Once they get it working every energy company on the planet will compete to hire them to build fusion plants, as well as invest heavily into further research to make said plants cheaper to build and operate.
Commercial fusion will be "20 years away" after normal fusion. As always.
Commercial fusion - the merging of two small corporations into a single large one - is already commonplace. The problem is making it profit-positive; that is, how do you make the profits from that large corporation minus the sum of profits from the small ones be larger than the money spent on the fusion?
Commercial fission, on the other hand, is regularly used to energize in the marketplace, and is usually catalyzed by neutral parties, such as anti-trust committees. Spontaneous decay does occur, however one would be wise to avoid the particle companies thus emitted, as they tend to be irradiated with poisonous debt.
Both of these commercial power generation forms are somewhat controversial amongst some religious and philosophical groups, such as libertarians, who argue that the Limited Liability Force that governs large corporate interactions is contrary to their beliefs and thus an evil perversion of nature. Said groups would rather we'd stick with less efficient but more straightforward interactions between indivisible (except with a chainsaw) businessmen particles. Some also argue that the supply of Corporate Spin, which is a vital element of all interactions, is of limited supply and will be exhausted unless we deploy Astroturf Generators which, unfortunately, also produce and release weapon-grade bullshit into the environment. There is no known way to contain this contaminant.
We are not quite there yet, but I think by the end of the Mass Effect Trilogy we will have seen a true 'next gen' RPG.
The next big thing is making a fully dynamic world, which will free the player from following a pre-scripted path. As long as the designer has to script every action and reaction the NPCs can have, it is impossible to make gameworlds that are both large and deep, or even just deep. Just like physics engines make it possible to have a world that reacts realistically (or even believably) to the player's actions, we need a "social" engine to model how humans interact with each other and the player.
It also implies that all seeds are honest. Oh, and that it takes as long to count 2^24 votes as it does to count 2 votes, unless I'm misreading you - my coffee hasn't kicked in yet.:P
You are misreading him. The idea is to divide the country into a tree-like counting structure, where each branch tallies up the votes of its subbranches and tells them upwards. In other words, it's a massively parallel counting structure.
You make civil war sound like a bad thing. When your government rapes its citizens and pisses in the face of its founding principles, then civil war is a good thing.
No, it isn't. A coup might be, but civil war and the associated massive loss of life and property are an extremely inefficient way of going about it.
In any case, I don't think that democracy and fair elections are amongst the founding principles of Iran, it being a theocratic dictatorship.
Yes, murder off all the dumb evil amoral fuckers.
The problem is that anyone taking that advice would need to commit suicide.
It is a far more civil event than letting those evil fuckers keep uncivilizing the society. I propose a $100 bounty on the head of every mullah. 10 times that for every American preacher. That, my friends, is solidarity.
Ah, fanatical atheism. It's fascinating how the very people who are supposed to be his sworn enemies end up sounding like Fred Phelps. It's good for the laugh on the Internet, thought.
You will never have a free society as long as a single one of those evil magical fairy fuckers is allowed to live.
Kill anyone who disagrees with you. Yup, that's the spirit of freedom allright.
I'm not worried about the guy who went to Vietnam or Iraq and got his dick shot off. Yeah, IVF is his only option and I'm glad it exists. Hell, I am a Vietnam era* veteran. That guy could have been me.
If you are genuinely worried about human race, then it shouldn't really matter if it "could had been you". Surely it shouldn't matter whose inferior children are "depleting the gene pool", whatever the Hell that is supposed to mean?
Or is this simply another rant by someone who thinks he's elite about how the unwashed masses should be treated and bred like cattle, least we produce Idiocracy? Because that was the original argument for eugenics, and here we are, a century later, and the world isn't any dumber than it's ever been.
What concerns me are people who are genetically deficient who "want what other people have." If it would just effect them, I would not care. The problem comes in when their genetically deficient children weaken the gene-pool.
They weaken the gene pool the same way someone who relies on agriculture to feed himself weakens it: not in any significant way.
Humans are a technology-using species, and as such it is perfectly fine for a human being to rely on said technology to stay alive. You are drawing a line in the sand while standing in the middle of Sahara.
But still. I'd argue that we've already stopped evolution. (or at least reversed it) We no longer have survival of the fittest.
Sure we do. It's only the fitness criteria that has changed, but that has been going on since life began.
If a below-average intelligence, addiction prone, unhealthy individual living on welfare can pop out half a dozen kids or more instead of failing at life how are we moving forward?
We aren't. There is no "forward" for evolution, nor is there "reverse". If that right-wing talking point strawman pops out more kids, who in pop out more kids and so on than John Galt, then he's more fit that John Galt, for his environment. And if John Galt popped out more kids than the strawman, it still wouldn't be moving forward, because there is no forward.
Once our society begins selecting and/or rejecting offspring based on their genes, or we begin manipulating our genetic codes, evolution stops. We won't have moved into another kind of evolution. We won't be make our evolution more efficient. We'll have stopped evolving altogether, at least in the only way we understand the evolution of organism.
And since most species that use sexual reproduction select the genes their offspring has by selecting a mate, it follows that they haven't evolved for the past few hundreds of millions of years, at least. I guess that makes us all delusional amphibians wearing fursuits, then.
In technical terms, we will have moved humanity from a local random search to a heuristics based local search. The difference cannot be emphasized enough.
"I choose an attractive mate" is a heuristic. From almost the very beginning, life has been a combination of random and heuristics.
Here we have a local random search for better organisms that has delivered incredible(literally to some) results over millions of years.
No, it hasn't, unless you count the heuristic system itself. Even most insects use some form of heuristic in their evolution. All interesting organisms certainly do.
Yet people are proposing replacing that system with heuristics that have no other qualification other than certain people think they will lead to improvement. Genetic manipulation advocates fail Optimisation 101.
Technically speaking, they're not optimizing, but adding chrome, at least in this plan.
But yes, I think that wilful manipulation of human species will save a lot of time and grief over letting nature experiment at random. Not through eugenics, but through getting our medicine and technology to the point where we can fix problems and modify ourselves as we see fit. For example, get rid of that pesky need for exercise and the tendency to store too much fat, stop aging at certain point, etc.
Just like everywhere else an entire generation got blinded by a huge leap forward in technology over the past couple decades, and unfortunately for everyone that generation is in charge at the moment.
Unfortunately? What is unfortunate about the censors being incompetent? It's when the tech-savy generation gets to try their hand in oppression things will go to Hell.
I guess the breakdown in the concept would be: how big a server farm would the German government have to build to filter the 80 million users' traffic...
I also kept them on the line for almost an hour being transferred from one "department" to another asking for their corporate mailing address.
That rises an interesting question: could we measure the efficiency of artificial intelligence by how long it can keep a phone solicitor busy? That would both act as an improvised Turing test, and help the populace.
Causality-Shmausality. I dropped a glass because I found it in pieces on the floor just this afternoon...
You laugh, but are actually correct. The laws of physics don't discriminate by the direction of time. If you see a glass falling towards floor, you can reasonably conclude that there is a point in spacetime where a glass hits the floor; if you see pieces of glass on a floor, you can reasonably conclude that there is a point in spacetime where a glass hits the floor. The important thing is that spacetime is continuous, that there are no discontinuities in either space or time. Given a point in spacetime, you can draw conclusions about other nearby points, both past, present and future, because those points must "fit" your point. This extends the normal intuitive concept of causality, where the future must fit the present.
The problem with time travel is that it allows the creation of closed loops, which are not necessarily continuous. Imagine yourself doing a year of research, then traveling in the past and giving yourself your research. Your past self would then continue where your future self left off, skipping the research he's already done at the previous iteration of the loop. The problem with this is that information comes out of nowhere - since you never did the research, yet it was you who gave it to you, where did it come from?
One possible way to solve this is to assume that time is actually two-dimensional, which allows us to turn the closed loop into a spiral. Another way is to simply accept the existence of such loops, which violate the naive concept of determinism, as long as the loop doesn't create discontinuities - information simply exists in the loop. And a third would be to assume that such loops cancel themselves out - you go through the loop over and over again, altering the past again and again, until you alter it so much you no longer travel there; at that point, since you never traveled there, the original past is replayed, but quantum uncertainties cause it to play out differently, so you never travel there (if you do, if the differences are not sufficient to prevent you, then the whole thing simply happens again and again until they are).
So. Are they selling electric motors or perpetual energy devices?
Actually, wouldn't a faster-than-light device be both? Use an electric engine and a hyperdrive to get a flywheel going faster than light, then extract energy; as it slows down, it's mass increases, and consequently its kinetic energy and rotational momentum, so it'll never slow down to speed of light.
Isn't it wonderful how once you break some of physics the rest will also unravel ?-)
Well, actually, no there isn't any mathematical evidence to explain gravity. There is mathematical evidence to explain the properties of gravity but that's not what your saying.
There is no such thing as "mathematical evidence". There are theories that describe gravity (such as Newton's law of gravity and Einstein's General Relativity), which have mathematical formulations, and there is physical evidence for said theories.
There are things that mathematics predict (such as frame dragging), but actual evidence for these phenomenon is something you get by testing and measuring.
But we don't know how to get it or create it or manipulate it once it is there, at best we can only manipulate other things with it.
Actually, we do know how to create it or manipulate it. Newton's formulas point out the most obvious way (gather a lot of mass in a single place), and General Relativity describes other ways (such as pressure, force, etc). The theory of Quantum Gravity, once we get that, might reveal still more ways.
The reason why all this knowledge isn't currently used is because getting a gravitational field of significant strength requires absurd amounts of power. Think about it: all the mass in Earth causes such a weak gravity that a housefly can overcome it.
For my argument to be a strawman, it would have to be putting words into your mouth. So, do you deny you suggested other people move so you don't have to pay taxes?
The more I hear the more I will know how to defend against.
I can see you still have lots to learn there.
Just out of curiosity, though, why do you consider Libertarians to be "nutjobs"?
Because cooperation has been such a successful strategy throughout human history that mere idiocy can't explain why libertarians want to exchange it for the law of the jungle, which is what abolishing taxes and making the government powerless would mean in practice.
You have a problem with free markets, or the Constitution?
No; however, I have a great deal of problem with the fundamentalistic demand for ideological purity some people take with them.
After all, those are the two big things Libertarians stand for.
And yet every single libertarian that pipes up on Slashdot is always speaking against taxes, rather than for them.
And... how would "following his own advice" be inconvenient. Assuming I were a libertarian, the fact is that I live neither in a hurricane zone, OR below sea level. Nor in a coastal area subject to typhoons or tsunamis. Nor in an area that is prone to earthquakes, or lava flows. Hmmm... seems that I am following my own advice...
No you aren't. You didn't complain about hurricanes or typhoons, you complained about taxes. Following your own advice would mean moving somewhere without taxes, or at least lower taxes.
A miscategorized geological formation isn't newsworthy unless they're trying to imply something else. It would have just been changed on a few note sheets and ignored.
This isn't a generic news site, thought; it's "news for nerds". And the story is not about a miscategorization, it's about new findings about a major geological feature.
Leave the politics out of it, and let's just consider MONEY. If those bastards want to live in a hurricane zone, below sea level, fine. Let them. But not on my nickel.
It's interesting that libertarians and other assorted nutjobs always point out that no one has to live in hurricane zone or below sea level, yet fail to realize that they themselves don't have to live in a civilized, cooperative society. They can move to Somalia or some other governmentless hellhole and be free of taxes and all that they imply.
But of course following his own advice would inconvenience the nutjob himself, rather than some unknown people.
10 years after a dam breaking you can use the land, 10 years after Chernobyl they where still guarding the wasteland.
The "wasteland" is in the process of turning into a forest, and is already a wildlife haven.
The real cost of CHernobyl was not the 56 direct deaths but the ~4,000 additional cancer deaths.
How many cancer deaths does the average coal power plant cause during its life?
There are a tiny number of dam's worldwide that could damage on that magnitude.
And only those few produce power on the magnitude of Chernobyl.
However, most of those saves lives due to a reduction in annual flooding and a steady water source so they would exist even if they did not provide energy.
They might exist. They might not. Producing power makes money, saving lives doesn't. Isn't capitalism wonderful?
Anyway, you didn't answer my point, despite re-iterating it: in case a dam breaks, what will the communities that depend on it for water do?
The only reason nuclear power is cheap is the bajillions the governments poured into researching the best way to make fuel for bombs. If a tenth of that had been spent researching solar power, then solar power would be cheap.
Large-scale solar power production would and does use mirrors to concentrate sunlight to boil water and drive turbines. This technology doesn't need any research; it's low-tech, efficient and frankly, pretty obvious.
The problem with solar is the same as with almost all renewable energy sources: energy storage. Sun doesn't always shine, so you need to store energy when it does so you'll have light and heat when it doesn't. Make storing energy cheap and efficient and sun and wind become competitive. Another problem is that sunlight is only available in some locales. For example, here in Finland, during winter when energy is most needed the Sun only shines a few hours a day, and even then near the horizon, which means that the atmosphere will absorb most of the energy.
Of course, we could coat Sahara with sunlight power stations and produce more than enough power to run the whole world, but that would be costly.
A dam breaking and flooding a populated valley is small potatoes compared to a melt-down or a terrorist group stealing the bad stuff and doing stuff with that stuff.
A dam breaking and flooding a populated valley will basically kill everyone there. A melt-down might kill a few people and will give a slightly increase risk of cancer to many more. A terrorist group, assuming they could get either the fuel or the waste and transport it offsite without dying from radiation poisoning would be unable to much of anything with it, except leaving it somewhere it would irradiate people - they'd cause a lot more actual destruction with conventional explosives.
I'm sorry to say this, but you have it exactly backwards.
A flood is over within days to weeks, and (hopefully) the damage is repaired within a few years.
A broken dam can't be repaired, it has to be completely rebuilt, possibly redesigned (since the old design broke). And while the flood will be over in a few days, don't forget that many dams also act as water supply to nearby communities. What will they do?
A major dam breaking is a major catastrophe that makes Chernobyl look like small potatoes.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, you're just as secure in a prison than in an average police state.
Fixed that for you.
Commercial fusion - the merging of two small corporations into a single large one - is already commonplace. The problem is making it profit-positive; that is, how do you make the profits from that large corporation minus the sum of profits from the small ones be larger than the money spent on the fusion?
Commercial fission, on the other hand, is regularly used to energize in the marketplace, and is usually catalyzed by neutral parties, such as anti-trust committees. Spontaneous decay does occur, however one would be wise to avoid the particle companies thus emitted, as they tend to be irradiated with poisonous debt.
Both of these commercial power generation forms are somewhat controversial amongst some religious and philosophical groups, such as libertarians, who argue that the Limited Liability Force that governs large corporate interactions is contrary to their beliefs and thus an evil perversion of nature. Said groups would rather we'd stick with less efficient but more straightforward interactions between indivisible (except with a chainsaw) businessmen particles. Some also argue that the supply of Corporate Spin, which is a vital element of all interactions, is of limited supply and will be exhausted unless we deploy Astroturf Generators which, unfortunately, also produce and release weapon-grade bullshit into the environment. There is no known way to contain this contaminant.
That would be "a resurrected ancient bacterium and its spawn of bacteria", actually. They only found and resurrected one, after all.
The next big thing is making a fully dynamic world, which will free the player from following a pre-scripted path. As long as the designer has to script every action and reaction the NPCs can have, it is impossible to make gameworlds that are both large and deep, or even just deep. Just like physics engines make it possible to have a world that reacts realistically (or even believably) to the player's actions, we need a "social" engine to model how humans interact with each other and the player.
You are misreading him. The idea is to divide the country into a tree-like counting structure, where each branch tallies up the votes of its subbranches and tells them upwards. In other words, it's a massively parallel counting structure.
No, it isn't. A coup might be, but civil war and the associated massive loss of life and property are an extremely inefficient way of going about it.
In any case, I don't think that democracy and fair elections are amongst the founding principles of Iran, it being a theocratic dictatorship.
The problem is that anyone taking that advice would need to commit suicide.
Ah, fanatical atheism. It's fascinating how the very people who are supposed to be his sworn enemies end up sounding like Fred Phelps. It's good for the laugh on the Internet, thought.
Kill anyone who disagrees with you. Yup, that's the spirit of freedom allright.
If you are genuinely worried about human race, then it shouldn't really matter if it "could had been you". Surely it shouldn't matter whose inferior children are "depleting the gene pool", whatever the Hell that is supposed to mean?
Or is this simply another rant by someone who thinks he's elite about how the unwashed masses should be treated and bred like cattle, least we produce Idiocracy? Because that was the original argument for eugenics, and here we are, a century later, and the world isn't any dumber than it's ever been.
They weaken the gene pool the same way someone who relies on agriculture to feed himself weakens it: not in any significant way.
Humans are a technology-using species, and as such it is perfectly fine for a human being to rely on said technology to stay alive. You are drawing a line in the sand while standing in the middle of Sahara.
Sure we do. It's only the fitness criteria that has changed, but that has been going on since life began.
We aren't. There is no "forward" for evolution, nor is there "reverse". If that right-wing talking point strawman pops out more kids, who in pop out more kids and so on than John Galt, then he's more fit that John Galt, for his environment. And if John Galt popped out more kids than the strawman, it still wouldn't be moving forward, because there is no forward.
And since most species that use sexual reproduction select the genes their offspring has by selecting a mate, it follows that they haven't evolved for the past few hundreds of millions of years, at least. I guess that makes us all delusional amphibians wearing fursuits, then.
"I choose an attractive mate" is a heuristic. From almost the very beginning, life has been a combination of random and heuristics.
No, it hasn't, unless you count the heuristic system itself. Even most insects use some form of heuristic in their evolution. All interesting organisms certainly do.
Technically speaking, they're not optimizing, but adding chrome, at least in this plan.
But yes, I think that wilful manipulation of human species will save a lot of time and grief over letting nature experiment at random. Not through eugenics, but through getting our medicine and technology to the point where we can fix problems and modify ourselves as we see fit. For example, get rid of that pesky need for exercise and the tendency to store too much fat, stop aging at certain point, etc.
Unfortunately? What is unfortunate about the censors being incompetent? It's when the tech-savy generation gets to try their hand in oppression things will go to Hell.
Maybe they could outsource the job to China?
That rises an interesting question: could we measure the efficiency of artificial intelligence by how long it can keep a phone solicitor busy? That would both act as an improvised Turing test, and help the populace.
You laugh, but are actually correct. The laws of physics don't discriminate by the direction of time. If you see a glass falling towards floor, you can reasonably conclude that there is a point in spacetime where a glass hits the floor; if you see pieces of glass on a floor, you can reasonably conclude that there is a point in spacetime where a glass hits the floor. The important thing is that spacetime is continuous, that there are no discontinuities in either space or time. Given a point in spacetime, you can draw conclusions about other nearby points, both past, present and future, because those points must "fit" your point. This extends the normal intuitive concept of causality, where the future must fit the present.
The problem with time travel is that it allows the creation of closed loops, which are not necessarily continuous. Imagine yourself doing a year of research, then traveling in the past and giving yourself your research. Your past self would then continue where your future self left off, skipping the research he's already done at the previous iteration of the loop. The problem with this is that information comes out of nowhere - since you never did the research, yet it was you who gave it to you, where did it come from?
One possible way to solve this is to assume that time is actually two-dimensional, which allows us to turn the closed loop into a spiral. Another way is to simply accept the existence of such loops, which violate the naive concept of determinism, as long as the loop doesn't create discontinuities - information simply exists in the loop. And a third would be to assume that such loops cancel themselves out - you go through the loop over and over again, altering the past again and again, until you alter it so much you no longer travel there; at that point, since you never traveled there, the original past is replayed, but quantum uncertainties cause it to play out differently, so you never travel there (if you do, if the differences are not sufficient to prevent you, then the whole thing simply happens again and again until they are).
Actually, wouldn't a faster-than-light device be both? Use an electric engine and a hyperdrive to get a flywheel going faster than light, then extract energy; as it slows down, it's mass increases, and consequently its kinetic energy and rotational momentum, so it'll never slow down to speed of light.
Isn't it wonderful how once you break some of physics the rest will also unravel ?-)
There is no such thing as "mathematical evidence". There are theories that describe gravity (such as Newton's law of gravity and Einstein's General Relativity), which have mathematical formulations, and there is physical evidence for said theories.
There are things that mathematics predict (such as frame dragging), but actual evidence for these phenomenon is something you get by testing and measuring.
Actually, we do know how to create it or manipulate it. Newton's formulas point out the most obvious way (gather a lot of mass in a single place), and General Relativity describes other ways (such as pressure, force, etc). The theory of Quantum Gravity, once we get that, might reveal still more ways.
The reason why all this knowledge isn't currently used is because getting a gravitational field of significant strength requires absurd amounts of power. Think about it: all the mass in Earth causes such a weak gravity that a housefly can overcome it.
For my argument to be a strawman, it would have to be putting words into your mouth. So, do you deny you suggested other people move so you don't have to pay taxes?
I can see you still have lots to learn there.
Because cooperation has been such a successful strategy throughout human history that mere idiocy can't explain why libertarians want to exchange it for the law of the jungle, which is what abolishing taxes and making the government powerless would mean in practice.
No; however, I have a great deal of problem with the fundamentalistic demand for ideological purity some people take with them.
And yet every single libertarian that pipes up on Slashdot is always speaking against taxes, rather than for them.
No you aren't. You didn't complain about hurricanes or typhoons, you complained about taxes. Following your own advice would mean moving somewhere without taxes, or at least lower taxes.
This isn't a generic news site, thought; it's "news for nerds". And the story is not about a miscategorization, it's about new findings about a major geological feature.
It's interesting that libertarians and other assorted nutjobs always point out that no one has to live in hurricane zone or below sea level, yet fail to realize that they themselves don't have to live in a civilized, cooperative society. They can move to Somalia or some other governmentless hellhole and be free of taxes and all that they imply.
But of course following his own advice would inconvenience the nutjob himself, rather than some unknown people.
Nah. In the US - and everywhere else, for that matter - all you need is more money than your opponent.
The university has more money than the student. Therefore, whatever the university says is the law.
That would explain why he hates them >;].
AAAAHH!!! Red scare! Red scare!
Seriously, free-market capitalism doesn't seem to be so hot nowadays, unless you're rich or Chinese.
Cue a hundred libertarian John Galt wannabes blaming it all on eeeevil Government and regulation.
The "wasteland" is in the process of turning into a forest, and is already a wildlife haven.
How many cancer deaths does the average coal power plant cause during its life?
And only those few produce power on the magnitude of Chernobyl.
They might exist. They might not. Producing power makes money, saving lives doesn't. Isn't capitalism wonderful?
Anyway, you didn't answer my point, despite re-iterating it: in case a dam breaks, what will the communities that depend on it for water do?
Large-scale solar power production would and does use mirrors to concentrate sunlight to boil water and drive turbines. This technology doesn't need any research; it's low-tech, efficient and frankly, pretty obvious.
The problem with solar is the same as with almost all renewable energy sources: energy storage. Sun doesn't always shine, so you need to store energy when it does so you'll have light and heat when it doesn't. Make storing energy cheap and efficient and sun and wind become competitive. Another problem is that sunlight is only available in some locales. For example, here in Finland, during winter when energy is most needed the Sun only shines a few hours a day, and even then near the horizon, which means that the atmosphere will absorb most of the energy.
Of course, we could coat Sahara with sunlight power stations and produce more than enough power to run the whole world, but that would be costly.
A dam breaking and flooding a populated valley will basically kill everyone there. A melt-down might kill a few people and will give a slightly increase risk of cancer to many more. A terrorist group, assuming they could get either the fuel or the waste and transport it offsite without dying from radiation poisoning would be unable to much of anything with it, except leaving it somewhere it would irradiate people - they'd cause a lot more actual destruction with conventional explosives.
I'm sorry to say this, but you have it exactly backwards.
A broken dam can't be repaired, it has to be completely rebuilt, possibly redesigned (since the old design broke). And while the flood will be over in a few days, don't forget that many dams also act as water supply to nearby communities. What will they do?
A major dam breaking is a major catastrophe that makes Chernobyl look like small potatoes.