Yup. The Hiller museum near here has a "flying car" from the 50's. Really not much has changed in the last 3 generations. The additional weight and drag required to make a vehicle a car, make it a terrible airplane. It may get off the ground, but the performance is terrible. (see the terrafugia which has a slow cruise speed, (100mph) and for its size requires a ton of runway - 1700'). Useful load is only 500 pounds. 23 gallons of gas is 130 pounds, so it just barely carries 2, 170 pound adults.
Its just easier to drive to the airport, get in your plane, and have a rental car waiting at your destination - I do it all the time. The really isn't much advantage to having the same vehicle do both.
I also have them written on a piece of paper, but it wouldn't do you much good if you stole it. if you see "god#" what would you type? It reminds me of what password I actually used (which doesn't contain English words).
Now if someone REALLY wanted access to my accounts they could probably use that hint to reduce their search. If they had cracked some accounts, they could probably figure out some of the schemes I use as reminders and quickly figure out the rest.
Of course they could also just hack my home wireless, or put me in a van and drill holes in my kneecaps until I told them.
I've tested your theory - and you are correct. I've have been trying to help some elderly relatives switch from windows 7 to windows 8. They were comfortable doing things on 7, and 8 has been a complete disaster. The can't remember where to swipe for what. Dealing with photos is a disaster - how do you remove a photo from the screensaver display without removing it entirely? Even MS's insane decision to put the address bar at the bottom of explorer, rather then than the top LIKE EVERY OTHER BROWSER, and then HIDING THE ADDRESS BAR UNLESS YOU SWIPE.....sometimes. Or hiding the windows button so that you need to move the mouse OFF THE SCREEN, not just near the edge.
If you go to the standard interface you discover that they now hide libraries, unless you specially display them - despite the fact that some apps like the photo viewer are directly linked to the library (I think - I've been using windows continuously since the first version came out and I can't tell how this really works in 8.1).
Windows, through windows 7 had a functional interface that almost everyone found familiar. Its true that with very limited screen space, it may have made sense to modify things, but on a desktop???? I have resisted buying another computer because I don't want to fight with win8 anymore, and I'm hoping something better comes along. Of course if I want a standard functional desktop I can just install Ubuntu....oh wait. (I'll probably just go with Debian next time).
I'm not particularly careful about my online behavior and with all of the news about massive tracking of consumer habits, why are the adds I see so badly targeted? I went to key west for a week, and for months later received banner adds on Google for things in Key West. I stayed at a Las Vegas hotel, and immediately afterwards received tons of adds for....Las Vegas hotels. I'm quite sure that if I bought a car, I'd see tons of car adds. It seems that advertisers haven't learned that simply collecting data does not provide the information they need - the goal is to provide adds to people for things that the WANT TO BUY, not to provide add for things that the NO LONGER NEED.
This leads me to wonder if advertisers are getting any real value out of all this tracking information that they are paying for.
Its based on the SLS launcher and Orion vehicle - but political troubled projects. The mission seems technologically possible, but would likely be expensive and seems much larger and more complex than anything NASA has done recently.
I hope they do it - but I'm very skeptical that we have the political will for such a project.
Terminology is very tricky, and if people try to treat scientific statements like legal ones they get into trouble. One can talk about "Kepler's laws of planetary motion". A scientist knows that these "laws" are approximations under a limited set of situations, but still very valuable. Works like "theory" and "law" really are somewhat fuzzy. The underlying science is solid, just not the words.
To a large extent science is the art of approximation. We don't know the initial conditions and cannot calculate the field equations for the entire universe. A very important part of science is figuring out what does and does not need to be included to get results of the desired accuracy in any situation.
Once you include humans in the experiment things get even more complicated to define. Astrology does not influence the earth in the sense that the motions of the planets have no direct impact on life here. OTOH, since a significant number of people DO believe in astrology, their behavior may be influenced by the motions of the planets, and that may show up in certain types of social data. So, does that meant that astrology DOES influence things on earth??????
"magic" falls into the same category. If someone believes that magic influences their life it will - does that make it "real"?
Personally I stick with physics where these sort of questions are less likely to arise (and I simply ignore the quantum measurement issue because it makes my brain hurt).
It is easy for surveys to give very misleading results if the questions are not well thought out, or if they have intentionally been designed to produce some result. The media tends to pick up on the more surprising results from surveys so that magnifies the effect in the public perception.
"do you believe in evolution" "do you believe the current theory of evolution is correct" "Do you believe that god was involved in the creation of life" "should students be taught to question scientific theories like evolution". "do you think evolution likely is a correct description of the species we see on earth now" These may seem to be asking the same question, but are really quite different.
And this is a huge worry. I post under my real name, but I worry that I may find my (absolutely necessary in my line of work) right to travel revoked. This is the "fear" tactic. I don't know whether my constitutionally protected expression of opinions may result in negative consequences. Fear motivates me and others to remain silent.
My guess is that the government has no interest in stopping people from whining her and on other forums but I don't know .
Not sure I agree with "terrorist" - that really isn't our preferred tactic. Terrorism is generally the tactic of the weak, we are more "bullies" than "terrorists".
Can't really object to the rest though, and you didn't mention that we have the worlds largest prison population, most never having had a trial (plea bargains), or indefinite detention - though I can't phrase those as elegantly as you did.
Its sad, I remember when we used to claim our freedoms were the best in the world, now it seems that we only try to argue that we are not the worst.
Anti laser goggles only work against a limited set of wavelengths, otherwise they would be completely black. You can buy enough different lasers now (I've seen red, green orange, blue and near-UV) that it isn't practical to make goggles that will block them all.
Even if laesrs don't cause eye damage (and I believe they have), they can cause distraction (which is deadly in aircraft - one of the largest causes of accidents), and can prevent the pilot from seeing the instruments .
Lasers do diverge, but there are tricks to shine a collimated laser at a plane and make a really dangerous weapon.
There are a large number of ways that unskilled idiots can cause damage and loss of life. Oil on mountain road curves. Metal debris on railway tracks. Rocks dropped from highway overpasses. Poison in supermarket food. We can't use technology to protect against all of these. Lasers are a tricky problem since they are available in a variety of wavelengths, it isn't easy to make a filter that will stop all of them.
Agreed. In a car you are never more than a few seconds away from safety on the side of the road and usually not much skill is required to get there. In an airplane you may need to spend 30 minutes flying to your destination, executing an instrument approach and a difficult landing.
Yes you can actually get reasonable condition used planes for not too much $$. The operating costs though are pretty high. A good condition 1970 Bonanza (a very nice high performance single engine plane) is probably about $60K, but plan on $200/hour to fly it.
Flying cars will be more expensive to operate than small aircraft because of the added weight to make them drivable. I haven't seen any "flying car" designs that look practical for anything other than a tiny niche market.
This is something the voters in a democracy need to decide. Do they want it to be possible to conduct large anonymous transactions or not. There are advantages and disadvantages to either choice. The technology is almost irrelevant, what matters is the desired outcome.
For the people who argue that voting doesn't matter, that the government is controlled by non-democratic entities, then there isn't much to do, since then those entities will decide what they do or don't want. Again the technology really isn't important.
I'd never write something big in a graphical language. Sometimes though you have small problems and a graphical language is a good tool for some of these. We are using simulink now to model the flow of information in a programmable logic based microwave processor. The tool uses blocks that map onto programmable logic blocks, so the results can directly be translated into a working part.
Using VHDL would be much more efficient, but this is faster for this particular type of problem, and efficiency is not a limitation for this application.
There are some applications where graphical design works. Matlab Simulink, Labview etc are very useful for a certain limited set of problems. My feeling is that if the problem can be easily represented graphically, it may make sense to use a graphical language to code the solution. I think it is rare for a graphical language to be a good choice for a large problem.
Its pretty similar to spreadsheets - they are very efficient tools for certain types of functions, but should not be turned into large scale programming tools.
A lot of work is being done on this, and the machines you see ARE the result of a lot of progress. A 14 TeV machine built 50 years ago would have been very much bigger than the LHC.
BTW - the machines are cicular because they DO send the particles around many times - typically accelerator over quite a long time, then store the beams for hours while they collide.
Of course if you want to give us more R&D money we would be very happy to work on better accelerator designs. There are some concepts out there: Laser Accelerators, Muon Colliders, etc but they aren't ready for use in a full scale machine yet
Even 10^20 eV cosmic rays don't make it through the earth's atmosphere. Instead they create huge diffuse showers of secondary particles, It seems non-intuitive, but higher energy doesn't help much in getting through solid materials.
You will get some muons which will go through a lot of matter, but they will not be very directional.
This is why market forces don't work correctly here. When you find that your netflix bandwidth is poor, it takes really technical expertise and a lot of time to figure out who is to blame. Netflix servers? Some major backbone? Your ISP? Problems with your home network? Problems with the computer you are using to view the movie.
This is a very general problem with the belief that "market forces" will fix this sort of issue. In many markets (like this), the customer doesn't really know which of the many related vendors is responsible for the problems that they are seeing, and so does not know which vendor to stop giving their business.
If you can control the optical phases (tricky but doable) you can combine same-frequency lasers into a single beam. If you direc two phase-matched lasers at a 50% beam splitter, all of the combined power will go in one direction because the beams will interfere and cancel in the other. What makes this tricky is that you need all of your mechanical tolerances to be a wavelength. Usually this is done with some sort of active feedback.
Combining different wavelengths (which Lockheed did) is easier, and probably better for brute-force military applications.
If you view a "purchase" of an ebook as a short term rental, and buy things you want to keep in paper, then it isn't so bad. Its deceptive advertising, but I'm OK with paying ~$10 to rent a book to read in a convenient (eg light weight) format when I'm traveling.
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Yup. The Hiller museum near here has a "flying car" from the 50's. Really not much has changed in the last 3 generations. The additional weight and drag required to make a vehicle a car, make it a terrible airplane. It may get off the ground, but the performance is terrible. (see the terrafugia which has a slow cruise speed, (100mph) and for its size requires a ton of runway - 1700'). Useful load is only 500 pounds. 23 gallons of gas is 130 pounds, so it just barely carries 2, 170 pound adults.
Its just easier to drive to the airport, get in your plane, and have a rental car waiting at your destination - I do it all the time. The really isn't much advantage to having the same vehicle do both.
I also have them written on a piece of paper, but it wouldn't do you much good if you stole it. if you see "god#" what would you type? It reminds me of what password I actually used (which doesn't contain English words).
Now if someone REALLY wanted access to my accounts they could probably use that hint to reduce their search. If they had cracked some accounts, they could probably figure out some of the schemes I use as reminders and quickly figure out the rest.
Of course they could also just hack my home wireless, or put me in a van and drill holes in my kneecaps until I told them.
I've tested your theory - and you are correct. I've have been trying to help some elderly relatives switch from windows 7 to windows 8. They were comfortable doing things on 7, and 8 has been a complete disaster. The can't remember where to swipe for what. Dealing with photos is a disaster - how do you remove a photo from the screensaver display without removing it entirely? Even MS's insane decision to put the address bar at the bottom of explorer, rather then than the top LIKE EVERY OTHER BROWSER, and then HIDING THE ADDRESS BAR UNLESS YOU SWIPE.....sometimes. Or hiding the windows button so that you need to move the mouse OFF THE SCREEN, not just near the edge.
If you go to the standard interface you discover that they now hide libraries, unless you specially display them - despite the fact that some apps like the photo viewer are directly linked to the library (I think - I've been using windows continuously since the first version came out and I can't tell how this really works in 8.1).
Windows, through windows 7 had a functional interface that almost everyone found familiar. Its true that with very limited screen space, it may have made sense to modify things, but on a desktop???? I have resisted buying another computer because I don't want to fight with win8 anymore, and I'm hoping something better comes along. Of course if I want a standard functional desktop I can just install Ubuntu....oh wait. (I'll probably just go with Debian next time).
I'm not particularly careful about my online behavior and with all of the news about massive tracking of consumer habits, why are the adds I see so badly targeted? I went to key west for a week, and for months later received banner adds on Google for things in Key West. I stayed at a Las Vegas hotel, and immediately afterwards received tons of adds for....Las Vegas hotels. I'm quite sure that if I bought a car, I'd see tons of car adds. It seems that advertisers haven't learned that simply collecting data does not provide the information they need - the goal is to provide adds to people for things that the WANT TO BUY, not to provide add for things that the NO LONGER NEED.
This leads me to wonder if advertisers are getting any real value out of all this tracking information that they are paying for.
Its based on the SLS launcher and Orion vehicle - but political troubled projects. The mission seems technologically possible, but would likely be expensive and seems much larger and more complex than anything NASA has done recently.
I hope they do it - but I'm very skeptical that we have the political will for such a project.
Terminology is very tricky, and if people try to treat scientific statements like legal ones they get into trouble. One can talk about "Kepler's laws of planetary motion". A scientist knows that these "laws" are approximations under a limited set of situations, but still very valuable. Works like "theory" and "law" really are somewhat fuzzy. The underlying science is solid, just not the words.
To a large extent science is the art of approximation. We don't know the initial conditions and cannot calculate the field equations for the entire universe. A very important part of science is figuring out what does and does not need to be included to get results of the desired accuracy in any situation.
Once you include humans in the experiment things get even more complicated to define. Astrology does not influence the earth in the sense that the motions of the planets have no direct impact on life here. OTOH, since a significant number of people DO believe in astrology, their behavior may be influenced by the motions of the planets, and that may show up in certain types of social data. So, does that meant that astrology DOES influence things on earth??????
"magic" falls into the same category. If someone believes that magic influences their life it will - does that make it "real"?
Personally I stick with physics where these sort of questions are less likely to arise (and I simply ignore the quantum measurement issue because it makes my brain hurt).
It is easy for surveys to give very misleading results if the questions are not well thought out, or if they have intentionally been designed to produce some result. The media tends to pick up on the more surprising results from surveys so that magnifies the effect in the public perception.
"do you believe in evolution" "do you believe the current theory of evolution is correct" "Do you believe that god was involved in the creation of life" "should students be taught to question scientific theories like evolution". "do you think evolution likely is a correct description of the species we see on earth now" These may seem to be asking the same question, but are really quite different.
Viking was a technological triumph and should not be forgotten. Along with Apollo and Voyager it is a marvel from of the glory days of NASA.
I wish we could have kept the funding going.
And this is a huge worry. I post under my real name, but I worry that I may find my (absolutely necessary in my line of work) right to travel revoked. This is the "fear" tactic. I don't know whether my constitutionally protected expression of opinions may result in negative consequences. Fear motivates me and others to remain silent.
My guess is that the government has no interest in stopping people from whining her and on other forums but I don't know .
Not sure I agree with "terrorist" - that really isn't our preferred tactic. Terrorism is generally the tactic of the weak, we are more "bullies" than "terrorists".
Can't really object to the rest though, and you didn't mention that we have the worlds largest prison population, most never having had a trial (plea bargains), or indefinite detention - though I can't phrase those as elegantly as you did.
Its sad, I remember when we used to claim our freedoms were the best in the world, now it seems that we only try to argue that we are not the worst.
The US space program had all sorts of problems early on - a bunch of Ranger probes failed. The key was that they kept trying until it worked.
Will China keep trying until they get it right, or will they decide that space is too hard?
Anti laser goggles only work against a limited set of wavelengths, otherwise they would be completely black. You can buy enough different lasers now (I've seen red, green orange, blue and near-UV) that it isn't practical to make goggles that will block them all.
Even if laesrs don't cause eye damage (and I believe they have), they can cause distraction (which is deadly in aircraft - one of the largest causes of accidents), and can prevent the pilot from seeing the instruments .
Lasers do diverge, but there are tricks to shine a collimated laser at a plane and make a really dangerous weapon.
There are a large number of ways that unskilled idiots can cause damage and loss of life. Oil on mountain road curves. Metal debris on railway tracks. Rocks dropped from highway overpasses. Poison in supermarket food. We can't use technology to protect against all of these. Lasers are a tricky problem since they are available in a variety of wavelengths, it isn't easy to make a filter that will stop all of them.
Agreed. In a car you are never more than a few seconds away from safety on the side of the road and usually not much skill is required to get there. In an airplane you may need to spend 30 minutes flying to your destination, executing an instrument approach and a difficult landing.
Yes you can actually get reasonable condition used planes for not too much $$. The operating costs though are pretty high. A good condition 1970 Bonanza (a very nice high performance single engine plane) is probably about $60K, but plan on $200/hour to fly it.
Flying cars will be more expensive to operate than small aircraft because of the added weight to make them drivable. I haven't seen any "flying car" designs that look practical for anything other than a tiny niche market.
This is something the voters in a democracy need to decide. Do they want it to be possible to conduct large anonymous transactions or not. There are advantages and disadvantages to either choice. The technology is almost irrelevant, what matters is the desired outcome.
For the people who argue that voting doesn't matter, that the government is controlled by non-democratic entities, then there isn't much to do, since then those entities will decide what they do or don't want. Again the technology really isn't important.
I'd never write something big in a graphical language. Sometimes though you have small problems and a graphical language is a good tool for some of these. We are using simulink now to model the flow of information in a programmable logic based microwave processor. The tool uses blocks that map onto programmable logic blocks, so the results can directly be translated into a working part.
Using VHDL would be much more efficient, but this is faster for this particular type of problem, and efficiency is not a limitation for this application.
There are some applications where graphical design works. Matlab Simulink, Labview etc are very useful for a certain limited set of problems. My feeling is that if the problem can be easily represented graphically, it may make sense to use a graphical language to code the solution. I think it is rare for a graphical language to be a good choice for a large problem.
Its pretty similar to spreadsheets - they are very efficient tools for certain types of functions, but should not be turned into large scale programming tools.
A lot of work is being done on this, and the machines you see ARE the result of a lot of progress. A 14 TeV machine built 50 years ago would have been very much bigger than the LHC.
BTW - the machines are cicular because they DO send the particles around many times - typically accelerator over quite a long time, then store the beams for hours while they collide.
Of course if you want to give us more R&D money we would be very happy to work on better accelerator designs. There are some concepts out there: Laser Accelerators, Muon Colliders, etc but they aren't ready for use in a full scale machine yet
wont' help.l they will just want one 3X bigger than THAT next. (I build high energy accelerators, we always want more...)
Even 10^20 eV cosmic rays don't make it through the earth's atmosphere. Instead they create huge diffuse showers of secondary particles, It seems non-intuitive, but higher energy doesn't help much in getting through solid materials.
You will get some muons which will go through a lot of matter, but they will not be very directional.
This is why market forces don't work correctly here. When you find that your netflix bandwidth is poor, it takes really technical expertise and a lot of time to figure out who is to blame. Netflix servers? Some major backbone? Your ISP? Problems with your home network? Problems with the computer you are using to view the movie.
This is a very general problem with the belief that "market forces" will fix this sort of issue. In many markets (like this), the customer doesn't really know which of the many related vendors is responsible for the problems that they are seeing, and so does not know which vendor to stop giving their business.
If you can control the optical phases (tricky but doable) you can combine same-frequency lasers into a single beam. If you direc two phase-matched lasers at a 50% beam splitter, all of the combined power will go in one direction because the beams will interfere and cancel in the other. What makes this tricky is that you need all of your mechanical tolerances to be a wavelength. Usually this is done with some sort of active feedback.
Combining different wavelengths (which Lockheed did) is easier, and probably better for brute-force military applications.
If you view a "purchase" of an ebook as a short term rental, and buy things you want to keep in paper, then it isn't so bad. Its deceptive advertising, but I'm OK with paying ~$10 to rent a book to read in a convenient (eg light weight) format when I'm traveling.