Oh by the way that huge thermal expansion/contraction shockwaves of 3000C is devastating to almost any known material. Inside a positive displacement engine the materials have to be exposed to it, as the fluid cools via mechanical work done during expansion. In a turbine on the other hand there are different temperatures as the fluid travels through the different pressure zones, and a uniform steady hot or steady cold temperature is maintained, and thermal stress cycling does not happen. From this point of view it's important to have to fluid travel, and in localized pressure drop zones only change very minutely in temperature, and do so in a uniform manner along the path of flow. With very low pressures of 3 atm to 0.03 atm large volumes are necessary, and any turbine-type blades would have to be huge sail-like sized to exploit the small pressure differences. With 0.03 atm the volumetric energy density is very minor, and devices are gigantic barely producing a few watts. Of course the 3000C is almost certainly not the economical equilibrium choice between highest energy harvesting efficiency and capital cost of the device, but it does seem like a theoretical limit on upper temperature solid materials available, unless ultrahigh diamond-manufacture like pressures are applied, and a heat engine is operated under such conditions, and somehow some shaft power is extracted. Such a supercompressed material-based heat engine might find materials that are still solid even at 6000C. If one like that is ever built, it might be able to thermal harvest the Sun by direct heat exchange to equal temperature on one side, and huge radiative space vacuum cold absorbing radiator heat exchangers on the other side. It could be kind of a solar sail that's superpowered by the heat instead of just the solar wind, by capturing and ejecting wind particles at near light speed from a cyclotron/particle acccelerator powered by the heat engine. There are two temperatures making up heat engine efficiency, and the practical/theoretical but most likely not economical max high temperatures is near 3000C, and possibly even more important the cold side, with the max minimum theoretically imaginable being based on radiative heat exchange with the outer space universe background thermal radiation that comes in at near 10K, or -263C. The efficiency of a heat engine can be tremendously improved by dropping the available cold side temp, but again, huge heat exchanger surfaces would be required, and they would only operate in the vacuum of outer space (with no heat radiation from air interfering), turned with their back to the Sun, and extremely well insulated from thermal conduction from the sunny 6000C side to the ~10K cold side.
So, thorium fluoride melts at 1110C, boils at 1680C, so it's a high pressure gas at 3000C.
Thorium dioxide melts at 3390C, and boils at 4400C. At 3000C one could still have thorium dioxide pebbles, though they might react with a graphite vessel to form thorium carbide and carbon monoxide, or some thorium-carbido-oxide. How fast this happens and how physically stable it would be, I don't know. With a tungsten vessel, there may be no reaction at all. The problem with tungsten is a relatively high neutron capture cross section.
Thorium nitride melts at 2820C, so it is probably liquid at 3000C, but it may be sufficiently metallic to react with graphite, and form some kind of thorium-carbido-nitride, with evolution of nitrogen gas.
Graphite melts, or more exactly sublimates at around 3600C. Next is tungsten melting near 3400C, boiling at near 5500C.
I just found http://www.periodictable.com/Properties/A/NeutronCrossSection.ssp.log.html
At least for thermal neutrons, graphite is one of the best neutron resistant materials at neutron cross section b 0.0035 , and I had no idea that oxygen is by far the most resistant, at 0.00028. Helium is third at 0.007, but this gives me the idea of using carbon monoxide as the heat exchange gas medium, in case helium's moderating power is too high. Carbon monoxide may behave like an inert gas in presence of graphite and thorium dioxide, unless C2O type materials might form, but that's very entropically unlikely. Beryllium and fluoride are next, at b=0.0092 and 0.0096, then bismuth at 0.034. Neon(0.04), lithium(0.045), magnesium (0.063), lead(0.171), and the first structural metal with sufficient strength, high enough melting point, other than graphite is zirconium with neutron cross section b=0.184 for thermal neutrons. But Zirconium's melting point is 1855C, and thorium's 1752C. Argon is 0.65, the cheapest noble gas, but much more absorbing than helium, neon or carbon monoxide.
High melting materials near tungsten are high absorbing some more than others. Thorium itself is 7.4 so the materials themselves should beat thorium dioxide 3400mp in nonabsorbing neutron capacity. Here are some top melting materials
Tungsten is b=18.4/mp 3400C, rhenium is 90/3200C , osmium 3030/15, tantalum 20.5/3020C, niobium 1.15/2477, molybdenum 2.6/2350C, thorium 7.4/1842, etc
Besides niobium carbide, that leaves graphite as the only cheap, nonreactive and truly high temperature nuclear material far beyond 2000C, together with thorium dioxide as the fuel, with carbon monoxide and helium as the heat exchange fluids with direct contact with the fuel. The heat exchange fluid might still have to go through a graphite heat exchanger external to the core, so that nuclear decay outgassing contaminants from thorium, such as lead oxides are contained, and the 2nd heat exchange fluid as it goes through the decompression cycle in a graphite piston or other mechanical device, does not contaminate up the wall surfaces from such nonvolatiles dropping out on cooling. Graphite pistons are self lubricating, but they are very weak mechanically. One could still build a humongous heat engine graphite piston that operates at 3100C to 100C temperature drop, and a pressure drop of 3 atm to near vacuum exhaust pressure, with very slow motion, with the high pressure gases introduced on alternating sides during a decompression cycle that might take 2 minutes to complete. Imagine a 10m x 10m diameter graphite piston, with a travel length of 30 meters. Such sizes are necessary at low pressures. It's very hard to find something that will provide containment to 100 bars at 3000C, but that very high temperature to exhaust temperature ratio, and initial pressure to final pressure ratio is what's critical to energy harvesting efficiency.
Yeah, no kidding! Most current reactors based on steam operate at about 200C, where there are plenty of structural materials that last decades . Temperatures near 1000C-2500C are an order of magnitude more thermodynamicaly efficient, but the very reason it's not currently done, is the construction material technology. Even in nonnuclear, such as natural gas or solar thermal, temperatures over 1000C would be better, but there is the same issue of consctruction material technology. One advancement that has become commonplace is the CNG plants, combined natural gas, where there is first a high temperature turbine stage before the conventional turbine technology, which ups the thermodynamic efficiency from about 30% useful work/70% waste heat, to 60% useful work, 40% waste heat - basically doubling the amount of electricity one gets from a mcf of natural gas. But that is relatively easy, because we have ultrahigh temperature turbine blades from military research on airplanes. Regular power companies have a hard time finding the money to look for new stuff, they are more concerned with making money TODAY, with what's proven and tested, so a bank will loan them the money to build a billion dollar contraption and amortize it over 30 years. The military does not have to jump such hoops, it's understood that what they are into is totally uncertain and without guarantees, but in military one cannot afford yesterday's proven and tried technology if there is something more cutting edge today. Power/energy company advances have to be sponsored/pushed by either obama/epa/nasa/military, a regular power company is simpy in the business of getting things done, not in looking for new stuff. These days however, they are swimming in so much cash from oil prices, maybe they can afford to run a research department as a luxury item. There is two sides to everything, even to nasty oil company business practices and ridiculous profits - now they can afford to do research, and build something even without a bank loan.
In any case, at very high temperatures, I'm more comfortable thinking about a solid object glowing white surrounded by an inert cooling gas like helium or argon, or even nitrogen or hydrogen (in non neutron appications, such as solar concentrators). Similar to an incandescent lightbulb, compared to a lightbulb that has a liquid salt as the glowing element. Solid objects also expand and contract with temperature, just like liquid salts, but they stay put, in the center of the reactor, and expensive thermal materials that need to be in immediate contact with them don't have to be used. The types of accidents and control issues that arise with liquid salts, with all their corrosion issues, they just leave one with an eerie feeling. A hot inert fluid such as argon, even in case of a catastrophic failure, is relatively safe to escape, and won't attack structural materials. The solids themselves stay contained in case of a failure, in case they stay solid. Chernobyl had liquid magma flowing out, a liquid meltdown. I don't know if there are any safe structural materials that sufficiently resist molten fluoride attack. Graphite is such a thing, but it's not very strong mechanically, so something like graphite lined tungsten or niobium/molybdenum alloys would be something to try, but even so the salt diffuses through the graphite to the metal. So, again, in the case of an incandescent bulb, the direct location fixing, solid contact, between the filament and something else is in a very limited, and cooled region, and regular glass can be used for the bulb surface because the contact happens through a gas or vacuum. Similarly a solids based pebble bed reactor would only need the bottom plate holding up the pebbels to be of some super material, also coolable, because the rest of the hot stuff would be insulated away by the bottom layer of pebbles. In case you're dealing with a liquid, the full containment material has to be the expensive stuff, or even cooled in a dynamic equilibrium just right. In case of molten salts, the cooling wil
I was thinking more of Ballmer than of Gates, but when it comes to making business decisions, I don't think they are too different, except one is soft spoken while the other is a screamer. Same difference.
In fact you should have 3 Feds, each with their own prime rate, kind of like Great Britain had it with the British Pound, each major bank issuing their separate bank notes, which were interconvertible.
But unfortunately this does not work, because of the way interest works, and the way monopolies work in a free market. If one of them gets a major bulk of the outstanding loans in an economy, they can still manage to sustain themselves at a very low interest rate that drives the other competitor banks out of business, and then they are free to charge whatever they feel unchecked by competition. The free market is not perfect, it's very vulnerable to monopoly tactics and in cases of monopoly other than the Fed, government regulation and price fixing is imposed. But the Fed is almost more important than the elected government when it comes to ensuring the well being of the economy, because they care more, because it's in their interest to care more. Elected officials care about getting reelected, and participate in topics of du jour that may have little long term effect or relevance. We change politicians like we change diapers, because In God we trust, but in people we don't, people are too easy to corrupt, and purging the corruption-connection-networking channels very frequently is the best way we know how to deal with this problem.
In any case, with a national debt of 10 trillion, the Fed might be able to charge interest rates of 0.001% if competition were available. But, as we said, competition of 3 different banks would very soon drive two of them out of business, and we're back to only one anyway. So the only true check on the Fed's abuse of high interest rates is their effect of slowing the economy, and in absence of competition, they can focus on tuning the economy to the max of their interest, as opposed to taking the economy through havoc and sacrifice while fighting competition. Still, that does not mean they are a completely benevolent creature, and they might engage in things not beneficial to the general public.
The Clinton's in the late nineties aimed to balance the budget and pay off government debt, something that seems natural to most everyday people. But this was a grave mistake on their part, this cannot be done, because the Fed's only source of income is debt, and the biggest borrower is the government. You cannot bite the hand that feeds you, even if you're the president, else you get punished. There was a Monica Lewinsky case and now, after a few years of wars we cannot afford, the national debt is at 10 trillion. Money talks. Always. Now the Fed can lower the prime rate, because it makes a shitload of money even on very low interest. The only thing the fed owns is the US dollar, the only income of the fed is interest, and the only way they influence the economy is through wiggling the prime rate around. Actually that's not completely true, because the economy being their cash cow, they care about the well being of the economy, and they can issue targeted loans and set wheels in motion to keep the economy from collapsing or keep the economy running at its best. When there is a will there is a way, and necessity is the mother of all invention. The Fed will do a lot of unusual and unheard of things in the background to maintain stability and status quo. It's much better having them than having to rely on a freshly elected government with no experience nor longterm relevance or even a communist government, where nobody seems to care about anything other than pleasing the party official next in the higher up ranks. The beauty of private property is that it makes people care. Unlike many other government issued currencies in the past, the privately owned dollar will not fail, if it's up to the Fed, unless they get to be the ones issuing the next currency too, but debts written in dollar amounts worth nothing would be annulled and a lot of the Fed's property would go down the drain with it. The Fed will do everything in its power to maintain a strong dollar, and an economy stable just enough and
This got me thinking some more. I never seen the Alien vs. Predator movie, but I just read the Wikipedia article, how there is a hybrid between Alien and Predator emerging at the end. Isn't there a way to create a balance between for-pay copyright but public abuse and public-only protecting but no personal incentive GPL? The current copyright is 90 years for corporations, lifetime+70 for individuals, and you can't contractually extend it further, to say 100 years for corporations, because public domain is protected, and intellectual property rights are not be recognized after the passage of certain amount of time, that certain amount of time being kicked around and extended to practically ad infinitum by unscrupulous government lobbyists these days. But you can give things away for free, (gift them), or you can put restrictions on the use of things you give away for free. As far as gift taxes go, of course things that are available as free gifts to anyone who wants them, the market price is zero, therefore the sales/gift tax is zero, because they represent no financial value. There are many things that carry no financial value, such as freedom, unless you bring back the institution of slavery, in which case one could sell and repurchase his own freedom.
So anyway, one could certainly create a software license that mimics the original copyright of 14 years, and give it away/sell it under those terms. Actually in the software world 14 years is an eternity, so I was thinking some semi-GPL software after 1 year, that both retains the original intent of rewarding creators, but it also protects public domain. So you could write software, deposit the source-code and binaries with a software repository such as Sourceforge, and sell it to customers, with the contract that it's copyrighted, except they will get the sourcecode from the repository 1 year from the release date, and agree to sell derivatives under similar contracts, of sourcecode obtained 1 year from the release date. It would be similar to how wills are executed on someone's death. I was thinking at first a contract of 1 year from release date, unless author dies, then you get the source instantly, but that would lead to a lot of contract killing of programmers. The hard 1 year deadline is actually a good thing, because if a programmer who's the only one with access to the source to fix a bug or add a feature, ends up in life support, the customer has an incentive to sustain him and bring him back to life, so then he can program that feature.
Another idea is having a price structure that follows an exponential decay over time, based on an original fixed price. This function could be something other than exponential, possibly with 3 peaks, 1 initial market hype for the very first day or week, representing those who gotta have the latest and greatest, 2 initial uptaking for the first few months by individuals who want the new features but don't care tremendously about stability, a valley representing decreased demand, and 3 a following peak representing uptake by corporations that like to lag a few years behind to get a tested and proven old version, and then a continuous exponential decay.
This way if you're a private company creating software such as web browser, office software, or database software, you could sell your product, with your users knowing what price they'd have to pay at any given time, and opting to buy in based on their funds and needs. This way newer versions would have to be priced with respect to the current dropping price of older version, and any premiums over older versions would have to be gained by representing true value and innovation that the users want compared to older versions that they already have. This way true innovation is compensated, and market hogs that do embrace, extend and extinguish would come too late to the game. Under such pricing scenario I wonder what the price of Windows 7 would be based on the decaying price of Windows XP, and how much innovation Windows 7 represents that the customers actu
Apropo that proverb, and whim, it reminds me of the situation between IBM and Microsoft, and how Microsoft bit IBM's hand bigtime around 1993, tanking their stockprice, and driving them to the brink of extinction. Microsoft is one of the most arrogant companies ever to come into existence, driven by the personality of its CEO. Microsoft's path through the business world is littered with carcasses of companies they've obliterated on their way to the top. Embrace, extend, extinguish. They are like the emergence of a flying piranha that enters every river and lake in the world, that eats up anything that moves, and once there is nothing left to eat in the water, flies out of the water for feeding on bears taking a few bites for a few minutes at a time, then returns to catch a breath in water. Of course they are very successful and proliferate well into everything they target. How do you deal with the emergence of such a beast? Well, if you're a snake, and these fish bite you, you can turn into a flying snake that specializes in eating exclusively these flying piranhas. Alien vs. predator. Or maybe a simpler remedy, like a species that carries a poison, like some mushrooms or berries do, after finding themselves on the path to extermination. IBM these days grows fruits filled with the GPL. As in embrace and extend this, biatch, because you cannot extinguish it. Or they can be called a bear with poisoned meat - saying bite me now. GPL'd software is untouchable by Microsoft, because they can embrace, extend but not extinguish, because they cannot put a block on it. IBM had rather deal with something that it has to give away free, but it lets it conduct a profitable business and assure its own survival, than be at the mercy of another corporation, who in the past showed no mercy to them. It's called intensified competition dropping the price of goods, and in this case, that of software. You can stay in business providing services around free software, compared to providing services around someone else's software, who, you know, will take over your business anyway. Now Microsoft can smell their own carcass starting to rot, because its based on purely selling software, so what do they do? They turn to what they do best, embrace, extend, extinguish. Find something that they did not invent, nor were ever good at, but something that represents control and power, and take over and take it into stagnation. These days they are after Google, after the Internet and Search. They wanted to buy yahoo, and they are pushing their own search engine. I don't know what the solution will be in that case, how to stop them if they succeed.
I personally do not like the GPL compared to public domain. In the old days, we had a 14 year artificial construct called 'intellectual property" subject to "copyright" to reward creators, with the understanding that everything would eventually pass into public domain, for the general benefit of human knowledge. This construct was created as an incentive to stop keeping secrets, and simply to reward creators. But it has turned into a mess. I don't like the GPL because it restricts freedom, because it has a clause that say's "you can't." Public domain says do whatever you want, including make software based on it that you sell for 14 years before you have to release the source to public domain. But, we don't have such laws. I don't mind people making money on writing software. But when it comes to the current state of affairs, with 90 year copyright on the way to being extended even further and the behavior of a software monopoly, I can see how things like the GPL are simply a necessity to survive as a business.
If Microsoft can successfully foot themselves and extract cold cash end user money out of a different field, such as internet search, then they too can go for GPL software, and compete with IBM at what IBM does best these days, providing services built around free software. However, while Microsoft's main revenue streams are based on sales of Windows and Office, IBM is immune from such attacks from the Beast.
You can always try to find your own little patch of land in a low population area out of sight, with low regulations (such as you a wooded lot in the country side where the city won't come out to cut and take your grass they like to call weed), low taxes and low expense. Then you can try to aim for a self sufficient yeoman farmer existence, try to grow your own food, lead a self reliant existence, and participate in the "greater economy" just enough to pay for your property taxes that they won't let you escape from, meaning also car insurance to get to your job. You can minimize your involvement in the bullshit and thick lies you have no power to solve, and just let the whole thing fizzle out or come to some equilibrium, where the compounded lies eventually have to be backed up and then either the thing goes under or the thing goes belly up, but at least you are not caught up in the middle of it being the prime scapegoat target, or even totally reliant on it, because hey, at least you can grow your own food. When everything fizzles out and there are no jobs left either, property taxes will have to drop too, and you might find yourself able to sustain an existence selling the food you grow, but not while there are still jobs and the high money suckers everyone in, so in the meantime, unfortunately, you have to participate, but at least try to stay at the fringes of responsibility in everything you do.
But don't get your hopes high, because even when there are no jobs, and money is impossible to come by, those with rights to print money will be able to go around and buy up every property in sight on sheriff's sales over unpaid property taxes. Something is wrong with that law, but once your 2nd amendment rights are suspended, and besides mandatory health insurance you can't afford to buy it will be mandatory to take a government issued daily "health pill" immune suppressant to "stop rampant autoimmune disease", you won't have a fighting chance to even rebel, because you will be so immune suppressed, it will be hard to even stand on your own two feet. I guess the root of such actions comes down to premeditated competition and extermination, based on bloodlines and tribalism. What else is new. You're either in with the gang, or you're on the list to be x'd out, it's that simple. Liberty, fraternity, equality? Ha ha ha. New world order all the way, based on blue blood, nobility, and bloodlines, like in the old days.
We're bemoaning the fees the lawyers charge in a dire situation of the client, similar to healthcare fees doctors charge in a dire situation of their patient. It's a sort of blackmailing that appears almost naturally.
If there were a legal system where individual defendants could defend themselves without lawyers, such as Socrates could(he still lost the case, it's still up to others(judge or jury) to interpret whatever the laws are, what is moral or just), so if people could defend themselves without lawyers, then besides their own time they wouldn't lose much. Actually, having your time wasted being dragged to court is also a way to be done away with, at least in the USA, where most people run in an monthly income to bills/expenses ratio very close to 1 or 1.1 or something along those lines, with their income derived from hourly work where their time is precious. If they are unable to show up at their jobs because they are summoned to court, they can fall under 1 in that ratio, and suddenly find their homes reposessed. For example suppose you've been paying a 30 year mortgage on your home for 20 years now, 10 years to go, unless you can find ways to quickly refinance the equity you built up in your home (which is getting difficult these days), you may default on your payments and end up in foreclosure, and there goes a lifetime's worth of work, simply from being dragged to court before a judge, irrelevant of who wins the case. Even if you win the bullshit case they are throwing at you, the whole point is wasting your time.
If you can find an independent existence with very low bills and monthly expenses, similar to being a yeoman farmer hailed by Newton and Jefferson, where minimal amount of savings are enough to sustain you for decades on, then you're better shielded from such time wasting scenarios, and in theory you could spend an eternity in court talking to lawyers and judges explaining your case and appealing and appealing and asking for extensions and continuances etc, because you'd have lots of free time on your hand. You could use similar tactics on an equal footing against lawyers who have nothing better to do but be in court and waste time as much as needed to win a case, and therefore make money, or even not win the case, and still make money on the time wasting. In fact a lawyer or a judge without a lawsuit is unemployed, so they may have an extra reason to delay things, and increase the bureaucratic red tape, especially if they charge by the hour. In the name of self interest. So, if you can afford to defend yourself because you have no bills and have enough savings to make it a few decades, then you might have a fighting chance. For instance someone making 80K/year, having bills of 30K/year can be worse off, or is easier to screw with that someone making 15K/y (minimum wage), having bills of 1K/yr. However if you do have to hire lawyers, you will not be able to manage from 15K/y. So, in general, any lawsuit brought against you is an automatic loss to you, unless you're able to defend yourself AND have a savings to monthly expense ratio very high. Such people are few and rare. Because, by the way, it's also "illegal" to save up money in the US, and any misbehavior such as funds accumulated in bank accounts, is carefully monitored, and severely punished. This way everyone is a virtual slave.
That's why I worry about all these bank mergers, and concentration of power of information on who has how much. When there are a lot of banks, with many small, disparate and private databases, there is at least some minor degree of shielding from ease data gathering, along the lines of hey look, that person over there saved up all these funds, we can obviously pay him less, lets lay him off and make him take a job that pays less so he gets back into the more secure for us (easier to control him) hamsterwheel 1.1:1 income to expense ratio, where he has almost no freedom to decide on what to do with his life, and we can make all the decisions for him. To those who want to exercise a lot of control, and in essence create virtual slavery (as in what's the difference from the real thing), freedom is the most dangerous thing, in the home of the brave.
Mcdonalds will be all robots/vending machines, because by then they will be cheaper than human burger flippers. The economy as you know it now won't be, but there will still be people engaged in all kinds of activities.
One thing I forgot to add in the original comment. We don't want AI stronger than ourselves, because we don't want to compete against it, nor can we put trust into it that it won't turn against us. But I was thinking of different scenarios. Suppose it's been 100 trillion years from now, and our descendants are starting to feel the onset of the Heat Death of the Universe very strongly. They have simply been incapabale, or not smart enough, through those millenia, to find ways to bend the rules of physics, the laws of nature, and stop the world from coming to a heat death. They've had the building plans available to create artificial intelligence smarter than themselves for millenia, but have been forbidden by some prime directive handed down through generations. So should they, under such circumstances, create something smarter than themselves, which can possibly figure out a way to save everyone from certain death, because it would be smarter? This may also apply to star wars type of scenarios, where Earth is under attack, by an unknown extraterrestrial civilization, for unknown reasons. You only know they are also chemical, carbon/water based, just like you, just very advanced and smart. What is your definition of life then, and survival and maintaining of life? Does that include them too, that extraterrestrial life? So would you build an AI smarter than yourself, and "hopefully" smarter than that other chemical life too, and hope that at least it can defend you, being programmed, at least initially, to care about Earth and you and fight against them? And risk what you create eventually exterminating both you and that other extraterrestrial chemical life? Even under such circumstances as a simple war between neighboring nations down here on Earth, does either one have the "right" to create AI and put all people and humanity as a whole at risk, in the name of their self defense? My head is starting to hurt now... Can't we just live, love and enjoy each other? Why we gotta deal with such questions..
That was the fatal mistake for AMD, to spin off their fabs, or let someone on top make such a bad strategic decision. Soon it's gonna be Intel alone, and we'll be back to $1000 cpu's again. It was because AMD, Cyrix, Winchip and Transmeta that we had $25 PC compatible GHz cpu's, or something at the. AMD is the only viable competitor still around. ARM is efficient but too slow by today's standards. VIA and IBM are still kind of around, but they are neither in the field, nor was cpu's ever one of their core businesses, nor were they at the forefront pushing technology and driving Intel to do a better job. I don't have anything against Intel, other than them being a threat of becoming a monopoly, but in fact I love the great work they do these days, which would not have happened without competition on their heels. Look at Windows back in the mid 90's, when there was plenty of uncertainty and competition, from Mac, commercial Unix, OS/2, and all kinds of other stuff. Microsoft did great work, because they had to, and they were more successful then the rest, because they did what they do better. But being left with no competitor they turned to dirty business, and stagnation. They've kind of saved their old competitor, the Mac, from the brink of the abyss by injecting a cash infusion back in the early 00's, then bringing Jobs back at the helm, and kind of screwing up Windows, to create some sort of artificial competition, or simply screwing up Windows because they wanted to do what the competitor, Apple did, better than them, so you got a Vista that has an Appleish feel. All they created was a straw man to compete against, a scarecrow filled with a ghost, but no real life and punch, only being able to produce alot of marketroid hype and seas of lemmings jumping on the latest bandwagons. Sure it's been a great moneymaker, but making funny money that's bringing the whole system down, because no true value or true innovations happened at the core of computing, other than coming from Intel. The job of money is to be the John Stuart Mill invisible hand, to guide the economy so that resources get allocated to most benefit society and humanity. Intel is doing amazing work that tremendously benefits society and humanity these days, something that cannot be said about either Microsoft, Apple, or even Linux. When Intel loses AMD as a viable competitor to compete against, they may end up in the same stagnation that MS got themselves into by being too successful at killing everybody else around. Now they've lost direction, because they cannot embrace, extend, extinguish a competitor's technology. I guess Intel always had the innovations coming from in-house, never needing to copy and adapt outsider technology and do it better than them (unless copper/silicon by AMD is such a thing), but they still benefited from someone being on their heels and driving them to do better. True, because of free market competition they have not made the money that they could have had they been a monopoly able to charge $1000-2000 for a CPU, but the rest of us, consumers benefited from that, and we should be very thankful to Intel and their competition for that. The same cannot be said about Microsoft or Apple innovations in efficiency and price drops brought to you in the last decade.
One interesting note here is that humans and turtles and elephants live longer than most other animals. In this sense, the longer living species require or have found themselves a lifestyle, environment and sustenance with more peace than the ones whose lives are measured in dog-years.
2000 years ago, according to the Ptolemian view of the world, the Universe was made up of Earth surrounded by different spheres. This view was arrived at by looking at the sky with a telescope, and summarizing the information collected succinctly, in a simple and reasonable form. There was the sphere of planets which traveled on epicycles, and were closer than the sphere of stars. Heaven was supposed to be beyond the sphere of the sky that held all the stars, and that's where the gods of Olympus, or Jehovah + the angels and similar super beings were supposed to be, with Satan and his disciples populating the lava filled nasty sulfur smelling underground. The Catholic Church turned this world view into a dogma, into a self evident and unquestionable truth that only requires the power of faith as proof. Then as the telescope technology advanced, Copernicus, a catholic priest himself put more faith into his own eyes and telescope than what he read in a book, and Galileo Galilei agreed with him, and had to spend the rest of his life under papal house arrest as punishment for doubting the validity of dogmas. Alas, our view of the world evolves in a mere 2000 years. Back then you could rightfully believe in the existence of heaven, because it had a physical location in the way you saw the Universe. Even if it was empty, it was a special place that had a place in the grand scheme of things. Now we don't know where heaven is, but we still talk about it. If anything we believe the Universe is infinite in a circular way, our 3d world being bent in 4d, so if you take off and go far enough in one direction, you will eventually arrive back in the other. Our telescopes are not good enough to see far enough round trip the Universe, and we can't see ourselves repeatedly at a periodic distance in it. The problem we say is that light ravels too slowly and there hasn't been enough time since the Big Bang(80 year old idea by monsignor Lemaitre, himself a catholic priest) for it to go many round trips. Today we talk about the Heat Death of the Universe (150 year old idea by William Thompson, aka Lord Kelvin), and laws of physics that are set in stone. In another 100 billion years we might find ways to mess with the rules that we believe in today as unchangeable, and mold their own Universe the way they need it best for a most comfortable and secure existence. The problem is that only happens if we and our children, whatever form of life they may be by that point, make it as far as 100 billion years. True that is not forever. But what if we're wrong and there is a forever? Let them figure out that question, 100 billion years from now. Our job is to do what we can, and have faith in future life, in our children, that they will do even better than us.
Radiation damaged reproducing DNA is checked on many levels by the immune system. If a mutation is successful as far as retaining replicating ability goes AND it passes the many checks imposed by the immune system successfully, it is called a cancer, benign or malignant, but doing different things from what it's supposed to be doing originally, with the tacit agreement of the immune system.
You need somewhere to send yourself or life in general, to "diversify your portfolio", to not be "keeping all your eggs in one basket", in case of a catastrophy down here on Earth. In a sense you live for life, to protect life, and to maintain life. If survival of silicon/metal robotic AI machines is sufficient in your opinion as a form of survival of life, without survival of chemical machine humans, animals, plants, then you can just send your AI off to outer space. But the rest of us love nature, trees, animals and our meatbag selves, and would like to see our children, or whatever meatbag stuff evolves from them, and whatever stuff evolves from trees too, survive on forever. That's our job on this planet, so we can die calmly, making sure that others live on. You have a duty of self interest to make sure that you live on, but balanced by a duty of making sure that the whole lives on. What else is the purpose of life? To fuck, shoot, kill, enjoy yourself without paying attention to what and who you cut in the name of your self interest, and bring the whole world down with you when you get pissed because it's your time to go out and depart? You will never die in peace when you make yourself the center of your world. You have to take care of yourself as a taking part in taking care of the whole, but ultimately, you don't live forever. But life, and meat, in general, has a chance to.
It's hard to say what happens when metal/silicon gets smarter than meat. I am meat, and I care about meat, and green plants like trees too. I chop wood, but I want to see trees in general exist forever. In a sense trees are my very distant siblings, and we share a common eukaryote ancestor going back 2 billion years ago. I also care about non eukaryote life, with whom I share a common ancestor going back to 3 billion years ago. Metal/silicon machines and automation that I create can help me get less tired and get things done that I can't do myself, and that's a big deal, but I don't want to make it so good that I have to fight or compete against it, because I know I would lose. One has to be careful with developing super strong AI if one wants to survive. Can cooperation between metal/silicon and meat be guaranteed forever? What happens when a smarter predator than us appears? Will we be to them as chickens are to us? And more importantly, do they get judged the same way during last judgment day as we do and go to the same Inferno or Paradiso that we do for committing sins?
The constant challenge to your immune system is xray and gamma radiation. Astronauts say spacewalk "smells" like a pine forest or sparks. Which is the smell of ozone/nitrous oxides. It's caused by radiation, it's like a locally generated ozone-layer, inside your spacesuit. Life, such as the human body, or especially Deinococcus Radiodurans bacteria, can still withstand quite a bit of radiation or oxidation damage and repair itself. The major source of radiation damage comes from potassium in the diet, from the potassium 40 isotope. Another similar damage is UV radiation damage, that still causes skin cancer here and there after all these millions of years of adaptation. The major source of oxidation damage that is very similar to radiation damage, comes from oxygen. Life cannot function without either potassium or oxygen, though you could clean up potassium 40 from your diet. But what's the point?
For any kind of successful very longterm space missions one needs heavy shielding at least equivalent to the atmosphere we have down here on earth. More radiation (even living at higher altitudes with less atmospheric shielding, or even near an ozone hole region) increases the rates of mutations miscarriages and cancers, but also the rate or adaptation to new environments. One of the dangers with non-well-shielded space travel is faster evolution than down here on Earth. But multilayer shielding can compensate for that, and keep mutation levels to lower than natural.
That brings up the question, that maybe lack of radiation is a cause of sicknesses, in a sense of not keeping the immune system well trained. People who live in a completely sterile bacteria free environment have very weak immune systems that lacks training. One still needs a flora to coexist inside the body if for nothing else, for composting intestinal contents. Those same bacteria can cause illnesses, if not kept under check by the immune systems constant vigilance. Still, as far as radiation goes, people coming from areas of high background radiation, such as India, don't seem to suffer much compared to people living in low background radiation areas. If anything, fluoride in their drinking water is the bigger problem for them, and background radiation is a relative nonissue. Perhaps a certain dose of background radiation is like a vitamin, increases health by keeping the immune system trained.
I don't dislike Windows per se. I understand the benefits of open source, and also understand proprietary software writer's concern needing to make money to pay bills. Unfortunately he can't find a better way to get paid for the useful work he does without doing nasty things, such as closing the source, or other ways to limit the end user's freedom and benefits, in a sense holding them hostage, and blackmailing the money out of them There is a balance in everything though. I try to pick on the most extreme things. Such as total domination and control over MY computer by a software vendor acting as if it's his computer. Changing stuff on it at his whim, simply because it's internet connected. Rigged with a million backdoors. Nuh uh.
I saw Windows 3.1 software running on an automated machine just last night. I was like wow, look at that awesome interface, how usable it is even today, compared to all these LCD/keypad things, what a nice advance it was, even if it uses a lot more energy. And it's not friggin hosed with total remote control from a software vendor - it doesn't even need an internet connection, let alone serial number/authentication keys. And the company who made it still made money. By at least half the people paying for it. Good old days. But I imagine Vista replacing that interface, and somehow it wouldn't be a good fit. It's like Win31 was already proper design. Regular Windows Menus that are easy to find, not needing close inspection or full mental focus, you can navigate them instinctually while your mind is off wandering about some other stuff. Status Bar - oh that lovely status bar. I miss that on a lot of programs these days. It used to convey such nice bits of information, one glance, and you knew it instinctually what was going on. Such as an LED on it changing from green to yellow. Sometimes you couldn't even tell that you were consciously aware about the color, but you were so used to the interface, you knew what to do based on it. If someone asked you why you did such and such, it might take you a while to pinpoint, oh, duh, that's how I know, that status bar LED color. Today's programs are much more "simple" in that they leave you absolutely "blank" mentally, and really not knowing anything, instead of a state of flow, a state of subconscious melt with the interface. It's only possible with an interface littered with minute details. I don't like the newer simplified interfaces of Windows, Mac, or even Gnome. I love old style hosed with a gazillion menu items and other details, confusing at first, awesome after a while when you got used to it Win31-95-2000 and KDE3 interfaces.
Re:Mapping Lunar Caves
on
Caves of the Moon
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Even if there is no lunar underground cave system, we could always dig one if the need arises. Moon mining could be done subsurface, to save the unmanned underground vehicle / remote controlled robots from temperature fluctuations and space radiation exposure. People and plants and animals are unlikely to ever live on the moon, other than as a work outpost, because there is not enough gravity for healthy functioning for highly extended periods such as over a few decades. Unless you construct a space station, spin it to create gravity, and stick that in a huge huge huge underground lunar cavern, with the axles supported by very strong pillars. Then you get extra protection from asteroid hits and radiation, but you'd still have to manage an on-surface solar panel array that gets lunar day and night fluctuations every 27.3 Earth days. Unless you can find and concentrate up enough uranium and thorium underground to manage simply with nuclear power, and no need for solar energy. Unless you figure out how to use and control fusion, whose fuel is abundant and whose nuclear waste is much less, mostly irradiated structural radiation, whose properties are not too far from outer space irradiated structural components.
In free outer space, off the surface of the moon, you can spin a large enough cylinder to generate artificial gravity needed by most lifeforms for proper functioning (humans, plants), and the spinning structure does not need superstrong bearings for axial support, it just floats in a free space orbit. Asteroid hits and radiation would mandate periodic replacement of the outermost shield, but if you have triple or tentuple airlock/shield layers, the innermost shields should stay safe. Of course it'd still need a longrange radar to catch and vaporize very large and very fast flying asteroids Patriot rocket style, similar to the ones used in the 1st gulf war, shooting at Scud missiles mid flight and destroying them, or at least throwing them off track.
Oh, radtea already answered it, very nicely too. It's neat how he says similar things. I didn't get that far while reading down through the comments and answering.
Sometimes in our evolutionary history there were some unicellular organisms, that didn't age, because they multiplied by cell division. Aging doesn't make sense in their case, unless they internally grow a few offspring cells, and release them into the environment, and then they grow some more. When one cell splits into two identical copies (except mutation cases), it's hard to say which one was the original, which is the copy, and track the original and see how many copies it ejects before suffering internal degradation, and no longer being able to duplicate. Single celled organisms just don't function like that, though you never know, we might find a peculiar one out there that does age, in some complicated sense.
All multicellular organisms, including plants such as seaweeds (algea) that have sexual fucntions, will age, and die, to give room to the offsprings. Sex and death go hand in hand - you have a way to track parents vs. offsprings, as opposed to unicellular bacterial cell divisions. Ultimately, parents have to give room to offsprings, or there is severe overpopulation, and parents competing against offsprings, and that nixes the whole point of going through the trouble and energy expense of producing offsprings through sex instead of simple autodivision. Sex, requiring more than one unit, is a way to increase the rate of mutations and "stillbirths," compared to simple division.
So as a summary, there were never any animals in our evolutionary history that didn't age. There were never any multicellular plants that didn't age either. If we came from single celled organisms that "moved", such as Euglena, which is a eukaryote that can move, photosynthesize, and consume other cells as food by phagocytosys, then multicellular plants were never in our evolutionary history, but they evolved as a separate branch from the same single celled organisms as we did, but developed the concept of sex and death independently.
17% less energy consumption vs. XP is the first good thing I heard about Windows 7. Is that only in special circumstances, or is it an across the board behavior? How does this compare to Windows 200, how about Linux distros? How much does it cost $-wise, and what are the tradeoffs in freedom one would have to make to get that 17% energy efficiency benefit? Can Win7 be run offline without an internet connection, or with an external router firewall that blocks access to absolutely everything except explicitely and manually allowed IP/urls, such as yahoo.com, google.com, but any other URL in general? Can it be installed without the vendor being an active participant during the process, such as if the vendor goes out of business, or simply deprecates and no longer wishes to support what you already paid for?
Yeah, but that will come with a locked BIOS that periodically checks and makes sure that WindowsTM is running, and connected via the internet to one of the MS beacon servers. The system will shut down in 30 seconds, if not provided with an internet access. Kind of like killing the RPC service does on Win2k and later OS's. The OS will be a subscription only based operating system, the retro obsolete standalone licensing model will be deprecated. Everyone will be mandated by law to purchase a subscription, and if you can't afford it, the government will help you pay for it, at least initially. In your own best interest. But the hardware will be free! Kind of like you get a free cellphone if you sign up for a two year contract, and the monthly payments add up to well over double what the hardware alone would have cost you. Also the EULA will state that you agree that all your documents will be stored on the cloud, kind of like webmail, such as gmail/hotmail/yahoo mail is today. It will be extraordinarily difficult to download and store a copy of anything offline(meaning you would have to make hand typed copies), unless you're willing to upgrade to the Windows Plus service for another 1999.99/mo, kind of like Yahoo Plus, which will let you get POP3 access to your inbox, and POP4 access to your cloud computing My Documents folder. You can get an offline copy of your files, but they will not be good for much, because you'll have to jump hoops of a 30 step process to simply get it loaded into MS Breath or MS One. Still, there will be no way to remove the original copies online, and you can throw them into the Recycle bin, but nothing can ever be permanently erased from the Recycle bin. Microsoft will fund the increased cost of storage for free, but only for items in the Recycle Bin that you want to get rid of. Files in the regular My Documents storage will cost you about 8cents/terabyte/month (don't laugh, a 30 page powerpoint presentation by Office 19 will weigh in at a heft 400 GB filesize, among other reasons, because it will be 256 bit based), while the My Pictures folder will go at 4 cents/tb/mo, and My movies at a 0.01 cent/TB/mo. It will be illegal to scheme the system and try to store my documents files in the movies folder, because you will get ticketed, and get a real life court citation over violating the intellectual property laws of the contracts you have signed. There will also be a mandatory penance booth, called My Confessions, where you have to write a blog about everything wrong that you've done each week, and ask forgiveness for your sins. People caught not visiting this folder often enough will be red flagged, and real life psychologists will make them take multiple choice tests where there are two correct answers, and no matter which one he picks, the other will be deemed correct, and by failing the tests prove that he is in dire need of mental health attention, and a prescription. Who wouldn't help a fellow suffering human being who does not even realize he has a problem. Admission you have a problem is the first step towards any solution. Mind control? How about ascertaining that there is order in society, and security, by keeping very close tabs on everyone. Wait.. oh, never mind.
That's a nice hypothesis to test, if you also collect rainfall data.
I was also thinking about DNA damage caused by radiation. All organisms are resilient to some low levels of radiation, or DNA molecular damage caused by even oxidizers/chemicals, heat, or radiation, and have sophisticated self-repair functions. Aging is deliberate built in function in all known multicellular organisms, caused by a counting mechanism that counts how many times the individual cells have divided - bacteria live indefinitely in this sense. Radiation might accelerate the cell division process, but at the same time, the aging process. But aging might be more complex than a simple count, what determines the overall age of an organism? Is it the count of a cancerous cell going haywire? Is it an average, local count? Is it the least multiplying cell? There is a lot of "junk" DNA that we don't understand, that might have sophisticated mechanisms to generate and regulate aging, involving counting day/light or even moon cycles, sleep/awake feed/hungry cycles, beyond a simple cell division count. Or aging might be as simple as each individual organ going at it at their own rate, and if someone has say, a wacky behaving liver for instance, that decides to age at a faster rate then the rest of the body, you could say there is a person with a 90 year old liver in a 40 year old body and everything ages independently. You could say some heavy alcoholics are like that, but I suspect a 90 year old liver is vastly different than a 40 year old artificially damaged one. I suspect aging is regulated on a whole organism level, by the organism. Aging is done on purpose, and it seems to happens too predictably to be just a random fluctuation of how some organs go. After all nobody lives 300 years. Though there are some people who don't make it past 20, still, we recognize how old people are just from looking at them. Aging is by design, death is by design, so that there can be mating and offsprings. It's a faster, better way to adapt to an environment, by throwing random solutions at a problem, to see which one sticks, brute force, 99.99% waste, but it solves the problems, which is more than no solution at all. Without death, with eternal life, there is no offsprings, no rooms for offsprings, and no automatic adaptation, or just a very slow one. If we humans ever create eternal life humans, that will mean no death, but also no children.
How cosmic radiation, or even radioactive radiation affects an organism can be very complex. For instance enhanced growth patterns in tree rings could be called "tumors", or "irregular growth patterns." We know radiation can both create and kill tumors. Perhaps a low dose creates a uniform low-tumor-activity type growth in all trees. Tumors can be benign or malignant, and benign tumors in and of themselves might be a form of evolution, if they are found to be a better adaptation to a given environment. What's irregular growth anyway? Who's the judge of that? Time is.
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Oh by the way that huge thermal expansion/contraction shockwaves of 3000C is devastating to almost any known material. Inside a positive displacement engine the materials have to be exposed to it, as the fluid cools via mechanical work done during expansion. In a turbine on the other hand there are different temperatures as the fluid travels through the different pressure zones, and a uniform steady hot or steady cold temperature is maintained, and thermal stress cycling does not happen. From this point of view it's important to have to fluid travel, and in localized pressure drop zones only change very minutely in temperature, and do so in a uniform manner along the path of flow. With very low pressures of 3 atm to 0.03 atm large volumes are necessary, and any turbine-type blades would have to be huge sail-like sized to exploit the small pressure differences. With 0.03 atm the volumetric energy density is very minor, and devices are gigantic barely producing a few watts. Of course the 3000C is almost certainly not the economical equilibrium choice between highest energy harvesting efficiency and capital cost of the device, but it does seem like a theoretical limit on upper temperature solid materials available, unless ultrahigh diamond-manufacture like pressures are applied, and a heat engine is operated under such conditions, and somehow some shaft power is extracted. Such a supercompressed material-based heat engine might find materials that are still solid even at 6000C. If one like that is ever built, it might be able to thermal harvest the Sun by direct heat exchange to equal temperature on one side, and huge radiative space vacuum cold absorbing radiator heat exchangers on the other side. It could be kind of a solar sail that's superpowered by the heat instead of just the solar wind, by capturing and ejecting wind particles at near light speed from a cyclotron/particle acccelerator powered by the heat engine. There are two temperatures making up heat engine efficiency, and the practical/theoretical but most likely not economical max high temperatures is near 3000C, and possibly even more important the cold side, with the max minimum theoretically imaginable being based on radiative heat exchange with the outer space universe background thermal radiation that comes in at near 10K, or -263C. The efficiency of a heat engine can be tremendously improved by dropping the available cold side temp, but again, huge heat exchanger surfaces would be required, and they would only operate in the vacuum of outer space (with no heat radiation from air interfering), turned with their back to the Sun, and extremely well insulated from thermal conduction from the sunny 6000C side to the ~10K cold side.
Hey as long as they don't restrict the niobium supplies, we're cool!
So, thorium fluoride melts at 1110C, boils at 1680C, so it's a high pressure gas at 3000C.
/mp 3400C, rhenium is 90/3200C , osmium 3030/15, tantalum 20.5/3020C, niobium 1.15/2477, molybdenum 2.6/2350C, thorium 7.4/1842, etc
Thorium dioxide melts at 3390C, and boils at 4400C. At 3000C one could still have thorium dioxide pebbles, though they might react with a graphite vessel to form thorium carbide and carbon monoxide, or some thorium-carbido-oxide. How fast this happens and how physically stable it would be, I don't know. With a tungsten vessel, there may be no reaction at all. The problem with tungsten is a relatively high neutron capture cross section.
Thorium nitride melts at 2820C, so it is probably liquid at 3000C, but it may be sufficiently metallic to react with graphite, and form some kind of thorium-carbido-nitride, with evolution of nitrogen gas.
Graphite melts, or more exactly sublimates at around 3600C. Next is tungsten melting near 3400C, boiling at near 5500C.
I just found http://www.periodictable.com/Properties/A/NeutronCrossSection.ssp.log.html
At least for thermal neutrons, graphite is one of the best neutron resistant materials at neutron cross section b 0.0035 , and I had no idea that oxygen is by far the most resistant, at 0.00028. Helium is third at 0.007, but this gives me the idea of using carbon monoxide as the heat exchange gas medium, in case helium's moderating power is too high. Carbon monoxide may behave like an inert gas in presence of graphite and thorium dioxide, unless C2O type materials might form, but that's very entropically unlikely. Beryllium and fluoride are next, at b=0.0092 and 0.0096, then bismuth at 0.034. Neon(0.04), lithium(0.045), magnesium (0.063), lead(0.171), and the first structural metal with sufficient strength, high enough melting point, other than graphite is zirconium with neutron cross section b=0.184 for thermal neutrons. But Zirconium's melting point is 1855C, and thorium's 1752C. Argon is 0.65, the cheapest noble gas, but much more absorbing than helium, neon or carbon monoxide.
High melting materials near tungsten are high absorbing some more than others. Thorium itself is 7.4 so the materials themselves should beat thorium dioxide 3400mp in nonabsorbing neutron capacity. Here are some top melting materials
Tungsten is b=18.4
Tantalum carbide Ta11C mp 3880, Ta1.0C0.89 4000C, niobium carbide 3490C, thorium carbide 2630C.
Besides niobium carbide, that leaves graphite as the only cheap, nonreactive and truly high temperature nuclear material far beyond 2000C, together with thorium dioxide as the fuel, with carbon monoxide and helium as the heat exchange fluids with direct contact with the fuel. The heat exchange fluid might still have to go through a graphite heat exchanger external to the core, so that nuclear decay outgassing contaminants from thorium, such as lead oxides are contained, and the 2nd heat exchange fluid as it goes through the decompression cycle in a graphite piston or other mechanical device, does not contaminate up the wall surfaces from such nonvolatiles dropping out on cooling. Graphite pistons are self lubricating, but they are very weak mechanically. One could still build a humongous heat engine graphite piston that operates at 3100C to 100C temperature drop, and a pressure drop of 3 atm to near vacuum exhaust pressure, with very slow motion, with the high pressure gases introduced on alternating sides during a decompression cycle that might take 2 minutes to complete. Imagine a 10m x 10m diameter graphite piston, with a travel length of 30 meters. Such sizes are necessary at low pressures. It's very hard to find something that will provide containment to 100 bars at 3000C, but that very high temperature to exhaust temperature ratio, and initial pressure to final pressure ratio is what's critical to energy harvesting efficiency.
With the piston construction however, hi
Yeah, no kidding! Most current reactors based on steam operate at about 200C, where there are plenty of structural materials that last decades . Temperatures near 1000C-2500C are an order of magnitude more thermodynamicaly efficient, but the very reason it's not currently done, is the construction material technology. Even in nonnuclear, such as natural gas or solar thermal, temperatures over 1000C would be better, but there is the same issue of consctruction material technology. One advancement that has become commonplace is the CNG plants, combined natural gas, where there is first a high temperature turbine stage before the conventional turbine technology, which ups the thermodynamic efficiency from about 30% useful work/70% waste heat, to 60% useful work, 40% waste heat - basically doubling the amount of electricity one gets from a mcf of natural gas. But that is relatively easy, because we have ultrahigh temperature turbine blades from military research on airplanes. Regular power companies have a hard time finding the money to look for new stuff, they are more concerned with making money TODAY, with what's proven and tested, so a bank will loan them the money to build a billion dollar contraption and amortize it over 30 years. The military does not have to jump such hoops, it's understood that what they are into is totally uncertain and without guarantees, but in military one cannot afford yesterday's proven and tried technology if there is something more cutting edge today. Power/energy company advances have to be sponsored/pushed by either obama/epa/nasa/military, a regular power company is simpy in the business of getting things done, not in looking for new stuff. These days however, they are swimming in so much cash from oil prices, maybe they can afford to run a research department as a luxury item. There is two sides to everything, even to nasty oil company business practices and ridiculous profits - now they can afford to do research, and build something even without a bank loan.
In any case, at very high temperatures, I'm more comfortable thinking about a solid object glowing white surrounded by an inert cooling gas like helium or argon, or even nitrogen or hydrogen (in non neutron appications, such as solar concentrators). Similar to an incandescent lightbulb, compared to a lightbulb that has a liquid salt as the glowing element. Solid objects also expand and contract with temperature, just like liquid salts, but they stay put, in the center of the reactor, and expensive thermal materials that need to be in immediate contact with them don't have to be used. The types of accidents and control issues that arise with liquid salts, with all their corrosion issues, they just leave one with an eerie feeling. A hot inert fluid such as argon, even in case of a catastrophic failure, is relatively safe to escape, and won't attack structural materials. The solids themselves stay contained in case of a failure, in case they stay solid. Chernobyl had liquid magma flowing out, a liquid meltdown. I don't know if there are any safe structural materials that sufficiently resist molten fluoride attack. Graphite is such a thing, but it's not very strong mechanically, so something like graphite lined tungsten or niobium/molybdenum alloys would be something to try, but even so the salt diffuses through the graphite to the metal. So, again, in the case of an incandescent bulb, the direct location fixing, solid contact, between the filament and something else is in a very limited, and cooled region, and regular glass can be used for the bulb surface because the contact happens through a gas or vacuum. Similarly a solids based pebble bed reactor would only need the bottom plate holding up the pebbels to be of some super material, also coolable, because the rest of the hot stuff would be insulated away by the bottom layer of pebbles. In case you're dealing with a liquid, the full containment material has to be the expensive stuff, or even cooled in a dynamic equilibrium just right. In case of molten salts, the cooling wil
I was thinking more of Ballmer than of Gates, but when it comes to making business decisions, I don't think they are too different, except one is soft spoken while the other is a screamer. Same difference.
In fact you should have 3 Feds, each with their own prime rate, kind of like Great Britain had it with the British Pound, each major bank issuing their separate bank notes, which were interconvertible.
But unfortunately this does not work, because of the way interest works, and the way monopolies work in a free market. If one of them gets a major bulk of the outstanding loans in an economy, they can still manage to sustain themselves at a very low interest rate that drives the other competitor banks out of business, and then they are free to charge whatever they feel unchecked by competition. The free market is not perfect, it's very vulnerable to monopoly tactics and in cases of monopoly other than the Fed, government regulation and price fixing is imposed. But the Fed is almost more important than the elected government when it comes to ensuring the well being of the economy, because they care more, because it's in their interest to care more. Elected officials care about getting reelected, and participate in topics of du jour that may have little long term effect or relevance. We change politicians like we change diapers, because In God we trust, but in people we don't, people are too easy to corrupt, and purging the corruption-connection-networking channels very frequently is the best way we know how to deal with this problem.
In any case, with a national debt of 10 trillion, the Fed might be able to charge interest rates of 0.001% if competition were available. But, as we said, competition of 3 different banks would very soon drive two of them out of business, and we're back to only one anyway. So the only true check on the Fed's abuse of high interest rates is their effect of slowing the economy, and in absence of competition, they can focus on tuning the economy to the max of their interest, as opposed to taking the economy through havoc and sacrifice while fighting competition. Still, that does not mean they are a completely benevolent creature, and they might engage in things not beneficial to the general public.
The Clinton's in the late nineties aimed to balance the budget and pay off government debt, something that seems natural to most everyday people. But this was a grave mistake on their part, this cannot be done, because the Fed's only source of income is debt, and the biggest borrower is the government. You cannot bite the hand that feeds you, even if you're the president, else you get punished. There was a Monica Lewinsky case and now, after a few years of wars we cannot afford, the national debt is at 10 trillion. Money talks. Always. Now the Fed can lower the prime rate, because it makes a shitload of money even on very low interest. The only thing the fed owns is the US dollar, the only income of the fed is interest, and the only way they influence the economy is through wiggling the prime rate around. Actually that's not completely true, because the economy being their cash cow, they care about the well being of the economy, and they can issue targeted loans and set wheels in motion to keep the economy from collapsing or keep the economy running at its best. When there is a will there is a way, and necessity is the mother of all invention. The Fed will do a lot of unusual and unheard of things in the background to maintain stability and status quo. It's much better having them than having to rely on a freshly elected government with no experience nor longterm relevance or even a communist government, where nobody seems to care about anything other than pleasing the party official next in the higher up ranks. The beauty of private property is that it makes people care. Unlike many other government issued currencies in the past, the privately owned dollar will not fail, if it's up to the Fed, unless they get to be the ones issuing the next currency too, but debts written in dollar amounts worth nothing would be annulled and a lot of the Fed's property would go down the drain with it. The Fed will do everything in its power to maintain a strong dollar, and an economy stable just enough and
This got me thinking some more. I never seen the Alien vs. Predator movie, but I just read the Wikipedia article, how there is a hybrid between Alien and Predator emerging at the end. Isn't there a way to create a balance between for-pay copyright but public abuse and public-only protecting but no personal incentive GPL? The current copyright is 90 years for corporations, lifetime+70 for individuals, and you can't contractually extend it further, to say 100 years for corporations, because public domain is protected, and intellectual property rights are not be recognized after the passage of certain amount of time, that certain amount of time being kicked around and extended to practically ad infinitum by unscrupulous government lobbyists these days. But you can give things away for free, (gift them), or you can put restrictions on the use of things you give away for free. As far as gift taxes go, of course things that are available as free gifts to anyone who wants them, the market price is zero, therefore the sales/gift tax is zero, because they represent no financial value. There are many things that carry no financial value, such as freedom, unless you bring back the institution of slavery, in which case one could sell and repurchase his own freedom.
So anyway, one could certainly create a software license that mimics the original copyright of 14 years, and give it away/sell it under those terms. Actually in the software world 14 years is an eternity, so I was thinking some semi-GPL software after 1 year, that both retains the original intent of rewarding creators, but it also protects public domain. So you could write software, deposit the source-code and binaries with a software repository such as Sourceforge, and sell it to customers, with the contract that it's copyrighted, except they will get the sourcecode from the repository 1 year from the release date, and agree to sell derivatives under similar contracts, of sourcecode obtained 1 year from the release date. It would be similar to how wills are executed on someone's death. I was thinking at first a contract of 1 year from release date, unless author dies, then you get the source instantly, but that would lead to a lot of contract killing of programmers. The hard 1 year deadline is actually a good thing, because if a programmer who's the only one with access to the source to fix a bug or add a feature, ends up in life support, the customer has an incentive to sustain him and bring him back to life, so then he can program that feature.
Another idea is having a price structure that follows an exponential decay over time, based on an original fixed price. This function could be something other than exponential, possibly with 3 peaks, 1 initial market hype for the very first day or week, representing those who gotta have the latest and greatest, 2 initial uptaking for the first few months by individuals who want the new features but don't care tremendously about stability, a valley representing decreased demand, and 3 a following peak representing uptake by corporations that like to lag a few years behind to get a tested and proven old version, and then a continuous exponential decay.
This way if you're a private company creating software such as web browser, office software, or database software, you could sell your product, with your users knowing what price they'd have to pay at any given time, and opting to buy in based on their funds and needs. This way newer versions would have to be priced with respect to the current dropping price of older version, and any premiums over older versions would have to be gained by representing true value and innovation that the users want compared to older versions that they already have. This way true innovation is compensated, and market hogs that do embrace, extend and extinguish would come too late to the game. Under such pricing scenario I wonder what the price of Windows 7 would be based on the decaying price of Windows XP, and how much innovation Windows 7 represents that the customers actu
Apropo that proverb, and whim, it reminds me of the situation between IBM and Microsoft, and how Microsoft bit IBM's hand bigtime around 1993, tanking their stockprice, and driving them to the brink of extinction. Microsoft is one of the most arrogant companies ever to come into existence, driven by the personality of its CEO. Microsoft's path through the business world is littered with carcasses of companies they've obliterated on their way to the top. Embrace, extend, extinguish. They are like the emergence of a flying piranha that enters every river and lake in the world, that eats up anything that moves, and once there is nothing left to eat in the water, flies out of the water for feeding on bears taking a few bites for a few minutes at a time, then returns to catch a breath in water. Of course they are very successful and proliferate well into everything they target. How do you deal with the emergence of such a beast? Well, if you're a snake, and these fish bite you, you can turn into a flying snake that specializes in eating exclusively these flying piranhas. Alien vs. predator. Or maybe a simpler remedy, like a species that carries a poison, like some mushrooms or berries do, after finding themselves on the path to extermination. IBM these days grows fruits filled with the GPL. As in embrace and extend this, biatch, because you cannot extinguish it. Or they can be called a bear with poisoned meat - saying bite me now. GPL'd software is untouchable by Microsoft, because they can embrace, extend but not extinguish, because they cannot put a block on it. IBM had rather deal with something that it has to give away free, but it lets it conduct a profitable business and assure its own survival, than be at the mercy of another corporation, who in the past showed no mercy to them. It's called intensified competition dropping the price of goods, and in this case, that of software. You can stay in business providing services around free software, compared to providing services around someone else's software, who, you know, will take over your business anyway. Now Microsoft can smell their own carcass starting to rot, because its based on purely selling software, so what do they do? They turn to what they do best, embrace, extend, extinguish. Find something that they did not invent, nor were ever good at, but something that represents control and power, and take over and take it into stagnation. These days they are after Google, after the Internet and Search. They wanted to buy yahoo, and they are pushing their own search engine. I don't know what the solution will be in that case, how to stop them if they succeed.
I personally do not like the GPL compared to public domain. In the old days, we had a 14 year artificial construct called 'intellectual property" subject to "copyright" to reward creators, with the understanding that everything would eventually pass into public domain, for the general benefit of human knowledge. This construct was created as an incentive to stop keeping secrets, and simply to reward creators. But it has turned into a mess. I don't like the GPL because it restricts freedom, because it has a clause that say's "you can't." Public domain says do whatever you want, including make software based on it that you sell for 14 years before you have to release the source to public domain. But, we don't have such laws. I don't mind people making money on writing software. But when it comes to the current state of affairs, with 90 year copyright on the way to being extended even further and the behavior of a software monopoly, I can see how things like the GPL are simply a necessity to survive as a business.
If Microsoft can successfully foot themselves and extract cold cash end user money out of a different field, such as internet search, then they too can go for GPL software, and compete with IBM at what IBM does best these days, providing services built around free software. However, while Microsoft's main revenue streams are based on sales of Windows and Office, IBM is immune from such attacks from the Beast.
You can always try to find your own little patch of land in a low population area out of sight, with low regulations (such as you a wooded lot in the country side where the city won't come out to cut and take your grass they like to call weed), low taxes and low expense. Then you can try to aim for a self sufficient yeoman farmer existence, try to grow your own food, lead a self reliant existence, and participate in the "greater economy" just enough to pay for your property taxes that they won't let you escape from, meaning also car insurance to get to your job. You can minimize your involvement in the bullshit and thick lies you have no power to solve, and just let the whole thing fizzle out or come to some equilibrium, where the compounded lies eventually have to be backed up and then either the thing goes under or the thing goes belly up, but at least you are not caught up in the middle of it being the prime scapegoat target, or even totally reliant on it, because hey, at least you can grow your own food. When everything fizzles out and there are no jobs left either, property taxes will have to drop too, and you might find yourself able to sustain an existence selling the food you grow, but not while there are still jobs and the high money suckers everyone in, so in the meantime, unfortunately, you have to participate, but at least try to stay at the fringes of responsibility in everything you do.
But don't get your hopes high, because even when there are no jobs, and money is impossible to come by, those with rights to print money will be able to go around and buy up every property in sight on sheriff's sales over unpaid property taxes. Something is wrong with that law, but once your 2nd amendment rights are suspended, and besides mandatory health insurance you can't afford to buy it will be mandatory to take a government issued daily "health pill" immune suppressant to "stop rampant autoimmune disease", you won't have a fighting chance to even rebel, because you will be so immune suppressed, it will be hard to even stand on your own two feet. I guess the root of such actions comes down to premeditated competition and extermination, based on bloodlines and tribalism. What else is new. You're either in with the gang, or you're on the list to be x'd out, it's that simple. Liberty, fraternity, equality? Ha ha ha. New world order all the way, based on blue blood, nobility, and bloodlines, like in the old days.
We're bemoaning the fees the lawyers charge in a dire situation of the client, similar to healthcare fees doctors charge in a dire situation of their patient. It's a sort of blackmailing that appears almost naturally.
If there were a legal system where individual defendants could defend themselves without lawyers, such as Socrates could(he still lost the case, it's still up to others(judge or jury) to interpret whatever the laws are, what is moral or just), so if people could defend themselves without lawyers, then besides their own time they wouldn't lose much. Actually, having your time wasted being dragged to court is also a way to be done away with, at least in the USA, where most people run in an monthly income to bills/expenses ratio very close to 1 or 1.1 or something along those lines, with their income derived from hourly work where their time is precious. If they are unable to show up at their jobs because they are summoned to court, they can fall under 1 in that ratio, and suddenly find their homes reposessed. For example suppose you've been paying a 30 year mortgage on your home for 20 years now, 10 years to go, unless you can find ways to quickly refinance the equity you built up in your home (which is getting difficult these days), you may default on your payments and end up in foreclosure, and there goes a lifetime's worth of work, simply from being dragged to court before a judge, irrelevant of who wins the case. Even if you win the bullshit case they are throwing at you, the whole point is wasting your time.
If you can find an independent existence with very low bills and monthly expenses, similar to being a yeoman farmer hailed by Newton and Jefferson, where minimal amount of savings are enough to sustain you for decades on, then you're better shielded from such time wasting scenarios, and in theory you could spend an eternity in court talking to lawyers and judges explaining your case and appealing and appealing and asking for extensions and continuances etc, because you'd have lots of free time on your hand. You could use similar tactics on an equal footing against lawyers who have nothing better to do but be in court and waste time as much as needed to win a case, and therefore make money, or even not win the case, and still make money on the time wasting. In fact a lawyer or a judge without a lawsuit is unemployed, so they may have an extra reason to delay things, and increase the bureaucratic red tape, especially if they charge by the hour. In the name of self interest. So, if you can afford to defend yourself because you have no bills and have enough savings to make it a few decades, then you might have a fighting chance. For instance someone making 80K/year, having bills of 30K/year can be worse off, or is easier to screw with that someone making 15K/y (minimum wage), having bills of 1K/yr. However if you do have to hire lawyers, you will not be able to manage from 15K/y. So, in general, any lawsuit brought against you is an automatic loss to you, unless you're able to defend yourself AND have a savings to monthly expense ratio very high. Such people are few and rare. Because, by the way, it's also "illegal" to save up money in the US, and any misbehavior such as funds accumulated in bank accounts, is carefully monitored, and severely punished. This way everyone is a virtual slave.
That's why I worry about all these bank mergers, and concentration of power of information on who has how much. When there are a lot of banks, with many small, disparate and private databases, there is at least some minor degree of shielding from ease data gathering, along the lines of hey look, that person over there saved up all these funds, we can obviously pay him less, lets lay him off and make him take a job that pays less so he gets back into the more secure for us (easier to control him) hamsterwheel 1.1:1 income to expense ratio, where he has almost no freedom to decide on what to do with his life, and we can make all the decisions for him. To those who want to exercise a lot of control, and in essence create virtual slavery (as in what's the difference from the real thing), freedom is the most dangerous thing, in the home of the brave.
Mcdonalds will be all robots/vending machines, because by then they will be cheaper than human burger flippers. The economy as you know it now won't be, but there will still be people engaged in all kinds of activities.
One thing I forgot to add in the original comment. We don't want AI stronger than ourselves, because we don't want to compete against it, nor can we put trust into it that it won't turn against us. But I was thinking of different scenarios. Suppose it's been 100 trillion years from now, and our descendants are starting to feel the onset of the Heat Death of the Universe very strongly. They have simply been incapabale, or not smart enough, through those millenia, to find ways to bend the rules of physics, the laws of nature, and stop the world from coming to a heat death. They've had the building plans available to create artificial intelligence smarter than themselves for millenia, but have been forbidden by some prime directive handed down through generations. So should they, under such circumstances, create something smarter than themselves, which can possibly figure out a way to save everyone from certain death, because it would be smarter? This may also apply to star wars type of scenarios, where Earth is under attack, by an unknown extraterrestrial civilization, for unknown reasons. You only know they are also chemical, carbon/water based, just like you, just very advanced and smart. What is your definition of life then, and survival and maintaining of life? Does that include them too, that extraterrestrial life? So would you build an AI smarter than yourself, and "hopefully" smarter than that other chemical life too, and hope that at least it can defend you, being programmed, at least initially, to care about Earth and you and fight against them? And risk what you create eventually exterminating both you and that other extraterrestrial chemical life? Even under such circumstances as a simple war between neighboring nations down here on Earth, does either one have the "right" to create AI and put all people and humanity as a whole at risk, in the name of their self defense? My head is starting to hurt now... Can't we just live, love and enjoy each other? Why we gotta deal with such questions..
That was the fatal mistake for AMD, to spin off their fabs, or let someone on top make such a bad strategic decision. Soon it's gonna be Intel alone, and we'll be back to $1000 cpu's again. It was because AMD, Cyrix, Winchip and Transmeta that we had $25 PC compatible GHz cpu's, or something at the. AMD is the only viable competitor still around. ARM is efficient but too slow by today's standards. VIA and IBM are still kind of around, but they are neither in the field, nor was cpu's ever one of their core businesses, nor were they at the forefront pushing technology and driving Intel to do a better job. I don't have anything against Intel, other than them being a threat of becoming a monopoly, but in fact I love the great work they do these days, which would not have happened without competition on their heels. Look at Windows back in the mid 90's, when there was plenty of uncertainty and competition, from Mac, commercial Unix, OS/2, and all kinds of other stuff. Microsoft did great work, because they had to, and they were more successful then the rest, because they did what they do better. But being left with no competitor they turned to dirty business, and stagnation. They've kind of saved their old competitor, the Mac, from the brink of the abyss by injecting a cash infusion back in the early 00's, then bringing Jobs back at the helm, and kind of screwing up Windows, to create some sort of artificial competition, or simply screwing up Windows because they wanted to do what the competitor, Apple did, better than them, so you got a Vista that has an Appleish feel. All they created was a straw man to compete against, a scarecrow filled with a ghost, but no real life and punch, only being able to produce alot of marketroid hype and seas of lemmings jumping on the latest bandwagons. Sure it's been a great moneymaker, but making funny money that's bringing the whole system down, because no true value or true innovations happened at the core of computing, other than coming from Intel. The job of money is to be the John Stuart Mill invisible hand, to guide the economy so that resources get allocated to most benefit society and humanity. Intel is doing amazing work that tremendously benefits society and humanity these days, something that cannot be said about either Microsoft, Apple, or even Linux. When Intel loses AMD as a viable competitor to compete against, they may end up in the same stagnation that MS got themselves into by being too successful at killing everybody else around. Now they've lost direction, because they cannot embrace, extend, extinguish a competitor's technology. I guess Intel always had the innovations coming from in-house, never needing to copy and adapt outsider technology and do it better than them (unless copper/silicon by AMD is such a thing), but they still benefited from someone being on their heels and driving them to do better. True, because of free market competition they have not made the money that they could have had they been a monopoly able to charge $1000-2000 for a CPU, but the rest of us, consumers benefited from that, and we should be very thankful to Intel and their competition for that. The same cannot be said about Microsoft or Apple innovations in efficiency and price drops brought to you in the last decade.
One interesting note here is that humans and turtles and elephants live longer than most other animals. In this sense, the longer living species require or have found themselves a lifestyle, environment and sustenance with more peace than the ones whose lives are measured in dog-years.
2000 years ago, according to the Ptolemian view of the world, the Universe was made up of Earth surrounded by different spheres. This view was arrived at by looking at the sky with a telescope, and summarizing the information collected succinctly, in a simple and reasonable form. There was the sphere of planets which traveled on epicycles, and were closer than the sphere of stars. Heaven was supposed to be beyond the sphere of the sky that held all the stars, and that's where the gods of Olympus, or Jehovah + the angels and similar super beings were supposed to be, with Satan and his disciples populating the lava filled nasty sulfur smelling underground. The Catholic Church turned this world view into a dogma, into a self evident and unquestionable truth that only requires the power of faith as proof. Then as the telescope technology advanced, Copernicus, a catholic priest himself put more faith into his own eyes and telescope than what he read in a book, and Galileo Galilei agreed with him, and had to spend the rest of his life under papal house arrest as punishment for doubting the validity of dogmas. Alas, our view of the world evolves in a mere 2000 years. Back then you could rightfully believe in the existence of heaven, because it had a physical location in the way you saw the Universe. Even if it was empty, it was a special place that had a place in the grand scheme of things. Now we don't know where heaven is, but we still talk about it. If anything we believe the Universe is infinite in a circular way, our 3d world being bent in 4d, so if you take off and go far enough in one direction, you will eventually arrive back in the other. Our telescopes are not good enough to see far enough round trip the Universe, and we can't see ourselves repeatedly at a periodic distance in it. The problem we say is that light ravels too slowly and there hasn't been enough time since the Big Bang(80 year old idea by monsignor Lemaitre, himself a catholic priest) for it to go many round trips. Today we talk about the Heat Death of the Universe (150 year old idea by William Thompson, aka Lord Kelvin), and laws of physics that are set in stone. In another 100 billion years we might find ways to mess with the rules that we believe in today as unchangeable, and mold their own Universe the way they need it best for a most comfortable and secure existence. The problem is that only happens if we and our children, whatever form of life they may be by that point, make it as far as 100 billion years. True that is not forever. But what if we're wrong and there is a forever? Let them figure out that question, 100 billion years from now. Our job is to do what we can, and have faith in future life, in our children, that they will do even better than us.
Radiation damaged reproducing DNA is checked on many levels by the immune system. If a mutation is successful as far as retaining replicating ability goes AND it passes the many checks imposed by the immune system successfully, it is called a cancer, benign or malignant, but doing different things from what it's supposed to be doing originally, with the tacit agreement of the immune system.
You need somewhere to send yourself or life in general, to "diversify your portfolio", to not be "keeping all your eggs in one basket", in case of a catastrophy down here on Earth. In a sense you live for life, to protect life, and to maintain life. If survival of silicon/metal robotic AI machines is sufficient in your opinion as a form of survival of life, without survival of chemical machine humans, animals, plants, then you can just send your AI off to outer space. But the rest of us love nature, trees, animals and our meatbag selves, and would like to see our children, or whatever meatbag stuff evolves from them, and whatever stuff evolves from trees too, survive on forever. That's our job on this planet, so we can die calmly, making sure that others live on. You have a duty of self interest to make sure that you live on, but balanced by a duty of making sure that the whole lives on. What else is the purpose of life? To fuck, shoot, kill, enjoy yourself without paying attention to what and who you cut in the name of your self interest, and bring the whole world down with you when you get pissed because it's your time to go out and depart? You will never die in peace when you make yourself the center of your world. You have to take care of yourself as a taking part in taking care of the whole, but ultimately, you don't live forever. But life, and meat, in general, has a chance to.
It's hard to say what happens when metal/silicon gets smarter than meat. I am meat, and I care about meat, and green plants like trees too. I chop wood, but I want to see trees in general exist forever. In a sense trees are my very distant siblings, and we share a common eukaryote ancestor going back 2 billion years ago. I also care about non eukaryote life, with whom I share a common ancestor going back to 3 billion years ago. Metal/silicon machines and automation that I create can help me get less tired and get things done that I can't do myself, and that's a big deal, but I don't want to make it so good that I have to fight or compete against it, because I know I would lose. One has to be careful with developing super strong AI if one wants to survive. Can cooperation between metal/silicon and meat be guaranteed forever? What happens when a smarter predator than us appears? Will we be to them as chickens are to us? And more importantly, do they get judged the same way during last judgment day as we do and go to the same Inferno or Paradiso that we do for committing sins?
The constant challenge to your immune system is xray and gamma radiation. Astronauts say spacewalk "smells" like a pine forest or sparks. Which is the smell of ozone/nitrous oxides. It's caused by radiation, it's like a locally generated ozone-layer, inside your spacesuit. Life, such as the human body, or especially Deinococcus Radiodurans bacteria, can still withstand quite a bit of radiation or oxidation damage and repair itself. The major source of radiation damage comes from potassium in the diet, from the potassium 40 isotope. Another similar damage is UV radiation damage, that still causes skin cancer here and there after all these millions of years of adaptation. The major source of oxidation damage that is very similar to radiation damage, comes from oxygen. Life cannot function without either potassium or oxygen, though you could clean up potassium 40 from your diet. But what's the point?
For any kind of successful very longterm space missions one needs heavy shielding at least equivalent to the atmosphere we have down here on earth. More radiation (even living at higher altitudes with less atmospheric shielding, or even near an ozone hole region) increases the rates of mutations miscarriages and cancers, but also the rate or adaptation to new environments. One of the dangers with non-well-shielded space travel is faster evolution than down here on Earth. But multilayer shielding can compensate for that, and keep mutation levels to lower than natural.
That brings up the question, that maybe lack of radiation is a cause of sicknesses, in a sense of not keeping the immune system well trained. People who live in a completely sterile bacteria free environment have very weak immune systems that lacks training. One still needs a flora to coexist inside the body if for nothing else, for composting intestinal contents. Those same bacteria can cause illnesses, if not kept under check by the immune systems constant vigilance. Still, as far as radiation goes, people coming from areas of high background radiation, such as India, don't seem to suffer much compared to people living in low background radiation areas. If anything, fluoride in their drinking water is the bigger problem for them, and background radiation is a relative nonissue. Perhaps a certain dose of background radiation is like a vitamin, increases health by keeping the immune system trained.
I don't dislike Windows per se. I understand the benefits of open source, and also understand proprietary software writer's concern needing to make money to pay bills. Unfortunately he can't find a better way to get paid for the useful work he does without doing nasty things, such as closing the source, or other ways to limit the end user's freedom and benefits, in a sense holding them hostage, and blackmailing the money out of them There is a balance in everything though. I try to pick on the most extreme things. Such as total domination and control over MY computer by a software vendor acting as if it's his computer. Changing stuff on it at his whim, simply because it's internet connected. Rigged with a million backdoors. Nuh uh.
I saw Windows 3.1 software running on an automated machine just last night. I was like wow, look at that awesome interface, how usable it is even today, compared to all these LCD/keypad things, what a nice advance it was, even if it uses a lot more energy. And it's not friggin hosed with total remote control from a software vendor - it doesn't even need an internet connection, let alone serial number/authentication keys. And the company who made it still made money. By at least half the people paying for it. Good old days. But I imagine Vista replacing that interface, and somehow it wouldn't be a good fit. It's like Win31 was already proper design. Regular Windows Menus that are easy to find, not needing close inspection or full mental focus, you can navigate them instinctually while your mind is off wandering about some other stuff. Status Bar - oh that lovely status bar. I miss that on a lot of programs these days. It used to convey such nice bits of information, one glance, and you knew it instinctually what was going on. Such as an LED on it changing from green to yellow. Sometimes you couldn't even tell that you were consciously aware about the color, but you were so used to the interface, you knew what to do based on it. If someone asked you why you did such and such, it might take you a while to pinpoint, oh, duh, that's how I know, that status bar LED color. Today's programs are much more "simple" in that they leave you absolutely "blank" mentally, and really not knowing anything, instead of a state of flow, a state of subconscious melt with the interface. It's only possible with an interface littered with minute details. I don't like the newer simplified interfaces of Windows, Mac, or even Gnome. I love old style hosed with a gazillion menu items and other details, confusing at first, awesome after a while when you got used to it Win31-95-2000 and KDE3 interfaces.
Even if there is no lunar underground cave system, we could always dig one if the need arises. Moon mining could be done subsurface, to save the unmanned underground vehicle / remote controlled robots from temperature fluctuations and space radiation exposure. People and plants and animals are unlikely to ever live on the moon, other than as a work outpost, because there is not enough gravity for healthy functioning for highly extended periods such as over a few decades. Unless you construct a space station, spin it to create gravity, and stick that in a huge huge huge underground lunar cavern, with the axles supported by very strong pillars. Then you get extra protection from asteroid hits and radiation, but you'd still have to manage an on-surface solar panel array that gets lunar day and night fluctuations every 27.3 Earth days. Unless you can find and concentrate up enough uranium and thorium underground to manage simply with nuclear power, and no need for solar energy. Unless you figure out how to use and control fusion, whose fuel is abundant and whose nuclear waste is much less, mostly irradiated structural radiation, whose properties are not too far from outer space irradiated structural components.
In free outer space, off the surface of the moon, you can spin a large enough cylinder to generate artificial gravity needed by most lifeforms for proper functioning (humans, plants), and the spinning structure does not need superstrong bearings for axial support, it just floats in a free space orbit. Asteroid hits and radiation would mandate periodic replacement of the outermost shield, but if you have triple or tentuple airlock/shield layers, the innermost shields should stay safe. Of course it'd still need a longrange radar to catch and vaporize very large and very fast flying asteroids Patriot rocket style, similar to the ones used in the 1st gulf war, shooting at Scud missiles mid flight and destroying them, or at least throwing them off track.
Oh, radtea already answered it, very nicely too. It's neat how he says similar things. I didn't get that far while reading down through the comments and answering.
Sometimes in our evolutionary history there were some unicellular organisms, that didn't age, because they multiplied by cell division. Aging doesn't make sense in their case, unless they internally grow a few offspring cells, and release them into the environment, and then they grow some more. When one cell splits into two identical copies (except mutation cases), it's hard to say which one was the original, which is the copy, and track the original and see how many copies it ejects before suffering internal degradation, and no longer being able to duplicate. Single celled organisms just don't function like that, though you never know, we might find a peculiar one out there that does age, in some complicated sense.
All multicellular organisms, including plants such as seaweeds (algea) that have sexual fucntions, will age, and die, to give room to the offsprings. Sex and death go hand in hand - you have a way to track parents vs. offsprings, as opposed to unicellular bacterial cell divisions. Ultimately, parents have to give room to offsprings, or there is severe overpopulation, and parents competing against offsprings, and that nixes the whole point of going through the trouble and energy expense of producing offsprings through sex instead of simple autodivision. Sex, requiring more than one unit, is a way to increase the rate of mutations and "stillbirths," compared to simple division.
So as a summary, there were never any animals in our evolutionary history that didn't age. There were never any multicellular plants that didn't age either. If we came from single celled organisms that "moved", such as Euglena, which is a eukaryote that can move, photosynthesize, and consume other cells as food by phagocytosys, then multicellular plants were never in our evolutionary history, but they evolved as a separate branch from the same single celled organisms as we did, but developed the concept of sex and death independently.
17% less energy consumption vs. XP is the first good thing I heard about Windows 7. Is that only in special circumstances, or is it an across the board behavior? How does this compare to Windows 200, how about Linux distros? How much does it cost $-wise, and what are the tradeoffs in freedom one would have to make to get that 17% energy efficiency benefit? Can Win7 be run offline without an internet connection, or with an external router firewall that blocks access to absolutely everything except explicitely and manually allowed IP/urls, such as yahoo.com, google.com, but any other URL in general? Can it be installed without the vendor being an active participant during the process, such as if the vendor goes out of business, or simply deprecates and no longer wishes to support what you already paid for?
Yeah, but that will come with a locked BIOS that periodically checks and makes sure that WindowsTM is running, and connected via the internet to one of the MS beacon servers. The system will shut down in 30 seconds, if not provided with an internet access. Kind of like killing the RPC service does on Win2k and later OS's. The OS will be a subscription only based operating system, the retro obsolete standalone licensing model will be deprecated. Everyone will be mandated by law to purchase a subscription, and if you can't afford it, the government will help you pay for it, at least initially. In your own best interest. But the hardware will be free! Kind of like you get a free cellphone if you sign up for a two year contract, and the monthly payments add up to well over double what the hardware alone would have cost you. Also the EULA will state that you agree that all your documents will be stored on the cloud, kind of like webmail, such as gmail/hotmail/yahoo mail is today. It will be extraordinarily difficult to download and store a copy of anything offline(meaning you would have to make hand typed copies), unless you're willing to upgrade to the Windows Plus service for another 1999.99/mo, kind of like Yahoo Plus, which will let you get POP3 access to your inbox, and POP4 access to your cloud computing My Documents folder. You can get an offline copy of your files, but they will not be good for much, because you'll have to jump hoops of a 30 step process to simply get it loaded into MS Breath or MS One. Still, there will be no way to remove the original copies online, and you can throw them into the Recycle bin, but nothing can ever be permanently erased from the Recycle bin. Microsoft will fund the increased cost of storage for free, but only for items in the Recycle Bin that you want to get rid of. Files in the regular My Documents storage will cost you about 8cents/terabyte/month (don't laugh, a 30 page powerpoint presentation by Office 19 will weigh in at a heft 400 GB filesize, among other reasons, because it will be 256 bit based), while the My Pictures folder will go at 4 cents/tb/mo, and My movies at a 0.01 cent/TB/mo. It will be illegal to scheme the system and try to store my documents files in the movies folder, because you will get ticketed, and get a real life court citation over violating the intellectual property laws of the contracts you have signed. There will also be a mandatory penance booth, called My Confessions, where you have to write a blog about everything wrong that you've done each week, and ask forgiveness for your sins. People caught not visiting this folder often enough will be red flagged, and real life psychologists will make them take multiple choice tests where there are two correct answers, and no matter which one he picks, the other will be deemed correct, and by failing the tests prove that he is in dire need of mental health attention, and a prescription. Who wouldn't help a fellow suffering human being who does not even realize he has a problem. Admission you have a problem is the first step towards any solution. Mind control? How about ascertaining that there is order in society, and security, by keeping very close tabs on everyone. Wait.. oh, never mind.
Oh, mon Dieu!
That's a nice hypothesis to test, if you also collect rainfall data.
I was also thinking about DNA damage caused by radiation. All organisms are resilient to some low levels of radiation, or DNA molecular damage caused by even oxidizers/chemicals, heat, or radiation, and have sophisticated self-repair functions. Aging is deliberate built in function in all known multicellular organisms, caused by a counting mechanism that counts how many times the individual cells have divided - bacteria live indefinitely in this sense. Radiation might accelerate the cell division process, but at the same time, the aging process. But aging might be more complex than a simple count, what determines the overall age of an organism? Is it the count of a cancerous cell going haywire? Is it an average, local count? Is it the least multiplying cell? There is a lot of "junk" DNA that we don't understand, that might have sophisticated mechanisms to generate and regulate aging, involving counting day/light or even moon cycles, sleep/awake feed/hungry cycles, beyond a simple cell division count. Or aging might be as simple as each individual organ going at it at their own rate, and if someone has say, a wacky behaving liver for instance, that decides to age at a faster rate then the rest of the body, you could say there is a person with a 90 year old liver in a 40 year old body and everything ages independently. You could say some heavy alcoholics are like that, but I suspect a 90 year old liver is vastly different than a 40 year old artificially damaged one. I suspect aging is regulated on a whole organism level, by the organism. Aging is done on purpose, and it seems to happens too predictably to be just a random fluctuation of how some organs go. After all nobody lives 300 years. Though there are some people who don't make it past 20, still, we recognize how old people are just from looking at them. Aging is by design, death is by design, so that there can be mating and offsprings. It's a faster, better way to adapt to an environment, by throwing random solutions at a problem, to see which one sticks, brute force, 99.99% waste, but it solves the problems, which is more than no solution at all. Without death, with eternal life, there is no offsprings, no rooms for offsprings, and no automatic adaptation, or just a very slow one. If we humans ever create eternal life humans, that will mean no death, but also no children.
How cosmic radiation, or even radioactive radiation affects an organism can be very complex. For instance enhanced growth patterns in tree rings could be called "tumors", or "irregular growth patterns." We know radiation can both create and kill tumors. Perhaps a low dose creates a uniform low-tumor-activity type growth in all trees. Tumors can be benign or malignant, and benign tumors in and of themselves might be a form of evolution, if they are found to be a better adaptation to a given environment. What's irregular growth anyway? Who's the judge of that? Time is.