vertexFarm

Oh, they did that in a previous emDrive experiment. It still produced the same thrust. They ignored it. This is par for the course with reactionless drive "research."

I know they are man-made units, but I don't think the men who made the second could measure the length of a day and split it into 86,400,000 units accurately.

Well you can't change it now. There's no use crying over spilt milk. I don't see the logic in creating this wasteful system in response to an pre-existing wasteful system, especially with how dubious it is that cryptocurrency is beneficial to mankind.

Like okay Alex Jones, we got a global system of control led by globally globalist banks. I don't think bitcoin is going to change that. Call me crazy, but that seems a bit grandiose.

Right? Remember when you could search for a tutorial online and you got an actual written process instead of some dolt on youtube awkwardly recording his screen and saying "uhhhhhhh" for the first third of the video? And wasting time doing stupid things like opening the program and setting up a test file instead of just recording the actual thing the tutorial is supposed to instruct? Ten minutes of bullshit just to show me where that one menu is hiding.

I hate video tutorials, and it's all you can find now. Sorry, I'll shut up. This is way off topic. Carry on.

This is such a massive straw man. We're not concerned with their right to distribute memos internally. We're concerned with their ability to almost unilaterally direct the progress of civilizations.

I think that securing a safe and prosperous future should be an obvious one, and one that we're royally screwing up with the amount of energy we spend.

If climate change is even a tenth as bad as it is projected to be this will have been a terribly selfish era of history. We're essentially devouring our young.

It would be very suspicious if our day was such an even number of milliseconds. It isn't, but still pretty cool! Things like this are what leap years are for, after all.

Or does that count? Is that caused by a partial day in the revolution of the earth around the sun or a failure of a day to fit into exactly 24 hours? Or both? Are we talking solar or sidereal days?

True, but at least you'd have somewhat more granular control and be able to do things like put a hardware switch on the transceiver. Crude, but it would at least work for when you're not actively using it.

I guess that's no different than a faraday pouch though.

I mean unless you've got a ham license and bounce your signal through your own network of relays using a different band than the final signal to the cell tower. But I don't think that's going to work as a popular solution. Would be a really fun experiment to build though.

I wonder if you could still use latency timing to get a rough fix on location through a secondary network like that. Not that anyone would be trying to.

Making a cell phone out of a pi with a sim card and gps daughter board is sounding less and less crazy each day. Really looking forward to when the librem phone starts shipping. I wonder if they've really been thorough enough vetting hardware for those bare-metal security issues.

This is at once staggering and completely unsurprising that companies would violate user trust in such a way and sell data without proper vetting that exploits people and could potentially put them in danger. Yet another episode in the misadventures of techno-illiterate regulation and totally unread TOS agreements.

Wow. That thing has more surface area than a motorcycle engine. I guess it really needs it with such a relatively low temperature gradient, not to mention the absence of airflow from movement. I'd love to see how that really performs.

I'd like to see the math on this electrolysis-via-gravity theory of yours. Usually it takes the likes of a nuclear furnace to squeeze oxygen and hydrogen out of a rock.

On airless worlds with less gravity than ours, water near the surface tends to sublimate and float off into the great old void. It's extremely rare to find it in places that are relatively easy to access. Even Earth isn't a great source, because all that atmospheric drag and gravity makes water a pain to loft up and out.

This new store of ice on the moon is right on our doorstep. Europa is not on our doorstep. Having it on the moon changes all the plans for future manned missions outside Earth's orbit. With hydrogen and oxygen readily available on the moon--and without nuclear reactors and massive chemical processing plants--it suddenly becomes a complete no-brainer to go over there and start making stores of cryogenic fuel for our more ambitious plans.

That is if we ever undertake another ambitious plan. New Horizons was amazing, it really was. But it's nothing like a manned flight.

People say robotic exploration is just as good, but the intangible things really matter. They really do. Think of just how much the moonshot in the 60s drove people into STEM and got everyone excited about the future. Look at science fiction then vs. now. It went from utopian and focused outward to heavily dystopian, obsessively focused inward. It's so sad.

It's impossible to calculate the value of the inspiration of the moonshot, let alone the advances in technology (solid-state computers anyone?). Just imagine how much of a boost it would give our society to go to Mars. This discovery makes it a lot more closer.

This discovery of so much more water ice on the moon than previously thought is such a boon for ISRU and future moon habitats and industry if we ever get around to continuing the space race.

We could crack lots of cryo propellant, and far more easily than the old plans. The moon could become a huge propellant, fuel, structural materials and life-support depot with a very easy gravity well to get out of--way easier than Earth. That makes it very important for future Mars missions as well. It's easier to stop off at the moon for a bit than to go straight to Mars from Earth.

Regolith has all kinds of neat stuff in it, such as aluminum and that legendary helium-3 which may or may not be a miracle fuel if fusion ever breaks even (and we figure out how to do it with aneutronic fuels, which is way harder). The aluminum can be made into solid rockets, which are good enough to get off the moon but damn near useless for anything else because of their pathetic specific impulse. But it would be a great way to get this water off the moon without having to waste much on shipping.

If we set up nuclear furnaces we could crack some of the minerals to get oxygen, but it would be so energy-intensive compared to melting ice, and hydrogen is super rare on worlds with easy gravity wells. Hydrogen likes to sublimate off into space and there's practically none anywhere this late in the game. That would be a big bottleneck on ISRU. But all this water ice hidden away near the surface really changes things.

Now if we'd only get serious and go nuclear and get people back in space. Check out the always incredible Atomic Rockets by Winchell Chung for great spacecraft diagrams, mission profiles, pdfs of charts and graphs and nomograms and more. It's a treasure trove for space nerds who wish NASA went the way we thought it was going to go in the fifties and sixties. http://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/

"I've conversed with many people who have done this to themselves, and they present as drug addicts to me, not as fully-functioning, let alone super-functioning, humans. Rather than grow as human beings, they're growing as some weird alien species."

This seems unfairly judgmental, and even worse I don't understand what kind of basis you're using to make that judgement. If it's just an ambiguous feeling, I have to say that sounds pretty unscientific.

For most of human history there has been addiction. It's just as valid a part of the human condition as anything else. Only in the last century or so has it become so stigmatized and relegated to fringe behavior. The vast majority of humanity has always been addicted to some substance or behavior or another, most likely including you.

Just for the sake of conversation. I feel like a lot of this self-experimentation is incredibly difficult to quantify, and you have to be aware that when you believe you've discovered something or made progress the easiest person to fool will be yourself. How do we determine whether or not our default mode network is switched off without an MRI machine? How do we communicate the thoughts and feelings of that state to another person in a way that enables them to do the same thing or recognize those results reliably? It's extremely subjective. Nobody knows very much about this field, and those who claim to know are likely charlatans.

It would be a far better use of the water to save it for life support or crack it into hydrogen and oxygen. Regolith can be used to create structures without having to haul everything up out of Earth's gravity well. It's also chock full of aluminum, so that would be easy to make with a nuclear or solar smelter. But water would never be used as a structural material, that would be a tremendous waste.

Well you can always add absurd amounts of surface area and mass to the heat sinks to take advantage of thermal inertia, or possibly change components to simply raise your safe operating temperatures to absurd levels. But that's pretty involved. Spacecraft take care of huge temperatures with no fans or even conductive or convective cooling. But that requires enormous, sail-sized surfaces to take advantage of extremely slow radiative cooling.

It would be an exotic option for sure. And not something you'll find pre-built.

I think a good route would be to get as efficient a fan-cooled psu you could find and modify it yourself. You can always take the PCBs out of the case and add bigger heat sinks, change the TIM under those heat sinks, add water blocks if needed, desolder components and swap with higher wattage components, etc.

Or you could just submerge the whole machine in mineral oil. That technique really sucks, though. As cool as it is to have a fully submerged computer, it's hell to clean literal liquid laxative out of a PCIe slot when it's time to upgrade the graphics card.

Anything that can be used can be misused, if you wanna get into the philosophy of it. And any information that is intelligible to one party can be made intelligible to another party, pending whether quantum weirdness™ pans out or not. Even if entanglement becomes a consumer-level thing, I bet eavesdropping techniques will eventually be developed, even if they only operate on the conventional side of the quantum computer.

But this is more about security engineering philosophy. The Intel management engine relies on a lot of security-by-obscurity, which is not the best way. But I think that Intel chips are passably secure as long as you watch what you're doing.

Anyone who falls for this kind of reasoning is incredibly naive.

If you ever hear that somebody has a plan to have the best offense and make sure that everyone else has the second-best defense so they're the only ones who can do something bad, the first thing that should come to your mind is that they are planning to do something bad. It's not an "will they" situation. It's a "can they" situation. If they have the capability, they will do it.

That is a terrible plan. And don't tell me that they are on our side so it's okay. Secretive, crypto-state actors are on their own side. Ask yourself: if this power eventually falls under the unilateral control of the executive branch, will that always be a good thing under any conceivable future administration? Believing the justifications is extremely dangerous.

What kind of bullshit argument is this? Manipulation? To not allow the NSA to choose what encryption people use? Is it manipulation to prevent the NSA from manipulating us? Give me a fucking break.

Yes, because Snowden taught us not to trust the NSA because they're shysters and crooks. How dare he!

It's like a burglar offering to change your locks. And promising he doesn't have a copy of the key. But you aren't allowed to check. Just trust him.

Ha. I really hope we start seeing some truly useful and widely adopted decentralized apps, but everyone seems to get stuck in get-rich-quick schemes. I can't blame people for going where the money is. But this is starting to look bad for blockchain tech. Eventually the economy has to be about something other than buying in and hoping the next guy buys in for more or trying to make more and more effective mining hardware.

Exactly. You know what I like from a friend? Just somebody to feel comfortable around. We don't even really need to have good conversation or share interests, though those can be a plus. I like somebody who can be there and I don't feel anxious or have to put on my public face. That's really it.

I don't want them to do a bunch of shit for me. I hate it when people do me a bunch of favors. It might be a character flaw of mine. But I can't stand the term "fair-weather friend" either. I'd never ask you to drag me out of a rough spell, so don't expect that I'm going to help you with all this bullshit. If you don't like that, fine. I can find someone else to be comfortable around.

The GDPR is about a lot more than cookies. I think you're going to have a hard time arguing that current massive internet advertising surveillance and analysis industry is friendly towards small business.

I wonder if there will ever be a suit in which that cookie banner ("Got it!" ugh) is found not to apply because users basically agree to it simply by seeing it. You have their stupid cookie by the time you can read that message. That doesn't seem like an agreement to me, but I'm not even slightly a lawyer.

The whole strategy seems to be in bad faith. I wish more sites would react by minimizing usage of cookies instead of just adopting that dumb overlay.

Germany, eh? Interesting. What kind of companies in that field are in Germany?

I wish I knew more about this subject.

I think it's meant more as a thought experiment than an actual formal proof.

Of course. Of course marketers are just allowed to track specific numbers for nebulous marketing reasons. Of course the phone companies just hand that feature out to whoever the fuck they want. What kind of god damn terrible security is this? What is wrong with the FCC? Oh yeah they were bought to exclusively terrorize the competitors of large telecom companies.

I remember when cell phones first started becoming commonplace and people thought I was crazy for having doubts. I hate being right.

Damn, good point. I figured this should be an easily solvable problem. Stands to reason that the FCC is just letting it happen because they're hilariously corrupt. Definitely one of the most successfully captured regulatory bodies.