"If 'thousands' of USPTO employees were not doing their work, it would be impossible for this agency to be producing the best performance in recent memory and, perhaps, in its entire 224 year history."
I tried to track down the reasoning behind a patent that has been recently issued covering growing plants by shining lights on them. The light bulb has been around since about 1880, and I expect we have been using them to grow plants since about 1881. You can't get anything out of them about how something has been approved by the system.
volpe (58112):
Really?... It's actually done in the retina itself?
There are a variety of processes that are applied to visual data before it comes to your awareness, the retina is first level of screening. The tissue of the retina is not that different than neural tissue, it is perfectly capable of comparing things and making decisions. A video camera will look at every pixel in its range equally and send of all its data uniformly. A living visual system is actively working to prune out anything you don't need to notice and is also working to highlight things that may have survival value. It starts right there in the retina.
if my watch is aimed in your direction and I'm not acting strange, (hell maybe I'm reading a book at the same time while the watch records) how would they know?
If you are only recording pictures in a public place then you're good (legally). If you surreptitiously record sound then you may run afoul of wiretapping laws. That there are no wires and you're not tapping anything makes no difference. Depends on your jurisdiction.
All of these lovely fantasies have problems. The hex one adds complexity to the construction for no particular reason. The water tower on the roof becomes a single point of failure and will tend to want to freeze up. Caves would be nice, but what are the odds there'll be convenient caves located right where they want to set up camp? All of them would be complicated to build on Earth, never mind by a guy in a spacesuit
What they actually build will be an extension of our oldest and most mature design school - the square. They'll bring Titanium or Aluminum I-beams and bolt them together. For the sake of discussion lets assume a cube ten meters on each side, maybe an overhang all around the top. They'll bolt cross pieces and panels across the top and pile up regolith on the roof for the first layer of radiation protection.
Once they have this they'll go underneath and set up pressurized tents (if we can find suitable material for local conditions.) If tents work, they keep them. If tents are problematical they'll start building room sized cubes. The cubes will be essentially the same as the outer shell, but smaller and with caulked joints. As time goes by they'll start linking them. For safety reasons, internal air locks will be common. Water will be stored in flat compartments in the ceiling of each cube or tent as secondary radiation protection. Each room will have its own ceiling tanks so the loss of any one unit won't cripple them.
I assume they'll have a number of tanks of liquids and gasses - Nitrogen, Oxygen, Water, whatever else they need. Up on top of the regolith layer would be the place to store them. They'll be close to hand but out of the way, and if a tank fails there'll probably be no shrapnel issues. They will also lend a little bit more radiation shielding. If they have excess sewage it will be frozen in blocks and left on the roof for the same reasons.
The above feature will combine to something that has all the style and grace of a junkyard shack, but hey, it'll be easy to build, can be grown in stages as time allows, and it'll work.
My apologies to those fancy design guys...
Now if we could only find plants to leech radioactive particles for both Japan and Ukraine
two problems:
1.) As the plant accumulates isotopes it will tend to irradiate itself. The better it works, the worse the problem.
2.) I'm not familiar with any biological processes that distinguish between isotopes. You'd need a suite of plants, each one a specialist at one or more elements, and you would bring in the appropriate plants for whatever you wanted to collect at a particular site. In fact you'd need multiple plants for each element, a wetland plant, a dryland plant, a warm weather plant, etc. You'd match them up with the geography of your various sites.
That's about the sentence you'd get here for robbing a convenience store, even if you didn't hurt any one. How many people did he kill? Except of course he's getting the equivalent of 3.8 million a year to do his time. Who says crime doesn't pay?
Buy a disposable phone. Use it for a few months, wipe its internal memory & associated voice mail box, then abandon it where you think it might get adopted. You will always have a phone, but searching for your records becomes difficult, your past becomes plausibly deniable. If you are currently under active surveillance this will probably open up delays in the tracking each time you change over before they catch up. It is not impossible to backtrack you, but the difficulty and expense of tracking go up with each change, and the reliability of the results goes down. Rather than being a crisp and clear ten year history in their records you become a blur. Is this Samzenpus?, what about that? This sort of looks like him, but what about these ones?
This setup lets you always be able to dial out, but will eventually weary your friends who don't know what number you are now. You might want to do something else for a receiving number.
You probably have a core "fingerprint" of usage that is identifiably you, but it may resemble the fingerprint of people who run in your social circle. Mix things up a little. With each new phone add a new group of numbers unrelated to the other phones. Let's say phone #1 calls a cluster of sports related numbers, # 2 local civic groups, #3 bars, taxis, and liquor stores, etc. Call them a few times with honest questions. Let the watchers burn through their budget finding out who all these new d@#mn numbers are.
No one will come around to download anything. It would be expensive and labor intensive. Operating costs would exceed purchase and installation. They communicate, either by radio or by wire. The one in the picture has an omnidirectional radio antenna on top. You're going to have a heck of a time following that.
You won't get a black SUV with a DHS logo on the side. You'll get an old pickup with some local contrator. The guy in the truck may just have a work order.
Biosphere II, north of Tuson Arizona.
considered by the press to be kind of a giant sad failure, considered by myself to be a radical experiment in ecological engineering. The result of the test run was not what they expected, but science is not about what you were expecting.
Arcosanti, outside Mayer, Arizona.
Experiment by Paolo Soleri in urban engineering, arcologies.
My understanding is that the plane broke up in flight and came down in a number of places. Besides, blowing it up makes it smaller, but does not hide the various materials, layers, and coatings involved.
A warship is basically a large steel box filled with things that are radioactive, flammable, explosive, or covered with sharp metal edges. They can deal out a hell of a pounding, but can't take that much of a shot, kind of like a heavyweight boxer with a glass jaw. Ammunition storage and handling is is inherently dangerous. If you can remove the gunpowder from your projectiles you now have a much less explosive ship.
As regards civilian uses, this is a potential way to put bulk materials in orbit in a hurry. Nothing living or delicate could take that 100 Gs, (or whatever) but you could send up a lot of air/food/water/clothes/tools/ etc, and they would arrive in orbit in perfectly good shape.
If a civilization is advanced enough to travel here, they're probably advanced enough to not have any good reason to be hostile.
If I decide to build a vacation house in the Everglades it might get a little rough for any alligators that happen to live on "my" lot. I'm not going to care if they've been there since sometime in the Mesozoic. I'm aware that alligators have some kind of intelligence, however I'm not that interested in it. They will never understand where I came from or how I got there, or what the hell I'm doing inside that big glass box my contractor put up on their best feeding ground. Any that get in my way will be dealt with, it doesn't matter how well they plan their defense. About all they can do is hope that I'm not a predator...
An ideal car system would have four fixed cameras and a mike. You would have a fixed forwards pointing camera that could see the dash and something of the road. Speedometer and turn signals would be visible, along with enough view of the road to judge your driving. Traffic lights and road control signs would be nice. You would have wide angle left and right facing cameras mounted in the "B" pillars, just a little glass dot on the outside of the pillar. The rear facing one I am undecided about. Cops like to shine as much light as possible at the back of your car, this would tend to blow out most images. You might be able to get around this by mounting the camera very high or low and aiming it at a sharp angle. The mike gets clipped into your collar if you see an encounter coming. It is designed to record you but not the officer. This may keep you out of wiretap charges, since you are only recording yourself. You can of course echo much of what he says to get it in the record, so long as you don't annoy him. Recording an officer without permission can be made into a crime. Recording yourself, not so much. Around the tops of the windows you have "you are subject to surveillance" warnings.
The system is designed to come on with the car. If you hit the unmarked button on the dash it starts saving what it sees. It is always running a five minute buffer, saves the buffer when you hit the button.
This gives you the ability to record any encounter near your car beginning five minutes before you get pulled over. He won't like you recording yourself and will probably confiscate the mike, but there's no help for that. If you have mad skillz you can also try to pipe the results off site. If a LEO realizes that he's recorded in the vehicle somewhere he can always confiscate it and have the car stripped right down to the frame looking for the data.
So, let's see, they estimate.5 to 1 million per installed unit, so figure in practice they'll be 5 million each. That laser blinder may be able to work with laser guided and heat seeking missiles, unless of course it too closely resembles the guidance dot for the weapon. It will be useless against radar, wire, and acoustic sensors. This means that they'll have to come out with upgrades at 15 million each.
Wouldn't flares be cheaper, work just as well?? Also, you could give them a thrill, but I don't think just one heat seeker will reliably take dow]\n a modern multi-engine passenger jet.
It's almost as if the units were optimized to transfer money, rather than protect planes.
If I drain a swamp and build a house it will be kind of hard on the local alligators. However I'm really not too concerned with them, don't care what they think, and may never really know or care how many of them died from being in my way.
To me it's not really violence, just business.
There are several cases right here on Earth where we appear to have changed the climate of a region by changing its vegetation. Areas that come to mind are Easter island, the Sahara, and parts of the Middle East. So yes, you can change a climate somewhat by changing the plants.
In regards to Mars, you would have to start by creating something that could live there. There are probably no or almost no terrestrial organisms that could handle martian conditions. Mars is short on Nitrogen, Oxygen, Water, warmth and sunlight. Most terrestrial life needs at least some of these items. Mars is high on radiation and the soil (regolith actually) is probably poisonously high in salt and minerals too.
If it was my assignment, I would start by trying to see if I could mod a lichen enough to grow on Mars. Mostly they just need rock and sunlight. I would expect said lichen to grow extremely slowly due to the cold and lack of water.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be one directional.
MindPrision wrote "endoscope", but I believe he meant "fiber optic." Glass optical fibers should work both ways just fine.
This technique would never work for something like Predator
What you would do is mount your lenses on the object you're hiding. They would move along with it.
"If 'thousands' of USPTO employees were not doing their work, it would be impossible for this agency to be producing the best performance in recent memory and, perhaps, in its entire 224 year history."
I tried to track down the reasoning behind a patent that has been recently issued covering growing plants by shining lights on them. The light bulb has been around since about 1880, and I expect we have been using them to grow plants since about 1881. You can't get anything out of them about how something has been approved by the system.
volpe (58112): Really?... It's actually done in the retina itself?
There are a variety of processes that are applied to visual data before it comes to your awareness, the retina is first level of screening. The tissue of the retina is not that different than neural tissue, it is perfectly capable of comparing things and making decisions. A video camera will look at every pixel in its range equally and send of all its data uniformly. A living visual system is actively working to prune out anything you don't need to notice and is also working to highlight things that may have survival value. It starts right there in the retina.
if my watch is aimed in your direction and I'm not acting strange, (hell maybe I'm reading a book at the same time while the watch records) how would they know?
If you are only recording pictures in a public place then you're good (legally). If you surreptitiously record sound then you may run afoul of wiretapping laws. That there are no wires and you're not tapping anything makes no difference. Depends on your jurisdiction.
All of these lovely fantasies have problems. The hex one adds complexity to the construction for no particular reason. The water tower on the roof becomes a single point of failure and will tend to want to freeze up. Caves would be nice, but what are the odds there'll be convenient caves located right where they want to set up camp? All of them would be complicated to build on Earth, never mind by a guy in a spacesuit
What they actually build will be an extension of our oldest and most mature design school - the square. They'll bring Titanium or Aluminum I-beams and bolt them together. For the sake of discussion lets assume a cube ten meters on each side, maybe an overhang all around the top. They'll bolt cross pieces and panels across the top and pile up regolith on the roof for the first layer of radiation protection.
Once they have this they'll go underneath and set up pressurized tents (if we can find suitable material for local conditions.) If tents work, they keep them. If tents are problematical they'll start building room sized cubes. The cubes will be essentially the same as the outer shell, but smaller and with caulked joints. As time goes by they'll start linking them. For safety reasons, internal air locks will be common. Water will be stored in flat compartments in the ceiling of each cube or tent as secondary radiation protection. Each room will have its own ceiling tanks so the loss of any one unit won't cripple them.
I assume they'll have a number of tanks of liquids and gasses - Nitrogen, Oxygen, Water, whatever else they need. Up on top of the regolith layer would be the place to store them. They'll be close to hand but out of the way, and if a tank fails there'll probably be no shrapnel issues. They will also lend a little bit more radiation shielding. If they have excess sewage it will be frozen in blocks and left on the roof for the same reasons.
The above feature will combine to something that has all the style and grace of a junkyard shack, but hey, it'll be easy to build, can be grown in stages as time allows, and it'll work. My apologies to those fancy design guys...
two problems: 1.) As the plant accumulates isotopes it will tend to irradiate itself. The better it works, the worse the problem.
2.) I'm not familiar with any biological processes that distinguish between isotopes. You'd need a suite of plants, each one a specialist at one or more elements, and you would bring in the appropriate plants for whatever you wanted to collect at a particular site. In fact you'd need multiple plants for each element, a wetland plant, a dryland plant, a warm weather plant, etc. You'd match them up with the geography of your various sites.
You get more insects and disease in general in places where it's warmer.
That's about the sentence you'd get here for robbing a convenience store, even if you didn't hurt any one. How many people did he kill? Except of course he's getting the equivalent of 3.8 million a year to do his time. Who says crime doesn't pay?
This setup lets you always be able to dial out, but will eventually weary your friends who don't know what number you are now. You might want to do something else for a receiving number.
You probably have a core "fingerprint" of usage that is identifiably you, but it may resemble the fingerprint of people who run in your social circle. Mix things up a little. With each new phone add a new group of numbers unrelated to the other phones. Let's say phone #1 calls a cluster of sports related numbers, # 2 local civic groups, #3 bars, taxis, and liquor stores, etc. Call them a few times with honest questions. Let the watchers burn through their budget finding out who all these new d@#mn numbers are.
Not sure Huges is a good example. Before the crash he was not that bad.
No one will come around to download anything. It would be expensive and labor intensive. Operating costs would exceed purchase and installation. They communicate, either by radio or by wire. The one in the picture has an omnidirectional radio antenna on top. You're going to have a heck of a time following that.
You won't get a black SUV with a DHS logo on the side. You'll get an old pickup with some local contrator. The guy in the truck may just have a work order.
You aren't planning on using them in court. You use them to look for vehicles and patterns of interest.
Biosphere II, north of Tuson Arizona. considered by the press to be kind of a giant sad failure, considered by myself to be a radical experiment in ecological engineering. The result of the test run was not what they expected, but science is not about what you were expecting. Arcosanti, outside Mayer, Arizona. Experiment by Paolo Soleri in urban engineering, arcologies.
My understanding is that the plane broke up in flight and came down in a number of places. Besides, blowing it up makes it smaller, but does not hide the various materials, layers, and coatings involved.
As regards civilian uses, this is a potential way to put bulk materials in orbit in a hurry. Nothing living or delicate could take that 100 Gs, (or whatever) but you could send up a lot of air/food/water/clothes/tools/ etc, and they would arrive in orbit in perfectly good shape.
The system operators will be fully uniformed, as per the Geneva Conventions. The weapon system will be fully camouflaged, as per universal custom.
The first time an officer fires this at a suspect vehicle, and hits the Cadillac dealership right in back of the suspect???
If I decide to build a vacation house in the Everglades it might get a little rough for any alligators that happen to live on "my" lot. I'm not going to care if they've been there since sometime in the Mesozoic. I'm aware that alligators have some kind of intelligence, however I'm not that interested in it. They will never understand where I came from or how I got there, or what the hell I'm doing inside that big glass box my contractor put up on their best feeding ground. Any that get in my way will be dealt with, it doesn't matter how well they plan their defense. About all they can do is hope that I'm not a predator...
The system is designed to come on with the car. If you hit the unmarked button on the dash it starts saving what it sees. It is always running a five minute buffer, saves the buffer when you hit the button.
This gives you the ability to record any encounter near your car beginning five minutes before you get pulled over. He won't like you recording yourself and will probably confiscate the mike, but there's no help for that. If you have mad skillz you can also try to pipe the results off site. If a LEO realizes that he's recorded in the vehicle somewhere he can always confiscate it and have the car stripped right down to the frame looking for the data.
"How far up does someone have to go to be outside of NOAA's jurisdiction? "
I'm betting they can extend their jurisdiction waaay faster than you can travel.
It's almost as if the units were optimized to transfer money, rather than protect planes.
If I drain a swamp and build a house it will be kind of hard on the local alligators. However I'm really not too concerned with them, don't care what they think, and may never really know or care how many of them died from being in my way. To me it's not really violence, just business.
In regards to Mars, you would have to start by creating something that could live there. There are probably no or almost no terrestrial organisms that could handle martian conditions. Mars is short on Nitrogen, Oxygen, Water, warmth and sunlight. Most terrestrial life needs at least some of these items. Mars is high on radiation and the soil (regolith actually) is probably poisonously high in salt and minerals too.
If it was my assignment, I would start by trying to see if I could mod a lichen enough to grow on Mars. Mostly they just need rock and sunlight. I would expect said lichen to grow extremely slowly due to the cold and lack of water.