (can include knowing "all" about computers).
The second part of the insight is that the first symptom of corruption is arrogance....
Do you or do you not understand what "IN GENERAL" means? Also, I wasn't talking about only me possibly someday needing DRM for something; the current data indicates that no one actually needs it for anything. Not to mention that since all existing DRM systems seem to have major flaws, it follows that the tech should perhaps be perfected before anyone uses it. Finally, the last gasp of copyright idiocy should happen about the time someone invents a way to stimulate the average human brain to do something known as "eidetic recall". Every song you've ever heard is already in your brain, and it can be perfectly recalled, no iPod or equivalent needed.
IN GENERAL I subscribe to the opinion that it is better to have something and not need it, than to need something and not have it. Logically, therefore, I should support the existence of DRM, even while I cannot now imagine what it might someday actually be needed for.... (The greed of DRM users is never an actual "need".)
While a JMP is equivalent to a goto, keep in mind that conditional loops are a higher-level language construct than what is available to those early processors, which kind of means that JMP/goto had to be used everywhere on those systems. In my personal experience, having written spaghetti code with goto, and also having written vastly less tangled code without it, I'm quite aware of the software-maintenance benefits of avoiding goto whenever it is easy to avoid. But I'm also aware of situations, usually involving getting out from the inside of many nestings of conditions and loops, where goto is clearly the simplest and most elegant way to do that, and I will unhesitatingly use it for that purpose. Those situations are uncommon enough that its use need never be called "excessive".
Thank you for all your feedback. I will note that it was claimed (not verified) that metallic deuterium had been produced in the Z machine. I'd prefer to wait until the claims are no longer dispute-able, and then see what they find out about the properties of metallic deuterium.
Regarding high-energy muons, what you wrote is not what I've read, unless you consider a close-orbiting muon to be the same thing as a high-energy muon. However fast they move when produced, they slow down enough to displace an electron orbiting a deuteron, and then they catalyze fusion with another deuteron (and they can actually do that quite a few times, perhaps as many as a hundred, before they decay from their 2-microsecond lifespan --I should mention that one failure mode, for multiple fusions, is failure to acquire enough energy from the fusion event to escape orbiting the new helium nucleus; have you ever wondered exactly how a muon, not participating in the Strong Nuclear Force, can acquire the energy to escape orbiting the new helium nucleus? My hypothesis offers an explanation for that...).
| Orbitals get arbitrarily close to the nucleus as is.|
That statement cannot be very accurate, for electrons, if it is possible for muons to orbit 206 times closer (which it most certainly is).
| you can find a discussion of fusion cross-sections in the intro chapter of many plasma textbooks |
I'm thoroughly aware of that. And now you are forgetting the factor of kinetic energy. In a hot plasma the kinetic energy of electrons is very high, while that kinetic energy is much smaller at room temperature. This makes a huge difference in how "spread out" an electron can appear to be, in terms of Quantum Mechanics. It means that in a hot plasma, while an electron can easily approach a nucleus at high speed, it also must leave at high speed, and the probability is LOW that another electron will be nearby enough, or moving in the right direction, to replace that first fast electron. But at room temperature lots and lots of electrons in the conduction band of a metal are quite widely-enough "spread out" to make it easy for one electron after another to get in-between two deuterons that happen to be approaching each other --the relatively slow loose electrons are attracted there, remember!
In the hot plasma, because there is no significant duration of cancellation of the mutual repulsion of two deuterons by a fast electron, they don't keep approaching each other, and they behave as is well-known in a hot plasma. But at low temperature, when one electron after another can easily get in-between a pair of deuterons, cancellation of their mutual repulsion can allow them to approach more closely than usual. The hypothesis is that they might be able to approach closely enough to fuse. (The hypothesis also states that they have to be randomly on an almost perfect collision course, which is very different from muon-catalyzed fusion --the muon has enough mass to influence a deuteron's course of motion, helping it get closer to another deuteron.) I'm not about to outright state that electron-shielding will allow deuterons to approach closely enough to fuse, because I know it is just a possibility that relatively cheap/simple experiments should be able to test --especially if they can now make metallic hydrogen (the claim was quickly disputed by other scientists, but Slashdot never posted that story).
| This is flat out false |
Not false. Your response is subliminally talking about electrons in fixed orbits, not loose electrons. But I am talking about what loose electrons can do.
| the electrons do not just sit on the nuclei |
For "hydrogen in general", the electrons are in fixed orbits, and that's why they can't approach the nucleus arbitrarily closely. For loose electrons, they can approach the nucleus, but they cannot stay there because of the Uncertainty Principle. But when there are lots and lots of loose electrons available, any electron that must leave the close vicinity of a nucleus can be (temporarily) replaced by another. And when two nuclei approach each other, the place of greatest electrical attraction, between both nuclei and a loose electron, is the place midway between the two nuclei.
Finally, density is an average thing. It is perfectly possible for two nuclei, among many approximately holding an average distance apart, to approach each other more closely than the rest. Just like there is a bell curve of molecular kinetic energies with respect to the temperature of something, there is also a bell curve of average distances between nuclei, with respect to density. For ordinary hydrogen, with its very low percentage of deuterium, the probability of fusion is simply two low, most of the time, for it to happen when two random nuclei approach each other. But two deuterons have a much greater probability of fusing ---are you aware that Jupiter is reported to have a slightly higher temperature than it "should" have, based on its age and distance from the Sun? Rare fusions of deuterons in its metallic-hydrogen layer could be happening, sufficient to explain that.
You are missing the fact that with respect to hydrogen, each atom has only one electron. For other materials with conduction bands, the atoms have plenty other electrons to prevent loose electrons from closely approaching nuclei. But when hydrogen forms a metal, a great many nuclei are now "bare", because their lone electrons have been loosed into the conduction band. The electrons are free to closely approach the bare nuclei!
One other thing, and that is that Quantum Mechanics allows electrons to appear to exist at many points simultaneously. This means multiple electrons can "partially" appear to exist in-between two bare nuclei that happen to be randomly approaching each other --you do realize, don't you, that the point of greatest electrical attraction, between two bare nuclei and loose electrons, is the point midway between the nuclei? --the net effect can be equivalent to a single electron holding its position in that place.
Remember that inside places like Jupiter and brown dwarfs, the percentage of deuterium is very low, compared to the percentage of ordinary hydrogen. This makes it quite rare for two deuterons to randomly approach each other --but in pure metallic deuterium, that fact is no longer valid.
Also, it is not the density that matters (per the hypothesis); it is the fact that the electrons are no longer in fixed "orbits" when hydrogen exists in the metallic state. The electrons are loose, forming a "conduction band", and are free to approach hydrogen nuclei arbitrarily closely (because they are not in fixed orbits) This means electrons can get in-between two deuterons that happen to be randomly approaching each other, no matter how closely the deuterons approach each other, and cancel out their mutual repulsion, similar to what muons do in the phenomenon called "muon catalyzed fusion" (the muons are in orbit, but because they have 206 times the mass of electrons, they orbit 206 times closer to the nucleus than electrons, which allows separate deuterons to get close enough to fuse). Electron-catalyzed fusion cannot possibly work when the electrons are in fixed orbits, but in metallic deuterium, they won't be in fixed orbits.
Several years ago I sent off a collection of wild ideas about "cold fusion" to a magazine, hoping for some feedback, and they published it as an actual article. Toward the end of the article was something about a possible way to test the hypothesis. Basically, if you could make some solid metallic hydrogen out of pure deuterium instead of ordinary hydrogen, some cold fusion might happen. It seems to me that the chances of someone being able to do such an experiment have now increased greatly....
Slashdot Mirror
Too much partisanship for enough folks to approve of that idea. What I think is more likely is, Tesla will soon be offering a line of rocket-powered cars....
The rescinding of net neutrality won't stop anyone from posting biased stuff, and therefore Pai's excuse regarding Twitter is utterly worthless. Also, note that because net neutrality has existed, there was nothing Twitter (or any other biased source) could do to prevent negative feedback from arriving. You can bet that if net neutrality is rescinded, biased sources will be happy to prevent unwelcome feedback from arriving.
The generic idea (different "liquid" specified) was posted on the internet back in 2001. Here.
That's not what the other poster meant. One of the recent revisions/extensions of copyright law was called the "Mickey Mouse Law", because it allowed Disney to keep MM under copyright, instead of that character getting liberated into the public domain.
Regarding the other issue, of companies streaming content with fees, an alternative that works is advertising. Major networks like ABC and NBC and CBS and Fox all offer their broadcast programs on the internet for some weeks after the broadcast, and those streamed programs are interspersed with advertisements, just like the broadcasts. When we think about ancient TV programs that are still in syndication, broadcast still with interspersed commercials, it should be obvious that any content-production company should be able to offer its content via streaming practically forever (well, at least until it finally enters the public domain), if it always added some interspersed advertising. The companies would never need to charge viewers fees, but their programs would still be making money. And only the most die-hard of pirates would insist they have some kind of right to view commercial-free content.. Most folks are used to commercials, after all!
It looks to me like they finally figured out a small part of something I wrote about more than a decade ago. Too bad I couldn't afford to patent it....
It's the vote- counting systems that need to be secured more than the actual voting machines. Some of those voting machines are not networked; they merely put data onto a data-transfer stick/card/chip, which is carried to another machine that supposedly accumulates the data as individual sticks are plugged into it. Obviously such vote-counting machines can be prime targets for remote hackers --change the accumulated data, change the outcome of the voting process.
Isn't the main weapon of the Death Star a particle beam? Perhaps Alderaan needed more submarines and a VLF comm system.
As far as I'm concerned, they don't make ebooks to be as user-friendly as regular books. I want a folding two-page ebook, that I can hold in both hands just like a regular book. The "next page" button would do the equivalent of flipping a regular-book-page, thus showing two new pages on the two-page ebook. Then the ebook can be advantageous by being thinner and lighter than the regular book (because many such books have quite-large numbers of pages). The ebook obviously needs a light-powered low-power display; I THINK that the "IMOD" display can be layered over the top of a solar-cell layer, and if so, the net result would be an ebook such that if you have enough light to see it, then you have enough light to use it (just like a regular book).
Anonymous or not, I like buying Amazon gift cards with cash, and then applying those cards to my account. It entirely avoids all risk associated with exposing one's credit-card or debit-card numbers to middlemen money-changers.
There is a MUCH bigger issue here than what someone might do with external computerized enhancements to the brain. Remember how just about everything is connected to the Internet? And how the Internet remembers everything? This means your thoughts will be recorded. And the Thought Police will arrive soon after....
"I think it's the destruction of our business."
If that's the business of recycling old ideas, without adding any significant new ideas, then why not?
Some relevant adages:
"Fore-warned is fore-armed." --things don't have to get worse.
"Too much of any good thing is always a bad thing." --the essence of how tech can make things worse.
"Use it or lose it!" --your brain, that is....
It is possible that the employers are confusing arrogance for competence. Recently I had a somewhat generic insight into an old old adage, "Power corrupts" --and that insight came in two parts.
The first part is that "power" doesn't have to be political to be corruptive. Money is power, for example. Knowledge is power, for another (can include knowing "all" about computers).
The second part of the insight is that the first symptom of corruption is arrogance....
Do you or do you not understand what "IN GENERAL" means? Also, I wasn't talking about only me possibly someday needing DRM for something; the current data indicates that no one actually needs it for anything. Not to mention that since all existing DRM systems seem to have major flaws, it follows that the tech should perhaps be perfected before anyone uses it. Finally, the last gasp of copyright idiocy should happen about the time someone invents a way to stimulate the average human brain to do something known as "eidetic recall". Every song you've ever heard is already in your brain, and it can be perfectly recalled, no iPod or equivalent needed.
IN GENERAL I subscribe to the opinion that it is better to have something and not need it, than to need something and not have it. Logically, therefore, I should support the existence of DRM, even while I cannot now imagine what it might someday actually be needed for.... (The greed of DRM users is never an actual "need".)
If the analog stick is "slower and clunkier" than a mouse, at least one obvious solution is a faster and more accurate analog stick.
While a JMP is equivalent to a goto, keep in mind that conditional loops are a higher-level language construct than what is available to those early processors, which kind of means that JMP/goto had to be used everywhere on those systems. In my personal experience, having written spaghetti code with goto, and also having written vastly less tangled code without it, I'm quite aware of the software-maintenance benefits of avoiding goto whenever it is easy to avoid. But I'm also aware of situations, usually involving getting out from the inside of many nestings of conditions and loops, where goto is clearly the simplest and most elegant way to do that, and I will unhesitatingly use it for that purpose. Those situations are uncommon enough that its use need never be called "excessive".
Here's a wild idea that might extend disk-drive lifespan even more. All the drive-spindles/axles in one of those pods should be aligned parallel with the Earth's rotation axis (details in the link).
Thank you for all your feedback. I will note that it was claimed (not verified) that metallic deuterium had been produced in the Z machine. I'd prefer to wait until the claims are no longer dispute-able, and then see what they find out about the properties of metallic deuterium. Regarding high-energy muons, what you wrote is not what I've read, unless you consider a close-orbiting muon to be the same thing as a high-energy muon. However fast they move when produced, they slow down enough to displace an electron orbiting a deuteron, and then they catalyze fusion with another deuteron (and they can actually do that quite a few times, perhaps as many as a hundred, before they decay from their 2-microsecond lifespan --I should mention that one failure mode, for multiple fusions, is failure to acquire enough energy from the fusion event to escape orbiting the new helium nucleus; have you ever wondered exactly how a muon, not participating in the Strong Nuclear Force, can acquire the energy to escape orbiting the new helium nucleus? My hypothesis offers an explanation for that...).
| Orbitals get arbitrarily close to the nucleus as is.|
That statement cannot be very accurate, for electrons, if it is possible for muons to orbit 206 times closer (which it most certainly is).
| you can find a discussion of fusion cross-sections in the intro chapter of many plasma textbooks |
I'm thoroughly aware of that. And now you are forgetting the factor of kinetic energy. In a hot plasma the kinetic energy of electrons is very high, while that kinetic energy is much smaller at room temperature. This makes a huge difference in how "spread out" an electron can appear to be, in terms of Quantum Mechanics. It means that in a hot plasma, while an electron can easily approach a nucleus at high speed, it also must leave at high speed, and the probability is LOW that another electron will be nearby enough, or moving in the right direction, to replace that first fast electron. But at room temperature lots and lots of electrons in the conduction band of a metal are quite widely-enough "spread out" to make it easy for one electron after another to get in-between two deuterons that happen to be approaching each other --the relatively slow loose electrons are attracted there, remember!
In the hot plasma, because there is no significant duration of cancellation of the mutual repulsion of two deuterons by a fast electron, they don't keep approaching each other, and they behave as is well-known in a hot plasma. But at low temperature, when one electron after another can easily get in-between a pair of deuterons, cancellation of their mutual repulsion can allow them to approach more closely than usual. The hypothesis is that they might be able to approach closely enough to fuse. (The hypothesis also states that they have to be randomly on an almost perfect collision course, which is very different from muon-catalyzed fusion --the muon has enough mass to influence a deuteron's course of motion, helping it get closer to another deuteron.) I'm not about to outright state that electron-shielding will allow deuterons to approach closely enough to fuse, because I know it is just a possibility that relatively cheap/simple experiments should be able to test --especially if they can now make metallic hydrogen (the claim was quickly disputed by other scientists, but Slashdot never posted that story).
| This is flat out false |
Not false. Your response is subliminally talking about electrons in fixed orbits, not loose electrons. But I am talking about what loose electrons can do.
| the electrons do not just sit on the nuclei |
For "hydrogen in general", the electrons are in fixed orbits, and that's why they can't approach the nucleus arbitrarily closely. For loose electrons, they can approach the nucleus, but they cannot stay there because of the Uncertainty Principle. But when there are lots and lots of loose electrons available, any electron that must leave the close vicinity of a nucleus can be (temporarily) replaced by another. And when two nuclei approach each other, the place of greatest electrical attraction, between both nuclei and a loose electron, is the place midway between the two nuclei.
Finally, density is an average thing. It is perfectly possible for two nuclei, among many approximately holding an average distance apart, to approach each other more closely than the rest. Just like there is a bell curve of molecular kinetic energies with respect to the temperature of something, there is also a bell curve of average distances between nuclei, with respect to density. For ordinary hydrogen, with its very low percentage of deuterium, the probability of fusion is simply two low, most of the time, for it to happen when two random nuclei approach each other. But two deuterons have a much greater probability of fusing ---are you aware that Jupiter is reported to have a slightly higher temperature than it "should" have, based on its age and distance from the Sun? Rare fusions of deuterons in its metallic-hydrogen layer could be happening, sufficient to explain that.
You are missing the fact that with respect to hydrogen, each atom has only one electron. For other materials with conduction bands, the atoms have plenty other electrons to prevent loose electrons from closely approaching nuclei. But when hydrogen forms a metal, a great many nuclei are now "bare", because their lone electrons have been loosed into the conduction band. The electrons are free to closely approach the bare nuclei!
One other thing, and that is that Quantum Mechanics allows electrons to appear to exist at many points simultaneously. This means multiple electrons can "partially" appear to exist in-between two bare nuclei that happen to be randomly approaching each other --you do realize, don't you, that the point of greatest electrical attraction, between two bare nuclei and loose electrons, is the point midway between the nuclei? --the net effect can be equivalent to a single electron holding its position in that place.
Remember that inside places like Jupiter and brown dwarfs, the percentage of deuterium is very low, compared to the percentage of ordinary hydrogen. This makes it quite rare for two deuterons to randomly approach each other --but in pure metallic deuterium, that fact is no longer valid. Also, it is not the density that matters (per the hypothesis); it is the fact that the electrons are no longer in fixed "orbits" when hydrogen exists in the metallic state. The electrons are loose, forming a "conduction band", and are free to approach hydrogen nuclei arbitrarily closely (because they are not in fixed orbits) This means electrons can get in-between two deuterons that happen to be randomly approaching each other, no matter how closely the deuterons approach each other, and cancel out their mutual repulsion, similar to what muons do in the phenomenon called "muon catalyzed fusion" (the muons are in orbit, but because they have 206 times the mass of electrons, they orbit 206 times closer to the nucleus than electrons, which allows separate deuterons to get close enough to fuse). Electron-catalyzed fusion cannot possibly work when the electrons are in fixed orbits, but in metallic deuterium, they won't be in fixed orbits.
Several years ago I sent off a collection of wild ideas about "cold fusion" to a magazine, hoping for some feedback, and they published it as an actual article. Toward the end of the article was something about a possible way to test the hypothesis. Basically, if you could make some solid metallic hydrogen out of pure deuterium instead of ordinary hydrogen, some cold fusion might happen. It seems to me that the chances of someone being able to do such an experiment have now increased greatly....
The train could be designed to get some lift from that low-pressure air, taking some of the load off the wheels.