It is not all that mysterious that such a policy or mechanism exists, but it still highlight's the piece's argument that we need more archives since a single point of failure is, well, a single point of failure.
I remember growing up people talking about how 'the internet is forever' and 'once it is out there it is always there', but over the decades one slowly finds more and more things that seem to be gone for good if they fail to be popular enough to keep spreading.
That level of 'easy' is already pretty far outside the range of the teams that are trying to demonstrate the that EMDrive is real.
Yes, it can be done, but it isn't trivial and requires specialized knowledge and equipment to build and maintain a cooling system capable of that and not have it explode. It gets even harder when you are pumping large amounts of energy into it.
Like the current experiments themselves, very few people with the skills to perform them have any interest, and the people believe in them lack the skills. Adding an extra layer of cost and complexity only amplifies this problem.
Not really.
One of the reasons this is such a nail in the coffin of the emdrive is it dashes their assumptions that ways will be found to scale up the effect. Proponents have been hoping that if they find the right material, right geometry, right frequency, they will hit on an effect that can produce lots of thrust for little power.
If it is just the rig interacting with the earth's magnetic field, that puts very well understood limits on how much movement you will be able to get out of it.
The EMDrive is one in a long line of such devices going back hundreds of years. Every once in awhile someone ads something new.. mercury, rotation, magnets, microwaves, whatever it takes to get people talking about 'this time it will work!' ideas..... yeah.... it can never be disproven and people will continue to believe it or its next variant. Apparently 'superconductor' is the new thing to add, and since we do not have room temperature ones.. and existing ones are difficult to build right, they will have years of 'it isn't our fault, we need this other thing first' excuses.
Shawyer, the guy who started this whole mess and is still an icon within that community, predicted all sorts of high thrust applications like flying cars. So yeah, a lot of the core people actually putting time, money, and advocacy into these drives did indeed believe they could be used for launch. There was also a lot of talk about thrust being relative to some kind of magical resonance, so you did not even need to conserve energy and getting into orbit would become super cheap.
Decades ago this is how it worked, more or less. You had a telecom that you bought you line from and an ISP you bought your service from. At the time a typical area had dozens of broadband ISPs, with new ones able to pop up fairly easily and lots of small ones filling niche needs. It was really great.
But then there was too much money to be made wrapping the two parts up, and even more money if you bound up telecom, ISP, and media provider, so they got the rules changed.
It would be nice if we could go back, but fighting telecoms is difficult and expensive.. they can afford better lawyers than the federal government.
One of the strange things about nationalism is that as it gets attached to particular things, the meme survives long after the original motivation is forgotten. The attachment Americans have to pluto was originally part of a nationalistic push, but today people just remember how much it was a part of their childhood (and cartoons). They know it is important, they know it is part of their identity, but the visible connection is long lost.
Even in walking, that shows a power imbalance.
You might starve or become homeless. The company just hires someone else. These clauses are not being used on 6 digit earners, but on larger numbers of fairly interchangeable poor people who are barely getting by in the first place. Hanging ruin over someone's head when they are cheap to replace, their vote is a joke.
Sad thing is, the stuff from the 50s and 60s wasn't really 'legislating from the bench', but more 'ahm, you do realize this is what the law actually says?'. Ever since the framing there has been a lot of 'wink and nod' and 'well of COURSE we didn't mean that!' that has slowly been corrected.
Gorsuch was brought in specifically because he legislates from the bench. That was the whole point of holding up the nomination in order to put him in place. He just happens to be the 'right' kind of judicial activist, creating new rights and powers for corporate interests or at minimal making sure inconvenient laws don't actually apply to them.
One side has the ability to unilaterally set terms, the other side gets to choose between having an income or not. Bit of a power imbalance there in terms of defining what the contract consists of.
One possible solution would be to shift the responsibility to prosecutors and regulators.
Class Actions are a bit of a band-aid on our 'DIY justice' system where if you have a problem you have to float the cost of dealing with it, but since that was so expensive they put together class actions to distribute the cost. If enforcing regulation was actually done by regulators instead there would be no need to find ways for poor people to afford fighting well funded companies.
The other question is : are there tons of places to get market data? That this point yes, but between facebook and google the useful options are getting pretty narrow.
Think about fusion not in terms of working or not, but instead if it preforms in a more economic manner than other power sources.
Fusion and quantum computing both currently 'work' in that the underlying mechanics have been demonstrated to happen in the real world, but neither scales well enough to work better than competing technologies. That is what I was trying to get at, at least ^_^
I do not think anyone (at least in the field) believes quantum computers will ever replace conventional ones for general computing. But I question if they will ever even be better than conventional computers at the narrow range of tasks they are 'better' at. Analog computers are a great example of this. In theory they can be far better than digital ones at a whole bunch of problems, but the economics of digital computers has made it so cheap to throw general purpose processors at the problems that it is almost always better to go with some kind of system on a chip than build an analog solution.
I am thinking back to the saying 'AI, like fusion, has been 10 years away for 30 years now'. I think that quote was from the 60s or 70s, so add a few decades.
The earth shattering predictions for quantum computers have been around for a while and they are always 'just about to be realized', but even today it is cheaper to emulate quantum computers on traditional machines than to actually build and use them. It is questionable, given advances in traditional semi-conductors, if it will EVER be cheaper to use quantum computing, even for the tasks it is best suited for.
At least Sealand actually exists. I think it says a lot that the only seastead around is one manufactured with government money and then claimed by a private individual.
They probably would not even have to piss off a navy to fail. Just a couple of frauder websites, or kiddy porn distributors, and they might get their internet access cut, and that would probably ruin them.
Yeah, but these are people who outright fetishize not learning from the past, so to them the failure of every attempt before is simply because those others were not as good as they are. Didn't you know everyone in the past was an idiot?
They are also used to the idea of firefights only destroying other people's territory. They forget that if a 'war' happens on your land, win or lose, you lose.
Yes, but this is a boat that people will pay you to live on. That is their big dream : to be their own government that 'the right sort of people' pay to live in their country.
Ok.
So I work in AI research. The lab I am in specializes in a type of modeling where you can drill down into the simulation and explain the full chain from root causes to final effects even with feedback loops. And no one is interested in what we do.
Why? Well, it is slow! It has the wrong buzzwords! It takes up too much CPU/Memory! Why, this other team can throw a few equations and a neural net at the same problem and get an answer faster! Sure the can't explain why, but oooh look at the glittery handwaving!
Which, granted, when you are making predictions about which movie someone might like that kind of understanding isn't all that critical, but when you are asking questions like 'who should we bomb?', you would think there would be greater interest....
Slashdot Mirror
It is not all that mysterious that such a policy or mechanism exists, but it still highlight's the piece's argument that we need more archives since a single point of failure is, well, a single point of failure. I remember growing up people talking about how 'the internet is forever' and 'once it is out there it is always there', but over the decades one slowly finds more and more things that seem to be gone for good if they fail to be popular enough to keep spreading.
That level of 'easy' is already pretty far outside the range of the teams that are trying to demonstrate the that EMDrive is real. Yes, it can be done, but it isn't trivial and requires specialized knowledge and equipment to build and maintain a cooling system capable of that and not have it explode. It gets even harder when you are pumping large amounts of energy into it. Like the current experiments themselves, very few people with the skills to perform them have any interest, and the people believe in them lack the skills. Adding an extra layer of cost and complexity only amplifies this problem.
Not really. One of the reasons this is such a nail in the coffin of the emdrive is it dashes their assumptions that ways will be found to scale up the effect. Proponents have been hoping that if they find the right material, right geometry, right frequency, they will hit on an effect that can produce lots of thrust for little power. If it is just the rig interacting with the earth's magnetic field, that puts very well understood limits on how much movement you will be able to get out of it.
The EMDrive is one in a long line of such devices going back hundreds of years. Every once in awhile someone ads something new.. mercury, rotation, magnets, microwaves, whatever it takes to get people talking about 'this time it will work!' ideas..... yeah.... it can never be disproven and people will continue to believe it or its next variant. Apparently 'superconductor' is the new thing to add, and since we do not have room temperature ones.. and existing ones are difficult to build right, they will have years of 'it isn't our fault, we need this other thing first' excuses.
Shawyer, the guy who started this whole mess and is still an icon within that community, predicted all sorts of high thrust applications like flying cars. So yeah, a lot of the core people actually putting time, money, and advocacy into these drives did indeed believe they could be used for launch. There was also a lot of talk about thrust being relative to some kind of magical resonance, so you did not even need to conserve energy and getting into orbit would become super cheap.
Decades ago this is how it worked, more or less. You had a telecom that you bought you line from and an ISP you bought your service from. At the time a typical area had dozens of broadband ISPs, with new ones able to pop up fairly easily and lots of small ones filling niche needs. It was really great. But then there was too much money to be made wrapping the two parts up, and even more money if you bound up telecom, ISP, and media provider, so they got the rules changed. It would be nice if we could go back, but fighting telecoms is difficult and expensive.. they can afford better lawyers than the federal government.
One of the strange things about nationalism is that as it gets attached to particular things, the meme survives long after the original motivation is forgotten. The attachment Americans have to pluto was originally part of a nationalistic push, but today people just remember how much it was a part of their childhood (and cartoons). They know it is important, they know it is part of their identity, but the visible connection is long lost.
Eh, there is a bit of nationalism and anti-intellectualism in there.
Even in walking, that shows a power imbalance. You might starve or become homeless. The company just hires someone else. These clauses are not being used on 6 digit earners, but on larger numbers of fairly interchangeable poor people who are barely getting by in the first place. Hanging ruin over someone's head when they are cheap to replace, their vote is a joke.
As long as they picture ~20% of the nation getting it even worse than them, that 50% seems pretty happy with it.
Sad thing is, the stuff from the 50s and 60s wasn't really 'legislating from the bench', but more 'ahm, you do realize this is what the law actually says?'. Ever since the framing there has been a lot of 'wink and nod' and 'well of COURSE we didn't mean that!' that has slowly been corrected.
Gorsuch was brought in specifically because he legislates from the bench. That was the whole point of holding up the nomination in order to put him in place. He just happens to be the 'right' kind of judicial activist, creating new rights and powers for corporate interests or at minimal making sure inconvenient laws don't actually apply to them.
Yeah, and activists knew full well that this was case that would have gone the other way if the seat had not been stolen for Gorsuch.
One side has the ability to unilaterally set terms, the other side gets to choose between having an income or not. Bit of a power imbalance there in terms of defining what the contract consists of.
One possible solution would be to shift the responsibility to prosecutors and regulators. Class Actions are a bit of a band-aid on our 'DIY justice' system where if you have a problem you have to float the cost of dealing with it, but since that was so expensive they put together class actions to distribute the cost. If enforcing regulation was actually done by regulators instead there would be no need to find ways for poor people to afford fighting well funded companies.
The other question is : are there tons of places to get market data? That this point yes, but between facebook and google the useful options are getting pretty narrow.
Keep in mind, when people talk about Facebook and its monopoly power it is not in terms of users, but of its customers.
Think about fusion not in terms of working or not, but instead if it preforms in a more economic manner than other power sources. Fusion and quantum computing both currently 'work' in that the underlying mechanics have been demonstrated to happen in the real world, but neither scales well enough to work better than competing technologies. That is what I was trying to get at, at least ^_^ I do not think anyone (at least in the field) believes quantum computers will ever replace conventional ones for general computing. But I question if they will ever even be better than conventional computers at the narrow range of tasks they are 'better' at. Analog computers are a great example of this. In theory they can be far better than digital ones at a whole bunch of problems, but the economics of digital computers has made it so cheap to throw general purpose processors at the problems that it is almost always better to go with some kind of system on a chip than build an analog solution.
I am thinking back to the saying 'AI, like fusion, has been 10 years away for 30 years now'. I think that quote was from the 60s or 70s, so add a few decades. The earth shattering predictions for quantum computers have been around for a while and they are always 'just about to be realized', but even today it is cheaper to emulate quantum computers on traditional machines than to actually build and use them. It is questionable, given advances in traditional semi-conductors, if it will EVER be cheaper to use quantum computing, even for the tasks it is best suited for.
At least Sealand actually exists. I think it says a lot that the only seastead around is one manufactured with government money and then claimed by a private individual.
They probably would not even have to piss off a navy to fail. Just a couple of frauder websites, or kiddy porn distributors, and they might get their internet access cut, and that would probably ruin them.
Yeah, but these are people who outright fetishize not learning from the past, so to them the failure of every attempt before is simply because those others were not as good as they are. Didn't you know everyone in the past was an idiot?
They are also used to the idea of firefights only destroying other people's territory. They forget that if a 'war' happens on your land, win or lose, you lose.
Yes, but this is a boat that people will pay you to live on. That is their big dream : to be their own government that 'the right sort of people' pay to live in their country.
Ok. So I work in AI research. The lab I am in specializes in a type of modeling where you can drill down into the simulation and explain the full chain from root causes to final effects even with feedback loops. And no one is interested in what we do. Why? Well, it is slow! It has the wrong buzzwords! It takes up too much CPU/Memory! Why, this other team can throw a few equations and a neural net at the same problem and get an answer faster! Sure the can't explain why, but oooh look at the glittery handwaving! Which, granted, when you are making predictions about which movie someone might like that kind of understanding isn't all that critical, but when you are asking questions like 'who should we bomb?', you would think there would be greater interest....