Slashdot Mirror


User: Baldrson

Baldrson's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
2,926
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 2,926

  1. Team America's Freedom Masers on Pentagon Urges Space-Based Solar Power · · Score: 1
    Space-based solar powered Freedom Masers for Team America, World Police! But there is still hope this will turn out the the National Space Transportation System -- continual cost over-runs bankrupting the bureaucracy and the government before it is close to reality.

    Moreover, if someone like Ron Paul gets any sort of influence on all this technosocialism, there is still hope that commercial space will make the whole thing moot with lunar materials exponentiating manufacturing and human presence in orbital solar power satellite habitats as Jeff Bezos discussed in his Valedictorian speech during his senior year at Miami High School.

    I can't imagine where the got that idea.

  2. President Camacho Has a PLAN on NSSO on Space Based Solar Power · · Score: 1
    El Presidente Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho has a PLAN to save AMERICAH!

    He'll pick a bunch of SMART guys and they'll solve our ENGERNY problems and they'll do it all in ONE WEEK or he'll... uh... he'll uh... give them MORE TIME and MORE MONEY because its REALLY REALLY HARD to solve our ENGERNY problems! And then if they don't do it before they die then... uh... he'll pick some MORE SMARTER GUYS and let THEM solve our ENGERNY problems!

    Nothing like incentives!

  3. Dead white males on Silicon Valley Culture Originated In Radio Days · · Score: -1, Troll

    Do we have to put up with yet another mythologizing of dead white males? Thank God for his Chosen Americans or we might not have had the Immigration and Nationalities Act of 1965 to terminate that hideously white nation.

  4. Riddle me this... on Will China Beat the United States Back to the Moon? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Who is going to be better at risk management inherent in technology development: Someone who is spending their own money or someone who is spending other people's money?

  5. Re:Private space flight on Will China Beat the United States Back to the Moon? · · Score: 1
  6. NASA Budget is 2800 Google Lunar X-Prizes on Will China Beat the United States Back to the Moon? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    NASA's budget for 2007 was $16.8 billion. The Google Lunar X-Prize is $0.030 billion with a duration of 5 years. Assuming NASA budget remains approximately the same that means NASA's budget could renewably fund the equivalent of 2800 Google Lunar X-Prizes.

  7. Of course its Constitutional! on US Senate Fails To Reinstate Habeas Corpus · · Score: 4, Funny

    The reason suspension of Habeas Corpus is Constitutional is that the government knows the people are going to rebel against to due to its suspension, and rebellion is a condition under which the suspension of Habeas Corpus is Constitutional. Do I get to be on the Supreme Court now?

  8. Iran has lots of fuel on Russia Tests World's Largest Non-Nuclear Bomb · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Wouldn't it be ironic if Iran were prevented from developing nuclear weapons only to find that they then developed fuel air bombs using a resource that they had in far more abundant supply than uranium? Moreover, wouldn't it be ironic if the ubiquitous availability of fuel in civilization enabled terrorists, gangs, etc. to bring down civilization?

  9. Re:Scaling laws on Swedish Company Trials Peer-to-Peer Cellphones · · Score: 1

    Presumably there will be hard encryption within the mesh so there could be some form of accounting for who was routing the most packets, with corresponding compensation.

  10. Scaling laws on Swedish Company Trials Peer-to-Peer Cellphones · · Score: 1

    The scaling laws relating to battery power cited in the article are off. Power use per capita is driven by packet rate through one's phone times the power required to relay the packet. As density increases, power drops off with a square law while the number of packets per capita doesn't increase linearly, nor even quadratically, let alone exponentially, just because the population density increases. Indeed, given that human interaction is more direct the more dense the population, there is reason to believe that the packets per capita may go down with population density.

  11. Evil geniuses for a worse tomorrow on Smarter-than-Human Intelligence & The Singularity Summit · · Score: 1
    One of the things I find highly suspicious about many of the "singularity" raconteurs is their fear of "unfriendly AI". We already have unfriendly intelligences around us competing for the same biological niche. They're called "other humans" -- or more specifically, "other humans who can't escape their unconscious negative sum game instincts". The more intelligent these unfriendly intelligences the worse off the rest of us are. Indeed, they might fear artificial intelligences since AIs will simply play the role of the innocent but observant child pointing out that the Evil Geniuses for a Worse Tomorrow have no clothes.

    "Unfriendly AI" really boils down to one of two problems:

    1) AIs under the control of Evil Geniuses for a Worse Tomorrow (you know -- the kind of people who would use spread fear of "unfriendly AI" so they could maintain control of AI technology for their own use).

    or

    2) Poor natural language skills.

    I prefer to focus on natural language knowledge acquisition so that communication with AIs is more along the lines of "Do what I want." rather than "Do what I say." since a major component of natural language communication is precisely that distinction.

    Toward that end, my signature says the rest:

  12. Hey Gates -- your next argument for immigration! on Implanted RFID Chips Linked To Cancer · · Score: 1

    Immigrants not only do jobs Americans won't do, they can be implanted with chips Americans won't take prior to embarking for the US.

  13. Re:The oldest profession on After 10,000 Years, Farming No Longer Dominates · · Score: 2, Funny

    It is heartless to deprive men of their mates via de facto monetization of female fertility within corporate and governmental harems.

  14. The oldest profession on After 10,000 Years, Farming No Longer Dominates · · Score: 1, Interesting
    People think "the services sector" is something new in civilization, but they forget the oldest profession: prostitution.

    Almost as soon as there were cities, there were temple prostitutes who, along with grain, formed the backing for much of the early currencies. These days the temple is returning to "services" for backing of the value of its currency, but we must ask ourselves one simple question:

    When subsistence agrarians are cut off from their lands through centralized land ownership, and wealth is increasingly centralized, how are we going to keep tabs on the portion of "the services sector" that is really just some form of temple prostitution? Or don't you care that the children of the world are increasingly going to have to provide, in the form of "services", what amounts to prostitution for their food and shelter?

  15. Compliance vs Compression on Algorithm Rates Trustworthiness of Wikipedia Pages · · Score: 1

    This algorithm is measuring compliance with the Wikipedia dispute processing norms -- not "trustworthiness". A better measure of "trustworthiness" of a passage is its consistency with the rest of the body of human knowledge -- which is most strictly measured by the degree to which it is not a special case within a compressed representation of that knowledge. This is the basis of the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge. The Hutter Prize is currently using a 100M sample from Wikipedia as its corpus.

  16. Re:Serial Endosymbiosis on One Species' Genome Discovered Inside Another's · · Score: 1
    It seems Serial Endosymbiosis has a lot in common with vertical transmission as an evolutionary source of symbiosis. I wonder if there is really any ultimate difference?

    PS: I find the statement that a vertically transmitted bacteria is a "parasite", without clear evidence that it is on balance a negative influence on the host, to be rather questionable. We need a word for organisms that are "sited with" other organisms in a damaging way and if we are to use "parasite" in other ways then it harms scientific communication. Indeed, "parasite" suffers from "parasitic" definitions. Fascinating when you think about it that way.

  17. Re:Atmospheric vortex engine cooling on Heat Wave Shuts Down Alabama Reactor · · Score: 1

    They use a heat exchanger to warm up in-rushing air (drawn by the chimney effect of the vortex) and cool the water. See slide 10 of the technical description (warning PDF).

  18. Re:Atmospheric vortex engine cooling on Heat Wave Shuts Down Alabama Reactor · · Score: 1

    Would an atmospheric vortex be more of an "eyesore" than a "tourist attraction"?

  19. Re:Atmospheric vortex engine cooling on Heat Wave Shuts Down Alabama Reactor · · Score: 1

    While that is another reason to run full scale tests of the idea in appropriately remote locations, the models do not predict any substantial local problems except, perhaps, a small amount of localized rain that would change position with the wind.

  20. OpenOffice opens Power Point on Heat Wave Shuts Down Alabama Reactor · · Score: 1

    Take it easy and download OpenOffice.

  21. Atmospheric vortex engine cooling on Heat Wave Shuts Down Alabama Reactor · · Score: 1
    It sounds like its time for the nuclear industry to do some testing of the atmospheric vortex engine (see slide 18 (warning PowerPoint):
    • delivers the performance of a $60 million natural draft tower at the cost of a $15 million mechanical draft tower
    • eliminates need for fans, saving 1% of the energy produced by a power plant
    • eliminates need for tall chimney, saving 2/3 of the capital cost
    • replaces conventional cooling towers
    • delivers the heat to the upper atmosphere where it radiates into space
    • solves problem of re-circulation
    • solves problem of fogging

    Now of course there is the minor problem of having a tornado by the tail near a nuclear reactor -- but aside from the fact that you can channel hot water quite a distance economically, the hydrodynamic models (computational and scale) indicate that the base of the vortex can, indeed, be contained in a location. The real problem is that this system hasn't been scaled up to a sufficient size -- in an appropriately isolated test area -- to validate the models to the degree required by public safety.

  22. Naw. It was the demand for labor. on New Explanation For the Industrial Revolution · · Score: 1

    The US frontier drew away labor from Great Britain and raised its value to the point that automation became more vital.

  23. Re:Too late for nonterrestrial resources utilizati on Public Discussion Opened on Space Solar Power · · Score: 1

    I've got a much shorter write up, but the idea could support a book-length description as well as a revolution in political economy.

  24. Lemmings on Can Space Nerds Get Along? · · Score: 1
    Space is the ultimate positive sum game but rent-seeking is the ultimate negative sum game.

    When you get NASA involved, you are immediately in rent-seeking hell with the bonus that the only way you won't drive private capital away from critical technologies NASA is working on is for NASA to show such gross incompetence over the course of decades that the private investors no longer worry that NASA will do to them what it did to private launch services when it introduced "The National Space Transportation System" to launch satellites.

  25. Re:Too late for nonterrestrial resources utilizati on Public Discussion Opened on Space Solar Power · · Score: 1

    If you speak from the standpoint of the public choice rent-seekers controlling government and centralized corporate structures you're correct -- but those people aren't of the pioneering culture -- they merely pushed the pioneering cultures buttons to get it to do their bidding during Apollo, etc. The Soviets pushed on space as a propaganda tool precisely because it was so powerful a mythic symbol for their own pioneering population as well as the people of their, then, primary adversary: The USA.