I've pretty much resigned myself to the idea that protection from the hard radiation will require the normal type of engineering, and not bio-engineering. Some sci-fi authors, notably Dan Simmons (in the Hyperion series, some post-humans were even adapted to hard vacuum, and possessed wings which they could use to fly on the solar wind), have made no such concessions, but I think at this early stage of a potential galactic empire, wearing radiation suits when outside isn't too big of a punt.
In looking at info about altitude adaptation, I found out a couple more interesting bits. One, some ethiopians also possess a special adaptation to altitude. And two, the adaptations possessed by the three groups (tibetans, peruvians, and ethiopians) are all distinct. Whether that means that interbreeding could result in someone possessing genes for all three traits, and whether this would grant resistance to even thinner atmospheres, is beyond me, but sounds like an interesting avenue of exploration.
There are several races of human that are already adapted to high altitude, namely peruvians and tibetans. In the Andes, there is a city at 4 km above sea level, where the air pressure is about 60 kPa. Some of these people could probably live comfortable at about.5 atm, which would make habitat and suit design a good deal simpler. Play some games with partial pressures, and you could have such people living in a -very- thin atmosphere.
You need to work on your deadpan delivery, man. I was halfway through a retort about how you need to get out and try more software before I realised that this was sarcasm.
If by 'largely removed' you mean 'more than half', then you are correct. However, your general tone suggests that you believe that 'largely removed' means "greater than 99%", when in fact that number is about 70-75%.
The best reference I can find on this on short notice is the World Health Organization, which I hope is sufficiently credible.
In a nutshell, the amount of radioisotopes is reduced from the ~.7% level present in naturally occurring uranium, to approximately.2%. That's still a significant amount of dangerous material, and nothing to be waved off as inconsequential.
Have you ever used google to research anything technical? Did you ever notice how often the google "show as text" function totally butchers the file?
Point is, not everything that ends life as non-text in a PDF or PS file started life as a picture. Your other respondent seems to have some in-depth knowledge of what precisely this is, all I know is what I see, and what I hear from the accessibility folks I've known or chatted with over the years. As someone else said, PDF files may as well be a Flash animation for all the attention some people pay to making their information generally available. Telling them to suck it up and get some OCR software is beyond rude, but then I'm starting to gather that about you.
I wonder... Could you get these chips rated for orbital applications? Would nanotube memory be more, or less susceptible to damage by high-energy particles?
Don't be such an insufferable prick. What are you going to complain about next? That the stupid crippled people want access to the public pool? Boy, they have some nerve, don't they? Trying to be included in normal every day activities. They should go hide in a dank basement, where they belong!
What about a simple press release requires a typesetting program? Word processors? Are you talking about those Regan-era, pre-PC monstrosities? What makes you think that a technology company would have those, let alone even remember what they are?
And maybe YOU should try OCR software. Then you and my wife can bitch to each other about how much proof-reading you have to do on the finished product.
There's blind, and there's blind. Legally blind, for many people, means they can see well enough to know they've just stepped in front of a city bus, but they can't make out fine detail, like traffic signs, or the printed word.
Hey! You're spoiling the self-congratulatory pseudo-Green backslapping, man!
This is just another one of those situations that gives proof to the saying that you can't solve a technical problem with the level of thinking that created it in the first place. Everyone's so stuck on trying to find a 'green' replacement for the spectacular amounts of energy we use that they don't realise that the energy gluttony itself isn't green.
I too, remember from school that deserts make their own weather. If you filled a desert with a solar farm that absorbed 30% of the solar energy, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it stopped being a desert. Worse, when it starts raining there, whose rain did it used to be?
The only things this sort of giant-scale solar collection would be useful for are removing the 'heat island' effect in cities, and in halting desert encroachment in areas where desertification is already a problem (for instance, Sub-Saharan Africa). Anything else, and you're playing with fire.
I realise this is a late reply, but for what it's worth...
Are you talking about speaking out against government officials? There's still the Dick Nixon example there, but these weren't strictly the folks I had in mind when I talked of consequences.
I was thinking more of situations such as speaking out against crooked cops, corrupt corporate officials, and organized crime. In other words, people who aren't the least bit polite about showing their dislike for what you're saying.
It only reduces to an issue of backbone when you're a certifiable social leper. This 'accountability' of which you speak is not always lawful, and even then is not always ethical. As such, it is often visited on the heads of innocent bystanders, instead of on the perpetrator.
Are you entitling me to blank checks on your backbone, should you happen to be my next-door neighbor, my relative, my spouse, or my dog? Do you speak for all of these people? Do I have your permission?
Humans, on the other hand, seem to enjoy living in artificial habitats, and will happily excrete in controlled locations.
Renton, Washington has a sewage treatment plant that's running partially on biomass power now. Unfortunately, they aren't at break-even. IIRC, they still source about half of their power demand from the power grid, but at least they're reducing the city's energy budget.
You can't have free-grazing cattle AND use their feces as biomass. It's an either-or compromise.
Penned cattle excrete onto concrete pads. It's a simple enough process to sweep/wash/flush these cow paddies into a holding tank where they can be used for biomass. Free-graze cattle excrete in the fields. It's infeasible to collect this waste, because it is literally scattered over acres of land. Even if it were possible to construct a machine that could pick up the manure at less of a fuel cost than the methane produced, you have the other problem of terrain. Flat, easy to navigate land is, more often than not, reserved for farming. Cattle don't mind hillocks, but farm equipment does.
It's kind of sad, really. It didn't start out that way. Once upon a time, I worked with folks who were investigating this sort of software. At the time, they thought they were helping out rural people by giving them access to specialist that would never deign to live in their communities.
Instead, we're just giving them cheaper access to people with the same degree of training, and magnifying our trade deficit in the process.
I know a lot of people are joking about this issue, but it's really a significant advantage.
We have important documents preserved which are multiple hundreds of years old. Meanwhile, we have digital archivists who are freaking out because the CD-Rs they burned their data onto are going to decompose within decades. Some places are worried that the amount of time needed just to transfer the data off the old media and onto new media (ie, next generation storage) may take longer than the shelf life of either the old media or the new media. It's even gotten sexy, ominous sounding names like The Digital Dark Ages, which has been discussed to death here some years ago.
Optical scanning technology seems to be rather stable. We have people reading LPs with lasers, or with high-res flatbed scanners and digitizing them. In theory, someone could use similar techniques to scan any optical media we come up with, so long as the media is still intact. If push came to shove, someone could probably digitize a CDROM even if there were no compatible players left on the planet. Magnetic storage doesn't seem to be quite as lucky in this regard, so it seems to me that optical storage is really where it's at. I've often wondered if we shouldn't be looking at some paper-and-ink mechanism for archiving this sort of material for the long term. Of course, at the sort of data densities Sony is talking about, you'll probably run into data loss long before the integrity of the ink or the paper has degraded past the point one would be able to read text written on the same paper with the same ink. The feature size is what hides subtle damage to the surface. You'd have to rely pretty heavily on error correction techniques, which would impact your data density significantly.
That's great and all, but the problem is that laptop sales have already outpaced desktop sales, and are set to completely massacre them in the coming years.
I've been looking at linux on the laptop objectively lately, and the situation is really pretty bad from a user-friendliness standpoint. Most of the bits I've gathered for getting peripherals and power conservation features on my laptop to function are scattered to the four winds. It's all arkane little tweaks and twiddles handed down through web forums and kernel mailing lists. None of it is cohesive, and all of it is perfectly opaque to the average end-user.
Additionally, a lot of the tools are simply incomplete. The Longrun utility doesn't support all of the features of the Crusoe chips. ACPID doesn't come with a SysV service script. And while the new laptop_mode project is coming along, it seems to be focussing on kernel tweaks to reduce disk utilization, which in my limited experience isn't the lion's share of wasted power on a laptop (for instance, on my laptop, spinning down the drive only reduces power usage by 5%). It also has no facilities for Crusoe processors as of yet.
I'm actually working on contributions to the respective projects to address my primary concerns, so this isn't a normal case of sour grapes. However, I fear that my improvements may only amount to a drop in a very large bucket. It's a big hill to climb, and it's getting taller with every quirky new laptop model that comes out.
As you say, a person can face personal fines or jail time.
How do you put a corporation in jail for 90 days?
How do you give a corporation the death penalty?
Once upon a time, the king could revoke your corporate charter, and your company went away. That's the closest thing to a 'death penalty' for corporations that I've ever encountered, but even modern trust busting practices don't go that far (Ma Bell was dismembered, but not actually destroyed).
Similarly, the punishment for some crimes allows for any goods that were acquired in the process of breaking the law to be seized. If you have a product that violates the law egregiously, why shouldn't the benefits (profits) of that product be seized, and funneled back toward the public good?
Fining a company that has $60B in the bank 600 million dollars is chump change. They can take that out of interest payments on their liquid assets. You really want to hurt them, you seize all of their profits (or source code) for that product. Anything less is merely an annoyance.
That's probably where I've seen this before, then. I couldn't recall if it was Brin or Simmons where I'd seen this first.
In Earth, wasn't there the added complication of not letting your thoughts wander so far that the computer mistakes idle wool-gathering as command input?
It's really awkward to explain to the cops why your robotic lawnmower was chasing your annoying next door neighbor, or why your dishwasher tried to eat your girlfriend right after you two got into a big fight.
You could use some sort of piezoelectric mechanism in a 'clicky' keyboard, and trade pulse duration for higher voltage. Still, I'd be surprised if you could do much more than create a self-powered keyboard from such an arrangement.
Personally, I still want to get back to my childhood, and have an electronic device that was powered by a pull-string, like those little "The cow goes 'moo'" toys. Of course, I used to break the string in a month or so. Maybe if they used Spectra instead of nylon...
Re:Cha ching, reloaded.
on
Gates on Spam
·
· Score: 1
This is pretty much what I had in mind as well. It also has the added advantage over prime factorization of being resistant to a dictionary attack, because you can add a nice fat nonce to the hashed value, and send it along with the challenge. Every six months you add another digit to the range, and another couple of digits to the nonce, and you can stay ahead of both the CPU curve and the storage curve.
> The amount of energy invested in the system will have to be exceeded by the energy produced or else it is for naught.
Perhaps not in this case, but that is not generally the correct litmus test for the viability of a power source.
Portability matters. Batteries are horribly inefficient, yet they seem to keep me from stumbling around in the woods at night quite nicely. Similarly, the photovoltaics on a satellite, or on a water pump in rural Bangledesh, may take far more power to create than they will ever produce, and yet they are useful because we can't run an extension cord up to geosynchronous orbit, or run power lines for hundreds of miles through sparsely populated territories, (especially where the scrap metal value of the powerlines exceeds the yearly income potential of the local population, but that's an economic issue, not a matter of physics).
Now, given the comparative simplicity of the current prototypes, it's probably safe to say that the power input required to create the device is not a limiting factor. However, for arguments sake, let's say that a working design which sustains the reaction may well require a more precise fusion chamber, made of specific materials machined to tight tolerances, and perhaps involving active electronic control. All of these involve great expenditures of energy, to mine the materials, refine them, and produce the finished product. Could it be used to power our cities? Of course not. And yet, that product could still be the most efficient (well-to-wheel, so to speak) portable power source ever built. That alone would make the effort worthwhile.
Slashdot Mirror
I've pretty much resigned myself to the idea that protection from the hard radiation will require the normal type of engineering, and not bio-engineering.
Some sci-fi authors, notably Dan Simmons (in the Hyperion series, some post-humans were even adapted to hard vacuum, and possessed wings which they could use to fly on the solar wind), have made no such concessions, but I think at this early stage of a potential galactic empire, wearing radiation suits when outside isn't too big of a punt.
In looking at info about altitude adaptation, I found out a couple more interesting bits. One, some ethiopians also possess a special adaptation to altitude. And two, the adaptations possessed by the three groups (tibetans, peruvians, and ethiopians) are all distinct. Whether that means that interbreeding could result in someone possessing genes for all three traits, and whether this would grant resistance to even thinner atmospheres, is beyond me, but sounds like an interesting avenue of exploration.
There are several races of human that are already adapted to high altitude, namely peruvians and tibetans. In the Andes, there is a city at 4 km above sea level, where the air pressure is about 60 kPa. Some of these people could probably live comfortable at about .5 atm, which would make habitat and suit design a good deal simpler. Play some games with partial pressures, and you could have such people living in a -very- thin atmosphere.
You need to work on your deadpan delivery, man. I was halfway through a retort about how you need to get out and try more software before I realised that this was sarcasm.
If by 'largely removed' you mean 'more than half', then you are correct. However, your general tone suggests that you believe that 'largely removed' means "greater than 99%", when in fact that number is about 70-75%.
.2%. That's still a significant amount of dangerous material, and nothing to be waved off as inconsequential.
The best reference I can find on this on short notice is the World Health Organization, which I hope is sufficiently credible.
In a nutshell, the amount of radioisotopes is reduced from the ~.7% level present in naturally occurring uranium, to approximately
Have you ever used google to research anything technical? Did you ever notice how often the google "show as text" function totally butchers the file?
Point is, not everything that ends life as non-text in a PDF or PS file started life as a picture. Your other respondent seems to have some in-depth knowledge of what precisely this is, all I know is what I see, and what I hear from the accessibility folks I've known or chatted with over the years. As someone else said, PDF files may as well be a Flash animation for all the attention some people pay to making their information generally available. Telling them to suck it up and get some OCR software is beyond rude, but then I'm starting to gather that about you.
I wonder... Could you get these chips rated for orbital applications? Would nanotube memory be more, or less susceptible to damage by high-energy particles?
Don't be such an insufferable prick. What are you going to complain about next? That the stupid crippled people want access to the public pool? Boy, they have some nerve, don't they? Trying to be included in normal every day activities. They should go hide in a dank basement, where they belong!
What about a simple press release requires a typesetting program? Word processors? Are you talking about those Regan-era, pre-PC monstrosities? What makes you think that a technology company would have those, let alone even remember what they are?
And maybe YOU should try OCR software. Then you and my wife can bitch to each other about how much proof-reading you have to do on the finished product.
There's blind, and there's blind. Legally blind, for many people, means they can see well enough to know they've just stepped in front of a city bus, but they can't make out fine detail, like traffic signs, or the printed word.
Hey! You're spoiling the self-congratulatory pseudo-Green backslapping, man!
This is just another one of those situations that gives proof to the saying that you can't solve a technical problem with the level of thinking that created it in the first place. Everyone's so stuck on trying to find a 'green' replacement for the spectacular amounts of energy we use that they don't realise that the energy gluttony itself isn't green.
I too, remember from school that deserts make their own weather. If you filled a desert with a solar farm that absorbed 30% of the solar energy, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it stopped being a desert. Worse, when it starts raining there, whose rain did it used to be?
The only things this sort of giant-scale solar collection would be useful for are removing the 'heat island' effect in cities, and in halting desert encroachment in areas where desertification is already a problem (for instance, Sub-Saharan Africa). Anything else, and you're playing with fire.
... and about 75 years until "Heat Pollution" becomes a household phrase.
Endless energy will not solve our problems. It will merely exchange them for new ones.
I realise this is a late reply, but for what it's worth...
Are you talking about speaking out against government officials? There's still the Dick Nixon example there, but these weren't strictly the folks I had in mind when I talked of consequences.
I was thinking more of situations such as speaking out against crooked cops, corrupt corporate officials, and organized crime. In other words, people who aren't the least bit polite about showing their dislike for what you're saying.
It only reduces to an issue of backbone when you're a certifiable social leper. This 'accountability' of which you speak is not always lawful, and even then is not always ethical. As such, it is often visited on the heads of innocent bystanders, instead of on the perpetrator.
Are you entitling me to blank checks on your backbone, should you happen to be my next-door neighbor, my relative, my spouse, or my dog? Do you speak for all of these people? Do I have your permission?
No cow-sourced biofuels.
Humans, on the other hand, seem to enjoy living in artificial habitats, and will happily excrete in controlled locations.
Renton, Washington has a sewage treatment plant that's running partially on biomass power now. Unfortunately, they aren't at break-even. IIRC, they still source about half of their power demand from the power grid, but at least they're reducing the city's energy budget.
I'll agree with most of your points, except one:
You can't have free-grazing cattle AND use their feces as biomass. It's an either-or compromise.
Penned cattle excrete onto concrete pads. It's a simple enough process to sweep/wash/flush these cow paddies into a holding tank where they can be used for biomass. Free-graze cattle excrete in the fields. It's infeasible to collect this waste, because it is literally scattered over acres of land. Even if it were possible to construct a machine that could pick up the manure at less of a fuel cost than the methane produced, you have the other problem of terrain. Flat, easy to navigate land is, more often than not, reserved for farming. Cattle don't mind hillocks, but farm equipment does.
Yes, but if you go this route, be sure to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow. (Favorite. Bad. Star Trek. Line. Ever.)
You're thinking of Starbridge Systems
It's kind of sad, really. It didn't start out that way. Once upon a time, I worked with folks who were investigating this sort of software. At the time, they thought they were helping out rural people by giving them access to specialist that would never deign to live in their communities.
Instead, we're just giving them cheaper access to people with the same degree of training, and magnifying our trade deficit in the process.
This guy claims to have figured out how to make XFree86 allow dual user mode. Haven't tried it yet, though.
I know a lot of people are joking about this issue, but it's really a significant advantage.
We have important documents preserved which are multiple hundreds of years old. Meanwhile, we have digital archivists who are freaking out because the CD-Rs they burned their data onto are going to decompose within decades. Some places are worried that the amount of time needed just to transfer the data off the old media and onto new media (ie, next generation storage) may take longer than the shelf life of either the old media or the new media. It's even gotten sexy, ominous sounding names like The Digital Dark Ages, which has been discussed to death here some years ago.
Optical scanning technology seems to be rather stable. We have people reading LPs with lasers, or with high-res flatbed scanners and digitizing them. In theory, someone could use similar techniques to scan any optical media we come up with, so long as the media is still intact. If push came to shove, someone could probably digitize a CDROM even if there were no compatible players left on the planet. Magnetic storage doesn't seem to be quite as lucky in this regard, so it seems to me that optical storage is really where it's at. I've often wondered if we shouldn't be looking at some paper-and-ink mechanism for archiving this sort of material for the long term. Of course, at the sort of data densities Sony is talking about, you'll probably run into data loss long before the integrity of the ink or the paper has degraded past the point one would be able to read text written on the same paper with the same ink. The feature size is what hides subtle damage to the surface. You'd have to rely pretty heavily on error correction techniques, which would impact your data density significantly.
That's great and all, but the problem is that laptop sales have already outpaced desktop sales, and are set to completely massacre them in the coming years.
I've been looking at linux on the laptop objectively lately, and the situation is really pretty bad from a user-friendliness standpoint. Most of the bits I've gathered for getting peripherals and power conservation features on my laptop to function are scattered to the four winds. It's all arkane little tweaks and twiddles handed down through web forums and kernel mailing lists. None of it is cohesive, and all of it is perfectly opaque to the average end-user.
Additionally, a lot of the tools are simply incomplete. The Longrun utility doesn't support all of the features of the Crusoe chips. ACPID doesn't come with a SysV service script. And while the new laptop_mode project is coming along, it seems to be focussing on kernel tweaks to reduce disk utilization, which in my limited experience isn't the lion's share of wasted power on a laptop (for instance, on my laptop, spinning down the drive only reduces power usage by 5%). It also has no facilities for Crusoe processors as of yet.
I'm actually working on contributions to the respective projects to address my primary concerns, so this isn't a normal case of sour grapes. However, I fear that my improvements may only amount to a drop in a very large bucket. It's a big hill to climb, and it's getting taller with every quirky new laptop model that comes out.
As you say, a person can face personal fines or jail time.
How do you put a corporation in jail for 90 days?
How do you give a corporation the death penalty?
Once upon a time, the king could revoke your corporate charter, and your company went away. That's the closest thing to a 'death penalty' for corporations that I've ever encountered, but even modern trust busting practices don't go that far (Ma Bell was dismembered, but not actually destroyed).
Similarly, the punishment for some crimes allows for any goods that were acquired in the process of breaking the law to be seized. If you have a product that violates the law egregiously, why shouldn't the benefits (profits) of that product be seized, and funneled back toward the public good?
Fining a company that has $60B in the bank 600 million dollars is chump change. They can take that out of interest payments on their liquid assets. You really want to hurt them, you seize all of their profits (or source code) for that product. Anything less is merely an annoyance.
That's probably where I've seen this before, then. I couldn't recall if it was Brin or Simmons where I'd seen this first.
In Earth, wasn't there the added complication of not letting your thoughts wander so far that the computer mistakes idle wool-gathering as command input?
It's really awkward to explain to the cops why your robotic lawnmower was chasing your annoying next door neighbor, or why your dishwasher tried to eat your girlfriend right after you two got into a big fight.
You could use some sort of piezoelectric mechanism in a 'clicky' keyboard, and trade pulse duration for higher voltage. Still, I'd be surprised if you could do much more than create a self-powered keyboard from such an arrangement.
Personally, I still want to get back to my childhood, and have an electronic device that was powered by a pull-string, like those little "The cow goes 'moo'" toys. Of course, I used to break the string in a month or so. Maybe if they used Spectra instead of nylon...
This is pretty much what I had in mind as well. It also has the added advantage over prime factorization of being resistant to a dictionary attack, because you can add a nice fat nonce to the hashed value, and send it along with the challenge. Every six months you add another digit to the range, and another couple of digits to the nonce, and you can stay ahead of both the CPU curve and the storage curve.
Tip over, hell. With 175+ lbs on your back, what happens if you -trip-?
*crunch*
> The amount of energy invested in the system will have to be exceeded by the energy produced or else it is for naught.
Perhaps not in this case, but that is not generally the correct litmus test for the viability of a power source.
Portability matters. Batteries are horribly inefficient, yet they seem to keep me from stumbling around in the woods at night quite nicely. Similarly, the photovoltaics on a satellite, or on a water pump in rural Bangledesh, may take far more power to create than they will ever produce, and yet they are useful because we can't run an extension cord up to geosynchronous orbit, or run power lines for hundreds of miles through sparsely populated territories, (especially where the scrap metal value of the powerlines exceeds the yearly income potential of the local population, but that's an economic issue, not a matter of physics).
Now, given the comparative simplicity of the current prototypes, it's probably safe to say that the power input required to create the device is not a limiting factor. However, for arguments sake, let's say that a working design which sustains the reaction may well require a more precise fusion chamber, made of specific materials machined to tight tolerances, and perhaps involving active electronic control. All of these involve great expenditures of energy, to mine the materials, refine them, and produce the finished product. Could it be used to power our cities? Of course not. And yet, that product could still be the most efficient (well-to-wheel, so to speak) portable power source ever built. That alone would make the effort worthwhile.