You need go no further than the wikipedia article to see the failures in this argument, but please do go further, you'll feel better.
With traditional reprocessing (and re-processing is needed when you have a breeder) proliferation is a concern when you have either a low fuel burn profile, or you have very advanced weapon design. However low fuel burn rate and the production of weapons grade materials thereoff is something we already monitor in PWRs. So that takes it out of the equation. As for the advanced weapons design, well, that is traditionally something you can only achieve with either:
1) Lots of tests 2) A very detailed knowledge of physics 3) Lots of computer simulation.
numbers 2 & 3 aren't something we can really stop, number 1 is very easy to monitor - but by the time they're doing tests on nukes, what can we really do to stop them from doing more? Face it, the world doesn't have a police force that monitors countries to ensure they follow our rules - I'd argue this is a good thing.
Take wife into outer space where normal earth laws don't apply. Saves on divorce proceedings.
Ok that would explain why I'm single then, I'm proposing space travel to get rid of annoying wives... BTW does anyone know what laws apply in outer space to ordinary citizens, is it the same as the open seas?
You speak of mythbusters as if they were performing actual experiments as opposed to trying to be a sensational popular television program. The few shows of their's I saw made the worst assumptions along the lines of "Well Archemedes (one of the cleverest men in ancient history) couldn't possibly have thought of using a forced air system (something that has been around since the stone age) to achieve heat on the fire, so we'll just pile some wood under the big tank of oil. There you go, he couldn't have got the heat up enough to create the required pressure and therefore could not have built the flame cannons history says he did, Myth Busted!"
Entertaining TV, certainly; acceptable reference in a serious discussion - hopefully not without some more evidence to back it up.
Consider a hole in the side of a boat(let's say a rowing boat). now consider a hole in the side of a balloon (you know one of those things you have at parties).
Which one explodes and which one is a comparitively relaxed failure? So no, a hole isn't just a hole, it depends on the material.
I'm sorry, how stupid is this? "producing far more data than we will have room to store"
That's like saying, for the last 2 months, my profit has increased by 10%. If my profit keeps increasing at 10% per month, then pretty soon I'll own all the money in the world, and then I'll own more money than exists! Damn I must stop making money now before I destroy the world economy!!!
Who are these people who draw straight lines on growth curves? Why do people print the garbage they write and why weren't they the first against the wall after the dot com bust? The only things that seem certain are death, taxes, entropy and stupid people...
By that logic why produce art - since most art loses money - I don't have the numbers, but I'm sure all money thrown into art, literature, films etc is far from profitable. The only statistic I have is that Hollywood runs on about 2% margin.
By that logic what kind of world would we live in, no opera, no novels, no paintings, no sculpture, no english grads paying their way by serving in McDs while writing their epic, no-one dreaming of the stars, no-one hoping for a better tomorrow? There comes a time when as a society that we decide that it doesn't all have to be about profit or about welfare or about anything logical, occasinally we have to dream and create and that is what makes life worth living.
Quick question: Which would you rather have - a future in which we've concentrated on exploration - probably by robots since we have concentrated on exploration not manned space flight; or one where we're building O'Neill cylinders, but have explored no further than our local orbit.
Personally I find the second option more attractive under the logic that knowlege is a good thing, but I prefer something practical like something to put food on the table.
Now knowledge of physics, the wider solar system and the wider issues will help with our progress don't get me wrong, but if we ever wantt o get off this planet, then space stations are probably our best way to do it. This is unless you believe that colonisation is the way forwards, I _believe_ that it'll be easier to build a space staion than to colonise/terraform a new planet - so I'd rather we concentrated on building space stations with a view to things that might be profitable in the mid term (like asteroid mining) as opposed to moon bases which will never be profitable in themselves.
Quite frankly all this take of space exploration sounds like someone watching one too many episodes of star trek - the future of space is when space becomes profitable and that is where I want us to go and where I believe space stations can help (granted not this one, but maybe ISS v10).
This is why it is the _International_ Space station. The progress ships can boost the orbit too, they bring fuel for the boost mechanism. Granted the shuttle can do it better and do it directly, but realise that if the ISS falls, then it's because the US, Russia, Europe and Japan have all given up on it.
Recall that both the ESA and JSA are working on their own re-supply ships. Stopping the suttle after construction is complete would leave Soyuz as the only way to get humans up there at the moment - but that's an accpetable compromise for the moment - recall Europe and Russia are working on their own shuttle to replace the Soyuz, and this time it should be a pure human carrying craft as opposed to a cargo truck too...
Hang on so my understanding goes: A: Hey this string theory is really bizzare, and it predicts these things should happen. B: Cool, lets try that experiment. A: Oh bum well that wasn't what we expected at all. Oh I see the problem with the theory, try agin. B: Nope still wrong. A: ok, here's a new bunch of predictions then b: Ok that matches. A: Great well here's the next set of predictions. B: Cool experiment, we can't actually reach those energy levels yet, but we can indirectly test it by... etc etc
In otherwords it's just like every other part of legitamate science. It makes predictions, some are consistent with experiment, some aren't where they aren't theory is refined. One way or they other it teaches us to think about new things and work in new ways.
How is any of this a bad thing or in anyway reminiscent of bad science?
Sigh! I know this is a joke, but in the interests of the people on here who care (geeks are allowed to be pedantic after all) Stephen Hawking is based at Cambridge, not Oxford Uk university email addresses are.ac.uk so he would be his_name@college_name.cam.ac.uk By what I hear you're more likely to find him in one of the local pubs. A place called B-bar is reputed to be one of his favorites, though I've only ever been there and a Friday/Saturday night when it is one of the explicitly trendy places with people packed in tight...
There, I feel all anally retentive and nerdy now...
Don't know about XP, but with NT I once tried that! It refused to boot, even into safe mode.
I set it to 1K, booted perfectly...
the other trick is to use Knoppix, create a ram drive (the size of the CD), copy the cd into the ram drive, and boot from there - now that is a fast system!
Re:Switching XP - Amiga
on
AmigaOS 4
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
How this got modded insightful, Mods only know!
I write this on a laptop with 2GB of memory - sum total of applications running: Outlook (yes I'm at work, we do what we have to) Several gVim sessions Firefox with 6 Slashdot tabs and 1 gmail tab Acrobat Reader VNC session Winamp
as I alt tab to winamp, watch the hdd light flash and the delay in re-draw. I kid you not, that with the exception of tabbed browsing, I used to do all of this on my Amiga 4000 with 16MB of ram without swapping. my old A1200 only had 4M of ram and i used that as a desktop for a couple of years and that didn't even have the concept of virtual ram! Now maybe this is the price of progress, but seriously, how much ram do you suggest I need to buy in order to stop this swapping?
As an collery, my desktop at home at 4GB runs Ubuntu and that swaps in similar situations too. Maybe this is the price of progress, but if this article only reminds us that there is another way then I'm all for it.
Were Nukes for nothing? Every country that possesses Nukes is effectively uninvadable. I would argue that this has given the superpowers the longest period of peace* in history**.
i wonder where we'll be in 100 years time when every country has Nukes, no-one dare invade anyone anymore. How is this a bad thing?
Yes this all assumes that no nutter gets his hands on a nuke, and proliferation would make this more accessable, but my understanding was that a sufficiently funded nutter presently had no issues doing that in this day and age anyway. Is an end to war worth the occasional nutter blowing up a major city?
* Yeah I know, but you know what i mean ** I've always liked the thought experiment of what would have happened if nukes hadn't been developed, when the USSR fell, would it then have been invaded by its neighbours - what would the world be like if india & china had each invaded bits of the USSR? What if NATO had sent in peace keeping troups and forcibly installed democracy through tracts of western russia in much the same way the USA is trying to do in the middle east.
I'd stress as well that America seems to have more of a habit of toying with countires it doesn't border with - messing in other peoples buisness. Whatever else you want to say about China/Tibet/Tiwan, Israel/Palestine, India/Pakistan etc they are all about local squabbles and land claims/expansionism - the US appears to interfere with other countries on the other side of the world. I think if the US was interfering with Canada (for example) people may have a different view than they did over the Iraq war.
In the same way printing on an inkjet is more expensive than gettinga book printed - per page...
Also there are FPAAa Analogue equivalents, but they're very limited appeal.
I'm curious what problem you want to solve with a circuit that can't be 99% solved with an FPGA with appropriate ADC & DACs. (the relaining 1% being signal conditioning which is always going to require a handful of custom components anyway) Assuming this custom technology takes off, no reason Xilinx and Altera won't start producing FPGA with ADCs/DACs integrated...
But a printer can only print something smaller than itself, so we can print our way down to self replicating nano printers! Therefore we have intelegently designed the first in a new species! Therefore we are GOD!
Finally we have proof of inteligent design!
Oh wait, wrong bandwagon, erm sorry - I'll be over here...
Remembering though that a perfect transformer/inductor (no resistive losses in the windings) uses no power whatsoever. However the currents running through the windings which have finite resistance produces( I^2)R losses each cycle .
One reason why room temperature superconductors are so interesting..
However even such a perfect inductor would still consume power as read by a domestic meter because it measures IV to determine power consumption - of course we could then apply power factor correction, but then you'd have resistive losses in your capacitors - uless you made them out of super conductors too.
Ok I may be teaching grandmother how to suck eggs here, but some people on slashdot don't seem to understand this so I thought I should jump in.
For the sake of argument, however large the risk of corruption/abuse of power is; provided anyone is free to go into that position of power - can you argue that the society is any less free? That where abuse of power becomes an issue is when that power is only available to some ruling elite - if this power is in the hands of your average bobby - then is not democracy served? i.e. if the lowest or the highest has the almost absolute power of total surveylance (through joining a law enforcement agency) then is not that true ultimate power to the masses?
Yes i know I am being naive, but absolute positions are always naive...
Thanks for this. Whilst I was aware of some of the points and was leaving them out to try and keep my post short you've filled me in on some important subtleties.
I too was trying to suggest that the powers for all of these invasions of privacy already exist, and it is the use of these powers, not the powers themselves that we need to be careful about.
I know you're trying to be funny, but your problem with that is?
To take your examples: I don't see how phone call monitoring is any different to the records your ISP is required legally to keep about every url you visit. Please explain the difference. Goggle already tracks all the emails I send through their system, and uses it for their commercial advantage - were it not google doing this it'd be yahoo, or NTL - even if I used my own mail server, every ADSL contract I have ever seen has a clause in there that allows them to monitor the traffic from servers that you run - i.e. you cannot get an internet connection in the UK that isn't monitored in this way already - I suspect other countries are similar. Companies, employers, parents etc already have access to your credit history - get over it, this is one of the joys of the modern world - you will not put that gremlin back in the box. So supposing I read books in the library about bomb building and "the government" knows this. Well if that is a criminal activity why does the library (a govenment funded institution) have the books? Now were the govenrment to bring in a law that would allow them to hold people for as long as they want wothout evidence or reason, then that would be something to worry about. Were they to bring in laws that allowed them to imprison peple for anti-social behaviour (which can be defined as anything they want such as wearing an offensive religious symbol) then I'd worry and protest. Oh no they already have done and people didn't seem to bat an eyelid! Police have always been able to search your home without telling you - with a court order - this doesn't ever seem likly to change.
How is giving police extra power and tools any different to giving biologists improved genetic engineering techniques? Yes there is danger in power - but we're supposed to embrace power and tame it, not run away like luddites!
Slashdot Mirror
Wait until they arrest every woman for having the equipment required for prostitution.
You need go no further than the wikipedia article to see the failures in this argument, but please do go further, you'll feel better.
With traditional reprocessing (and re-processing is needed when you have a breeder) proliferation is a concern when you have either a low fuel burn profile, or you have very advanced weapon design. However low fuel burn rate and the production of weapons grade materials thereoff is something we already monitor in PWRs. So that takes it out of the equation.
As for the advanced weapons design, well, that is traditionally something you can only achieve with either:
1) Lots of tests
2) A very detailed knowledge of physics
3) Lots of computer simulation.
numbers 2 & 3 aren't something we can really stop, number 1 is very easy to monitor - but by the time they're doing tests on nukes, what can we really do to stop them from doing more?
Face it, the world doesn't have a police force that monitors countries to ensure they follow our rules - I'd argue this is a good thing.
See this link for details on the long term prospects of nukes:e n.html
http://www.sustainablenuclear.org/PADs/pad8301coh
"What on earth would you use a spaceport for?"
Take wife into outer space where normal earth laws don't apply. Saves on divorce proceedings.
Ok that would explain why I'm single then, I'm proposing space travel to get rid of annoying wives...
BTW does anyone know what laws apply in outer space to ordinary citizens, is it the same as the open seas?
You speak of mythbusters as if they were performing actual experiments as opposed to trying to be a sensational popular television program.
The few shows of their's I saw made the worst assumptions along the lines of "Well Archemedes (one of the cleverest men in ancient history) couldn't possibly have thought of using a forced air system (something that has been around since the stone age) to achieve heat on the fire, so we'll just pile some wood under the big tank of oil. There you go, he couldn't have got the heat up enough to create the required pressure and therefore could not have built the flame cannons history says he did, Myth Busted!"
Entertaining TV, certainly; acceptable reference in a serious discussion - hopefully not without some more evidence to back it up.
Consider a hole in the side of a boat(let's say a rowing boat).
now consider a hole in the side of a balloon (you know one of those things you have at parties).
Which one explodes and which one is a comparitively relaxed failure?
So no, a hole isn't just a hole, it depends on the material.
I'm sorry, how stupid is this?
"producing far more data than we will have room to store"
That's like saying, for the last 2 months, my profit has increased by 10%. If my profit keeps increasing at 10% per month, then pretty soon I'll own all the money in the world, and then I'll own more money than exists! Damn I must stop making money now before I destroy the world economy!!!
Who are these people who draw straight lines on growth curves? Why do people print the garbage they write and why weren't they the first against the wall after the dot com bust?
The only things that seem certain are death, taxes, entropy and stupid people...
By that logic why produce art - since most art loses money - I don't have the numbers, but I'm sure all money thrown into art, literature, films etc is far from profitable. The only statistic I have is that Hollywood runs on about 2% margin.
By that logic what kind of world would we live in, no opera, no novels, no paintings, no sculpture, no english grads paying their way by serving in McDs while writing their epic, no-one dreaming of the stars, no-one hoping for a better tomorrow? There comes a time when as a society that we decide that it doesn't all have to be about profit or about welfare or about anything logical, occasinally we have to dream and create and that is what makes life worth living.
Quick question:
Which would you rather have - a future in which we've concentrated on exploration - probably by robots since we have concentrated on exploration not manned space flight; or one where we're building O'Neill cylinders, but have explored no further than our local orbit.
Personally I find the second option more attractive under the logic that knowlege is a good thing, but I prefer something practical like something to put food on the table.
Now knowledge of physics, the wider solar system and the wider issues will help with our progress don't get me wrong, but if we ever wantt o get off this planet, then space stations are probably our best way to do it.
This is unless you believe that colonisation is the way forwards, I _believe_ that it'll be easier to build a space staion than to colonise/terraform a new planet - so I'd rather we concentrated on building space stations with a view to things that might be profitable in the mid term (like asteroid mining) as opposed to moon bases which will never be profitable in themselves.
Quite frankly all this take of space exploration sounds like someone watching one too many episodes of star trek - the future of space is when space becomes profitable and that is where I want us to go and where I believe space stations can help (granted not this one, but maybe ISS v10).
This is why it is the _International_ Space station.
The progress ships can boost the orbit too, they bring fuel for the boost mechanism. Granted the shuttle can do it better and do it directly, but realise that if the ISS falls, then it's because the US, Russia, Europe and Japan have all given up on it.
Recall that both the ESA and JSA are working on their own re-supply ships. Stopping the suttle after construction is complete would leave Soyuz as the only way to get humans up there at the moment - but that's an accpetable compromise for the moment - recall Europe and Russia are working on their own shuttle to replace the Soyuz, and this time it should be a pure human carrying craft as opposed to a cargo truck too...
Hang on so my understanding goes:
A: Hey this string theory is really bizzare, and it predicts these things should happen.
B: Cool, lets try that experiment.
A: Oh bum well that wasn't what we expected at all. Oh I see the problem with the theory, try agin.
B: Nope still wrong.
A: ok, here's a new bunch of predictions then
b: Ok that matches.
A: Great well here's the next set of predictions.
B: Cool experiment, we can't actually reach those energy levels yet, but we can indirectly test it by...
etc etc
In otherwords it's just like every other part of legitamate science. It makes predictions, some are consistent with experiment, some aren't where they aren't theory is refined. One way or they other it teaches us to think about new things and work in new ways.
How is any of this a bad thing or in anyway reminiscent of bad science?
Sigh! .ac.uk so he would be his_name@college_name.cam.ac.uk
I know this is a joke, but in the interests of the people on here who care (geeks are allowed to be pedantic after all)
Stephen Hawking is based at Cambridge, not Oxford
Uk university email addresses are
By what I hear you're more likely to find him in one of the local pubs. A place called B-bar is reputed to be one of his favorites, though I've only ever been there and a Friday/Saturday night when it is one of the explicitly trendy places with people packed in tight...
There, I feel all anally retentive and nerdy now...
Don't know about XP, but with NT I once tried that!
It refused to boot, even into safe mode.
I set it to 1K, booted perfectly...
the other trick is to use Knoppix, create a ram drive (the size of the CD), copy the cd into the ram drive, and boot from there - now that is a fast system!
How this got modded insightful, Mods only know!
I write this on a laptop with 2GB of memory - sum total of applications running:
Outlook (yes I'm at work, we do what we have to)
Several gVim sessions
Firefox with 6 Slashdot tabs and 1 gmail tab
Acrobat Reader
VNC session
Winamp
as I alt tab to winamp, watch the hdd light flash and the delay in re-draw.
I kid you not, that with the exception of tabbed browsing, I used to do all of this on my Amiga 4000 with 16MB of ram without swapping. my old A1200 only had 4M of ram and i used that as a desktop for a couple of years and that didn't even have the concept of virtual ram!
Now maybe this is the price of progress, but seriously, how much ram do you suggest I need to buy in order to stop this swapping?
As an collery, my desktop at home at 4GB runs Ubuntu and that swaps in similar situations too. Maybe this is the price of progress, but if this article only reminds us that there is another way then I'm all for it.
Were Nukes for nothing?
Every country that possesses Nukes is effectively uninvadable. I would argue that this has given the superpowers the longest period of peace* in history**.
i wonder where we'll be in 100 years time when every country has Nukes, no-one dare invade anyone anymore. How is this a bad thing?
Yes this all assumes that no nutter gets his hands on a nuke, and proliferation would make this more accessable, but my understanding was that a sufficiently funded nutter presently had no issues doing that in this day and age anyway.
Is an end to war worth the occasional nutter blowing up a major city?
* Yeah I know, but you know what i mean
** I've always liked the thought experiment of what would have happened if nukes hadn't been developed, when the USSR fell, would it then have been invaded by its neighbours - what would the world be like if india & china had each invaded bits of the USSR? What if NATO had sent in peace keeping troups and forcibly installed democracy through tracts of western russia in much the same way the USA is trying to do in the middle east.
The same as china can attack a us ship in international waters if it wishes.
This might not be the best move, but I imagine the response would be very similar; and be similarly justified.
Probably easier just to give you a link:- A-WarMay02.htm
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2002/How-To-Start
Ok it's a commentry on America's use of war over time, but I think it's worth a read.
I'd stress as well that America seems to have more of a habit of toying with countires it doesn't border with - messing in other peoples buisness. Whatever else you want to say about China/Tibet/Tiwan, Israel/Palestine, India/Pakistan etc they are all about local squabbles and land claims/expansionism - the US appears to interfere with other countries on the other side of the world.
I think if the US was interfering with Canada (for example) people may have a different view than they did over the Iraq war.
Which reminds me of the Robin Williams joke
"They came in 3 sizes, extra large, large and white man"
In the same way printing on an inkjet is more expensive than gettinga book printed - per page...
Also there are FPAAa Analogue equivalents, but they're very limited appeal.
I'm curious what problem you want to solve with a circuit that can't be 99% solved with an FPGA with appropriate ADC & DACs. (the relaining 1% being signal conditioning which is always going to require a handful of custom components anyway) Assuming this custom technology takes off, no reason Xilinx and Altera won't start producing FPGA with ADCs/DACs integrated...
But a printer can only print something smaller than itself, so we can print our way down to self replicating nano printers!
Therefore we have intelegently designed the first in a new species! Therefore we are GOD!
Finally we have proof of inteligent design!
Oh wait, wrong bandwagon, erm sorry - I'll be over here...
Remembering though that a perfect transformer/inductor (no resistive losses in the windings) uses no power whatsoever. However the currents running through the windings which have finite resistance produces( I^2)R losses each cycle .
One reason why room temperature superconductors are so interesting..
However even such a perfect inductor would still consume power as read by a domestic meter because it measures IV to determine power consumption - of course we could then apply power factor correction, but then you'd have resistive losses in your capacitors - uless you made them out of super conductors too.
Ok I may be teaching grandmother how to suck eggs here, but some people on slashdot don't seem to understand this so I thought I should jump in.
"The article says the black holes are "resting" inside the globular cluster"
Next you'll be telling me its pining for the fyords!
For the sake of argument, however large the risk of corruption/abuse of power is; provided anyone is free to go into that position of power - can you argue that the society is any less free?
That where abuse of power becomes an issue is when that power is only available to some ruling elite - if this power is in the hands of your average bobby - then is not democracy served? i.e. if the lowest or the highest has the almost absolute power of total surveylance (through joining a law enforcement agency) then is not that true ultimate power to the masses?
Yes i know I am being naive, but absolute positions are always naive...
Thanks for this.
Whilst I was aware of some of the points and was leaving them out to try and keep my post short you've filled me in on some important subtleties.
I too was trying to suggest that the powers for all of these invasions of privacy already exist, and it is the use of these powers, not the powers themselves that we need to be careful about.
I know you're trying to be funny, but your problem with that is?
To take your examples:
I don't see how phone call monitoring is any different to the records your ISP is required legally to keep about every url you visit. Please explain the difference.
Goggle already tracks all the emails I send through their system, and uses it for their commercial advantage - were it not google doing this it'd be yahoo, or NTL - even if I used my own mail server, every ADSL contract I have ever seen has a clause in there that allows them to monitor the traffic from servers that you run - i.e. you cannot get an internet connection in the UK that isn't monitored in this way already - I suspect other countries are similar.
Companies, employers, parents etc already have access to your credit history - get over it, this is one of the joys of the modern world - you will not put that gremlin back in the box.
So supposing I read books in the library about bomb building and "the government" knows this. Well if that is a criminal activity why does the library (a govenment funded institution) have the books? Now were the govenrment to bring in a law that would allow them to hold people for as long as they want wothout evidence or reason, then that would be something to worry about. Were they to bring in laws that allowed them to imprison peple for anti-social behaviour (which can be defined as anything they want such as wearing an offensive religious symbol) then I'd worry and protest. Oh no they already have done and people didn't seem to bat an eyelid!
Police have always been able to search your home without telling you - with a court order - this doesn't ever seem likly to change.
How is giving police extra power and tools any different to giving biologists improved genetic engineering techniques? Yes there is danger in power - but we're supposed to embrace power and tame it, not run away like luddites!