It is class warfare to increase tax rates in the highest income brackets to a level that is about half that of the 1950s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States#1913_-_2010. The current tax rate for the highest income brackets is 33%. In the 1950s and 1950s the highest tax rate was 91%. One can also argue that the proposed increased tax rate won't even restore the high tax rate to the same extent, since the historical tax rates were for income of at least $250,000, whereas this will apply to income of at least a million dollars but this would be slightly misleading since adjusting for inflation $250,000 in 1960 dollars is around a 2 million now. But even given that, the general point should be clear: This is far less than the historic tax rate during a time period that is often considered to be one of the most stable and prosperous.
The other problem with labels like class warfare is how much they miss the point of what actual class warfare is. If one wants to see actual class warfare look at the French Revolution where aristocrats and clergy got executed and this eventually spread to wealthy merchants. Or look at the Russian Revolution and the following years where people were punished and exiled for simply being farmers who owned their own land and equipment. That's class warfare. Voting to increase tax rates to levels well below historical levels is just regular economic policy. One can discuss whether such taxes are a good or bad thing, but it is pretty clear that such discussion isn't going to go very far when people like Ryan are using this sort of ridiculously inflammatory rhetoric.
It does look like the IG investigators were way over their heads. But the point about "seven of what number is 11 percent?" seems to be taken out of context. The full section of the transcript where that occurs
CHARLES MONNETT: Yeah. Well, thats a nothing. Um,
23 yeah, 10.8. And then we said, um, four dead – four swimming
24 polar bears were encountered on these transects, in addition
25 to three.
26 ERIC MAY: Three dead polar bears?
1 CHARLES MONNETT: Yeah, three dead.
2 ERIC MAY: Right.
3 CHARLES MONNETT: But the four swimming were a week earlier.
4 ERIC MAY: Okay.
5 CHARLES MONNETT: And, um, then we said if they accurately
6 reflect 11 percent of the bears present so, in other words,
7 theyre just distributed randomly, so we looked at 11 percent
8 of the area.
9 ERIC MAY: In that transect?
10 CHARLES MONNETT: Yeah.
11 ERIC MAY: Right.
12 CHARLES MONNETT: In, in our, in our area there, um –
13 ERIC MAY: Right.
14 CHARLES MONNETT: – and, therefore, we should have seen
15 11 percent of the bears. Then you just invert that, and you
16 come up with, um, nine times as many. So thats where you get
17 the 27, nine times three.
18 ERIC MAY: Where does the nine come from?
19 CHARLES MONNETT: Uh, well 11 percent is one-ninth of
20 100 percent. Nine times 11 is 99 percent. Is that, is that
21 clear?
22 ERIC MAY: Well, now, seven of 11 – seven of what number is
23 11 percent? Shouldnt that be – thats 63, correct?
24 CHARLES MONNETT: What?
25 ERIC MAY: So you said this is –
26 CHARLES MONNETT: Seven/11ths this is –
1 ERIC MAY: No, no, no, no, no. This, this is, this is 11 –
2 seven is what number of 11 percent?
3 CHARLES MONNETT: Seven?
4 ERIC MAY: Yeah.
5 CHARLES MONNETT: Is what number of 11 percent?
6 ERIC MAY: Eleven percent, right.
7 CHARLES MONNETT: Well, I dont know. I dont even know
8 what youre talking about. It makes no sense.
9 LYNN GIBSON: I think what hes saying is since theres four
10 swimming and three dead, that makes –
11 ERIC MAY: And three dead.
12 CHARLES MONNETT: Well, you dont count them all together.
13 That doesnt have anything to do. You cant – that doesnt
14 even –
15 LYNN GIBSON: So youre not saying that the seven represent
16 11 percent of the population.
17 CHARLES MONNETT: Theyre different events.
The confusion here seems to be about what metrics are being used. It looks like the IG people didn't look at things in much detail before the interview which is clearly bad. But if I'm reading this correctly the actual context of the 11 percent line seems to be a unit confusion of an easy form to occur if one isn't that used to handling percentages and isn't actually writing things down. The section does make the IG look pretty bad and like they haven't done their research. But it doesn't look as incredibly bad as the summary suggests.
Quantum dot are semiconductors where their electrons and holes for electrons (which can be for most purposes thought of as particles themselves) are bound in special tight pairs that are unable to move much. One really nice is that their electronic properties can vary with the size and shape of the crystal. In particular, the band gap:, which is the energy range where electrons cannot live, can vary and be carefully controlled in a quantum dot. Insulators have really big band gaps, conductors have none or close to none, and things with medium band gaps are generally semiconductors. So being able to control your bandgap size means you can make semiconductors with essentially any properties you want.
The reason that quantum dots are so exciting for solar cells is that the way they transfer light to electricity can be fundamentally different than the standard process. For normal solar cells there's a theoretical maximum efficiency before which some of the energy has to go to waste heat. There are clever ways you can take advantage of some of this otherwise wasted heat, but by and large this is true waste heat. However, there are suggestions that the theoretical limit for quantum dot enabled solar cells should be larger.
This is not the only nice set of properties that quantum dots have. There's been suggestion that properly designed quantum dots could be used to do solid state quantum computing. If this does occur it will potentially allow quantum computers to be much more scalable and fault tolerant which currently are the primary problems preventing quantum computers from being more than lab curiosities.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a physicist or an electrical engineer. Details here might be wrong.)
Similar hypotheses have been suggested based on genetic evidence which suggested that humans and neanderthals interbred. See http://www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/news/2010/may/first-genetic-code-of-neanderthal-reveals-inbreeding66724.html. In both cases, the work has been done by Chris Stringer who seems to focus a lot on this hypothesis. Stringer is a very respected anthropologist who was responsible for formulating a lot of the now accepted ideas about how homonids spread from Africa in successive waves of migrations.
This is a really good thing. As the summary notes, this will teach kids logic and thinking systematically. Knowing how to program isn't just a useful skill in the direct sense of programming things and possibly being employed that way. It also does a really good job of making one think precisely and carefully. There's also another advantage which is it helps kids appreciate that the technology around them are things they can understand and don't need to treat like they are magic.
While the money has been allocated the total NASA budget has not been increased, in fact it has gone down. That means that the money for it is coming from somewhere. This could easily damage other important programs. Until we know exactly where things are going to come from this is a cause for concern. In general, all the sciences are being hit hard right now. The situation seems somewhat similar to Russian roulette with the programs which don't get bullets getting budgets.
So if you thought that the shuttle was a political compromise of various different interests this will look even worse. There's one primary reason that this new design uses so much of the shuttle: whiny lobbyists and politicians who want to make sure that the factories in their home districts stay doing the exact same thing. To most Slashdot readers the space program isn't what may be the first stepping stones to the stars, and we imagine people a thousand years from now looking back on this early age as we look back on the great achievements of the past. These people don't look at that way. They look at this as one more form of pork. And frankly, given how bad the economy is, I sort of understand that. Their home districts need every job they can get.
But even given that, this still pisses me off. This will have less lift capacity than the Saturn V or the shuttle, will be less frequently launchable, will be essentially not reusable. This is a clear step backwards. More expensive and less capable. Great way to go.
Aircraft landing is really tough. Many pilots who train for it never get the hang of it. Landing an aircraft on a ship is also one of the most common ways for pilots in the military to die. It's that difficult. Ships, even large ships, are constantly rolling from the waves and currents. Spacecraft are also a really difficult technology. Landing on a ship might be doable in the very far future but right now the technology is nowhere near that. Patents don't need to have working examples, but I can't imagine that this patent will still be in force by the time this sort of technology becomes at all implementable.
There's a fair bit of evidence that human doctors are not very good at actually making diagnoses. For example, doctors when given various simple probabilities and asked to estimate the likelyhood of diseases given specific test results often get the estimates drastically wrong. The classical form of this is when one has a disease that is rare but and with a low rate of false positives. Doctors often don't realize that if the disease is sufficiently rare it will turn out that the majority of tests will be false positives. Doctors also will sometimes miss very basic things due to simple human error or fatigue. Watson won't have these problems. Already machine learning systems are used by some to help predict and diagnose diseases http://www.openclinical.org/aiinmedicine.html. Watson will just be one more example of such.
So you want people with whom you disagree to not be able to vote? How do you feel when someone on the other end of the political spectrum doesn't want you to be able to vote? Most people believe that voting is a fundamental right, not something we remove simply because someone has beliefs we think are crazy.
Just imagine how much better our society would be if religionists were disenfranchised. The Tea Party would disappear overnight, and who among the following would disagree with that: Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emanuel, Dan Savage, Paul Krugman, Julian Assange, Hugo Chavez, Janeane Garofalo, Al Franken, Barack Obama, Micheal Moore, Evo Morales, Hillary Clinton.Can you seriously say you are on the opposite end of the agreement of these intellectual heavyweights?
First of all, I'm pretty sure that most of the people on that list aren't in favor of removal of peoples right to vote even if it would mean that the Tea Party would disappear. Second of all, most of that list is not by any means "intellectual heavyweights." Being a famous person who agrees with your positions doesn't make someone an intellectual heavyweight. For example, Dan Savage is a sex advice columnist and occasional pundit about GLBTQE issues. That's it. Frankly, putting most of those people on the same list as Krugman is essentially insulting Krugman. Please keep in mind that agreeing with you doesn't make people smart, just as disagreeing with you doesn't make them necessarily dumb.
Bad example then since I don't agree with Paul's stance on immigration but think his stance is more moderate than that of a lot of Republicans. If you prefer consider his stance on the Patriot Act where he voted against it. The basic point should be clear: I can agree with someone on some positions and disagree with them on others. Just because someone has bad positions in one issue doesn't make every position they have automatically bad.
There's a lot wrong with what you've said. First of all, these reactors are thermoelectric reactors. They don't have any moving parts and they don't have any highly radioactive components. Pu-238 is radioactive and nasty, but there's more danger from it being a heavy metal than it being radioactive. Moreover, one is talking about very small quantities of Pu-238, literally grams of matter. If a rocket with that explodes it will be a minor mess on the launch pad and not much else. Other than a very tiny easily cleaned up area, the total radiation level will not be beyond background even assuming the radioactive material does get breached (which is tough since it is very secured).
You are also confused about claiming this has something to do with the military. This sort of technology is not that useful for the military. Although Pu-238 has been used in some satellites the primary purpose is civilian space probes that need to go deep into space where the sun is dim from being so far away. The idea that you can't differentiate between military and commercial uses says more about you than it does about whether such differential is possible.
Your statement about Julian Assange is also worth discussing if in a marginal fashion. You are engaging in classic tribalism. Just because someone agrees with Assange on one thing or another is in no way a reason to think that one has a logical reason to agree with him on other things. For example, I can agree with Ron Paul on immigration issues and still think that his attitude about the Federal Reserve is deeply wrong. Similarly, your attempted comparison to people who disagree with you to Tea Partiers fails in a similar fashion. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence ahref=http://lesswrong.com/lw/lw/reversed_stupidity_is_not_intelligence/rel=url2html-23799http://lesswrong.com/lw/lw/reversed_stupidity_is_not_intelligence/>. Just because a position is taken up by a group that is frequently wrong or even morally repugnant does not mean that any position which they endorse is necessarily wrong. Indeed, given that the position in question is a trivial budget cut that has a large negative impact, this seems to be right up their alley.
So let's see, SSC canceled but that was a while ago. James Webb Telescope on the chopping block, probably gone. Tevatron closing (and yes, the Tevatron does a lot of work that can't be done at the LHC. It uses lower energy but a different set of collision types). And now this. At this point it really seems like the US is just giving up at doing interesting science when it has anything like a big price tag where a big price tag means a price tag that is a tiny fraction of the military budget.
That is by and large a fair summary but there's an important part of TFA that also comes up: A large part of the added cost could have been avoided if Congress had just given an additional 250 million for a launch date in 2015. If that had occurred this would be only a few hundred million dollars over budget.
Shutting down the internet had two other results: It made people in Egypt who were not involved in the revolution sit up and take notice. This especially applied to some of the higher income people in Cairo who used the internet for both entertainment and business. Also, shutting down the internet made the rest of the world a lot more sympathetic to the Egyptian revolutionaries. Shutting down the internet is such an obvious, massive form of censorship that it immediately becomes clear to a lot of people that the people doing it are doing a bad thing. It wouldn't surprise me if in thirty or forty years shutting down the internet will itself be considered a form of crime against humanity.
So apparently they used the remaining fuel a few years ago to move it into a more rapidly decaying orbit. If they had enough fuel to do that why not just deorbit the whole thing in a controlled fashion and aim it at an ocean? We've done that before. Obviously these are some very smart people but it seems weird that they'd have exactly enough fuel to put it into a rapidly decaying orbit but not enough fuel to handle that last little bit.
On the bright side, the danger from deorbiting satellites is pretty small. The biggest actual problem that has occurred when a Soviet satellite with radioactive material decided to scatter itself over a large part of Canada back in the 1970s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_954. When the US space station Skylab pulled a similar stunt over Australia, the local government fined NASA a few hundred dollars for littering.
You can fuse iron but you will have to put in more energy than you get out. Elements around iron and nickel are the most efficient way of storing protons and neutrons. So if you have larger elements like uranium you can get energy out by breaking them down. If you have really small elements you can get energy out by forming them into elements closer in size to iron. Moreover, fusing gets more difficult when you have larger elements because there are more protons in the nucleus so the strength of the positive charge repelling the nuclei from each other gets stronger. This is also why stars eventually die out. At first they fuse hydrogen (which is easy to fuse and gets a lot of energy out). Then when that no longer works they start fusing helium and so on. This whole process can keep going until you get to heavy elements (although small stars stop before iron because they can't enough pressure to fuse much beyond helium). When they get to iron and nickel they are stuck. Then, if the star is big enough, this lack of fusion causes the star to go supernova which results in its own very brief set of fusion of really heavy elements (which is where elements like uranium come from). This process consumes energy but there's so much energy in a supernova that the energy consumed in this process is tiny compared to the output of the supernova itself.
That's a really good idea. And it shouldn't be that hard to implement. You could possibly have the software update for new companies. I like your idea a lot.
One obvious lesson for this is that using email systems that have autocompletes for addresses you've already used or have had replies from is obviously important. A lot of modern software does this although some does not (my university's default webmail application doesn't for example although gmail does). Another more technical response to this is for people to use public key encryption when they are sending sensitive stuff. There's still some danger that they will at some point look up the public key but this will at least reduce problems. And there are obvious ways of distributing a lot of these keys in a secure fashion. For example, when you go to a bank to open a new account they could hand you a physical USB with their public key on it. Similarly, if one is an employee of a company they could physically do the same thing. One has enough real world interactions with people in the sort of circumstances described by the researchers that the thorny problems of key distribution are much simpler. However, I doubt almost anyone will implement this sort of thing since it is a change from the status quo which involves new technology to prevent what they may see as minor risks.
Balaroth's point is that fusion takes a lot of different technologies working together in order to work well. This is true for a lot of technologies but fusion is an example where the total number of technologies is much higher than it is for lots of other technologies.
There are now multiple different approaches to fusion research. Laser fusion looks promising although we don't have a really good understanding of how to efficiently extract energy from laser fusion. Magnetic containment fusion in the form of tokamaks is also still ongoing. There is an international group working now to build ITER which will be a very large tokamak which will be in France. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER. There are other ideas out there but unfortunately many of the more interesting ones are not receiving much funding. Laser fusion confines the plasma and crushes it with brief intense laser pulses while tokamaks confine the plasma using a torus of electromagnets. However, stellarators use a different form of magnetic confinement and might end up working but they are getting almost no funding.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator
The idea that we are always 50 years from fusion seems to be unfair. We've gotten much better at handling the basics. We can now consistently get fusion to occur with a variety of methods. The primary problems are doing so efficiently enough to get more energy out than we are putting in. We've made slow but steady progress at improving efficiency through a variety of methods. The development of so-called high temperature superconductors (that is able to superconduct a bit over the temperature at which nitrogen boils) in the 1970s has helped a lot. And the engineering issues really are immense. We've also sort of been spoiled by the previous success with fission power. The United States pored a massive amount of funding and resources into fission research from the beginning of the Manhattan project until a bit after World War 2. If fusion power was treated the same way we might be able to develop it quickly also.
There's another aspect about this sort of thing that is good news. The United States is steadily eroding its scientific and exploratory capability. We've retired the shuttle with no replacement. In the 1990s we canceled the Superconducting Super Collider. As a result when the LHC came online the US lost a lot of particle physicists who went over to Europe. The US particle physics has been in a state of decline since then. Most recently, the US is closing down the Tevatron, http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/68988/title/Tevatron_to_shut_down_in_September which is the star US particle accelerator. While the energy levels of the Tevatron are less than the LHC the types and variety of collisions it does are sufficiently different such that having both of them is very much not redundant. And, the James Webb Telescope might be getting canceled, so it looks like cutting edge astronomy is another area the US is giving up on. If I had just been told that there was a Slashdot headline about laser fusion in the US I would have guessed that it would have been funding cuts for the NIR. The fact that organizations from elsewhere are actually joining suggests that the decline in US science might not be as bad as a pessimist might think. It might be reversible.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok. I understand that sarcasm in titles can be difficult to detect. But did you even read my comment before writing your reply?
It is class warfare to increase tax rates in the highest income brackets to a level that is about half that of the 1950s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States#1913_-_2010. The current tax rate for the highest income brackets is 33%. In the 1950s and 1950s the highest tax rate was 91%. One can also argue that the proposed increased tax rate won't even restore the high tax rate to the same extent, since the historical tax rates were for income of at least $250,000, whereas this will apply to income of at least a million dollars but this would be slightly misleading since adjusting for inflation $250,000 in 1960 dollars is around a 2 million now. But even given that, the general point should be clear: This is far less than the historic tax rate during a time period that is often considered to be one of the most stable and prosperous.
The other problem with labels like class warfare is how much they miss the point of what actual class warfare is. If one wants to see actual class warfare look at the French Revolution where aristocrats and clergy got executed and this eventually spread to wealthy merchants. Or look at the Russian Revolution and the following years where people were punished and exiled for simply being farmers who owned their own land and equipment. That's class warfare. Voting to increase tax rates to levels well below historical levels is just regular economic policy. One can discuss whether such taxes are a good or bad thing, but it is pretty clear that such discussion isn't going to go very far when people like Ryan are using this sort of ridiculously inflammatory rhetoric.
CHARLES MONNETT: Yeah. Well, thats a nothing. Um,
23 yeah, 10.8. And then we said, um, four dead – four swimming
24 polar bears were encountered on these transects, in addition
25 to three.
26 ERIC MAY: Three dead polar bears?
1 CHARLES MONNETT: Yeah, three dead.
2 ERIC MAY: Right.
3 CHARLES MONNETT: But the four swimming were a week earlier.
4 ERIC MAY: Okay.
5 CHARLES MONNETT: And, um, then we said if they accurately
6 reflect 11 percent of the bears present so, in other words,
7 theyre just distributed randomly, so we looked at 11 percent
8 of the area.
9 ERIC MAY: In that transect?
10 CHARLES MONNETT: Yeah.
11 ERIC MAY: Right.
12 CHARLES MONNETT: In, in our, in our area there, um –
13 ERIC MAY: Right.
14 CHARLES MONNETT: – and, therefore, we should have seen
15 11 percent of the bears. Then you just invert that, and you
16 come up with, um, nine times as many. So thats where you get
17 the 27, nine times three.
18 ERIC MAY: Where does the nine come from?
19 CHARLES MONNETT: Uh, well 11 percent is one-ninth of
20 100 percent. Nine times 11 is 99 percent. Is that, is that
21 clear?
22 ERIC MAY: Well, now, seven of 11 – seven of what number is
23 11 percent? Shouldnt that be – thats 63, correct?
24 CHARLES MONNETT: What?
25 ERIC MAY: So you said this is –
26 CHARLES MONNETT: Seven/11ths this is –
1 ERIC MAY: No, no, no, no, no. This, this is, this is 11 –
2 seven is what number of 11 percent?
3 CHARLES MONNETT: Seven?
4 ERIC MAY: Yeah.
5 CHARLES MONNETT: Is what number of 11 percent?
6 ERIC MAY: Eleven percent, right.
7 CHARLES MONNETT: Well, I dont know. I dont even know
8 what youre talking about. It makes no sense.
9 LYNN GIBSON: I think what hes saying is since theres four
10 swimming and three dead, that makes –
11 ERIC MAY: And three dead.
12 CHARLES MONNETT: Well, you dont count them all together.
13 That doesnt have anything to do. You cant – that doesnt
14 even –
15 LYNN GIBSON: So youre not saying that the seven represent
16 11 percent of the population.
17 CHARLES MONNETT: Theyre different events.
The confusion here seems to be about what metrics are being used. It looks like the IG people didn't look at things in much detail before the interview which is clearly bad. But if I'm reading this correctly the actual context of the 11 percent line seems to be a unit confusion of an easy form to occur if one isn't that used to handling percentages and isn't actually writing things down. The section does make the IG look pretty bad and like they haven't done their research. But it doesn't look as incredibly bad as the summary suggests.
Quantum dot are semiconductors where their electrons and holes for electrons (which can be for most purposes thought of as particles themselves) are bound in special tight pairs that are unable to move much. One really nice is that their electronic properties can vary with the size and shape of the crystal. In particular, the band gap :, which is the energy range where electrons cannot live, can vary and be carefully controlled in a quantum dot. Insulators have really big band gaps, conductors have none or close to none, and things with medium band gaps are generally semiconductors. So being able to control your bandgap size means you can make semiconductors with essentially any properties you want.
The reason that quantum dots are so exciting for solar cells is that the way they transfer light to electricity can be fundamentally different than the standard process. For normal solar cells there's a theoretical maximum efficiency before which some of the energy has to go to waste heat. There are clever ways you can take advantage of some of this otherwise wasted heat, but by and large this is true waste heat. However, there are suggestions that the theoretical limit for quantum dot enabled solar cells should be larger.
This is not the only nice set of properties that quantum dots have. There's been suggestion that properly designed quantum dots could be used to do solid state quantum computing. If this does occur it will potentially allow quantum computers to be much more scalable and fault tolerant which currently are the primary problems preventing quantum computers from being more than lab curiosities. (Disclaimer: I'm not a physicist or an electrical engineer. Details here might be wrong.)
Similar hypotheses have been suggested based on genetic evidence which suggested that humans and neanderthals interbred. See http://www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/news/2010/may/first-genetic-code-of-neanderthal-reveals-inbreeding66724.html. In both cases, the work has been done by Chris Stringer who seems to focus a lot on this hypothesis. Stringer is a very respected anthropologist who was responsible for formulating a lot of the now accepted ideas about how homonids spread from Africa in successive waves of migrations.
This is a really good thing. As the summary notes, this will teach kids logic and thinking systematically. Knowing how to program isn't just a useful skill in the direct sense of programming things and possibly being employed that way. It also does a really good job of making one think precisely and carefully. There's also another advantage which is it helps kids appreciate that the technology around them are things they can understand and don't need to treat like they are magic.
While the money has been allocated the total NASA budget has not been increased, in fact it has gone down. That means that the money for it is coming from somewhere. This could easily damage other important programs. Until we know exactly where things are going to come from this is a cause for concern. In general, all the sciences are being hit hard right now. The situation seems somewhat similar to Russian roulette with the programs which don't get bullets getting budgets.
No. This planet is not like Tatooine. It is likely to be very cold because both of the two stars are in fact quite dim. Much closer to Hoth than Tatooine. See Phil Plait's description here where he discusses how you can estimate the planet's probable temperature- http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/15/astronomers-discover-a-wretched-hive-of-scum-and-villainy/.
Only until 2017. Read TFS.
Really? Want to bet on whether congress will force further extensions of the same stuff?
So if you thought that the shuttle was a political compromise of various different interests this will look even worse. There's one primary reason that this new design uses so much of the shuttle: whiny lobbyists and politicians who want to make sure that the factories in their home districts stay doing the exact same thing. To most Slashdot readers the space program isn't what may be the first stepping stones to the stars, and we imagine people a thousand years from now looking back on this early age as we look back on the great achievements of the past. These people don't look at that way. They look at this as one more form of pork. And frankly, given how bad the economy is, I sort of understand that. Their home districts need every job they can get.
But even given that, this still pisses me off. This will have less lift capacity than the Saturn V or the shuttle, will be less frequently launchable, will be essentially not reusable. This is a clear step backwards. More expensive and less capable. Great way to go.
Yeah, that's a very good point. Since this is intended to be a vertical landing system my worry is groundless.
Aircraft landing is really tough. Many pilots who train for it never get the hang of it. Landing an aircraft on a ship is also one of the most common ways for pilots in the military to die. It's that difficult. Ships, even large ships, are constantly rolling from the waves and currents. Spacecraft are also a really difficult technology. Landing on a ship might be doable in the very far future but right now the technology is nowhere near that. Patents don't need to have working examples, but I can't imagine that this patent will still be in force by the time this sort of technology becomes at all implementable.
There's a fair bit of evidence that human doctors are not very good at actually making diagnoses. For example, doctors when given various simple probabilities and asked to estimate the likelyhood of diseases given specific test results often get the estimates drastically wrong. The classical form of this is when one has a disease that is rare but and with a low rate of false positives. Doctors often don't realize that if the disease is sufficiently rare it will turn out that the majority of tests will be false positives. Doctors also will sometimes miss very basic things due to simple human error or fatigue. Watson won't have these problems. Already machine learning systems are used by some to help predict and diagnose diseases http://www.openclinical.org/aiinmedicine.html. Watson will just be one more example of such.
So you want people with whom you disagree to not be able to vote? How do you feel when someone on the other end of the political spectrum doesn't want you to be able to vote? Most people believe that voting is a fundamental right, not something we remove simply because someone has beliefs we think are crazy.
Just imagine how much better our society would be if religionists were disenfranchised. The Tea Party would disappear overnight, and who among the following would disagree with that: Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emanuel, Dan Savage, Paul Krugman, Julian Assange, Hugo Chavez, Janeane Garofalo, Al Franken, Barack Obama, Micheal Moore, Evo Morales, Hillary Clinton.Can you seriously say you are on the opposite end of the agreement of these intellectual heavyweights?
First of all, I'm pretty sure that most of the people on that list aren't in favor of removal of peoples right to vote even if it would mean that the Tea Party would disappear. Second of all, most of that list is not by any means "intellectual heavyweights." Being a famous person who agrees with your positions doesn't make someone an intellectual heavyweight. For example, Dan Savage is a sex advice columnist and occasional pundit about GLBTQE issues. That's it. Frankly, putting most of those people on the same list as Krugman is essentially insulting Krugman. Please keep in mind that agreeing with you doesn't make people smart, just as disagreeing with you doesn't make them necessarily dumb.
Bad example then since I don't agree with Paul's stance on immigration but think his stance is more moderate than that of a lot of Republicans. If you prefer consider his stance on the Patriot Act where he voted against it. The basic point should be clear: I can agree with someone on some positions and disagree with them on others. Just because someone has bad positions in one issue doesn't make every position they have automatically bad.
There's a lot wrong with what you've said. First of all, these reactors are thermoelectric reactors. They don't have any moving parts and they don't have any highly radioactive components. Pu-238 is radioactive and nasty, but there's more danger from it being a heavy metal than it being radioactive. Moreover, one is talking about very small quantities of Pu-238, literally grams of matter. If a rocket with that explodes it will be a minor mess on the launch pad and not much else. Other than a very tiny easily cleaned up area, the total radiation level will not be beyond background even assuming the radioactive material does get breached (which is tough since it is very secured).
You are also confused about claiming this has something to do with the military. This sort of technology is not that useful for the military. Although Pu-238 has been used in some satellites the primary purpose is civilian space probes that need to go deep into space where the sun is dim from being so far away. The idea that you can't differentiate between military and commercial uses says more about you than it does about whether such differential is possible.
Your statement about Julian Assange is also worth discussing if in a marginal fashion. You are engaging in classic tribalism. Just because someone agrees with Assange on one thing or another is in no way a reason to think that one has a logical reason to agree with him on other things. For example, I can agree with Ron Paul on immigration issues and still think that his attitude about the Federal Reserve is deeply wrong. Similarly, your attempted comparison to people who disagree with you to Tea Partiers fails in a similar fashion. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence ahref=http://lesswrong.com/lw/lw/reversed_stupidity_is_not_intelligence/rel=url2html-23799http://lesswrong.com/lw/lw/reversed_stupidity_is_not_intelligence/>. Just because a position is taken up by a group that is frequently wrong or even morally repugnant does not mean that any position which they endorse is necessarily wrong. Indeed, given that the position in question is a trivial budget cut that has a large negative impact, this seems to be right up their alley.
So let's see, SSC canceled but that was a while ago. James Webb Telescope on the chopping block, probably gone. Tevatron closing (and yes, the Tevatron does a lot of work that can't be done at the LHC. It uses lower energy but a different set of collision types). And now this. At this point it really seems like the US is just giving up at doing interesting science when it has anything like a big price tag where a big price tag means a price tag that is a tiny fraction of the military budget.
That is by and large a fair summary but there's an important part of TFA that also comes up: A large part of the added cost could have been avoided if Congress had just given an additional 250 million for a launch date in 2015. If that had occurred this would be only a few hundred million dollars over budget.
Shutting down the internet had two other results: It made people in Egypt who were not involved in the revolution sit up and take notice. This especially applied to some of the higher income people in Cairo who used the internet for both entertainment and business. Also, shutting down the internet made the rest of the world a lot more sympathetic to the Egyptian revolutionaries. Shutting down the internet is such an obvious, massive form of censorship that it immediately becomes clear to a lot of people that the people doing it are doing a bad thing. It wouldn't surprise me if in thirty or forty years shutting down the internet will itself be considered a form of crime against humanity.
So apparently they used the remaining fuel a few years ago to move it into a more rapidly decaying orbit. If they had enough fuel to do that why not just deorbit the whole thing in a controlled fashion and aim it at an ocean? We've done that before. Obviously these are some very smart people but it seems weird that they'd have exactly enough fuel to put it into a rapidly decaying orbit but not enough fuel to handle that last little bit.
On the bright side, the danger from deorbiting satellites is pretty small. The biggest actual problem that has occurred when a Soviet satellite with radioactive material decided to scatter itself over a large part of Canada back in the 1970s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_954. When the US space station Skylab pulled a similar stunt over Australia, the local government fined NASA a few hundred dollars for littering.
You can fuse iron but you will have to put in more energy than you get out. Elements around iron and nickel are the most efficient way of storing protons and neutrons. So if you have larger elements like uranium you can get energy out by breaking them down. If you have really small elements you can get energy out by forming them into elements closer in size to iron. Moreover, fusing gets more difficult when you have larger elements because there are more protons in the nucleus so the strength of the positive charge repelling the nuclei from each other gets stronger. This is also why stars eventually die out. At first they fuse hydrogen (which is easy to fuse and gets a lot of energy out). Then when that no longer works they start fusing helium and so on. This whole process can keep going until you get to heavy elements (although small stars stop before iron because they can't enough pressure to fuse much beyond helium). When they get to iron and nickel they are stuck. Then, if the star is big enough, this lack of fusion causes the star to go supernova which results in its own very brief set of fusion of really heavy elements (which is where elements like uranium come from). This process consumes energy but there's so much energy in a supernova that the energy consumed in this process is tiny compared to the output of the supernova itself.
That's a really good idea. And it shouldn't be that hard to implement. You could possibly have the software update for new companies. I like your idea a lot.
One obvious lesson for this is that using email systems that have autocompletes for addresses you've already used or have had replies from is obviously important. A lot of modern software does this although some does not (my university's default webmail application doesn't for example although gmail does). Another more technical response to this is for people to use public key encryption when they are sending sensitive stuff. There's still some danger that they will at some point look up the public key but this will at least reduce problems. And there are obvious ways of distributing a lot of these keys in a secure fashion. For example, when you go to a bank to open a new account they could hand you a physical USB with their public key on it. Similarly, if one is an employee of a company they could physically do the same thing. One has enough real world interactions with people in the sort of circumstances described by the researchers that the thorny problems of key distribution are much simpler. However, I doubt almost anyone will implement this sort of thing since it is a change from the status quo which involves new technology to prevent what they may see as minor risks.
Balaroth's point is that fusion takes a lot of different technologies working together in order to work well. This is true for a lot of technologies but fusion is an example where the total number of technologies is much higher than it is for lots of other technologies.
There are now multiple different approaches to fusion research. Laser fusion looks promising although we don't have a really good understanding of how to efficiently extract energy from laser fusion. Magnetic containment fusion in the form of tokamaks is also still ongoing. There is an international group working now to build ITER which will be a very large tokamak which will be in France. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER. There are other ideas out there but unfortunately many of the more interesting ones are not receiving much funding. Laser fusion confines the plasma and crushes it with brief intense laser pulses while tokamaks confine the plasma using a torus of electromagnets. However, stellarators use a different form of magnetic confinement and might end up working but they are getting almost no funding.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator
The idea that we are always 50 years from fusion seems to be unfair. We've gotten much better at handling the basics. We can now consistently get fusion to occur with a variety of methods. The primary problems are doing so efficiently enough to get more energy out than we are putting in. We've made slow but steady progress at improving efficiency through a variety of methods. The development of so-called high temperature superconductors (that is able to superconduct a bit over the temperature at which nitrogen boils) in the 1970s has helped a lot. And the engineering issues really are immense. We've also sort of been spoiled by the previous success with fission power. The United States pored a massive amount of funding and resources into fission research from the beginning of the Manhattan project until a bit after World War 2. If fusion power was treated the same way we might be able to develop it quickly also.
There's another aspect about this sort of thing that is good news. The United States is steadily eroding its scientific and exploratory capability. We've retired the shuttle with no replacement. In the 1990s we canceled the Superconducting Super Collider. As a result when the LHC came online the US lost a lot of particle physicists who went over to Europe. The US particle physics has been in a state of decline since then. Most recently, the US is closing down the Tevatron, http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/68988/title/Tevatron_to_shut_down_in_September which is the star US particle accelerator. While the energy levels of the Tevatron are less than the LHC the types and variety of collisions it does are sufficiently different such that having both of them is very much not redundant. And, the James Webb Telescope might be getting canceled, so it looks like cutting edge astronomy is another area the US is giving up on. If I had just been told that there was a Slashdot headline about laser fusion in the US I would have guessed that it would have been funding cuts for the NIR. The fact that organizations from elsewhere are actually joining suggests that the decline in US science might not be as bad as a pessimist might think. It might be reversible.