I'd think that, especially if there isn't anything too esoteric about the original communication mechanism, suitably motivated people could probably bang out (especially if some documentation still exists) an SDR implementation (at negligible power, obviously) for a few tens of thousands, tops, worth of hardware. The component you'd probably have to beg, borrow, or steal would be a suitably punchy transmitter and a suitably capable receiver to plug that into.

The material of choice for cheapo masks seems to be cellulose, just because it's all nice and fibrous with minimal processing, largely borrowed from the pulp and paper industry; but I wonder if you could make maskes from fish head sludge?

There should be plenty of collagen, which can be used to produce fibers and membranes (as with sausage casings and musical instrument 'gut' strings). On the minus side, those are hydrophilic, which could cause the filter membranes to swell and close because of breath moisture, which would be counterproductive...

Manservant! My finest Laboratory!

Yes; but it's also a government agency that probably has a few geeks on payroll. As an official project, there probably isn't even time to circulate the RFPs and cut the POs. As a hobby project, it's much more likely that somebody just needs to look the other way as whatever signalling gear can hit the right frequency sees a little after-hours misuse.

Aside from preventing any central bank from reacting, since they'd need sufficient consensus to modify the protocol behavior, is there anything that would stop a zOMG financial crisis style event denominated in BTC rather than USD?

Hypothetically, you might be able to prevent most leverage-providing instruments if all depositors deposited a specific bitcoin, with the right to demand that specific one back (though, since that would effectively prevent most uses to which deposits are put, any institution offering such a service would probably expect to be paid for secure storage, rather than paying you for use of capital, so they'd likely spin a more fungible 'your bitcoin in, a bitcoin out on request' offer, at which point you are back in fractional reserve territory.

The various yet-more-obscure CDOs and credit default swaps and things also seem like something that today's bitcoin holders would tend to be culturally averse to; but not something that any property of bitcoins would preclude. The only real difference would be the endgame, since you just don't get a choice about tweaking the money supply with bitcoins.

BTC is definitely too 'buyer beware' to really make it as a currency in its present state; but it's worth noting that there is apparently (a whole lot) of money in adding incomprehensibility to even relatively well behaved currencies. You don't want to let that side of the market get out of hand (Why hello there, world financial crisis, we were just talking about you, those functionally-impossible-to-value instruments, and assorted similar wacky stories...)

Once you count the dreadful freakshows grafted onto real currencies, BTC actually scores relatively low on complexity, on average; but the trouble is that there isn't really a 'safe for noobs' option.

With USD and friends, you should Stay Out Of The Deep End, because that's where the sharks live; but (in no small part because regulators stepped in to make it so) just getting a smallish bank account isn't a harrowing experience.

Although I wouldn't blame anyone who got the contrary impression, I'm actually a supporter of nuclear energy as well (and, just by way of vaguely connected story, I was a veritable nuclear power fanboy at the age when kids are supposed to be enthusiastic about trains or trucks. I had cutaway posters in my room showing the layouts and components of major commercial reactors, my model fuel pellet, assorted nuclear-physics-at-the-picture-book-level books... One time my dad arranged a tour at the nearest nuclear plant for my birthday. We got lost on the way in and ended up innocently wandering right into the main control room. Luckily, this was pre terrorist-hysteria, and having a kid along probably helps with the harmlessness, so we didn't get hassled. I think the operators thought it was cute that there was this random kid who wanted to see their stuff. Unfortunately, some sort of NRC regulation pertaining to areas of potential exposure meant no under-18s. I was crushed).

In this case, having to pull workers out at inconveniently short intervals to keep doses down is a specific nuclear nuisance (heavy construction/demolition work, plus aggressive dust control, isn't any faster because the workers are limited to very, very short shifts); but I was thinking of the much broader, and much older, cultural habit of putting certain people (mostly those who needed a very particular combination of independence and motivation-management) into a role where they are The Leader, and enjoy nontrivial power; but if things go bad, they have nontrivial responsibility, and it is both considered shameful(and often illegal) not to fulfil that as well. Take ship captains. That one in Italy is being raked over the coals right now over the question of whether or not he left his post before all possible rescuing was done. That's not because one pudgy 40-something was considered vital to the rescue effort; but because he was The Captain, and being the captain means that that is among your duties. Some military designations and higher level government posts(where resignation is effectively mandatory on the occasion of certain types of scandal, even if you could easily mount a legally sound defense) carry similar flavors.

As for the 'nontrivial power' bit, there are certain people who you want to put the fear of god into and make, within their sphere, more powerful than people who would ordinarily be above them on the hierarchy. You want the captain to be able to say "Listen, the nautical something system is not seaworthy. There is no way that that ship is going anywhere under my command until that is fixed. Period." You would want a nuclear plant operator to be able to say the same thing about the system under his charge. Those are just the sort of functions where you need to power, even impunity, some of the time(do you want the guy handling safety systems to know that he'll be fired if he raises any expensive questions? You would want him to be able to barge into the CEO's office and tell him that This Isn't Bloody Good Enough, if that's what it takes. On the other hand, you can't just toss him a load of general-purpose power and impunity; because failure to carry out his own assignment dutifully and correctly could have very, very, messy consequences indeed.

'Red' smog alert is expressed by drawing the chinese pictogram for 'sandpaper' inside the pictogram for 'lungs'.

(yes, I know that that's absolutely bullshit; but I've had enough of that 'Since I've been strongarmed into giving a commencement address to H.S. 341232's singularly uninteresting class, did you know that the Chinese word for 'crisis' is the combination of their word for 'danger' with their word for 'opportunity'? Really makes you think, doesn't it? Now, don't get too shiftfaced in college, what you learn there costs you more per hour than you are ever likely to make, so keep that in mind. And, um, Go class of 2000-and-something!'

If I were wearing a respirator for something Seriously Important(pathogens, war gasses, beryllium dust, etc.) it would be very important to me that absolutely everything is as it ought to be (and I'd probably be fucked, because good luck getting a nice seal if you get caught with a faceful of stubble, and sucks to be the beard guy, though that isn't a concern of mine personally).

However, if I were just trying to help my odds against something in the 'definitely unpleasant, very probably not good, especially at a population level' category, I'd see a role for something that provides 100% only in the hands of an expert; but 50-90 in the hands of n00bs.

That said, though, most filters impede air passing through them to some degree, so inhalations would likely favor any unfiltered imperfections in fit over a trip through the filters, making even dimensionally modest gaps much more serious in practice.

Does anybody know how badly that effect bites you? Obviously, for viruses or something where literally tens of them, if you aren't lucky, can be enough, it basically doesn't matter; but what's the efficiency drop-off for generic bulk particulate masks as user competence declines? Is it, because of airflow taking the low resistance path, basically all or nothing, or is it a fairly smooth decline in effectiveness, with progressively less competent users getting less protection; but no ugly cliff somewhere in the effectiveness value?

Luckily, ethernet totally has this covered: in the event of a collision, you just back off for a random number of milliseconds and then retransmit. No big deal! And cars are basically just big packets, right?

Estimated time until the last of the responsible parties retires and no longer has even a nominal obligation to give a fuck?

Some tasks are difficult because of the assorted parameters that you have to adhere to while doing them. In this case, relatively low tolerance for irradiation of workers and human morbidity and mortality are probably major inconveniences.

This being so, it seems only logical to employ TEPCO management as decommisioning operators. It's not like they were good for whatever their existing job descriptions are, and we can safely value their radiation exposure as unimportant, or even a benefit.

Fixed that for you.

I'm sure that the 'parse natural language expression and then do some 3d rendering' library is epic fun to debug if it behaves unexpectedly...

Honestly, seeing that much power in a demo makes the hair on the back of my neck rise (and in the 'something vile beyond comprehension this way comes' sort of way, not the 'awe at technology indistinguishable from magic' kind of way).

If you can do extremely complex and powerful things with very, very, short commands, that suggests that all those commands have a lot of internal magic baked in, quite possibly including some might-as-well-be-nondeterministic guessing to paper over any ambiguity in commands, or in output from one command moving to be input for another.

In the context of a demo, where you can carefully test, and confine yourself to some highlights from the set of programs that are both cool and well behaved, fantastic. In the context of taking the language out into the wild, that sounds like every nightmare interaction with an unpredictable and opaque 3rd-party library that you'll never expunge from your nightmares....

I'm assuming that you don't spend north of 22 hours/day in your apartment, with thrilling breaks in the, similarly sized, exercise cage?

I mean, so long as we are ignoring salient variables, I was in this elevator the other day, and the thing was tiny and all just brushed metal, without even furniture or plumbing, just a few buttons like some sick science experiment. I probably wouldn't have made it out with my humanity intact, except that the trip took 90 seconds!