Aye, true enough. The waste and light pollution are both big concerns of mine; sorry. I'm a bit trigger happy on the subject, or anything, apparently, that even looks like the subject. Mea culpa.
That's not simple at all, and probably damn easy to track back to you. A single shot.50 will probably set you back $2K+. One with a clip will be $8K if your are lucky.
You need to learn about the amount of money crime, organized and otherwise, brings in. Google can help. Likewise, in re traceability, you need to learn about the underground market for weapons, particularly heavy weapons available via the international market. Again, Google can help.
And your post ignores the not so minor point that gunmen are disposable, not to mention that you have to catch the gunman in the first place, which statistics show the police are really, really bad at getting done.
Face it. If those helicopters were in any way significant with regard to reducing serious crime, they'd be smoking piles of rubbish in no time.
Helicopter shows up, you wait. It goes away, you continue. Threat level? Zero.
but I want my cats to have the freedom to roam around outside
I bet you let your kids play unsupervised in the street too, right? After all, your kids should have the "freedom to roam around outside", right? And they're smarter than cats, so surely they'll be just fine, right? Right? Let 'em out in the morning, surely they'll come back for dinner, yes?
Both of my cats are around or over 10 years old.
The plural of anecdote is not "data." The average lifespan of a cat is considerably less when allowed outdoors. For excruciatingly obvious reasons. Given the average, anyone who can rub two brain cells together can extrapolate the risk.
And fuck you too, pal.
Hey, why not? After all, you're already fucking your cats. Why stop there?
No, doesn't follow. Bacteria don't exist to consume. They exist to reproduce. And there's no problem doing that, so no pressure to consume anything but the easy stuff. Most of them don't even bother with harvesting radiative energy, preferring to hit sources that have already done some of the work for them.
However, a disassembler has an entirely different imperative, and an entirely different set of capabilities. All it would take for a grey goo scenario is for the one to become uncoupled from the other.
Natural gas from gas wells is not just burned off or vented. It is sold.
It's supposed to be. Out in the ND Bakken undertakings, the law requires that the gas output from the wells be taken off, rather than burned off, within one year of when the well begins to produce gas. Only a small fraction of the wells have done this -- one look at a night time satellite photo of the area shows you the result. Most of them look just like this. No one is rushing to prosecute the well owners, either.
The only rights worth more than the hot air it takes to describe them are the rights where the power exists that can and will enforce said right for you. And -- unfortunately -- rights being delineated in the US constitution ceased to matter when our congress and judiciary decided it was acceptable and practical to ignore their oaths in favor of expediency and funding.
However, in the case of scarce food, you will find that the typical individual will, when food is scarce enough, make very serious attempts to enforce their right to it at the expense of yours.
See, rights aren't what most people think they are. Not at all.
Here's the place where they typically demonstrate they are deluded: When they emit most sentences that contain "you can't", based on an idea. Because, oh yes, they can. The only question is "will they?" and in that case, if they are starving... sure they will.
Responsible cat owners -- that is to say, people who want their cats to live more than just a few years on average -- don't let their cats outside.
You have to subtract those numbers from your 76 to 96 million cats or you're just hand waving. We have six cats here; they don't go out at all, and I mean *never*. Most cat owners I know are smart enough to understand that cats have not evolved to deal with traffic; young humans with firecrackers/guns/poisons, curiosity, and little socialization; poisonous pools of vehicle fluids; and so on.
The other owners... well, you can't fix stupid, unfortunately.
So what? Animals happen to not be human. Why should I be concerned?
Because it isn't much of a step from there to "people in khallow's class are not in my class. Why should I be concerned?" (reference recent right-wing rhetoric about health care for a fine example of this.)
Animals are not human -- but humans are animals. You might want to keep that in mind. You have a great deal in common with those creatures. What happens to them because of arbitrary classing is just stuff that can happen to you when the classing paradigm shifts a little. And population and/or resource pressure are likely candidates for exactly that type of shift. Furthermore, classing is becoming quite divisive at the extremes in the US already; I can't speak for other places, but here, you can become "of no matter" in people's thinking fairly easily.
Then there's whole ethical spectrum of snuffing out lives, imposing suffering and the undertaking of cruelty, but I'm guessing those aren't significant to you, based on your apparent lack of concern.
If those helicopters were seriously impacting criminal activity, I would think they would have been shot down by now. There are 17 helicopters, each very expensive and hard to acquire in both the time and financial senses. Hardware sufficient to drop helicopters with extreme prejudice, particularly low flying ones, is almost free by comparison. Also easy. I could build such a device in my garage. One way is basic model rocketry and the most trivial short-ranged IR or human-assisted video guidance. Even a cheap drone could bring a helicopter down with the proper payload, which wouldn't even have to be explosive. Chemical and mechanical means are practical. Or go really simple: a 50 caliber machine gun, ground-to-air. So it seems quite unlikely these copters are having any significant effect on serious crime.
Unfortunately, the cost of the vast majority of pharmaceuticals is hardly related at all to the cost of the ingredients.
It's the R and D, the testing, the approvals, the red tape and paperwork, the patents, the lawyers, the lawsuits, other stuff along those lines, and of course the requirement to make a profit.
What this has the potential to bring in is a time where prototyping a drug from theoretical compound-might-do-this to have-compound-will-test is a practical reality.
Much drug generation is truly blind -- essentially, find a compound (rain forest, sea creature, etc.) and try it on a bunch of problems, see what happens. This could benefit a different approach, one that requires more up-front understanding and insight into what problem X might respond to. You could also use it with a shotgun approach, but with billions of possibilities (and probably more, later), it seems like one "shotgun" blast would require so much testing as to be wholly impractical.
That's not what they meant by arms. They consistently wrote about weaponry of all varieties by saying "arms." You're thinking of "small arms" which is also a term in use at the time, but is not the terminology used in the US constitution. Further, at the time, citizens could, and did, own weapons up to and including frigates, cannon and so on. These individuals were *extremely* welcome in militia call-ups and were typically assigned officer rank immediately.
In 1791 (when the bill of rights were ratified), “arms” included all manner of pistols, rifles, muskets, cannons, explosive and solid cannonballs, cannonballs filled with shards, frigates with multiple decks of cannon, wagons with explosives and multiple guns rigged to fire in unison, chain shot, flaming missiles soaked with pitch and other inflammable, easily spread and hard to extinguish compounds, swords, knives, bayonets, fighting canes, brass knuckles, battering rams, catapults, siege towers, glass bottles, garrotes, whips, chains, both fused and mechanically triggered explosives, striking weapons like sticks and poles and quarterstaffs and maces and war-hammers, spears, bows, axes, arrows and crossbows I could go on for quite some time. All of these things were in common use in warfare and self-defense at the time. Yet, knowing all these things, all they put in the 2nd amendment was “arms.” So clearly, that’s what they meant. Arms of any kind. They didn’t say “muskets and pistols.” They said arms.
If you really want to know if it's aliens figure out what stars brightening in that pattern would be useful for outside of signalling. Saying "I'm here" might be reasonable if neutrino beams and stars get cheap but doing something useful is more likely to get funded earlier.
Yes and no. The most obvious pattern, just general brightening, might be the beacon, and a more subtle pattern, perhaps just in a few element lines changing or some other kind of modulation than amplitude could carry further information. But, if space travel is as difficult as it appears to be, with a single light year being a temporal and energetic obstacle to all the biology we know about, it could still simply be "you're not alone out there."
On top of that, you're making an assumption that the source would be limited by a capitalist economy. It could be an economy of plenty, where there are enough resources for its constituents to do pretty much whatever they want. It might be something else entirely, like a military undertaking, or simply an experiment.
From our perspective, as we can't get there or communicate with them, if this is an artificial signal, we benefit simply by knowing we are not alone; we could, potentially, benefit from more detailed information, but as they don't know who or what they are talking to nor the extant circumstances, what benefits they could offer seem to me to be very difficult to present... without context, what do you say? If anything, I anticipate more math.
Given lots of materials resources, brightness modulation can be set up without high technology involved in the actual signaling. The initial cost would be high, but there would be almost no maintainance costs. Just set up a an orbiting series of spinning disks at considerable remove (deep space, slow orbit) from the source star. Into the disks, punch some large holes. As the disks spin, anyone looking at them will see a series of flashes as the star is occluded, then not. They would probably line the orbit up with the plane of the galaxy so the most potential worlds could be in line with the effect. The cost would seem to be staggering, but again, we have no reason to assume they don't have access to sufficient raw materials, automated workforces and manufacturing, and any amount of time you care to speculate on.
Time to shop, then. You're going to need a lot of chloroform, and quite a few condoms.
Oblig:
Dude1: You ever go camping? Dude2: Sure. Dude1: Hey, if you were butt-raped when camping, would you tell anyone? Dude2: Oh, hell no! Dude1: Wanna go camping?
Apple is likely going to recommend regular service during which the battery will be replaced.
Um. Apple is likely to obsolete that watch as soon as they possibly can, as well as completely drop support for it, and stop manufacturing / providing the custom battery inside, similar to what they have done for every other bit of hardware and software (except iTunes) they've manufactured that's older than my next-to-last tax return plus one or two.
But they will be right there offering you a new watch, much better than the "old" one. Cool, eh?
Oh, I think DeathElk got it all right... he's just in pain, as well he should be. Give his some credit, at least until he confirms for you his post was the work of an illiterate, rather than obviously the opposite.
No watt eye mien? Aye mite halve two right moor, THAN wear wood yew bee?
They tossed a port they really needed to keep: ethernet. To get (a slower, less capable, CPU-eating version of) it back, you must re-dongle the USB port (and you'd better hope you have some kind of mega-wire-spider so you can feed it power at the same time... and connect your USB stuff... and connect an external HDMI monitor...)
Then they failed to make wireless the thing they really needed to make wireless: charging. And why is this so needful? Because they REMOVED one of the best features of macbooks, the magsafe power cord, so now, instead of your macbook reliably staying on the table when you or your kid or your dog trips over the power cord, it's now considerably more likely to hit the floor instead. Also, of course, wireless charging is awesome, and wired charging is... not.
Apparently, this thing was designed by the same clever folks who made the new Mac Pro into a rats-nest generator, took away the expandable memory option for the mini, and broke both the hosts file LAN functionality. Bravo. Braaaaaavo. They are doing an excellent job of keeping me looking out for earlier model used Mac Pros. It appears that they feel they have enough money.
I agree that Apple has successfully identified something I clearly don't need: the new macbook.
Yes, I've been meaning to spend more time watching television and drinking beer. Thank you. Perhaps this evening I'll sit down, take in some spectator sports, and veg out.
So apple will make dongles to bridge the momentary time you need to bridge with legacy devices
That "momentary time" will only end until the day wifi or its successor can replicate the reliability and physical security of an Ethernet connection at 100 feet, or even further with good switches and routers. That day is not yet here.
Slashdot Mirror
Aye, true enough. The waste and light pollution are both big concerns of mine; sorry. I'm a bit trigger happy on the subject, or anything, apparently, that even looks like the subject. Mea culpa.
You need to learn about the amount of money crime, organized and otherwise, brings in. Google can help. Likewise, in re traceability, you need to learn about the underground market for weapons, particularly heavy weapons available via the international market. Again, Google can help.
And your post ignores the not so minor point that gunmen are disposable, not to mention that you have to catch the gunman in the first place, which statistics show the police are really, really bad at getting done.
Face it. If those helicopters were in any way significant with regard to reducing serious crime, they'd be smoking piles of rubbish in no time.
Helicopter shows up, you wait. It goes away, you continue. Threat level? Zero.
I bet you let your kids play unsupervised in the street too, right? After all, your kids should have the "freedom to roam around outside", right? And they're smarter than cats, so surely they'll be just fine, right? Right? Let 'em out in the morning, surely they'll come back for dinner, yes?
The plural of anecdote is not "data." The average lifespan of a cat is considerably less when allowed outdoors. For excruciatingly obvious reasons. Given the average, anyone who can rub two brain cells together can extrapolate the risk.
Hey, why not? After all, you're already fucking your cats. Why stop there?
No, doesn't follow. Bacteria don't exist to consume. They exist to reproduce. And there's no problem doing that, so no pressure to consume anything but the easy stuff. Most of them don't even bother with harvesting radiative energy, preferring to hit sources that have already done some of the work for them.
However, a disassembler has an entirely different imperative, and an entirely different set of capabilities. All it would take for a grey goo scenario is for the one to become uncoupled from the other.
Absolutely. As is any notion of safety. :)
Based on your post, I suspect almost anyone could meet that metric. Unless you're just ignorant. :)
It's supposed to be. Out in the ND Bakken undertakings, the law requires that the gas output from the wells be taken off, rather than burned off, within one year of when the well begins to produce gas. Only a small fraction of the wells have done this -- one look at a night time satellite photo of the area shows you the result. Most of them look just like this. No one is rushing to prosecute the well owners, either.
The only rights worth more than the hot air it takes to describe them are the rights where the power exists that can and will enforce said right for you. And -- unfortunately -- rights being delineated in the US constitution ceased to matter when our congress and judiciary decided it was acceptable and practical to ignore their oaths in favor of expediency and funding.
However, in the case of scarce food, you will find that the typical individual will, when food is scarce enough, make very serious attempts to enforce their right to it at the expense of yours.
See, rights aren't what most people think they are. Not at all.
Here's the place where they typically demonstrate they are deluded: When they emit most sentences that contain "you can't", based on an idea. Because, oh yes, they can. The only question is "will they?" and in that case, if they are starving... sure they will.
The stupider people are, the less control they will exert over reproductive issues in their lives.
Pretty sure that's both a major, perhaps *the* major, factor in population growth, and it is definitely a genetically coupled factor.
I support a bounty on sycodon. See how that works?
Responsible cat owners -- that is to say, people who want their cats to live more than just a few years on average -- don't let their cats outside.
You have to subtract those numbers from your 76 to 96 million cats or you're just hand waving. We have six cats here; they don't go out at all, and I mean *never*. Most cat owners I know are smart enough to understand that cats have not evolved to deal with traffic; young humans with firecrackers/guns/poisons, curiosity, and little socialization; poisonous pools of vehicle fluids; and so on.
The other owners... well, you can't fix stupid, unfortunately.
Because it isn't much of a step from there to "people in khallow's class are not in my class. Why should I be concerned?" (reference recent right-wing rhetoric about health care for a fine example of this.)
Animals are not human -- but humans are animals. You might want to keep that in mind. You have a great deal in common with those creatures. What happens to them because of arbitrary classing is just stuff that can happen to you when the classing paradigm shifts a little. And population and/or resource pressure are likely candidates for exactly that type of shift. Furthermore, classing is becoming quite divisive at the extremes in the US already; I can't speak for other places, but here, you can become "of no matter" in people's thinking fairly easily.
Then there's whole ethical spectrum of snuffing out lives, imposing suffering and the undertaking of cruelty, but I'm guessing those aren't significant to you, based on your apparent lack of concern.
If those helicopters were seriously impacting criminal activity, I would think they would have been shot down by now. There are 17 helicopters, each very expensive and hard to acquire in both the time and financial senses. Hardware sufficient to drop helicopters with extreme prejudice, particularly low flying ones, is almost free by comparison. Also easy. I could build such a device in my garage. One way is basic model rocketry and the most trivial short-ranged IR or human-assisted video guidance. Even a cheap drone could bring a helicopter down with the proper payload, which wouldn't even have to be explosive. Chemical and mechanical means are practical. Or go really simple: a 50 caliber machine gun, ground-to-air. So it seems quite unlikely these copters are having any significant effect on serious crime.
Yeah, it's not like lots and lots of free energy is available (cough solar radiation cough), is it?
Disassembler runaway is entirely possible, energy wise, sad to say.
Unfortunately, the cost of the vast majority of pharmaceuticals is hardly related at all to the cost of the ingredients.
It's the R and D, the testing, the approvals, the red tape and paperwork, the patents, the lawyers, the lawsuits, other stuff along those lines, and of course the requirement to make a profit.
What this has the potential to bring in is a time where prototyping a drug from theoretical compound-might-do-this to have-compound-will-test is a practical reality.
Much drug generation is truly blind -- essentially, find a compound (rain forest, sea creature, etc.) and try it on a bunch of problems, see what happens. This could benefit a different approach, one that requires more up-front understanding and insight into what problem X might respond to. You could also use it with a shotgun approach, but with billions of possibilities (and probably more, later), it seems like one "shotgun" blast would require so much testing as to be wholly impractical.
That's not what they meant by arms. They consistently wrote about weaponry of all varieties by saying "arms." You're thinking of "small arms" which is also a term in use at the time, but is not the terminology used in the US constitution. Further, at the time, citizens could, and did, own weapons up to and including frigates, cannon and so on. These individuals were *extremely* welcome in militia call-ups and were typically assigned officer rank immediately.
In 1791 (when the bill of rights were ratified), “arms” included all manner of pistols, rifles, muskets, cannons, explosive and solid cannonballs, cannonballs filled with shards, frigates with multiple decks of cannon, wagons with explosives and multiple guns rigged to fire in unison, chain shot, flaming missiles soaked with pitch and other inflammable, easily spread and hard to extinguish compounds, swords, knives, bayonets, fighting canes, brass knuckles, battering rams, catapults, siege towers, glass bottles, garrotes, whips, chains, both fused and mechanically triggered explosives, striking weapons like sticks and poles and quarterstaffs and maces and war-hammers, spears, bows, axes, arrows and crossbows I could go on for quite some time. All of these things were in common use in warfare and self-defense at the time. Yet, knowing all these things, all they put in the 2nd amendment was “arms.” So clearly, that’s what they meant. Arms of any kind. They didn’t say “muskets and pistols.” They said arms.
Yes and no. The most obvious pattern, just general brightening, might be the beacon, and a more subtle pattern, perhaps just in a few element lines changing or some other kind of modulation than amplitude could carry further information. But, if space travel is as difficult as it appears to be, with a single light year being a temporal and energetic obstacle to all the biology we know about, it could still simply be "you're not alone out there."
On top of that, you're making an assumption that the source would be limited by a capitalist economy. It could be an economy of plenty, where there are enough resources for its constituents to do pretty much whatever they want. It might be something else entirely, like a military undertaking, or simply an experiment.
From our perspective, as we can't get there or communicate with them, if this is an artificial signal, we benefit simply by knowing we are not alone; we could, potentially, benefit from more detailed information, but as they don't know who or what they are talking to nor the extant circumstances, what benefits they could offer seem to me to be very difficult to present... without context, what do you say? If anything, I anticipate more math.
Given lots of materials resources, brightness modulation can be set up without high technology involved in the actual signaling. The initial cost would be high, but there would be almost no maintainance costs. Just set up a an orbiting series of spinning disks at considerable remove (deep space, slow orbit) from the source star. Into the disks, punch some large holes. As the disks spin, anyone looking at them will see a series of flashes as the star is occluded, then not. They would probably line the orbit up with the plane of the galaxy so the most potential worlds could be in line with the effect. The cost would seem to be staggering, but again, we have no reason to assume they don't have access to sufficient raw materials, automated workforces and manufacturing, and any amount of time you care to speculate on.
Time to shop, then. You're going to need a lot of chloroform, and quite a few condoms.
Oblig:
Dude1: You ever go camping?
Dude2: Sure.
Dude1: Hey, if you were butt-raped when camping, would you tell anyone?
Dude2: Oh, hell no!
Dude1: Wanna go camping?
Neutrino beams used on otherwise useless stars to serve as beacons doesn't, though.
Um. Apple is likely to obsolete that watch as soon as they possibly can, as well as completely drop support for it, and stop manufacturing / providing the custom battery inside, similar to what they have done for every other bit of hardware and software (except iTunes) they've manufactured that's older than my next-to-last tax return plus one or two.
But they will be right there offering you a new watch, much better than the "old" one. Cool, eh?
Oh, I think DeathElk got it all right... he's just in pain, as well he should be. Give his some credit, at least until he confirms for you his post was the work of an illiterate, rather than obviously the opposite.
No watt eye mien? Aye mite halve two right moor, THAN wear wood yew bee?
The new laptop:
They tossed a port they really needed to keep: ethernet. To get (a slower, less capable, CPU-eating version of) it back, you must re-dongle the USB port (and you'd better hope you have some kind of mega-wire-spider so you can feed it power at the same time... and connect your USB stuff... and connect an external HDMI monitor...)
Then they failed to make wireless the thing they really needed to make wireless: charging. And why is this so needful? Because they REMOVED one of the best features of macbooks, the magsafe power cord, so now, instead of your macbook reliably staying on the table when you or your kid or your dog trips over the power cord, it's now considerably more likely to hit the floor instead. Also, of course, wireless charging is awesome, and wired charging is... not.
Apparently, this thing was designed by the same clever folks who made the new Mac Pro into a rats-nest generator, took away the expandable memory option for the mini, and broke both the hosts file LAN functionality. Bravo. Braaaaaavo. They are doing an excellent job of keeping me looking out for earlier model used Mac Pros. It appears that they feel they have enough money.
I agree that Apple has successfully identified something I clearly don't need: the new macbook.
Yes, I've been meaning to spend more time watching television and drinking beer. Thank you. Perhaps this evening I'll sit down, take in some spectator sports, and veg out.
Or not. :)
That "momentary time" will only end until the day wifi or its successor can replicate the reliability and physical security of an Ethernet connection at 100 feet, or even further with good switches and routers. That day is not yet here.