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and oh yeah — keep people and vehicles out of the downwind flight path

Thankfully no one was seriously injured or killed. It's been fifty years today since the infamous Nedelin Disaster happened at the Baikonur cosmodrome. It shocks me that as recently as 15 years ago these sort of catastrophes happened.

At least nobody ordered video evidence destroyed.

Given the above incidents and their cover-ups, I'd agree. We must study these mistakes, own up to them and learn from them.

Because photons travel differently in other enviroments than Earth?

Possibly

whatever.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sheedl/sets/72157624448891934/
apple wouldn't be there if there was no market.

http://micgadget.com/8615/beijing-apple-store-closed-due-to-scalpers-reselling-iphone-4/
the one in Beijing had to close temporarily because people were buying up to 30 iphone4's at a time.

http://www.physorg.com/news204955403.html
100k sold in 4 days.

what are you talking about? there's plenty of disposable income for plenty of people.

explains it rather well, imho.

http://www.physorg.com/news205050157.html

"In a multicore system, multiple cores often perform calculations that involve the same chunk of data. As long as the data is still required by some core, it shouldn't be deleted from memory. So when a core begins to work on the data, it ratchets up a counter stored at a central location, and when it finishes its task, it ratchets the counter down. ...
As the number of cores increases, however, tasks that depend on the same data get split up into smaller and smaller chunks. The MIT researchers found that the separate cores were spending so much time ratcheting the counter up and down that they weren't getting nearly enough work done."

I don't own a ps3 either, nor am I a gamer. However, as one who regularly blows away or dual boots OSs, I wonder how long it's going to take for other hardware vendors to go mental like this. It's an intriguing battle to watch, and I'll enjoy seeing Sony auger in in flames.
    http://www.physorg.com/news148749271.html

    http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2007/10/ps3_supercomputer

That's the history. You need newer stuff to do this. Bon chance. My hat's off to you.

Fsck, now Sony's gonna sue me. Crap.

Wait, didn't NEC do the same thing six years ago? http://www.physorg.com/news1344.html

Most taxes go to pay the salaries of government employees, who are certainly not poor.

"New study finds public workers earn less than private sector workers, even factoring in benefits"
"Once age and education are factored in, state and local workers actually earn less, on average, than their private-sector counterparts. The wage penalty for state and local government workers in New England is close to 3 percent."
http://www.physorg.com/news203874436.html

Be careful what you wish for. People with Hyperthymesia (total perfect memory) describe it as being "as non-stop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting." This could be the gene that locks that down and keeps us sane.

http://www.physorg.com/news129561635.html

Study here.

That's great, but I mean, according to this (which I admit I don't know how accurate it is) it seems to indicate that the US is still pretty low in terms of overall connection speed.

Why does north america suck so much when it comes to technical infrastructure? It's kind of irritating, especially when this is apparantely the hub of the economic first world.

I always bitch about /. sending me to some blog instead of a meaty article (and it's usually even worse.) Half the time they send me somewhere that's firewalled off at work, or TFA isn't any more informative then TFS.

What's exasperating is sometimes there's a really good FA, like this one (still not yet posted, it's showing up for subscribers).

As to tootech, I just looked him up. If he's a karma whore, he isn't very good at it; no +5s at all. If you mean you think he's MY sock puppet, I have no need for one*; over 200 fans and less than 30 freaks. I've had excellent karma for, like, forever, never had to sweat it. If I did, I wouldn't be posting this offtopic comment.

* I do have one other account that I haven't used since I got this one back.

I'm no expert on the matter, but I am hopeful for the tech like most geeks. From what I understand from reading articles about other work in the field and watching documentaries about it, 30% is common in the lab and even 50% or 60% is expected from some of the current work, but breakdown is rapid. The breakdown, in most cases, is caused by being exposed to sunlight and creating electricity from the exposure. Sometimes the efficiencies are down to 5% to 15% in a matter of hours or days.

Highly efficient silicon cells have been prototyped and tested up to around 40% as well. A combination solar heat engine and fuel cell of a sort has been shown on paper to work at up to 60%, but has yet to be tested even as a prototype from what I've been able to find. Some multi-junction semiconductor photovoltaics made from a small number of different alloys to widen the wavelength range are said to have the theoretical capability of 60% or even 70% over the whole solar spectrum, but the data is not yet from actual cells -- not even prototypes (it's being extrapolated from work with LEDs).

A rapid breakdown of a solar cell from exposure to solar energy is obviously bad. The main benefit as I understand it to this particular work over other developments using novel materials is that they've figured out a possible way how to deal with that problem. It works for them so far in the prototype, and hopefully it works in production systems.

The article even says they're hoping to get close to total efficiency (within the ranges of wavelengths it can use) of energy conversion with additional development. Even if they can get us a consistent range of 60-80% of a decently wide range of wavelengths my mind boggles at the applications.

http://www.physorg.com/news166980974.html

It has been shown over the years, repeatedly, that tighter speed limits save lives, including 55 mph vs. 65 mph. And you're bellyaching for a "safe" 75 mph because Nevada is "empty" and it's roads are "flat" and "straight". Selfish idiocy, as usual, continues to rule in the US.

This study came about because a previous study by the same researchers, using this same data, had produced unexpected results, Knobloch-Westerwick said. The original study had hypothesized that people prefer media messages that portray people like themselves - people of the same age and the same gender, in this case. Overall, the original study found that was indeed true. However, the researchers were puzzled by the fact that older people in that first study seemed as equally interested in stories about younger people as they were in stories about older people like themselves.

This is what makes the study interesting and why it can't be chalked up to 'I don't like people who disagree with me'. Its too bad the summery failed to mention this.

Physorg.com covered this story two days ago. Here is a link to the original article from Ohio State University which sponsored the research.

That just sounds really scary to me.

Yes, I suppose it does. What is decidedly *not* scary, though, is orbiting solar satellites that beam the power down in low-intensity microwave or IR laser radiation. Energy is even more abundant in space than asteroids! Let's start with the easy stuff.

There are *at-least* 2 major categories of endeavour:

Public/Community benefit ( dying in a crash? here's help. education? here. Honestly-fighting addiction? here. ), and, separately,

Profit ( I make these ultra-widgets, buy them because they're gonna benefit YOU in your competition against others, social/status/business/whatever )

Mistakenly assuming that the 2 are actually 1 category is where many go wrong...

The US system of for-profit doctoring puts "health-care" into double-speak's realm, as it CAN'T be HEALTH-care, because it's motivated by profit, and profit is provided by
1. proceedures
2. hospitalization
3. medication,
and is *protected* by
4. authority
( doctors have the right to remove your self-determination, if they find you to be unacceptably buddhist ( believing in meditation for your survival against illness/disease is mental-illness or delusion, "obviously", according to the medical religion ), e.g.
and that right of doctors is backed by the police )

Since creating a healthy population would *slaughter* so much medical revenue, and decimate effective/felt medical authority, it is, in fact, the opposite of what doctors are obliged, by their group, to do.

( explicit vs implicit/group motivation )

You'll find, if you dig, that children of doctors, particularly psychotherapist/psychiatrist type doctors, have a very high failure-rate & suicide-rate...

That's because the doctors don't develop health:
they apply treatments & proceedures to illness & disease, managing one's gradual decline "life" in illness.
"Wellbeing" and "health" can be considered delusions, because illness/disease/injury/death ARE valid, but "health" is fraudulent make-believe, as underneath what some "healthy" person allows themself to notice, is .. underlying illness/medical-condition/whatever!

It's a religion/paradigm that you simply can't break, no matter how YOUR religion holds health to be right...

"Health-care" is a lie, in the current system, and HAS TO be.

Not that truth will ever be spoken ( the AMA wouldn't allow it, for 1 thing )

hit http://physorg.com/sort/date/all and then search for the tag ARROGANCE, and dig into the cost, IN LIVES, due to the medical professionals' refusal to tolerate integrity, or accountability...
( wash hands? a DOCTOR??? f***-off: you've no right to impose on an Authority in any such way! )

Years ago it was discovered, in an experiment in a UK ICU, that ionizers dropped cross-infection TO ZERO. ( New Scientist )

Won't happen throughout the medical establishment, however, no matter how many lives would be saved:
"ionizers" are too New Age-y, so it's better to simply obliterate a few thousand lives every year, than to admit that some *outsider* means was more valid than medical authority...

Try asking children of doctors & MENSA-types what they want to be...

Any of them that want to be a doctor, probably want to be a "Very Important Doctor" ( one of the most depressing statements of any child I've ever heard )...

Authority/Status's the root addiction of the medical establishment's culture...

It's their PRIMARY "coin".

Look at BP: from the MONEY perspective, the sanest thing they could possibly have done was probably to simply declare immediate bankruptcy, on losing that well...

It'd honour THEIR INVESTORS, instead of doing what they actually did, which was prove to the world that they won't accept/acknowledge either integrity or even the direct order of some sovereign government, because they're BIG, and They Don't Have To ( they were ordered by the US to stop using a specific surfactant, and ignored the order. They photoshopped some published "update" photos, they blocked access to bottom video whenever it showed that there was seeping coming up through the silt, etc )

Again, the COIN the are really in it for, isn't the coin they *claim* they are in it for...

Free will is an illusion

I choose not to read that... :p

Free will is an illusion

If an electrical connection can control an arm, how much longer until you can control a whole body?

I think we're likely to be able to repair spinal cord damage long before we learn how to patch around it with electronics. We're getting closer every day.

I wasn't assuming the big bang or its rapid expansion phase. Read this. I wasn't assuming that one either. The ideas work either way, and in many others.

A warmer planet with more CO2 in the atmosphere is a biological paradise

Oh really, a five Celsius rise a few million years ago caused this mass extinction

http://www.physorg.com/news199005915.html

Reduce the CO2 level to pre-industrial levels in 10 years via solar energy, create insane amounts of very pure carbon that can be used in the manufacture of liquid fuels and to generate electricity the traditional, coal-fired way, but without the mercury, radioactives, etc. Just need some lithium and some time to construct it. Should produced about $15 trillion worth of high-quality (zero sulphur) carbon fuel... pay for itself, too.

Ok I'm going to give a more realistic example...
Take a look at the OCZ Colossus it's a pure flash 3.5" drive which was produced last year which has a capacity of 1TB. Now mind you this was engineered by tacking together a bunch of flash on a SATA controller, then plugging two of these into another SATA controller to produce a RAID of these two cards. IMHO this this design was not made to create the highest capacity drive possible.
However it might be a better benchmark for figuring out where our limits are for example..
This drive puts about 5mm between each Flash package. Given that Toshiba has a 128 GB Flash chip/controller launching this fall. Considering that the carrier measures 17mm x 22mm x 1.4mm we can probably put a 4 x 5 Array of these on a card like the ones in the Colossus. Either by double-siding the board or adding more boards (but not necessarily by using bulky SATA connectors). Let's say we can put four of these hypothetical boards into a 3.5" chassis. That still clocks us in at 10TB. Which is still 3x what we have going on with spinning disks. So even if we assume that the density increases for Disk vs. Flash are the same. I'd argue that economies of scale will soon make this cost effective.

So many statements, so little truth!

1) Nuclear energy, as it's been sold so far, is ANYTHING but clean. 98% of the "fuel" that goes into a classic-style nuclear plant comes back out as highly toxic nuclear waste that isn't fit to live next to for 100,000 years. It can be reprocessed, but that comes with its own suite of problems.

2) There isn't an infinite amount of Uranium, either. Many would argue that we're already past "peak Uranium" so it's out of the pan and into the fire...

3) You can't just stick power plants wherever you like. High capacity transmission lines are *expensive* - it's usually much cheaper to stick your power plants closer to supply. Closer to supply means people are nearby, and people still freak out when they find out a Nuke plant might open up 10 miles away...

4) Why would we put nuke plants in the desert when they are so ripe for solar power? Solar power has now become cheap enough to compete with traditional power sources dollar for dollar in many areas, and the price is continuing to drop as new techologies continue to push the envelope Solar Energy does very well in sunny areas where the solar energy available closely matches the peak demand for Air Conditioning.

Nuke *can* be done right. But the (mostly legal/political) hurdles to do so are tall, and the benefits of a successful nuclear program are less compelling every year.

OK you've lost me, how does my carbon footprint in North America effect whether billions of Nepalese, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Chinese and Hindustanis cook their food over a sooty kerosene fire, or ride around on smoky 2-cycle mopeds?

The Age of Empires series (including Age of Mythology) also deserve an honorable mention.
Not only because they contain historical information (Saladin, Cortés, trebuchets, etc).
Not only because they may be good for your cognitive skills.
But because of their motivational value.

In my case, I first started playing these games when I was around 10 years old. I was fascinated by some of the stuff I learned from playing these games, so they helped spark an interest for history and mythology in general. I’ve since read numerous books on the subject (currently reading a translation of the Egyptian “Book of the Dead”), and ancient history became one of my favorite subjects in school.

Too bad Ensemble Studios closed down.

I'm not going to try to use the right terminology, simply because I'm not an astrophysicist, but I wonder if attempts have been made to analyze the signal across different timeframes, as opposed to one continuous stream of radio-waves. Plato has done it in his works, so why couldn't the aliens?

So concrete can be tweaked to remove some pollutants from the atmosphere. Yay. However, do these scientists realise just how much CO2 is released in the production of concrete? Lots. This piece describes the situation well: in cement production, CO2 is released both directly (chemically) and indirectly (burning fossil fuels). The piece also suggest that 5-10% of that CO2 is reabsorbed by the finished concrete, but that's it, and this new "tweak" doesn't make much more of a dent. There's an elephant in the room, and it's made of concrete.

That kind of lateral gene transfer between complex multi-cellular organisms just doesn't happen.

Amazingly enough, this does happen in nature. Here is one recent example of a sea slug incorporating genes from algae:

http://www.physorg.com/news182501672.html

Granted, the algae may not be a "complex" multi-cellular organism according to your definition, but the sea slug certainly is.

That's not what pirates are, and I've shown you the difference using your own definition of pirate. So either your quote is wrong, or the definition is.

Corsairs != Pirates. Any article that describes corsairs as pirates is wrong, because the very definition of pirate collides with the definition of corsair.

My bet is the article writer was trying to explain people what a corsair is by using the "Pirate" concept (that people are familiar with), which although is factually incorrect, it's good enough for the purpose.

But your article is actually about corsairs, not pirates, and therefore it is completely irrelevant to this discussion.

I give you a link about real pirates, not corsairs: Pirates pursued democracy, helped American colonies survive:

Jason Acosta, who studied pirates for his history thesis at the University of Florida, shows his pirate paraphernalia, including a replica of a 17th century pirate flintlock gun and sword, on May 10, 2006. Pirates deserve more credit than the Hollywood stereotype of bloodthirsty one-eyed peg-legged men who bury treasure and force people to walk the plank, Acosta said. They helped European nations explore the Americas and practiced the same egalitarian principles as our Founding Fathers, he said. Acosta is a descendant of a pirate who fought in the Battle of New Orleans. (University of Florida/Kristen Bartlett)

The real question here isn't so much why did they get rid of it -- that's pretty obvious -- but why they released this product in the first place? Is their management really so out of touch they thought this had potential?

Actually, I was thinking it might make a decent kids phone. Not that kids would want it mind you, but parents buy the thing and a phone that allows them to do the favorite social networking sites while not free access to the internet might be a nice compromise that both parents and kids could deal with. Then again, I'm not a parent, nor a kid, so I am unfamiliar with the realities of raising a child in the internet age. From people saying they have actually seen them in the wild, it seems that mostly poster's wives are buying them. I can see it being an older person's phone also. The few apps they need to keep in touch with family and not have to deal with the complexity of a smart phone. My parents use Facebook to keep in touch with me and my cousins, but lord knows when they'll figure out texting. Then there was the entire 'backed up to the cloud' aspect which is why they bought Danger and is appealing to anybody who has never head of Sidekick.

...since the 'other news' today says that's all we have left [ http://www.physorg.com/news196489543.html ]...

Couple this with:
http://www.physorg.com/news156423566.html "Physicists build new anti-mosquito laser"

I think our house will soon be wasp-free. And maybe we'll all be blinded, but dammit we won't have to worry about wasps.

I'll explain it like this. Say all we had as a propellant was sound waves. Could you make something travel faster than sound with sound waves? No it isn't possible.

Well, that's not true for a start.

http://www.physorg.com/news165084657.html/

In high-density liquid (HDL) water, the molecules are close together and break some hydrogen bonds. That sounds like the conditions of meteorites. Extreme low temps, H20 under high pressure similar to the experiment of Mr. Leporini and you have a pretty good way of transporting life across space.

Ah, no. I can do no better than to quote ThinAirDesigns:

The key thing to remember is that due to the tailwind, the wheels are traveling over the ground much further than the propeller is traveling through the air[1] -- thus using the force x distance calculations for work and power it's easy to see that when we are traveling the speed of the wind, we can gain more power from the wheels (faster moving ground) than we have to expend in the air (slower moving air).

________
[1] As he is about to mention, this is best considered at the moment when the car is moving at the speed of the wind. In this case, there is no wind over the propeller, since the car and the wind are traveling at the same rate in the same direction; however, the wheels are moving relative to the ground at the speed of the wind, and therefore turn the propeller and supply additional thrust to the car, accelerating it.

What about inserting individual genes (from humans) into animals to see how they work? Isn't a lot of research done that way? Example in today's news: http://www.physorg.com/news194796686.html

It's very simple - amphetamines (much like any other Dopamine Reuptake Inhibitors) work by releasing dopamine, a neurotransmitter responsible for cognition, attention, and the body's level of alertness, from the neurons into the synaptic cleft. Incidentally, Dopamine is also the key chemichal in the brain's reward mechanism, which means its release results in instant gratification without you having to do any actual work for it. Nicotine and Caffeine produce are dopaminergic agents as well.

According to a recent Physorg article ADHD may be linked to "low maternal education, lone parents and welfare benefits" (link), which makes all the sense - if there is nobody to reward a child for doing the work or being good, the brain will eventually be wired like that on the chemical level. At the same time, this type of children are more prone to drug abuse than those from successful (balanced) backgrounds.

It's a thin line (no pun intended) when tinkering with low level brain functions, so let me conclude with somebody's famous quote - "the difference between medicine and poison is dosage". So it's your, mine and other slashdotters' responsibility (you know who you are!) to get the dose right!

That being said, you may also want to look into some Cognitive Behavioural Therapy techniques for your ADHD.

As far as I know the current distance record is held by the Japan Electric Vehicle Club with 623.76 miles on a single charge:

http://www.physorg.com/news194158832.html

It even has bumpers and some ground clearance.

True, XOR is the fastest operation, and One-Time Pads use XOR and nothing else. However, short of you and the other person using radio telescopes to obtain a common intergalactic source of randomness (and, yes, that is seriously done), you need to take account of the time (and space) needed to store pads large enough and the encryption time (which can't use a One-Time Pad) taken to securely transfer it.

Having said that, for B2B, OTPs using an intergalactic RNG would likely be cheaper and safer than using quantum cryptography. It would also be much more practical, as it takes a lot of hardware at the moment to deliver qbits. Also, OTPs can't be broken -at all- if the pad itself is secure, but the vulnerability recently discussed shows that quantum cryptography CAN be broken to the extent of being partially readable.

To use a common radio source, all you need is a common starting point and a common target. Aluminum atomic clocks have an error of 8.6e-18 of a second. (This makes it a 1.1 Petahertz clock, rather better than the clock chips we're typically using.) That should be good enough to get some excellent randomness from just about any source out there and insure that both collection systems are in-phase.

Craig Venter can now generate lots of DNA sequences all different and new, it must surely make them very happy to be able to cheaply fill their database.

http://www.physorg.com/news184423418.html

Wait which part are we discussing that is Shuttle Derived?

The Heavy lift portion that we need to get out of the Earths Colossal Gravity well or the capsule that sits atop the rocket itself?

Just trying to get it straight how scrapping the work done on the Heavy lift module and related SRBs are bad ideas. Especially if said SRB could easily be adapted due to configuration to plasma based applications in the future.

Also wanting to make sure we are both talking about the same Constellation Program

The carbon cycle is not in balance any more. The concentration of carbon dioxide has been at about 200-300 ppm for millions of years. Now that humans are burning fossil fuels at an increasing rate, the concentration is approaching 400 ppm. Because carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and can remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, this is increasing the temperature of the planet. We will have to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in half by 2050 to keep temperatures from reaching two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This reduction can be achieved by increased energy efficiency and use of alternative methods of generating energy, such as nuclear power plants.

You're being a bit disingenuous:

'Starving yogi' astounds Indian scientists
Chavez rockets to No. 1 on Twitter in Venezuela
'Happy ending' gives recyclable products higher status
Sweden pushes condom use as study hints risky sex common

All from today, May 10th. Don't get me wrong, I love physorg as well and read it daily. But to say it's not political charged or sometimes trivial is frankly misleading and disingenuous. Every news site has problems, just find what's best for you.

You're being a bit disingenuous:

'Starving yogi' astounds Indian scientists
Chavez rockets to No. 1 on Twitter in Venezuela
'Happy ending' gives recyclable products higher status
Sweden pushes condom use as study hints risky sex common

All from today, May 10th. Don't get me wrong, I love physorg as well and read it daily. But to say it's not political charged or sometimes trivial is frankly misleading and disingenuous. Every news site has problems, just find what's best for you.

You're being a bit disingenuous:

'Starving yogi' astounds Indian scientists
Chavez rockets to No. 1 on Twitter in Venezuela
'Happy ending' gives recyclable products higher status
Sweden pushes condom use as study hints risky sex common

All from today, May 10th. Don't get me wrong, I love physorg as well and read it daily. But to say it's not political charged or sometimes trivial is frankly misleading and disingenuous. Every news site has problems, just find what's best for you.

You're being a bit disingenuous:

'Starving yogi' astounds Indian scientists
Chavez rockets to No. 1 on Twitter in Venezuela
'Happy ending' gives recyclable products higher status
Sweden pushes condom use as study hints risky sex common

All from today, May 10th. Don't get me wrong, I love physorg as well and read it daily. But to say it's not political charged or sometimes trivial is frankly misleading and disingenuous. Every news site has problems, just find what's best for you.

PhysOrg.com offers REAL science and tech news, interesting science factoids etc, not just fanboi stuff. Let's see what some of today's front page headlines are...

New evidence for quantum Darwinism found in quantum dots
Masses of common quarks are revealed
Psychologists say babies know right from wrong even at six months
QUT physicist corrects Oxford English Dictionary
Funnel vision: New info about how cells in the eye help guide light into the retina
Suppressing activity of common intestinal bacteria reduces tumor growth
Scientists create mouse grimace scale to help identify pain in humans and animals
Chemist stitches up speedier chemical reactions
Next generation hard drives may store 10 terabits per sq inch: research