zeteo

78 ms·

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by zeteo 15y ago
> The article itself concentrates on intra-system conflicts Neptune is more than 4 light-hours away, and the Oort cloud (discussed as a possible source of projectiles) a full light-year further. So I don't see how anything short of gene
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by zeteo 15y ago
>Almost all of those things were actually decided by the officers commanding the tank / plane battalions You'd be surprised: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Villers-Bocage#Mornin...
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by zeteo 15y ago
We're talking about replacing people in combat vehicles with AI. Considering the need for tactics, strategy and improvisation in a conflict that can take place light-years away, that won't work with anything less than general-purpose AI.
664.
by zeteo 15y ago
Once you fire a rifle, everything is also Newtonian and deterministic. You still have to move into position, decide which target to fire at, with what ammo etc What you describe is quite close to an actual weapon used in WW2, the SG 500: h
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by zeteo 15y ago
Oh, come on. Tank and plane crews are also "sitting in a glorified tin can", but that didn't preclude, say, WW2 from being vastly more strategic than any preceding conflicts. The crew still has to decide where and how the vehicle moves, wha
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by zeteo 15y ago
>I fully expect AI to advance sufficiently in the next 20 years Yes, people have been expecting AI to become human-like within 20 years for the past 6 decades. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellige... ("Research
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by zeteo 15y ago
Eh? My point was that humans on board can improvise (remember Apollo 13) and carry out their objectives even in the presence of a forewarned and intelligent opponent.
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by zeteo 15y ago
> Why put humans on warships at all? The whole idea of the article is to explore what's possible with current technology, and general-purpose AI is not part of that. Guided missiles are routinely defeated by counter-measures even when t
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by zeteo 15y ago
"Unmanned" can mean many things, but considering the OP's quote "when we're already flying unmanned vehicles on earth", he clearly meant remote control.
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by zeteo 15y ago
If you take longer to accelerate it, that just increases the probability of detection by other means. It still doesn't change the argument that it should be much cheaper for the defender to detect and deflect your projectile than it was for
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by zeteo 15y ago
The energy required to accelerate a big object to even half the speed of light is prohibitive. Even if the process was feasible, it would be a vast cosmic event bound to emit some radiation, which would still arrive much sooner than the obj
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by zeteo 15y ago
Reaching even a small proportion of the speed of light requires prohibitively high amounts of energy. Let's consider the energy required to accelerate Haley's Comet (relatively small at 2.2e14 kg) to half the speed of light (v = c/2): E = m
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by zeteo 15y ago
The fighting methods in that essay still require ships (to sneak up into e.g. Kuiper's Belt). In any case, a big, dumb projectile can have its course changed with much less energy than required to fire it. The bigger it is, the earlier it w
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by zeteo 15y ago
>Why would space war ships be manned when we're already flying unmanned vehicles on earth Because the longest distance on Earth is only about 0.07 light-seconds.
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by zeteo 15y ago
"society does not grant [...] protection for free. Nor does it expect to get the short end of the deal. It [...] expects [its] stake to be rewarded [...] mhartl's implication [...] represents [...] arrogance [...] It is supremely egocentric
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by zeteo 15y ago
If you can make a shiv out of a soda can, I'm sure there are a lot of high security inmates who are very interested in your recipe.
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by zeteo 15y ago
If you were a math major and got into the PhD program, you've made it and I don't think foreign students have any advantage over you. I was rather talking about people who just begin college. What was your experience of the drop-out rate fr
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by zeteo 15y ago
There's little point in making a career more appealing for someone if they lack the basic background for it. The explosion in college remedial math courses is good support for my argument, I believe.
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by zeteo 15y ago
Of course it's market driven. My point was that the cost structure for a STEM degree for someone who did K-12 in the US is different from someone who went to a good program in, say, Poland, where I'm told that until recently they would skip
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by zeteo 15y ago
But of course the completion times and attrition rates are high. Anyone who's worked in the science academia is well aware of the fact that way too many American K-12 graduates, no matter how much they may like a STEM career, are woefully u
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by zeteo 15y ago
It's not the emphasis on STEM immigration that's keeping young Americans from these jobs, it's the piss-poor state of math education in the average US K-12. I was a calculus TA in college and was amazed at the proportion of prospective scie
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by zeteo 15y ago
> immigrants [...] who stay take the place of a US citizen who could have had the job, if our education system was better and our government's policies were otherwise aligned with the welfare of its people. All routine immigration shoul
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by zeteo 15y ago
>Wouldn't it be harder for skilled Americans to find jobs here if they're competing with immigrants? You must have missed a paragraph or two of the article, see below. Wouldn't it be easier for skilled Americans to find jobs if there we
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by zeteo 15y ago
Gambling and marijuana have constituencies, foreign engineers who can't get a work visa don't.
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by zeteo 15y ago
Ignoring the fancy drawings, this is not necessarily such an outlandish project. The main idea is buying a surplus cruise ship and transforming it into office space for highly paid workers who can get a tourist visa but not a work visa for
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by zeteo 15y ago
>Living in confined spaces [...] is bad enough in a company space where you can actually go home or go out every now and then The ship is supposed to be parked 12 miles off SF. It's like a regular job, you live in the city and commute b
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by zeteo 15y ago
That's a really funny quote considering the iron cannonball is the size of a softball and a 17th century technology. It's a bit like saying "the horse sped by like an 18-wheeler".
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by zeteo 15y ago
I don't think it's wrong, or at least not for the reason you've mentioned.
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by zeteo 15y ago
Umm the date on my link is November 14th. It's the same thing, except I'm linking to the original PDF and you're linking to the Scribd version. Have you read the details in the post you're replying to? It's exactly about the paragraph (10)
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by zeteo 15y ago
What is the base for your unsupported assertion that the judge is a "dinosaur who know[s] nothing of technology policy"? If you had read the ruling, you'd have seen there's a lot of technical detail in it. Plus, the article is probably also

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