Disabling your microphone on an already air-gapped most certainly makes it much harder to clandestinely *control* your machine. Maybe you could send a signal in through the grounding and pick it up somehow in a harmonic of the voltage regulator (amplifying it with a thermal virus so it is detectible), but that's much harder to do (which means the bandwidth will be much-much lower)...

Of course simply disabling a microphone obviously doesn't do much to eliminate *emanations* from your already compromised machine to an agent's laptop, duh?

At the risk of trivializing the issue, it's not so dissimilar to why sometimes people throw good money after bad... After you've invested all this time researching something and the results are disappointing, you might be tempted to justify your cheating as preserving your time investment in the research direction...

Perhaps one way to mitigate this is to increase the perceived value of producing negative research results (of course w/o making things too valuable as to encourage folks to research stupid things and publishing the inevitable negative results)...

FWIW, Back in the 90's people were also worried about tempest-like stuff (e.g., EM emissions), but simply disabling the speakers isn't enough to inhibit the sonic transmission path. Electronics can "hum" at ultra-sonic frequencies (and fans can transmit audible frequencies), so by running of a suitable thermal virus actions, it is possible to leak information from a previously compromised machine that was not network connected.

However, disabling the microphone would certain make it harder to control such a compromised, air-gapped machine...

FWIW, they apparently have a paper and a website...

As I understand it, although many previous hemoglobin substitutes have been tried and tested, the hemoglobin tends to eventually becomes toxic. Their new approach is to re-engineer the hemoglobin molecule to attach tyrosine which apparently has the effect of allowing some natural cleaning processes in the blood to reduce toxic build up before it gets to bad (in theory)...

Of course they'll have to test it eventually. Hopefully it won't be a *opt-out* processes the way they attempted to test Polyheme (an earlier effort by Northfield labs). To opt-out, of the Polyheme trial, you had to pre-order a bracelet and *wear-it-all-the-time* to prevent being randomly given Polyheme instead of blood as part of your emergency treatment by a hospital participating in that trial.

Actually, when it comes to the ISS, the "ruskies" might decide to dump the US first (at least the Russians claim that, "The Russian segment can exist independently from the American one. The U.S. one cannot."). Apparently Russia has already "banned" the US from using their RD-180 engines which power the Atlas V rockets used to launch our military satellites as a consequence of this Ukraine tiff...

Perhaps you are unaware of how much regression has occurred the US space program. You talk about the science of space travel from a knowledge point of view, but that is currently a moot problem from the US point of view, we don't have launchers at the moment. If you are in a hurry, you might have better luck if you direct your scientific requests to Roscosmos... Maybe the "ruskies" can dump the US from the ISS and build the centrifuge you seek...

While you're at it, you can probably look into this study of circadian rhythms on MIR cosmonauts

Some people travel from city-to-city and don't like to carry 2 phones (or rent phones for a different network when they get there)...

FWIW, that was part of the dream that was WiMax and VoLTE... Maybe we'll get there with VoLTE eventually, but WiMax part of the dream is certainly dead...

Two things...

With many companies, the lifetime of the equities are shorter than an investor's lifetime (e.g., nearly all US-based airlines, GM, Chrysler, automobile companies, banks, energy trading companies like Enron, Calpine, PG&E, WorldCom). With some internet companies, significantly shorter...

Stock ownership with its historical PE levels, is often less about ownership of the company, than a bet on the future performance of the company.

The stock market is really about providing a safe place to gamble. Think of it like gambling in Vegas vs gambling in a smoke filled room in the basement of a restaurant wondering if you win the pot, if you are going to get out the room alive. Stocks are merely the chips in this game. They have some intrinsic value which follows the fortune of the company they are attached to, but there is an artificial shortage of chips and people that want to play the game are bidding up the value of those chips...

Why not make more chips? The internet bubble showed what happens when you create more chips (e.g, companies that issue stock) simply to fill that demand...

Contrary to popular belief, you can sell ownership securities in a company and *not* register them, or even list them in a regulated stock exchange (e.g., if the number of owners is small enough). The only purported rationale to do so is so that if securities are sold to the public at large, the public can have a fair chance to see what they are probably worth so that small-fry can play the game. High-frequency trading pretty much obliterates this idea, so you might begin to wonder what the rationale is for a regulated stock exchange to service a secondary securities market (other than a false sense of security).

If a company wanted to, it could sell partial ownership securities directly to a investment partnership and ordinary joes could invest in that partnership (if they trusted that partnership), but then the investment wouldn't be as liquid. Asset liquidity is really the only reason the stock markets continue to exist, not ownership...

FWIW, Ecology isn't just "fuzzy" animals and although space is not likely to be completely sterile (e.g., space faring bacteria diaspora?), you can still have ecological impact w/o native organizing. However, it could affect *our* future

Say capturing an asteroid and mining it isn't going to kill and fuzzy animals, but there is likely going to be unexpected collateral pollution issues (e.g, space debris in orbit of the moon, etc). Nascent industrial operations often ignore any such collateral pollution issue (it's usually expensive to bootstrap operations, and since initial operations are small, people don't care as much and corners are cut).

Once industrial operations gain inertia, they tend to resist reform measures until forced to by political pressure. Examples of this kind of crap are near my own backyard. During early silicon valley years, industrial solvents like TCE spilled into the soil by AMD and TRW resulted in a sub-surface toxic contaminated plume which became superfund site near a neighborhood elementary school (San Miguel).

Okay, humans aren't likely to be living near asteroids captured for mining near the moon, but given that we've had direct experience with orbital pollution before (e.g., Project West Ford), we should at least think about pausing before releasing unrestrained industrial forces in an area...

Well, since you asked...

Of course if the challenge of sending humans to Mars is something we are unwilling to accept, or willing to postpone, or intend to lose...

Industrializing space may sound like a meaningful thing, but industrializing areas of our own earth hasn't been the most ecological of pursuits. Nothing like the chants of "drill-baby-drill" being replaced by "launch-and-mine-baby-launch-and-mine"... It seems like it was also meaningful thing Yellowstone was the first national park, although I'm sure there's someone out that could make an argument that exploiting sustainable geo-thermal energy in old-faithful will help build up our oil independence...

Are you sure? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

No, it's actually somewhat true, but that doesn't mean any of those doors are necessary desirable destinations, or that getting less than A's in a class is a barrier to any actual measures of success (e.g., happiness, status, high-paying job, etc), or the opportunity cost of working towards that A results in a overall better life.

Of course, although there are very few consequence for lower GPAs in early schools, there are actual consequences for a pattern of mediocre grades as you advance in schooling (putting students in "tracks" is nearly inevitable regardless of your schooling options) which does pin you into certain corners of future outcomes.

At least in the USA, it's possible (and perhaps even not uncommon) to break out of the consequences of "tracks", however, in many countries in the world, it's nearly impossible to do so, so it is not exactly a "myth".

We'd like to think there should always be a second chance at a door, but often in life there are usually not. However, most of the time, there are often many alternatives, some of which may be even better than the original choice, but this isn't the same as a second chance at a door, and you need to learn to identify these situations and catch that door before it closes, if it's something you really want. If you need to teach your kid anything, that's probably the thing to teach them.

Similarly, the opportunity cost of working for something as abstract as all A's, might be too high a cost to pay relative to other uses of someone's time (say spending the time learning/practicing some valuable "hobby" that would be valuable in the future, or on interpersonal relationships). As someone who used to spend time working with college admissions officers, I'd say this is the unspoken reality of the college application game that parents often fail to understand: A's can only get you so far...

No, we are either creating our personal slaves, or our new masters (or both, but over time)...
In either case, the misery we are bringing forth is probably our own...

Once mechanical machine marvels were our slaves, then in the industrial revolution, in some ways, they became masters of those workers on the assembly line and made many lives miserable along the way...

Electronic computers also started out as our slaves, but sometimes we are the slaves to our electronic creations and/or in the process of making some computer workers lives more miserable along the way...

There's no reason to believe AI will be much different. Although it will likely enables many achievements, it will also no doubt make some lives more miserable along the way to a potential post-blue-collar (workers replaced by machines run by computers), post-white-collar (workers replaced by computers run by AI), economy...

OR, perhaps we use the same method but look at the data a different way (e.g., like a turbo code uses the same basic error correction code technology, but permutes the input data)... I suspect the brain does something similar to this, but I have no evidence...

Not exactly ;^)

Th232 + neutron -> Th233 (which isn't as stable stable)

Then two stages of beta- decay

Th233 -> Pa233 + electron + anti-neutrino
Pa233 -> U233 + electron + anti-neutrino

The problem is with U232 production is because all of these intermediate products are also fissile in the reactor (e.g., can interact w/ stray fast neutrons and undergo extra neutron decay before undergoing beta- decay resulting in U232 instead of U233).

However, the issue isn't that U232 is so unstable it decays with products that emit large amounts of gamma radiation (which in the decay chain, Tl208 is a big gamma emitter so it's really dangerous), it's mostly that you can't use chemistry to separate U232 from U233 (since only the mass is different, not the valence electrons). You either have to use advanced techniques (e.g, laser isotope separation), or modify your reactor parameters so that U232 production is reduced.

The ironic thing is that purported proliferation resistance of U233 is because reactors can be deliberately tweaked to increase the concentration of U232 to denature the U233. However, as I understand it, there is no particular technical reason to do this other than proliferation resistance (except to make it more dangerous to potential nuclear power plant workers as if that was a goal). If a rogue country wanted to operate a Th reactor to create large amounts of U233 w/o a limited amount U232 contamination, apparently it's not that hard to do (basically replacing the fuel more frequent schedule than normal, since most of the U232 yield comes at the end of the fuel cycle where there are more high energy neutrons bouncing around)...

If your goal is to simply produce a bomb, (not necessarily a large one with optimal yield), apparently India detonated an experimental U233 bomb as part of their Pokhran-II tests back in 1998... I don't think that bomb was a fizzle...