I was going to say, 'Put your tin foil hat on son'. But the tin foil hats never worked. The trouble was the voices were already inside. 'They told me to do it, destroy the evil machine people who lived inside the satellites. I had to do it.' 'I solved the problem now, took a big drill to my skull, drilled out a nice big hole and scooped out... Now everything's much better, nice and empty and the voices have gone.' Oh hang on I'm dead the government must have done it. Now where's my foil hat? [sarcasm]
Per unit of power coal is about 1,000 to 10,000 times more dangerous than nuclear. When that is statistically taken into account both the nuclear regulators and anti-nuclear campaigners are far more dangerous than nuclear itself..
Re : "The problem is that crowd funding combines pre-orders with donations, and it's easy to fuck up your reward tiers such that you end up having promised everyone who donated $10 a widget that's going to cost you $11 to make, and your "huge funding overflow" is due to volume on those $10 pledges, when you haven't yet finished R&D on the widget."
Overrunning costs on these types of project is very very common, and even the simplest looking projects can run into difficulties. For instance printed versions of Web comics. - Things like packing and postage costs can be very hard to predict and are frequently under-budgeted. Its not uncommon for project creators feeling an implied debt promise to contributors, to fund the difference themselves -ending up with a large debt at the end.. (that's the vagaries of small business) Its almost better to see projects where things are slightly over-priced - after all the contribution is a donation to support a project, and the return is essentially a reward to say thank you..
No RTGs on board - otherwise we would already have had Greenpeice screaming about the 'end of the world'. Besides the reason the USA doesn't use RTGs for ordinary satellites isn't about safety - its because they are expensive to make. Most/all RTG's are designed to withstand the fall from orbit - as was the US's space reactor which was crashed - deorbited into the deepest part of the sea decades ago. As I have pointed out before the sea already has 4 billion tons of natural uranium in it so a bit extra wont make any difference. Of course Greenpiece were still worried about contaminating the natural uranium - which is good , with the evil human uranium.
I never really got to the level of detail of looking at heat dissipation in assemblers themselves.
I did look at heat dissipation in a computer that was assembler constructed. The machines design was for a flat grid of roughly 1 million CPUs connected in a 4D hypercube array, designed as a flat plate of 10 mm x 10mm x 0.2 mm - mounted in a much larger support structure. At its peak power it would consume an estimate of about 40KW of power and put out 40 KW of heat. My sketch solution to cooling was to have a liquid cooling system pumping fluid through thousands of parallel channels through the 'die'. A bigger problem than cooling was getting the power in - my solution to that was thousands of rigid vibrating diamond springs again running in parallel through the die..
- The original design was a cube with 1 billion CPU's but I rejected that as soon as I began to look the heat dissipation.. It might make a very good high explosive though.. - In fact heat was a general problem with all these machines including the assemblers themselves, they would have to constantly stop to allow heat to dissipate.. Powering them was an even bigger problem though, especially with the assemblers - both getting energy into the machines and storing it. My very crude solution for storage at the time was a clockwork system powered by a spring... but to be honest that came more out of ignorance than knowledge..
The really humorous thing at the time was people talking about 'grey goo', all you had to do to stop any diamond composite based assembler dead was turn off the power..
I'm working on the design of a Strong AI system - its security will not be unlike what you describe.. Ultra secure but a massive pain to use. Any breach in security and the machine shuts down and must be returned to a secure servicing site before it can be restarted. Of course Strong AI also has a wonderful security get out, if it gets hacked it could be used as a weapon to kill people. This A lists any potential hacker as a terrorist, B anyone who wants a back door would have to sign a security liability waiver, C the system already has to be designed to allow cooperation with authorities, giving them power but with limitations and keeping them outside the inner security loop.
Just like with HD firmware our biggest security vulnerability will almost certainly be malware in the hardware components and their firmware.. The ideal solution is to have a secure FAB and make your own chips - if only it wasn't so ridiculously expensive..
What is life? Maybe active homeostasis? Maybe any system where continuing active homeostasis is required to maintain the system and for continuing on-going functionality. Where the failure of active homeostasis leads to irreversible 'death' where the system cannot be restarted... of course that still doesn't cover hibernation.
Way back in 1990, I worked for about six months informally on the theoretical design of assemblers based loosely on Eric Drexlers design plans. For them the 'bag' or shell definitely looked like one of the hardest parts. The design required that the 'bag' be a rigid crystalline shell, and that it had to be structurally strong enough to support the internal mechanisms. It also had to survive temperatures from around liquid nitrogen or cooler - the assemblers functional working temperature, - all the way up to room temperature. The assembler needed a ~100% clean environmental space inside it, and a protective envelope that could expand and open and then reseal without contamination -to allow for self-replication or releasing of parts. To do anything useful the assembler also needed external manipulators and sensors which required links through the shell. The machine also had to be able to move itself and to take in raw materials and process them to working state feedstock's. Then there was the nightmare issue of power. - Even as a primitive sketch design it all looked insanely complex and difficult to do.... not surprising they still don't exist today.
Oh no I sounded like a right wing bigot, didn't intend to do that. Most of the poor don't intend to come here, but the media out there is telling how much better off we all are. The real problem is the shear number who would have to be educated in things like family planning to make a difference - it would literally take tens of millions of educators.. Besides the biggest problems in the third world isn't just simple poverty - its also political corruption, military conflict, dictatorship, intolerant ultra orthodox religious indoctrination, outright theft, lack of general education... Endlessly growing population is a slower problem that often barely gets noticed on the ground.. but is does slowly make all the other problems worse and increases urbanization, load on food resources, and stress on remaining wilderness..
Yes but its still rising by 80 million ever year - that's 10 new cities the size of London, or 5 the size of New York every year. Most of them are poor and starving and want to come to the US or Europe where they think money and food are given away for free and the streets are paved with gold...
I think the point is that gunsmithing equipment can be used to make guns. If those guns then have no identity or ID stamps then I'm pretty sure they would be illegal. Those guns could be used to commit crimes. Maybe worse if the person doesn't make the guns right there is a good chance someone is going to fire one and blow their face off. Mostly flowers don't blow faces off or kill people, and are absolutely useless for holding up a store or robbing a bank.
Oh so that's why everyone in Europe and half of Asia are dead. Like when the Hiroshima bomb cracked the Earth and killed everyone on the planet.... While the 100+ million killed by coal over the last 100 years are real.
Having an iPhone is a status symbol showing people that you can afford to throw away money. 'Ten dollar bills? I wipe my ass on them and flush them down the toilet, that's why I have an iPhone..'
I know I'm late but we can end this infinity stuff.. An infinite number of monkeys have an infinite mass and therefore instantly collapse into a gravitational singularity. We can go further, in an infinite multiverse all words written in any book are true by tautology. This also applies to TV, so given an infinite number of Earths the probability returns to unity - we should have been visited by Stewie and Brain from Family Guy. Even worse there are an infinite number of purple dinosaurs out there - and they are singing. An infinite number will be people in suits but an infinite number will be real dinosaurs - with fabric skin.
In an infinite multiverse an infinite number of monkeys can and do write the works of Shakespeare every day - thank god (by the same tautology) that an infinite multiverse itself is impossible.... BTW we can roughly compute the minimum number of universes in an infinite multiverse from the anthropic question, the number is > 10^10^123 universes.. the universe and our existence are both finite.
Except that if you actually examine the FTL geometry of space its quite clear that general relativity fails at the speed of light, and for anything beyond it GR becomes a complete nonsense. GR is incompatible with an absolute frame, but without an absolute frame light shouldn't even travel in straight lines - there should be no fixed distance between the stars - and it also predicts a universe that is young, even 5000 years old would be pushing it pretty hard. The trick is to create a composite model that allows an absolute frame at FTL speeds and a curved local space time frame at STL speeds..
Great post. Except if you have FTL technology nukes are going to be about as threatening as throw rocks - or sticks. When on ST:TNG Pickard asks for 'Tea, Early Grey' the replicator uses - or handles about as much energy as about a hundred Hiroshima bombs. That is handle - it doesn't explode, it just moves matter about and rearranges it. The FTL space is an unimaginably hostile environment so anything that could fly through it and survive wouldn't have any trouble surviving hundreds or thousands of direct attacks by nukes. As for weapons, expect micro singularities held together by force fields, or containers full of antimatter, or 'teleporter' beams, or neutron flux weapons, or gamma ray lasers, or weapons that use the FTL directly.
If that is not enough another aspect of FTL tech is that the ships will have machines that an see into and predict the future - its impossible to sneak up on someone who can sense you coming before you get there...
FUN FACT : Nuclear protestors are statistically far more dangerous than nuclear power. By switching the world from nuclear towards coal they have indirectly killed 5 to 10 million people (since 1975). Whereas the total death toll from nuclear power is between about 10,000 and 60,000 people - ever. Even nuclear weapons have only killed between about 300,000 and 500,000 people. Coal kills over a million every year..
Plutonium 238 - the only radiation power source safe enough to use inside the human body. With an efficient enough power converter and a big enough battery Pu238 could just about make a nuclear car work.... The major problem (apart from regulation) is that the stuff is very expensive to make..
Sadly I don't think this will get us anywhere near to the reality of schizophrenia. The problem is that schizophrenia is inside a persons mind not outside it. Also it is not essentially a hallucination or delusion although those are very common side effects. Schizophrenia is a malfunction in the core of consciousness that seeds a separate 'voice' that then feeds the person information and lies and then isolates them from external society and people. At its core schizophrenia is an illness of sleep - its primary cause is in the sleep cycle. - Most schizophrenics only sleep for at most two or three hours a day - and most of their other symptoms come from that. About a week to ten days with no sleep at all is enough to induce schizophrenia in almost anyone.
True except the only part you got wrong is that the drugs don't work. The drugs in a lot of cases actually make you worse, they crush your talents and your skill and leave you emotionally dead and broken. They can literally make the illness worse and cause damaging effects that are pretty much permanent. Psychiatrists don't really understand schizophrenia and they don't really understand the brain. They still think you can fix a neural network with chemicals alone... (or - ECT like trying to start a car, at least a little better than an ice pick to the frontal lobes.) Unfortunately there is no proper 'medical science' for curing mental illness yet... Its leaches and mercury poultices and blood letting, if you had cancer would you want leaches and mercury poultices or would you want chemotherapy?
And you must be..reeeaaallly.y.. high on something if you think Tony Blair could be a child molester and get away with it.. He is a monster and a killer of hundreds of thousands and was George Bushes obedient poodle. Look even the 14 feet tall lizard-alien-policemen who live under the parliament couldn't get away with that...... Now Thatcher did have a taste for eating live human babies - that is a documented fact. [humour] [irony] [metaphor]
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I was going to say, 'Put your tin foil hat on son'. But the tin foil hats never worked. The trouble was the voices were already inside. 'They told me to do it, destroy the evil machine people who lived inside the satellites. I had to do it.' ... Now everything's much better, nice and empty and the voices have gone.' Oh hang on I'm dead the government must have done it. Now where's my foil hat?
'I solved the problem now, took a big drill to my skull, drilled out a nice big hole and scooped out
[sarcasm]
Per unit of power coal is about 1,000 to 10,000 times more dangerous than nuclear. When that is statistically taken into account both the nuclear regulators and anti-nuclear campaigners are far more dangerous than nuclear itself..
Re : "The problem is that crowd funding combines pre-orders with donations, and it's easy to fuck up your reward tiers such that you end up having promised everyone who donated $10 a widget that's going to cost you $11 to make, and your "huge funding overflow" is due to volume on those $10 pledges, when you haven't yet finished R&D on the widget."
Overrunning costs on these types of project is very very common, and even the simplest looking projects can run into difficulties. For instance printed versions of Web comics. - Things like packing and postage costs can be very hard to predict and are frequently under-budgeted. Its not uncommon for project creators feeling an implied debt promise to contributors, to fund the difference themselves -ending up with a large debt at the end.. (that's the vagaries of small business)
Its almost better to see projects where things are slightly over-priced - after all the contribution is a donation to support a project, and the return is essentially a reward to say thank you..
No RTGs on board - otherwise we would already have had Greenpeice screaming about the 'end of the world'. Besides the reason the USA doesn't use RTGs for ordinary satellites isn't about safety - its because they are expensive to make.
Most/all RTG's are designed to withstand the fall from orbit - as was the US's space reactor which was crashed - deorbited into the deepest part of the sea decades ago. As I have pointed out before the sea already has 4 billion tons of natural uranium in it so a bit extra wont make any difference. Of course Greenpiece were still worried about contaminating the natural uranium - which is good , with the evil human uranium.
I never really got to the level of detail of looking at heat dissipation in assemblers themselves.
I did look at heat dissipation in a computer that was assembler constructed. The machines design was for a flat grid of roughly 1 million CPUs connected in a 4D hypercube array, designed as a flat plate of 10 mm x 10mm x 0.2 mm - mounted in a much larger support structure. At its peak power it would consume an estimate of about 40KW of power and put out 40 KW of heat. My sketch solution to cooling was to have a liquid cooling system pumping fluid through thousands of parallel channels through the 'die'. A bigger problem than cooling was getting the power in - my solution to that was thousands of rigid vibrating diamond springs again running in parallel through the die..
- The original design was a cube with 1 billion CPU's but I rejected that as soon as I began to look the heat dissipation.. It might make a very good high explosive though.. - In fact heat was a general problem with all these machines including the assemblers themselves, they would have to constantly stop to allow heat to dissipate.. Powering them was an even bigger problem though, especially with the assemblers - both getting energy into the machines and storing it. My very crude solution for storage at the time was a clockwork system powered by a spring ... but to be honest that came more out of ignorance than knowledge..
The really humorous thing at the time was people talking about 'grey goo', all you had to do to stop any diamond composite based assembler dead was turn off the power..
I'm working on the design of a Strong AI system - its security will not be unlike what you describe.. Ultra secure but a massive pain to use. Any breach in security and the machine shuts down and must be returned to a secure servicing site before it can be restarted.
Of course Strong AI also has a wonderful security get out, if it gets hacked it could be used as a weapon to kill people. This A lists any potential hacker as a terrorist, B anyone who wants a back door would have to sign a security liability waiver, C the system already has to be designed to allow cooperation with authorities, giving them power but with limitations and keeping them outside the inner security loop.
Just like with HD firmware our biggest security vulnerability will almost certainly be malware in the hardware components and their firmware.. The ideal solution is to have a secure FAB and make your own chips - if only it wasn't so ridiculously expensive..
What is life? Maybe active homeostasis? Maybe any system where continuing active homeostasis is required to maintain the system and for continuing on-going functionality. Where the failure of active homeostasis leads to irreversible 'death' where the system cannot be restarted... of course that still doesn't cover hibernation.
Way back in 1990, I worked for about six months informally on the theoretical design of assemblers based loosely on Eric Drexlers design plans.
For them the 'bag' or shell definitely looked like one of the hardest parts. The design required that the 'bag' be a rigid crystalline shell, and that it had to be structurally strong enough to support the internal mechanisms. It also had to survive temperatures from around liquid nitrogen or cooler - the assemblers functional working temperature, - all the way up to room temperature. The assembler needed a ~100% clean environmental space inside it, and a protective envelope that could expand and open and then reseal without contamination -to allow for self-replication or releasing of parts. To do anything useful the assembler also needed external manipulators and sensors which required links through the shell. The machine also had to be able to move itself and to take in raw materials and process them to working state feedstock's. Then there was the nightmare issue of power.
- Even as a primitive sketch design it all looked insanely complex and difficult to do.... not surprising they still don't exist today.
I immediately thought of putting it into a whale, God knows what we could create then.. (insane Frankenstein cackle....)
His figures are accurate enough to make him a Greenpeace spokesman.. :)
Oh no I sounded like a right wing bigot, didn't intend to do that. Most of the poor don't intend to come here, but the media out there is telling how much better off we all are. .. but is does slowly make all the other problems worse and increases urbanization, load on food resources, and stress on remaining wilderness..
The real problem is the shear number who would have to be educated in things like family planning to make a difference - it would literally take tens of millions of educators.. Besides the biggest problems in the third world isn't just simple poverty - its also political corruption, military conflict, dictatorship, intolerant ultra orthodox religious indoctrination, outright theft, lack of general education... Endlessly growing population is a slower problem that often barely gets noticed on the ground
Yes but its still rising by 80 million ever year - that's 10 new cities the size of London, or 5 the size of New York every year. Most of them are poor and starving and want to come to the US or Europe where they think money and food are given away for free and the streets are paved with gold...
I think the point is that gunsmithing equipment can be used to make guns. If those guns then have no identity or ID stamps then I'm pretty sure they would be illegal. Those guns could be used to commit crimes. Maybe worse if the person doesn't make the guns right there is a good chance someone is going to fire one and blow their face off.
Mostly flowers don't blow faces off or kill people, and are absolutely useless for holding up a store or robbing a bank.
Maybe we could build a Terminator and like send it back in time to save America.
Oh so that's why everyone in Europe and half of Asia are dead. Like when the Hiroshima bomb cracked the Earth and killed everyone on the planet....
While the 100+ million killed by coal over the last 100 years are real.
Having an iPhone is a status symbol showing people that you can afford to throw away money. 'Ten dollar bills? I wipe my ass on them and flush them down the toilet, that's why I have an iPhone..'
I know I'm late but we can end this infinity stuff.. An infinite number of monkeys have an infinite mass and therefore instantly collapse into a gravitational singularity.
We can go further, in an infinite multiverse all words written in any book are true by tautology. This also applies to TV, so given an infinite number of Earths the probability returns to unity - we should have been visited by Stewie and Brain from Family Guy. Even worse there are an infinite number of purple dinosaurs out there - and they are singing. An infinite number will be people in suits but an infinite number will be real dinosaurs - with fabric skin.
In an infinite multiverse an infinite number of monkeys can and do write the works of Shakespeare every day - thank god (by the same tautology) that an infinite multiverse itself is impossible.... BTW we can roughly compute the minimum number of universes in an infinite multiverse from the anthropic question, the number is > 10^10^123 universes.. the universe and our existence are both finite.
Except that if you actually examine the FTL geometry of space its quite clear that general relativity fails at the speed of light, and for anything beyond it GR becomes a complete nonsense.
GR is incompatible with an absolute frame, but without an absolute frame light shouldn't even travel in straight lines - there should be no fixed distance between the stars - and it also predicts a universe that is young, even 5000 years old would be pushing it pretty hard. The trick is to create a composite model that allows an absolute frame at FTL speeds and a curved local space time frame at STL speeds..
Great post. Except if you have FTL technology nukes are going to be about as threatening as throw rocks - or sticks.
When on ST:TNG Pickard asks for 'Tea, Early Grey' the replicator uses - or handles about as much energy as about a hundred Hiroshima bombs. That is handle - it doesn't explode, it just moves matter about and rearranges it. The FTL space is an unimaginably hostile environment so anything that could fly through it and survive wouldn't have any trouble surviving hundreds or thousands of direct attacks by nukes. As for weapons, expect micro singularities held together by force fields, or containers full of antimatter, or 'teleporter' beams, or neutron flux weapons, or gamma ray lasers, or weapons that use the FTL directly.
If that is not enough another aspect of FTL tech is that the ships will have machines that an see into and predict the future - its impossible to sneak up on someone who can sense you coming before you get there...
FUN FACT : Nuclear protestors are statistically far more dangerous than nuclear power. By switching the world from nuclear towards coal they have indirectly killed 5 to 10 million people (since 1975). Whereas the total death toll from nuclear power is between about 10,000 and 60,000 people - ever.
Even nuclear weapons have only killed between about 300,000 and 500,000 people. Coal kills over a million every year..
Plutonium 238 - the only radiation power source safe enough to use inside the human body.
With an efficient enough power converter and a big enough battery Pu238 could just about make a nuclear car work.... The major problem (apart from regulation) is that the stuff is very expensive to make..
Sadly I don't think this will get us anywhere near to the reality of schizophrenia. The problem is that schizophrenia is inside a persons mind not outside it. Also it is not essentially a hallucination or delusion although those are very common side effects. Schizophrenia is a malfunction in the core of consciousness that seeds a separate 'voice' that then feeds the person information and lies and then isolates them from external society and people.
At its core schizophrenia is an illness of sleep - its primary cause is in the sleep cycle. - Most schizophrenics only sleep for at most two or three hours a day - and most of their other symptoms come from that. About a week to ten days with no sleep at all is enough to induce schizophrenia in almost anyone.
True except the only part you got wrong is that the drugs don't work. The drugs in a lot of cases actually make you worse, they crush your talents and your skill and leave you emotionally dead and broken. They can literally make the illness worse and cause damaging effects that are pretty much permanent. Psychiatrists don't really understand schizophrenia and they don't really understand the brain. They still think you can fix a neural network with chemicals alone... (or - ECT like trying to start a car, at least a little better than an ice pick to the frontal lobes.) Unfortunately there is no proper 'medical science' for curing mental illness yet...
Its leaches and mercury poultices and blood letting, if you had cancer would you want leaches and mercury poultices or would you want chemotherapy?
Negative rating for that??? I'd +1 you.... Small minded fools are (unfortunately) never in short supply.
And you must be ..reeeaaallly.y.. high on something if you think Tony Blair could be a child molester and get away with it.. He is a monster and a killer of hundreds of thousands and was George Bushes obedient poodle. Look even the 14 feet tall lizard-alien-policemen who live under the parliament couldn't get away with that...... Now Thatcher did have a taste for eating live human babies - that is a documented fact. [humour] [irony] [metaphor]