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Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article provides little insight into the issue of noncommercial, noneducational aspects of fair use which are what I was talking about in the first place.

Take a bit of time to read this article.

Consider this segment:

HRRC always has maintained that even where particular consumer practices may be controversial, private, noncommercial home recording practices should not be lumped in with piracy. For example, in a congressional hearing on "Internet Redistribution" earlier this year, U.S. Representative Ed Markey (D-MA) noted that he has a fair use right to make a home recording of a copyrighted broadcast and share it with a relative over the Internet.

See? Some U.S. house reps agree with my position.

This is a longer and deeper look into the whole noncommercial, private aspect of Fair use. It outlines the cases for both sides.

Now consider the case of how I am doing the sharing; At work, I have perhaps two or three people listing to my shared iTunes music. I have three licenses free for other computers to play my music.

So then, I can if I wish authorize the other computers to play back my protected shared music. If I do so, you have to admit I am breaking no law, as the system is built to allow it.

So then what changes when instead I do not assign the licenses, and simply let them play the shared music anyway? How does that differ?

To me this case would be pretty cut and dried were it ever to come to legal action - as noted in the Wikipedia entry some aspects of fair use are "Effect upon work's value", and "Amount and substantiality". Since the shared works never permanently reside on the others computers, and I could just authorize them anyway there is not loss and nothing in the way of sustainability.

You need to ruminate on issues like these before you jump to hasty conclusions and dubious Wikipedia links about what is or is not fair use - by doing so you pretend to have more clarity on the issue than the supreme court!

BTW, the vulgar language doesn't really help your case any and just made you look silly and childish. When you get into the business world you are going to have drop things like that or you are going to be a rung of other peoples ladders instead of climbing your own. Not that people don't swear like sailors at work, they just NEVER do it in written form if they wish to appear professional. You may as well start working on that now as it's a hard habit to break.

Rather than engage in another flamebaity article designed to maximize readership.

Why don't people educate themselves about the issues.

http://www.nap.edu/books/0309064996/html/

Then you all will be ready for Michael's next posting.

"9A.56.020 Theft - Definition, defense. (1) "Theft" means:
(a) To wrongfully obtain or exert unauthorized control over the property or
services of another or the value thereof, with intent to deprive him of
such property or services; or
(b) By color or aid of deception to obtain control over the property or
services of another or the value thereof, with intent to deprive him of
such property or services; . . .[Emphasis mine]"

According to your reference, "no real work has been done" on automotive stirling engines, while I'm not sure how your reference defines 'work', you'll probably find this an interesting read Automotive Stirling Engine report

www.nap.edu/openbook/0309074487/html/151.html

The robots most certainly will (probably more often then you'd like), it's the people you have to worry about-- somewhere betwen 40,000 and 100,000 people die every year due to medical errors.
The classic text on this (if an article from 2000 can be considered classic), is To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System

Could it be ionospheric disturbance?

There is an on-going research to forecast earthquakes via detecting ionospheric disturbances (can't find a good article now...it has to do with the detection of a very-remote FM radio signal that could only be detected when anomalous disturbance occurs in the ionosphere. An initial finding was done while amateur astronomers were monitoring FM radio signal for meteor detection). Maybe animals can detect minute changes in the terrestrial electro-magnetic field, I wonder?

Can't believe nobody has mentioned this yet (maybe they have?), but this book (I think it is the same book) can be read for free online at the National Academies Press
I've started it and it is very good so far. Haven't had time to get past the first few chapters unfortunately.

The old testament, and new testament affirm nothing.

Have you read the Bible yourself? All of it?

While you may believe that it is merely a collection of nice stories that are used to prove a point, I would suggest to you that your belief may not be completely accurate.

The Bible is quite remarkable in terms of ancient literature. There are many many 'holy books' that are revered by religious peoples around the world. None of them have had the impact on Western culture and society that the Bible has.

We know that what is written there has been preserved since its original versions because of the vast number of copies that we have. There are more accurate copies of the Bible than ANY other ancient work. (The alleged discrepancies that many of you want to point out as you read this are completely irrelevant to all major doctrines of the Christian faith.)

To suggest that it's merely a collection of stories on a par with mother goose is a bit...unreasonable.

In terms of disease, the Christian faith teaches that we all are diseased, and are in need of an ultimate physician to heal us. The disease is sin, evidenced by our selfishness and pride. This is what separates us from a Holy God.

God does give us free will. Doing what He says is wrong is, as I mentioned in my last post to you, akin to smashing your gold Rolex on a galvanized nail.

If you do what God says is wrong, you can expect that there will be consequences. That's the way it is. You don't have to like it, but you can't change it, either. The only way to avoid the consequences is to believe that you are imperfect, recognize that perfection is required to have relationship with a holy God, and ask Him to accept you in your imperfection, beacuse of Christ's sacrifice on your behalf.

This is completely unrelated to procreation. Procreation is not at issue if you look lustfully at a woman, and Christ called that sin, too.

WRT your embryonic stem cell point, I believe that you are mistaken. This site states that embryonic stem cells require a fertilized egg.

I'm not buying your simplistic analogies, but I was wrong too. See CheshireCatCO's reply to my posting.

Also these fascinating pages.

Apparently we still don't know what creates the density wave in the first place, or maintains them. All we know is why they're brighter...

I'm writing in general, about engineers and computer scientists (guys especially) who think that the heuristics of their profession give them any extra advantage over the general public in self-diagnosing illnesses. Its the opposite-- your tools and knowledge, so good for your profession, can harm you when it comes to medical treatment.

Yes, medicine itself is still primative, we've only just built MRIs that can see metabolism by imaging C,N and O on top of H20. Medical error is a leading cause of death. Doctors can believe that real illnesses aren't just psychological - it took medicine a while to accept that bacteria caused ulcers. Sometimes unpatented, ordinary vitamins help with a major symptom of a major illness (and if you have or know someone with diabetes- read the research and go get some benfotiamine!). Medicine is like that.

But the heuristics of medicine are far better than any other for dealing with illnesses. Non-medical common sense is orthogonal to medicine- if it gives good results that's just luck. But given how easily people are helped by placebos, how good are we going to be at telling if a particular treatment is working or not? Given how we can tune out outside signals when working on something (like the need to eat or drink), how often are we going to miss far more subtle clues? Given how personal psychology can make it hard to admit to feeling pain or to talk about body weaknesses (especially guys), how can we make sure that we're telling the doctor all relevant clues? Given how most medical research on the net is in the form of abstracts, not full articles, and given our strong abilities to find patterns (even where there aren't any), how easy is it to be side-tracked into thinking we've diagnosed ourselves when we haven't? Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments is an intensely applicable article to everyone.

I recently had a relative who died. With Staphylococcus aureus pneumonia your odds aren't good, but they're far worse if you don't know if you have the methicillin sensitive or the methicillin resistant version: the antibiotics for MRSA don't work very well on MSSA (the reverse is, of course, obvious).

Very tiny differences in what illness you have can make big differences in what treatment you need. Only medical tests- not all the reading and self-diagnoses in the world- will find those differences. Making sure you get those tests- that's hacking the medical and insurance system. Thinking you can figure out on your own what you have or whether or not a treatment is working? That's trying to hack your own body, and our self-assessments on how well we do that aren't very good. Our own self-diagnosis system is worse than the one in Windows (and for spaghetti code without any comments see dna).

However, the relief is apparently short-lived and comes only with sufficiently high dosage to get fairly high ...

Sir, I accept your challenge. Give me a few days and I'll report back. =)

One can try to improve things (such as pro-deo lawyers), but I don't think it's actually possible to completely root out this sort of unfairness.

Those are reasons for why patents are only justifiable if a sector does not function (properly) without them, otherwise the free market should have its go. Additionally, thanks to network effects the IT-sector even already has a natural tendency towards (semi-)monopolies (e.g. Microsoft).

What slows down the nuclear-powered reactors in space is not much the technological problem involved but the political issue related to the use of nuclear energy in space. For a good report on thermoionics read e.g. http://www.nap.edu/books/030908282X/html/ (Thermionics Quo Vadis?) Also keep an eye on the eccentric but pragmatic Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia who brought up the novel concept of utilizing the highly energetic fragments produced by nuclear fission to heat a gas. Extremely high temperatures produced in this reaction would enable faster interplanetary travel. Though interestingly he also states that this technology is not suited for interstellar travel (see http://www.spacedaily.com/news/fuel-01a.html The Italian Space Agency has started feasability studies on this.

Correct. But that is today. Software development in twenty years will likely look very different.

Will it? It doesn't look that different today than it did 20 years ago. There are some new concepts (OOP, AOP, etc), we have RAD's, but in the end it's still programmers and designers thinking of new algorithms, debugging stuff, and integrating everything into a stable and usable whole.

Consider: None of these arguments is, well, novel - they have thirty years of dust on them. They were all made regarding biotech, too.

I doubt it. Did anyone ever claim the biotech industry is a "cottage industry"? (see the last paragraph) That you barely need any investments to start a new biotech company? That everything underlying biotech innovations in pure maths? That biotech patents pave the way for patents on business methods? That biotech patents could be used to prevent publications of new biotech techniques and not just their use? (program claims) That biotech is pervasive throughout all economic sectors going from grocery shops to space stations, and as such is an "enabling technology" of which hindrances have very broad reaches?

Fortunately, those arguments were declined. Obviously, the predicted cataclysm has not materialized. Today, our biotech industry is basically causing a golden age of medicine - we're creating far more disease cures, far faster, than ever before in history.

To be fair, I've never followed the biotech patent situation. So I just searched for "biotech patents" on Google. The fourth link contains several links which seem to show the controversy is still far from settled. So does the sixth and the eighth. There are of course other views as well (such as the tenth link), but claiming everything is happy happy joy joy with no downsides seems just a tad misleading.

There's also a bit about it in the recent FTC report on patents and innovation. They note that the fact that biotech includes quite a bit of consequential innovation (as opposed to traditional pharmaceuticals) causes some problems. You are presumably aware of the fact that software development is almost nothing but consequential innovation (and lots of reuse as well). The solution proposed by the panel members regarding biotech is what is currently already done in the software world: extensive cross licensing. Of course, you need a lot of patents to be able to join that game.

The industry will become more selective about filing software patents. It must, since absurdities like patents on hash tables will never be useful to anyone. Even large companies cannot afford to throw away vast sums of money on patent portfolios that are not enforceable.

Of course they are useful for those companies! They are strategic assets, used as trading cards or litigation tokens. Enforceability is generally not even a concern, as many small companies can simply not afford the litigation costs (if you have the choice between a $50,000 license or a $2,000,000 lawsuit, what do you pick?)

By approximately 2020, we will have an incredibly well-documented record of the state of software development - both in the form of 50 years of programming journals, and in the form of all previously-filed software patent applications.

And there will be tons more of programming legacy which is not documented in this way at all, but just available as source code (which is also a publication, given that source code

Because the kind of hard work and knowledge and investigation and thought that goes into devising a solution to a difficult problem in matter-space is exactly the kind that goes into devising a solution to a difficult problem in information-space. One type of problem solving shouldn't be protected more than the other simply because you need bolts and motors and lubricant to implement it.

1. Are patents necessary to get enough investments in the IT-sector?
2. Are the positive effects of granting software patents larger than their associated negative effects?

And there are differences between the software world and other sectors which change the effects that patents have there, see e.g. this text (under the black box) from the US National Research Council.

Why not? Should Xerox not have been granted a patent on the xerographic photocopy process, but rather only a copyright on their machine's manufacturing bluep

There have been attempts to reconcile the two sets of data, mostly having to do with the difficulty of maintaining calibration of the satellites. These tend to produce corrected satellite records that agree with the larger warming measured on the surface, but the jury is still out.

The Naval Research Laboratory (and American Geophysical Union) say: "This decrease in density had been predicted by theoretical simulations of the upper atmosphere's response to increasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases." The decreased density leads to LOWER temperatures in the upper atmosphere. The full article is here

There've been a few reply posts to point out the fact that flying is safer than driving regardless of exposure, but here are some numbers for the interested:

According to the Research and Special Programs Administration Office of Hazardous Materials Safety (who said our government is bloated?) here are the stats:

Motor Vehicle
-General population risk for accidental death: 1 in 6,300 per year
-1.7 deaths per 100 million veh. miles

Commercial Air Carriers (Includes large and commuter airlines)
- General population risk for accidental death: 1 in 1,568,000 per year
- 0.19 deaths per million aircraft departures

To compare trip by trip risk, I'll estimate an average car trip at 20 miles. That yields 1.7 deaths per 5 million car trips, compared to about 1 death per 5 million airline departures. So using this estimate of car trip length, taking a car ride is almost twice as risky as taking a flight.

For some more perspective, I took a class on health care two years ago that spent a lot of time on an Institute of Medicine report. The report is famous for showing that preventable medical errors in hospitals are responsible for more deaths every year than motor vehicle accidents.

And the industry that health care experts often use as a model for improvement? The airline industry.

So you're healthiest in a plane...if you can't afford to fly all day, then a car will do. But don't go to a hospital!

That page assumes a 0 dose equals 0 risk philosphy, which is incorrect.

Why? You haven't explained why this should be the case. Making analogies to completely different things is just silly.

Fact:
A single photon of (UV or gamma) radiation can cause cancer. The chemical processes involved, such as the formation of thymine dimers, are well understood.

Fact:
Radiation dosage is the number of photons per unit of time and unit of body mass.

It is quite reasonable to believe that radiation dose is proportional to cancer risk.

Radiation hormesis is not accepted as fact. In fact, there are a good number of people which consider it to be psuedoscience.

And there is signficant evidence to the contrary, both summaries from respectable sources (National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements and the National Research Council's Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation)

So, if you want to believe this Luckey guy, go do so. But most experts in the field do not - and I'm listening to them.

This is false. Congress held hearings in several locations on the topic of software patents.

I read the 600K+ of transcripts from hearings they held in California (talk about dull reading). Almost to a person, there was a stark division between two camps: the developers opposed software patents, largely arguing that "copyright and speed of innovation is sufficient"; the lawyers argued that patents were absolutely required.

The time is fast approaching when the developers should form a single voice (hello ACM, IEEE, are you there?) and say "we told you so, change it." This is and always will be an inherently political process.

Although you raise a good point, there is nothing that I've ever seen (and there have been some whopping clinical system failures to study for this) has shown a single mortality from a clinical computer system crashing. It makes sense that it might, however (for now at least) most hospitals seem to be able to readily revert back to the old ways of doing things in order to survive.

On the other hand, I have seen strong evidence that 10's of thousands of americans die a year from medical errors. A large chunk of those errors (something like 60% of pharmacy errors, which made up 19% of the deaths in the above report) were caused by lack of knowledge at the time of a decision, either about the patient or about the drug. If you really had to choose, I would suggest you choose networked clinical information, even if that happened to come from an unpatched Windows XP device...

All this being said, however, I have yet to see a system running on Windows XP, other than at the client-side, which is what the article was talking about (although it didn't make that clear). Since many of these apps (for reasons I can't fathom) use ActiveX components in IE6 to be "interactive", this causes breaks with even minor tweaking. I'm not sure why vendors still do this, rather than just using regular web pages or a regular thick client (they often cite "customer demands") but like I said in my other post, we're often behind the times.

The space shuttle doesn't need that much for its automated stuff.

Well, yeah. But the space shuttle runs on hardware designed in the 1970s. Building and maintaining the software they need to run on this costs $100 million per annum, according to this site.

I suspect if they were less constrained in their hardware, it would reduce that cost, at least a little. But that would require a reevaluation of the hardware from an engineering perspective, and would probably cost even more. NASA spends a lot of money on safety, and very tight, critically analysed software (probably audited at an assembly language level) is the only way they can achieve that. But it means a lot of extra work for them.

Yes it makes it stiffles the market for open source software

but it gives the person that came up with the idea a fair shot of making money out of it.

The problem isn't software patents.

To slightly adapt the old adage: when your preferred tool is a hammer, you try to make everything into a nail.

The problem is that some software patents are just rediculous and they should be given to someone that at least tries to implement the idea.

Most of the patent litigation that gets reported on slashdot is usually the other way around, heck most of it is just the potential of a patent to be used in a bad way, but there are cases where the little guy that poured his heart and soul into something was able to prevent a bigger company from ripping him off.

Granted, if you're just someone who doesn't innovate, just copies other ideas, then you don't want software patents.

Copyright protects you from plagiarising (and that's a lot more than just literal bit-by-bit copying), patents are also enforceable if someone else came up with exactly the same thing entirely on his own. And, surprise, this happens an awful lot in software development. That's not just my opinion, that's what the National Research Council wrote (search for "But there is little or no market in software components") in its book titled "The Digital Dilemma - Intellectual Property in the Information Age".

BTW here's the answer you looking for

Maybe I'm missing your obvious sarcasm, but "A Brief History of Time" was a monster hit.

You can read more here: National Academies Press

"Entering the Sunday Times best-seller list within two weeks of publication, it rapidly reached number one, where it remained unchallenged throughout the summer. The book had already broken many records and indeed went on to break them all stay- ing on the list in Britain for a staggering 234 weeks, and notching up British sales in excess of 600,000 in hardback before Hawking's publisher Bantam decided to paperback the book in 1995."
^-- and that's in Britain only. Who knows how many more in the US.

"The commission also endorses NASA's plans to award large cash prizes to encourage technological innovation."

The inducement prize allows one-off profits.

Profit = Prize - Cost

1. Go to Moon/Mars
2. Win prize
3. Profit!

The ANSARI X PRIZE and Centennial Challenges are the first steps.

Robert Zubrin recently had the idea of 'a competition open to all the different NASA centers and national laboratories and companies to see who could develop the most efficient Mars plan'.

I think you have it all backwards.

Riemann did not "discover" the Riemann zeta function. It was known and many important properties were discovered by Johann Bernoulli and Leonhard Euler 200 years before Riemann was even born, e.g. the fact that zeta(n) for n an even number is a rational multiple of a pi^n, and the fact that there exists an infinite product representation of zeta(s) that goes through all of the prime numbers. If John Derbyshire's book Prime Obsession is correct, Riemann knew all about that latter result of Euler's and thought that it might allow the application of all of the powerful tools of real and complex analysis that were being developed in his time to be applied to the theory of prime numbers. His struggling with it led to the formulation of the Riemann hypothesis and the entire branch of analytic number theory.

Bah! there go my mod points, you all better appreciate this...

Prime Obsession Full Text

that's a link to the full text of the book. Online, for free. Brought to you courtesy of the nice people at National Acadamy (of Science) Press.

<a href="http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/far/ch6 .html">the story</a>

Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base by the Institute of Medicine (1999)

One of the more controversial effects claimed for marijuana is the production of an "amotivational syndrome." This syndrome is not a medical diagnosis, but it has been used to describe young people who drop out of social activities and show little interest in school, work, or other goal-directed activity. When heavy marijuana use accompanies these symptoms, the drug is often cited as the cause, but no convincing data demonstrate a causal relationship between marijuana smoking and these behavioral characteristics. Sited from: Chait LD, Pierri J. 1992. Effects of smoked marijuana on human performance: A critical review. In: L Murphy and A Bartke, Editors, Marijuana/Cannabinoids: Neurobiology and Neurophysiology. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Pp. 387--424.)

Thirty years later [after the LeDain Commission], we assert that the studies done in the meantime have not confirmed the existence of the so-called amotivational syndrome and add that most studies rule out this syndrome as a consequence of the use of cannabis.

I said: "BTW, studies in the Netherlands showed that drug use did not increase with an easing supply."
You said: "I call BS on this one, unless they happened to all be junkies in the first place. Provide link to this study please. "

Linky linky:

Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base by the Institute of Medicine (1999)

In 1976, the Netherlands adopted a policy of toleration for possession of up to 30 g of marijuana. There was little change in marijuana use during the seven years after the policy change, which suggests that the change itself had little effect.

Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base by the Institute of Medicine (1999)

One of the more controversial effects claimed for marijuana is the production of an "amotivational syndrome." This syndrome is not a medical diagnosis, but it has been used to describe young people who drop out of social activities and show little interest in school, work, or other goal-directed activity. When heavy marijuana use accompanies these symptoms, the drug is often cited as the cause, but no convincing data demonstrate a causal relationship between marijuana smoking and these behavioral characteristics. Sited from: Chait LD, Pierri J. 1992. Effects of smoked marijuana on human performance: A critical review. In: L Murphy and A Bartke, Editors, Marijuana/Cannabinoids: Neurobiology and Neurophysiology. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Pp. 387--424.)

Thirty years later [after the LeDain Commission], we assert that the studies done in the meantime have not confirmed the existence of the so-called amotivational syndrome and add that most studies rule out this syndrome as a consequence of the use of cannabis.

I said: "BTW, studies in the Netherlands showed that drug use did not increase with an easing supply."
You said: "I call BS on this one, unless they happened to all be junkies in the first place. Provide link to this study please. "

Linky linky:

Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base by the Institute of Medicine (1999)

In 1976, the Netherlands adopted a policy of toleration for possession of up to 30 g of marijuana. There was little change in marijuana use during the seven years after the policy change, which suggests that the change itself had little effect.

While I believe NORML's stats are correct, you are justified in questioning them.

"Report of the Senate Special Comminttee on illegal drugs (2002)":

... permit persons over the age of 16 to procure cannabis and its derivatives at duly licensed distribution centre.

Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding, Commissioned by President Richard M. Nixon (March 1972)

1. Possession of marihuana for personal use would no longer be an offense, but marihuana possessed in public would remain contraband subject to summary seizure and forfeiture.
2. Casual distribution of small amounts of marihuana for no remuneration, or insignificant remuneration not involving profit would no longer be an offense.

Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base by the Institute of Medicine (1999)

"The vast majority of evidence on harmful effects of marijuana is based on smoked marijuana, and, except for the psychoactive effects that can be reasonably attributed to THC, it is not possible to distinguish the drug effects from the effects of inhaling smoke from burning plant material. "

I'm not saying marijuana is harmless but studies place it's dangers less than alcohol, tobacco and caffeine. IMO it's not worth jailing someone for.

Ingres technology diffused into the commercial sector through three major channels: code, people, and publications. Unlike the technical details of the IBM project, Ingres source code was publicly available, and about 1,000 copies were distributed around the world so that computer scientists and programmers could experiment with the system and adjust it to their own needs. Michael Stonebraker founded Ingres Corporation (purchased by Computer Associates in 1994) to commercialize the Berkeley code directly. Robert Epstein, the chief programmer at Ingres in the 1970s, went on to co-found Britton-Lee Incorporated and then Sybase. Both Britton-Lee and Sybase used ideas and experience from the original Ingres, and government agencies were early customers of both companies. Computer Associates released a commercial version of the Ingres code in the 1980s.

Continued movement of Ingres researchers throughout the database community spread the technology even farther. Jerry Held and Carol Youseffi moved from UC-Berkeley to Tandem Computers Incorporated, where they built a relational system, the predecessor to NonStop SQL. Until joining Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers in 1998, Held was senior vice-president of engineering at Oracle, where he headed that company's database efforts. Paula Hawthorn moved from Ingres to Britton-Lee (as did Michael Ubell) and eventually became a co-founder of Illustra Information Technologies Incorporated, now part of Informix. Stonebraker himself worked with Ingres Corporation, Illustra, and Informix. Other Ingres alumni went to AT&T, Hewlett-Packard Company (HP), IBM, and Oracle, bringing with them the lessons learned from Ingres. As Robert Epstein observed, "What came from Ingres was the experience of having built a prototype . . . to say what parts need to be done differently."

Let's hope it does nothing, as in no space debris hits the space station.

Actually space debris and meteoroids hit ISS quite often. So far they have been very small and as you say hopefully it remains that way. ISS is designed to withstand impacts up to a certain size and probability by placing an additional wall outside the pressurised module to absorb and diffuse the impact. Learn more about the general policy in Protecting the Space Station from Meteoroids and Orbital Debris. Or see a short explanation of the Meteorid / Debris Protection System for Node 2.

- charboy

The result? There were many goals described, some of which may now be in peril as a result of Bush's backhanded hit on science within NASA. Putting a man on the moon or on Mars is not on the list, however. You can read the brief summary here. The entire text of the report is availbale here. Although the entire text is well over 200 pages, there is a lot of material in it that sets it apart from most beauracratic reports, including some 40+ pages of a layman's discussion of the science driving the requests.

Bob

The classic example of this was the conversion of the basic "hamburger box" by McDonalds....

"In November 1990 the McDonald's Corporation, largely in response to pressure from the public and from environmental groups, made the decision to replace Styrofoam "clamshell" hamburger containers with paperboard boxes." ... "The manufacturing process uses other resources, too--one study estimates that manufacturing a Styrofoam clamshell uses 30 percent less energy, and generates 46 percent less air pollution and 42 percent less water pollution, than does manufacturing a paperboard box."

Not to mention the paper box insulates poorly, requiring more heat-lamp energy; and because paper has to be treated to repel grease, it decomposes slower than normal paper, and could not be recycled like the plastic-based styrofoam could.

>And then fixes developed for the one would have no bearing on the other.

Exactly. That's the whole point. One is broken from a problem, while the problem shouldn't exist (and therefore doesn't need fixing) in the other.

While common problems can exist, it's about as likely as linux and windows having similar problems. ie: It has happened, rarely, but in the norm, never happens.

>Having the two the same gives you another identical platform to compare readings against

A particularly bad thing when trying to investigate something completely foreign. You want different units to check that the readings *do* come out identically. Any discoveries that are particularly different are suspect until another mission.

>you can apply it to the other as soon as you're confident of the fix.

That's no good if the problem turns out to be unrepairable. This one might be repairable, but they still haven't implemented a fix yet.

Fortunately, for more dangerous missions, NASA does employ a strategy of independant teams when building a Space Shuttle (although the independant teams are mostly separated by development and test procedures).

we've had this for years

Very, very interesting that you brought this up. In the mid-90s I worked with a NASA HQ employee who worked on a proposal for a manned Mars mission (it was submitted to then-Pres. Clinton, but not approved, obviously). He told me that the radiation issue was a "show-stopper". I just did a little digging on my own, and uncovered a very interesting study from around that time (1997), which you can read online at National Academies Press here. The bottom line: it may not quite be a show-stopper (yet), but it is certainly a Very Big Deal, and quite a bit more research needs to be done before the spacecraft is designed. Interestingly, the study seems to rule out any sort of active shielding (artificial magnetic fields, etc.) in favor of passive shielding. But, how much? And what materials do you use, considering that secondary radiation from particles that are emitted when the shielding is energized is also a risk? To quote the study: "It is not a matter of simply adding more aluminum". They also raise the issue of monitoring systems that need to be employed in orbit around the sun to signal that solar flares/coronal ejections are imminent, as these are a major source of dangerous radiation. Very complicated issue...

From the National Academies Press

"LORD KELVIN. Honored for his contributions to science and to the British realm, hailed as a genius, courted for his charm and wit, feared for his sharp tongue and intimidating manner - and ultimately ridiculed by his peers who labeled him a dabbler, a pretender of the worst sort. "

"Charismatic, confident, and boyishly handsome, Thomson was elevated to the peerage by the Queen for his achievements. Indeed, his name survives in the designation of degrees Kelvin, the temperature scale on which absolute zero is defined. Lauded for his brilliance, Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, was Great Britain's unrivaled scientific hero."

Well the upper atmosphere is warming, but that can be easily explained by the weakening of the magnetic field which causes more radiation to hit the atmosphere in turn increasing the temperature in that region.

What? You don't know? I'm not surprised.

As for the ground data, Urban heat islands are the cause.

(1) Land surfaces are only 30 percent of the Earth's surface; and the area of the U.S. is only a few percent at most of Earth's surface. Since area weighting of all global land and sea surface temperature data is used to get global data sets, this modifi ed urban heat island effect - if it's real - would have a very small effect on the computed global warming.

When the early global warming models, which did not account for cooling caused by aerosols (which are also produced by burning coal and oil), were changed, the new models have forecast average temperatures "right on the nose," says Schneider.

Borehole temperatures can also provide an independent instrumental validation of surface measurements. Pollack et al.'s (1998) analysis of underground temperature measurements from four continents indicates that the average surface temperature of the earth has increased by about 0.5 C in the twentieth century.

A timely article on why Maglev is ready for use in the United States, what it will have to compete with, and why people will or will not use it.

National academies press (nap.edu) has thousands of free (public domain) books online, in pdf format. Many of them are reports of some government committees etc., but if you are prepared to dig around for a while you can find some real gems. I've read about a dozen of the books on the site, and they're really good. Check out Storms from the sun. Its an excellent book, both highly informative and very readable. Chapter 3 in particular ("A sudden conflagration") is about the 1859 storm in question. Enjoy.

There are a lot of temperature graphs that show increases in the last 100 years. There is also a nice graph showing an increase in CO2 levels from coal and oil burning. That's not just a coincidence, given that the physics behind the temperature increase is pretty straightforward (greenhouse effect). in fact, in order for surface tempertures not to rise with increasing CO2 levels requires some rather fancy footwork; you have to invoke the existence of various negatiuve feedback cycles, like increased cloudiness (which may actually have a net warming effect after all) etc. The radiative-tranfer physics behind the greenhouse effect is a lot more solid than our understanding of cloud formation.

To state that the increase in CO2 is undeniably causing the increase in temperature is just bad science.

In science nothing is "undeniable". However, some things are more or less plausible, likely, belivable etc. A good scientist working on something realitively new will always hedge. But sooner or later the evidence starts to build up to the point where only cranks deny it. Hence most scientists think e.g. evolution is pretty solid. The same goes for general relativity, QED, etc. Climate change due to increased CO2 levels is getting to be such a strong theory (or so says the NAS here and here, and the IPCC).

There's no evidence to back it up.

That is simply hogwash. There is a lot of evidence for a coupling between CO2 and temperature rise. It may be challenging to directly link CO2 to this particular ice shelf, but I ask you this: if global and regional temperatures are rising due to increasing CO2 levels, are you surprised that we are seeing more ice melt?

We need experiments and more data before any sound scientific conclusion like that can be made.

We always need more data (I'm a scientist after all), but we have the basis to act now, and the longer we wait the harder the problem will be.

In my list I mentioned at least four very plausible reasons for global temperature rise that do not depend on an increase in CO2.

I'm going to hope it is the "alien death ray", personally. Seriously, though, greenhouse gases are about the only plausible ones in your list. The Earths core is pretty stable in it's heat output, not to mention that it's about a factor of 100 lower than the heat input from the Sun. To raise temperatures by the observed amount you'd have to increase the core heat output by a factor of about 4. Not likely.

Is the Sun putting out more energy on some long period that we don't yet know about?

First of all, there is not a lot of evidence for such a change (we can measure the solar constant afetr all). Second, you'd then have to explain how the increasing CO2 wasn't causing a rise, while at the same time the Sun caused a rise that coincides very nicely with the CO2 increase.

The rest of the list is just silly.

Is the Earth getting warmer? Yes. Is it because of pollution? Most likely not.

The scientific consensus is that you're wrong. See the world-wide IPCC and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Reason: around 635 (give or take a hundred years) Krakatoa exploded and put a significant amount of dust and gas into the atmosphere causing what is known as the "Little Ice Age."

Oh, and of course the world's climatologists forgot about this, except for a handful of Brave Rouges who Challenged the System...

Jeez.

Climatologists are smart enough to figure in volcanic dust, and solar radiation variability, and natural climatological variability. There's still a significant factor left over that seems to result from human activity.

This is not an extraordinary claim - indeed, it would be highly surprising if we could pump tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere without some effect.

(And Krakatoa was in the 1800s. And the "Little Ice Age" ended long ago.)

Here's another excellent resource on the subject:
The Polygraph and Lie Detection Some quotes:

Polygraph Accuracy Almost a century of research in scientific psychology and physiology provides little basis for the expectation that a polygraph test could have extremely high accuracy.

Theoretical Basis The theoretical rational for the polygraph is quite weak....

Utility Polygrap examinations may have utility to the extent that they can elicit admissions and confessions, deter undesired activity, and instill public confidence. However, such utility is seperate from polygraph validity.

I think the last point is most telling, and in fact, an associate that used to do counter-espionage polys for the DoD confirmed this ... they are basically an intimidation tool. They've never caught a spy with a polygraph. And if they eliminated everybody who failed them, our cleared workforce would be decimated.

How about you stop right there and go and read up a bit more. Galvanic skin responses can be ellicited by *a lot* of conciously controlled actions. If you take a sudden, strong sniff of air, for example, you'll see a really big GSR. That's an easy one. Also, btw, GSR *is* an autonomic response. If you doubt me on either of these two points, go ahead and read the recently published report on the scientific basis for the polygraphby the National Academies of Science. You can find it online and read it for free.

All "lie detector" tests are bogus because the results are always "subjective" to the machine's operator.

Not quite. Polygraphs can be valid under the right circumstances. They are reasonably accurate when used to ask questions about specific instances. Less so when they are used in hiring decision contexts. See this recent report from the National Academy of Science. There are many effective countermeasures to "fool" a polygraph. I wouldn't want my future (guilt or innocence) to depend on one, but they are pretty good at recognizing when people have unusual reactions to stimuli. How they are interpreted (e.g., is that a 'lie' or just nervousness?) is another matter.

Anyone know when this concept was first used?

The use of the polygraph as lie detector was pioneered by psychologist Dr. William Moulton Marston. He may be more familiar to Slashdotters under his pseudonym Charles Moulton. That's the name he used when he created the comic book "Wonder Woman."

Seriously!

Some basic background: Here

Ever heard of a phong shader? I belive Phong himself was involved in this project at one point. PDF on Phong at Utah

Vox

Damn straight! You are correct to do so. The total number is completely irrelevant to an individual considering an exam. The right number is the probability, which you correctly focus on. The problem you're dealing with is that the patient is likely to read about a rare adverse event in the newspaper and focus on that, just as with shark attacks at beaches.

In contrast, according to the Institute of Medicine, any time you check into a hospital in the United States, you face about a 1.5% chance of experiencing serious injury or death due to a preventable medical error, for a total of somewhere between 44,000 and 98,000 preventable deaths each year in the US.

A large fraction of these are from medication errors (about 7% of all hospital admissions have at least one medication error, but most of these do not cause serious injury or death). Compared to this, MRI risks are not worth losing sleep over.