I was wondering about the cost of the Great Wall of China. And there are a few things some folks hope to build that likely would cost more than 35 billion dollars, such as a space elevator (counts as "on Earth", right?). Personally, I'd like to see the Waxahachie SuperConducting SuperCollider tunnel built, and then a nuclear fusion stellarator installed in it, as part of an overall power plant. The ratio of "major diameter" to "minor diameter" of that kind of fusion torus would greatly simplify its construction, but its size would still make it quite expensive. But we know enough about fusion that it would probably work, and so we could power a rather large chunk of the USA from that one power plant.
This almost sounds like an invitation for hackers to seek a security hole such that one instance of the client can control the entire cloud of OpenStack implementations....
I call it "stupid". Laser light does get less intense with distance; we can't make a beam powerful enough to cut a planet that is hundreds of light years away.
Also, consider the other planets in our Solar System, and think about "Bode's Law". When a star has multiple planets for billions of years, their orbits must be such as to allow gravitational effects upon each other to mostly cancel out. A pattern such as Bode's Law emerges from that, and if aliens see our system's other planets, they will still be able to deduce that our hidden planet must be there somewhere. I expect their not finding Earth would make them more curious than finding it.
Yeah, Apple is approaching the wrong party. That company in Israel found the flaw, and the FBI paid them to use it. Apple has so far been unwilling to encourage folks to expose bugs, by paying them, so....
Logically, especially since it is well known that Apple has plenty of cash on-hand to buy things, Apple should buy the vulnerabililty, instead of expecting to get it for free from the Feds. How greedy do you think ordinary folks are willing to let Apple be, in such circumstances?
For more than a decade I've been waiting for the "interferometric modulator" (iMod) display to be perfected enough for mass production. Quallcomm bought the technology and has had difficulties with the yield quality of its production runs. I keep thinking that if I wait long enough, the bugs will get ironed out, and then finally someone will be making a smartphone I would actually want to own.
An even better "better question" is, "Why is the current nuclear industry eating its seed corn?"
Almost all existing nuclear power plants consume Uranium-235. Once it is gone, it will be exponentially more difficult to manufacture Plutonium 239 from U-238, and U-233 from Thorium 232, than it is currently easy to make those other fissionable substances from vastly-more-common resources. If one is going to support fission power, then one must either support breeder reactors, or recognize that fission power for civilization will have a rather short lifespan, just like fossil-fuel power for civilization is having a short lifespan.
If one is going to support nuclear power for the long term, then my personal vote is that we need fusion reactors even more than we need fission reactors. Fusion reactors are expected to produce only a fraction of the radwaste that fission reactors produce, be less risky to operate, cannot be a good source of materials for making terror weapons, and have much-less-expensive fuel costs, for just four reasons why.
"In the end, the fossil fuel electrical power plant could have zero net carbon dioxide emissions."
Looks to me that in the end it will actually be solar power replacing fossil-fuel power.
"one healthy mother completely lacked a gene called PRDM9 that is involved in shuffling chromosomes during the formation of eggs and sperm. Mice lacking the gene are sterile."
The researchers might need to take another look at that woman; she might be a "chimera", whose reproductive organs don't have the same DNA as the part of the body responsible for a more-easily-tested substance (usually blood or saliva).
Nevertheless, the fact remains that anything that can be used can also be abused. A pillow can be a murder weapon or help you sleep better. An H-bomb can deflect a dangerous asteroid or destroy a city. Water is problematic.:) Government can be tyrannical or...hmmm!. And so on.
The Boy Scouts offer a merit badge in mapping. I suspect the real problem is that while maps are common, large numbers of folks never really learned how to use them. Sounds to me like an elementary-school class on the topic is in order.
One of the Mysteries of the Universe has the very simple and generic name, "women". Others exist, too. In the future a new one will be added, something like, "If the Internet remembers everything, then why do links go bad?"
A while back I installed Debian on an experimental system for learning more about Linux, and came away feeling a bit lost, because (compared to some other distros) there seemed to be oodles of new config files, scattered everywhere. Trying to keep track of them all was, for me, nightmarish. I wished all the config files were located in a single root-level directory (like "home"), perhaps named "cfg".
Well, if such a thing existed, that directory might be considered too valuable to be allowed to get included in any generic remove-all system command, and could thus be a safer place for the UEFI variables. One could go inside that directory and deliberately erase everything, but the specter of knowing that all the system's config files would be destroyed might give one pause,before daring to actually specify that command.
Since it is well known that capitalists try to put competitors out of business, thus restricting the supply of resources so that it doesn't grow as fast as population, what you say fits as a small part of what I wrote here
While the article is correct in pointing out the problem caused by unfair wealth distribution, the cause of the unfair wealth distribution is not China per se. It is the Law of Supply and Demand in action, whenever population grows faster than resource-production. Folks who say the world is not overpopulated tend to focus only on food production, but people need rather more things than just food, and all of them need to be produced at the rate population grows, for wealth distribution to stay fair. I've presented more details about that (and the reverse, that when resource production increases faster than population, wealth distribution goes the other way), here.
I first heard of something like this idea long before the Internet became popular. That old story also mentioned a problem, that when the vas is closed, it bursts. This is why when doctors do a vasectomy, they only tie ONE end of each cut tube (the end that leads toward the prostate, not the end connected to the testicle). This invention actually needs a Y-shaped valve, such that when it is closed, only the flow toward the prostate stops, while sperm can continue to flow out into the body cavity, as if one end of the vas had been cut but not tied.
This is not a reply to the original "OK, next!" --it is more "next".
Some years ago I gathered up and posted some amateur speculations about abiogenesis (in two parts). Whether or not any of them could be interesting or even useful, remains to be seen.
If a system is set up to require administer approval for installation of software, can this ransomware actually install the core utilities it needs to interact with the Operating System, without the user noticing? I'm quite willing to never install NW.js if that's all I need to, to protect myself from this.
It is my understanding that some ladders are made of magnesium. The biggest drawback that I see, regarding common use, is the flammability factor. If a car built of this stuff gets on fire, the fire is soon going to get spectacular.
Imagine something like a parabolic microphone, except that at the focus of the parabola they put an EMP device, instead of a microphone. The frequencies produced only need to be whatever are able to fry the drone's electronics, and the parabola could cause the pulse to be beam-shaped, so as not to affect things you didn't aim the gun at.
A true artificial intelligence would be equivalent to a human person --and a human person is not allowed to be owned. So, if the goal is to create a true artificial intelligence, and the result cannot be owned, isn't it simply logical that the creation be done outside the ownership-leads-to-max-profits capitalist system?
We know that the dinosaur group filled most of the world's ecological niches, and when the Chicxulub event happened, a vast number of niches had their occupants wiped out. All we need do is assume that for any species, there is a reasonably constant mutation rate, and most mutants won't survive when there are better-adapted competitors already in a given ecological niche. If the mutant can find a different niche, though, then its chance of survival goes up a lot. So, no need to assume a "burst of evolution" when the simpler explanation is a "burst of opened opportunities", thanks to all those wiped-out competitors.
Well, depending on the total number of virtual gravitons available, "mostly transparent" might be so close to "actually transparent" as makes an indetectable difference. Some wild-eyed speculations that I've played around with include the notion that if we want ANY type of mass-energy to be directly associated with a rate-of-production of virtual gravitons, then we might most-simply compute it using the wave-particle duality. Pretend each wave-like vibration is associated with one virtual graviton, and a single electron would emit something like 10-to-the-20th-power virtual gravitons per second. If another electron was nearby, how many virtual gravitons per second would need to be absorbed, to account for gravitation between the two electrons? Even granting that the gravitons get radiated in all directions, such that only a portion pass near enough to the other electron to be absorbable, how many ignore that electron as if it wasn't there?
The second of the two links has some algebra in it, and a proposed explanation for how virtual gravitons could be so-rarely absorbable --and it is "interesting" that if a virtual graviton from the Sun had appropriate properties such that it got absorbed by the Earth, those same properties would have not made it absorbable when it reached the Moon! And vice-versa; only those virtual gravitons with properties such that the Earth couldn't absorb them might have properties such that the Moon could absorb some of them. This neatly makes the Earth totally transparent, with respect to Sun-Moon interactions, heh!
Slashdot Mirror
I was wondering about the cost of the Great Wall of China. And there are a few things some folks hope to build that likely would cost more than 35 billion dollars, such as a space elevator (counts as "on Earth", right?). Personally, I'd like to see the Waxahachie SuperConducting SuperCollider tunnel built, and then a nuclear fusion stellarator installed in it, as part of an overall power plant. The ratio of "major diameter" to "minor diameter" of that kind of fusion torus would greatly simplify its construction, but its size would still make it quite expensive. But we know enough about fusion that it would probably work, and so we could power a rather large chunk of the USA from that one power plant.
I wonder how much of the user data was skewed by the Slashdot Effect, or some equivalent thereof.
This almost sounds like an invitation for hackers to seek a security hole such that one instance of the client can control the entire cloud of OpenStack implementations....
I call it "stupid". Laser light does get less intense with distance; we can't make a beam powerful enough to cut a planet that is hundreds of light years away.
Also, consider the other planets in our Solar System, and think about "Bode's Law". When a star has multiple planets for billions of years, their orbits must be such as to allow gravitational effects upon each other to mostly cancel out. A pattern such as Bode's Law emerges from that, and if aliens see our system's other planets, they will still be able to deduce that our hidden planet must be there somewhere. I expect their not finding Earth would make them more curious than finding it.
Yeah, Apple is approaching the wrong party. That company in Israel found the flaw, and the FBI paid them to use it. Apple has so far been unwilling to encourage folks to expose bugs, by paying them, so....
Logically, especially since it is well known that Apple has plenty of cash on-hand to buy things, Apple should buy the vulnerabililty, instead of expecting to get it for free from the Feds. How greedy do you think ordinary folks are willing to let Apple be, in such circumstances?
For more than a decade I've been waiting for the "interferometric modulator" (iMod) display to be perfected enough for mass production. Quallcomm bought the technology and has had difficulties with the yield quality of its production runs. I keep thinking that if I wait long enough, the bugs will get ironed out, and then finally someone will be making a smartphone I would actually want to own.
An even better "better question" is, "Why is the current nuclear industry eating its seed corn?"
Almost all existing nuclear power plants consume Uranium-235. Once it is gone, it will be exponentially more difficult to manufacture Plutonium 239 from U-238, and U-233 from Thorium 232, than it is currently easy to make those other fissionable substances from vastly-more-common resources. If one is going to support fission power, then one must either support breeder reactors, or recognize that fission power for civilization will have a rather short lifespan, just like fossil-fuel power for civilization is having a short lifespan.
If one is going to support nuclear power for the long term, then my personal vote is that we need fusion reactors even more than we need fission reactors. Fusion reactors are expected to produce only a fraction of the radwaste that fission reactors produce, be less risky to operate, cannot be a good source of materials for making terror weapons, and have much-less-expensive fuel costs, for just four reasons why.
It depends on the surfaces being exposed to UV. Surfaces with titanium dioxide in them do tend to be self-cleaning.
"In the end, the fossil fuel electrical power plant could have zero net carbon dioxide emissions."
Looks to me that in the end it will actually be solar power replacing fossil-fuel power.
"one healthy mother completely lacked a gene called PRDM9 that is involved in shuffling chromosomes during the formation of eggs and sperm. Mice lacking the gene are sterile."
The researchers might need to take another look at that woman; she might be a "chimera", whose reproductive organs don't have the same DNA as the part of the body responsible for a more-easily-tested substance (usually blood or saliva).
I wonder what might be the result of associating each person with a blockchain.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that anything that can be used can also be abused. A pillow can be a murder weapon or help you sleep better. An H-bomb can deflect a dangerous asteroid or destroy a city. Water is problematic. :) Government can be tyrannical or ...hmmm!. And so on.
The Boy Scouts offer a merit badge in mapping. I suspect the real problem is that while maps are common, large numbers of folks never really learned how to use them. Sounds to me like an elementary-school class on the topic is in order.
One of the Mysteries of the Universe has the very simple and generic name, "women". Others exist, too. In the future a new one will be added, something like, "If the Internet remembers everything, then why do links go bad?"
A while back I installed Debian on an experimental system for learning more about Linux, and came away feeling a bit lost, because (compared to some other distros) there seemed to be oodles of new config files, scattered everywhere. Trying to keep track of them all was, for me, nightmarish. I wished all the config files were located in a single root-level directory (like "home"), perhaps named "cfg".
Well, if such a thing existed, that directory might be considered too valuable to be allowed to get included in any generic remove-all system command, and could thus be a safer place for the UEFI variables. One could go inside that directory and deliberately erase everything, but the specter of knowing that all the system's config files would be destroyed might give one pause,before daring to actually specify that command.
Since it is well known that capitalists try to put competitors out of business, thus restricting the supply of resources so that it doesn't grow as fast as population, what you say fits as a small part of what I wrote here
While the article is correct in pointing out the problem caused by unfair wealth distribution, the cause of the unfair wealth distribution is not China per se. It is the Law of Supply and Demand in action, whenever population grows faster than resource-production. Folks who say the world is not overpopulated tend to focus only on food production, but people need rather more things than just food, and all of them need to be produced at the rate population grows, for wealth distribution to stay fair. I've presented more details about that (and the reverse, that when resource production increases faster than population, wealth distribution goes the other way), here.
I first heard of something like this idea long before the Internet became popular. That old story also mentioned a problem, that when the vas is closed, it bursts. This is why when doctors do a vasectomy, they only tie ONE end of each cut tube (the end that leads toward the prostate, not the end connected to the testicle). This invention actually needs a Y-shaped valve, such that when it is closed, only the flow toward the prostate stops, while sperm can continue to flow out into the body cavity, as if one end of the vas had been cut but not tied.
This is not a reply to the original "OK, next!" --it is more "next".
Some years ago I gathered up and posted some amateur speculations about abiogenesis (in two parts). Whether or not any of them could be interesting or even useful, remains to be seen.
If a system is set up to require administer approval for installation of software, can this ransomware actually install the core utilities it needs to interact with the Operating System, without the user noticing? I'm quite willing to never install NW.js if that's all I need to, to protect myself from this.
It is my understanding that some ladders are made of magnesium. The biggest drawback that I see, regarding common use, is the flammability factor. If a car built of this stuff gets on fire, the fire is soon going to get spectacular.
Imagine something like a parabolic microphone, except that at the focus of the parabola they put an EMP device, instead of a microphone. The frequencies produced only need to be whatever are able to fry the drone's electronics, and the parabola could cause the pulse to be beam-shaped, so as not to affect things you didn't aim the gun at.
A true artificial intelligence would be equivalent to a human person --and a human person is not allowed to be owned. So, if the goal is to create a true artificial intelligence, and the result cannot be owned, isn't it simply logical that the creation be done outside the ownership-leads-to-max-profits capitalist system?
We know that the dinosaur group filled most of the world's ecological niches, and when the Chicxulub event happened, a vast number of niches had their occupants wiped out. All we need do is assume that for any species, there is a reasonably constant mutation rate, and most mutants won't survive when there are better-adapted competitors already in a given ecological niche. If the mutant can find a different niche, though, then its chance of survival goes up a lot. So, no need to assume a "burst of evolution" when the simpler explanation is a "burst of opened opportunities", thanks to all those wiped-out competitors.
Well, depending on the total number of virtual gravitons available, "mostly transparent" might be so close to "actually transparent" as makes an indetectable difference. Some wild-eyed speculations that I've played around with include the notion that if we want ANY type of mass-energy to be directly associated with a rate-of-production of virtual gravitons, then we might most-simply compute it using the wave-particle duality. Pretend each wave-like vibration is associated with one virtual graviton, and a single electron would emit something like 10-to-the-20th-power virtual gravitons per second. If another electron was nearby, how many virtual gravitons per second would need to be absorbed, to account for gravitation between the two electrons? Even granting that the gravitons get radiated in all directions, such that only a portion pass near enough to the other electron to be absorbable, how many ignore that electron as if it wasn't there?
The second of the two links has some algebra in it, and a proposed explanation for how virtual gravitons could be so-rarely absorbable --and it is "interesting" that if a virtual graviton from the Sun had appropriate properties such that it got absorbed by the Earth, those same properties would have not made it absorbable when it reached the Moon! And vice-versa; only those virtual gravitons with properties such that the Earth couldn't absorb them might have properties such that the Moon could absorb some of them. This neatly makes the Earth totally transparent, with respect to Sun-Moon interactions, heh!