Whoa whoa, according to the story they weren't wrong at all. The dangerous substances were all things so massively destructive that no sane person would use them and no insane person would ever have control over them. It all builds up to the only actually dangerous thing on the crashed ship: people who appear totally sane and benign when in fact they will do anything they are allowed to do. Basically, the whole thing is a shaggy dog about Ronald Reagan being the most dangerous person on the planet because he's charismatic enough to attain power while also being perfectly capable of destroying the world (Adams really didn't like Reagan).
Steel on Steel wheels, larger more efficient engine, and a much more areodynamic shape (compared to trucks with shipping containers hauling the same amount of cargo) all comes together to mean that they could generate the power at a coal plant and still be an order of magnitude more efficient than a fleet of semis.
Using nukes would allow a smaller projectile, but would very likely cause radioactive debris to renter earth's atmosphere. Not good. Its better to land on it and push it into the sun's gravity well.
I thought the idea for nukes was to set the off well away from the surface so that one side of the asteroid ablates off producing a net thrust. This is preferred because it doesn't waste energy breaking a large rock into smaller pieces, doesn't create debris, and can also be effective on 'rubble pile' type asteroids.
And of course, the biggest advantage for a nuke is that it's the densest form of energy storage that we have, you can send a nuclear warhead up for way less delta-V than an equivalent amount of rocket fuel, even if the nuke is only 40% efficient in terms of energy to thrust. But then I suppose you could have an Ion type engine that uses little propellent and gathers energy from solar panels or even a nuclear reactor. Find a way to use the asteroid itself as the propellent (mass driver), use energy from the sun, and the necessary automation to gather and process the rock and you'd have a very light weight solution (with the added advantage of setting up the first, prototypical asteroid mining facility).
Correction: Should read "Babies behave towards things the same way they observed adults behaving towards them". The babies in the study didn't behave as if the robots were sentient unless they had watched an adult treat the robot as if it were sentient. Only if they watched an adult 'play' with the robot like a human child did the babies respond as if the robot were alive, even though the robot was programmed with the exact same movements in both set ups. This says a lot more about how children learn from adults than it does about how children perceive robots.
You've obviously decided which piece of software you want to recommend even though the only reason you can think of to recommend it is that it is FOSS? If the open software isn't as good it just isn't as good; just because it's FOSS doesn't mean that it is the be all and end all to solve your problems. Compare features, stability, cost, and support; if your boss is actively against FOSS make a point to explain it's advantages (and disadvantages if you want to be fair) and leave the decision to him. After all, it's entirely possible that the closed, proprietary solution fits your situation better; basically, its dishonest to make your decision and then go digging specifically for evidence to support that decision.
It's straight from the Reuters news wire for christ's sake, widely considered one of the less biased news sources around. I would have hoped that people on Slashdot were intelligent enough to spot bias when they see it, rather than just deciding anything connected in any with with Fox is automatically wrong and anyone speaking against Fox News is automatically right. Clearly, I was incorrect, there are at least 3 people (the author of this comment plus 2 mods) who will argue that an article is wrong because Fox News reposts it.
But there are other ways to secure a bicycle like... ok, the metaphor is breaking down so I'm going back to reality. MAC filtering, guest SSIDs, or firewalls are all valid ways to secure your network while not encrypting the signal.
If the 'you can't give stuff away and make a profit' argument held in reality Google would be bankrupt instead of one of the most profitable companies in the world. That 'free' OS? First and foremost it ships by default with a ton of Google apps installed, all of which generate advertising revenue and market information that Google uses to generate it's profit. Secondly, since a ridiculously large majority of people still use Google for their search it stands to reason that the more connected people are to the internet the more money Google makes, even without their apps. Google makes money off of android the same way it makes money off of search: collecting information about its users, and selling ad space more effectively than the competition.
As for the carriers... really? You really think that they just give away phones 'for free'? Here's what you should hear when you listen to those advertisements:
We'll give it to you for 'free'*
*Where 'free' is equal to $720 ($30 per month * 24 months).
a lot of people have this implicit assumption that if a few simple steps bring them to a result that doesn't look like it makes sense, then they did something wrong.
It should be noted that this is not a bad thing. Indeed, it is one of the first things that a good math teacher will teach to the class - all answers should go through a 'does this make sense?' filter before you consider the problem done. It is only very rarely that it causes problems, and it is exceedingly common that it prevents them.
My question is how this rate compares to other major advances in TV technology over the years. What was the adaptation rate in the first 12 months for color, flap panel, and high definition TVs? This, to me, sounds exactly like all those articles that used to claim that Blu-ray was dead on arrival; and I seem to see not one but two isles devoted to blu-ray at my local Target these days.
I'm not saying 3D tv's are going to sell well or are worth the money (and the stupid, stupid glasses). I'm just pointing out that without some perspective the given numbers are next to meaningless. Except the lack of glasses sold, that is kind of a nail in the coffin. OTOH, are they leaving out the sets that come with the set? I find it hard to believe that people are paying twice as much for a 3D tv and never, ever using it as a 3D tv.
Am I the only one who thinks that this could have been done 30 years ago with multiple shuttle launches. I know, I know, the shuttle engines are designed to perform multiple long burns without being inspected and rebuilt but come on, orbital refueling just seems like the kind of thing we should have been doing for decades now. I guess we haven't done much for manned (and therefor time critical) long range missions since Apollo but still, this seems like it's some pretty low hanging fruit as far as space exploration technology is concerned.
As someone up above posted, that's still only 1 hour, 18 minutes per month. That doesn't seem like much... but then I start to consider that probably a small fraction actually plays online games... I bet the mode (to the nearest hour) is probably closer to 20 hours a month than 1.
Re:Israel is an interesting exercise in Game Theor
on
Gambling On Bacteria
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· Score: 1
There is one way, both sides have to agree to pursue attacks on the other as the criminal acts that they are. Random guy in Palestine shoots a rocket over the border? He needs to be hunted down and tried for attempted manslaughter, as well as maybe some laws against individuals performing international militant actions. The same goes the other way, if a land developer in Israel illegally tries to build a new apartment block on contested territory, he needs to be tried and punished under similar non-interference laws.
You need each government to be actively supporting the other against certain segments of their own people. Maybe if each side sees that the other is serious about eliminating rogue miltantism inside it's own borders the process could move forward, but not until then. As it stands now, I've never heard of the government of Palestine punishing the '3rd party actors' who are supposedly launching attacks against Israel, and I've often heard the government of Israel itself take part in acts that are aggressive to the Palestinians.
Clearly you missed the Song of Songs: "My lover is like a gazelle or a young stag..." Had to try to keep a straight face for that one at my brother-in-law's wedding, and I would have made it if it weren't for the priest's homily.
If a new player enters the market the current players might not have any choice but to lower their profit margins. Maybe if someone were to set up a free municipal wireless system using newly opened and freely available wireless spectrum for instance?
Is this really sustainable for the industry? It seems like every mobile company has patents that every other mobile company is either stepping on or tiptoeing around. I have to think that by this time next year all the major companies involved will have set up a meeting somewhere and agreed to cross license with each other. All these patent suits are just wrangling for a better position in the agreement that they all know is coming eventually. Of course, such an agreement would make it next to impossible for any new companies to enter the market, which I'm sure none of the current manufacturers would be sad about.
Not one of those things should be under the 'Science' heading, which is what the question was in reference to. Besides, just because the only subject you care about is technology doesn't mean that biology isn't interesting science to a lot of other people. Discovering a carnivorous mammal for the first time is quite rare, as the article says, the last time it happened was 24 years ago.
I'm just saying that an army of patent lawyers will box in any important invention so much that any layman's patent is going to be 100% worthless because they won't be able to do anything with it without stepping all over a dozen other patents. Lets say that you're one of the inventors and want to start a business to actually sell a product that uses graphene. Oh, you want to mass produce graphene now? Well, there's 13 patents on ways to mass produce it so you'll need to license one of them even though it is really just an automation of the process that one you a Nobel prize. You want to use graphene in a touchscreen display? Sorry, that violate the patent on "monolayer semiconductor based resistive devices". etc, etc, etc.
Never understood the 'not obvious to the layperson' requirement, seems to me like it should be 'not obvious to someone in the given field'. In other words, if you presented 5 engineers with a problem and they all came up with the same or similar solutions, that solution should not be patentable, there is no leap that is worth rewarding with a monopoly. But I guess just getting the layperson requirement to actually be honored would be a good step in the right direction.
I think the difference is that most treaties affect the signing countries at a government level, whereas ACTA affects the signatories at an individual level; i.e. there are provisions in that treaty which will require many hundreds of thousands of individuals to change their behavior or face punishment. Yes, Arms Limitation obviously affects all the individuals in a country, but it doesn't take cooperation on an individual or corporate level to follow the treaty, nor is there punishment on an individual or corporate level.
Oh yes, a very simple method to make graphene is covered by the prior art. But what if they come up with some tiny improvement to the process (or more likely a massive improvement if they're going to commercialize it I don't think using scotch tape and pencil lead is going to cut it). And then you can file a patent for each possible use that you can come up with, and another for every tiny incremental improvement you make to those uses, and even uses that you come up with that you know won't work but might end up being close enough to something that does work that you can sue someone later. Broken... broken... broken, I just can't express how broken the patent system is.
If the CIA is using this kind of 'evidence' against someone, you can damn well bet that they know exactly how ridiculous it is, they just don't care. Believe it or not, government agencies are made up of people that aren't completely retarded, they just don't have the same value system that you do. For them 'immoral but works' is a much preferable alternative to 'honest but fails', it's just part of the mindset required to work there effectively.
In Red Mars the interplanetary ship was basically a giant wet lab, it was actually the fuel tanks from all the shuttle launches that brought the rest of the equipment into orbit. It takes surprisingly little extra Delta-V to get the tank into a stable orbit, a small solid rocket mounted on the bottom would have been plenty to do it and could have provided more living space than the entire ISS with a single launch (without any internal equipment of course). It was an idea that NASA had invested considerable research into but the tests were cancelled after the Challenger accident. As an aside, I'm not convinced that most people realize just how much the Challenger explosion derailed the manned space effort, there were a lot, and I mean a lot of potentially game changing ideas that were close to fruition that were canceled as a result of that single accident.
Back to the hypothetical reuse of shuttle parts, I think what they are talking about is something more like the rocket designed by NASA (and other) engineers in their spare time. It would use a re-purposed shuttle fuel tank as the main body of the rocket with a second and possible third stage stacked on top of it, and use space shuttle solid rocket boosters for a heavy lift variant.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoa whoa, according to the story they weren't wrong at all. The dangerous substances were all things so massively destructive that no sane person would use them and no insane person would ever have control over them. It all builds up to the only actually dangerous thing on the crashed ship: people who appear totally sane and benign when in fact they will do anything they are allowed to do. Basically, the whole thing is a shaggy dog about Ronald Reagan being the most dangerous person on the planet because he's charismatic enough to attain power while also being perfectly capable of destroying the world (Adams really didn't like Reagan).
Steel on Steel wheels, larger more efficient engine, and a much more areodynamic shape (compared to trucks with shipping containers hauling the same amount of cargo) all comes together to mean that they could generate the power at a coal plant and still be an order of magnitude more efficient than a fleet of semis.
Using nukes would allow a smaller projectile, but would very likely cause radioactive debris to renter earth's atmosphere. Not good. Its better to land on it and push it into the sun's gravity well.
I thought the idea for nukes was to set the off well away from the surface so that one side of the asteroid ablates off producing a net thrust. This is preferred because it doesn't waste energy breaking a large rock into smaller pieces, doesn't create debris, and can also be effective on 'rubble pile' type asteroids.
And of course, the biggest advantage for a nuke is that it's the densest form of energy storage that we have, you can send a nuclear warhead up for way less delta-V than an equivalent amount of rocket fuel, even if the nuke is only 40% efficient in terms of energy to thrust. But then I suppose you could have an Ion type engine that uses little propellent and gathers energy from solar panels or even a nuclear reactor. Find a way to use the asteroid itself as the propellent (mass driver), use energy from the sun, and the necessary automation to gather and process the rock and you'd have a very light weight solution (with the added advantage of setting up the first, prototypical asteroid mining facility).
Correction: Should read "Babies behave towards things the same way they observed adults behaving towards them". The babies in the study didn't behave as if the robots were sentient unless they had watched an adult treat the robot as if it were sentient. Only if they watched an adult 'play' with the robot like a human child did the babies respond as if the robot were alive, even though the robot was programmed with the exact same movements in both set ups. This says a lot more about how children learn from adults than it does about how children perceive robots.
You've obviously decided which piece of software you want to recommend even though the only reason you can think of to recommend it is that it is FOSS? If the open software isn't as good it just isn't as good; just because it's FOSS doesn't mean that it is the be all and end all to solve your problems. Compare features, stability, cost, and support; if your boss is actively against FOSS make a point to explain it's advantages (and disadvantages if you want to be fair) and leave the decision to him. After all, it's entirely possible that the closed, proprietary solution fits your situation better; basically, its dishonest to make your decision and then go digging specifically for evidence to support that decision.
It's straight from the Reuters news wire for christ's sake, widely considered one of the less biased news sources around. I would have hoped that people on Slashdot were intelligent enough to spot bias when they see it, rather than just deciding anything connected in any with with Fox is automatically wrong and anyone speaking against Fox News is automatically right. Clearly, I was incorrect, there are at least 3 people (the author of this comment plus 2 mods) who will argue that an article is wrong because Fox News reposts it.
But there are other ways to secure a bicycle like... ok, the metaphor is breaking down so I'm going back to reality. MAC filtering, guest SSIDs, or firewalls are all valid ways to secure your network while not encrypting the signal.
If the 'you can't give stuff away and make a profit' argument held in reality Google would be bankrupt instead of one of the most profitable companies in the world. That 'free' OS? First and foremost it ships by default with a ton of Google apps installed, all of which generate advertising revenue and market information that Google uses to generate it's profit. Secondly, since a ridiculously large majority of people still use Google for their search it stands to reason that the more connected people are to the internet the more money Google makes, even without their apps. Google makes money off of android the same way it makes money off of search: collecting information about its users, and selling ad space more effectively than the competition.
As for the carriers... really? You really think that they just give away phones 'for free'? Here's what you should hear when you listen to those advertisements:
We'll give it to you for 'free'*
*Where 'free' is equal to $720 ($30 per month * 24 months).
a lot of people have this implicit assumption that if a few simple steps bring them to a result that doesn't look like it makes sense, then they did something wrong.
It should be noted that this is not a bad thing. Indeed, it is one of the first things that a good math teacher will teach to the class - all answers should go through a 'does this make sense?' filter before you consider the problem done. It is only very rarely that it causes problems, and it is exceedingly common that it prevents them.
My question is how this rate compares to other major advances in TV technology over the years. What was the adaptation rate in the first 12 months for color, flap panel, and high definition TVs? This, to me, sounds exactly like all those articles that used to claim that Blu-ray was dead on arrival; and I seem to see not one but two isles devoted to blu-ray at my local Target these days.
I'm not saying 3D tv's are going to sell well or are worth the money (and the stupid, stupid glasses). I'm just pointing out that without some perspective the given numbers are next to meaningless. Except the lack of glasses sold, that is kind of a nail in the coffin. OTOH, are they leaving out the sets that come with the set? I find it hard to believe that people are paying twice as much for a 3D tv and never, ever using it as a 3D tv.
Am I the only one who thinks that this could have been done 30 years ago with multiple shuttle launches. I know, I know, the shuttle engines are designed to perform multiple long burns without being inspected and rebuilt but come on, orbital refueling just seems like the kind of thing we should have been doing for decades now. I guess we haven't done much for manned (and therefor time critical) long range missions since Apollo but still, this seems like it's some pretty low hanging fruit as far as space exploration technology is concerned.
As someone up above posted, that's still only 1 hour, 18 minutes per month. That doesn't seem like much... but then I start to consider that probably a small fraction actually plays online games... I bet the mode (to the nearest hour) is probably closer to 20 hours a month than 1.
There is one way, both sides have to agree to pursue attacks on the other as the criminal acts that they are. Random guy in Palestine shoots a rocket over the border? He needs to be hunted down and tried for attempted manslaughter, as well as maybe some laws against individuals performing international militant actions. The same goes the other way, if a land developer in Israel illegally tries to build a new apartment block on contested territory, he needs to be tried and punished under similar non-interference laws.
You need each government to be actively supporting the other against certain segments of their own people. Maybe if each side sees that the other is serious about eliminating rogue miltantism inside it's own borders the process could move forward, but not until then. As it stands now, I've never heard of the government of Palestine punishing the '3rd party actors' who are supposedly launching attacks against Israel, and I've often heard the government of Israel itself take part in acts that are aggressive to the Palestinians.
Clearly you missed the Song of Songs: "My lover is like a gazelle or a young stag..." Had to try to keep a straight face for that one at my brother-in-law's wedding, and I would have made it if it weren't for the priest's homily.
No, you're just being overly pedan-Wait ...I see what you did there.
If a new player enters the market the current players might not have any choice but to lower their profit margins. Maybe if someone were to set up a free municipal wireless system using newly opened and freely available wireless spectrum for instance?
Is this really sustainable for the industry? It seems like every mobile company has patents that every other mobile company is either stepping on or tiptoeing around. I have to think that by this time next year all the major companies involved will have set up a meeting somewhere and agreed to cross license with each other. All these patent suits are just wrangling for a better position in the agreement that they all know is coming eventually. Of course, such an agreement would make it next to impossible for any new companies to enter the market, which I'm sure none of the current manufacturers would be sad about.
Not one of those things should be under the 'Science' heading, which is what the question was in reference to. Besides, just because the only subject you care about is technology doesn't mean that biology isn't interesting science to a lot of other people. Discovering a carnivorous mammal for the first time is quite rare, as the article says, the last time it happened was 24 years ago.
I'm just saying that an army of patent lawyers will box in any important invention so much that any layman's patent is going to be 100% worthless because they won't be able to do anything with it without stepping all over a dozen other patents. Lets say that you're one of the inventors and want to start a business to actually sell a product that uses graphene. Oh, you want to mass produce graphene now? Well, there's 13 patents on ways to mass produce it so you'll need to license one of them even though it is really just an automation of the process that one you a Nobel prize. You want to use graphene in a touchscreen display? Sorry, that violate the patent on "monolayer semiconductor based resistive devices". etc, etc, etc.
Never understood the 'not obvious to the layperson' requirement, seems to me like it should be 'not obvious to someone in the given field'. In other words, if you presented 5 engineers with a problem and they all came up with the same or similar solutions, that solution should not be patentable, there is no leap that is worth rewarding with a monopoly. But I guess just getting the layperson requirement to actually be honored would be a good step in the right direction.
I think the difference is that most treaties affect the signing countries at a government level, whereas ACTA affects the signatories at an individual level; i.e. there are provisions in that treaty which will require many hundreds of thousands of individuals to change their behavior or face punishment. Yes, Arms Limitation obviously affects all the individuals in a country, but it doesn't take cooperation on an individual or corporate level to follow the treaty, nor is there punishment on an individual or corporate level.
Oh yes, a very simple method to make graphene is covered by the prior art. But what if they come up with some tiny improvement to the process (or more likely a massive improvement if they're going to commercialize it I don't think using scotch tape and pencil lead is going to cut it). And then you can file a patent for each possible use that you can come up with, and another for every tiny incremental improvement you make to those uses, and even uses that you come up with that you know won't work but might end up being close enough to something that does work that you can sue someone later. Broken... broken... broken, I just can't express how broken the patent system is.
Wait... so in Capitalist Russia... you track hidden GPS devices?
I'm so confused.
If the CIA is using this kind of 'evidence' against someone, you can damn well bet that they know exactly how ridiculous it is, they just don't care. Believe it or not, government agencies are made up of people that aren't completely retarded, they just don't have the same value system that you do. For them 'immoral but works' is a much preferable alternative to 'honest but fails', it's just part of the mindset required to work there effectively.
In Red Mars the interplanetary ship was basically a giant wet lab, it was actually the fuel tanks from all the shuttle launches that brought the rest of the equipment into orbit. It takes surprisingly little extra Delta-V to get the tank into a stable orbit, a small solid rocket mounted on the bottom would have been plenty to do it and could have provided more living space than the entire ISS with a single launch (without any internal equipment of course). It was an idea that NASA had invested considerable research into but the tests were cancelled after the Challenger accident. As an aside, I'm not convinced that most people realize just how much the Challenger explosion derailed the manned space effort, there were a lot, and I mean a lot of potentially game changing ideas that were close to fruition that were canceled as a result of that single accident.
Back to the hypothetical reuse of shuttle parts, I think what they are talking about is something more like the rocket designed by NASA (and other) engineers in their spare time. It would use a re-purposed shuttle fuel tank as the main body of the rocket with a second and possible third stage stacked on top of it, and use space shuttle solid rocket boosters for a heavy lift variant.