I'll consider it. When they did the numbers for project Orion they calculated out that on average, there would be one cancer death for each launch of an Orion vehicle. We put a price on life everytime we do risk vs reward, in this case the reward would be enormous and the risk almost trivial, assuming that you launch from an appropriate location. If anything, the problem would be getting the ship through the Van Allen belts without pumping them full of radiation.
My question is this: why DO people enjoy games simulating things that ought to be horrific to us?
Because play, at all levels, is based on training for the future. Puppies play fight, chase, hunt, and hump because those are all things they need to be able to do as adults. Humans are the same way. We play at running a house, at being parents, at hunting/escaping, and yes, we play at warfare. Even organized sports, for the most part, boil down to ritualized tribal warfare or atleast competition.
What people don't realize is that playing violent video games today is no different from playing cowboys and indians 20 years ago. It's done to satisfy the same instincts and desires, which is to prepare the brain for situations that are rare, but dangerous.
What about the women in the crowd? Did they choose to watch it or was it forced on them if they wanted to take part in the conference. I for one, would really like to be able to talk to a member of the opposite sex about my work. And don't say that females aren't interested in engineering because I have lots of female coworkers in the 40s, a handful in their 30s, and virtually none in their 20s. And when crap like this happens, I understand why. How would you like it if you went to a major, professional conference for your dream job and their were male exotic dancers on stage? Maybe you're the exception, but the vaste majority of guys would be quite uncomfortable.
This is just idle speculation, but what if they took care of the 'keeping steady' part for you? Both for speed and direction. For speed, it would be like you are always using cruise control, the neutral forward/back position means maintain the current speed. Back a little is coast, back a lot is brake. Steering is harder, obviously, but is a move towards auto-drive systems that most of us have wanted for decades.
I guess that what I'm trying to say is that technology has changed a lot in 20 years. What didn't work then might be doable now. I could see this as being a gentle introduction to having my car drive itself.
Fine be me, if NVIDIA thinks they can make this work it'll be just one more industry supporting net neutrality. Maybe we should encourage more and more industries to implement high bandwidth, questionably useful technologies. Eventually, the lobby money from the Net Neutrality group will be greater than the lobby money from the Telcos/ISP group.
On this particular subject, and I know this is unrealistic on slashdot, it would be good to read the article. The techniques used in this study were brilliant, they are specifically designed to investigate the criticisms that are usually leveled on studies of evolution and they do so beautifully. I'll try for a quick explanation of why your criticism is invalid.
First, how the experiment worked. They put E. Coli. into dishes with a growth medium of glucose and other nutrients with glucose as the limiting nutrient (add more glucose and the maximum population will go up, take some out and the max will go down). Each and every day, for 20 years, they took 1% of this sample and put it into a new dish, each time they did so the population would boom and bust as the bacteria consumed the new glucose present in the new dish. Each day the researchers would take measurements of lots of things including cell size and total population (which would be the maximum population that the level of glucose could support) as well as occasionally freezing off a sample that could be revived later.
Now, here's where it gets interesting. Almost 20 years into he experiment, the total population (again, the max that glucose could support) suddenly shot up by a factor of 5. That's right, after nearly 40,000 generations, the maximum number of bacterium that the dish could support, suddenly increased to five times it's previous level. After looking into it, the cause was discovered to be that the E. Coli. could suddenly digest a chemical used to prepare the dishes, effectively increasing the food size by 5 times. If this ability was always present, it should have shown up decades ago and also should have shown up in one of the other 11 lines (the mutation only occurred in a single one).
Now, I said it was interesting before but I lied, this is where it gets interesting. The researchers know the average mutation rate for E. Coli. They also know approximately how many generations occurred and therefore have some idea how many mutations occurred . If the ability to digest the chemical required only one mutation, it is statistically unlikely that it would have occurred in only one of the cell lines. Obviously, this mutation was worth investigating. So the researchers thawed out old samples from that cell line and let them start evolving again. What's interesting is that samples frozen before the 20,000th generations never evolved the ability to digest the plate medium. Whereas samples taken after the 20,000th generation often did. The implication is that a mutation occurred around that time which 'primed' the cell line, so that they were then only a single mutation away from being able to digest the medium. What's also cool is that the 'priming' mutation doesn't cause any large increase in fitness. In effect, this is a perfect example of irreducible complexity evolving by natural selection (human beings creating the environment isn't artificial selection the same way breeding a dog is).
As a nerd who absolutely thinks about money to be made in the space industry, I have to disagree. Right now, space is about exploration and science, but the money to be made when someone figures out how to mine an asteroid is enormous. And the amount of money that can be made if you put an automated multipurpose factory on the asteroid is even more (if nothing else, you can produce more mining equipement and speed up the process). It'll only take a single successful mission of that type to bootstrap us into space in a way that isn't possible without it.
That's what people don't understand when commercial groups talk about monetizing space. You hear things about solar power plants in orbit and everybody immediately jumps into how the launch costs make it impracticle. The idea isn't to launch the solar panels up, it's to build them in situ from material mined from NEOs. We can't do that yet, but the company that has the orbital solar concepts proven out when we can stands to make billions. If we can mine rocket fuel, air, and water from an NEO in addition to metals and trace elements... the possibilities for science, business, and colonization are very exciting.
Ok, I'll bite. I'll start by positing that this kind of structure is more efficient or accurate but not 100% necissary to life. An assumption, granted but with a bit of research it should be possible to confirm or deny that hypothesis.
Given that it isn't necissary and is quite complex primitive life probably didn't have it, but due to the fact that is is more efficient or accurate it became more and more common in the gene pool. You know, the exact same way that any feature evolves.
Are you aware of the term 'Total War' and how it applies to WWII? Yes, the US did horrible things during WWII, I'm not saying they didn't and I'm not saying that it was right. But to argue that Japan posed 'no further military threat' is shortsighted and, quite frankly, revisionist.
The people in power of Japan at that time had a history of war crimes and human rights abuses, including but not limited to: the murder of "6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese" prisoners of war, sexual slavery, medical experimentation, biological warfare, chemical warfare, torture, cannibalism, and forced labor. I supose the allies should have stopped at the border of Germany too once their industrial capicity was destroyed? Because Hitler certainly wouldn't have rebuilt and attacked again a decade down the line.
The allies were faced with two choices. First, to leave those generals and leaders in power or two remove them from power. Due to the literally religioius devotion that the average Japanese citizen had towards their emporor and by extention the rest of the government, the only way that was going to happen was to force a complete surrender. The second choice, after the first had been made, was to use the atomic bomb or to invade. You could perhaps argue that a demonstration of the bomb's power may have swayed the people in power to surrender (it is, in fact, what I feel should have been done). An invasion, however, whould have cost hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides of the conflict. A number that was deemed realistic at the time due to the way Japanese soldiers had fought on other islands in the Pacific.
Finally, to single out the use of nuclear weapons as a particular horrible point of WWII isn't exactly honest. Firebombings used by both sides of the conflict killed as many, if not more, people in single attacks as the nuclear bombings did. Diverting food and other resources from civilians to the military led to millions of deaths. The death of 200,000 people in a single attack, while obviously horrible, is not out of line with the levels of violence common during WWII. Expecially considering that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both key strategic locations for the Japanese military, which would have been key targets if an invasion had proven necissary.
Foreman said in the affidavit that Gaughan showed him what appeared to be "hacked and stolen e-mail communications" since the material involved the private e-mail accounts of both himself and Hanni.
Emphasis Added.
This isn't a case of the CEO having access to Foreman's company email account, this was his personal account where he was (apparently) sharing more information that the company wanted him to. He was subsequently fired because of those disclosures. Again, disclosures made through a private, non-company owned channel which the company somehow (presumably illegally) had access to.
Yep, not really news. Would "Woman with a Restraining Order Against Her Arrested for Calling and Hanging Up" make the front page? Even "Woman with a Restraining Order Against Her Arrested for Texting" wouldn't raise any eyebrows.
I would argue that the correct way to close a loophole is to make the law simpler, not more complicated. It's like the joke someone had when the found the missing link, "As you can clearly see, there are now 2 gaps in the fossil record." Making laws more and more detailed and more and more specific opens them up for abuse because it creates more corner cases, which is where the abuse takes place.
The OS is open source, some of the Apps are not. It's no different than some developing a closed source app for Linux and expecting to be paid for it, which is perfectly in line with every open source licensing system in the world.
If you want to ignore the law to make a statement that's fine. Hell, that's how some of the most effective protests in US history went down. The difference is, when people burned their draft cards or refused to pay taxes for nuclear weapons, they accepted the concequences of those actions. And yes, the punishments for pirating music and software are draconian and way out of line, I'm not saying they're not.
I'm just saying be aware of what you are doing and what the possible repercussions of that are. If you're willing to pirate to make a point and accept the concequences, that is protest. If you're only pirating because you want stuff and don't want to pay for it I can't agree with that.
There's no limit to how much energy you can put into your propellent though. If you had Sufficiently Advanced Technology you could put a huge particle accellerator on your spaceship and send your exhuast out behind you at 99.999999999% the speed of light which, in fact, gives you a KE > 1/2m*V^2 due to relativistic effects. In fact, you could accelerate a million ton spacecraft up to.5 c with half a kilogram of propellent if you could put enough energy into it.
Pres: I was under the impression that I was the only one in authority to order the use of nuclear weapons.
Turgidson: That's right sir. You are the only person authorized to do so. And although I hate to judge before all the facts are in, it's beginning to look like General Ripper exceeded his authority.
I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think that the picture at the top is the 'new' design that the article. Other than the circular layout, that table doesn't seem to really change anything. Farther down there is a different table that seems to be grouped differently (or more explicitly?) than the standard Mendelev table.
It's interesting to note that even with the new estimate being 100X greater than the old, the new data is still only a billionth of a billionth of the maximum value. What, if anything, does that mean for the past and future of the universe? Reminds me of the Stephen Baxter book Manifold: Time, where the age of stars and galaxies is thought of in the same way we think of the instant right after the big bang.
You look at this as a potential privacy invasion, which I supose that it is technically, although it is way overkill for mere identification purposes. I look at this and see the possibilities for huge medical breakthroughs. Having one human DNA sequenced is neat, but it isn't really enough to tell us much about what our DNA does. To really discover or rule out genetic causes of disease, we'll need tens of thousands of sequenced genomes that we can cross reference and compare; something that is within the realm of posibility if the cost can be pushed down to $1000 a sequencing.
So, you're saying that Intel gave him a bunch of money with a "gentleman's agreement" that anything he came up with would belong to them? Doesn't that strike you as the kind of thing you would want a contract for? I kind of doubt that Intel was like "Here's a million dollars, don't worry about signing anything, we trust you."
He has no control over it, if he used University facilities to do the research and isn't bound by some other agreement, the patents are controlled by WARF. Complain about A) a system that takes control away from the inventor or B) the way WARF handled this case.
As much as I want to agree, I just can't. Any liturature class should be about exposing the students to works that they would probably not have discovered on their own. If you only have them read what they like, they would have read it without the class anyway. I definately feel that giving them a choice has a place in such a class, but more like something to do at the end, and have them write a report comparing and contrasting the 'classics' with their choice of book.
A non-chemical rocket that can produce that level of thrust is absolutely news, it has the potential to open up the solar system. Personally, I'd rather see research and developement into ground to orbit launch technologies, but this is a big part of moving things quickly from one part of the system to another.
To be fair, the title is what is wrong, it should be "VASIMR Tested at Full Power" not "VASIMR under developement".
Slashdot Mirror
I'll consider it. When they did the numbers for project Orion they calculated out that on average, there would be one cancer death for each launch of an Orion vehicle. We put a price on life everytime we do risk vs reward, in this case the reward would be enormous and the risk almost trivial, assuming that you launch from an appropriate location. If anything, the problem would be getting the ship through the Van Allen belts without pumping them full of radiation.
My question is this: why DO people enjoy games simulating things that ought to be horrific to us?
Because play, at all levels, is based on training for the future. Puppies play fight, chase, hunt, and hump because those are all things they need to be able to do as adults. Humans are the same way. We play at running a house, at being parents, at hunting/escaping, and yes, we play at warfare. Even organized sports, for the most part, boil down to ritualized tribal warfare or atleast competition.
What people don't realize is that playing violent video games today is no different from playing cowboys and indians 20 years ago. It's done to satisfy the same instincts and desires, which is to prepare the brain for situations that are rare, but dangerous.
There was no rocket attached to the simulator and hence no method to stabalize it's flight, at least that I what I assumed.
What about the women in the crowd? Did they choose to watch it or was it forced on them if they wanted to take part in the conference. I for one, would really like to be able to talk to a member of the opposite sex about my work. And don't say that females aren't interested in engineering because I have lots of female coworkers in the 40s, a handful in their 30s, and virtually none in their 20s. And when crap like this happens, I understand why. How would you like it if you went to a major, professional conference for your dream job and their were male exotic dancers on stage? Maybe you're the exception, but the vaste majority of guys would be quite uncomfortable.
This is just idle speculation, but what if they took care of the 'keeping steady' part for you? Both for speed and direction. For speed, it would be like you are always using cruise control, the neutral forward/back position means maintain the current speed. Back a little is coast, back a lot is brake. Steering is harder, obviously, but is a move towards auto-drive systems that most of us have wanted for decades.
I guess that what I'm trying to say is that technology has changed a lot in 20 years. What didn't work then might be doable now. I could see this as being a gentle introduction to having my car drive itself.
Fine be me, if NVIDIA thinks they can make this work it'll be just one more industry supporting net neutrality. Maybe we should encourage more and more industries to implement high bandwidth, questionably useful technologies. Eventually, the lobby money from the Net Neutrality group will be greater than the lobby money from the Telcos/ISP group.
On this particular subject, and I know this is unrealistic on slashdot, it would be good to read the article. The techniques used in this study were brilliant, they are specifically designed to investigate the criticisms that are usually leveled on studies of evolution and they do so beautifully. I'll try for a quick explanation of why your criticism is invalid.
First, how the experiment worked. They put E. Coli. into dishes with a growth medium of glucose and other nutrients with glucose as the limiting nutrient (add more glucose and the maximum population will go up, take some out and the max will go down). Each and every day, for 20 years, they took 1% of this sample and put it into a new dish, each time they did so the population would boom and bust as the bacteria consumed the new glucose present in the new dish. Each day the researchers would take measurements of lots of things including cell size and total population (which would be the maximum population that the level of glucose could support) as well as occasionally freezing off a sample that could be revived later.
Now, here's where it gets interesting. Almost 20 years into he experiment, the total population (again, the max that glucose could support) suddenly shot up by a factor of 5. That's right, after nearly 40,000 generations, the maximum number of bacterium that the dish could support, suddenly increased to five times it's previous level. After looking into it, the cause was discovered to be that the E. Coli. could suddenly digest a chemical used to prepare the dishes, effectively increasing the food size by 5 times. If this ability was always present, it should have shown up decades ago and also should have shown up in one of the other 11 lines (the mutation only occurred in a single one).
Now, I said it was interesting before but I lied, this is where it gets interesting. The researchers know the average mutation rate for E. Coli. They also know approximately how many generations occurred and therefore have some idea how many mutations occurred . If the ability to digest the chemical required only one mutation, it is statistically unlikely that it would have occurred in only one of the cell lines. Obviously, this mutation was worth investigating. So the researchers thawed out old samples from that cell line and let them start evolving again. What's interesting is that samples frozen before the 20,000th generations never evolved the ability to digest the plate medium. Whereas samples taken after the 20,000th generation often did. The implication is that a mutation occurred around that time which 'primed' the cell line, so that they were then only a single mutation away from being able to digest the medium. What's also cool is that the 'priming' mutation doesn't cause any large increase in fitness. In effect, this is a perfect example of irreducible complexity evolving by natural selection (human beings creating the environment isn't artificial selection the same way breeding a dog is).
As a nerd who absolutely thinks about money to be made in the space industry, I have to disagree. Right now, space is about exploration and science, but the money to be made when someone figures out how to mine an asteroid is enormous. And the amount of money that can be made if you put an automated multipurpose factory on the asteroid is even more (if nothing else, you can produce more mining equipement and speed up the process). It'll only take a single successful mission of that type to bootstrap us into space in a way that isn't possible without it.
That's what people don't understand when commercial groups talk about monetizing space. You hear things about solar power plants in orbit and everybody immediately jumps into how the launch costs make it impracticle. The idea isn't to launch the solar panels up, it's to build them in situ from material mined from NEOs. We can't do that yet, but the company that has the orbital solar concepts proven out when we can stands to make billions. If we can mine rocket fuel, air, and water from an NEO in addition to metals and trace elements... the possibilities for science, business, and colonization are very exciting.
Ok, I'll bite. I'll start by positing that this kind of structure is more efficient or accurate but not 100% necissary to life. An assumption, granted but with a bit of research it should be possible to confirm or deny that hypothesis.
Given that it isn't necissary and is quite complex primitive life probably didn't have it, but due to the fact that is is more efficient or accurate it became more and more common in the gene pool. You know, the exact same way that any feature evolves.
Are you aware of the term 'Total War' and how it applies to WWII? Yes, the US did horrible things during WWII, I'm not saying they didn't and I'm not saying that it was right. But to argue that Japan posed 'no further military threat' is shortsighted and, quite frankly, revisionist.
The people in power of Japan at that time had a history of war crimes and human rights abuses, including but not limited to: the murder of "6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese" prisoners of war, sexual slavery, medical experimentation, biological warfare, chemical warfare, torture, cannibalism, and forced labor. I supose the allies should have stopped at the border of Germany too once their industrial capicity was destroyed? Because Hitler certainly wouldn't have rebuilt and attacked again a decade down the line.
The allies were faced with two choices. First, to leave those generals and leaders in power or two remove them from power. Due to the literally religioius devotion that the average Japanese citizen had towards their emporor and by extention the rest of the government, the only way that was going to happen was to force a complete surrender. The second choice, after the first had been made, was to use the atomic bomb or to invade. You could perhaps argue that a demonstration of the bomb's power may have swayed the people in power to surrender (it is, in fact, what I feel should have been done). An invasion, however, whould have cost hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides of the conflict. A number that was deemed realistic at the time due to the way Japanese soldiers had fought on other islands in the Pacific.
Finally, to single out the use of nuclear weapons as a particular horrible point of WWII isn't exactly honest. Firebombings used by both sides of the conflict killed as many, if not more, people in single attacks as the nuclear bombings did. Diverting food and other resources from civilians to the military led to millions of deaths. The death of 200,000 people in a single attack, while obviously horrible, is not out of line with the levels of violence common during WWII. Expecially considering that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both key strategic locations for the Japanese military, which would have been key targets if an invasion had proven necissary.
Foreman said in the affidavit that Gaughan showed him what appeared to be "hacked and stolen e-mail communications" since the material involved the private e-mail accounts of both himself and Hanni.
Emphasis Added.
This isn't a case of the CEO having access to Foreman's company email account, this was his personal account where he was (apparently) sharing more information that the company wanted him to. He was subsequently fired because of those disclosures. Again, disclosures made through a private, non-company owned channel which the company somehow (presumably illegally) had access to.
Yep, not really news. Would "Woman with a Restraining Order Against Her Arrested for Calling and Hanging Up" make the front page? Even "Woman with a Restraining Order Against Her Arrested for Texting" wouldn't raise any eyebrows.
I would argue that the correct way to close a loophole is to make the law simpler, not more complicated. It's like the joke someone had when the found the missing link, "As you can clearly see, there are now 2 gaps in the fossil record." Making laws more and more detailed and more and more specific opens them up for abuse because it creates more corner cases, which is where the abuse takes place.
The OS is open source, some of the Apps are not. It's no different than some developing a closed source app for Linux and expecting to be paid for it, which is perfectly in line with every open source licensing system in the world.
If you want to ignore the law to make a statement that's fine. Hell, that's how some of the most effective protests in US history went down. The difference is, when people burned their draft cards or refused to pay taxes for nuclear weapons, they accepted the concequences of those actions. And yes, the punishments for pirating music and software are draconian and way out of line, I'm not saying they're not.
I'm just saying be aware of what you are doing and what the possible repercussions of that are. If you're willing to pirate to make a point and accept the concequences, that is protest. If you're only pirating because you want stuff and don't want to pay for it I can't agree with that.
There's no limit to how much energy you can put into your propellent though. If you had Sufficiently Advanced Technology you could put a huge particle accellerator on your spaceship and send your exhuast out behind you at 99.999999999% the speed of light which, in fact, gives you a KE > 1/2m*V^2 due to relativistic effects. In fact, you could accelerate a million ton spacecraft up to .5 c with half a kilogram of propellent if you could put enough energy into it.
Pres: I was under the impression that I was the only one in authority to order the use of nuclear weapons.
Turgidson: That's right sir. You are the only person authorized to do so. And although I hate to judge before all the facts are in, it's beginning to look like General Ripper exceeded his authority.
I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think that the picture at the top is the 'new' design that the article. Other than the circular layout, that table doesn't seem to really change anything. Farther down there is a different table that seems to be grouped differently (or more explicitly?) than the standard Mendelev table.
It's interesting to note that even with the new estimate being 100X greater than the old, the new data is still only a billionth of a billionth of the maximum value. What, if anything, does that mean for the past and future of the universe? Reminds me of the Stephen Baxter book Manifold: Time, where the age of stars and galaxies is thought of in the same way we think of the instant right after the big bang.
You look at this as a potential privacy invasion, which I supose that it is technically, although it is way overkill for mere identification purposes. I look at this and see the possibilities for huge medical breakthroughs. Having one human DNA sequenced is neat, but it isn't really enough to tell us much about what our DNA does. To really discover or rule out genetic causes of disease, we'll need tens of thousands of sequenced genomes that we can cross reference and compare; something that is within the realm of posibility if the cost can be pushed down to $1000 a sequencing.
So, you're saying that Intel gave him a bunch of money with a "gentleman's agreement" that anything he came up with would belong to them? Doesn't that strike you as the kind of thing you would want a contract for? I kind of doubt that Intel was like "Here's a million dollars, don't worry about signing anything, we trust you."
He has no control over it, if he used University facilities to do the research and isn't bound by some other agreement, the patents are controlled by WARF. Complain about A) a system that takes control away from the inventor or B) the way WARF handled this case.
As much as I want to agree, I just can't. Any liturature class should be about exposing the students to works that they would probably not have discovered on their own. If you only have them read what they like, they would have read it without the class anyway. I definately feel that giving them a choice has a place in such a class, but more like something to do at the end, and have them write a report comparing and contrasting the 'classics' with their choice of book.
A non-chemical rocket that can produce that level of thrust is absolutely news, it has the potential to open up the solar system. Personally, I'd rather see research and developement into ground to orbit launch technologies, but this is a big part of moving things quickly from one part of the system to another.
To be fair, the title is what is wrong, it should be "VASIMR Tested at Full Power" not "VASIMR under developement".
It's a wellknown fact that reality has an unfair liberal bias.