It's not a direct help, but I can tell you that it's certainly possible these days to communicate and control external actuators using brain activity only. What they're doing (AFAIK) is record the 2D electrical activity on the brain's surface (using EEGs on the scalp or -- for even greater accuracy -- below the skull bone), analyze it statistically and deduce what the person is thinking of doing, e.g. move a mouse pointer in some direction and choose which of several buttons to press. It requires a learning phase, but then the accuracy is quite high. I'm not sure about the actual bandwidth that you can achieve when communicating using this method only, but it's much better than what was possible only a few years ago, and it's improving further.
(the links refer to a Berlin-based research group -- but that's just a coincidence because I live there a saw a presentation a few weeks ago. I'm sure there's even more research on the subject in the US).
It seems the real remote drawing / display technology these days is HTML/CSS, carried via HTTP. It even supports running client-provided code locally on the display server, as did NeWS and DPS 20 years ago, to render animations and depressed beveled buttons without incurring a server roundtrip (and Javascript is generally much nicer than PostScript -- you can even run the whole program on the display server if you want). And the protocol is a bit backwards in that the display server (aka "web browser"), rather than the client (aka "web server"), initiates the protocol requests.
Tokamak power plants would use the energy of the 14MeV neutron produced by the DT fusion reaction to heat water to steam and generate it directly. `Moving charged particles' is just a plasma
Uh, a plasma contains charged particles, but is neutral overall (normally). And the particle motion is undirected. What they claim to get out it is a pulsed, directed beam of multi-MeV 4He ions (and only those -- the electrons fly away in the opposite direction), which could be converted into electricity directly (via induction).
I hardly understand a goddamn word of TFA and have never heard of the "Integrated information theory", but I know that TFA's proposition must be false because the brain is based on the laws of physics, which are computable. Q.e.d.
You're trying to make stuff up. The probablity not being 0.5 stems from the fact that there will be some years in which more than one storm occurs, and this must be "balanced out" by there being no storm at all in more than 50% of the years (and thus, a probability < 0.5 of a storm occuring in a particular year). If storms don't happen independently, but come in "packs" as you suggest, and you're still holding up your scenario of one storm every two years on average, then the chance of a storm occuring in a particular year will be even lower than 0.393.
what? where the hell did you pull that from? why 1/e?
if a storm hit every two years, your method would give a probability of 0.393.
Right.
what sense does that make?
Imagine you're throwing a 100-sided dice 100 times in two years (i.e. 50 times a year). Then you statistically throw a particular number (say, 1) once every two years. The chance of throwing that number in one year (i.e. in 50 throws) is 1-(99/100)^50=0.395 (=the inverse of not throwing that number 50 times in a row). There you go. If you transition from discrete to continuous probabilities, the number of dice sides and throws approaches infinity, and lim_{x->infinity} (1-1/x)^x = 1/E.
LeMessurier calculated that a storm powerful enough to take out the building hit New York every 16 years." In other words, for every year Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse."
Umm, actually that would be p=1-(1/E)^(1/16)=0.0605869 (about 1-in-16.5052).
Why does the heartbeat request even contain the length of the heartbeat block?
The real question is, why even have the whole heartbeat TLS RFC in the first place, when the underlying TCP layer already checks for timeouts all by itself (you can run TLS over UDP, but hardly anybody does, and then you'd specify the heartbeat stuff only for that use case).
In order to live as long as possible, I have decided to have gender reassignment surgery to become a woman, and I will move to Antarctica and start a utopian lesbian society, since there are no murders there. I haven't worked out the details yet, but it seems like a no-brainer.
You could start with killing somebody else -- the odds of *two* murders occuring would be even lower!
"Simply being a guest on David Letterman’s show has been a highlight of my career"
Wait...he really meant that. It's kinda creepy when Colbert makes out-of-character statements.
And now there's gonna be a whole show full of those? Ugh...
Unless the mmap/malloc combo on the O/S you're using was able to purposely put guard pages after mmaped blocks so many malloced objects would end in such guard pages. Unfortunately...
Apparently OpenSSL uses its own allocator on top of the libc's (malloc). I.e. it only occasionally allocates a large chunk of memory from the C heap and then does its own allocations/reallocations in that (without anything like ASLR or guard pages of course). And apparently the particular sequence in which the OpenSSL library code allocates bits of memory using this allocator leads to a situation where the private key is always deterministically located behind the heartbeat packet space in memory. AFAICT this is why this bug is so remarkably portable and "works" reliably on all platforms.
By the time you're going to all of this trouble to turn electricity into fuel, it is unlikely that you'd want to run a car on it - you'd rather just have an electric car.
Not sure about that. Electrical energy can't be stored easily -- you need some high-tech battery with all kinds of electrolytes and complicated chemicals, and still the capacity is relatively measly. Electricity works much better if it can be consumed right after it is produced, without storing it (but if this can be achieved, electricity is otherwise very flexible -- it can be scaled up and down easily, and it can be transported quickly over long distances). HC fuels OTOH work well for storing energy -- they already store it, you just have to pour them into any airtight vessel, and they'll stay there until you burn them. So electricity and HC fuels might compliment each other quite well if the right technologies are in place. Any process that can convert electricity into fuel (and also happens to consume and thus neutralize the byproduts of burning the fuel) should be almost like a gold mine, if it can be scaled up sufficiently. So if this water-to-fuel conversion or similar processes can be made to work efficiently, chances are liquid fuels will continue to be the preferred method for large-scale mobile energy consumption needs.
Regardless, it took 23-year-old Magnus Carlsen, a "grandmaster" Chess player since the age of 13 and new world Chess champion, just 71 seconds to defeat Gates in a friendly game of Chess on a Norwegian television show. It takes longer to heat up a cup of water in the microwave.
Thanks for that helpful comparison---without it, I would have had no clue how long 71 seconds actually is.
A BTU is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of 1 pound (0.454 kg) of liquid water by 1 F (0.56 C) at a constant pressure of one atmosphere.[1] As with calorie, several BTU definitions exist, which are based on different water temperatures and therefore vary by up to 0.5%.
The unit MBtu or mBtu was defined as one thousand BTU, presumably from the Roman numeral system where "M" or "m" stands for one thousand (1,000). This is easily confused with the SI mega (M) prefix, which multiplies by a factor of one million (1,000,000). To avoid confusion many companies and engineers use MMBtu or mmBtu to represent one million BTU.
Somebody must have thought really long and hard to come up with that stuff.
Yes, dolphins are cuter than cows and pigs... is harvesting one worse than the other?
How many million cows are slaughtered every year? How many pigs? How many chickens?
This sounds like one set of animals has better PR than another.
If we had dolphin farms with millions of animals, then maybe your argument would me more valid. But I guess the point is that dolphin farms just wouldn't work. There are some animals like pigs and cows that can be herded and bred easily -- they hardly try to escape, and they reproduce in captivity easily and in large numbers. You can basically just catch a few of them in the wild and build a fence around them, and provide food and water, and they'll be content until the day you kill them. So we use them as livestock. The same wouldn't work with other animals, for example because they show strong territorial behavior or just mature or reproduce too slowly or not at all in captivity. Which is why most of us eat cows or pigs but not mountain goats, antelopes or dolphins. If you nevertheless try to use one of those "wild", undomesticated types of animals for food in large quantities, you'll end up endangering the species.
Exactly, it should just support formats that users have and not play politics.
Wrong. I think it should "play politics" in this case. Wikipedia is one of the very few sites which, because of its popularity, uniqueness, and non-commercial nature, has some leverage over browser vendors, and has more freedom than others to make use of it.
Almost everywhere else on the web it's the other way round: The browser vendors can force the site owners into compliance. If you have a smallish website and you want to provide video content on it, you often have no choice than to use an encoding like H.264 that all browsers support -- thereby furthering the agenda of consortiums like MPEG LA to steer the market towards a universal adoption of a patent-encumbered "hands off" format, and also lessening the incentive for browser vendors to support open royalty-free encoding formats. But if you run the like 4th most popular site in the world, the only one of its kind, AND you're not commercially bound to maximize your number of visitors no matter what, then you have some power to drive the web (and the whole industry) in the direction of truly open, royalty-free, "free to tinker with" video encoding formats, which would help lower costs and market entry barriers for new companies and individuals. Wikipedia shouldn't throw this leverage away.
Bingo. My first thought when I read TFS was "my neck hurts already."
4K is for sprendthrifts.
Most developers these days run dual- or triple-screen setups with at least 22" monitors; the edge-to-edge width of that would be larger than that of one single 40" 4K screen -- albeit with much less vertical resolution.
Fukushima's containment vessel could (and did) contain the molten core...
I didn't claim otherwise. I said existing reactors aren't designed to contain a nuclear accident as a whole, so that the environment would be unaffected. Your language implied that existing reactors had that capability, because you reduced what's a whole array of potential safety problems to just the capability of the containment vessel to contain a molten core.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a direct help, but I can tell you that it's certainly possible these days to communicate and control external actuators using brain activity only. What they're doing (AFAIK) is record the 2D electrical activity on the brain's surface (using EEGs on the scalp or -- for even greater accuracy -- below the skull bone), analyze it statistically and deduce what the person is thinking of doing, e.g. move a mouse pointer in some direction and choose which of several buttons to press. It requires a learning phase, but then the accuracy is quite high. I'm not sure about the actual bandwidth that you can achieve when communicating using this method only, but it's much better than what was possible only a few years ago, and it's improving further.
Brain-Computer Interface-The HCI communication channel for discovery
brain-controlled Pinball
(the links refer to a Berlin-based research group -- but that's just a coincidence because I live there a saw a presentation a few weeks ago. I'm sure there's even more research on the subject in the US).
[scnr]
Focus Fusion: The Fastest Route to Cheap, Clean Energy
Tokamak power plants would use the energy of the 14MeV neutron produced by the DT fusion reaction to heat water to steam and generate it directly. `Moving charged particles' is just a plasma
Uh, a plasma contains charged particles, but is neutral overall (normally). And the particle motion is undirected. What they claim to get out it is a pulsed, directed beam of multi-MeV 4He ions (and only those -- the electrons fly away in the opposite direction), which could be converted into electricity directly (via induction).
I hardly understand a goddamn word of TFA and have never heard of the "Integrated information theory", but I know that TFA's proposition must be false because the brain is based on the laws of physics, which are computable. Q.e.d.
Yeah, at least until they hit the water at 700km/h...
Eh, terminal velocity in the lower atmosphere is abound 250 km/h. Not that it would make much of a difference though.
You're trying to make stuff up. The probablity not being 0.5 stems from the fact that there will be some years in which more than one storm occurs, and this must be "balanced out" by there being no storm at all in more than 50% of the years (and thus, a probability < 0.5 of a storm occuring in a particular year). If storms don't happen independently, but come in "packs" as you suggest, and you're still holding up your scenario of one storm every two years on average, then the chance of a storm occuring in a particular year will be even lower than 0.393.
what? where the hell did you pull that from? why 1/e?
if a storm hit every two years, your method would give a probability of 0.393.
Right.
what sense does that make?
Imagine you're throwing a 100-sided dice 100 times in two years (i.e. 50 times a year). Then you statistically throw a particular number (say, 1) once every two years. The chance of throwing that number in one year (i.e. in 50 throws) is 1-(99/100)^50=0.395 (=the inverse of not throwing that number 50 times in a row). There you go. If you transition from discrete to continuous probabilities, the number of dice sides and throws approaches infinity, and lim_{x->infinity} (1-1/x)^x = 1/E.
LeMessurier calculated that a storm powerful enough to take out the building hit New York every 16 years." In other words, for every year Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse."
Umm, actually that would be p=1-(1/E)^(1/16)=0.0605869 (about 1-in-16.5052).
Why does the heartbeat request even contain the length of the heartbeat block?
The real question is, why even have the whole heartbeat TLS RFC in the first place, when the underlying TCP layer already checks for timeouts all by itself (you can run TLS over UDP, but hardly anybody does, and then you'd specify the heartbeat stuff only for that use case).
In order to live as long as possible, I have decided to have gender reassignment surgery to become a woman, and I will move to Antarctica and start a utopian lesbian society, since there are no murders there. I haven't worked out the details yet, but it seems like a no-brainer.
You could start with killing somebody else -- the odds of *two* murders occuring would be even lower!
"Simply being a guest on David Letterman’s show has been a highlight of my career"
Wait...he really meant that. It's kinda creepy when Colbert makes out-of-character statements. And now there's gonna be a whole show full of those? Ugh...
Unless the mmap/malloc combo on the O/S you're using was able to purposely put guard pages after mmaped blocks so many malloced objects would end in such guard pages. Unfortunately...
Apparently OpenSSL uses its own allocator on top of the libc's (malloc). I.e. it only occasionally allocates a large chunk of memory from the C heap and then does its own allocations/reallocations in that (without anything like ASLR or guard pages of course). And apparently the particular sequence in which the OpenSSL library code allocates bits of memory using this allocator leads to a situation where the private key is always deterministically located behind the heartbeat packet space in memory. AFAICT this is why this bug is so remarkably portable and "works" reliably on all platforms.
By the time you're going to all of this trouble to turn electricity into fuel, it is unlikely that you'd want to run a car on it - you'd rather just have an electric car.
Not sure about that. Electrical energy can't be stored easily -- you need some high-tech battery with all kinds of electrolytes and complicated chemicals, and still the capacity is relatively measly. Electricity works much better if it can be consumed right after it is produced, without storing it (but if this can be achieved, electricity is otherwise very flexible -- it can be scaled up and down easily, and it can be transported quickly over long distances). HC fuels OTOH work well for storing energy -- they already store it, you just have to pour them into any airtight vessel, and they'll stay there until you burn them. So electricity and HC fuels might compliment each other quite well if the right technologies are in place. Any process that can convert electricity into fuel (and also happens to consume and thus neutralize the byproduts of burning the fuel) should be almost like a gold mine, if it can be scaled up sufficiently. So if this water-to-fuel conversion or similar processes can be made to work efficiently, chances are liquid fuels will continue to be the preferred method for large-scale mobile energy consumption needs.
Well, that and you could make some badass telescopes on the dark side.
You mean on the far site.
Authorities quickly debunked this story this AM.
Denied, not debunked. Big difference.
Batteries using this copolymer had an initial storage capacity of 1,225 mAh per gram of material.
At what voltage? mA*h isn't a unit of energy. V*mA*h is.
No, it was a stupid coding standards error
Which is just what you would do to have plausible deniability. :-P
Can existing commercial reactors run on weapons-grade Uranium or Plutonium?
Thanks for that helpful comparison---without it, I would have had no clue how long 71 seconds actually is.
Can't you convert it into football fields first?
Due to high demand for heating, natural gas supplies dropped and prices skyrocketed to $140/mmBtu
Off-topic question: Do these people actually invent new units of energy for each application?
Wikipedia
A BTU is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of 1 pound (0.454 kg) of liquid water by 1 F (0.56 C) at a constant pressure of one atmosphere.[1] As with calorie, several BTU definitions exist, which are based on different water temperatures and therefore vary by up to 0.5%.
The unit MBtu or mBtu was defined as one thousand BTU, presumably from the Roman numeral system where "M" or "m" stands for one thousand (1,000). This is easily confused with the SI mega (M) prefix, which multiplies by a factor of one million (1,000,000). To avoid confusion many companies and engineers use MMBtu or mmBtu to represent one million BTU.
Somebody must have thought really long and hard to come up with that stuff.
Yes, dolphins are cuter than cows and pigs ... is harvesting one worse than the other?
How many million cows are slaughtered every year? How many pigs? How many chickens?
This sounds like one set of animals has better PR than another.
If we had dolphin farms with millions of animals, then maybe your argument would me more valid. But I guess the point is that dolphin farms just wouldn't work. There are some animals like pigs and cows that can be herded and bred easily -- they hardly try to escape, and they reproduce in captivity easily and in large numbers. You can basically just catch a few of them in the wild and build a fence around them, and provide food and water, and they'll be content until the day you kill them. So we use them as livestock. The same wouldn't work with other animals, for example because they show strong territorial behavior or just mature or reproduce too slowly or not at all in captivity. Which is why most of us eat cows or pigs but not mountain goats, antelopes or dolphins. If you nevertheless try to use one of those "wild", undomesticated types of animals for food in large quantities, you'll end up endangering the species.
It's an encyclopedia
Exactly, it should just support formats that users have and not play politics.
Wrong. I think it should "play politics" in this case. Wikipedia is one of the very few sites which, because of its popularity, uniqueness, and non-commercial nature, has some leverage over browser vendors, and has more freedom than others to make use of it.
Almost everywhere else on the web it's the other way round: The browser vendors can force the site owners into compliance. If you have a smallish website and you want to provide video content on it, you often have no choice than to use an encoding like H.264 that all browsers support -- thereby furthering the agenda of consortiums like MPEG LA to steer the market towards a universal adoption of a patent-encumbered "hands off" format, and also lessening the incentive for browser vendors to support open royalty-free encoding formats. But if you run the like 4th most popular site in the world, the only one of its kind, AND you're not commercially bound to maximize your number of visitors no matter what, then you have some power to drive the web (and the whole industry) in the direction of truly open, royalty-free, "free to tinker with" video encoding formats, which would help lower costs and market entry barriers for new companies and individuals. Wikipedia shouldn't throw this leverage away.
Bingo. My first thought when I read TFS was "my neck hurts already."
4K is for sprendthrifts.
Most developers these days run dual- or triple-screen setups with at least 22" monitors; the edge-to-edge width of that would be larger than that of one single 40" 4K screen -- albeit with much less vertical resolution.
Fukushima's containment vessel could (and did) contain the molten core...
I didn't claim otherwise. I said existing reactors aren't designed to contain a nuclear accident as a whole, so that the environment would be unaffected. Your language implied that existing reactors had that capability, because you reduced what's a whole array of potential safety problems to just the capability of the containment vessel to contain a molten core.