"This is insidious! Alongside a high-capacity magazine ban, we should also ban 3D printing! Clearly it's a technology that will only be used by TERRORISTS!"
If anything causes ban on 3d printers, it won't be firearms/magazines, but rather ability to print plastic rectangles with rounded corners without Apple license.
Yes, current technologies can support bigger numbers if applied properly - but I don't think they can support them in sustainable fashion. At the moment, we are running in energy deficit - and we borrow from Earth by consuming non-renewable resources. And I'm not really convinced that windfarms, huge solar panel arrays and hydroenergy is safe - there might be unforseen consequences of using them at really big scale (plus, even building them and replacing used up components are using some rare resources).
Africa is probably most striking issue here, without amount of hunger there and the 'give fish instead of teaching how to fish' efforts ongoing. I don't think that converting Sahara into farmlands (at possible unpredictable climatic costs 50 years down the line) and having 3 billion people in Africa is what should be the aim. Let Afrika support as many people as it can support with proper quality of life - instead of having 10 times more population and trying to fix the symptoms.
Of course, our entire discussion is purely academical. Population growth will continue and it will be fueled by destruction of Earth and quick consumption of non-renevable resources. Bigest number of people will vote - either with poll booths or with guns - and grab/use whatever is needed for them to survive next 5 years. And after few global wars, famines, climatic change etc, surviving population will decline to rural medieval age and never recover, because of lack of easily available resources. Fermi's Great Filter at it's best...
We ARE living in the closed system. If we continue to sustain current growth, in 6000 or so years, people will weight more than observable universe;)
On more serious note, space exploration is not going to solve population problems. It might, with some serious technology advancement, allow us enough off-Earth colonies to avoid risk of extinction event wiping entire civilization, but won't be a solution for expotential growth of population. This has to stop at some point. We just have a choice of stopping early and preparing for long run (possibly reaching imaginary point in future where we can start population explosion again when we reach far away stars) or ignore the problem, turn every square mile of ocean into algae farm, cover every square meter of deserts with solar panels and build 1000-stories high buildings to house everybody. And when we reach 50-500 billion people on earth, we will hit a wall - but it will be too late to start basic research to go over that wall, because every consumable resource on earth will be used up for basic needs of people.
There is no reason for having 10+ billion people on earth. Fact that we possibly can doesn't mean we should. Civilization is fully sustainable with less, we cannot plan forever hoping for pyramid-scam solutions where bigger and bigger number of children is supporting elders.
It is not about predicting every thing happening - it is about passive safety, which means that when things go wrong, reactor calms down. Designers of old reactors KNEW that things can go wrong and tried to avoid it by putting a lot of safety around - which depended on proper design and operation. This has proven to be not always safe. Some of 4th generation reactors are done on opposite side - if safety fails, reactor shut downs on it's own, because of the way physics work, not because of some backup systems coming online at proper moment.
Technology CAN help. Problem with current reactors is that that when mismanaged or left alone when problems happen, they go hotter and hotter. Some of proposed reactor designs are opposite of that - if system breaks, they will calm down. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety
If we ever plan to have sustainable civilisation, we need 4th+ generation atomic power AND reduce the population. Only then we can think about civilization surving and expanding for next thousand of years. Without reducing population, nothing will save us. Without proper atomic power, we will be energy starved and damage environment even more.
Actually, we are. A 50-165 foot asteroid can sneak up on us, but that isn't going to do much. It has less energy than the 9.0 Fukushima Earthquake, which killed ~10,000 people.
And how much energy from earthquake goes into actual surface damage? I was under impression that vast majority of it is used to shake rocks up and down, which is quite different from releasing same energy in something similar to surface nuclear strike.
I think we should be comparing it to Tunguska event rather than earthquakes. Imagine Tunguska happening over one of densly populated areas. I don't think that it would end up being 2-hours news.
I suppose that they have algo datacenters co-located with exchange in both locations for immediate trading - but they want to perform some kind cross-market arbitrage accross locations. And when arbitrage opportunity comes, you probably have just these 1-2ms of headstart to execute it.
Still, I'm suprised that with so many repeaters (they have to put one each 100-300km?) they have less than 0.5ms overhead compared to speed of light.
Anyway, these mountain-top signal repeaters will come handy when New York will have to call Rohan for help.
My friend works with severely disabled/handicapped children, with quite a few of them being result of adverse vaccine reaction. No, it is not very common, but this is a special institution which gathers all such cases from large area over the country - so from his personal point of view, there is 'plenty' of cases. He said that bringing his own daughter to be vaccinated was one of most scary experiences in his life, even if he knew that statistics make it extremly unlikely that anything goes wrong. But he still DID vaccinate his child. Despite of having to care about 10+ vaccine 'victims' each day, he still believes it is right thing to do.
However, we are all sitting in the same boat (including China). If we sink, they sink too.
Not so sure. I have a feeling that when the really bad global disaster strikes, there will be more people in China after that than in Europe. This might be best chance for China to take over the world (even if bit damaged), given that cold war shown inabililty to do it with military strength by other countries.
It is not about saving the world. It is about developing/protecting yourself/hoarding as much as possible before it collapses. Seems that USA and China understand that, Europe not that much...
I think it is more about the direction it can evolve into. Add wearable AR glasses, less blocky models and 'laser' tag guns and you might get quite interesting variations on cooperative outdoor 'paintball' (think Starship Troopers).
This is how it starts - and we end up with cyberpunk, cover-your-person-in-AR-avatar world where you don't know if something is real before your touch it. Plus obligatory http://xkcd.com/331/ becomes true...
Well, depends if you are talking about criminal activity. Yes, traders can earn their money by front trading and other dirty tricks, but generally, they are very well monitored and are NOT allowed to invest any personal money. Instead, they are given very good bonuses dependent on... guess what... how much money they have earned for their clients !
Reward and benefit of the clients is very closely coupled here - if you make profit, you get paid more, your clients gain more. There is no conflict of interests here.
Now, you have to differentiate between clients and clients. Or actually, 'our guys' and 'losers'. If you are stockholder of my company, you are 'our guy'. If you give you money for us to invest, you are also our guy. If you are person coming from the street looking to buy structured product, you are loser. Yes, officially you are our 'client', but thats just the name - you are the victim which will give the money to real clients.
I suppose that a lot of confusion comes from that. Think about it as a auction house. People putting antiques in auction house are clients. Auction house tries to sell antiques for maximum money, without worrying if they are worth that much, as long as anybody is willing to buy. People buying antiques are not clients - they are targets.
And there is a big difference between investment banking and insurance business - in insurance, EVERYBODY is a target to cheat at any cost.
With everybody wearing these glasses and some shared protocols, people could apply virtual makeup instead of real one, color their dress/hair depending on mood (think Nymphadora from HP movie), do real world scare pranks (please look at my face closely for 20 seconds trying to spot the ghost...). And - most important maybe - all women can be given burkas as soon as voting for new goverment finishes!
Tell me about it. I have to shove off dead bodies of elderly people out of the superfast elevators in tall buildings all week. 50km/h mean almost 14 m/s which would end up being 2.5g in your world, which is enough to cause some casaualties.
Or maybe it is the acceleration which matters, not speed ? But from where all the dead bodies in elevators are coming from?
We were deploying on both linux and windows. Server side on solaris sparc then linux x86, gui on windows. 40-50% of code was shared. Company policy (it was a huge bank, not a small IT shop) was that desktops are running windows. Later, we were able to experiment with linux desktops, but for sure nobody was going to buy Solaris/sparc desktops just to make us feel better (and gui deployment was done on windows, so it would be the same problem of developing on different platform, just other direction). Finally, most of the team was a lot more familiar with windows gui than with solaris one, so it was more natural to run IDEs on windows (and we were not using any gui component for solaris deployment).
As somebody said here - java is the platform, not OS. In that sense, we WERE developing on platform which we are deploying. And my statement is, that java-the-platform is similar enough between OSes to save very considerable amount of work, making cross-platform testing very small problem, as opposed to C++ for example. Now, we were lucky enough to use Sun JDK in all places. I suppose that for people who try to deploy on IBM jdk/gcj/ExcelsiorJET after developing for Sun JDK, they might be into more problems that going from SunJDK one OS -> Sun JDK another OS.
With Java predominantly on the server side instead of in the browser, what exactly is the use case that WORA is supposed to solve? Or put another way, who is writing cross-platform apps?
From a person who actually writes java apps for living, not by reading slashdot: it is VERY useful. It allows me to run the server-side code which used to be deployed on Solaris/SPARC on my Windows/x86 box for quick development/debugging. And guess what? When we upgraded to Solaris/x86 AND Linux/x86, we had to do a bit of performance testing, but only real problems were with a native library we had to use - because the C++ guys porting it have assumed that gcc STL works the same way as CC STL... Half million lines of non-trivial multithreaded java code which is handling billions of EUR daily and not a single code change required because of the OS/cpu change.
The gui itself was written in Swing and running on Windows. Somebody asked for Linux version. It was not painless, because I was using some extra native libraries for window transparency and some custom L&F extensions - but again, within 2 days of work, gui was working on Linux. Yes, it had ugly corners on rounded tabs (because I was missing transparency lib for Linux) and I have spent few hard hours debugging and fixing some focus events behaving differently - but absolute majority of the app just worked.
Yes, for all the drones coding HTML pages, WORA doesn't matter. For people doing standalone server apps, it does a lot.
100 years - be still alive and functioning 5 years - start taking wonderful anti-aging nanobots 12 months - make sure wonderful anti-aging nanobots are put into clinic trials so they can be available for public 4 years later 6 weeks - read about invention of wonderful anti-aging nanobots on Slashot or invent them myself
I'm have already created not working, large scale prototype of nanobot from origami, now I need somebody to miniaturize them and add some clockwork mechanism inside to get them ticking.
The LMC (home of SN1987A) is 160,000 light years away, so this would have the neutrino signal arriving several years ahead of the optical signal.
Maybe it did? Are we really sure that there was no neutrino burst event few years earlier? Or 100000 years before that, because they had different energy ?
As there was a neutrino burst event around the time light reached earth, it would indicate multiple types (or at least speeds) of neutrinos produced. Italian Neutrions can have 1.00003c speed, maybe other kinds have 1.0000...000000001c speed (to arrive just slightly ahead of supernova light). Maybe there are two different kinds of things, both detectable my neutrion detectors (we can call the FTL kind... tachyons ?).
My bets are still on the instrument error in this case of course;)
I think that this is why 'ammonia' is mentioned. I can already see that Health&Safety instructions - "In case of being buried in the rubble, release as soon as possible".
Still, for the first n hours, to find unconcious people who are not following H&S rule, CO2 marker is probably more important.
Take your example with financial markets. L.E.S. predicts that Company XYZ is going to bankrupt/it's stock become worthless. Everybody listening L.E.S.stop to lend money to XYZ/call in debts/sell stocks as soon as possible. Stock price plummets, company has blocked cashflows because of creditors not trusting it, bankrupt.
What you say would be true if prediction of the market would lead people to extend forces balancing the scale in opposite direction. For the many cases I know about, opposite is quite true - if you know about something, actions you take to make profit out of it help it becoming true. Same thing could be extended to other things - like military. If L.E.S.predicts increased tension at certain point of the border between North and South, guess, where they will deploy the extra troops?
I think that traffic jams are better example. If people are trusting L.E.S., traffic jam won't form in the predicted place. And here, you need to pull out rule number two - there are enough people in the world who are thinking they are smarter than L.E.S.... You don't really need a predictive power in such machine. You need to convince important people it has predictive capabilities and for many aspects, job is done - as long as you output reasonably possible predictions, they will come true.
I think that it is very important we will start the campaign against killing the baby seals in the simulated environment. If we all start boycotting LES products, maybe we can all make simulation a better place for cute, furry animals.
Slashdot Mirror
"This is insidious! Alongside a high-capacity magazine ban, we should also ban 3D printing! Clearly it's a technology that will only be used by TERRORISTS!"
If anything causes ban on 3d printers, it won't be firearms/magazines, but rather ability to print plastic rectangles with rounded corners without Apple license.
Yes, current technologies can support bigger numbers if applied properly - but I don't think they can support them in sustainable fashion. At the moment, we are running in energy deficit - and we borrow from Earth by consuming non-renewable resources. And I'm not really convinced that windfarms, huge solar panel arrays and hydroenergy is safe - there might be unforseen consequences of using them at really big scale (plus, even building them and replacing used up components are using some rare resources).
Africa is probably most striking issue here, without amount of hunger there and the 'give fish instead of teaching how to fish' efforts ongoing. I don't think that converting Sahara into farmlands (at possible unpredictable climatic costs 50 years down the line) and having 3 billion people in Africa is what should be the aim. Let Afrika support as many people as it can support with proper quality of life - instead of having 10 times more population and trying to fix the symptoms.
Of course, our entire discussion is purely academical. Population growth will continue and it will be fueled by destruction of Earth and quick consumption of non-renevable resources. Bigest number of people will vote - either with poll booths or with guns - and grab/use whatever is needed for them to survive next 5 years. And after few global wars, famines, climatic change etc, surviving population will decline to rural medieval age and never recover, because of lack of easily available resources. Fermi's Great Filter at it's best...
We ARE living in the closed system. If we continue to sustain current growth, in 6000 or so years, people will weight more than observable universe ;)
On more serious note, space exploration is not going to solve population problems. It might, with some serious technology advancement, allow us enough off-Earth colonies to avoid risk of extinction event wiping entire civilization, but won't be a solution for expotential growth of population. This has to stop at some point. We just have a choice of stopping early and preparing for long run (possibly reaching imaginary point in future where we can start population explosion again when we reach far away stars) or ignore the problem, turn every square mile of ocean into algae farm, cover every square meter of deserts with solar panels and build 1000-stories high buildings to house everybody. And when we reach 50-500 billion people on earth, we will hit a wall - but it will be too late to start basic research to go over that wall, because every consumable resource on earth will be used up for basic needs of people.
There is no reason for having 10+ billion people on earth. Fact that we possibly can doesn't mean we should. Civilization is fully sustainable with less, we cannot plan forever hoping for pyramid-scam solutions where bigger and bigger number of children is supporting elders.
It is not about predicting every thing happening - it is about passive safety, which means that when things go wrong, reactor calms down. Designers of old reactors KNEW that things can go wrong and tried to avoid it by putting a lot of safety around - which depended on proper design and operation. This has proven to be not always safe. Some of 4th generation reactors are done on opposite side - if safety fails, reactor shut downs on it's own, because of the way physics work, not because of some backup systems coming online at proper moment.
Technology CAN help. Problem with current reactors is that that when mismanaged or left alone when problems happen, they go hotter and hotter. Some of proposed reactor designs are opposite of that - if system breaks, they will calm down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety
If we ever plan to have sustainable civilisation, we need 4th+ generation atomic power AND reduce the population. Only then we can think about civilization surving and expanding for next thousand of years. Without reducing population, nothing will save us. Without proper atomic power, we will be energy starved and damage environment even more.
What I would like to know is how often we mistakenly take foreign news at face value.
I know plenty of people who are still treating thousands years old news in Aramaic at face value.
Actually, we are. A 50-165 foot asteroid can sneak up on us, but that isn't going to do much. It has less energy than the 9.0 Fukushima Earthquake, which killed ~10,000 people.
And how much energy from earthquake goes into actual surface damage? I was under impression that vast majority of it is used to shake rocks up and down, which is quite different from releasing same energy in something similar to surface nuclear strike.
I think we should be comparing it to Tunguska event rather than earthquakes. Imagine Tunguska happening over one of densly populated areas. I don't think that it would end up being 2-hours news.
I suppose that they have algo datacenters co-located with exchange in both locations for immediate trading - but they want to perform some kind cross-market arbitrage accross locations. And when arbitrage opportunity comes, you probably have just these 1-2ms of headstart to execute it.
Still, I'm suprised that with so many repeaters (they have to put one each 100-300km?) they have less than 0.5ms overhead compared to speed of light.
Anyway, these mountain-top signal repeaters will come handy when New York will have to call Rohan for help.
My friend works with severely disabled/handicapped children, with quite a few of them being result of adverse vaccine reaction. No, it is not very common, but this is a special institution which gathers all such cases from large area over the country - so from his personal point of view, there is 'plenty' of cases. He said that bringing his own daughter to be vaccinated was one of most scary experiences in his life, even if he knew that statistics make it extremly unlikely that anything goes wrong. But he still DID vaccinate his child. Despite of having to care about 10+ vaccine 'victims' each day, he still believes it is right thing to do.
However, we are all sitting in the same boat (including China). If we sink, they sink too.
Not so sure. I have a feeling that when the really bad global disaster strikes, there will be more people in China after that than in Europe. This might be best chance for China to take over the world (even if bit damaged), given that cold war shown inabililty to do it with military strength by other countries.
It is not about saving the world. It is about developing/protecting yourself/hoarding as much as possible before it collapses. Seems that USA and China understand that, Europe not that much...
I think it is more about the direction it can evolve into. Add wearable AR glasses, less blocky models and 'laser' tag guns and you might get quite interesting variations on cooperative outdoor 'paintball' (think Starship Troopers).
This is how it starts - and we end up with cyberpunk, cover-your-person-in-AR-avatar world where you don't know if something is real before your touch it. Plus obligatory http://xkcd.com/331/ becomes true...
Well, depends if you are talking about criminal activity. Yes, traders can earn their money by front trading and other dirty tricks, but generally, they are very well monitored and are NOT allowed to invest any personal money. Instead, they are given very good bonuses dependent on... guess what... how much money they have earned for their clients !
Reward and benefit of the clients is very closely coupled here - if you make profit, you get paid more, your clients gain more. There is no conflict of interests here.
Now, you have to differentiate between clients and clients. Or actually, 'our guys' and 'losers'. If you are stockholder of my company, you are 'our guy'. If you give you money for us to invest, you are also our guy. If you are person coming from the street looking to buy structured product, you are loser. Yes, officially you are our 'client', but thats just the name - you are the victim which will give the money to real clients.
I suppose that a lot of confusion comes from that. Think about it as a auction house. People putting antiques in auction house are clients. Auction house tries to sell antiques for maximum money, without worrying if they are worth that much, as long as anybody is willing to buy. People buying antiques are not clients - they are targets.
And there is a big difference between investment banking and insurance business - in insurance, EVERYBODY is a target to cheat at any cost.
With everybody wearing these glasses and some shared protocols, people could apply virtual makeup instead of real one, color their dress/hair depending on mood (think Nymphadora from HP movie), do real world scare pranks (please look at my face closely for 20 seconds trying to spot the ghost...). And - most important maybe - all women can be given burkas as soon as voting for new goverment finishes!
Tell me about it. I have to shove off dead bodies of elderly people out of the superfast elevators in tall buildings all week. 50km/h mean almost 14 m/s which would end up being 2.5g in your world, which is enough to cause some casaualties.
Or maybe it is the acceleration which matters, not speed ? But from where all the dead bodies in elevators are coming from?
We were deploying on both linux and windows. Server side on solaris sparc then linux x86, gui on windows. 40-50% of code was shared.
Company policy (it was a huge bank, not a small IT shop) was that desktops are running windows. Later, we were able to experiment with linux desktops, but for sure nobody was going to buy Solaris/sparc desktops just to make us feel better (and gui deployment was done on windows, so it would be the same problem of developing on different platform, just other direction). Finally, most of the team was a lot more familiar with windows gui than with solaris one, so it was more natural to run IDEs on windows (and we were not using any gui component for solaris deployment).
As somebody said here - java is the platform, not OS. In that sense, we WERE developing on platform which we are deploying. And my statement is, that java-the-platform is similar enough between OSes to save very considerable amount of work, making cross-platform testing very small problem, as opposed to C++ for example.
Now, we were lucky enough to use Sun JDK in all places. I suppose that for people who try to deploy on IBM jdk/gcj/ExcelsiorJET after developing for Sun JDK, they might be into more problems that going from SunJDK one OS -> Sun JDK another OS.
With Java predominantly on the server side instead of in the browser, what exactly is the use case that WORA is supposed to solve? Or put another way, who is writing cross-platform apps?
From a person who actually writes java apps for living, not by reading slashdot: it is VERY useful. It allows me to run the server-side code which used to be deployed on Solaris/SPARC on my Windows/x86 box for quick development/debugging. And guess what? When we upgraded to Solaris/x86 AND Linux/x86, we had to do a bit of performance testing, but only real problems were with a native library we had to use - because the C++ guys porting it have assumed that gcc STL works the same way as CC STL... Half million lines of non-trivial multithreaded java code which is handling billions of EUR daily and not a single code change required because of the OS/cpu change.
The gui itself was written in Swing and running on Windows. Somebody asked for Linux version. It was not painless, because I was using some extra native libraries for window transparency and some custom L&F extensions - but again, within 2 days of work, gui was working on Linux. Yes, it had ugly corners on rounded tabs (because I was missing transparency lib for Linux) and I have spent few hard hours debugging and fixing some focus events behaving differently - but absolute majority of the app just worked.
Yes, for all the drones coding HTML pages, WORA doesn't matter. For people doing standalone server apps, it does a lot.
100 years - be still alive and functioning
5 years - start taking wonderful anti-aging nanobots
12 months - make sure wonderful anti-aging nanobots are put into clinic trials so they can be available for public 4 years later
6 weeks - read about invention of wonderful anti-aging nanobots on Slashot or invent them myself
I'm have already created not working, large scale prototype of nanobot from origami, now I need somebody to miniaturize them and add some clockwork mechanism inside to get them ticking.
From wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westfield_Stratford_City
The centre opened on 13 September 2011.
From Pavegen article:
With nearly 30 million shoppers a year, the Westfield Stratford City Shopping Centre has plenty of foot traffic.
Somebody is doing far reaching predictions here and presenting them as facts.
The LMC (home of SN1987A) is 160,000 light years away, so this would have the neutrino signal arriving several years ahead of the optical signal.
Maybe it did? Are we really sure that there was no neutrino burst event few years earlier? Or 100000 years before that, because they had different energy ?
As there was a neutrino burst event around the time light reached earth, it would indicate multiple types (or at least speeds) of neutrinos produced. Italian Neutrions can have 1.00003c speed, maybe other kinds have 1.0000...000000001c speed (to arrive just slightly ahead of supernova light). Maybe there are two different kinds of things, both detectable my neutrion detectors (we can call the FTL kind... tachyons ?).
My bets are still on the instrument error in this case of course ;)
I think that this is why 'ammonia' is mentioned. I can already see that Health&Safety instructions - "In case of being buried in the rubble, release as soon as possible".
Still, for the first n hours, to find unconcious people who are not following H&S rule, CO2 marker is probably more important.
There is a limit of doubling the jedi-robot speed each year - at some point, they will start adding more swords.
Take your example with financial markets. L.E.S. predicts that Company XYZ is going to bankrupt/it's stock become worthless. Everybody listening L.E.S.stop to lend money to XYZ/call in debts/sell stocks as soon as possible. Stock price plummets, company has blocked cashflows because of creditors not trusting it, bankrupt.
What you say would be true if prediction of the market would lead people to extend forces balancing the scale in opposite direction. For the many cases I know about, opposite is quite true - if you know about something, actions you take to make profit out of it help it becoming true. Same thing could be extended to other things - like military. If L.E.S.predicts increased tension at certain point of the border between North and South, guess, where they will deploy the extra troops?
I think that traffic jams are better example. If people are trusting L.E.S., traffic jam won't form in the predicted place. And here, you need to pull out rule number two - there are enough people in the world who are thinking they are smarter than L.E.S.... You don't really need a predictive power in such machine. You need to convince important people it has predictive capabilities and for many aspects, job is done - as long as you output reasonably possible predictions, they will come true.
I think that it is very important we will start the campaign against killing the baby seals in the simulated environment. If we all start boycotting LES products, maybe we can all make simulation a better place for cute, furry animals.
I wonder if they will go after the telecoms - after all, phonebook is a kind of huge listing of phone-using community...
More to the point, if I fly at the speed of light today to alpha centauri it will still be June 2 2010 when I get there.
Not on my watch, sir !