I'm pretty much convinced that intelligent life is extremely improbable, and that we're alone in the galaxy.
If by "intelligent life" you mean human-like civilization with very complic... er, "rich material culture" way of life, I completely agree.
However, it is very much possible that Cosmos is full of various intelligent beings of different kinds, covering spectrum from dolphin-like intelligent, playful, social and friendly creatures, all the way to almost "Alien"-like super tough, hive-building predator killer monsters. However, what we probably won't find in high supply is any kind of beings capable or wanting to travel out of their home worlds.
Because, you see, the story of humans on Earth is story of a nerd beating all the jocks and becoming the top dog in his school, all that without giving up his nerdness and growing muscles, of course (e.g. by going to the gym and working out). While such story has certain appeal and makes a nice comedy plot, it is very unlikely to happen out of the realm of fiction, and even less likely to happen twice (or at least not very often).
We as a species broke out of the beaten path of survival because of peculiar pattern of our ancestors' position in food chain and our planet's climate history.
It is not some inevitable fate that will happen anywhere if you give it enough time, like Karl Sagan believed. It is more of a deviation from usual cycles of evolution. Besides, we still may fall back to self-indulgence (and we actually regularly do, according to history of most successful and organized societies from the past). Once we make it the way we want it and solve all our problems that worry us on this planet, we won't even wish to go out and search for some alien intelligent life, just like those hypothetic intelligent top-of-the-food-chain superbeasts I mentioned before. Absolute success is as much a showkiller as catastrophic failure.
Now that you know my position, I can get into the why is murder bad. It is because you are purposely taking a life that could contribute to society. Killing them after they demonstrated they weren't productive and actually harmful to society is fine with me. But I think we should at least give them a chance to live to an age where this can be demonstrated before killing them. If they didn't want kids in the first place, then there are ways to prevent it before an abortion becomes an option.
OK, your reasoning is clear. I suppose you would OK abortion in case of pregnancy resulting from rape? I mean, there is that asocial male who couldn't pass the sexual acceptance filter and so instead of accepting the fate of own biological line extinction, he resorted to forceful conception. I think we shouldn't let him get out with it. Women didn't consent on that, you can not call on her responsibility.
What about high-risk pregnancies? Would you insist on keeping this one, even if it may die after all the effort to keep it alive, when there could be more of them born later from that mother, if she survives? Following your reasoning, social benefit is greater in latter case.
Now, what about the "sexual con men" - man didn't use force, but he used fraud to represent himself as suitable father to be, but was seen through early? Isn't it a variant of the rape case?
What about combination of last two: teen pregnancies? She is a minor, not fully responsible for her actions. Later in her life, that girl may be able to support three kids in good environment, if she is not encumbered by caring for a child born early in her life.
Some or perhaps most of this "cases" (new lives) will have great chances of ending, as you put it, in: "Killing them after they demonstrated they weren't productive and actually harmful to society is fine with me.". You, sir, are a hypocrite.
That's a pretty standard design feature in modern solar cells, though typically they use pyramids rather than honeycombs.
I know about it, the V-groove, like in VMOSFETS, but I thought it was done that way to make light-exposed area of P-N junction larger, not to lower its albedo?
...cover the front of solar cell with deep, open, honeycomb-shaped, reflective walls (e.g. Aluminum or silver) grid? That would effectively act as a light trap, making solar panel more "absolutely black body"-like. Or, even better, make open "boxes" with walls covered in solar cells. Photon should have very little chance to escape after multiple reflections...
However, there never was a show stopper weapon in the history of war.
There is always a workaround. Sometimes it is a stupid, "non-workaround" like sending bigger mass of infantryman against machine guns and barbed wire in WWI, but each new mil tech is response to a particular problem, which poses a new problem for other side, which then eventually finds out another response and so on.
So far, there are certain premises behind MTHEL. That premises are that threat is small, fast but at the same time very visible, with predictable trajectory and that there is uninterrupted line of sight between MTHEL and said threat (targeted shells or missiles).
Each of these premises can and will be contested by next generation of offensive weapons that will be designed to work around this defense system, when it gets massively deployed in the field.
Some of these "new problems" for offensive side even have working solutions today: e.g. stealth technology, cruise missiles, smart self-guided ammo that implements evasion maneuvers... robust, cheap and powerful, micro electronics today can offer intelligence to yesterday dumb and dull iron. It will push the prices of war up for both "regulars" and "insurgents" but it will not end the wars. There are even "lower tech" solutions: more "duds" launched along with "live" shells, circular or wide-angle simultaneous launches, or simple infiltration and suicide attack demolition of expensive and efficient weapon.
My guess is that this kind of weapon (after it renders classical artillery obsolete in couple of decades) will excel in air-to-surface missions. After all, best place to spot (and fry) slow prowler missile crawling toward your positions is from high above. However, by then, all SA, AA defense will be laser-based too (no ceiling!), so it will be very risky. Whoever carries faster shooters, and more of them, will prevail in the battle between land and air. As soon as possible, "Star Wars" style instant-kill blasters will emerge...
Also, iirc the THEL used deuterium to power its pumping, which could make it rather expensive. The breakthrough will be when they manage to get solid state lasers ( like Neodynium-YAG ) working like this.
But, chemical power is what makes the weapon autonomous. Go solid state and you'll have to carry around generator and fuel for it. Besides, how fast can you produce laser-usable energy from classic fuel? It is similar trade-off like between classical explosive-propelled artillery and rail guns. If you have hefty electric power source, like i.e. on the large battle ship, you may consider the option of rail gun. If not, you are better off with stored chemical energy quanta - the ammo.
Perhaps in the future someone will invent universal disposable/recyclable fast power cells - some objects of enormous electrical capacity which, when triggered somehow, virtually instantly fills up by an undergoing fast chemical process. Then we will be able to use these in laser- or rail- weaponry, as well as in emergency tools, winches, jacks, air compressors, etc. I can imagine that, like ammo today, it will still be dangerous to store and handle, though.
You could, if "insurgent" was in line-of-sight with you, but typically they aren't, hence high-profile trajectory, which is a good case for laser shot. In fact, you are better off with having your own mortars ready for fast response & targeting radar which recalculates position from incoming shell trajectory.
It is simple to make it automagic: If a window got focus, or is topmost (visible) window on desktop, its process and its "processes relatives" (parent process, child processes, sibling processes) get higher priority (lower niceness).
For advanced users, if they have multiple applications running, they should be able to edit an ordered list of descending priorities for them, but if they don't, then priority == visiting history (last visited, most served, second last visited, next most served,... etc, last visited,... come again tomorrow!).
I believe that concept (hierarchy) is easy to grasp for anyone, not just computer scientists.
However, if that computer is not a desktop machine (human inanimate tool, a brain extension) but primary a server, automaton chugging alone for most of the time with just a nice, graphical "cockpit" for admin to occasionally peek into its work, then there should be an unmovable (at least not magically) hard line that separates desktop apps from background server processes and daemons. Each "world" should have own "pool" of slices - there should be a two-layered scheduling approach - on the highest level it is decided if this CPU slice is given^Wfirst offered to the server pool or to the desktop pool, then scheduling is performed for subsequent layer, according to predefined policy for one or for the other pool.
But they go above and beyond the call of duty here, drowning everybody in layers of process that have no possible benefit.)
I haven't been to Boeing, but this may have something to do with fact that today none knows how to recreate e.g. Apollo project because too many knowledge resided only in heads of employees, who were subsequently fired, retired or died of old age. Sometimes the benefits of paperwork and "process" are neither immediate nor certain to surface... ever, but these things may make difference between "can do" and "can not do" in some indefinite point in future. IMHO, collecting experience in non-volatile recordings is essential for a high tech business that as its core values has reliability and safety.
Since the air pressure on mars is 1/100 of earth's you will need about 1/100th of the helium you would use here on earth.
Not quite. You would need almost just as much of it as here on Earth:
Pressure is the same for gas inside blimp and gas outside of it. By Archimedes' Principle, the difference in weight of gas (Helium) inside blimp and weight of atmospheric gas displaced by blimp and payload must be greater or equal to weight of empty blimp and the payload.
In other words, what pushes your lighter-then-air aircraft up is not some magic quality of gas which fills it, but the weight of air missing from the space occupied by your aircraft. If air around you is lighter (e.g. because it has lower pressure), you need to displace more of it to keep on flying.
For air pressure on mars 1/100 of earth's, on same temperature, you would need 100 times greater volume of blimp to float the same payload weight. If Martian atmosphere was the same as Earth's, only lower pressure, you would end up needing (approximately) same mass (since all three: air, helium and payload are in same gravitational field, we can compare masses in our calculations instead of weights) of Helium as on Earth, but in much larger blimp (fabric of greater area, weighting more). On the plus side, bigger blimp would have more air drag if it doubles as parachute.
However, since Martian air is mostly CO2 and Earth's air mostly 80% nitrogen (N2) and 20% oxygen (O2), Martian "air" is approximately (12+2*16)/((2*14*0.8+2*16*0.2), or 1.5 times heavier, mol for mol, so it is assumed that we would need only 65% of Helium mass needed here on Earth.
Your glider will probably be ripped to shreds, and then it's a long way down.
Hmm, use a variable geometry wing lander design to adjust for high speed entry phase cruise at high altitude, then switch to higher lift configuration at lower speed?
OTOH, it would still require quite elaborate landing infrastructure (wire arrest, very long landing strip).
You either end up going in at such a flat angle that you just bounce straight off the atmosphere like a skipping stone,
Why can't we make a series of "skips"? Each encounter, each "skip" will take some KE off. Or, starting from orbit trajectory, retrobrake in controlled manner to keep a circular orbit with shrinking radius and "surf" on top of atmosphere slowly losing speed until you are so slow that the border "softens"? Mach 4 horizontal flight is not such a big deal and you ought to lose KE from the drag.
What's more interesting is that brain death (an EEG flatline) seems to be a reversible condition.
Flatline reversible? Does it mean that prolonged coma could perhaps be treated with a sort of jump start, like, an ECT shock to induce "reboot"? Is there a "pacemaker" part of the brain?
I don't know exactly what kind of gel do you have in mind, but I thought gelatinous paste or very viscous fluid would tend to leek less than, e.g. water, in case the suit gets damaged. Just in case you had an actual objection on the subject of space hygiene and not just tried to pull a joke which I missed, I propose following method for changing into something more comfortable after getting home from space work:
1. remove suit 2. take a shower to wash off the rest of the filler 3. dry 4. put on space station casual clothes 5. have suit washed (change filler after each use to prevent unwanted microbe farming) and store it away.
However I cant' see that actually being possible, and having any flexibility. If You expand even slightly your blood pressure will drop. it would have to fit everywhere exactly, down to the gonads. cause you'd get enormous swelling in any place there was no counter-force.
Fill the remaining empty space between body and suit with a fluid (or perhaps a gel). That would even the pressure and as a plus, double as anti-G equipment.
Re:This is also the Pirate Party's stance
on
Patents Don't Pay
·
· Score: 1
Then there is another loophole: you sell to the consumer DIY kit of generic components in right measures and a test indicator to verify success of resulting chemical and a recipe (instructions), strap all the disclaimers ("DON'T do this if you are not a...", blah, blah, blah) and of course a legal warning about not giving it to someone else when prepared.
Sorry, I had a large pause in the middle of writing the post. Unfinished sentence in the middle was meant to become: "Fourier analysis can break down periodic signals into harmonic components, but mixing all the ingredients back in may produce quite different signal envelope. That fact is deliberately used in DSP to simplify calculations."
Skin effect is effectively, in a nutshell, variation of conductor's resistance as function of signal's frequency. Strictly speaking, it ought to make harmonic distortions. However, this effect is quite negligible in signals whose frequencies are in audio spectrum.
OTOH, there are people who can positively recognize the difference by listening. Obvious conclusion is that our theory of auditory experience is incomplete in some way. There is something somewhere we've chosen not to look.
My first bet was on signal phase shift, as frequency response has been thoroughly "ironed straight" even more then is necessary, according to our tests. Fourier analysis can break down periodic signals into
Another possibility is that we have neglected the fact that our auditory sensors - "hair cells" may have more then one mode of resonance: since they are basically little mechanical oscillators, they could probably resonate on overtones, too. Therefore, it could be possible for a human to hear certain discrete ultrasound frequencies as well, although much attenuated.
Archimedes of Syracuse, Hero of Alexandria... most famous engineers of Classical Age, were Greeks (well... Hellenic colonists in Sicily and Egypt, respectively) and they predated and very much influenced and inspired Roman engineers (which is why memory of those two is so well preserved).
There already are air corridors. Why not train airline pilots in joining, leaving and flying in "wild geese" - "V" shaped formations on common path segments to save fuel? Of course, provided passenger airplanes could fly in formations at all... AFAIK they avoid flying in trail of another airliner because of turbulences. Then, why military planes can fly in formations, what is essential difference? Wing span?
Slashdot Mirror
Err... I found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_balloon
Solar-powered hovering device? No problem... solar heated hot-air baloon! (there is also a prior art out there, in some kids' TV show)
If by "intelligent life" you mean human-like civilization with very complic... er, "rich material culture" way of life, I completely agree.
However, it is very much possible that Cosmos is full of various intelligent beings of different kinds, covering spectrum from dolphin-like intelligent, playful, social and friendly creatures, all the way to almost "Alien"-like super tough, hive-building predator killer monsters. However, what we probably won't find in high supply is any kind of beings capable or wanting to travel out of their home worlds.
Because, you see, the story of humans on Earth is story of a nerd beating all the jocks and becoming the top dog in his school, all that without giving up his nerdness and growing muscles, of course (e.g. by going to the gym and working out). While such story has certain appeal and makes a nice comedy plot, it is very unlikely to happen out of the realm of fiction, and even less likely to happen twice (or at least not very often).
We as a species broke out of the beaten path of survival because of peculiar pattern of our ancestors' position in food chain and our planet's climate history.
It is not some inevitable fate that will happen anywhere if you give it enough time, like Karl Sagan believed. It is more of a deviation from usual cycles of evolution. Besides, we still may fall back to self-indulgence (and we actually regularly do, according to history of most successful and organized societies from the past). Once we make it the way we want it and solve all our problems that worry us on this planet, we won't even wish to go out and search for some alien intelligent life, just like those hypothetic intelligent top-of-the-food-chain superbeasts I mentioned before. Absolute success is as much a showkiller as catastrophic failure.
OK, your reasoning is clear. I suppose you would OK abortion in case of pregnancy resulting from rape? I mean, there is that asocial male who couldn't pass the sexual acceptance filter and so instead of accepting the fate of own biological line extinction, he resorted to forceful conception. I think we shouldn't let him get out with it. Women didn't consent on that, you can not call on her responsibility.
What about high-risk pregnancies? Would you insist on keeping this one, even if it may die after all the effort to keep it alive, when there could be more of them born later from that mother, if she survives? Following your reasoning, social benefit is greater in latter case.
Now, what about the "sexual con men" - man didn't use force, but he used fraud to represent himself as suitable father to be, but was seen through early? Isn't it a variant of the rape case?
What about combination of last two: teen pregnancies? She is a minor, not fully responsible for her actions. Later in her life, that girl may be able to support three kids in good environment, if she is not encumbered by caring for a child born early in her life.
Some or perhaps most of this "cases" (new lives) will have great chances of ending, as you put it, in: "Killing them after they demonstrated they weren't productive and actually harmful to society is fine with me.". You, sir, are a hypocrite.
...cover the front of solar cell with deep, open, honeycomb-shaped, reflective walls (e.g. Aluminum or silver) grid? That would effectively act as a light trap, making solar panel more "absolutely black body"-like. Or, even better, make open "boxes" with walls covered in solar cells. Photon should have very little chance to escape after multiple reflections...
However, there never was a show stopper weapon in the history of war.
There is always a workaround. Sometimes it is a stupid, "non-workaround" like sending bigger mass of infantryman against machine guns and barbed wire in WWI, but each new mil tech is response to a particular problem, which poses a new problem for other side, which then eventually finds out another response and so on.
So far, there are certain premises behind MTHEL. That premises are that threat is small, fast but at the same time very visible, with predictable trajectory and that there is uninterrupted line of sight between MTHEL and said threat (targeted shells or missiles).
Each of these premises can and will be contested by next generation of offensive weapons that will be designed to work around this defense system, when it gets massively deployed in the field.
Some of these "new problems" for offensive side even have working solutions today: e.g. stealth technology, cruise missiles, smart self-guided ammo that implements evasion maneuvers... robust, cheap and powerful, micro electronics today can offer intelligence to yesterday dumb and dull iron. It will push the prices of war up for both "regulars" and "insurgents" but it will not end the wars. There are even "lower tech" solutions: more "duds" launched along with "live" shells, circular or wide-angle simultaneous launches, or simple infiltration and suicide attack demolition of expensive and efficient weapon.
My guess is that this kind of weapon (after it renders classical artillery obsolete in couple of decades) will excel in air-to-surface missions. After all, best place to spot (and fry) slow prowler missile crawling toward your positions is from high above. However, by then, all SA, AA defense will be laser-based too (no ceiling!), so it will be very risky. Whoever carries faster shooters, and more of them, will prevail in the battle between land and air. As soon as possible, "Star Wars" style instant-kill blasters will emerge...
But, chemical power is what makes the weapon autonomous. Go solid state and you'll have to carry around generator and fuel for it. Besides, how fast can you produce laser-usable energy from classic fuel? It is similar trade-off like between classical explosive-propelled artillery and rail guns. If you have hefty electric power source, like i.e. on the large battle ship, you may consider the option of rail gun. If not, you are better off with stored chemical energy quanta - the ammo.
Perhaps in the future someone will invent universal disposable/recyclable fast power cells - some objects of enormous electrical capacity which, when triggered somehow, virtually instantly fills up by an undergoing fast chemical process. Then we will be able to use these in laser- or rail- weaponry, as well as in emergency tools, winches, jacks, air compressors, etc. I can imagine that, like ammo today, it will still be dangerous to store and handle, though.
You could, if "insurgent" was in line-of-sight with you, but typically they aren't, hence high-profile trajectory, which is a good case for laser shot. In fact, you are better off with having your own mortars ready for fast response & targeting radar which recalculates position from incoming shell trajectory.
It is simple to make it automagic: If a window got focus, or is topmost (visible) window on desktop, its process and its "processes relatives" (parent process, child processes, sibling processes) get higher priority (lower niceness).
... etc, last visited, ... come again tomorrow!).
For advanced users, if they have multiple applications running, they should be able to edit an ordered list of descending priorities for them, but if they don't, then priority == visiting history (last visited, most served, second last visited, next most served,
I believe that concept (hierarchy) is easy to grasp for anyone, not just computer scientists.
However, if that computer is not a desktop machine (human inanimate tool, a brain extension) but primary a server, automaton chugging alone for most of the time with just a nice, graphical "cockpit" for admin to occasionally peek into its work, then there should be an unmovable (at least not magically) hard line that separates desktop apps from background server processes and daemons. Each "world" should have own "pool" of slices - there should be a two-layered scheduling approach - on the highest level it is decided if this CPU slice is given^Wfirst offered to the server pool or to the desktop pool, then scheduling is performed for subsequent layer, according to predefined policy for one or for the other pool.
Not quite. You would need almost just as much of it as here on Earth:
Pressure is the same for gas inside blimp and gas outside of it. By Archimedes' Principle, the difference in weight of gas (Helium) inside blimp and weight of atmospheric gas displaced by blimp and payload must be greater or equal to weight of empty blimp and the payload.
In other words, what pushes your lighter-then-air aircraft up is not some magic quality of gas which fills it, but the weight of air missing from the space occupied by your aircraft. If air around you is lighter (e.g. because it has lower pressure), you need to displace more of it to keep on flying.
For air pressure on mars 1/100 of earth's, on same temperature, you would need 100 times greater volume of blimp to float the same payload weight. If Martian atmosphere was the same as Earth's, only lower pressure, you would end up needing (approximately) same mass (since all three: air, helium and payload are in same gravitational field, we can compare masses in our calculations instead of weights) of Helium as on Earth, but in much larger blimp (fabric of greater area, weighting more). On the plus side, bigger blimp would have more air drag if it doubles as parachute.
However, since Martian air is mostly CO2 and Earth's air mostly 80% nitrogen (N2) and 20% oxygen (O2), Martian "air" is approximately (12+2*16)/((2*14*0.8+2*16*0.2), or 1.5 times heavier, mol for mol, so it is assumed that we would need only 65% of Helium mass needed here on Earth.
Hmm, use a variable geometry wing lander design to adjust for high speed entry phase cruise at high altitude, then switch to higher lift configuration at lower speed?
OTOH, it would still require quite elaborate landing infrastructure (wire arrest, very long landing strip).
I don't know exactly what kind of gel do you have in mind, but I thought gelatinous paste or very viscous fluid would tend to leek less than, e.g. water, in case the suit gets damaged. Just in case you had an actual objection on the subject of space hygiene and not just tried to pull a joke which I missed, I propose following method for changing into something more comfortable after getting home from space work:
1. remove suit
2. take a shower to wash off the rest of the filler
3. dry
4. put on space station casual clothes
5. have suit washed (change filler after each use to prevent unwanted microbe farming) and store it away.
Then there is another loophole: you sell to the consumer DIY kit of generic components in right measures and a test indicator to verify success of resulting chemical and a recipe (instructions), strap all the disclaimers ("DON'T do this if you are not a ...", blah, blah, blah) and of course a legal warning about not giving it to someone else when prepared.
Sorry, I had a large pause in the middle of writing the post. Unfinished sentence in the middle was meant to become: "Fourier analysis can break down periodic signals into harmonic components, but mixing all the ingredients back in may produce quite different signal envelope. That fact is deliberately used in DSP to simplify calculations."
Skin effect is effectively, in a nutshell, variation of conductor's resistance as function of signal's frequency. Strictly speaking, it ought to make harmonic distortions. However, this effect is quite negligible in signals whose frequencies are in audio spectrum.
OTOH, there are people who can positively recognize the difference by listening. Obvious conclusion is that our theory of auditory experience is incomplete in some way. There is something somewhere we've chosen not to look.
My first bet was on signal phase shift, as frequency response has been thoroughly "ironed straight" even more then is necessary, according to our tests. Fourier analysis can break down periodic signals into
Another possibility is that we have neglected the fact that our auditory sensors - "hair cells" may have more then one mode of resonance: since they are basically little mechanical oscillators, they could probably resonate on overtones, too. Therefore, it could be possible for a human to hear certain discrete ultrasound frequencies as well, although much attenuated.
Archimedes of Syracuse, Hero of Alexandria ... most famous engineers of Classical Age, were Greeks (well... Hellenic colonists in Sicily and Egypt, respectively) and they predated and very much influenced and inspired Roman engineers (which is why memory of those two is so well preserved).
It is an easy one: don't let air (oxygen) in and it can spark all day...
OK, but what do you, as a pilot, think: is "airline geese flock" plausible idea?
Do we have some Air Force transporter airplane pilots here to comment? If they don't do or can't do that, then it probably will never fly.
There already are air corridors. Why not train airline pilots in joining, leaving and flying in "wild geese" - "V" shaped formations on common path segments to save fuel? Of course, provided passenger airplanes could fly in formations at all... AFAIK they avoid flying in trail of another airliner because of turbulences. Then, why military planes can fly in formations, what is essential difference? Wing span?