Oh, my fail. I actually did read, but the page started describing the rotating-vortex type nuclear lightbulb, and I stopped before it mentioned the fuel loss problem.:(
The interesting thing is that when the moon tries to drag it's tides along and can't (since the continents get in the way), the result is a "lump" on one side of earth where the tides are held up. As a result, we effectively have an asymmetry in earth's mass that is not down the earth-moon axis; As a result of the mass' gravitational attraction to the moon, there is a net torque that saps earth's angular momentum and transfers it to the moon's orbit, causing the moon to spiral out over time. I doubt we can draw more power from the tides than they transfer to the moon...
The nuclear lightbulb would be a great thing once it was in space, but it would have some significant problems lifting off. The main one being that since hydrogen is extremely light and UF4 is one of the densest gasses there is, the ship would only be able to acheive extremely small accelerations before the uranium began escaping it's vortex and getting into the exhaust stream owing to bouyancy. The gas core nuke article on wikipedia puts it at around 1cm/s^2.
Frankly, if we're going to go for putting something big in orbit, I say we just freaking do it right and build a super-orion. Eight million tons, anywhere in the solar system in weeks or months, also capable of reaching a measurable fraction of lightspeed for interstellar journeys. Yes, it would mean detonating a bunch of small nukes in earth's atmosphere. Frankly, if the return is putting twenty thousand international space stations up in one go, I could live with that.
Did they in fact create "copyright cops" or is the bill merely a proposal? *looks at first sentence of article* Gee I'm shocked. If you think you need to sensationalize something involving the MAFIAA for our daily Two Minute's Hate, you severely underestimate how easy it us to get Slashdot whipped up.
That being said, Fuck the MPAA, Fuck the RIAA, Fuck the suits behind the BSA, and Fuck them all for the DMCA. The best way to hurt them is to introduce your family and friends to indie music and websites. Oh, and every single one of you should run a script to wget riaa.com/mpaa.com/etc once per second. Times a million and they don't stand a chance >:)
If we aren't, then either almost no civilizations are interested in simulating sentient life forms, or almost no civilizations ever attain the power to simulate sentient life forms.
Since it's hard to imagine a civilization having enough drive to reach a singularity that wouldn't be interested in learning about the past "first" hand, or that almost every single civilization stops itself before reaching a singularity, it is a near certainty that we are in fact living inside a computer simulation.
Now if I could just find the ten-page essay I just summarized...
True, I should've given a timeframe. As usual, Jon Stewart had the best explanation; Half a dozen clips of talking heads saying "Hillary is inevitable" just before the... second? most recent debate.
Oh, and Ron Paul FTW. Ever notice how Fox/CNN/ABC/NBC are trying so hard to ignore him? And how after Kucinich said the I word at that debate, they made sure to shut him up? This is the kind of crap that I was talking about in terms of oligopolies being bad: They've all decided who's in their/the status quo's best interest, and it's not in ours.
I'd say that many aspects of a media oligopoly are essentially impossible to police; Given a very small number of CEOs, they'll very likely reach an agreement (implicitly or explicitly) to protect mutual interests and the status quo (think of how all the news channels seem to have determined that Hillary is the winner). By keeping the number up, the probability of a majority or supermajority working together is decreased and real competition is maintained.
We used to have hundreds of news and media corporations in the US.
If the government should never regulate business, why is the period of American history from 1870 to 1910 not regarded as a golden age of wonders? Ya see, if we're going to live together in societies of hundreds of millions of people, we're going to have to make some compromises to prevent the assholes from causing too much misery.
I should be able to shoot you if I feel like it; The government saying otherwise is restricting my liberty to do as I want.
Because they're going to be needing an OC-256 or the fucking spammers will be able to ddos the servers that compute aggregate scores off the 'Net and break the system.
Don't pretend that this is about Joe Business Owner selling the company he built at a healthy profit, this is about five or fewer corporations controlling the vast majority of media in the entire United States who want to make it four or fewer (preferably one). History has shown that the rules need to change for oligpolies and monopolies or very bad things happen. These "very bad things" take on the general form of low quality goods and/or high prices.
In the case of multimedia, are you going to seriously pretend that that you don't see how having an oligopoly controlling the media is a bad thing? Here's an outline: First, a story threatens to upset the Status Quo and/or expose wrongdoing by the rich and powerful. Word of it percolates up, and in one conference call between the good 'ole boys club they make sure your story never gets any real press.
The other thing the public has missed in this story is that there's a huge body of literature showing not only that torture doesn't work, but that it's counterproductive. Torture radicalizes people. In fact, the Israeli torture of Palestinians was actually seen by some as redemptive, in terms of validating the evil of the Israeli side and the rightness of the Palestinian cause. It validated their own importance as torture survivors, and it validated their membership in the group. The CIA did about 200 studies of torture from 1953 to 1974, under two successive projects, one called MK Ultra and one called MK Search. That collective body of work found that torture didn't work. The Brits found the same thing when they were using interrogational torture on the IRA.
And why are you holding up a sample of one out of the hundreds (most likely thousands) of people held in total at Gitmo, "extraordinary rendition" sites, and those formerly held in abu Gharib as an example of how torture works? If anything, he was a unique case. Khalid isn't/wasn't the stereotypical jihadist or suicide bomber (a young man with raging hormones who can't get laid (a fact for many men in polyandrous societies) and was told he'd get all the sex he wanted if he'd blow himself up for God), he's smart enough to be upper management in a major organization. As such, he posessed both facts (being upper management) and the smarts to know when the game was over. He'd have talked to the "nice guy" who brought food and chatted with him for a while every day too.
At any rate, this all boils down to who is willing to commit evil in the name of expediency.
Don't remember where, but there have been claims that the level of radiation naturally present in the background or very slightly more is actually beneficial; It does just enough damage to make the body keep it's DNA checks and repair mechanisms in order. They found that organisms raised in very low-radiation environments (i.e. underground, inside boxes made of isotopically-depleted materials) actually showed higher rates of senesence.
And IMO, it just makes evolutionary sense; There is always a natural background of radiation, between remnant radioactivity and the neverending shower of muons from cosmic rays, so it makes sense that a body tailored to such an environment would expect some radiation.
Torture is still used because it works, and it works because it's still used? That's some nice circular logic there, Lou.
The only reason it's still used because some people are sociopaths who enjoy hurting others (or they are in search of "revenge"). This is why it's generally associated with Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and North Korea. It's a verifiable fact that torture does not work for the reasons I explained previously.
No, torture means "Hurting someone physically or mentally until they will do anything to make the torture stop." So, Mr. Tough Guy, how long could YOU stand being tied up with loudspeakers blasting a neverending variety of sound at you at just under the pain threshold? How many times could I rub a q-tip with concentrated hydrofluoric acid over YOUR toe until you broke? How long could I lock YOU up in a sensory deprivation chamber until you begged to tell me everything if you could just see light again?
Of course, this is all moot; After the evil enemy had tortured you for weeks and weeks on end (lol), you'd break down in tears and tell them whatever you thought they wanted to hear regardless of truth which is why torture does not help to learn the truth and is therefore useless as a tool for gaining intel. Or do you think that all those people the Spanish Inquisition killed for confessing to witchcraft were actually witches?
Though I'm sure Mr. Beckerman will arrive with the correct interpertation shortly, I think show cause just means show why. "They asked me to throw this out. Why shouldn't I?"
Except they're like muggles trying to deal with keys from Harry Potter; Normal keys don't self-destruct if the wrong person tries to use them, show you what their owner wants you to see, or magically stop working at a set date. Plus, we can destroy encryption keys with thought alone ("I forgetted! Durr!"), and you won't even know the room/keyhole is there unless we show you.
Converting a coherent radiation beam back to usable power is not only feasable in theory, but (given access to a semiconductor fab) reality. If you take away the blackbody continuum and replace it with burningly intense monochromatic radiation, you can simply set the bandgap to that radiation's energy and *poof* - you'll have solar cells that convert a majority of the energy beamed down to DC. Alternately, if you can scale a rectifying antenna small enough that's even more efficient.
Interestingly, there have also been tests of microwave power beamers; Small electric helicopter models were run by a focused microwave beam (which went into a uhf rectifer for conversion back to usable power). They kept the thing aloft for hours, without harming any plants or animals in the test range.
There are two reasons we don't have space-based solar power. First, solar cells really hate space. You've got ionizing radiation (x-rays, protons, cosmic rays, electrons, etc) which create and grow crystal defects in the cells. The defects act as recombination centers, increasing recombination losses and reducing power output. Meteorites don't do any favors, and neither does the ever-growing cloud of junk we create. More importantly, it's expensive to put things in space. Really expensive. You may think it's expensive to fill your gas tank, but that's just peanuts to putting it into space. Try and think how much square miles of solar cells and scaffolding would *weigh,* and at $10000/pound it's an absurd proposition.
But this is all pointless - either you agree, or disagree and prove that you're part of The Conspiracy and not to be listened to. Yay, self-reinforcing delusions.
Don't have any cites, but I've heard that this is part of the wonder of the tree/backbone structure the Internet's fallen into: you've only got to tap a suprisingly small number of NOCs at the main backbones to see almost everything. Like when they put a tap on every single connection from America to Europe in one swoop since every cable conveniently arrives at a single point in (IIRC) New Jersey. Likewise, almost every cable across the pacific comes in at a couple points on the west coast. Tap the trunks running through Mountainview CA, and the main cross-country ones, and poof - Big Brother is watching us.
And even if they were caught doing something like that (rerouting traffic), it's not like the average idiot would understand or care.
not [Internet] ---- [NSA scanner] ---- [ATT router] ---- [Internet]
The whole idea is that Y-splitters let them capture everything without being visible. Except that it's an analog world, and the split took too much signal and they were exposed when an idiot blabbed to a patriot about the splitter which was there for no technical reason causing data errors.
Everyone is up in arms because a PRIVATE shipping company is opening and xeroxing every document that passes through it's PRIVATE distribution network and forwarding the xerox to the government.
I mean, so what that it's basically impossible to avoid either using Bizzaro-FedEx or have them handle your document at some point, they're a MONOPOLY CORPORATION and not the government, so that magically makes it moral and legal *coughfruit of a poisoned treecough* for them to help the government spy on you by proxy.
Can I have some of the peyote they're putting in your koolaid?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, my fail. I actually did read, but the page started describing the rotating-vortex type nuclear lightbulb, and I stopped before it mentioned the fuel loss problem. :(
The interesting thing is that when the moon tries to drag it's tides along and can't (since the continents get in the way), the result is a "lump" on one side of earth where the tides are held up. As a result, we effectively have an asymmetry in earth's mass that is not down the earth-moon axis; As a result of the mass' gravitational attraction to the moon, there is a net torque that saps earth's angular momentum and transfers it to the moon's orbit, causing the moon to spiral out over time. I doubt we can draw more power from the tides than they transfer to the moon...
The nuclear lightbulb would be a great thing once it was in space, but it would have some significant problems lifting off. The main one being that since hydrogen is extremely light and UF4 is one of the densest gasses there is, the ship would only be able to acheive extremely small accelerations before the uranium began escaping it's vortex and getting into the exhaust stream owing to bouyancy. The gas core nuke article on wikipedia puts it at around 1cm/s^2.
Frankly, if we're going to go for putting something big in orbit, I say we just freaking do it right and build a super-orion. Eight million tons, anywhere in the solar system in weeks or months, also capable of reaching a measurable fraction of lightspeed for interstellar journeys. Yes, it would mean detonating a bunch of small nukes in earth's atmosphere. Frankly, if the return is putting twenty thousand international space stations up in one go, I could live with that.
*mumble*goddamn sodding gravity well*mumble*
Did they in fact create "copyright cops" or is the bill merely a proposal? *looks at first sentence of article* Gee I'm shocked. If you think you need to sensationalize something involving the MAFIAA for our daily Two Minute's Hate, you severely underestimate how easy it us to get Slashdot whipped up.
That being said, Fuck the MPAA, Fuck the RIAA, Fuck the suits behind the BSA, and Fuck them all for the DMCA. The best way to hurt them is to introduce your family and friends to indie music and websites. Oh, and every single one of you should run a script to wget riaa.com/mpaa.com/etc once per second. Times a million and they don't stand a chance >:)
If we aren't, then either almost no civilizations are interested in simulating sentient life forms, or almost no civilizations ever attain the power to simulate sentient life forms.
Since it's hard to imagine a civilization having enough drive to reach a singularity that wouldn't be interested in learning about the past "first" hand, or that almost every single civilization stops itself before reaching a singularity, it is a near certainty that we are in fact living inside a computer simulation.
Now if I could just find the ten-page essay I just summarized...
True, I should've given a timeframe. As usual, Jon Stewart had the best explanation; Half a dozen clips of talking heads saying "Hillary is inevitable" just before the... second? most recent debate.
Oh, and Ron Paul FTW. Ever notice how Fox/CNN/ABC/NBC are trying so hard to ignore him? And how after Kucinich said the I word at that debate, they made sure to shut him up? This is the kind of crap that I was talking about in terms of oligopolies being bad: They've all decided who's in their/the status quo's best interest, and it's not in ours.
I'd say that many aspects of a media oligopoly are essentially impossible to police; Given a very small number of CEOs, they'll very likely reach an agreement (implicitly or explicitly) to protect mutual interests and the status quo (think of how all the news channels seem to have determined that Hillary is the winner). By keeping the number up, the probability of a majority or supermajority working together is decreased and real competition is maintained.
We used to have hundreds of news and media corporations in the US.
If the government should never regulate business, why is the period of American history from 1870 to 1910 not regarded as a golden age of wonders? Ya see, if we're going to live together in societies of hundreds of millions of people, we're going to have to make some compromises to prevent the assholes from causing too much misery.
I should be able to shoot you if I feel like it; The government saying otherwise is restricting my liberty to do as I want.
Because they're going to be needing an OC-256 or the fucking spammers will be able to ddos the servers that compute aggregate scores off the 'Net and break the system.
Don't pretend that this is about Joe Business Owner selling the company he built at a healthy profit, this is about five or fewer corporations controlling the vast majority of media in the entire United States who want to make it four or fewer (preferably one). History has shown that the rules need to change for oligpolies and monopolies or very bad things happen. These "very bad things" take on the general form of low quality goods and/or high prices.
In the case of multimedia, are you going to seriously pretend that that you don't see how having an oligopoly controlling the media is a bad thing? Here's an outline: First, a story threatens to upset the Status Quo and/or expose wrongdoing by the rich and powerful. Word of it percolates up, and in one conference call between the good 'ole boys club they make sure your story never gets any real press.
But are they over NINE THOUSAND???
And why are you holding up a sample of one out of the hundreds (most likely thousands) of people held in total at Gitmo, "extraordinary rendition" sites, and those formerly held in abu Gharib as an example of how torture works? If anything, he was a unique case. Khalid isn't/wasn't the stereotypical jihadist or suicide bomber (a young man with raging hormones who can't get laid (a fact for many men in polyandrous societies) and was told he'd get all the sex he wanted if he'd blow himself up for God), he's smart enough to be upper management in a major organization. As such, he posessed both facts (being upper management) and the smarts to know when the game was over. He'd have talked to the "nice guy" who brought food and chatted with him for a while every day too.
At any rate, this all boils down to who is willing to commit evil in the name of expediency.
Don't remember where, but there have been claims that the level of radiation naturally present in the background or very slightly more is actually beneficial; It does just enough damage to make the body keep it's DNA checks and repair mechanisms in order. They found that organisms raised in very low-radiation environments (i.e. underground, inside boxes made of isotopically-depleted materials) actually showed higher rates of senesence.
And IMO, it just makes evolutionary sense; There is always a natural background of radiation, between remnant radioactivity and the neverending shower of muons from cosmic rays, so it makes sense that a body tailored to such an environment would expect some radiation.
Torture is still used because it works, and it works because it's still used? That's some nice circular logic there, Lou.
The only reason it's still used because some people are sociopaths who enjoy hurting others (or they are in search of "revenge"). This is why it's generally associated with Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and North Korea. It's a verifiable fact
that
torture
does
not
work
for
the
reasons
I
explained
previously.
There Are Four Lights!
No, torture means "Hurting someone physically or mentally until they will do anything to make the torture stop." So, Mr. Tough Guy, how long could YOU stand being tied up with loudspeakers blasting a neverending variety of sound at you at just under the pain threshold? How many times could I rub a q-tip with concentrated hydrofluoric acid over YOUR toe until you broke? How long could I lock YOU up in a sensory deprivation chamber until you begged to tell me everything if you could just see light again?
Of course, this is all moot; After the evil enemy had tortured you for weeks and weeks on end (lol), you'd break down in tears and tell them whatever you thought they wanted to hear regardless of truth which is why torture does not help to learn the truth and is therefore useless as a tool for gaining intel. Or do you think that all those people the Spanish Inquisition killed for confessing to witchcraft were actually witches?
But they do not tell you the details - like those that the Burmese monks indeed broke Burmese law and were treated exactly according to it.
Will the last sane person in government please switch it to runlevel 6? But run rm -rf /home/uspto first please.
Though I'm sure Mr. Beckerman will arrive with the correct interpertation shortly, I think show cause just means show why. "They asked me to throw this out. Why shouldn't I?"
The University of Oregon catalog mentions lie algebras under "Advanced Algebra 681/682/683," so I guess it's graduate-level abstract algebra.
Except they're like muggles trying to deal with keys from Harry Potter; Normal keys don't self-destruct if the wrong person tries to use them, show you what their owner wants you to see, or magically stop working at a set date. Plus, we can destroy encryption keys with thought alone ("I forgetted! Durr!"), and you won't even know the room/keyhole is there unless we show you.
Converting a coherent radiation beam back to usable power is not only feasable in theory, but (given access to a semiconductor fab) reality. If you take away the blackbody continuum and replace it with burningly intense monochromatic radiation, you can simply set the bandgap to that radiation's energy and *poof* - you'll have solar cells that convert a majority of the energy beamed down to DC. Alternately, if you can scale a rectifying antenna small enough that's even more efficient.
Interestingly, there have also been tests of microwave power beamers; Small electric helicopter models were run by a focused microwave beam (which went into a uhf rectifer for conversion back to usable power). They kept the thing aloft for hours, without harming any plants or animals in the test range.
There are two reasons we don't have space-based solar power. First, solar cells really hate space. You've got ionizing radiation (x-rays, protons, cosmic rays, electrons, etc) which create and grow crystal defects in the cells. The defects act as recombination centers, increasing recombination losses and reducing power output. Meteorites don't do any favors, and neither does the ever-growing cloud of junk we create. More importantly, it's expensive to put things in space. Really expensive. You may think it's expensive to fill your gas tank, but that's just peanuts to putting it into space. Try and think how much square miles of solar cells and scaffolding would *weigh,* and at $10000/pound it's an absurd proposition.
But this is all pointless - either you agree, or disagree and prove that you're part of The Conspiracy and not to be listened to. Yay, self-reinforcing delusions.
I'll take a fight over whether to use [\r | \n | \r\n] over the Cryptonomicon-sized standards we're fighting over now.
Don't have any cites, but I've heard that this is part of the wonder of the tree/backbone structure the Internet's fallen into: you've only got to tap a suprisingly small number of NOCs at the main backbones to see almost everything. Like when they put a tap on every single connection from America to Europe in one swoop since every cable conveniently arrives at a single point in (IIRC) New Jersey. Likewise, almost every cable across the pacific comes in at a couple points on the west coast. Tap the trunks running through Mountainview CA, and the main cross-country ones, and poof - Big Brother is watching us.
And even if they were caught doing something like that (rerouting traffic), it's not like the average idiot would understand or care.
Why should it show on any routing table or ping time?
............ \---- [NSA scanner]
It's
[Internet] ---- [ATT router] ---- [Internet]
not [Internet] ---- [NSA scanner] ---- [ATT router] ---- [Internet]
The whole idea is that Y-splitters let them capture everything without being visible. Except that it's an analog world, and the split took too much signal and they were exposed when an idiot blabbed to a patriot about the splitter which was there for no technical reason causing data errors.
Everyone is up in arms because a PRIVATE shipping company is opening and xeroxing every document that passes through it's PRIVATE distribution network and forwarding the xerox to the government.
I mean, so what that it's basically impossible to avoid either using Bizzaro-FedEx or have them handle your document at some point, they're a MONOPOLY CORPORATION and not the government, so that magically makes it moral and legal *coughfruit of a poisoned treecough* for them to help the government spy on you by proxy.
Can I have some of the peyote they're putting in your koolaid?