Fukushima, which has put a large swath of Japan off limits to human habitation, is a crisis that never ends, and whose remediation cost has reached war level. Everytime one of these things goes bad, it is a staggering disaster.
Here is the antipode to Fukushima. This is not a perfect solution perhaps because of its pristine location, but it is a far better future than carbon or nuclear energy.
Sometime soon, a lab mouse could wake up thinking he had snuggled up to a girl mouse the night before. But he hadn’t. The memory would be fake.
Scientists have successfully implanted a false memory into a mouse’s brain — a seemingly far-fetched idea reminiscent of a science fiction film.
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“If mice had Hollywood, this would be ‘Inception’ for them,” said one of the lead researchers, MIT neuroscientist Steve Ramirez, whose study was published online Thursday in the journal Science.
Ramirez and his colleagues tagged brain cells associated with a specific memory and then tweaked that memory to make the mouse believe something had happened when it hadn’t.
President Barack Obama gave a major economic policy speech yesterday. Here’s what he didn’t say, and probably won’t ever say: Businesses will not begin new, significant hiring this year or in 2014.
Business leaders around the country tell me they’re not thinking about new hires right now. Rather, their sole focus is on how to win new customers. Too few people know this, but employees follow customer growth, not the other way around. Most importantly, businesses want to survive. They’ve cut everything to the bone and stored cash, and they won’t risk anything until they experience customer growth. New hires don’t solve their problems.
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Bluntly, the jobs picture is not improving, despite what you hear in the news, and it will get worse. Yes, businesses are sitting on billions of dollars in cash and productivity gains and the stock market has been rallying. But those businesses are hoarding that cash because they still lack that all-important state of mind and spirit: confidence.
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The first map may be what you are looking for, it is generic in nature.
Here is a 2013 map, showing a sharp decline but still a strong threat. Piracy is not “an expensive enough problem” for the US Government to take it seriously. This was clearly and explicitly laid out, down to commercial imagery of the villages, docks, and specific boats, in a CENTCOM J-2 Plans memorandum written in 2005. The emerging threat and the need to take non-state and individual actors seriously has been on the table since 1988. There just is not enough money in it to get those who wish to be bribed and those who do the bribing interested.
Eventually there could be a safe passage marketplace that is funded by insurance companies utilizing rapid response private military contractors and full-up Internet access world-wide. Eventually publics are going to refuse to pay for government programs that are rooted in corruption and buying “big” things that do not serve the public interest. Right now we are all caught between the rotting dinosaurs and the hatching birds of paradise.
In the wake of increasingly successful/irrefutable LENR experimentation/demonstrations over the past 20+ years, a big question still remains: ‘Where does the excess energy output come from?' Hopefully the article cited here can provide a partial answer to that question:
Ubuntu is aiming to raise $32 million in crowdfunding to fund Ubuntu Edge, a mobile computer that can dual-boot between Android and Ubuntu GNU/Linux.
Will Ubuntu Edge commit to using only free software? If the project succeeds and has $32 million available to spend, this is surely possible, but there is no indication in any of the promotional materials that this is part of the plan.
Isn't Android already free software? In theory, yes, but in practice, no. To work on actual hardware, Android ends up relying on device drivers that are either outright proprietary or use proprietary firmware blobs. All commonly available Android devices also come with proprietary software applications installed.
This is why today we announced a fundraising partnership with the Replicant project, which produces a version of Android that runs on existing devices without proprietary system software.
Isn't Ubuntu already always committed to free software? No. Ubuntu's default GNU/Linux distribution includes nonfree drivers, and its software marketplace promotes proprietary programs.
But, we don't want to make assumptions about what Ubuntu Edge will or won't be. We and many other free software supporters excited about the possibility of a GNU/Linux mobile device would like to hear official confirmation:
Will the Ubuntu Edge versions of both Android and Ubuntu contain or rely on any proprietary software or proprietary firmware?
Will the device have Restricted Boot, or will users be able to replace the operating system with a free one of their choice?
Will Ubuntu Edge include F-Droid, the free software Android application repository, as part of a commitment to promote and recommend only free software?
Ubuntu in the past has said they are forced to make temporary compromises in software freedom in order to have their operating system work on the computers people own and speed adoption of free software. But in this case, Ubuntu would have the chance to dictate the design of the hardware themselves. Software freedom should be the foundation of that design. There is no reason for compromise.
Conveniently, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth is doing an AMA on Reddit starting at 12:30 EDT, so maybe we will get some answers.
Fukushima, which has put a large swath of Japan off limits to human habitation, is a crisis that never ends, and whose remediation cost has reached war level. Everytime one of these things goes bad, it is a staggering disaster.
