some researcher will find out that whales already do it. The reason they leap out of the water every now and then is to replenish the bubble layer inside their nano-scale bubble-trapping boundarylayer-less super low frictional drag whale-skin.
Next we'll find out that dolphins and killer whales do it even better than whales, or that whales are optimized for low speed drag but killer whales & dolphins have special features optimized for high speed.
Nature is light years ahead of us: she does nanoscale engineering including nano-manufacturing an in creature that feeds on plankton and small fish.
|Heck... Why don't you encourage a person with an MMOG addiction to meet more |players like him at game conventions (like dragon con or penny arcade con) so | that maybe he can meet other people that also have the same problem and he |can go "Geez.. That guy is really addicted to that game... Oh wait..."
One might call it "the circle of life"...where everybody compares themselves to everybody else all the time. With everyone trying to be better than their neighbour, the whole world looks like an M.C. Escher staircase, everyone trying to be one step higher than the guy next to them, ad infinitum.
Better to get some role models in real life and use them to guide you forwards. The most common role models (Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha) and all wise people treat real-life with its endless struggle for cars, mortgages and food to eat, as nothing more than a massive "game" too, and look down equally on all of them (describing them as deserving Hell) on people who merely played the game and got nothing else out of it.
The only way to benefit from life is to train yourself to be a better person, by learning from what life throws at you and doing good to others and gaining "points" for doing the right thing.
The way to deal with the world, according to religion, is to not give too much importance( ie dont make it the most important thing in your life) to it.
The world is more distracting and takes more out of you than any multiplayer game does. The rules are simple, so just play the game a little bit and take what you need from it, get a balanced perspective and show yourself for what you want to be, and move on.
googling religion and "world" or "material world" should give lots of tips on how religion talks about seeing through the video-game aspect of life in the world (or samsara, as the Buddhists call it.) Life and its rules can be studied, played and won-at as straightforwardly as any video game can.
>Okay but that is still begging the question since were talking >about non moving motor. adding in a permenant magent to boost >the force is a lot like adding a spring to boos the force. You >pay for it by the energy it took to load the spring.
That was my first reaction, but after reading the article I think there is a more basic mistake here. They were not talking about 100% more "energy" at all. All they are saying is that the magnets
"...manipulate the flux to act in the direction of motion, generating considerably more motive power than conventional motors."
Weasel words to say a) you get more "force" than you would without the magnets. He said power, but meant force.
Power is a weasel word since he knew he couldn't say more energy (that would not be true), and generating x00% more force than anything other system is a bit underwhelming (especially since Archimedes had the last word on that form of one-upmanship), so he fudged in-between and came up with "motive power."
They didn't reinvent the wheel, but they reinvented the lever.
The Bible is not even close to being a pristine source of Gods words, but as of, say, 1990, the genetic code of everything on earth was--until we humans tampered with some microorganisms.
All this debate we are having is because we have left these questions to be pondered by lawyers (and theologians), but they should be done by geeks (and their religious counterpart, mystics). The method is simple: look to the source. Our software/and hardware source-code is our DNA, and it is responsible for creating everything from our nano-scale protein structure to the shape of our butts (the ultimate unfathomable macro-scale manifestation of a micro-feature viz.
Looking at the source code could tell us what life is, what coding tricks the original designer used, and if he left any comments or "easter eggs" or something which give us a clue as to his original intent behind any features.
The Sufis quote Muhammad in saying "he who knows himself knows his Lord." Well, literally then whoever comprehends the genetic code knows the genetic designer, if any. If there never was a designer, then that will become apparent when we look at the code.
This is a classic example of trading off latency for throughput.
The buffering they use means that the waiting time for each user to get served (latency) is increased, but the total transaction time decreases due to the buffering, which makes the input traffic pattern less "random".
Actually when farmland becomes scarce, or oil prices make it too expensive to truck perishables all over the continent, to and farmers can charge exorbitant prices to city dwellers (like they did in the Dark Ages during the plague), then there will be mass starvation--but not the farmers. They already live a preindustrial lifestyle, and so they won't suffer if the industrial world melts down.
It's the 1 billion who rely on electricity for their survival who will notice this.
>What would this system be missing? (I just typed as I thought it up, FYI)
It would be missing an optical free-space communication system, rooftop to rooftop, which would allow you 100Mbps connectivity to 2 or more of your neighbours.
Using the internet for such "pedestrian" tasks as sharing static movies is silly, why not instead try to run a link to your 2 nearest neighbours houses, let them do the same, and so on...do some fast routing and there you have a truly fast network with high latency--well suited for file sharing programs and doing the occasional 1GB download. Since the nwtwork is self-administered, there is no reliability issue, so you can split your collection up among the whole neighbourhood, and there is no chance of a RIAA lawsuit--since is no involvement of the internet at all.
This would be the arrival of the "Undernet." An underground net, with local control, under no supervision, and no cost. In a disaster, this could be up and running if the old networks go down.
Even without point to dedicated links, people could still build this type of network by simply buying 2 or 3 wireless NICS and connecting to their neighbours wireless routers. I want to know why we don't see more of this type of thing going on?
One important point to remember is that most of the solar energy hitting the land, eventually ends up as wind power. It is simple to see why: most of the solar energy hitting the land gets turned into heat, which rises. This causes a pressure difference with other parts of the planet, and you get wind.
Better than mind control is mood control, or sex control.
There is a way to do this, more or less: just inject estrogen hormones into the food of a people, and they will switch to being unaggressive and docile. There are a ton of chemicals which sort-of look like estrogens to animal bodies, and they are showing up in our foods and plastic wrappings all over the place (the inside of pop cans in the plastic liner, for example.) So to control the population, all you have to do is inject estrogen into the food or water supply, that way they will become fatty, docile, easy to manage. Sperm counts have been going down in men all over the western world for the past 50 years because of chemicals like pesticides, pthalates, DDT, PCBs and dioxins making estrogen-like changes to the anatomy of men. The plastic liner inside the soda pop can also has estrogen-like properties. So the whole world *is* becoming more subdued, because of the plastics we use for food containers and everything like that.
The two parts of the brain which deal with aggression and intellect, are separate. The two are never active in the same mind, at the same time, and a person would lose his intellect if he behaved "evil" for too long.
So people could poison the LA water supply in some diabolical scheme, but they could never do so out of anger or in a fit of rage--unless they didn't have to think about it or plan it first. Nobody ever build a cathedral on impulse; there were just impulsive "decisions" to build them.
That is why the most dangerous villains have always been described as "diabolical" plots, because there first had to be someone (a devil) who convinced some poor fool to do something bad by lying to him and telling him that "fair is foul and foul is fair" and only then would he be willing (and capable) of doing what the job required.
I think that normal people don't descend into that muck without losing something valuable within themselves, or (a psychologist could comment on this) there would have to be a feedback mechanism in the mind to discourage negative behaviours. As far as terrorism goes, it still seems to fit the pattern of a sporadic "eruption" of violence, but not some world-wide planned revolution of the havenots against the haves or something like that.
Here is my "dangerous idea": that most of the forms of group-behaviour we have on the planet, are more or less cults. The idea is that we have the basic social pattern for a "group" programmed in our brains, and it is the lowest level of organization possible.
It is the mental equivalent of the ROM BIOS, in that it once served a purpose in simpler life forms (lizards, and other reptiles) but it has no purpose in modern life. We have much more brain capacity today, so there is no need to follow the old standards--any more than there is a need to use int10 video services to draw pixels to the screen. There are more advanced methods of doing things now.
This reptilian behaviour is exemplified best by most cults, although many other forms of social organization fall-back into this level of behaviour when they don't have any other choice. The boss who declares a disaster and "pulls out all the stops" when the deadline approaches, and starts yelling and barking orders and expecting instant reflexive responses back is doing just that.
The bad parent who freaks out at you for not listening to them, everything outside the class in high school, the army, all use this low form of social control. It's fast, simple, requires no programming and is almost always guaranteed to work in the face of any danger, since there is no way to overcome it except via common sense.
Religion knew about this form of thought (they called it "the lower soul") and called it "Satan", and it was aptly symbolized by a snake. The irony is that they are the ones most often accused of seeing the world in that "reptilian" black-and-white way.
If you sit in a group of people where they have all more or less agreed to turn off their higher rational faculties of mind, (any cult or Amway meeting or car full of teenagers will provide a suitable group to observe) you will see just how this mode of social organization operates. Here are a few of the rules which I will share with you from my own personal experience:
* everyone constantly chuckles and jabs at each other, to communicate the shared group-state to each other via pitch and timing (since grunts are passe now)
* everyone constantly reinforces the group (like a network with its heartbeat messages),
* there is a strict hierachy of control--defined by physical size or stamina and not by any other real-life means (which is why the cool kid can take control over even a more wiser and saner adult),
* don't even think of leaving the group, since as we all know you will die of starvation or be eaten by the wolves sitting outside the light of the fire
* anyone who acts in any sort of individualistic way is a threat to the entire groups survival, and must be dealt with as a threat or a risk
* don't even think of joining another group, you will be followed, hunted down and killed--since that sort of behaviour leads to bad blood.
* you are encourages, allowed, and even expected to be as aggressive as possible towards other memebers of the group, since as we all know the only reason you would not try to dominate the other members of the group--is if you can't.
None of these behaviours are unknown to anyone reading this message, but the interesting thing is that they are not from our culture but are hard-wired within the brain--and all come from the same region of the brain--the brainstem, the lowest portion of the brain, aka the reptilian brain. The social manifestation of these things is in aggressive behaviour, violent actions and self-preservation instincts. In a persons personal life, you can tell from their face if they have used this form of social behaviour too much in the past (they look "evil") or if they are using it right now ("their eyes glass over.")
I think it is the most dangerous and evil thing in the world today, as bad as if the servers on the internet suddenly started using BIOS services to do DISK and video IO -- for no other reason than that they felt insecure all of a sudden as a result of a hacker attack. The wizard's advice is so obvious: nobody in their right mind needs to even know about the BIOS services--unless you are a kernel progammer.
Hasan
> Turns out it was a quasar, a hithero unkown phenomena,
>but the Soviets made laughing stocks out of themselves by
>assuming first it was aliens instead of a more mundane
>explanation...
It was an alien signal, but not aimed at humans: quasars are just key components of the galactic GPS system.
No, the dangers from nuclear power are far worse than those from coal, global-warming aside. Nuclear plants have the potential to make a large portion of the landscape uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years, due to benign accident, sabotage, or outright terrorist attack. Nobody can design a plant that can be permanently safe in the face of a determined military strike, or any such terrorist attack. Even if you could, your neighbour down the road will not hold to your higher standards (try telling him "I'm ready for nuclear power, but you are not.")
In the case of an accident at a plant, who knows what the effects would be for people living there. Would it be mass evacuations to another continent, or what?
Nuclear power is best left alone. unless the plants are built in the middle of the Sahara desert. (Incidentally, that is also where the worlds 3rd largest uranium deposits are to be found, in Niger. Convenient enough for everyone--no transport of nuclear waste, and a safe place to put it back after it is done. Nature has provided us with a simple way forward--a large deserted wasteland to put the nuclear plants in, with copious solar energy resources nearby for an alternative power source when feasible, and a central location in the middle of the old world.) Energy central.
Hasan
Slashdot Mirror
some researcher will find out that whales already do it. The reason they leap out of the water every now and then is to replenish the bubble layer inside their nano-scale bubble-trapping boundarylayer-less super low frictional drag whale-skin.
Next we'll find out that dolphins and killer whales do it even better than whales, or that whales are optimized for low speed drag but killer whales & dolphins have special features optimized for high speed.
Nature is light years ahead of us: she does nanoscale engineering including nano-manufacturing an in creature that feeds on plankton and small fish.
Then they just log as somebody else.
Where do they get somebody else's passwords from? From the National Enquirer and magazines that ask the question "what makes (so and so) tick?"
Well any hardware in the brain would be like the BIOS of the brain. Religion and culture is the operating system.
|Heck... Why don't you encourage a person with an MMOG addiction to meet more
|players like him at game conventions (like dragon con or penny arcade con) so
| that maybe he can meet other people that also have the same problem and he
|can go "Geez.. That guy is really addicted to that game... Oh wait..."
One might call it "the circle of life"...where everybody compares themselves to everybody else all the time. With everyone trying to be better than their neighbour, the whole world looks like an M.C. Escher staircase, everyone trying to be one step higher than the guy next to them, ad infinitum.
Better to get some role models in real life and use them to guide you forwards. The most common role models (Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha) and all wise people treat real-life with its endless struggle for cars, mortgages and food to eat, as nothing more than a massive "game" too, and look down equally on all of them (describing them as deserving Hell) on people who merely played the game and got nothing else out of it.
The only way to benefit from life is to train yourself to be a better person, by learning from what life throws at you and doing good to others and gaining "points" for doing the right thing.
The way to deal with the world, according to religion, is to not give too much importance( ie dont make it the most important thing in your life) to it.
The world is more distracting and takes more out of you than any multiplayer game does. The rules are simple, so just play the game a little bit and take what you need from it, get a balanced perspective and show yourself for what you want to be, and move on.
googling religion and "world" or "material world" should give lots of tips on how religion talks about seeing through the video-game aspect of life in the world (or samsara, as the Buddhists call it.) Life and its rules can be studied, played and won-at as straightforwardly as any video game can.
>Okay but that is still begging the question since were talking
>about non moving motor. adding in a permenant magent to boost
>the force is a lot like adding a spring to boos the force. You
>pay for it by the energy it took to load the spring.
That was my first reaction, but after reading the article I think there is a more basic mistake here. They were not talking about 100% more "energy" at all. All they are saying is that the magnets
"...manipulate the flux to act in the direction of motion, generating considerably more motive power than conventional motors."
Weasel words to say a) you get more "force" than you would without the magnets. He said power, but meant force.
Power is a weasel word since he knew he couldn't say more energy (that would not be true), and generating x00% more force than anything other system is a bit underwhelming (especially since Archimedes had the last word on that form of one-upmanship), so he fudged in-between and came up with "motive power."
They didn't reinvent the wheel, but they reinvented the lever.
We are already digging up the graves of dead dinosaurs to harness their bodies for the worlds energy problems.
Egads...!they've reinvented the Commodore 64.
sicut erat in principio
et nunc et semper
et in saecula saeculum.
Amen.
The Bible is not even close to being a pristine source of Gods words, but as of, say, 1990, the genetic code of everything on earth was--until we humans tampered with some microorganisms.
All this debate we are having is because we have left these questions to be pondered by lawyers (and theologians), but they should be done by geeks (and their religious counterpart, mystics). The method is simple: look to the source. Our software/and hardware source-code is our DNA, and it is responsible for creating everything from our nano-scale protein structure to the shape of our butts (the ultimate unfathomable macro-scale manifestation of a micro-feature viz.
Looking at the source code could tell us what life is, what coding tricks the original designer used, and if he left any comments or "easter eggs" or something which give us a clue as to his original intent behind any features.
The Sufis quote Muhammad in saying "he who knows himself knows his Lord." Well, literally then whoever comprehends the genetic code knows the genetic designer, if any. If there never was a designer, then that will become apparent when we look at the code.
This is a classic example of trading off latency for throughput.
The buffering they use means that the waiting time for each user to get served (latency) is increased, but the total transaction time decreases due to the buffering, which makes the input traffic pattern less "random".
Actually when farmland becomes scarce, or oil prices make it too expensive to truck perishables all over the continent, to and farmers can charge exorbitant prices to city dwellers (like they did in the Dark Ages during the plague), then there will be mass starvation--but not the farmers. They already live a preindustrial lifestyle, and so they won't suffer if the industrial world melts down.
It's the 1 billion who rely on electricity for their survival who will notice this.
>What would this system be missing? (I just typed as I thought it up, FYI)
It would be missing an optical free-space communication system, rooftop to rooftop, which would allow you 100Mbps connectivity to 2 or more of your neighbours.
Using the internet for such "pedestrian" tasks as sharing static movies is silly, why not instead try to run a link to your 2 nearest neighbours houses, let them do the same, and so on...do some fast routing and there you have a truly fast network with high latency--well suited for file sharing programs and doing the occasional 1GB download. Since the nwtwork is self-administered, there is no reliability issue, so you can split your collection up among the whole neighbourhood, and there is no chance of a RIAA lawsuit--since is no involvement of the internet at all.
This would be the arrival of the "Undernet." An underground net, with local control, under no supervision, and no cost. In a disaster, this could be up and running if the old networks go down.
Even without point to dedicated links, people could still build this type of network by simply buying 2 or 3 wireless NICS and connecting to their neighbours wireless routers. I want to know why we don't see more of this type of thing going on?
One important point to remember is that most of the solar energy hitting the land, eventually ends up as wind power. It is simple to see why: most of the solar energy hitting the land gets turned into heat, which rises. This causes a pressure difference with other parts of the planet, and you get wind.
Better than mind control is mood control, or sex control.
There is a way to do this, more or less: just inject estrogen hormones into the food of a people, and they will switch to being unaggressive and docile. There are a ton of chemicals which sort-of look like estrogens to animal bodies, and they are showing up in our foods and plastic wrappings all over the place (the inside of pop cans in the plastic liner, for example.)
So to control the population, all you have to do is inject estrogen into the food or water supply, that way they will become fatty, docile, easy to manage. Sperm counts have been going down in men all over the western world for the past 50 years because of chemicals like pesticides, pthalates, DDT, PCBs and dioxins making estrogen-like changes to the anatomy of men. The plastic liner inside the soda pop can also has estrogen-like properties. So the whole world *is* becoming more subdued, because of the plastics we use for food containers and everything like that.
You can http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/ for more about this.
The two parts of the brain which deal with aggression and intellect, are separate. The two are never active in the same mind, at the same time, and a person would lose his intellect if he behaved "evil" for too long.
So people could poison the LA water supply in some diabolical scheme, but they could never do so out of anger or in a fit of rage--unless they didn't have to think about it or plan it first. Nobody ever build a cathedral on impulse; there were just impulsive "decisions" to build them.
That is why the most dangerous villains have always been described as "diabolical" plots, because there first had to be someone (a devil) who convinced some poor fool to do something bad by lying to him and telling him that "fair is foul and foul is fair" and only then would he be willing (and capable) of doing what the job required.
I think that normal people don't descend into that muck without losing something valuable within themselves, or (a psychologist could comment on this) there would have to be a feedback mechanism in the mind to discourage negative behaviours. As far as terrorism goes, it still seems to fit the pattern of a sporadic "eruption" of violence, but not some world-wide planned revolution of the havenots against the haves or something like that.
Hasan
Here is my "dangerous idea": that most of the forms of group-behaviour we have on the planet, are more or less cults. The idea is that we have the basic social pattern for a "group" programmed in our brains, and it is the lowest level of organization possible. It is the mental equivalent of the ROM BIOS, in that it once served a purpose in simpler life forms (lizards, and other reptiles) but it has no purpose in modern life. We have much more brain capacity today, so there is no need to follow the old standards--any more than there is a need to use int10 video services to draw pixels to the screen. There are more advanced methods of doing things now. This reptilian behaviour is exemplified best by most cults, although many other forms of social organization fall-back into this level of behaviour when they don't have any other choice. The boss who declares a disaster and "pulls out all the stops" when the deadline approaches, and starts yelling and barking orders and expecting instant reflexive responses back is doing just that. The bad parent who freaks out at you for not listening to them, everything outside the class in high school, the army, all use this low form of social control. It's fast, simple, requires no programming and is almost always guaranteed to work in the face of any danger, since there is no way to overcome it except via common sense. Religion knew about this form of thought (they called it "the lower soul") and called it "Satan", and it was aptly symbolized by a snake. The irony is that they are the ones most often accused of seeing the world in that "reptilian" black-and-white way. If you sit in a group of people where they have all more or less agreed to turn off their higher rational faculties of mind, (any cult or Amway meeting or car full of teenagers will provide a suitable group to observe) you will see just how this mode of social organization operates. Here are a few of the rules which I will share with you from my own personal experience: * everyone constantly chuckles and jabs at each other, to communicate the shared group-state to each other via pitch and timing (since grunts are passe now) * everyone constantly reinforces the group (like a network with its heartbeat messages), * there is a strict hierachy of control--defined by physical size or stamina and not by any other real-life means (which is why the cool kid can take control over even a more wiser and saner adult), * don't even think of leaving the group, since as we all know you will die of starvation or be eaten by the wolves sitting outside the light of the fire * anyone who acts in any sort of individualistic way is a threat to the entire groups survival, and must be dealt with as a threat or a risk * don't even think of joining another group, you will be followed, hunted down and killed--since that sort of behaviour leads to bad blood. * you are encourages, allowed, and even expected to be as aggressive as possible towards other memebers of the group, since as we all know the only reason you would not try to dominate the other members of the group--is if you can't. None of these behaviours are unknown to anyone reading this message, but the interesting thing is that they are not from our culture but are hard-wired within the brain--and all come from the same region of the brain--the brainstem, the lowest portion of the brain, aka the reptilian brain. The social manifestation of these things is in aggressive behaviour, violent actions and self-preservation instincts. In a persons personal life, you can tell from their face if they have used this form of social behaviour too much in the past (they look "evil") or if they are using it right now ("their eyes glass over.") I think it is the most dangerous and evil thing in the world today, as bad as if the servers on the internet suddenly started using BIOS services to do DISK and video IO -- for no other reason than that they felt insecure all of a sudden as a result of a hacker attack. The wizard's advice is so obvious: nobody in their right mind needs to even know about the BIOS services--unless you are a kernel progammer. Hasan
> Turns out it was a quasar, a hithero unkown phenomena, >but the Soviets made laughing stocks out of themselves by >assuming first it was aliens instead of a more mundane >explanation... It was an alien signal, but not aimed at humans: quasars are just key components of the galactic GPS system.
No, the dangers from nuclear power are far worse than those from coal, global-warming aside. Nuclear plants have the potential to make a large portion of the landscape uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years, due to benign accident, sabotage, or outright terrorist attack. Nobody can design a plant that can be permanently safe in the face of a determined military strike, or any such terrorist attack. Even if you could, your neighbour down the road will not hold to your higher standards (try telling him "I'm ready for nuclear power, but you are not.") In the case of an accident at a plant, who knows what the effects would be for people living there. Would it be mass evacuations to another continent, or what? Nuclear power is best left alone. unless the plants are built in the middle of the Sahara desert. (Incidentally, that is also where the worlds 3rd largest uranium deposits are to be found, in Niger. Convenient enough for everyone--no transport of nuclear waste, and a safe place to put it back after it is done. Nature has provided us with a simple way forward--a large deserted wasteland to put the nuclear plants in, with copious solar energy resources nearby for an alternative power source when feasible, and a central location in the middle of the old world.) Energy central. Hasan