Fire him

Sorry! Should have referred to it by its now reinstated original (?) name, Bengalaru. :)

I have absolutely nothing against McD. In fact I would dearly love to go to Maine to try McDonalds version of a Maine Lobster sandwich (no kidding, I saw it on the internet so it must be true). I wonder if they are still making it.

http://m.slashdot.org/story/195431

(If you didn't read the article, basically it's how the Indian Govt., seemingly in light of Nokia's purchase by deep pocketed Microsoft, has raised the amount of taxes due from $300M to $3B)

I have no problem with any country imposing whatever taxes they want on any foreign entity wanting to do business in their country. That's what comes with them being a "sovereign" state I guess. What's sure to drive businesses away (and will keep me from bringing my modest company there) is when they impose such taxes/restrictions RETROACTIVELY as was in this and other cases. That's not to mention the lack of infrastructure, corruption, nepotism, and poor education there. (I have just suffered personally from this, I was in Bangalore two days ago where I got serious food poisoning from a McDonalds, evidently some people are cutting corners or aren't properly trained/managed).

I'm sure Nokia is rueing the day they decided to build their manufacturing plant(s) there. While apologists for this may say it's probably just a negotiating tactic, there's another word for it: extortion.

Say what you will about the U.S. and other developed countries at least they pay lip service to the rule of (hopefully non-arbitrary) law for decades (or maybe centuries like in Switzerland). Seen in this light, perhaps Google's decision to likewise stay out of China is a bit less mysterious. A prominent Chinese professor was fired from a top ranked Chinese university for calling on the government to follow the Chinese Constitution and adhere to the rule of law. Evidently he didn't toe the government line (as announced by the newly installed, not elected premiere) that requiring the government to follow their own Constitution was a plot by the western powers to weaken China. (I believe the government didn't even pretend, as in other cases, that this professor was bad at his job; he received generally positive reviews from student evaluations. Of course even if he was terrible, tenure should allow him academic freedom to speak his mind but hey, this is China).

Instead the Chinese government reserves the right to arbitrary use of power. So if you were Google, would you put a substantial technological investment there?

Thank god that Google (Android), Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Intel, Cisco, AMD and I almost forgot Microsoft, are American companies. Can you imagine what the world would be like if China had the power the NSA has? (I guess ARM is not American but their British so that's close. And although I'm American, I'm not remotely white, can you tell by my username? :)

And this would be such a great thing for my level of comfort, I'd love to try it.

There's only one thing, I'd have to be sure it isn't fooling (or not too much) the body's thermo-regulation system. I'd hate to die of heat stroke because my brain thought my core temperature was 98.6F when actually it was 106F.

Anyway perhaps this is actually (very efficiently!) lowering or raising the core body temperature. I understand that someone discovered that the past (current?) method of cooling off NFL football players, dunking their heads in ice cold water, was counterproductive. It causes the capillaries in the face/head to constrict REDUCING heat transfer when you want to increase it. Thus someone came up with a box that applied a partial vacuum to the hands which (combined with some cold water) efficiently reduced their temperature. Hopefully this device works using this principle (and perhaps the DARPA gloves do the same).

Anyone know if this is a perceived or actual control of body temperature?

Not only am I upset as a strong supporter of the sciences but as an investor I took out some (fortunately) relatively inexpensive options to protect my portfolio against a possible catastrophic default on the debt (which would most likely caused the stock and bond markets to crash).

These options (betting the market would go down) were relatively inexpensive because most people thought the Republicans would blink which of course they did. However since I'm retired and most of my assets are in equities and bonds, I would've been very upset if there was a huge drop in the markets like the recent crash even if it was just a short term hit. Thus my insurance policy.

To (hopefully) teach these idiot assholes a lesson, I plan on donating an equal amount of money that I spent on my options to whoever is challenging them in the mid-term elections. Unfortunately, the real root of the problem is the gerrymandering of the districts which has concentrated the Tea Partiers into their district which has made them beholden only to the Tea Party's radical views. Short of a legal challenge, I don't know a bette way to influence these elections. Still it is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.

May I suggest you do the same?

To do anything really useful they'll need to probably have more power than their batteries can provide.

A wireless beaming (microwave?) power solution might be usable for local use. For long distance (interplanetary explorer?) use perhaps having each face of the cube covered with solar cells with the ability to recharge their batteries for relatively short bursts might be the only solution.

It might be good to see if they could form antenna arrays for long distance control and communications.

I know that the context of this thread hardly lends itself to serious speculation but I was just wondering...

Since "puffs" of air are basically over-pressure waves in a medium, can an apparatus be made to make an "under" pressure wave? In air, or water or other mediums? Prurient applications aside there might be some useful applications (I used to work in the theme park industry so water shows come to mind). Maybe if a cavitation bubble (which I understand is an under-pressure volume) could be projected, it could be an effective underwater weapon (they damage propellers on ships and submarines). Perhaps an acoustic under-pressure wave could damage eardrums or supress audio (useful for crowd control). How about undersea trench laying for fiber optic cables?

Most likely though there is something about the non-linear response of under-pressure waves that would prevent them from being used in a practical application. Then my next question would be, did the Disney researchers try using a pressure wave shaped in a soliton? This might enable it to travel great(er) distances without losing its "shape". Or are solitons even possible in compressive versus transverse waves?

Wouldn't be the first time the porn industry helped accelerate the adoption of a whole industry! (VCRs).

Is good spatial ability because of / or an indicator of creativity?
Or, is creativity because of good spatial ability?

If spatial ability has some sort of causal effect on creativity then LEGOs (and no, I don't work for them! :) should be required part of every childhood. (How many science Nobel prize winners used LEGOs/tinker toys/wooden blocks when they were little?).

Also it would be an interesting to see what effect watching movies or even playing video games have had (looking at images on a 2D surface) have had. Maybe that explains the term "couch potatoes" (looking at 2D images exclusively might make the brain very UN-creative). Perhaps 3D video games like FPS would more than make up for this and games like minecraft even more so. Still this is another reason why fully immersive virtual reality can't come soon enough (that is if we don't all get sick from vertigo)!

I wonder if the stock price if LEGO has changed due to the findings from this study?

So if one considers the weight distribution the bulkheads in the ill-fated Titanic as a "network" perhaps it would have been possible to save her (or at least keep her afloat long enough for the Carpathia to rescue all the passengers) by further "damaging" it.

While it has been often said that she could withstand any two bulkheads being flooded, in truth she could take many more, various simulations show that she could take at least four being flooded, in various combinations. And this was with them being COMPLETELY flooded (up to the top of the bulkhead partitions); if she were on a more even keel they would only flood to the water level.

The problem of course is that the Titanic was NOT on an even keel. When the compartments, all in the front, were flooded that caused her to pitch down. The water kept rising until it went OVER the bulkhead partition, flooding the next. This caused the weight in the front to increase even more which caused her to pitch even further and ... you get the picture.

So, thinking of this like a damaged "network"; perhaps if the captain had flooded one of the far aft bulkheads (breaking the network more), the Titanic would not have pitched downward as much and the water wouldn't have overflowed the bulkheads (they were not watertight, water could go over the partitions). This might have prevented the cascading effect which led to the sinking of the world's largest ship just two and a half hours later.

Would she still have sunk if they flooded one of the aft compartments? Maybe but it might have happened much more slowly and gently (no scenes of people falling down a nearly vertical ship!). And if the downward pitch was reduced so much that the water didn't surmount the bulkheads (the partitions separating them were quite high, much higher than the normal water level), maybe she would have remained afloat!

The builder (designer?) of the boat was on her when she sank, I wonder if he considered this? Or did the thought of damaging the boat further never cross his mind?

While (I believe) current space treaties prohibit any COUNTRIES from claiming planetary bodies, it is not clear if a an individual or company can claim the resources on them.

The U.N. should allow (and someday protect and enforce!) property rights.

This might open up a huge wave of investment and exploration. Say (perhaps like shipwreck salvage rights) one could claim the exclusive mineral rights to a (piece of a) celestial body. Even if it weren't permanent, like only a 100 year lease, many people might be tempted (look at what the British did with Hong Kong; their administration help turn it from a fishing port into one of the world's great cities even though they knew they'd have to give it back to the Chinese. So a completely regulation/tax free environment on an asteroid might be useful (once prices to LEO become more reasonable, go Space X!).

This has been mentioned as one of the possible ways to help get Africa out of its misery, if property rights could be accurately (right now it's a complete mess) determined and assigned it would become a source of capital that their people could buy and sell; in short it would open up a huge source of capital. Along with the proper controls (I know, that's the big problem) it could permanently stimulate their economies in a big way. (I understand the Chinese, in order to lock down property boundaries in their rural districts have been using google maps and satellite photos. Once properly recorded the villagers and make transactions confident in knowing that they have enforceable contracts).

(In more ways than one!)

Imagine being able to determine (or having someone determine for you!) who you fall in love with. A real life "love potion" as it were.

It would be the end of civilization as we know it. If it were used "rationally" we could end up as a society of Vulcans, with love (and mating) at carefully proscribed times and settings (it was called "Pon Far" or something like that). If it were used as a means of control, it could usher in a true "Brave New World". If it were used like the Internet is used today, society could fragment into hyper-specialized castes; nerds might only mate with nerds, jocks with jocks or even more specialized like accountants only wanting to be with other accountants. The human race could speciate (is that a word?) very quickly.

I've always wondered if the answer to the Fermi paradox was something like this; that we will do ourselves in not by crudely blowing ourselves up but rather in the process of understanding more and more of our biology we'd find (and open) Pandora's box. Like we'd discover an incredibly addictive drug or maybe mind control. Considering how central "love" has been to the course of human events, the ability to switch it on (or off?) could prove equally devastating.

In the book "Godel, Escher, Bach" my faint recollection is that the author claimed any programmable machine can be fed a program that can make it "halt". One example given was that of a simple record player; when a specially crafted record was played the precisely made vibrations was such that the turntable shook itself apart (halted). Maybe all intelligent creatures carry this same flaw and as our science and technology we are coming closer and closer to finding it.

Or maybe I just need to stop worrying, get some of this love potion and get myself a girlfriend! :)

While I'm sure that Mr. Kaspersky is a trustworthy, ethical person and that his staff adhere to the highest of professional standards, the fact remains that Kaspersky is based in Russia and therefore most of its assets (and employees!) are subject to the whims of the Russian government.

And yes, I do mean "whims". I'm sure that close observers of Russia will agree that the rule of law does not apply when strategic interests (defined as whatever interests Putin) are at stake. While the United States by comparison, is hardly an angel in that regard it cannot be compared to a government that throws Billionaires in prison on trumped up charges and assassinates its own agents overseas (with Polonium no less) who cross it. Ethics and professional standards would/should crumble when your life or the lives or your family members are at stake.

So should Kaspersky be allowed to make changes (at the chip level!) I would hope that at the very least it can be shown that it does not give the Russian govt. a back door into the platform. (For the same reason I would be very reluctant to use a home grown Chinese OS on a smartphone.)

Seeing as this was only a university study (and not a company project), I'm afraid that they'll publish a few papers, get their citations then move on to other things with only a prototype developed and no plans to sell it (sorry but I'm not a do-it-yourselfer and probably wouldn't want to try putting one together by myself even if the plans/source code were freely available).

So, maybe, could an Oculus Rift developer come up with this or an equivalent program? Even if the rights to Tetris are unavailable, I'm sure a similar game could be devised that would provide the same functionality (less the annoying soundtrack! ;)

Or does the Oculus Rift API only take in a high level 3D scene description and independently render the two, slightly dissimilar viewpoints? I assume not but, if so, perhaps they could be prevailed upon to add some new APIs.

It would be nice to be able to see in 3D. I might actually be able to play some ball sports (ping pong, tennis, football) with some proficiency.

Ok, so once the asteroid collector has delivered the asteroid to high lunar orbit, what does the spacecraft do then?

Well, if its got even a tiny fraction of its propellant left over (remember it just towed something maybe 100x its size clear across the inner solar system) , it slowly spirals down to low earth orbit and... REFUELS.
Now here's where things get interesting. Once it's refueled (remember that while its main consumable is up to 12,000 lbs. of Xenon, it gets its energy from solar power), it can do any number of things. Of course it could be sent out again to get another asteroid, including, as I mentioned in a previous post, one with precious WATER (Fuel and Oxygen!), but that might be boring. How about having it PAY FOR ITSELF by moving satellites from LEO to geosynchronous orbit. (This is very expensive as it typically requires an additional booster, I think the cost per pound is at least double that to low orbit). I think this market is on the order of $5B per year.

The reason why this would work is because the asteroid tug would clearly be capable of moving very(!) large payloads. It wouldn't even have to be very slow, if it can accelerate a 500 ton asteroid at 1/10,000th of a g, it could accelerate a 5 ton satellite at say 1/200th of a gee (taking into account the tug's own weight). So it could deliver the satellites in weeks if not days. Of course there would need to be a few minor design modifications to the tug. The collapsible "bag" would have to be removable and some sort of industry standard docking ports added. There would need to be some provision for refueling ports and critical components (gyroscopes, reaction wheels, electronics) would need to be replaceable/upgradeable like the Hubble space telescope. Of course servicing this "space tug" in this way is probably beyond the near term capabilities of robotics. However, rather than this being a problem, it could be an opportunity... ... for the International Space Station to actually be USEFUL. Here it could serve as a fuel depot, servicing "garage" and interchange point for these "space tugs". The kind of problem that robotics can't handle yet are ideally suited for an astronaut with a wrench (and maybe some elbow grease). The fact that the main propellant for these tugs is Xenon, an inert noble element, makes handling the fuel much less problematic (no problems with corrosion or toxicity) and safer (no fear of explosive combustion). Even the fact that these tugs use ion thrusters would be an advantage meaning that everything would be happening very slowly, if one went out of control they could probably move the entire station out of the way (like they do when avoiding space junk). The station could also keep spare, interchangeable parts for these tugs such as additional "bags" or robot arms or other modules. In short, the ISS would have a PURPOSE. (Although a pressurized "dry dock" would be preferable, substantial maintenance could be performed in a vacuum as the Hubble telescope servicing missions, Skylab repairs and recently tested refueling robot at the ISS).

With even a little thought, these space tugs have lots of additional uses. The same high power ion engines that can move a 500 ton asteroid could also send 500 tons of cargo cheaply (if slowly) to Mars. The same collapsible bag that can capture a tumbling asteroid can easily capture a much lighter piece of space junk. All it takes is for a government with foresight to make the initial investment that may (as I've suggested) quickly repay itself perhaps many times over. And isn't that the purpose of government (if not NASA)?

(By the way, putting the mini-asteroid in high lunar orbit may be useful as a last resort because, if we detect a threatening object heading our way, it might be in a good position that we could put the mini-asteroid on a new trajectory to hit the object and thus deflect it out of the way. With luck the 500 ton mass will strike the incoming object at a high incidental angle and at a significant velocity since it'll be coming from a completely different orbit. Of course it would be much preferred to nudge the incoming object years before in deep space off of an intercept trajectory but if we're caught with our pants down it would be nice to have a big rock whirling in the sling of its lunar orbit. In that case, we coud call it "David's Rock" or "The Goliath Killer".)