I thought that the essence of that problem was that there was no way to sort out the various desires of "consumers" (whether they were people wanting shoes and cheese, or industrialists wanting iron ore and bauxite) unless you had some sort of pricing model, and people had to decide what they wanted more based on their limited number of "tokens" available to allocate to their choices. And this is the crux of the "free market".
(IIRC, just asking them doesn't work out well enough, because sometimes someone's true relative desires aren't surfaced until they have to make a choice under limits. Distributed computing is just a red herring here - there's no accurate model or algorithm to compute from.)
(Now, the method by which you allocate those limited number of tokens, based upon the relative values of labor, "management", "capital", etc. - that's a completely different problem.)
]]>a single PIRA bombing (Baltic Exchange) killed one person, injured forty, but caused £800 million of damage.
Wikipedia says 3 dead, 91 injured, and £800 million worth of damage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Exchange_(building)#Bombing_of_the_exchange_building
]]>That story holds no water if you know about Bletchley Park.
Yeahbut....
During WWII, there was a great patriotic effort to not upset the War Effort - "Loose Lips Sink Ships". And all that. Also the efforts of the security apparat (don't remember which MI#, as I am not UK).
By the middle 70s, with Watergate in the air and Greenpeace mucking about - you couldn't have kept a secret that big for more than milliseconds.
]]>Classic keeping-of-secrets theory. Alternate launcher implies staff, physical infrastructure, training, yadda yadda.... None of which would be easy to hide.
If it existed, somebody would have mentioned something to a mate over a pint, and someone else would have dug around a bit or a bit more, and someone else would have had an expose in The Sun, or whatnot.
]]>Of course, it would still be ridiculously expensive, but think of the resolution, and the light collecting power.
Resolution, yes; light gathering power, NO. The gathering power is directly proportional to the actual area of the mirrors, nevermind their separation.
Search for "synthetic aperture telescope", or look at the Wikipedia article on "Aperture synthesis".
]]>I am aware of no reports of any kind of "extracurricular" activities, however.....
]]>As far as I know, being able to survive freezing to near absolute zero and thawing (the only plausible technology) is limited to single-celled organisms and some plant material.
The arctic wooly bear caterpillar freezes solid every year, thawing the following summer to continue feeding. It takes 14 years for it to eat enough to finish up with metamorphosis. True, not "near absolute zero", but I wonder if anyone has tried taking one of the frozen ones and deep-freezing it in liquid helium, then bringing it back later on to just below water's freezing point.
(Saw the video on Public Television a while back: http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/frozen-planet/videos/caterpillar-survives-frozen-death/ )
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