The truth is that there is little to nothing society can do against lone individuals or extremely small groups bent on damaging it. Better technology and increasing reliance upon technology necessarily create more opportunities for disruption. Dependency chains for the features in our lives are growing longer, and it's increasingly easy to find weak links.

As a society we can't bear to face the truth of this, so we use lies to pretend the problem doesn't exist. You can't change people at the level necessary to prevent this, so you have to make sure that the lies you do tell them are less damaging to personal freedom ...and where possible more damaging to corporate freedom.

--Ryv

I don't honestly care whether there's a real medical issue here. I don't care if it takes Fox News-style "gotcha" tactics to make the hysterical cries of "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" echo up and down the corridors of the powerful.

Anything that kills this program needs to be seized upon, hyped, spun into something it's probably truthfully not - the lies and paranoia that have been eating away at us like a cancer need to be repurposed toward actually helping us.

--Ryv

iPhone battery life is, I've found, *entirely* dependent upon your location.

Placing an average of 10 5-15 minute calls a day, my iPhone 3G which is coming up on 2 years old lasts 2.5-3 days in the Boston metro area.

Back when it was 6 months old, placing 5 15-20 minute calls in the heart of San Francisco plus a little Google maps had the battery go from a full charge to completely drained in 6 hours. Similar results in the 7-8 hour range occurred on my next two visits.

Contrast to the Sprint Mogul, which consistently had a 36-hour battery life no matter where I was.

Presumably number of towers, number of competing phones, ambient radio noise and building/terrain geometry, etc. are the primary factors. Either way, my point is that this is a very relative thing: the iPhone is simultaneously the best and worst smartphone I've ever had in terms of battery life, depending on which city I'm in.

--Ryv

I'm a bit worried about workers in China regardless of who they work for.

--Ryvar

He throws out some tentative numbers at the end of the abstract on the requirements for using this principle to manipulate satellites. Anyone here with a solid understanding of physics want to take a stab at working out what the energy input->force output is like assuming a magneto-electric constant of 10^-4 and the particles comprising 50% of the total object mass?

If I refresh Slashdot next week the only thing I'm going to see is a dupe of this story.

This whole 'theory' really just sounds like an application of the Novikov Self-Consistency Conjecture to particle physics. The short version is: the probability of events which could lead to a violation of causality is zero. So, according to this conjecture if the manifestation or observation of the Higgs Boson eventually lead us to develop technology with which we might otherwise violate causality, we'll never discover it.

I can think of at least one way it might - the Higgs Boson is critical to our understanding gravity. We know from relativity that there are certain gravitric structures which might potentially lead to violations of causality. One example is a toroidal singularity, spun extremely fast, which theoretically generates stable artificial wormhole along the axis of the spin with an opening small enough to fire, say, an x-ray laser through. A signal sent through such a wormhole and then back again could lead to extremely clear-cut violations of causality.

Thus, if the Novikov Self-Consistency Conjecture is correct, the discovery of anything capable of allowing us to engage in large scale gravity manipulation of this sort might well have zero probability of ever occurring.

I don't really believe this is what's going onhere , but given the abject failure of every experiment that might lead us to real, large-scale gravity manipulation (I'm thinking of that experiment where extremely fine measurements of lasers fired down long tubes buried under the ground were supposed to be used to detect gravity waves), it's a neat idea.

--Ryvar

You seem to know what you're talking about, care to clue the rest of us in as to whether the link is at all plausible? Given the nature of the source, I have difficulty believing so.

The speed of Light can be violated (i.e., there are hidden states that can exchange information faster than the speed of light). This implies, by the way, causality failures would be possible, so that in principle you could do something like kill your grandfather and prevent your own existence.

Not necessarily. One possible alternative is the Novikov Self-Consistency principle, which posits that if a faster-than-light communication or a classical 'time travel' ever did occur, the probability of those events violating causality would be zero. Some undefined sequence of events would always prevent any attempts at violating causality from ever succeeding. Time travel or faster than light communication events might even be fixed within the timeline and actually be *required* of the participants.

It's just a bonghit, but an interesting one. Within Copenhagen Many-Worlds it could, for instance, be interpreted along the lines of the Anthropic Principle: universes which *would* contain causal paradoxes cancel themselves out entirely, leaving only universes in which no such paradox managed to occur.

--Ryvar

The navigators? Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this a guaranteed one-way trip? For what possible reason would we use human pilots?

Somebody already mashed this trailer up with Michael Jackson's "Beat It" - it works disturbingly well.

--Ryv

But even with Tesla aside, this isn't new... it's just not as vastly useful as people re-discovering it seem to think it is. It doesn't work over gigantic distances, only moderate ones, and there's no engineering you can do to get around that.

The misunderstanding a lot of people have is that they think Tesla was chasing *truly* wireless power - when in fact this was probably never his goal. Tesla was always chasing after something he called "longitudinal waves" in an attempt to perform worldwide "wireless" power transmission - he even called one of his companies World Wireless.

Tesla certainly wasn't foolish enough to believe this distance was possible with purely wireless transmission, but instead investigated single-wire transmission systems using the ground as the single wire. His initial success at single-wire transmission was at Colorado Springs in 1900 with three lightbulbs in a closed circuit loop with no power source and a transmission source a hundred feet away. In this experiment, as in his later vacuum tube powering experiment performed at considerably greater distances (eventually miles away), the objects in question were always had a metallic contact with the ground.

Take a look at figures 3, 6, and 7 on this page: http://amasci.com/tesla/tmistk.html. This seems the most likely explanation for the experiments at Colorado Springs and Wardenclyffe. Wardenclyffe in particular is where we find Tesla sinking iron rods 300 feet into the ground, burning out local power station dynamos with his energy demands, and constructing a massive omnidirectional transmission tower.

The reasonable conclusion from all this is that Tesla was always pursuing single-wire transmission schemes in which literally the entire Earth itself was the single wire, and the transmission medium for the wireless component was the entire ionosphere. "World Wireless" seems to have been meant quite literally, which was in keeping with all we know about Tesla's personality. Unfortunately, as we all know, Tesla needed something like an order of magnitude more funding than JP Morgan was willing to provide - particularly after Marconi.

Beyond that, though, Morgan would have probably pulled the project even if Tesla had gotten it working: if single-wire worldwide transmission was in fact his intention, it would've been impossible to meter consumption on a per-user basis.

Yeah, the original post is terrible. If he was *really* trying to get people to needlessly hyperventilate he should have titled it "A GNU/Linux distro needing BSD to install?!?!"

That's the most damning thing about this - myself and several friends have used Zicam heavily over the past year. It *really* works if you're in a super-high-stress job that exposes you to a lot of colds/flu (med student, floor trader for a brokerage, constantly traveling for business, etc.).

I got a vicious cold last weekend and would not be traveling right now if it weren't for the stuff, and the universal reaction from the group of people I just IM'd to make sure they knew was, "Crap... it's *almost* worth it."

It's not almost worth it, of course, but the one thing I'll say for Zicam is that it definitely does what it claims to do.

Damn.

Hey, maybe Iran or North Korea would let us borrow some of theirs!