Read moreIn short, turn games into economic darknets that work in parallel and better than the broken status quo systems. As in: economic games that connect effort with reward. Economic games with transparent rules that tangibly improve the lives of all of the players in the REAL WORLD.
This isn’t tech utopian. It’s reality. The global electronic marketplace and the political system that currently dominates our lives is at root a game but with hidden rule sets. As a result, it’s a game that being run for the benefit of the game designers to the detriment of the players. The reason we keep playing is that we don’t have any choice. Let’s invent something better and compete with it. Let’s provide people with a choice.
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Read moreThomas Roth of Cologne, Germany told Reuters he used custom software running on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud service to break into a WPA-PSK protected network in about 20 minutes. With refinements to his program, he said he could shave the time to about six minutes. With EC2 computers available for 28 cents per minute, the cost of the crack came to just $1.68.
Read moreIn results just published in the journal Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, they have devised a system no bigger than a large desk that uses the same energy as an electric kettle. Two mini-magnetospheres will be contained within two mini satellites located outside the spaceship. Should there be an increase in solar wind flux, or an approaching cloud of energetic particles from a flare and/or coronal mass ejection (CME), the magnetospheres can be switched on and the solar ions are deflected away from the spacecraft.
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Prof. Bob Bingham, a theoretical physicist at the University of Strathclyde, gives a graphic account as to why this technology is important:
“Solar storms or winds are one of the greatest dangers of deep space travel. If you got hit by one not only would it take out the electronics of a ship but the astronauts would soon take on the appearance of an overcooked pizza. It would be a bit like being near the Hiroshima blast. Your skin would blister, hair and teeth fall out and before long your internal organs would fail. It is not a very nice way to go. This system creates a Magnetic Field Bubble that would deflect the dangerous radiation away from the spacecraft.” –
Read moreOperated by the Air Force 20th Space Control Squadron and created by Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, Space Fence is a multistatic radar system capable of detecting almost everything that moves in orbits up to 18,641 miles (30,000 kilometers). From the Hubble or the International Space Station down to the four-inch long metal shards that resulted from the collision of a commercial Iridium communications satellite and a defunct Russian satellite in 2009, this thing can track anything.
Read more..the more I think about it, the more I become convinced that optimism isn’t just hard work, it’s scary: it invites disillusionment, it openly courts the up-ending and down-throwing of one’s conceptions of the world. To maintain optimism, one must keep picking oneself up after the arrival of a disappointment, rebuild a new theory of the world, adjust and amend it as new data comes to light. By comparison, pessimism is easy: sit back, shake your head stoically as you predict bad things to come, and then just open a newspaper or web-browser and pick out the evidence to prove you were right. People are a lot like electricity, in that we tend to follow the path of least resistance. Pessimism has a nice fat copper cable strapped straight to the psychological earth-point; the gratification of being proved right, gained with minimum emotional expenditure.
Read moreThe modules, which have never been launched, were built as part of Almaz, a Soviet military programme that sent astronauts into orbit to take reconnaissance photographs of Earth. But Excalibur has also bought four reusable Almaz spacecraft, including one that was flown twice, which might be used much sooner.
Indeed, the firm’s immediate goal is finding ways to get passengers into orbit. Before this is possible the spaceships will need to be refurbished and modernised. However, Excalibur will attempt to preserve many of their “workhorse” components, including the heat shield, parachute system, solid rocket motors, and an escape system that can jettison a crew to safety if a rocket malfunctions.
Read moreIt’s time to make a few things clear. If one measures power strictly according to GDP at market exchange rates, then the United States is roughly 250 percent more powerful than China. If one uses a combination of metrics – as does, for example, the U.S. National Intelligence Council’s 2025 project – then China possesses a little less than half of America’s relative power. Even on the financial side, the U.S. still reigns, and, hype notwithstanding, the dollar is not going anywhere as the world’s reserve currency. The renminbi could be an alternative in the far future – but after the 2008 financial crisis, China is loath to open up its capital markets. Even by the less tangible metrics of soft power, the United States still outperforms China handily in new public opinion surveys from the Pacific Rim by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
Read moreBeyond the loss of patrimony, the disconnect from food production puts the capital in a precarious food security situation. With a food system relying on unsustainable oil-fed transportation, not only Paris but also most cities throughout the world are at risk. If the transport system were to fail, food would run out on supermarket shelves within a few days.
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Cities can’t go on being disconnected from food production, trapped in a globalized food system that is dependent on fuel, generating waste and not producing anything. If we are serious about tackling the issue of their self-sufficiency, solutions have to be the fruit of concerted work by producers, chefs, activists, academics, and politicians, all of them gathered around the ones for whom this work has to be done: the consumers.
Read moreThe takeaway then is not that all prices will trend towards free, but instead that in the absence of traditional benchmarks pricing trends towards chaos. As traditional standards like Don Draper’s professionalism lose their appeal, we not only lose benchmarks for setting prices, but we also lose any frame of reference for determining when a monetary transaction should be expected in the first place.
Read moreI honestly don’t want to knock the hard work of executives who are struggling to survive in a terrible economy. But really. 20,000 products? Each one the result of hours, days, weeks, months of meetings and discussions and agonized decision making. Each one apparently accompanied by a breathless press release describing how it represents genuine innovation, not to mention fabulous design. And yes, some of the products will probably even be a welcome addition to our gadget-laden homes. But this as the face of modern day innovation? Oy.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 