Yeah, except that if Vader used Dell parts, his respirator would crash every half hour. Plus, instead of the neat black colour scheme, his armour would probably have holstein spots. And he'd have to deal with their tech support, which make Sith lords seem charming and helpful by comparison...
You hear that whooshing sound? That was the humour of the parent poster flying over your head.
The grandparent said that games are used in military training, ergo the arguement that "games teach kids to kill" is valid. The parent mocked this by pointing out, correctly, that the army also uses written instructions to train people to kill - essentially showing that any arguements based on what training tools the military uses are inherently ridiculous.
If you can't understand why that's funny and insightful, then you shouldn't post here, let alone vote.
It will not explode even if hit by a bullet, punched, cut, or thrown into a fire. The only reliable method for detonation is via a detonator or blasting cap. However, applying pressure in combination with heat can often cause detonation.........Because C-4 burns slowly if a started explosion is not feeding it, during the Vietnam War era, many soldiers would use small amounts of C-4 as means of heating rations while on long patrols. While many soldiers were able to use C-4 in this manner safely, there are several anecdotes about soldiers attempting to put out the fire by stomping on it and causing it to detonate.
So, in short, I wouldn't count on it. Burning C4 is likely to just expend it's chemical energy slowly, but there is still a danger if the mine is put under pressure as well. Also, I wouldn't gurantee that the fire would keep burning in a buried mine; often when you burn something in an unventelated environment, it will use up available oxygen and snuff itself out.
And as I understand it, a C4 fire is slow and takes a great deal of time to burn all the available explosives - if there isn't a person around to make sure it's all burned up, then you can't know for sure that therre isn't still live exlosives in the mine. Plus, if the mine uses C4, then it presumably uses a blasting cap - do you really want to expose a detonator to fire?
Well, I'm not a chemist. But I think the issue with making high explosives that can safely decay into something chemical inert is their potential energy.
A pound of TNT, or gunpowder, or thermite, or napalm, or [insert nasty stuff here] has a certain amount of potential chemical energy that is released by combustion. Most of those materials listed are stable enough that we can safely handle them in the context of warfare. If the exlosives deteriorate, then they usually become easier to detonate; less like dynamite and more like nitro glycerin (which are the same thing essentially, but differing in stability).
To make an exlosive substance that becomes inert after a set amount of time, I'm pretty sure you'd need it to somehow expend it's chemical energy potential without detonating it. In other words, your bomb materials need to decay into something safe while slowly releasing the energy they contain over time, all while remaining stable enough not to blow up spontainiously. This may or may not be possible, but I'd bet good money it isn't cost effective. You'd have a hell of a hard time selling the military on it.
self-deactivating timers in a few months, with explosives that decay in a few years, and casings that bio-degrade in a few decades would be better. (for the winners)
Some of these already exist. Others have signifigant problems when you stop to think about them.
Timers: These exist. However, they do fail some of the time. A minefield that is less than 100% deactivated is still dangerous to civilians after the war is over. Additionally, a "deactivated" mine still has live explosives in it, so it's only safe in the sense that it's not going to blow up when you step on it. I'm not saying that this isn't a helpful idea, I'm just saying it isn't enough; you can't put a timer on a mine to make it "safe".
Exlosives that decay: This can be a really bad idea. There are plenty of circumstances under which deteriorating exlosives are more dangerous than stable ones, since they can detonate spontainiously. The absolute last thing you want is a minefield full of ticking time bombs that become more and more delicate as time goes on. Can you imagine the damage an anti-tank mine going off when someone jostles it could cause?
Decaying casings: I'm not sure if this would work or not. You'd be leaving exposed live explosives with no container out where the mine used to be. It might not be any more likely to detonate, but it would also be a bitch to clean up.
The single best solution I could propose would be an enforcable international legal obligation to clean up your country's mess after a war. You make the mines easy to dispose of safely, and program them to deactivate after a set amount of time; you then make the minelaying country pay to have them dug up and safely disposed up. The problem I see with this is making the minelaying country do their part; if they won the war, then it's hard to pressure them into doing anything, whereas if they lost they may no longer have the minefield location data or the money/resources to do the cleanup.
Also, "enforcable, international legal obligation" sounds like a pipe dream - when has the international community been able to force any given country to obey any law?
You can't magically 'reprocess' radioactive waste and expect to get a net gain. It's not a perpetual motion device.
No, it isn't perpetual motion, nor does anyone claim otherwise.
When a nuclear plant uses fuel, it transmutes some of that fuel into material that is truely "waste". These nuclear leftovers are useless and dangerous. However, most spent fuel rods are still 90% Uranium or more - only some of the mass is turned into waste.
You start with a 1Kg rod. When you take it out of the reactor, you've got (for example).9Kg Uranium and.1Kg "waste". You seperate the waste, which is actually several different materials mixed in together, and you're left with a slightly smaller amount of fuel than went into the reactor in the first place. Alternatively, you use a different type of reactor that uses fuel more effeciently and doesn't leave so much Uranium unspent.
The true waste needs to be disposed of, and an equivalent amount of Uranium mined to replace it, but you've still come out ahead of where you'd be if you just threw that impure fuel rod away as waste, which is what the United States currently does. The figure you quoted for "10 years of Uranium left" assumes that none of it will be reproccessed at all - in other words, you're assuming the least effecient methods possible.
And for the record, the usual figure given for American style nuclear reactors running out of fuel is 50 years, not 10 - and this doesn't account for reproccessing, intergral fast reactors or Thorium fueled reactors, nor does it take into account possible future mining or reactor technology.
That's a pretty arbitrary statement, and not one that's going to convince me.
Nevertheless, it happens to be true. There is a fixed amount of potential energy in any radioactive material. If it's highly radioactive, then that means it's emitting that energy faster, which means that it will have a shorter halflife. If it's long lived, that means it can't be radiating as much energy per second, and therefor isn't as dangerous.
Radiation isn't perpetual motion; eventually it "runs out", same as anything else - and how fast it runs out is inversely proportional to how dangerous it is. This is high school physics, and you should already know this if you'd done your research.
There are always people who say "Oh but we could do this with it, and that with it. In your example, who is to say that the stuff will be sucked back into the mantle. What if, instead of being sucked into the mantle, it gets blasted up into the atmosphere?
Tectonic plate movement is what prevents this. Don't you know your geology?
Subduction zones are places where one tectonic plate slides under another. Over time, material buried in the bottom plate liquifies in the mantle, only to reform back into rock at a fissure someplace else thousands of kilometers away where the plates are moving apart. This reformation happens on a geological time scale - hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of years. So, we bury radioactives at a subduction zone, they get sucked away, and by the time they reemerge millenia later, they are no longer radioactive.
The plates themselves become our storage facility - given that they've lasted a few billenia thus far, I think we can count on them holding out for as long as needed. And given that the mantle already contains plentiful radioactives (we can even detect fallout from volcanic eruptions), we don't need to worry about contaminating it.
Again, this isn't difficult or advanced science. Proposing doomsday scenarios like the waste getting blasted into the atmposphere when said scenario contradics basic geology is just silly.
Western civilisation has only been around for a couple of hundred years. How the hell are we supposed to guarantee that
No it's not. There is enough uranium in the world for about 10 years of total energy consumption, and then you have millions of tons of radioactive waste that will be around for millions of years to come. Which company - or civilisation for that matter - is going to be around in millions of years to safeguard the world from this waste? Who will pay to maintain the containment? Not the companies that profited from it, you can be sure of that.
If you were American, I'd assume that you wrote this unaware of reprocessing technology, however you've indicated you're from a different country. Do you not know we can use nuclear waste as fuel, or are you opposed to the technology? I've heard a couple of valid objections to it, though I don't agree on them.
First up, we don't need to use only Uranium (Thorium reactors have been proposed). Second, most of the nuclear waste a plant produces is... Uranium and Plutonium. Yep, that's right - the only difference between waste and fuel is purity. It is possible to either make a reactor that runs on the waste, or extract the still usable fuel from the unusable nuclear leftovers.
The final leavings when all the Uranium is gone do not last "millions of years" - there is an inverse relationship between halflife and radioactivity. Essentially, the really nasty stuff is short lived, and the long lived stuff is relatively harmless. The radioactive materials that have a lot of energy potential and long half lives are also the ones you want to use as fuel. Once they're gone, what's left isn't anywhere near as bad as you're making them out to be.
Additionally, there are means of final disposal available to us. Bury the waste at a geological subduction zone, far beneath the water table, and wait for it to be sucked back into the mantle. This will take time, but won't require constant monitoring or indefinate safe storage. We can seperate out the waste that lasts decades and store it in a safe vault, and then take the stuff that lasts thousands of years and use the method described above.
There are valid objections to nuclear power, but you are misinformed about them.
That's for [insert deity here] to worry about, assuming that said deity exists (untestable). The question is moot from a human perspective. Since we cannot detect or objectively prove the existance of a soul, we can't really debate wheter cyborgs and AIs have them. If there is a god who worries about such details, he/she/it/they can work it out on their own time. The outcome of human debates will be meaningless regardless, even if we somehow guessed correctly.
All we can ever look at are consciousness, sentience, thought and maybe free will. Most of those we can't measure objectively, but it should be blatantly obvious that a cyborg with a fully human brain is no different from a human in those aspects. Augmented brains, aftificially grown nervous tissue, and fully inorganic AI are where the questions arise, and even then we could probably make a common sense judgement some of the time. And it's not like the question of non human intelligence is new - we've been debating what status animals have for years now.
Whether a cyborg with a 50% inorganic brain has a soul is an irrelevant question, as it can never be answered to anyone's satisfaction. If there are souls, and a deity to quantify them, then that's the business of said deity, not human theologians or philosophers. Whether that same cyborg has the same rights as a human under the law is what will matter, and hopefully we'll be able to make an intelligent decision there.
Actually, if you really want to get technical about it, all our crop seeds are genetically altered. Domesticated plants and animals have been bred for specific purposes for thousands of years, and artifcial selection has altered the gene pool.
In fact, half the danger to our current crops is due to genetic "monoculture", whereby the plants are all too genetically similar to each other. When you have field after field of practically identical plants, the possibility for a disease or parasite finding a niche is very high. Look at the Irish potatoe famine as an example of this.
Hence the need for backups like this. Monsanto isn't the source of the problem, though they've certainly made it worse.
Anything that renders the human race extinct, by definitiion also renders these seed vaults irrelevant. This means that we mostly consider dangers arising from either war, plauge or natural disaster.
War won't affect the poles as much as it will the rest of the world. There are no strategically signifigant targets nearby to worry about. Plague that wipes out crops won't affect frozen seeds in hard to reach places. And the only natural disasters I can think of that would matter here are things like global warming and asteroid impacts - and as long as you don't build somewhere that'll flood, you should be safe from those.
The moon is much harder to get to. If we have a war, or mass starvation due to crop failure, we'd be better off with the seeds close to hand. And asteroid impacts are a much larger issue on the moon (no atmosphere to block them), as is radiation (which would sterilize the seeds), so it's not like they'd be a whole lot safer there than here.
Uh, these are crop seeds. They aren't trying to preserve wild organisms or anything like that.
Domesticated crops can't even handle your average weed all that well. They aren't part of any natural ecosystem (some can't even breed without human help). They're essentially dependant on us to survive, which is exactly why we need to have a backup stored, in case we fuck up our existing stocks. How exactly would this "cause the destruction of future life"? Attack of the killer tomatos maybe?
And as for the earth adapting, who cares? The earth isn't in any danger, and never has been. There are plenty of events that would be disasterous for our species, and plenty of other events that would be equally disasterous for other species, but as you rightly say, life would adapt and continue. However, we might not be around to see it.
This vault has nothing to do with helping the earth adapt and everything to do with helping future humans adapt/recover.
Gotta disagree with you here, anecdotes aren't valid evidence. Anecdotally, the one women whose opinion on the matter I know has no problem with illegal downloads. She has as low an opinion on the record labels as I do.
As far as that goes, my younger brother was introduced to kazza by his (now ex) girlfriend.
And the two people I've met who were on the music industry's side were respectively a 40+ male and a 50+ female. My observation is that age is a major factor and gender is not. I've yet to meet someone below 30, male or female, who was anti-piracy, and the women seem just as OK with it as the men.
All this goes to show is that anecdotes are meaningless. I can cite people I know who think one way, you can cite people you know who think the opposite, and all we'll have proved is that we don't know the same people.
only on slashdot do I hear males admit to actually buying music
Might that possibly be slashdot's majority male demographic? There are flamewars fought here as to whether illegal downloading is morally OK, and the vast majority of posters on both sides are male. There are very few women here, and I don't see them clustering on the anti-piracy side.
Re:Robots will still have the advantage
on
10th Annual RoboCup
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
True, but all that assumes that whatever sport the robots are playing has no rules.
If we said today that the only requirement for playing pro sports was that the player be human, then what would stop the athletes from doping themselves to the gils before play? I would imagine that if there was a "cyborg league", there'd be some sort of rule set for what equipment is allowable on the player, equivalent to the rules we have now about steroid use.
Re:Robots will still have the advantage
on
10th Annual RoboCup
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Let me guess, you are now typing with one hand?
He is, but that has nothing to do with robotics.:-P
On a more serious note, given that the only part of the body that's really needed for an otherwise mechanical entity to be considered a "human" cyborg is the brain, who says that robots will have the advantage?
I'd say a 800 pound cybernetic football player with a metal body and a human brain (augmented by microchips) would have an advantage over the same metal body governed by a computer. After all, computers can't improvise as well, and I suspect that football is simple enough that the extra processing power of a computer isn't needed.
Of course, that's assuming that we can't make an AI that is equal to a human mind in that regard, but I'd actually think that such an AI would be harder to develop than the cybernetics involved in creating a robotic body with a human brain. After all, a robot physically capable of playing football would probably be possible with modern technology, and I'd imagine that we'll have the technology to turn nervous signals into computer data before we have the technology to make a software program think like a human.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude! You got a star destroyer!
/slaps forehead
Whoops! My bad - it was indeed gateway who did the whole "cow" thing.
In my defense, it's hard to remember which crappy computer company is which...
Yeah, except that if Vader used Dell parts, his respirator would crash every half hour. Plus, instead of the neat black colour scheme, his armour would probably have holstein spots. And he'd have to deal with their tech support, which make Sith lords seem charming and helpful by comparison...
For the regular gamers, yes. For the D&D gamers however, they set it to dice :-P
You hear that whooshing sound? That was the humour of the parent poster flying over your head.
The grandparent said that games are used in military training, ergo the arguement that "games teach kids to kill" is valid. The parent mocked this by pointing out, correctly, that the army also uses written instructions to train people to kill - essentially showing that any arguements based on what training tools the military uses are inherently ridiculous.
If you can't understand why that's funny and insightful, then you shouldn't post here, let alone vote.
I understood each of those words by themselves. But taken together like that? It just doesn't parse...
Nah, this is Athens. It's too warm for them to freeze to death, and besides, large hairy bipeds blend right in with the local crowd :-)
Don't get greedy. That was Lay's mistake
From Wiki (assuming it's accurate):
So, in short, I wouldn't count on it. Burning C4 is likely to just expend it's chemical energy slowly, but there is still a danger if the mine is put under pressure as well. Also, I wouldn't gurantee that the fire would keep burning in a buried mine; often when you burn something in an unventelated environment, it will use up available oxygen and snuff itself out.
And as I understand it, a C4 fire is slow and takes a great deal of time to burn all the available explosives - if there isn't a person around to make sure it's all burned up, then you can't know for sure that therre isn't still live exlosives in the mine. Plus, if the mine uses C4, then it presumably uses a blasting cap - do you really want to expose a detonator to fire?
Well, I'm not a chemist. But I think the issue with making high explosives that can safely decay into something chemical inert is their potential energy.
A pound of TNT, or gunpowder, or thermite, or napalm, or [insert nasty stuff here] has a certain amount of potential chemical energy that is released by combustion. Most of those materials listed are stable enough that we can safely handle them in the context of warfare. If the exlosives deteriorate, then they usually become easier to detonate; less like dynamite and more like nitro glycerin (which are the same thing essentially, but differing in stability).
To make an exlosive substance that becomes inert after a set amount of time, I'm pretty sure you'd need it to somehow expend it's chemical energy potential without detonating it. In other words, your bomb materials need to decay into something safe while slowly releasing the energy they contain over time, all while remaining stable enough not to blow up spontainiously. This may or may not be possible, but I'd bet good money it isn't cost effective. You'd have a hell of a hard time selling the military on it.
There's an international ban on the use of bowling balls in any context in warfare. Don't you know about the great bowler rebellion of '03? :-P
Actually, "the fastest way to clear a minefield is to march troops over it" according to a famous WWII era russian commander.
Some of these already exist. Others have signifigant problems when you stop to think about them.
Timers: These exist. However, they do fail some of the time. A minefield that is less than 100% deactivated is still dangerous to civilians after the war is over. Additionally, a "deactivated" mine still has live explosives in it, so it's only safe in the sense that it's not going to blow up when you step on it. I'm not saying that this isn't a helpful idea, I'm just saying it isn't enough; you can't put a timer on a mine to make it "safe".
Exlosives that decay: This can be a really bad idea. There are plenty of circumstances under which deteriorating exlosives are more dangerous than stable ones, since they can detonate spontainiously. The absolute last thing you want is a minefield full of ticking time bombs that become more and more delicate as time goes on. Can you imagine the damage an anti-tank mine going off when someone jostles it could cause?
Decaying casings: I'm not sure if this would work or not. You'd be leaving exposed live explosives with no container out where the mine used to be. It might not be any more likely to detonate, but it would also be a bitch to clean up.
The single best solution I could propose would be an enforcable international legal obligation to clean up your country's mess after a war. You make the mines easy to dispose of safely, and program them to deactivate after a set amount of time; you then make the minelaying country pay to have them dug up and safely disposed up. The problem I see with this is making the minelaying country do their part; if they won the war, then it's hard to pressure them into doing anything, whereas if they lost they may no longer have the minefield location data or the money/resources to do the cleanup.
Also, "enforcable, international legal obligation" sounds like a pipe dream - when has the international community been able to force any given country to obey any law?
No, it isn't perpetual motion, nor does anyone claim otherwise.
.9Kg Uranium and .1Kg "waste". You seperate the waste, which is actually several different materials mixed in together, and you're left with a slightly smaller amount of fuel than went into the reactor in the first place. Alternatively, you use a different type of reactor that uses fuel more effeciently and doesn't leave so much Uranium unspent.
When a nuclear plant uses fuel, it transmutes some of that fuel into material that is truely "waste". These nuclear leftovers are useless and dangerous. However, most spent fuel rods are still 90% Uranium or more - only some of the mass is turned into waste.
You start with a 1Kg rod. When you take it out of the reactor, you've got (for example)
The true waste needs to be disposed of, and an equivalent amount of Uranium mined to replace it, but you've still come out ahead of where you'd be if you just threw that impure fuel rod away as waste, which is what the United States currently does. The figure you quoted for "10 years of Uranium left" assumes that none of it will be reproccessed at all - in other words, you're assuming the least effecient methods possible.
And for the record, the usual figure given for American style nuclear reactors running out of fuel is 50 years, not 10 - and this doesn't account for reproccessing, intergral fast reactors or Thorium fueled reactors, nor does it take into account possible future mining or reactor technology.
Nevertheless, it happens to be true. There is a fixed amount of potential energy in any radioactive material. If it's highly radioactive, then that means it's emitting that energy faster, which means that it will have a shorter halflife. If it's long lived, that means it can't be radiating as much energy per second, and therefor isn't as dangerous.
Radiation isn't perpetual motion; eventually it "runs out", same as anything else - and how fast it runs out is inversely proportional to how dangerous it is. This is high school physics, and you should already know this if you'd done your research.
Tectonic plate movement is what prevents this. Don't you know your geology?
Subduction zones are places where one tectonic plate slides under another. Over time, material buried in the bottom plate liquifies in the mantle, only to reform back into rock at a fissure someplace else thousands of kilometers away where the plates are moving apart. This reformation happens on a geological time scale - hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of years. So, we bury radioactives at a subduction zone, they get sucked away, and by the time they reemerge millenia later, they are no longer radioactive.
The plates themselves become our storage facility - given that they've lasted a few billenia thus far, I think we can count on them holding out for as long as needed. And given that the mantle already contains plentiful radioactives (we can even detect fallout from volcanic eruptions), we don't need to worry about contaminating it.
Again, this isn't difficult or advanced science. Proposing doomsday scenarios like the waste getting blasted into the atmposphere when said scenario contradics basic geology is just silly.
If you were American, I'd assume that you wrote this unaware of reprocessing technology, however you've indicated you're from a different country. Do you not know we can use nuclear waste as fuel, or are you opposed to the technology? I've heard a couple of valid objections to it, though I don't agree on them.
First up, we don't need to use only Uranium (Thorium reactors have been proposed). Second, most of the nuclear waste a plant produces is... Uranium and Plutonium. Yep, that's right - the only difference between waste and fuel is purity. It is possible to either make a reactor that runs on the waste, or extract the still usable fuel from the unusable nuclear leftovers.
The final leavings when all the Uranium is gone do not last "millions of years" - there is an inverse relationship between halflife and radioactivity. Essentially, the really nasty stuff is short lived, and the long lived stuff is relatively harmless. The radioactive materials that have a lot of energy potential and long half lives are also the ones you want to use as fuel. Once they're gone, what's left isn't anywhere near as bad as you're making them out to be.
Additionally, there are means of final disposal available to us. Bury the waste at a geological subduction zone, far beneath the water table, and wait for it to be sucked back into the mantle. This will take time, but won't require constant monitoring or indefinate safe storage. We can seperate out the waste that lasts decades and store it in a safe vault, and then take the stuff that lasts thousands of years and use the method described above.
There are valid objections to nuclear power, but you are misinformed about them.
That's for [insert deity here] to worry about, assuming that said deity exists (untestable). The question is moot from a human perspective. Since we cannot detect or objectively prove the existance of a soul, we can't really debate wheter cyborgs and AIs have them. If there is a god who worries about such details, he/she/it/they can work it out on their own time. The outcome of human debates will be meaningless regardless, even if we somehow guessed correctly.
All we can ever look at are consciousness, sentience, thought and maybe free will. Most of those we can't measure objectively, but it should be blatantly obvious that a cyborg with a fully human brain is no different from a human in those aspects. Augmented brains, aftificially grown nervous tissue, and fully inorganic AI are where the questions arise, and even then we could probably make a common sense judgement some of the time. And it's not like the question of non human intelligence is new - we've been debating what status animals have for years now.
Whether a cyborg with a 50% inorganic brain has a soul is an irrelevant question, as it can never be answered to anyone's satisfaction. If there are souls, and a deity to quantify them, then that's the business of said deity, not human theologians or philosophers. Whether that same cyborg has the same rights as a human under the law is what will matter, and hopefully we'll be able to make an intelligent decision there.
Even faster first posts of course!
Does that make tight fitting briefs a meltdown hazard?
Actually, if you really want to get technical about it, all our crop seeds are genetically altered. Domesticated plants and animals have been bred for specific purposes for thousands of years, and artifcial selection has altered the gene pool.
In fact, half the danger to our current crops is due to genetic "monoculture", whereby the plants are all too genetically similar to each other. When you have field after field of practically identical plants, the possibility for a disease or parasite finding a niche is very high. Look at the Irish potatoe famine as an example of this.
Hence the need for backups like this. Monsanto isn't the source of the problem, though they've certainly made it worse.
Think smaller than that.
Anything that renders the human race extinct, by definitiion also renders these seed vaults irrelevant. This means that we mostly consider dangers arising from either war, plauge or natural disaster.
War won't affect the poles as much as it will the rest of the world. There are no strategically signifigant targets nearby to worry about. Plague that wipes out crops won't affect frozen seeds in hard to reach places. And the only natural disasters I can think of that would matter here are things like global warming and asteroid impacts - and as long as you don't build somewhere that'll flood, you should be safe from those.
The moon is much harder to get to. If we have a war, or mass starvation due to crop failure, we'd be better off with the seeds close to hand. And asteroid impacts are a much larger issue on the moon (no atmosphere to block them), as is radiation (which would sterilize the seeds), so it's not like they'd be a whole lot safer there than here.
Uh, these are crop seeds. They aren't trying to preserve wild organisms or anything like that.
Domesticated crops can't even handle your average weed all that well. They aren't part of any natural ecosystem (some can't even breed without human help). They're essentially dependant on us to survive, which is exactly why we need to have a backup stored, in case we fuck up our existing stocks. How exactly would this "cause the destruction of future life"? Attack of the killer tomatos maybe?
And as for the earth adapting, who cares? The earth isn't in any danger, and never has been. There are plenty of events that would be disasterous for our species, and plenty of other events that would be equally disasterous for other species, but as you rightly say, life would adapt and continue. However, we might not be around to see it.
This vault has nothing to do with helping the earth adapt and everything to do with helping future humans adapt/recover.
Didn't they already do that? Oh wait, I'm thinking of something else:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079501/
You do know that these are the "painful death" kind of toxic, right? Not the lickable "I'm so stoned!" variety? :-P
Though come to think of it, I'm not sure I'd want to actually try and eat a regular hallucenogenic toad whole either....
As far as that goes, my younger brother was introduced to kazza by his (now ex) girlfriend.
And the two people I've met who were on the music industry's side were respectively a 40+ male and a 50+ female. My observation is that age is a major factor and gender is not. I've yet to meet someone below 30, male or female, who was anti-piracy, and the women seem just as OK with it as the men.
All this goes to show is that anecdotes are meaningless. I can cite people I know who think one way, you can cite people you know who think the opposite, and all we'll have proved is that we don't know the same people.
Might that possibly be slashdot's majority male demographic? There are flamewars fought here as to whether illegal downloading is morally OK, and the vast majority of posters on both sides are male. There are very few women here, and I don't see them clustering on the anti-piracy side.
True, but all that assumes that whatever sport the robots are playing has no rules.
If we said today that the only requirement for playing pro sports was that the player be human, then what would stop the athletes from doping themselves to the gils before play? I would imagine that if there was a "cyborg league", there'd be some sort of rule set for what equipment is allowable on the player, equivalent to the rules we have now about steroid use.
He is, but that has nothing to do with robotics.
On a more serious note, given that the only part of the body that's really needed for an otherwise mechanical entity to be considered a "human" cyborg is the brain, who says that robots will have the advantage?
I'd say a 800 pound cybernetic football player with a metal body and a human brain (augmented by microchips) would have an advantage over the same metal body governed by a computer. After all, computers can't improvise as well, and I suspect that football is simple enough that the extra processing power of a computer isn't needed.
Of course, that's assuming that we can't make an AI that is equal to a human mind in that regard, but I'd actually think that such an AI would be harder to develop than the cybernetics involved in creating a robotic body with a human brain. After all, a robot physically capable of playing football would probably be possible with modern technology, and I'd imagine that we'll have the technology to turn nervous signals into computer data before we have the technology to make a software program think like a human.