But google for "L5 Society" and you can see if they're still around.
NASA looked at the plan, too. But made an error: They split the power plant and heavy-lifter vehicle parts of the fesability study into separate projects.
The power plant designers got an extra percent or so efficiency by using a big turbine. Then the heavy lifter designers designed around the largest piece - which was the turbine. This resulted in an enormous lifter and a small number of shots to pay off design and construction.
With fuel free (except for putting up a collector) they could have used a much smaller turbine and taken a small efficiency hit. The next smaller part is tiny by comparison, resulting in a smaller vehicle, more flights, and greatly reduced costs.
(You do need a heavy lift vehicle because there's so much stuff to send up that using an expensive manned vehicle like the shuttle for all of it would break the budget. You use shuttles for the assembly crew, anything delicate, anything too expensive to trust to a lower-reliability vehicle, and cargos-of-opportunity.)
The problem is that, given "unfair and unbalanced" reporting, only the press' pick gets heard. And that pick often turns out to be the crackpot idea.
Would you rather the crackpot idea seemed (to people who don't look closely and critically) to be on a par with the well-grounded one? Or would you rather the crackpot idea got touted continuously before millions of viewers and the well-grounded one never got heard at all?
You don't get to pick the one true answer to every question and suppress coverage of all the false ones - even if you could somehow pick them right.
It's like the republic / representative democracy governmental forms. They're pretty bad. But all the alternatives seem to be worse.
But I'll tell you what: If you have an idea for a better way to do it (and to make it succeed in the market place), and this is really important to you, give it a try.
That's where CNN came from. That's where Fox News came from. Maybe you'll be the next media billionaire, while doing something you really believe in.
What's the practical time limit for this technique if it's at 7 deg C? A few days? Meat doesn't keep forever in a refrigerator.
Got me. (They just invented it, after all.) Let's see how it works out. Real data will be forthcoming from the labs - and hospitals - soon enough.
But cooler means longer - and frozen means cooler. There are already techniques to get past the ice-crystal barrier near freezing, and some success with the shrink-and-crack-the-brain barrier when going for liquid nitrogen temperatures.
What makes this a breakthrough is that it shows you can shut down a brain and body and then get them restarted without detectable permanent damage - and gives you one way to do it. That's a BIG hurdle cleared.
It's an enabler for developing practical techniques for going beyond 7C in the search for days and years of suspension.
Honestly, how much would it cost to require an SUV to get 30+ MPG instead of 15?
It would actually costs less than an SUV, you'd just have to dump half the steel to cut weight, which would reduce its size significantly.
And it would weaken it and reduce its utility - so the people who NEED its function (farmers, rural residents, people with families) would have to move to the NEXT heavier vehicle - a van or a truck, depending on application requirements.
This already happened once: The SUV as originaly designed was used mainly in rural settings, where the off-road capability, strength, and load capacity was necessary. But government intervention to force higher mileage on passenger cars killed the station wagon - the utility vehicle (cargo and multiple passengers) for urban and suburban families. This was the main factor that drove the broad adoption of the heavier, less fuel-efficient, SUV in the urban market.
(Another significant factor was the deterioration of the urban roads - which was allowed to happen deliberately in some regions (i.e. the SF Bay area) in an attempt to force commuters onto inadequate mass transit systems.)
The urban adoption has lead to several other effects - such as the redesign of SUVs to make them more comfortable on urban roads and to be more attractive (at major cost to their offroad capability and price-performance).
Now you propose to compound the error.
Keep it up: Pretty soon you'll have them driving around in something the size of a semitractor. Think how much more fuel THAT will burn. Think how much worse the problem will be.
Think how much more political power you can grab with a problem of that size to "fight".
There's only one downside to this - if we divert all this energy down to earth & use it, it all ends up as heat in the end, which completely nullifies the original purpose of the ring (if you remember) of preventing global warming! D'oh!
Let's do the rest of the numbers.
By your own assumptions, only 7% of the radiation caught by the ring makes it to the grid. More than 7% of the ring's shadow falls on the earth, and essentially all of the light it intercepts would have been absorbed and turned into heat if it had been allowed to pass though and hit the earth, so you have a net gain (even IF you paved the WHOLE thing with panels).
But much of that power is displacing grid power - mainly generated by Carnot cycle heat engines which dump several times as much heat as they generate power. There's a factor of about 5 for the power replaced.
Next: Most of the power replaced comes from FOSSIL FUEL PLANTS which are currently pouring out the carbon dioxide that is the main alleged cause of the problem in the first place. The carbon dioxide absorbs many times as much heat as was involved in its burning before it's finally sequestered in minerals again. So displacing fossil fuel plants is an ongoing gain.
The main problem to worry about is bringing on another ice age.
It's called a "Steam Plant". Very much like the current fuel-driven plants, whether burning chemicals or nucleii.
Average efficiency (even with the carnot cycle losses) is better than current panels. Much less stuff to lift into orbit - because mirrors are much lighter than solar panels and they're the bulk of the object. (Radiators are heavier but the total system still has panels beat by a bunch.)
For some reason, I'm getting an image of a charred barren hillside a few miles from the collector.
That was examined in considerable detail a few decades ago, with an eye to preventing exactly that scenario (along with things like microwave-cooked birds falling out of the sky ready to eat). A fine solution was found:
First: Pick a frequency that, unlike the band used in microwave ovens, is NOT readily absorbed by the water composing most obstructions or potentially damagable natural structures (clouds, birds, cows, plants) or by other materials found in lifeforms. (There are some fine bands for this in the milimeter wavelengths.)
Second: Put up a "rectenna" site (antennas with microwave semiconductors - "Crystal sets of Inconcevable Power" to quote a pardoy of Doc Smith). This covers tens or hundreds of acres, and catches essentially all of the energy while letting most of the sunlight through. (You can graze cattle under it if it's not at Fort Stinkin' Desert - and even there it won't bother the lifeforms beneath it once the constructin is done.) Even if the beam were pure heat it would only be a large-single-digit multiple of the amount of sunlight shining on the area on a clear day, and it's nearly all caught by the rectenna.
Third: Transmit a "pilot carrier" from an antenna in the middle of the array to synchronize the transmitters spread out across the broad structure of your solar collectors (or across a number of them).
The result is a "synthetic aperture" antenna of large size, tightly focussing the return power on the receiving rectenna site. If the pilot signal is lost the beam immediately defocusses - within milliseconds - as the syncronization is lost, with most of the energy missing the entire planet and the rest being orders of magnitude weaker than a distant radar site. (Ditto for the energy from an individual transmitter that loses sync - it stops being combined with the rest of the beam and turns into a much smaller microwave beacon.)
From synchronous orbit the earth is a small fraction of the visible sky, and any target on it is not visible to the naked eye. If the energy from the beam were all visible light and defocussed you'd have a hard time spotting it in daylight.
You could do the same pilot beam hack with laser light. But why bother? Lasers are less efficient, more more would be absorbed by the atmosphere, and less converted to useful power at the output. Even with the tech available in the '70s you could get 85% or better from DC in at the satellites to power to the grid on Earth.
Construction costs would be comparable to those of an earthbound plant. Then fuel is free for the life of the plant and there's no waste to dump (except the plant itself if you ever decommission it, or any burned-out parts).
Semiconductors on the ground. Vacuum transmitting tubes in orbit. (Vacuum tubes are EASY in orbit, and very efficient. B-) )
Even in science, you need to examine the competing theories - even the crackpot ones - if only to determine that they ARE false and DON'T make accurate predictions.
Yes, providing "fair and balanced" coverage gives too much weight to the false, with the result that a lot of people mistakenly think it is true. But picking one side and suppressing even the major alternative convinces even more people of that side's truth, regardless of whether it is true (or even a rough approximation).
Hard scientists, of exceptional intelligence, spending their lives working in tight focus on their special piece of knowlege, still pick the wrong answer. Sometimes they go to their graves convinced that it's right, despite a more accurate competing theory being well known to them and having convinced the bulk of the other specialists in their field. (Science is the process of correcting such mistakes and discarding such theories in favor of ever-better approximations of the truth.)
Why should we expect journalists to make a better pick? They're non-specialists, who spend a few hours to a few days interviewing a handfull of people (or attend a press conference, ask a question, pick up a press release, and maybe change a couple words) and must produce a "story" comprehensible to a broad audience (which they perceive as being of lower intelligence than themselves) by deadline time. Their incentive structure is NOT to find and spread truth. It is to capture eyeballs, to sell the papers, the sponsors' products, or the editor's political line.
In EVERY SINGLE CASE where I've known the actual story behind a newspaper article they've gotten it wrong - even on minor details (dates, times, the spelling of names) that a cursory check check would have caught. (The closest I've ever seen to a reporter in any medium getting the story right was in a Wired article. For that I give the reporter major cudos, even though it detracts from my argument here.)
Meanwhile, if it's so tough to make the right call in something as exact and repeatable as hard science, why should we expect anything better in the softer "sciences" - or politics?
We should let THEM pick one side and make it all we hear - about things as important as war, politics, or potential UNnatural disasters?
No, thanks!
I'll take the "Fair and Balanced" approach. At least that way I'll have heard TWO sides to chose from. (Sometimes they're both wrong. But the truth is much more likely to be in one of them than in an arbitrary pick - or the mainstream media's usual choices.)
To quote Fox News' other motto: "We report. You decide."
I have a firewall machine, with the linux boxen behind it on one subnet.
Recently we had to break down our no-Windows rule and get the wife a Windows box for her classwork (unrelated to IT). The college profs assumed Windows in the students' hands and with her classload we couldn't take the risk of slowing her down with Microsoft/Open incompatibilities.
So I put another ethernet card in the firewall and gave her her own subnet. Each subnet sees the other as 'outside'. (If machines on one subnet get infected the only advantage the malware gets over being on the general net is that machines on one subnet can address machines on either subnet by their own (globally-routable) IP numbers rather than going through the DSL feed's NAT. They still have to navigate the rest of the filtering mechanisms - which includes no incoming almost-anything.)
She installed the best anti-malware software packages she could get - upon initial activation before the network connection was plugged in - then was given only specific outbound connections to obtain updates before general (still firewalled) service was enabled.
She also powers it down when not actively using it.
She's had the machine for almost a year and hasn't had a detected malware infection so far. (But lots of "crunch" sounds from one of the packages as it claims successful attack-blocking. B-) ) While I've seen the firewall block lots of probes from outside I've seen nothing coming over from the other subnet.
From what I recall, during drowning or suffocation, brain damage occurs in humans quite soon (10 minutes?). How is it that this process negates the lack of oxygen to the brain, allowing no damage to occur?
The 10 minute limit is for slow suffocation at normal temperatures. Two things happen:
- First, many of the tiny valves controlling the distribution of blood in the brain capilaries shut, trying to route the remaining oxygen to the neurons controlling things like breathing and heart rate.
These valves are tiny muscles, which, once contracted, require power (from metabolization) to reopen. Let them be oxygen-starved for too long - about ten minutes - and they get stuck closed. Then, even once oxygen is restored, the blood remains cut off to the areas they control. (It does no good to raise the blood pressure to try to force blood past them: You'll blow the plumbing before they leak. Massive stroke.)
- Second: As with the muscles, the neurons have continuous chemical reactions going on that cause damage that must be cleaned up by active, powered, systems. Turn down the oxygen while leaving the temperature up and the cleanup systems fail while the damage mechanisms continue. (Firing the nerve uses up additional power, making the problem worse.)
Let this go on for more than half an hour or so without turning the air back on and the damage gets ahead of the nerve's ability to repair it - causing cell death. That ruptures the cell and releases a glutamate - which tends to force other nearby nerves to fire, consuming their resources and speeding their death, in the "glutamate chain reaction". This easily gets started in regions of the brain fed by still-shut-off plumbing. But with enough glutimate dumped it can spread to nearby areas that have adequate oxygen - because it's not adequate to keep ahead of the massive firing and cell exhaustion.
The first mechanism sets the normal time limit. But the second is the final catastrophe.
But diving sets up a condition much like suffocation upon resurfacing: Swimming underwater pressurizes the gas in the lungs, and the organism can remain active for some time before it starts to run out of oxygen. But then it takes time to get back to the surface - and the lowered pressure on the ascent causes oxygen levels in the blood and tissue to crash. Not good.
Evolution came up with a workaround: The "mamilian diving reflex", so called because it's characteristic of all mamals - happened a LONG time back.
When the reflex detects a deep dive (cold on the skin - especially on the back of the neck, I think), it modifies the valves' reaction to overall oxygen shortage: Instead of shutting off blood to "unimportant" (for respiration) parts of the brain, it causes ALL the valves to OPEN. Then if they stick they stick open. This risks speeding respiratory failure. But once (if) oxygen is restored, it allows it to reach ALL the brain. Get oxygen back before the cells start dying (after a half hour or so) and they all get the power they nead to clean up and get on with life.
So if you drown in COLD water you can be breathing-stopped for a half-hour or a bit more and still be restarted with no long-term brain damage.
This treatment seems to extend on that: Flooding with cold saline will activate the diving reflex, sticking the valves open. Then the rapid oxygen loss will shut down all energy-driven metabolism - both the repair and some of the damage-makers.
Meanwhile, the deep cooling of the tissue (to essentially refrigerator temperatures) will slow the other damaging chemical reactions, just as refrigeration slows meat spoilage. (It IS slowing meat spoilage! And 7C is about 45F, close to the 40F recommended for refrigerator settings.) This is probably the main factor in getting past the half-hour limit on cold-drowning.
Separate storage of the blood allows the replacement fluid to be optimized to cool the rest of the body at a more rapid rate than could be accom
In that case, Cable provision is a natural monopoly and there is nothing to be gained by having it run by a private company (the theory of capitalism being based on competition), so it should be taken under public ownership.
If there were no other way to obtain equivlent products to those provided by cable, that might be true. But the products cable sells are also availble by other transport: Broadband internet connectivity by DSL satellite, and wireless. Video feeds by satellite and any competing broadband connection. And so on.
So while the actual CABLE connection may be a "natural monopoly" and thus immune to effective competition, the things you actually buy a cable connection FOR are available from other sources. This puts cable providers in a competitive market, creating the price pressure and incentive structure for service improvement that makes private ownership a better deal for customers than government ownership (or the approximation of government ownership plus operation by a contractor that you get through the regulated private monopoly mechanism).
XviD is licensed under the GPL. If they link with it at runtime they must provide the code not only for the version of XviD they used, but also for any parts of their application that link with XviD.
But they must offer it to the parties to whom they DISTRIBUTED THE SOFTWARE or devices containing it. That means the companies who bought the camera/development system.
Does it have to go further? If you actually PURCHASE the cameras, I believe so. If ownership remains with the store (and you are merely leaving a deposit when you "buy" the camera), I'm not so sure.
If there's GPLed software in the navigation computer of a car, and you rent it from Avis, is either Avis or the device manufacturer responsible for making the source available to you? I don't think so. If you buy the car from Avis when they're done renting it, at least one of them is obligated.
Evidently, nothing is sacred anymore. Not even grammatical rules against double negatives in the English language.
Unlike French, the English language does not have a standards body.
"Standard English" is a particular regularization of a particular dialect (from the US east coast quite some time back), foisted on children continent-wide by an educational establishment. It qualifies as merely one of the regional dialects. (Granted it's a widespread one thanks to the institutional support, as well as to its origin within, and use by, a region with a lot of money and power.) Claiming there is one "correct" English usage and this is it is an example of provincialism.
A number of regional dialects of American English use the double-negative as an intensifier, rather than forbidding it or using it in the mathematical sense of reinverting the sign to restore the positive.
Near the ground, I consider it in proportion to the objects around it. In the sky, I have no reference
Near the ground you compare it to objects on the horizon. Some of those objects are things you have experience with up close (like buildings, trees, and mountains). So you get a sense of scale. The moon appears to be just behind the horizon, making it gigantic (though nowhere as big as it really is).
Far from the ground you compare it to other flying objects that you also occasionally see on the ground or at known distances (i.e. birds) and thus can use for a reference. It appears to be at or just beyond birdflight altitude, which makes it appear much smaller (though it subtends the same angle).
Same illusion happens with the sun, of course. But it's usually not quite as pronounced - because it's more difficult to look directly at it and compare it to objects on the horizon. The "Oh, GOSH it's BIG!" phenomenon happens when the moon or sun and the objects near its postion on the horizon are visible simultaneously, and that happens more often and more clearly with the moon.
It also happens with traffic lights, which are much larger than they appear when they're hanging over an intersection.
In fact, there *IS* evidence that sex offenders *CAN* change their behavior. If there was not, no court in 49 states (California excluded because they're just insane) would ever release them. Ever.
This shows a profound misunderstanding of the court system. They do not make the law. They interpret the law. (Though they can stretch interpretations to ridiculous lengths...)
In the case of someone convicted of a crime, child molestation or otherwise, they only have the option of confining them up to the maximum sentence provided by the law banning what the offender did.
If, say, child molestation has a penalty of x-to-y years in jail they can't keep them in jail for even y plus one day.
As to the claims that there are therapies that can cure child molestation, or that child molesters who have been so blatant or repetitive as to be caught and convicted can then learn to control their behavior and not repeat: I'll be overjoyed to see evidence to that effect.
Those convicted of felonies generally lose a number of rights, even after serving their time: Possession of guns, voting (in some jurisdictions), elegibility for certain positions of trust (such as military service, practice of law, security guard, locksmith, high corporate official), and so on. (Some states automatically "restore civil rights" if they don't re-offend after a certain number of years, and any state governor can restore them on a case-by-case basis by a decree akin to a pardon.)
One thing they lose is anonymity.
At least one class of sex offenders - child molesters - have an additional issue: They repeat. They have a compulsive sexual attraction to a prohibited category of potential "partners" that has not been shown to be alterable by any therapy yet tried. (Even by themselves - some of them would LOVE to be able to change.) When combined with impulse control inadequate to keep them from acting on the attraction despite both social and legal barriers (as evidenced by their past offenses) you have a situation where there is no safety once they are released.
Increasing the tax base is now a reason to seize someone's property.
And that creates a new way around California's Proposition 13 (which keeps them from raising property taxes on your house and land until it sells). Watch for this:
1) Emminent domain the tax-capped house.
2) Sell it to another buyer. (Taxes now at new rate.)
3) Previous owner has to buy a different house. (Taxes now at new rate.)
Old owner is now paying the higher tax rate. Old property is now taxed at the higher tax rate.
I recall reading about a case a while back in which the police obtained evidence without a warrant by taking it from someone's trash, and the court ruled that as non-infringing.
Admissible.
I hear the Supremes have ruled that if you throw out a document intact the police can retreive it and use it against you, but if you shred it they can not use the reassembled pieces against you as evidence in court. The distinction is over whether you have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" of the document's contents.
Apple is getting its just deserts from supporting the software patent system.
IMHO Apple is getting its just deserts for something ELSE they did earlier: The "Look and Feel" suit. This was when they tried to stretch copyright into a longer-term patent on interfaces by suing Microsoft for copyright violation over Windows.
As I recall it they claimed that the interface was akin to a play, the software to the play's script and its operation was a performance. So any substantially similar interface was a prohibited derivative work.
Of course if this interpretation had held up it would have KILLED the software industry. It's far worse than patents - both because of the enormous term (even before the latest extensions) and because of the broad reach (far beyond the tight specification of the claims). And it's also far beyond a reasonable interpretation of copyright as applied to code (where substantial literal copying is prohibited but the ideas behind it are unprotected). So it's fortunate that the courts weren't convinced.
(I still have a protest button Gilmore was circulating at the time, with an ugly "apple worm" eating a computer and the slogan "Keep your Lawyers off My Computer if I recall it correctly.")
This is either a diversion away from, or a test of, such a system.
Or perhaps it's another attempt to discredit competing media outlets.
By setting up an open wiki over opinion pieces they're creating a situation where the result will be hash. Then they can point to it and say "See! Wikis are hash when it comes to anything important. You can't trust them as a source of accurate information. (You should be reading us instead. B-) )"
They might just leave it up as a glaring example of what happens. But I'd give odds that there will be a big news piece about it in a couple weeks, once it's had a chance to ferment.
It doesn't always work. Sometimes urban myths and other popular misconceptions can be found. Before believing anything you read there you had better be sure to get confirmation elsewhere.
But that's also true of commercial encyclopedias, both printed and electronic. Sometimes it's even deliberate, with the editors pressing a political position as fact.
You ALWAYS have to get confirmation elsewhere, no matter WHAT your source.
At least with a wiki there's no pretence that the authors credentials are checked and he's necessarily unbased. So you KNOW you have to check it.
By the way: Ditto with other sources of "truth": newspapers, broadcast news, dictionaries, university courses, textbooks, religions,...
Even technical manuals and data tables need to be checked. I hear that automated theorem-proving software exposed errors in a large percentage of the standard integrals in the tables found in the back of textbooks - mainly those not used for much of anything practical, the latter having been debugged by use and failure. And the breakthrough in building a computer-predictor of the horribly complex behavior of water at various pressures and temperatures came with the discovery that a section of the "steam tables" - a fundamental tool for the design of engines and power systems from early railroads to modern nuclear generation plants - was flat-out wrong.
Don't stereotype Slashdot. The membership consists of people who are barely into middle school and those who have their Ph. Ds, and just about every single person you can think of in between.
Not only that, but (like usenet before it) the membership contains a mix of old hands and newbies - including a continuous flux of the latter.
The old hands have gone through the arguments, changed some of their opinions thanks to the insights of others, and now are pretty stable in their current mindsets (pending NEW data or insights.) The newbies arrive with only the opinions they have formed on the basis of their own reasoning and the data and interpretations they have observed elsewhere, ask the same old questions or spout the same old arguments, and are presented with the same old revalations. Many of them absorb some of the insights and become enlightened (in one or more of the many ways available). Some of them contribute conter-insights, and the consensuses are honed. After a while they to become old-hands, ready to present the latest rev of enlightenment to the next round of newbies. And some of them take their newly honed memes to other forums (fora?),
To a viewer who makes the three standard media mistakes of assuming a static population, homogeneous in experience and in opinion, much of the traffic appears to be an infinite-loop debating society, rehashing the same old arguments with no progress whatsoever. In fact there are multiple sets if ideas (often competing) among subpopulations of members and an ongoing process of learning, improving, and spreading the successful arguments both to new participants and to a broader external audience.
Much like a university. Or an interacting collection (NOT a single instance) of political parties or religious/philosophical organizations.
And (like usenet before it), the occasional set-in-his-ways gadfly who NEVER learns and ALWAYS brings up the same old, discredited arguments whenever his hotbutton subject arises, serves a valuable function. He provides a periodic opportunity for the other participants to dissect the errors of the stock arguments and present (and hone) the refutations - bringing up the old subjects (when external events have made them interesting again) so the new participants can see all sides of the issue. You can't count on the current crop of new players to raise the strawman and have it blasted apart every time it's topical. As we used to say in usenet: "If didn't exist we'd have to invent him."
Indeed, very occasionally someone did. But a real true-believer would do it SO much better. So it is fortunate there would usually be at least one of the genuine article hanging around. B-)
The web is teeming with information. Unfortunately, most of it is probably worthless.
Sturgeon's law: "But 98% of [Science Fiction] is [excrement]". "Madam, 98% of EVERYTHING is [excrement]".
It's the 2% that is important. Music hasn't gotten worse since the Classical stuff was written. There was just as much crap back then. But only a few exceptional masterpieces are still being played. Yet there are enough of those to keep orchestras and classical music radio stations in business worldwide.
However, don't become so pessimistic. I don't think that the level of national dialogue has declined. It's probably stayed the same. The internet has just given more ignorant people an easy way to express themselves.
IMHO - honed by half a century of observation - the level of national dialogue has been vastly improved by the unlimited access of the internet.
Yes it gives the ignorant-yet-opinionated an opportunity to spout. And EVERYBODY is BORN ignorant, and at first absorbs a set of opinions from his/her parents, acquaintences, and local authority figures. So unlimited access means there's a LOT of ignorant-but-opinionated spouting. (Fortunately ignorance does NOT equal stupidity OR pig-headedness, and ignorance can be cured very simply.)
If you thought as good about everything as a savant thought about one thing, I believe it would show that with proper organization a well wired smaller mass can be capable of greater predictions of the environment than a larger brain mass.
On the other hand there is an experiment that seem to indicate that cognitive ability is largely a function of number of instances of some simple pattern:
Experiment was run in a Y maze, i.e. subject placed in one end, food reward at one of the other two ends. Three subject types: Particular breed of fish, turtles (with about twice the brain mass), and a third I'll get to later.
Initially food is always on, say, the right at first. Subject learns to turn right. Once this learning is established, the maze is reversed. Subject must UNlearn "food on right" and learn "food on left". Measure number of trials to do this. Repeat.
With the fish it takes a while for them to figure out the food is now on the left. And then takes them about the same number trials to learn it's back on the right. You can do reversals until your grant runs out and it still takes them about the same number of trials to figure out that it's switched.
With the turtles, after a few reversals they suddenly get the concept of reversals. After that they catch on very quickly that the maze has swapped again.
Now the interesting part: Take embryos of the fish species. Remove the prototype brain tissue from one and insert it into another. Let it mature. Result is a chimera fish with a double-mass fish brain of apparently the normal organization - and about the size of the brain of the turtle.
Run these through the test and they learn reversals just like the turtle did. They "get it" with what is apparently just more-of-the-same rather than anything special.
With respect to savants: It's pretty clear that different areas of the brain are specialized for different things. So savants having normal-sized brains and being exceptionally good at one thing is not at odds with the idea that it's more neurons that make more smarts. They could as easily have given over more of their brain tissue to processing that specialty - possibly at the cost of starving other functions of neurons.
On the other hand, that doesn't eliminate other possibilities, such as better organization of that part of the brain, or more attention given to the subject in a more general-purpose system. The big-brained fish could be expected to have more of any specialized processor sections, as well as more "general-purpose cpu resources" to distribute (as "attention") to tasks like cracking the maze problem.
Slashdot Mirror
You're about 30 years too late. B-(
But google for "L5 Society" and you can see if they're still around.
NASA looked at the plan, too. But made an error: They split the power plant and heavy-lifter vehicle parts of the fesability study into separate projects.
The power plant designers got an extra percent or so efficiency by using a big turbine. Then the heavy lifter designers designed around the largest piece - which was the turbine. This resulted in an enormous lifter and a small number of shots to pay off design and construction.
With fuel free (except for putting up a collector) they could have used a much smaller turbine and taken a small efficiency hit. The next smaller part is tiny by comparison, resulting in a smaller vehicle, more flights, and greatly reduced costs.
(You do need a heavy lift vehicle because there's so much stuff to send up that using an expensive manned vehicle like the shuttle for all of it would break the budget. You use shuttles for the assembly crew, anything delicate, anything too expensive to trust to a lower-reliability vehicle, and cargos-of-opportunity.)
No argument with that.
The problem is that, given "unfair and unbalanced" reporting, only the press' pick gets heard. And that pick often turns out to be the crackpot idea.
Would you rather the crackpot idea seemed (to people who don't look closely and critically) to be on a par with the well-grounded one? Or would you rather the crackpot idea got touted continuously before millions of viewers and the well-grounded one never got heard at all?
You don't get to pick the one true answer to every question and suppress coverage of all the false ones - even if you could somehow pick them right.
It's like the republic / representative democracy governmental forms. They're pretty bad. But all the alternatives seem to be worse.
But I'll tell you what: If you have an idea for a better way to do it (and to make it succeed in the market place), and this is really important to you, give it a try.
That's where CNN came from. That's where Fox News came from. Maybe you'll be the next media billionaire, while doing something you really believe in.
What's the practical time limit for this technique if it's at 7 deg C? A few days? Meat doesn't keep forever in a refrigerator.
Got me. (They just invented it, after all.) Let's see how it works out. Real data will be forthcoming from the labs - and hospitals - soon enough.
But cooler means longer - and frozen means cooler. There are already techniques to get past the ice-crystal barrier near freezing, and some success with the shrink-and-crack-the-brain barrier when going for liquid nitrogen temperatures.
What makes this a breakthrough is that it shows you can shut down a brain and body and then get them restarted without detectable permanent damage - and gives you one way to do it. That's a BIG hurdle cleared.
It's an enabler for developing practical techniques for going beyond 7C in the search for days and years of suspension.
Honestly, how much would it cost to require an SUV to get 30+ MPG instead of 15?
It would actually costs less than an SUV, you'd just have to dump half the steel to cut weight, which would reduce its size significantly.
And it would weaken it and reduce its utility - so the people who NEED its function (farmers, rural residents, people with families) would have to move to the NEXT heavier vehicle - a van or a truck, depending on application requirements.
This already happened once: The SUV as originaly designed was used mainly in rural settings, where the off-road capability, strength, and load capacity was necessary. But government intervention to force higher mileage on passenger cars killed the station wagon - the utility vehicle (cargo and multiple passengers) for urban and suburban families. This was the main factor that drove the broad adoption of the heavier, less fuel-efficient, SUV in the urban market.
(Another significant factor was the deterioration of the urban roads - which was allowed to happen deliberately in some regions (i.e. the SF Bay area) in an attempt to force commuters onto inadequate mass transit systems.)
The urban adoption has lead to several other effects - such as the redesign of SUVs to make them more comfortable on urban roads and to be more attractive (at major cost to their offroad capability and price-performance).
Now you propose to compound the error.
Keep it up: Pretty soon you'll have them driving around in something the size of a semitractor. Think how much more fuel THAT will burn. Think how much worse the problem will be.
Think how much more political power you can grab with a problem of that size to "fight".
There's only one downside to this - if we divert all this energy down to earth & use it, it all ends up as heat in the end, which completely nullifies the original purpose of the ring (if you remember) of preventing global warming! D'oh!
Let's do the rest of the numbers.
By your own assumptions, only 7% of the radiation caught by the ring makes it to the grid. More than 7% of the ring's shadow falls on the earth, and essentially all of the light it intercepts would have been absorbed and turned into heat if it had been allowed to pass though and hit the earth, so you have a net gain (even IF you paved the WHOLE thing with panels).
But much of that power is displacing grid power - mainly generated by Carnot cycle heat engines which dump several times as much heat as they generate power. There's a factor of about 5 for the power replaced.
Next: Most of the power replaced comes from FOSSIL FUEL PLANTS which are currently pouring out the carbon dioxide that is the main alleged cause of the problem in the first place. The carbon dioxide absorbs many times as much heat as was involved in its burning before it's finally sequestered in minerals again. So displacing fossil fuel plants is an ongoing gain.
The main problem to worry about is bringing on another ice age.
You don't need solar cells.
Use mirrors, plumbing, and water.
It's called a "Steam Plant". Very much like the current fuel-driven plants, whether burning chemicals or nucleii.
Average efficiency (even with the carnot cycle losses) is better than current panels. Much less stuff to lift into orbit - because mirrors are much lighter than solar panels and they're the bulk of the object. (Radiators are heavier but the total system still has panels beat by a bunch.)
For some reason, I'm getting an image of a charred barren hillside a few miles from the collector.
That was examined in considerable detail a few decades ago, with an eye to preventing exactly that scenario (along with things like microwave-cooked birds falling out of the sky ready to eat). A fine solution was found:
First: Pick a frequency that, unlike the band used in microwave ovens, is NOT readily absorbed by the water composing most obstructions or potentially damagable natural structures (clouds, birds, cows, plants) or by other materials found in lifeforms. (There are some fine bands for this in the milimeter wavelengths.)
Second: Put up a "rectenna" site (antennas with microwave semiconductors - "Crystal sets of Inconcevable Power" to quote a pardoy of Doc Smith). This covers tens or hundreds of acres, and catches essentially all of the energy while letting most of the sunlight through. (You can graze cattle under it if it's not at Fort Stinkin' Desert - and even there it won't bother the lifeforms beneath it once the constructin is done.) Even if the beam were pure heat it would only be a large-single-digit multiple of the amount of sunlight shining on the area on a clear day, and it's nearly all caught by the rectenna.
Third: Transmit a "pilot carrier" from an antenna in the middle of the array to synchronize the transmitters spread out across the broad structure of your solar collectors (or across a number of them).
The result is a "synthetic aperture" antenna of large size, tightly focussing the return power on the receiving rectenna site. If the pilot signal is lost the beam immediately defocusses - within milliseconds - as the syncronization is lost, with most of the energy missing the entire planet and the rest being orders of magnitude weaker than a distant radar site. (Ditto for the energy from an individual transmitter that loses sync - it stops being combined with the rest of the beam and turns into a much smaller microwave beacon.)
From synchronous orbit the earth is a small fraction of the visible sky, and any target on it is not visible to the naked eye. If the energy from the beam were all visible light and defocussed you'd have a hard time spotting it in daylight.
You could do the same pilot beam hack with laser light. But why bother? Lasers are less efficient, more more would be absorbed by the atmosphere, and less converted to useful power at the output. Even with the tech available in the '70s you could get 85% or better from DC in at the satellites to power to the grid on Earth.
Construction costs would be comparable to those of an earthbound plant. Then fuel is free for the life of the plant and there's no waste to dump (except the plant itself if you ever decommission it, or any burned-out parts).
Semiconductors on the ground. Vacuum transmitting tubes in orbit. (Vacuum tubes are EASY in orbit, and very efficient. B-) )
... than just one.
We've seen far too much of where that leads.
Even in science, you need to examine the competing theories - even the crackpot ones - if only to determine that they ARE false and DON'T make accurate predictions.
Yes, providing "fair and balanced" coverage gives too much weight to the false, with the result that a lot of people mistakenly think it is true. But picking one side and suppressing even the major alternative convinces even more people of that side's truth, regardless of whether it is true (or even a rough approximation).
Hard scientists, of exceptional intelligence, spending their lives working in tight focus on their special piece of knowlege, still pick the wrong answer. Sometimes they go to their graves convinced that it's right, despite a more accurate competing theory being well known to them and having convinced the bulk of the other specialists in their field. (Science is the process of correcting such mistakes and discarding such theories in favor of ever-better approximations of the truth.)
Why should we expect journalists to make a better pick? They're non-specialists, who spend a few hours to a few days interviewing a handfull of people (or attend a press conference, ask a question, pick up a press release, and maybe change a couple words) and must produce a "story" comprehensible to a broad audience (which they perceive as being of lower intelligence than themselves) by deadline time. Their incentive structure is NOT to find and spread truth. It is to capture eyeballs, to sell the papers, the sponsors' products, or the editor's political line.
In EVERY SINGLE CASE where I've known the actual story behind a newspaper article they've gotten it wrong - even on minor details (dates, times, the spelling of names) that a cursory check check would have caught. (The closest I've ever seen to a reporter in any medium getting the story right was in a Wired article. For that I give the reporter major cudos, even though it detracts from my argument here.)
Meanwhile, if it's so tough to make the right call in something as exact and repeatable as hard science, why should we expect anything better in the softer "sciences" - or politics?
We should let THEM pick one side and make it all we hear - about things as important as war, politics, or potential UNnatural disasters?
No, thanks!
I'll take the "Fair and Balanced" approach. At least that way I'll have heard TWO sides to chose from. (Sometimes they're both wrong. But the truth is much more likely to be in one of them than in an arbitrary pick - or the mainstream media's usual choices.)
To quote Fox News' other motto: "We report. You decide."
IMHO they got that one right.
Seriously, that's what I do.
I have a firewall machine, with the linux boxen behind it on one subnet.
Recently we had to break down our no-Windows rule and get the wife a Windows box for her classwork (unrelated to IT). The college profs assumed Windows in the students' hands and with her classload we couldn't take the risk of slowing her down with Microsoft/Open incompatibilities.
So I put another ethernet card in the firewall and gave her her own subnet. Each subnet sees the other as 'outside'. (If machines on one subnet get infected the only advantage the malware gets over being on the general net is that machines on one subnet can address machines on either subnet by their own (globally-routable) IP numbers rather than going through the DSL feed's NAT. They still have to navigate the rest of the filtering mechanisms - which includes no incoming almost-anything.)
She installed the best anti-malware software packages she could get - upon initial activation before the network connection was plugged in - then was given only specific outbound connections to obtain updates before general (still firewalled) service was enabled.
She also powers it down when not actively using it.
She's had the machine for almost a year and hasn't had a detected malware infection so far. (But lots of "crunch" sounds from one of the packages as it claims successful attack-blocking. B-) ) While I've seen the firewall block lots of probes from outside I've seen nothing coming over from the other subnet.
From what I recall, during drowning or suffocation, brain damage occurs in humans quite soon (10 minutes?). How is it that this process negates the lack of oxygen to the brain, allowing no damage to occur?
The 10 minute limit is for slow suffocation at normal temperatures. Two things happen:
- First, many of the tiny valves controlling the distribution of blood in the brain capilaries shut, trying to route the remaining oxygen to the neurons controlling things like breathing and heart rate.
These valves are tiny muscles, which, once contracted, require power (from metabolization) to reopen. Let them be oxygen-starved for too long - about ten minutes - and they get stuck closed. Then, even once oxygen is restored, the blood remains cut off to the areas they control. (It does no good to raise the blood pressure to try to force blood past them: You'll blow the plumbing before they leak. Massive stroke.)
- Second: As with the muscles, the neurons have continuous chemical reactions going on that cause damage that must be cleaned up by active, powered, systems. Turn down the oxygen while leaving the temperature up and the cleanup systems fail while the damage mechanisms continue. (Firing the nerve uses up additional power, making the problem worse.)
Let this go on for more than half an hour or so without turning the air back on and the damage gets ahead of the nerve's ability to repair it - causing cell death. That ruptures the cell and releases a glutamate - which tends to force other nearby nerves to fire, consuming their resources and speeding their death, in the "glutamate chain reaction". This easily gets started in regions of the brain fed by still-shut-off plumbing. But with enough glutimate dumped it can spread to nearby areas that have adequate oxygen - because it's not adequate to keep ahead of the massive firing and cell exhaustion.
The first mechanism sets the normal time limit. But the second is the final catastrophe.
But diving sets up a condition much like suffocation upon resurfacing: Swimming underwater pressurizes the gas in the lungs, and the organism can remain active for some time before it starts to run out of oxygen. But then it takes time to get back to the surface - and the lowered pressure on the ascent causes oxygen levels in the blood and tissue to crash. Not good.
Evolution came up with a workaround: The "mamilian diving reflex", so called because it's characteristic of all mamals - happened a LONG time back.
When the reflex detects a deep dive (cold on the skin - especially on the back of the neck, I think), it modifies the valves' reaction to overall oxygen shortage: Instead of shutting off blood to "unimportant" (for respiration) parts of the brain, it causes ALL the valves to OPEN. Then if they stick they stick open. This risks speeding respiratory failure. But once (if) oxygen is restored, it allows it to reach ALL the brain. Get oxygen back before the cells start dying (after a half hour or so) and they all get the power they nead to clean up and get on with life.
So if you drown in COLD water you can be breathing-stopped for a half-hour or a bit more and still be restarted with no long-term brain damage.
This treatment seems to extend on that: Flooding with cold saline will activate the diving reflex, sticking the valves open. Then the rapid oxygen loss will shut down all energy-driven metabolism - both the repair and some of the damage-makers.
Meanwhile, the deep cooling of the tissue (to essentially refrigerator temperatures) will slow the other damaging chemical reactions, just as refrigeration slows meat spoilage. (It IS slowing meat spoilage! And 7C is about 45F, close to the 40F recommended for refrigerator settings.) This is probably the main factor in getting past the half-hour limit on cold-drowning.
Separate storage of the blood allows the replacement fluid to be optimized to cool the rest of the body at a more rapid rate than could be accom
In that case, Cable provision is a natural monopoly and there is nothing to be gained by having it run by a private company (the theory of capitalism being based on competition), so it should be taken under public ownership.
If there were no other way to obtain equivlent products to those provided by cable, that might be true. But the products cable sells are also availble by other transport: Broadband internet connectivity by DSL satellite, and wireless. Video feeds by satellite and any competing broadband connection. And so on.
So while the actual CABLE connection may be a "natural monopoly" and thus immune to effective competition, the things you actually buy a cable connection FOR are available from other sources. This puts cable providers in a competitive market, creating the price pressure and incentive structure for service improvement that makes private ownership a better deal for customers than government ownership (or the approximation of government ownership plus operation by a contractor that you get through the regulated private monopoly mechanism).
XviD is licensed under the GPL. If they link with it at runtime they must provide the code not only for the version of XviD they used, but also for any parts of their application that link with XviD.
But they must offer it to the parties to whom they DISTRIBUTED THE SOFTWARE or devices containing it. That means the companies who bought the camera/development system.
Does it have to go further? If you actually PURCHASE the cameras, I believe so. If ownership remains with the store (and you are merely leaving a deposit when you "buy" the camera), I'm not so sure.
If there's GPLed software in the navigation computer of a car, and you rent it from Avis, is either Avis or the device manufacturer responsible for making the source available to you? I don't think so. If you buy the car from Avis when they're done renting it, at least one of them is obligated.
Evidently, nothing is sacred anymore. Not even grammatical rules against double negatives in the English language.
Unlike French, the English language does not have a standards body.
"Standard English" is a particular regularization of a particular dialect (from the US east coast quite some time back), foisted on children continent-wide by an educational establishment. It qualifies as merely one of the regional dialects. (Granted it's a widespread one thanks to the institutional support, as well as to its origin within, and use by, a region with a lot of money and power.) Claiming there is one "correct" English usage and this is it is an example of provincialism.
A number of regional dialects of American English use the double-negative as an intensifier, rather than forbidding it or using it in the mathematical sense of reinverting the sign to restore the positive.
Near the ground, I consider it in proportion to the objects around it. In the sky, I have no reference
Near the ground you compare it to objects on the horizon. Some of those objects are things you have experience with up close (like buildings, trees, and mountains). So you get a sense of scale. The moon appears to be just behind the horizon, making it gigantic (though nowhere as big as it really is).
Far from the ground you compare it to other flying objects that you also occasionally see on the ground or at known distances (i.e. birds) and thus can use for a reference. It appears to be at or just beyond birdflight altitude, which makes it appear much smaller (though it subtends the same angle).
Same illusion happens with the sun, of course. But it's usually not quite as pronounced - because it's more difficult to look directly at it and compare it to objects on the horizon. The "Oh, GOSH it's BIG!" phenomenon happens when the moon or sun and the objects near its postion on the horizon are visible simultaneously, and that happens more often and more clearly with the moon.
It also happens with traffic lights, which are much larger than they appear when they're hanging over an intersection.
So what's the big mystery?
In fact, there *IS* evidence that sex offenders *CAN* change their behavior. If there was not, no court in 49 states (California excluded because they're just insane) would ever release them. Ever.
This shows a profound misunderstanding of the court system. They do not make the law. They interpret the law. (Though they can stretch interpretations to ridiculous lengths...)
In the case of someone convicted of a crime, child molestation or otherwise, they only have the option of confining them up to the maximum sentence provided by the law banning what the offender did.
If, say, child molestation has a penalty of x-to-y years in jail they can't keep them in jail for even y plus one day.
As to the claims that there are therapies that can cure child molestation, or that child molesters who have been so blatant or repetitive as to be caught and convicted can then learn to control their behavior and not repeat: I'll be overjoyed to see evidence to that effect.
Those convicted of felonies generally lose a number of rights, even after serving their time: Possession of guns, voting (in some jurisdictions), elegibility for certain positions of trust (such as military service, practice of law, security guard, locksmith, high corporate official), and so on. (Some states automatically "restore civil rights" if they don't re-offend after a certain number of years, and any state governor can restore them on a case-by-case basis by a decree akin to a pardon.)
One thing they lose is anonymity.
At least one class of sex offenders - child molesters - have an additional issue: They repeat. They have a compulsive sexual attraction to a prohibited category of potential "partners" that has not been shown to be alterable by any therapy yet tried. (Even by themselves - some of them would LOVE to be able to change.) When combined with impulse control inadequate to keep them from acting on the attraction despite both social and legal barriers (as evidenced by their past offenses) you have a situation where there is no safety once they are released.
An even simpler workaround: They'll make you buy your own house from yourself at current market prices and then raise your taxes accordingly.
Naw, that one would almost certainly get zapped, even by California's own supreme court or the federal 9th Circus.
But making you play musical-houses with everybody else in town is a tad harder to zap.
Increasing the tax base is now a reason to seize someone's property.
And that creates a new way around California's Proposition 13 (which keeps them from raising property taxes on your house and land until it sells). Watch for this:
1) Emminent domain the tax-capped house.
2) Sell it to another buyer. (Taxes now at new rate.)
3) Previous owner has to buy a different house. (Taxes now at new rate.)
Old owner is now paying the higher tax rate. Old property is now taxed at the higher tax rate.
Public good: Increased tax base.
Supremes say that's OK, it's a state matter.
Oops!
Three conservatives and one swing.
5-4: One more conservative and it would have gone the other way.
That's why the "filibuster the judicial appointments" battle - a warmup for the next supreme court opening - is so important.
I recall reading about a case a while back in which the police obtained evidence without a warrant by taking it from someone's trash, and the court ruled that as non-infringing.
Admissible.
I hear the Supremes have ruled that if you throw out a document intact the police can retreive it and use it against you, but if you shred it they can not use the reassembled pieces against you as evidence in court. The distinction is over whether you have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" of the document's contents.
Mandatory disclamer: IANAL.
Apple is getting its just deserts from supporting the software patent system.
IMHO Apple is getting its just deserts for something ELSE they did earlier: The "Look and Feel" suit. This was when they tried to stretch copyright into a longer-term patent on interfaces by suing Microsoft for copyright violation over Windows.
As I recall it they claimed that the interface was akin to a play, the software to the play's script and its operation was a performance. So any substantially similar interface was a prohibited derivative work.
Of course if this interpretation had held up it would have KILLED the software industry. It's far worse than patents - both because of the enormous term (even before the latest extensions) and because of the broad reach (far beyond the tight specification of the claims). And it's also far beyond a reasonable interpretation of copyright as applied to code (where substantial literal copying is prohibited but the ideas behind it are unprotected). So it's fortunate that the courts weren't convinced.
(I still have a protest button Gilmore was circulating at the time, with an ugly "apple worm" eating a computer and the slogan "Keep your Lawyers off My Computer if I recall it correctly.")
This is either a diversion away from, or a test of, such a system.
Or perhaps it's another attempt to discredit competing media outlets.
By setting up an open wiki over opinion pieces they're creating a situation where the result will be hash. Then they can point to it and say "See! Wikis are hash when it comes to anything important. You can't trust them as a source of accurate information. (You should be reading us instead. B-) )"
They might just leave it up as a glaring example of what happens. But I'd give odds that there will be a big news piece about it in a couple weeks, once it's had a chance to ferment.
It doesn't always work. Sometimes urban myths and other popular misconceptions can be found. Before believing anything you read there you had better be sure to get confirmation elsewhere.
...
But that's also true of commercial encyclopedias, both printed and electronic. Sometimes it's even deliberate, with the editors pressing a political position as fact.
You ALWAYS have to get confirmation elsewhere, no matter WHAT your source.
At least with a wiki there's no pretence that the authors credentials are checked and he's necessarily unbased. So you KNOW you have to check it.
By the way: Ditto with other sources of "truth": newspapers, broadcast news, dictionaries, university courses, textbooks, religions,
Even technical manuals and data tables need to be checked. I hear that automated theorem-proving software exposed errors in a large percentage of the standard integrals in the tables found in the back of textbooks - mainly those not used for much of anything practical, the latter having been debugged by use and failure. And the breakthrough in building a computer-predictor of the horribly complex behavior of water at various pressures and temperatures came with the discovery that a section of the "steam tables" - a fundamental tool for the design of engines and power systems from early railroads to modern nuclear generation plants - was flat-out wrong.
Don't stereotype Slashdot. The membership consists of people who are barely into middle school and those who have their Ph. Ds, and just about every single person you can think of in between.
Not only that, but (like usenet before it) the membership contains a mix of old hands and newbies - including a continuous flux of the latter.
The old hands have gone through the arguments, changed some of their opinions thanks to the insights of others, and now are pretty stable in their current mindsets (pending NEW data or insights.) The newbies arrive with only the opinions they have formed on the basis of their own reasoning and the data and interpretations they have observed elsewhere, ask the same old questions or spout the same old arguments, and are presented with the same old revalations. Many of them absorb some of the insights and become enlightened (in one or more of the many ways available). Some of them contribute conter-insights, and the consensuses are honed. After a while they to become old-hands, ready to present the latest rev of enlightenment to the next round of newbies. And some of them take their newly honed memes to other forums (fora?),
To a viewer who makes the three standard media mistakes of assuming a static population, homogeneous in experience and in opinion, much of the traffic appears to be an infinite-loop debating society, rehashing the same old arguments with no progress whatsoever. In fact there are multiple sets if ideas (often competing) among subpopulations of members and an ongoing process of learning, improving, and spreading the successful arguments both to new participants and to a broader external audience.
Much like a university. Or an interacting collection (NOT a single instance) of political parties or religious/philosophical organizations.
And (like usenet before it), the occasional set-in-his-ways gadfly who NEVER learns and ALWAYS brings up the same old, discredited arguments whenever his hotbutton subject arises, serves a valuable function. He provides a periodic opportunity for the other participants to dissect the errors of the stock arguments and present (and hone) the refutations - bringing up the old subjects (when external events have made them interesting again) so the new participants can see all sides of the issue. You can't count on the current crop of new players to raise the strawman and have it blasted apart every time it's topical. As we used to say in usenet: "If didn't exist we'd have to invent him."
Indeed, very occasionally someone did. But a real true-believer would do it SO much better. So it is fortunate there would usually be at least one of the genuine article hanging around. B-)
The web is teeming with information. Unfortunately, most of it is probably worthless.
Sturgeon's law: "But 98% of [Science Fiction] is [excrement]". "Madam, 98% of EVERYTHING is [excrement]".
It's the 2% that is important. Music hasn't gotten worse since the Classical stuff was written. There was just as much crap back then. But only a few exceptional masterpieces are still being played. Yet there are enough of those to keep orchestras and classical music radio stations in business worldwide.
However, don't become so pessimistic. I don't think that the level of national dialogue has declined. It's probably stayed the same. The internet has just given more ignorant people an easy way to express themselves.
IMHO - honed by half a century of observation - the level of national dialogue has been vastly improved by the unlimited access of the internet.
Yes it gives the ignorant-yet-opinionated an opportunity to spout. And EVERYBODY is BORN ignorant, and at first absorbs a set of opinions from his/her parents, acquaintences, and local authority figures. So unlimited access means there's a LOT of ignorant-but-opinionated spouting. (Fortunately ignorance does NOT equal stupidity OR pig-headedness, and ignorance can be cured very simply.)
If you thought as good about everything as a savant thought about one thing, I believe it would show that with proper organization a well wired smaller mass can be capable of greater predictions of the environment than a larger brain mass.
On the other hand there is an experiment that seem to indicate that cognitive ability is largely a function of number of instances of some simple pattern:
Experiment was run in a Y maze, i.e. subject placed in one end, food reward at one of the other two ends. Three subject types: Particular breed of fish, turtles (with about twice the brain mass), and a third I'll get to later.
Initially food is always on, say, the right at first. Subject learns to turn right. Once this learning is established, the maze is reversed. Subject must UNlearn "food on right" and learn "food on left". Measure number of trials to do this. Repeat.
With the fish it takes a while for them to figure out the food is now on the left. And then takes them about the same number trials to learn it's back on the right. You can do reversals until your grant runs out and it still takes them about the same number of trials to figure out that it's switched.
With the turtles, after a few reversals they suddenly get the concept of reversals. After that they catch on very quickly that the maze has swapped again.
Now the interesting part: Take embryos of the fish species. Remove the prototype brain tissue from one and insert it into another. Let it mature. Result is a chimera fish with a double-mass fish brain of apparently the normal organization - and about the size of the brain of the turtle.
Run these through the test and they learn reversals just like the turtle did. They "get it" with what is apparently just more-of-the-same rather than anything special.
With respect to savants: It's pretty clear that different areas of the brain are specialized for different things. So savants having normal-sized brains and being exceptionally good at one thing is not at odds with the idea that it's more neurons that make more smarts. They could as easily have given over more of their brain tissue to processing that specialty - possibly at the cost of starving other functions of neurons.
On the other hand, that doesn't eliminate other possibilities, such as better organization of that part of the brain, or more attention given to the subject in a more general-purpose system. The big-brained fish could be expected to have more of any specialized processor sections, as well as more "general-purpose cpu resources" to distribute (as "attention") to tasks like cracking the maze problem.