> evolution does not consider risks and benefits, changes are random
Interestingly, not all changes are random. There are some fascinating changes in DNA triggered by environment, many of them studied as "epigenetics". And there are certainly changes in organisms that are defensive responses to environment. The darkening of skin under sunlight is a classic example. Evolution occurs at _many_ levels. These include environmental, biological, behavioral, cultural.
> The only group that is really helped by other people's vaccinations is a small percentage of the population that cannot get vaccinated.
You obviously don't remember polio. I do. You apparently also don't remember when the flu killed so many people in winter, and fail to understand how modern cities and especially air traffic make pandemics far more likely and far more dangerous.
There was a similar set of claims roughly 60 years ago for the "Dean Drive" a "reactionless drive" that did not seem to use propellant. To casual review, and letting it push your hand, it seemed to work, and a great campaign for research and to ignore the sceptics of the time was headed by John W. Campbell, the editor of Analog magazine. Analog was, and remains, a science fiction magazine specializing in hard science and science fiction based on it, and it had many real scientists as readers and contributors, so the Dean Drive received quite a lot of attention.
The Dean Drive has since been pretty thoroughly debunked as an "oscillation thruster", a device that relies on tuned "slipping" on the floor it rests on to creep forward and even to provide a modest thrust, _pushing against the floor_. The designer was never willing to allow a full "pendulum" test, or careful testing outside of his own workshop, and there seem to be dozens more of similarly patented "reactonless drives". The ones that work at all also seem to be "isicllation thrusters", pushing against the floor or the mehanism in which they are mounted.
> As an added added bonus, such a drive would accelerate faster at a given thrust, because of the absence of reaction mass.
If only they didn't require an actual motor, or storage system for the energy for the microwaves. Since the maximum _chemical_ energy available in batteries is quite close to that of a good chemical propellant, it's only a big benefit if the energy for it comes from elsewhere, such as solar cells or a quite large nuclear power source. And if you have low mass space based solar cells, you can use either a solar _sail_ based system, or a transmission base to propel target spacecraft with a larger, more stable microwave source.
Have you been to France, Palestine, Nicaragua, Cuba, North Korea, or the former Soviet Union in the last 50 years? Hating America has been a popular national policy for decades, if not centuries, in many countries around the world.
Why should they paint it? If he's staying in captivity, he doesn't need camouflage, and it makes him far more noticeable for his caregivers or any fascinated schoolchildren who might want to see him.
I very much agree with you. I'd not expect immediate, dangerous coupling from a relatively low intensity coupling such as a recharger might product, even if someone slept with such a device under their pillow and wore loop earrings.
It was the reasoning from viperidsenz that because MRI is safe, inductive recharging is safe that I meant to call into question. MRI, misused or accidentally mishandled, can cause injury and death. The scanners devices are not a good starting point for comparison of safety.
It's also quite awkward and destructive to the connector if any mistakes happen, and lugging around the cabling is awkward. It's hardly a new idea, "www.poermat.com" has been selling such stations for years.
Unfortunately, the customized charging case you have to keep the phone in for Powermat to work are quite expensive and make the phones unwieldy.
Thank you for pointing out that a small loop may not cause injury. A casual look at published guidelines shows that they say to remove _all_ metal, and some metal may be safe if designed carefully. But some guidelines accept that wedding rings, in particular, may be impossible to remove without cutting them and accept the modest risk. I'm looking particularly at this as an example:
So you've raised a very good point, thank you for the refinement. In turn, I'll point out that not all patients in an MRI are conscious, and that not all loops are worn on the hand. There is a particular case, described at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu..., where a man with a very serious head injury had a "magnetic resonance safe" pressure monitor implanted in his head. It coupled to the MRI, and the tip melted in his brain.
If you rely on your phone for work messages or reaching loved ones during travel, here are some hard-learned suggestions.
1) Don't leave the house thinking "I've got 30%, that's plenty until I can find a charger!". 2) No video or audio except when it's plugged into power or someone is paying you for it, whether it is your workplace or your family's good will. 3) Use an older phone with simpler features. Real work _does not need_ large screens or high scores on cell phone games. 4) If you get bored, bring or get a book. Even a local daily newspaper can provide fascinating local politics and color to share with business contacts while traveling. 5) Carry a real battery, one that is as large as your phone. Numerous batteries with enough charge to recharge multiple cell phones work very well at long meetings, and it makes you seem well prepared if you can recharge both your own phone and the other person stuck there all day. They're also invaluable on long plane trips, commutes, or drives home when you've had no chance to recharge your phone all day.
Car electronics are safe like work IT systems are safe. No one competent would design the systems with a shared set of credentials, with an easily cracked master control system, with low security systems granted bus access and with privileged commands going over the common bus without protection, because we "trust the people we work with".
Unfortunately, this is rarely completely true in a large IT environment. There's often a set of vulnerabilities, which can be closed but require time and resources not allocated in the current quarter or even ever enabled. They're checked off on the security checklist, but the checklist is crafted to avoid the real problems, or personnel simply lie outright: this is at the core of many companies compliance with the FIPS guidelines. Those kinds of gaps help pay my salary: I often help close them and reduce the danger of them while they're being fixed.
For car systems, there are various "buses" in use now. A casual search shows more than 10 distinct "vehicle bus" standards in use, and trying to secure and reliably use all of them consistently and safely _in terms of security_ is barely feasible, much less likely in the high urgency car market. The components also have to be extremely robust, low quiescent power, and not too expensive per unit, which adds other limitations and slows closing known security or newly discovered security holes.
So I'm afraid that real security risks of the systems are to be expected. And they're quite unlikely to be fixed quickly when discovered, because it could involve replacing core components of the system and causing a _much_ higher rate of upgrade induced failures.
Unless you have a conducting loop in or around your body when it fires, such as a wedding ring, or a magnets in your body, such as are found in some medical electronics, or if you've got any accidentally embedded magnets such as those swallowed by children..
I'm not suggesting that a modest hom recharger will create such risks. But please, do not extrapolate armchair physics to assume you understand the real risks of a real electromechanical device without doing the research.
It's generally not known to American students, no. The lack of direct US military involvement, and the slaughter of millions by wealth seeking remote nationals doesn't garner the same sympathy 100 years later as the genocide of a nation's own citizens that occurred in Nazi Germany and in their conquered territories, a genocide that American military forces became directly involved in stopping and witnessed directly. There are few people alive who remember it personally, but the availability of popular media and of film evidence lent the later genocide more visual and historical power.
_Energy_ and entropy propose some profound limitations. There have been some very interesting ideas published for quantum computing, which is not necessarily binary, and could another step upwards. The ability to actually trigger a measurable change for recording equipment to read an answer is, itself, a limitation.
I believe you failed to mention "Carnivore". But you're quite correct to be concerned about these large scale, non-specific surveillance programs. They are created and funded for "protection" against nebulous, ill-defined enemies, and they enable wholesale invasive political and personal abuse on a massive scale.
The botched work is also often blamed on the previous engineer, who may have been presented by policy or resource management or "there's not a business case for it" from doing a more effective, more thorough job.
> The transitions from agriculture and (early) mining to manufacturing left a wide margin of time to retrain. International threats largely
Except when they did not. Take a careful look at the US Civil War, and the role of the cotton gin in replacing slave labor with automation. The US South was struggling with economic changes, and tremendous fiscal losses, to the more mechanized Northern economies. The shift as steam power and mechanical production become more common was profound and devastating to farm after farm, and city after city, as their transportation shifted from wind and horse based to steam. Coupled with the rise of the telegraph to speed communications and entire industries based on long term planning and investment collapsed.
Similar large scale changes occurred with the import of the horse, and of European weaponry and technology, to the New World colonies. In those cases. the local farming or hunting economies were pretty much slaughtered en masse, so there wasn't the same economic shift to "new labor training". But similar economic shifts occurred with the invention of the horse collar, which made a horse far more productive than a group of men for the same amount of food.
What makes you think there is not a strong gag order involved? I've not seen confirmation of that, but it's certainly typical of a small company or isolated developer faced with a gag order.
Jar Jar Binks rolling, ungrammatical voice sounded like a caricature of a beach living, laid back, ganja smoking Jamaican. And yes, the parody was so horrible that it made me think of the remnants of the last of hte "blackface" shows and minstrel performances from when I was very young.
The freeware ntpd at http://www.ntp.org/downloads.h... was extremely stable code. It's greatest problems have been with subtle configuration issues, not with the old daemon itself. Unfortunately, the service is now merged into systemd itself, which means that support for it from that large part of the Linux world will no longer apply to any other operating system.
The main codeline at http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~ntp... shows that it is in active development, mostly to support new operating systems and hardware.
Except that most of them are obsolete, discarded in favor of more effective or more powerful tools, or never had another user. This includes most of CPAN for perl, most rubygems, most python modules, most maven packages, and perhaps 90% of github or sourceforge hosted projects. It's not possible to simply select an array of such tools and throw time or money at them. Some focus on ones that have a chance of working or a chance of usefulness is necessary.
The result now is a "bazaar" of varying quality tools which live up to Theodore Sturgeon's famous conversation:
From a new science fiction reader: "90% of science fiction is crap!"
From Theodore Sturgeon: "90% of *everything* is crap!"
> As previously noted: the Tritium will remain cryogenically suspended, or it will "boil off". It's not an issue.
Keeping tritium around as a fuel source means keeping quite radioactive fuel, in significant quantities, aboard the aircraft and in storage for the aircraft. "cryogenic suspension" is expensive to maintain. If the suspension fails, it will disperse into the local atmosphere, combine with free oxygen locally, and contaminate the whole area, especially if there is any fire involved in the containment failure.
By patenting it, they control _research_ on it and closely related work for the next 20 years. Patents are written by the attorneys to cover as much of the related work and developments as possible.
All current fusion reactor designs rely on deuterium and tritium. Tritium is _quite_ radioactive, with a half-life of 12 years. There is also very little of it. The world supply is on the order of 20 kilograms, and it's all accumulated from fission reactors. quoting Wikipedia, "Commercial demand for tritium is 400 grams per year and the cost is approximately US $30,000 per gram." Tritium cannot be reasonably refined: all tritium on earth in quantities large enough to refine is from fission reactors. Growing commercial production could improve the price tremendously, but it's source remains dangerous and expensive and inefficient to produce tritium.
Deuterium is stable, and available, but also quite expensive at $1000/kg. for deuterium oxide. With an atomic weight of 2, with two oxygen atoms of atomic weight of 16, the deuterium is only 2 / 34 of the mass. So the cost for pure deuterium itself is roughly $17000/kg, or about $17/gram. It's refinable from water, but the dollar cost reflects the energy costs of refining it.
The only large scale source of either isotope that would not be prohibitively expensive or rely on quite large scale fission generators is the solar wind. But much like large scale fission generators to create tritium it's senseless in terms of energy production. If you're bothering to build the plant for tritum, why not simply harvest the energy of the plant itself? A solar sail in orbit gathers roughly 2 kilowatts/square meter, and a roughly square kilometer mirror is quite feasible. That would be roughly 2 Terawatts of power. One could theoretically harvest deuterium and tritium from it, but with such a large power source, there seems to be no need to harvest it for fuel production for a much less efficient and quite radioactive system.
Slashdot Mirror
> evolution does not consider risks and benefits, changes are random
Interestingly, not all changes are random. There are some fascinating changes in DNA triggered by environment, many of them studied as "epigenetics". And there are certainly changes in organisms that are defensive responses to environment. The darkening of skin under sunlight is a classic example. Evolution occurs at _many_ levels. These include environmental, biological, behavioral, cultural.
> The only group that is really helped by other people's vaccinations is a small percentage of the population that cannot get vaccinated.
You obviously don't remember polio. I do. You apparently also don't remember when the flu killed so many people in winter, and fail to understand how modern cities and especially air traffic make pandemics far more likely and far more dangerous.
There was a similar set of claims roughly 60 years ago for the "Dean Drive" a "reactionless drive" that did not seem to use propellant. To casual review, and letting it push your hand, it seemed to work, and a great campaign for research and to ignore the sceptics of the time was headed by John W. Campbell, the editor of Analog magazine. Analog was, and remains, a science fiction magazine specializing in hard science and science fiction based on it, and it had many real scientists as readers and contributors, so the Dean Drive received quite a lot of attention.
The Dean Drive has since been pretty thoroughly debunked as an "oscillation thruster", a device that relies on tuned "slipping" on the floor it rests on to creep forward and even to provide a modest thrust, _pushing against the floor_. The designer was never willing to allow a full "pendulum" test, or careful testing outside of his own workshop, and there seem to be dozens more of similarly patented "reactonless drives". The ones that work at all also seem to be "isicllation thrusters", pushing against the floor or the mehanism in which they are mounted.
> As an added added bonus, such a drive would accelerate faster at a given thrust, because of the absence of reaction mass.
If only they didn't require an actual motor, or storage system for the energy for the microwaves. Since the maximum _chemical_ energy available in batteries is quite close to that of a good chemical propellant, it's only a big benefit if the energy for it comes from elsewhere, such as solar cells or a quite large nuclear power source. And if you have low mass space based solar cells, you can use either a solar _sail_ based system, or a transmission base to propel target spacecraft with a larger, more stable microwave source.
The "propellant" is the microwaves, which carry momentum. They don't have to have _rest_ mess, but they still are a measurable propellant.
Have you been to France, Palestine, Nicaragua, Cuba, North Korea, or the former Soviet Union in the last 50 years? Hating America has been a popular national policy for decades, if not centuries, in many countries around the world.
Why should they paint it? If he's staying in captivity, he doesn't need camouflage, and it makes him far more noticeable for his caregivers or any fascinated schoolchildren who might want to see him.
I very much agree with you. I'd not expect immediate, dangerous coupling from a relatively low intensity coupling such as a recharger might product, even if someone slept with such a device under their pillow and wore loop earrings.
It was the reasoning from viperidsenz that because MRI is safe, inductive recharging is safe that I meant to call into question. MRI, misused or accidentally mishandled, can cause injury and death. The scanners devices are not a good starting point for comparison of safety.
> It is easy enough to plug it in.
It's also quite awkward and destructive to the connector if any mistakes happen, and lugging around the cabling is awkward. It's hardly a new idea, "www.poermat.com" has been selling such stations for years.
Unfortunately, the customized charging case you have to keep the phone in for Powermat to work are quite expensive and make the phones unwieldy.
Thank you for pointing out that a small loop may not cause injury. A casual look at published guidelines shows that they say to remove _all_ metal, and some metal may be safe if designed carefully. But some guidelines accept that wedding rings, in particular, may be impossible to remove without cutting them and accept the modest risk. I'm looking particularly at this as an example:
http://www.mrisafety.com/Safet...
So you've raised a very good point, thank you for the refinement. In turn, I'll point out that not all patients in an MRI are conscious, and that not all loops are worn on the hand. There is a particular case, described at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu..., where a man with a very serious head injury had a "magnetic resonance safe" pressure monitor implanted in his head. It coupled to the MRI, and the tip melted in his brain.
If you rely on your phone for work messages or reaching loved ones during travel, here are some hard-learned suggestions.
1) Don't leave the house thinking "I've got 30%, that's plenty until I can find a charger!".
2) No video or audio except when it's plugged into power or someone is paying you for it, whether it is your workplace or your family's good will.
3) Use an older phone with simpler features. Real work _does not need_ large screens or high scores on cell phone games.
4) If you get bored, bring or get a book. Even a local daily newspaper can provide fascinating local politics and color to share with business contacts while traveling.
5) Carry a real battery, one that is as large as your phone. Numerous batteries with enough charge to recharge multiple cell phones work very well at long meetings, and it makes you seem well prepared if you can recharge both your own phone and the other person stuck there all day. They're also invaluable on long plane trips, commutes, or drives home when you've had no chance to recharge your phone all day.
Car electronics are safe like work IT systems are safe. No one competent would design the systems with a shared set of credentials, with an easily cracked master control system, with low security systems granted bus access and with privileged commands going over the common bus without protection, because we "trust the people we work with".
Unfortunately, this is rarely completely true in a large IT environment. There's often a set of vulnerabilities, which can be closed but require time and resources not allocated in the current quarter or even ever enabled. They're checked off on the security checklist, but the checklist is crafted to avoid the real problems, or personnel simply lie outright: this is at the core of many companies compliance with the FIPS guidelines. Those kinds of gaps help pay my salary: I often help close them and reduce the danger of them while they're being fixed.
For car systems, there are various "buses" in use now. A casual search shows more than 10 distinct "vehicle bus" standards in use, and trying to secure and reliably use all of them consistently and safely _in terms of security_ is barely feasible, much less likely in the high urgency car market. The components also have to be extremely robust, low quiescent power, and not too expensive per unit, which adds other limitations and slows closing known security or newly discovered security holes.
So I'm afraid that real security risks of the systems are to be expected. And they're quite unlikely to be fixed quickly when discovered, because it could involve replacing core components of the system and causing a _much_ higher rate of upgrade induced failures.
Unless you have a conducting loop in or around your body when it fires, such as a wedding ring, or a magnets in your body, such as are found in some medical electronics, or if you've got any accidentally embedded magnets such as those swallowed by children..
http://www.npr.org/sections/he...
Or unless there is a bulky, conducting metal object in the room, such as an oxygen tank:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07...
I'm not suggesting that a modest hom recharger will create such risks. But please, do not extrapolate armchair physics to assume you understand the real risks of a real electromechanical device without doing the research.
It's generally not known to American students, no. The lack of direct US military involvement, and the slaughter of millions by wealth seeking remote nationals doesn't garner the same sympathy 100 years later as the genocide of a nation's own citizens that occurred in Nazi Germany and in their conquered territories, a genocide that American military forces became directly involved in stopping and witnessed directly. There are few people alive who remember it personally, but the availability of popular media and of film evidence lent the later genocide more visual and historical power.
_Energy_ and entropy propose some profound limitations. There have been some very interesting ideas published for quantum computing, which is not necessarily binary, and could another step upwards. The ability to actually trigger a measurable change for recording equipment to read an answer is, itself, a limitation.
I believe you failed to mention "Carnivore". But you're quite correct to be concerned about these large scale, non-specific surveillance programs. They are created and funded for "protection" against nebulous, ill-defined enemies, and they enable wholesale invasive political and personal abuse on a massive scale.
The botched work is also often blamed on the previous engineer, who may have been presented by policy or resource management or "there's not a business case for it" from doing a more effective, more thorough job.
> The transitions from agriculture and (early) mining to manufacturing left a wide margin of time to retrain. International threats largely
Except when they did not. Take a careful look at the US Civil War, and the role of the cotton gin in replacing slave labor with automation. The US South was struggling with economic changes, and tremendous fiscal losses, to the more mechanized Northern economies. The shift as steam power and mechanical production become more common was profound and devastating to farm after farm, and city after city, as their transportation shifted from wind and horse based to steam. Coupled with the rise of the telegraph to speed communications and entire industries based on long term planning and investment collapsed.
Similar large scale changes occurred with the import of the horse, and of European weaponry and technology, to the New World colonies. In those cases. the local farming or hunting economies were pretty much slaughtered en masse, so there wasn't the same economic shift to "new labor training". But similar economic shifts occurred with the invention of the horse collar, which made a horse far more productive than a group of men for the same amount of food.
> This is NOT a gag order...
What makes you think there is not a strong gag order involved? I've not seen confirmation of that, but it's certainly typical of a small company or isolated developer faced with a gag order.
Jar Jar Binks rolling, ungrammatical voice sounded like a caricature of a beach living, laid back, ganja smoking Jamaican. And yes, the parody was so horrible that it made me think of the remnants of the last of hte "blackface" shows and minstrel performances from when I was very young.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fil...
The freeware ntpd at http://www.ntp.org/downloads.h... was extremely stable code. It's greatest problems have been with subtle configuration issues, not with the old daemon itself. Unfortunately, the service is now merged into systemd itself, which means that support for it from that large part of the Linux world will no longer apply to any other operating system.
The main codeline at http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~ntp... shows that it is in active development, mostly to support new operating systems and hardware.
Except that most of them are obsolete, discarded in favor of more effective or more powerful tools, or never had another user. This includes most of CPAN for perl, most rubygems, most python modules, most maven packages, and perhaps 90% of github or sourceforge hosted projects. It's not possible to simply select an array of such tools and throw time or money at them. Some focus on ones that have a chance of working or a chance of usefulness is necessary.
The result now is a "bazaar" of varying quality tools which live up to Theodore Sturgeon's famous conversation:
From a new science fiction reader: "90% of science fiction is crap!"
From Theodore Sturgeon: "90% of *everything* is crap!"
> As previously noted: the Tritium will remain cryogenically suspended, or it will "boil off". It's not an issue.
Keeping tritium around as a fuel source means keeping quite radioactive fuel, in significant quantities, aboard the aircraft and in storage for the aircraft. "cryogenic suspension" is expensive to maintain. If the suspension fails, it will disperse into the local atmosphere, combine with free oxygen locally, and contaminate the whole area, especially if there is any fire involved in the containment failure.
By patenting it, they control _research_ on it and closely related work for the next 20 years. Patents are written by the attorneys to cover as much of the related work and developments as possible.
All current fusion reactor designs rely on deuterium and tritium. Tritium is _quite_ radioactive, with a half-life of 12 years. There is also very little of it. The world supply is on the order of 20 kilograms, and it's all accumulated from fission reactors. quoting Wikipedia, "Commercial demand for tritium is 400 grams per year and the cost is approximately US $30,000 per gram." Tritium cannot be reasonably refined: all tritium on earth in quantities large enough to refine is from fission reactors. Growing commercial production could improve the price tremendously, but it's source remains dangerous and expensive and inefficient to produce tritium.
Deuterium is stable, and available, but also quite expensive at $1000/kg. for deuterium oxide. With an atomic weight of 2, with two oxygen atoms of atomic weight of 16, the deuterium is only 2 / 34 of the mass. So the cost for pure deuterium itself is roughly $17000/kg, or about $17/gram. It's refinable from water, but the dollar cost reflects the energy costs of refining it.
The only large scale source of either isotope that would not be prohibitively expensive or rely on quite large scale fission generators is the solar wind. But much like large scale fission generators to create tritium it's senseless in terms of energy production. If you're bothering to build the plant for tritum, why not simply harvest the energy of the plant itself? A solar sail in orbit gathers roughly 2 kilowatts/square meter, and a roughly square kilometer mirror is quite feasible. That would be roughly 2 Terawatts of power. One could theoretically harvest deuterium and tritium from it, but with such a large power source, there seems to be no need to harvest it for fuel production for a much less efficient and quite radioactive system.