The consequences of such an event shouldn't be ignored.
And they weren't. End of story.
Everything else you wrote is either wrong or completely irrelevant. There are no lessons from Chernobyl and Fukushima that can be applied to RTGs, and no analogies between them can be drawn except for ones comparing apples with spoons.
RTGs don't work even remotely like a nuclear reactor of any type, well-engineered, poorly-engineered, or otherwise. It's not clear that plutonium is as dangerous as people have been told it is. In particular, there seems to be no scientific backing for the usual claim that a single inhaled particle is 'guaranteed' to cause cancer. RTGs containing various radioisotopes have been damaged in accidents before with no apocalyptic consequences,.
When you build an RTG you use such a small amount of radioactive material that it's feasible to encapsulate it in a manner that renders it reasonably safe under any reasonably conceivable failure conditions. (Launch-pad explosions are not all that violent, frankly -- Kaku's major concern with Cassini was the Earth flyby, where a miscalculation would have exposed the RTG to much greater heat and higher mechanical stress.)
The launch will probably be successful, and if it's not, it's very unlikely that anyone will die from plutonium exposure as a result. Those are the only guarantees you'll get from any honest engineer. They're good enough for me, they're good enough for you, and they're good enough for the good Dr. Kaku.
The real problem is there's no way to close the negative feedback loop. Our legislators have no incentive not to grandstand by writing blatantly unconstitutional laws. If there were some sort of penalty when they had a law smacked down by the courts, it might make them think twice... but there's not, so no, I don't think much can be done about it. Call it apathy if you want, but nobody asked me how I thought it should work when they were setting up the system....
Yes, pretty much. The Soviets lied to you, and so did we. Big surprise.
This particular law is hardly worth protesting, though, as it will be declared unconstitutional as soon as it its the courts. The US Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint, as the saying goes, and that's what this is.
Heh, I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, because I haven't followed his work since the Cassini episode. But before that, he actually was a decent science writer, someone who could bring leading-edge physics down the mountain and talk intelligently to the people who are asked to fund it.
That's why I was so disillusioned when he went off the deep end. Science desperately needs good communicators like Kaku... and it needs them to not go full retard.
Mars eats orbiters for lunch and landers for dinner, unfortunately. It's called "rocket science" for a reason. If we limited our efforts to sure-fire bets, we'd still be squinting through telescopes and wondering who dug the canals.
I'm confident that if anyone can pull off a project this ambitious, the JPL folks can. If they fail, I'll be happy with raising my taxes by the $1.50/year it will cost to try again.
I'm glad somebody besides me remembers Kaku's graduate-level derp campaign. Hopefully his restless-knee syndrome has improved since then, or at least his statistics and risk-assessment skills have.
The political application in the modern era may be relatively new
True, and that's when it became a problem for the rest of us.
The post that started this discussion claimed it was creationism that is holding back technology advancements and that is just not true.
I'd like to agree with you but I have deeper misgivings. Science isn't a collection of knowledge and facts, it's a process for acquiring and understanding them -- the only one that works. Those who would bring religion into science classrooms can have only one goal -- to teach kids that reality isn't all that interesting and important, and that objective truth plays second fiddle to spirituality.
And it's working. It's 2011, and 59% of U.S. physicians believe in an afterlife (or at least they did in 2005 when the survey was conducted). A similar percentage favor 'intelligent design' over Darwinian models of evolution.
Are those figures in line with what you'd have guessed? You may disagree but IMHO those surveys are a big deal, even though they involve medical doctors rather than technologists and engineers. They tell me that respect for science as the only valid process for learning about our Universe, our world, and our bodies is in decline. There's no way you would have gotten results like these in the Sputnik era, or even in the 1930s.
The more science does for people -- and the less religion does for them -- the more they seem to cling to the latter. That's not entirely the fault of public education but it damned sure should be a big concern for it.
Creationism is not a new idea and was much more prevalent and politically pandered to in the past.
Actually creationism as a force in American politics and education is VERY new, along with most other aspects of American Christian fundamentalism. Creationism was a direct response to the rise of Darwinian evolution as the key basis for 20th-century biology education. If species are shown to descend from earlier forms by means of natural selection, and if such phenomena can be shown to apply to hominids, then original sin -- the keystone of Christian theology -- is completely discredited.
The Catholic Church tends to shy away from the fight, having a long history of losing arguments with science-talking guys, but the American Protestant sects have no such history to learn from. They treat evolution as a threat to the survival of their faith, and rightly so.
From the perspective of virtually every right-of-center American politician, religion gets votes, so it has to be preserved at all costs. Spreading FUD about evolution is a tactic that the thumpers cannot afford to pass up.
I'd assume that if a laser is being used to defend against railgun projectiles, the projectiles are coming directly towards it and wouldn't be hard to track with the sort of fancy adaptive optics that any atmospheric laser weapon is probably going to have to include. If the projectile is coming at you so fast that you can't track it with mm-wave radar and keep the beam locked on it, you may have bigger problems, such as an enemy who has figured out a way around c.
But yeah, a laser designed to defend against railgun projectiles would probably have to do substantially different things than one that was meant to take out cruise missiles. Lasers are actually pretty crappy weapons in the best of conditions.
You should probably take a look at what communism is, as in, the proper definition of communism, not the attempts at practical implementations of derivatives (leninism, stalinism, maoism et al).
It doesn't matter what communism is. If you have to stick a gun in peoples' backs to get them to practice it, it's wrong.
It wasn't vandalism. He did write such a book, which got decidedly mixed reviews. I haven't read it.
In this case the his driving (and seat belt) probably had nothing to do with it. He was 70, recently diagnosed with diabetes, and had just come back from a memorial for a good friend. He was most likely dead of a coronary event before his car left the road.
And why is this my problem, as a passenger, and not Boeing's, or the FAA's?
Do you want to fly on an airplane that can be crashed if little Johnny in seat 34C leaves his Game Boy turned on? Didn't think so. And this is somehow the devices' fault?
Exactly. "Weather is not the same thing as climate, dumbass!"... except when the two are equated by environmentalists, politicians, and journalists a way to boost awareness of global warming^W^Wclimate change. ate
Giving nukes to the commies kept the Warsaw Pact intact, and led to the deaths of millions of people from communist persecution.
I'm having trouble seeing your cause-effect argument here. Many of the worst purges (as documented by Solzhenitsyn and others) happened well before the 1950s. To the best of my knowledge there was little or no connection between the USSR's theft of nuclear technology and their millions of murdered citizens.
I suppose if they hadn't been so heavily armed with said nuclear technology, we could have invaded Russia and liberated the GULAGs, or something.:-P
By no means am I saying the HUAC investigations were perfect, but there was a valid reason for them - hunting down traitors in our government
Yeah, it's pretty clear that were were much safer after we ran Charlie Chaplin out of the country.
Klaus Fuchs (passing nuclear secrets to the soviets), or any of the others.
It's kind of interesting to contemplate what Fuchs did, with the benefit of hindsight. His treachery, and that of various other spies, led directly to MAD, by enabling the Warsaw Pact to match NATO's nuclear arsenal.
And it's possible that MAD prevented World War III.
So... perhaps what happened was actually the best way for the second half of the 20th century to unfold. Put it this way: if I ever invent a time machine, the Fuchs and Rosenbergs are not the first people I will try to hunt down and kill. I have no sympathy for their cause, but I'd be too afraid of unintended consequences.
Bad enough what Harry Dexter White did (provoke us into fighting Japan instead of potentially negotiating a peace)
Same argument, only even more defensible: the right thing happened for the wrong reasons. Defeat at the hands of the Allies was the best thing that happened to Japan since the dawn of recorded history. Besides, Japan's imperialists needed to be put down like dogs for their actions in China alone, never mind Pearl Harbor.
No, I'm not pretending, I'm indifferent. Who cares? They can 'infiltrate' us all they want. It should not be illegal for Communists, Nazis, or other 'undesirables' to seek and hold public office in the US. That was the whole idea. Spies from behind the Iron Curtain should have been ferreted out mercilessly, sent welcome baskets, and asked if there was anything we could do to make their stay more comfortable.
Not that America is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but your statement putting us on moral parity with the communists is just painfully naive.
Ironically I'm usually the one levelling that accusation at people on Slashdot, and for the same reason. Moral parity between the actions of the US and those of the Soviet regime is indeed a ridiculous thing to suggest. There were clearly bad guys and good guys on the playing field, and yes, we were unequivocally the good guys, all snarkiness aside. However, the fact remains that we damned near shredded the Constitution in order to save it... an art which is only now being perfected. If anything, we should be more vigilant now against our own government than we were against the Soviets.
The true test of a nation's character is how it responds to ideological threats. If our ways of life are genuinely better than those espoused by the Soviets and the Red Chinese, we should not have had anything to fear, and shouldn't have reacted to them to the way we did. We could have showed the Communists that "Let a hundred flowers bloom" isn't just a trap for dissidents, but the right way to run things.
Slashdot Mirror
The consequences of such an event shouldn't be ignored.
And they weren't. End of story.
Everything else you wrote is either wrong or completely irrelevant. There are no lessons from Chernobyl and Fukushima that can be applied to RTGs, and no analogies between them can be drawn except for ones comparing apples with spoons.
RTGs don't work even remotely like a nuclear reactor of any type, well-engineered, poorly-engineered, or otherwise. It's not clear that plutonium is as dangerous as people have been told it is. In particular, there seems to be no scientific backing for the usual claim that a single inhaled particle is 'guaranteed' to cause cancer. RTGs containing various radioisotopes have been damaged in accidents before with no apocalyptic consequences,.
When you build an RTG you use such a small amount of radioactive material that it's feasible to encapsulate it in a manner that renders it reasonably safe under any reasonably conceivable failure conditions. (Launch-pad explosions are not all that violent, frankly -- Kaku's major concern with Cassini was the Earth flyby, where a miscalculation would have exposed the RTG to much greater heat and higher mechanical stress.)
The launch will probably be successful, and if it's not, it's very unlikely that anyone will die from plutonium exposure as a result. Those are the only guarantees you'll get from any honest engineer. They're good enough for me, they're good enough for you, and they're good enough for the good Dr. Kaku.
The real problem is there's no way to close the negative feedback loop. Our legislators have no incentive not to grandstand by writing blatantly unconstitutional laws. If there were some sort of penalty when they had a law smacked down by the courts, it might make them think twice... but there's not, so no, I don't think much can be done about it. Call it apathy if you want, but nobody asked me how I thought it should work when they were setting up the system....
Yes, pretty much. The Soviets lied to you, and so did we. Big surprise.
This particular law is hardly worth protesting, though, as it will be declared unconstitutional as soon as it its the courts. The US Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint, as the saying goes, and that's what this is.
Heh, I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, because I haven't followed his work since the Cassini episode. But before that, he actually was a decent science writer, someone who could bring leading-edge physics down the mountain and talk intelligently to the people who are asked to fund it.
That's why I was so disillusioned when he went off the deep end. Science desperately needs good communicators like Kaku... and it needs them to not go full retard.
Mars eats orbiters for lunch and landers for dinner, unfortunately. It's called "rocket science" for a reason. If we limited our efforts to sure-fire bets, we'd still be squinting through telescopes and wondering who dug the canals.
I'm confident that if anyone can pull off a project this ambitious, the JPL folks can. If they fail, I'll be happy with raising my taxes by the $1.50/year it will cost to try again.
I'm glad somebody besides me remembers Kaku's graduate-level derp campaign. Hopefully his restless-knee syndrome has improved since then, or at least his statistics and risk-assessment skills have.
The political application in the modern era may be relatively new
True, and that's when it became a problem for the rest of us.
The post that started this discussion claimed it was creationism that is holding back technology advancements and that is just not true.
I'd like to agree with you but I have deeper misgivings. Science isn't a collection of knowledge and facts, it's a process for acquiring and understanding them -- the only one that works. Those who would bring religion into science classrooms can have only one goal -- to teach kids that reality isn't all that interesting and important, and that objective truth plays second fiddle to spirituality.
And it's working. It's 2011, and 59% of U.S. physicians believe in an afterlife (or at least they did in 2005 when the survey was conducted). A similar percentage favor 'intelligent design' over Darwinian models of evolution.
Are those figures in line with what you'd have guessed? You may disagree but IMHO those surveys are a big deal, even though they involve medical doctors rather than technologists and engineers. They tell me that respect for science as the only valid process for learning about our Universe, our world, and our bodies is in decline. There's no way you would have gotten results like these in the Sputnik era, or even in the 1930s.
The more science does for people -- and the less religion does for them -- the more they seem to cling to the latter. That's not entirely the fault of public education but it damned sure should be a big concern for it.
Creationism is not a new idea and was much more prevalent and politically pandered to in the past.
Actually creationism as a force in American politics and education is VERY new, along with most other aspects of American Christian fundamentalism. Creationism was a direct response to the rise of Darwinian evolution as the key basis for 20th-century biology education. If species are shown to descend from earlier forms by means of natural selection, and if such phenomena can be shown to apply to hominids, then original sin -- the keystone of Christian theology -- is completely discredited.
The Catholic Church tends to shy away from the fight, having a long history of losing arguments with science-talking guys, but the American Protestant sects have no such history to learn from. They treat evolution as a threat to the survival of their faith, and rightly so.
From the perspective of virtually every right-of-center American politician, religion gets votes, so it has to be preserved at all costs. Spreading FUD about evolution is a tactic that the thumpers cannot afford to pass up.
You can help stop them.
What do they rely on, if not exactly that?
I just want something out of SONY.
They already gave you a free rootkit, what do you want? Don't be greedy.
I'd assume that if a laser is being used to defend against railgun projectiles, the projectiles are coming directly towards it and wouldn't be hard to track with the sort of fancy adaptive optics that any atmospheric laser weapon is probably going to have to include. If the projectile is coming at you so fast that you can't track it with mm-wave radar and keep the beam locked on it, you may have bigger problems, such as an enemy who has figured out a way around c.
But yeah, a laser designed to defend against railgun projectiles would probably have to do substantially different things than one that was meant to take out cruise missiles. Lasers are actually pretty crappy weapons in the best of conditions.
Why would that be a problem?
You should probably take a look at what communism is, as in, the proper definition of communism, not the attempts at practical implementations of derivatives (leninism, stalinism, maoism et al).
It doesn't matter what communism is. If you have to stick a gun in peoples' backs to get them to practice it, it's wrong.
They're something else now. I don't think there's a word for it, unless it's "Borg."
I'm a lot more afraid of what they are now than I was when they were Communists. What they're doing now just might work.
It wasn't vandalism. He did write such a book, which got decidedly mixed reviews. I haven't read it.
In this case the his driving (and seat belt) probably had nothing to do with it. He was 70, recently diagnosed with diabetes, and had just come back from a memorial for a good friend. He was most likely dead of a coronary event before his car left the road.
As a RIM employee, you need to read this guy's thoughts on your company and its future. ("What's wrong with Blackberry...").
Now. No -- now as in right now.
Because right now, you're in a world of shit, regardless of what those balance statements are telling you.
Um, do you know what a failed state is? It's when a state does not have monopoly over the use of force within its borders.
Wow. I don't even....
Just, wow.
You're doing illegal things yourself, dumbass. Most likely before you got out of bed this morning. So did I, and everybody who's reading this thread.
Seriously. Depending on where you live, do you have any idea just how many local, state or province, and Federal or EU laws you're subject to?
And why is this my problem, as a passenger, and not Boeing's, or the FAA's?
Do you want to fly on an airplane that can be crashed if little Johnny in seat 34C leaves his Game Boy turned on? Didn't think so. And this is somehow the devices' fault?
Exactly. "Weather is not the same thing as climate, dumbass!"... except when the two are equated by environmentalists, politicians, and journalists a way to boost awareness of global warming^W^Wclimate change.
ate
(Shrug) If people can develop for PS3s and Xbox 360s on Windows PCs, they can develop for iOS the same way. Not that big of a deal, so to speak.
Giving nukes to the commies kept the Warsaw Pact intact, and led to the deaths of millions of people from communist persecution.
I'm having trouble seeing your cause-effect argument here. Many of the worst purges (as documented by Solzhenitsyn and others) happened well before the 1950s. To the best of my knowledge there was little or no connection between the USSR's theft of nuclear technology and their millions of murdered citizens.
I suppose if they hadn't been so heavily armed with said nuclear technology, we could have invaded Russia and liberated the GULAGs, or something. :-P
By no means am I saying the HUAC investigations were perfect, but there was a valid reason for them - hunting down traitors in our government
Yeah, it's pretty clear that were were much safer after we ran Charlie Chaplin out of the country.
Klaus Fuchs (passing nuclear secrets to the soviets), or any of the others.
It's kind of interesting to contemplate what Fuchs did, with the benefit of hindsight. His treachery, and that of various other spies, led directly to MAD, by enabling the Warsaw Pact to match NATO's nuclear arsenal.
And it's possible that MAD prevented World War III.
So... perhaps what happened was actually the best way for the second half of the 20th century to unfold. Put it this way: if I ever invent a time machine, the Fuchs and Rosenbergs are not the first people I will try to hunt down and kill. I have no sympathy for their cause, but I'd be too afraid of unintended consequences.
Bad enough what Harry Dexter White did (provoke us into fighting Japan instead of potentially negotiating a peace)
Same argument, only even more defensible: the right thing happened for the wrong reasons. Defeat at the hands of the Allies was the best thing that happened to Japan since the dawn of recorded history. Besides, Japan's imperialists needed to be put down like dogs for their actions in China alone, never mind Pearl Harbor.
I liked the Beastie Boys better when they were called "Johnny Horton"
Are you pretending the USSR didn't infiltrate the US (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona), or that the Community Party of America was anything but an arm of COMINTERN (with an attached espionage wing- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_USA#The_Third_Period_.281928.E2.80.931935.29)?
No, I'm not pretending, I'm indifferent. Who cares? They can 'infiltrate' us all they want. It should not be illegal for Communists, Nazis, or other 'undesirables' to seek and hold public office in the US. That was the whole idea. Spies from behind the Iron Curtain should have been ferreted out mercilessly, sent welcome baskets, and asked if there was anything we could do to make their stay more comfortable.
Not that America is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but your statement putting us on moral parity with the communists is just painfully naive.
Ironically I'm usually the one levelling that accusation at people on Slashdot, and for the same reason. Moral parity between the actions of the US and those of the Soviet regime is indeed a ridiculous thing to suggest. There were clearly bad guys and good guys on the playing field, and yes, we were unequivocally the good guys, all snarkiness aside. However, the fact remains that we damned near shredded the Constitution in order to save it... an art which is only now being perfected. If anything, we should be more vigilant now against our own government than we were against the Soviets.
The true test of a nation's character is how it responds to ideological threats. If our ways of life are genuinely better than those espoused by the Soviets and the Red Chinese, we should not have had anything to fear, and shouldn't have reacted to them to the way we did. We could have showed the Communists that "Let a hundred flowers bloom" isn't just a trap for dissidents, but the right way to run things.