Sharks are an ancient division of life, roughly 440 million years old, which has survived far warmer oceans.
There are ~500 living species of shark and likely tens of thousands extinct in their lineage.
We are perpetrating a mass extinction event that incorporates not just temperatures, but ocean acidification and trophic cascade for fisheries. In mass extinctions, enough things about the ecosystem change that specialists often go extinct. Great White Sharks are a specialist species in their extreme size; Most size specialists are in a precarious local maxima that disappears too quickly to adapt if conditions change drastically.
Ukraine dramatically reduced Russian fuel export revenue, and the sanctions did so even more.
It was really coming to the point of urgent existential threat to the Putin regime this spring, before Trump and Netanyahu bailed him out, first by doubling the global oil price and then by relaxing sanctions.
And Ukraine's drone / cruise missile portfolio includes things like the Flamingo, more than twice the payload and range of a Tomahawk.
If Ukraine had access to Tomahawks, Russian oil industry would not exist at this point. With drones after two and halve years of attacks with multiple hits at the same refineries Ukraine reduced Russian fuel production at best by 20%.
Flamingo is still mostly vaporware. For precise strikes against Russian factories Ukraine uses either Storm Shadow or domestic Neptun.
But that just shows again that drones are not particularly effective against most industrial targets and even against oil installations the damage is not lasting.
Or consider how US was able to destroy the bridge in Iran yet Crimea bridge and bridges in Rostov that are absolutely vital to Russian war logistics still stands.
Why do you think this bridge is vital when there is a land bridge (Kherson) with multiple rail links all in Russian controlled territory containing the entry and exit points of the bridge?
That bridge is A) incredibly expensive and something a postwar Ukraine would prefer to exist for economic reasons, B) extremely overbuilt in certain ways, and C) not strictly required if Russia can keep rail going on the landbridge.
It might be in play if the land bridge fell.
It would be almost trivial in terms of range to make it a target of any number of strike munitions. If you can hit the Baltic ports or factories in the Urals...
As for drones vs cruise missiles - at this point every missile strike is associated with drone accompaniment, it's part of the counter SHORAD proposition.
My crude understanding is that in the 90's, the US controlled basically all the world's large-scale financial clearing network, and after 9/11 declared a holy war against anything that didn't provide visibility to US intelligence (like the surviving medieval Middle Eastern 'Hawala' banking system) and the ability for the US to sanction it on a fine-grained basis.
Since that time, we have grabbed on tighter and tighter, and are finding that the world is starting to seek out a less politically volatile patron for a financial system.
It's pretty wild, I work in finance and hawala was specifically called out in my anti money laundering training. Really seems like cultural chauvanism and thinly veiled racism to eschew an entire traditional monetary support system.
* You can pack many more different colors into fiber optic communication lines. Every color carries a few tens of GHz in modulation, but the carrier light is in hundreds of THz; there's a ton of bandwidth not used between readily available colors.
* You can likely do interesting molecular chemistry by precisely adjusting laser light to the energy levels of particular bonds / electrons.
* Maybe you can precisely target particular wavelengths / absorption bands for more efficient laser cutting and welding, if these adjustable lasers can be made high-power.
Fiber has fairly narrow windows in which it is as transparent as it needs to be to go long distance. We're already pretty good at filling these windows with conventional semiconductor lasers.
What this is actually interesting for is being able to access arbitrary atomic transitions, many of which are outside the range of conventional semiconductors (too short, usually - there's a big hole between green and red for semiconductors). That's why they talk about quantum stuff.
This is true. But even within this window, e.g. between 1100 nm infrared and 700 nm red, we could put 40 different "colors" at 10 nm steps. Separation at the receiving end may become hard though.
Standard ITU grid is 100 GHz channel spacing, with subdivisions of 25 and 50. We're routinely using symbol rates high enough that the channels are fairly well filled.
> Jury Finds Live Nation Acts as a Monopoly in a Victory for States
In a verdict that could have far-reaching consequences in the music industry, the live colossus that includes Ticketmaster was found to have violated antitrust laws.
We can tune them slightly with differences in temperature if I recall correctly, but there are limited uses for a few nanometers up or down in wavelength. If there's now a versatile multi wavelength generator for numerous specific discrete frequencies, you may be able to just cool it down to access nearby bands.
Didn't we already invent much of this with wavelength division multiplexing and optical routing switches, the invention that pierced the tech bubble by quite suddenly increasing bandwidth of in-place fiber pipes by ~100x during a large buildout?
(I am not an expert, but this is the narrative I've heard; I may not be using the right words)
The substance is they've created a way to fabricate a device that can make the optical frequencies they wish. That is useful: it means a designer isn't limited to frequencies that are economic to generate with existing techniques, which is a constraint that lasers currently struggle with: low cost, compact, efficient laser sources (the kind that fit on a chip, and are fabricated by cost effective processes,) only exist for a limited number of frequencies.
The story is typical tech journalism pabulum, but the underlying paper does discuss efficiency. It's about what you'd expect: 35 mW -> 6 mW @ 485 nm, for example.
An obvious use case is multimode fiber communication: perhaps this makes it possible to use more frequencies for greater bandwidth and/or make the devices cheaper/smaller/more efficient. But there are other, more exotic things one might do when some optical frequency that was previously uneconomic becomes feasible to use at scale.
Probably not because EUV gets absorbed incredibly quickly by anything other than vacuum. This is why it is created in low density gas, thin liquid or solid samples (high harmonic generation) or electron clouds (free electron laser).
It’s like any other fundamental research: you don’t know how much it’s worth until people start using it to solve real problems. This is something that is literally impossible to guess ahead of time. The most abstract mathematical techniques could turn into a trillion–dollar industry (number theory begat RSA encryption which now underpins _everything_ we do).
But I will say that precise control of laser wavelength is critical to today’s communication technologies. I doubt their new techniques will be useless.
Hopefully the billions money in AI will find some of its to turn this into real life applications. AI inference would love some more faster more efficient communication.
I mean, Photonic computing already got the attention of these big tech companies.
I think it's more relevant for quantum computing. The ions we choose for ion trap quantum computers are in part due to what wavelengths are excitable by modified telecom lasers, because they're the wavelengths that are easiest to produce and where the most research/stability/miniaturization has been focused. If the laser wavelength is configurable to this degree then it no longer becomes a constraint, and maybe you can choose single ions with different characteristics.
Not an expert in the field but it seems to me the key points are.
Generating any wavelength. (this article)
Accurately measuring wavelength. (otherwise there's no information benefit to arbitrary wavelength generation)
Wavelength insensitive holographic gates. (If they work on that frequency, and in a way that does not change the frequency) I don't know what properties such devices currently have
Assuming all of those, your ability to compute increases to your ability to distinguish wavelengths.
You could theoretically calculate much more in a way you could never detect, but then you get into some really interesting tree falling in a forest issues.
Depends on the cost. We already have variable wavelength lasers. We have had them for years. They are currently expensive, large, and not the easiest things to control electronically.
I have an application in mind for this technology outside of photonic computing. Again, it depends entirely on price, tunability, bandwidth of the profile, etc. My understanding of the photocomputing field is limited but I never thought the major issues were wavelength related? Maybe someone can educate me.
If anyone wants to send me one of these I would be pumped.
The short answer if there is any "there" there for photonic computing is no, maybe.
You need to understand quantum physics[3,2]. For example, photonic computing, photonic logic does not have a switch equivalent as semiconducting (CMOS transistor) or superconducting (Josephson Junction JJ) but we have a photonic Mach Zener interferometer (MZI) and a photon detector.
Photonics and superconducting electronics is always going to be much larger in size (and therefore more expensive) than semiconductors build from few atoms.
In quantum physics photonics we have advantages like quantum impedance, you can replace wires with photon transmitters and photodetectors and thus switch with only a few photons instead of large numbers of electrons.
With photonics you can have billions of cheap low power data channels instead of high power wire bundles. But MZI as JJ will probably always be a few orders of magnitude larger than transistors so switching is not going to be better, but interferometry is.
Shorter answer still: just low power communications and information processing yes, computing no.
Bulk CMOS manufacturing is still cheaper than all the alternatives we have discovered or invented, until we learn to manufacture atom by atom or compute with single photons or electrons (also dependent on molecule by molecule self-assembly), we will stay with CMOS and Moore's law.
Just listen to David B. Millers[1] lectures [2], his lectures are a shortcut to reading all his papers[2] that explain it all, especially [3].
Email me, I'll give you a private lecture.
Your question's anwer is/was a summary of our whole lives research [4]:
There's a lot of people here with esoteric knowledge of lasers, because they're generally incredible devices (along with masers). Someone should be able to comment.
I wish we had a large laser manufacturing ability in the West. I would say 95% of lasers of all kinds are manufactured in China.
But does the oxidative effect of rare short-lived impact atmospheres match the other chemistry associated with being exposed to billions of years of hard (blackbody) sunlight, solar wind, and cosmic rays on the surface of a body without much of a magnetosphere? How much are those impact oxides, particularly the ones in fine dust, shorn of their chemical bonds?
This sort of scenario, which was thought too improbable to plan for, even by an organization as psychotically obsessed with astronaut safety as NASA, is exactly why human spaceflight was important for exploration. Because astronauts could improvise a sensible solution and the tech couldn't.
If all you've got is full political power and control over propaganda networks, your won't get the USSR. You'll get Hungary between 2010 and 2026. It works well, but in the critical moments when things start going wrong you need to kill people to maintain power, or else your nascent autocracy collapses as quick as Orban's.
I'm no fun of Stalin, but this meme about 20+ million victims needs to be purged.
"The scholarly consensus affirms that archival materials declassified in 1991 contain irrefutable data far superior to sources used prior to 1991, such as statements from emigres and other informants.
Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the archival revelations, some historians estimated that the numbers killed by Stalin's regime were 20 million or higher. After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives was declassified and researchers were allowed to study it. This contained official records of 799,455 executions (1921–1953), around 1.5 to 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag, some 390,000[ deaths during the dekulakization forced resettlement, and up to 400,000 deaths of persons deported during the 1940s, with a total of about 3.3 million officially recorded victims in these categories. According to historian Stephen Wheatcroft, approximately 1 million of these deaths were "purposive" while the rest happened through neglect and irresponsibility. The deaths of at least 5.5 to 6.5 million persons in the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 are sometimes included with the victims of the Stalin era." [0]
Would it be? I'd argue the current US administration is entirely propped up by television. Hell, the president seems to "rule" based on what Fox News said last night.
A slightly different and no more charitable perspective is that the people pulling the president's strings are the same people pulling Fox News's strings.
Let's see, during Stalin's Rule 18 million people went through forced labor camps and roughly 10% died, around 1.8 million
Let's add around 5 million for man made famine, and probably a 2 million for arbitrary executions and deportations, while many estimate the full death count as between 15-20 million
As far I can understand the top range of estimates for CECOT, which is a non American facility, are that 500 died, of around imprisoned 20,000 inmates. So the scale is a bit... different
I think the issue here is that contrary to popular belief, not every wrong thing is the same
Death rates are particularly hard to compare because part of the idea of El Salvador's system is that people are expected to die there - there is no release policy - yet most of them are young healthy men recently detained.
If we just look at incarceration rates:
CECOT is one facility, but around 2% of El Salvador's population has been imprisoned by Bukele's operation.
In 1950 the USSR had a population of around 180 million, and the gulag system was at its height with a population of 2.5 million, very similar.
The US prison system has been around 1% from the peak of the War On Drugs until recent fads in liberalized sentencing, currently holding at 0.7%, one of the highest in the world if you exclude ethnic purges like Xinjiang or Gaza.
Imagine how lost your morale compass needs to be to defend Stalin because you don't like Trump.
Apart for the fact that people were released from El Salvador system, the population percentage is wrong for El Salvador, USSR and US, the difference between slavery camps and a penal system, Gaza not being a prison.
But what are you really saying, that the 200-500 dead in El Salvador, most non associated with Trump, makes Trump equivalent with Stalin's 15 million dead? Does that make sense?
... which is entirely consistent with his statements.
Here are more of his own words from the same letter:
> And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.
The blood of patriots and tyrants. He never expected rebellion to go unchallenged, he was advocating that we should maintain the spirit of rebellion as a guard against tyranny.
Microsoft just force-updated my operating system (despite declining every option and prompt) and the first thing I noticed working differently was it offering, in an OS popup, to "connect" the computer to "Facebook".
These people have root access to all our webcams.
I don't think we can tolerate these entities to continue to exist.
What can we do about it? The major tech firms have nearly all the power here, including quite obviously full capture of government (not just here but other countries as well).
Basically a mass-protest via network packets. Could we argue sending packets to a server is essentially a form of protest protected by speech similar to a public gathering?
There are ~500 living species of shark and likely tens of thousands extinct in their lineage.
We are perpetrating a mass extinction event that incorporates not just temperatures, but ocean acidification and trophic cascade for fisheries. In mass extinctions, enough things about the ecosystem change that specialists often go extinct. Great White Sharks are a specialist species in their extreme size; Most size specialists are in a precarious local maxima that disappears too quickly to adapt if conditions change drastically.
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