I wonder, does it account for leap seconds and the slowing rotation of the Earth?
Not to mention continental drift...
The design includes a mechanism for setting the clock using diurnal and seasonal variations. Leap seconds only matter in comparison to atomic timekeeping. Mother Earth takes care of her own.
One doubts the reliability of the study - after all, one of the investigators is on Facebook!
"Could it be that the same quiet kids in high school that kept to themselves, studied and did well in school, are the same kids that are less likely to get into anything with the word social in it? I think its just more likely that facebook attracts the social people who spend less time worrying about schooling, and shows no interest to the people who are brainy loners."
Many on slashdot will have pertinent experience here - from my own pointed experience it is obvious that loners are more desperate than they are uninterested about socializing. The "brainy loners" are going to be the ones who social networking fails. They seem very likely to be among the first who try to make Facebook work. Their nascent social networks will simply die on the vine.
The operative quote is not "correlation does not imply causation". The operative quote is "you can lead a horse to water,..."
One doubts the reliability of the study - but if there is any validity here, it is likely that the most highly socially skilled individuals avoid gimmicks and build their own networks, extending their own influence over the world directly. Interpersonal skill is another type of braininess.
Like Hendrix said, "Gimmicks, here we go again, gimmicks man..."
Why is NASA getting grief here? Vast amounts of data from other organizations are deleted every day without comment. Rather, the space and astronomy communities are eager archivists precisely because the picture in question is a unique snapshot of the Earth and Moon at that moment and time - once deleted, irretrievably lost.
That budgets often fail to provide for long term maintenance is nothing to be surprised about. The real story here - as usual with NASA - is the strength of the organization's spirited staff. These data were saved - as all things of value are ultimately saved - due to their intrinsic value, not their monetary valuation.
The other naive thing about many replies to this thread is the thought that - har, har, har - those folks back in the '60's sure didn't know what they was doin'! Rather, today's archivists are facing a vastly larger problem. Presumably the current technology choice would involve spinning storage at multiple sites, perhaps with a tape robot at a supercomputer center serving as deep storage. Those spinning disks will eventually halt - will inevitably halt - very quickly after funding runs out. The copy in deep storage relies on migrating data to new media with a cadence of something like every few years - this, too, requires an ongoing funding commitment.
Even data that are explicitly committed to optical or magnetic media with the intent of long term offline storage in a salt mine require some sort of perpetual maintenance. Modern high-density storage is no more permanent that tapes from the 60's - perhaps less so since it has been demonstrated that those old NASA tapes are still readable half a century later. These are nearly time capsule sorts of time scales.
In any event, just as with these NASA data, any attempt at permanent storage requires saving readers for the media, not just the media themselves. And this just pushes the question one level deeper as those tape drives or optical readers have to be compatible with appropriate computer technology. Save the computers? Then you have to be compatible with the evolving network standards.
One of the more interesting aspects is that a different group engineered the defense from the offense.
Human sports are often decomposable in similar fashions. A team may have separate coaches for attacking and defending, but more generally a sport could have a complete separation of roles. Instead of two teams each responsible for both offense and defense, a game could involve four teams in two pairs. Award points to the defenders according to saves.
This would be trivial in sports like baseball and American football that separate the game modally - two different teams take the field each half inning, for instance. For sports like basketball or soccer, the four teams would be on the field (or court) throughout the game.
Martial sports like Karate and fencing could become tag team events.
A little of this nonsense would go a long way, but it might be rather entertaining in some cases.
When Earth becomes completely overpopulated and/or runs into resource shortages, that's when we'll see space flight really take off.
How is that, exactly? Population is governed by compound interest. Our population today is 6.6 billion souls. The current growth rate is 1.167% per annum. (Data via CIA.) Do the math. Today there were 213,000 more souls and 6000 tons more human flesh pressing inward on Mother Earth than yesterday. Tomorrow there will be 213,000 more. The day after - another 213,000. In six months that will be 214,000 per day - six months later, 215,000 per day, and so forth and so on. Less than a year from now there will be another 1.8 million tons of human flesh literally shouldering other species into extinction. That's not 1.8 million tons total - that's just the additional growth of skin and hair and sinew and good red meat locked up in your mama's Soylent Green recipe.
For space to matter in the solution of this problem, we have to build a fleet of ships capable of offloading 213,000 people - a new space fleet every day, year after year - forever. A space shuttle carries a crew of seven - so we need 30,000 space shuttles a day or 35,000 Orions. (Of course, that only gets you to low Earth orbit.) Each year we would have to move 1.8 million tons of human cold cuts - that's the equivalent of 18 Nimitz class aircraft carriers of flesh - to some other distant, unwelcoming world.
And then, of course, you've just shifted the horizon of the always looming catastrophe to a collection of planets rather than a single planet. Since this is a doubling issue, colonizing another planet - say, a terraformed Venus - just buys you an additional 60 years. If you want to push the inevitable collapse of civilization off for 240 years (roughly the duration of the American Experiment to date) - well, you need 15 additional Earth clones.
Our population problem will be solved on Earth - one way or another.
Each company's products evolved through many generations. Large cartridges, small cartridges, flash cubes, flash bars, wet developer/fixer, dry process. We gave my dad a Polaroid SX-70 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SX-70) when it first came out. Something very satisfying about the whirr and thunk of the ejection mechanism. The batteries were contained in the film cartridge.
I recall some Japanese tourists stopping him to take a look at the camera - this may have been the last cool technology that the U.S. saw before Japan.
I used juggling to make a different point once at a staff meeting. The soul of juggling is passing objects between two or more jugglers (I humbly assert). When we juggle (or work) in partnership, our actions must accommodate this simple mirroring in the workflow.
It's all in the throw, not in the catch. If the throw is perfect, the catch happens without any corrections or concious thought.
Rather, corrections happen all the time, both in juggling objects and in juggling time management tasks. A throw is never perfect. Even a simple three ball cascade (a pattern/sequence that is wired into our brains) involves constantly correcting varying throwing mistakes.
Jugglers just peep at the object as it arcs over and downwards, and that's enough to tell them where and when to stick out a hand and catch it.
And as you imply, the throw isn't perfect, rather a quick glimpse is enough to correct within a window of possibilities. So when a single juggler tosses a little bit too far in front, the catching hand is directed to the new landing area and then the next throw compensates to return the ball (or club or ring) back to the stationary position. Without these corrections it is commonplace to see a newly taught juggler chasing the evolving pattern across the room.
This very different, however, when juggling with a partner. Imagine juggler A tosses too short. In this case, juggler B receives the throw too far from the body. The natural response is reversed. Juggler A's mistake is compounded if juggler B makes the natural correction of receiving short so throwing long. The errors quickly accumulate as one throws shorter and shorter and the other longer and longer.
Rather, both in juggling and in task management, the response should be calibrated in terms of energy levels. If one juggler (or coworker) throws too hard, the other must convey that fact through their own actions - but without triggering an escalation of reactions.
Let's make sure I understand this correctly, since maybe I'm not following.
Not only did the hospital not actually move and the Daleks moved the planet out from under it, but they achieved this by moving the episodes out from under the planet, which they did by moving the seasons out from under the episodes, the sidekicks, and the villians?
People live where they have the means to live. This implies that we all live in a "centre of excellence" of some technology or other. A few hundred yards over my left shoulder sits the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab with huge rotating ovens for making the world's largest telescope optics. This makes Tucson fancy itself "Optics Valley" - at least, we'd undoubtedly appear on the top ten list for optics centers.
Someone has already mentioned Nebraska's claim as "Corn Valley". Think this is silly? Farming is a far more critical infrastructure than IT. What about biotechnologies in general? These will surely have as much to do with writing the history of the 21st century as IT.
Or generalize this to pure research - the fundamental engine of all technology. Obviously Boston would appear on that list, too, as well as the Bay area. L.A., or at least Pasadena, would jump into place. The original Cambridge and/or Oxford. A lot of IT centers would drop right off this list. Let the current recession linger a little too long and the IT centers buoyed up purely by commerce will collapse under the own weight. Those driven by basic innovation will survive just as the ivory towers did during the middle ages.
There are topics the Slashdot community is good at handling. And there are topics that Slashdot simply doesn't gain any traction on. This is obviously one of the latter.
The real issue is that the survey in question is insipid. It is unsurprising that when the political climate is such that some position needs to be justified that surveys and articles and opinion pieces will appear in the press supporting one side or another of the issue. The President (rightly or wrongly) appears to want to pursue a new strategy for funding education. Therefore PR is needed to raise the priority of this issue relative to the vast numbers of other critically important issues.
The semiotics of the survey are to say 1) science is important, and 2) we suck at teaching science.
If there were some scientific reason to study the public's knowledge of basic oceanographic facts, an appropriate question for narrowing in on our grasp of the fact that the Earth is about twice as much covered by the oceans as by the continents would likely have broader bins. Or perhaps it would ask for a sliding scale and then bin the data after the fact. I'm personally rather impressed that almost half the sample would have been within +/- 5 percentage points (not "percent") of the "right" answer.
...which begs the question of how the right answer is defined. Are we talking salt water or liquid of any type? What about the ice caps - ain't they water? Water to what depth? Seasonal variations? Variations with climate change?
Those who are concerned about science education can actually do something about it rather than kvetch about teachers. Schools are often willing to work with parents and community members to provide resources they can't afford in their budget. Schools have extracurricular programs like Science Olympiad (and many others) that are usually staffed by volunteers. Universities and labs often partner with local schools. A few hundred volunteers will be judging our regional science fair this Tuesday. You don't even need to do it "for the kids" - they'll feed you breakfast and lunch paid for by TI or a utility company - and personally, my take on the state of the world is always bettered by the experience.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but why precisely do we think everybody needs to be flogged into math and science (even if such could possibly succeed)? There are also language fairs, art fairs, dance and music and theater - and auto shop and carpentry and... One of my best experiences in a rather dreadful HS career was print shop - the technologies have all changed, but the diversity of niches still remain. We used to have neighbors - she was a PhD in the University French department. He was a (successful) baker from Switzerland with no college education.
If that had hit the Soyuz, it would have went in one side and out the other likely without even slowing down much, vaporizing a significant chunk of the hull - think white-hot metal shrapnel and shredded astronauts.
It wouldn't have been a good situation, but the design of the Soyuz actually provides some extra protection depending on its orientation with respect to the incoming object:
They would presumably have been sitting in the descent module, sandwiched between the orbital module (docked to the space station) and the service module (with the solar panels). Oriented the long axis along the crossing orbit and the debris would have to traverse one or the other. It wouldn't be good to shred either the airlock or the retrorockets, but what are you gonna do?
And of course the space station itself could provide cover for the Soyuz. It would be nice if for once one of these reports actually described the full situation, orientation of the spacecraft relative to the orbiting debris, etc., not just the sensational version...Cosmonauts Cower in Soyuz! News at 11!
The chances of something from an entirely different orbit impacting a craft are still infinitesimal.
Much more likely than infinitesimal. As someone else commented, this has already happened. You must not have been watching the news lately.
The odds are either identically zero if the orbits do not intersect, or are small but significant if they do intersect. Orbits are not static and basically are never perfect closed ellipses, so there is a fair amount of fuzziness about whether two close orbits do or do not intersect. And, of course, every pair of orbits (about the same primary) cross twice on opposite sides of the planet - the two questions to ask are 1) whether they cross at the same altitude, and 2) whether the two objects are at the crossing at the same time.
Since an object in LEO completes about 15 orbits per day and each orbit crosses ALL others twice per orbit, there are many opportunities daily for collision. Most close passes are quite distant. Even if the two objects are near the particular crossing point the altitude may differ. Do the math, however, and you will find that there are several passages of two large objects within a few kilometers every single day. The odds of an actual collision then just scale as the volumes of the spacecraft divided by the volume of a unit cube. Wait long enough and they are guaranteed to collide.
All else being equal, the odds are about even that two large objects (spacecraft sized or so) will collide once per decade. There are hundreds of such orbiting objects, of course, so the odds for a specific satellite are something like once per a few millennia - for a collision with a similarly sized object. The odds are correspondingly larger for a collision between a spacecraft and the much more numerous pieces of small orbital debris.
So mashups are legally ambiguous. Try this variation. YouTube releases an API that permits indexing into any video at any point. Further, the API allows displaying the video within a region-of-interest on the screen. The API is multi-threaded.
Under this scenario exactly the same artistic presentation could result, but without any prior editing. All that is being orchestrated is the simultaneous presentation of several works that were released precisely with the intent of display on remote desktops.
It would only be at the point that an end-user captured the performance into a permanent file, thus completing the remix, that any possible infringement would occur. (Although then an argument of private use might pertain.)
The art here (whatever one thinks of this New Elvis) is in the remix, not the permanent copy. These remixes could be traded as YouTube "scripts" - a form of extreme data compression - preserving the freedom of expression. Live performances could be organized using video projectors from laptops.
If YouTube manages to make any money from my idea, I reserve the right to beg for my fair share. But then, maybe I should remix this message as a script that samples other messages.
There can't be a huge lot of commercial use cases for rapid discharge. Tasers?
Rapid charge, on the other hand, makes a lot of applications much easier to market. Gasoline has one big advantage over electric powered cars - you can drive into and out of a gas station in 3 minutes as opposed to having to plug the car in overnight.
And I'll expand. I understand your point. I'm no knee jerk lover of copyright and/or patent as they are currently formulated.
However, ownership of real property is no more clear cut than assertions of ownership of intangible property (whether such actually exists). Most of the shortcomings attributed to malformed notions of "intellectual property" are actually shortcomings of applying the notion of ownership to anything whatsoever.
"You have a limited time monopoly on your rented house, your landlord has ownership."
A landlord's "ownership" is itself a complex legal entity. In particular, such notions have not historically scaled well to the very wealthy. Why, particularly, is it to either society's or the individual's benefit to promote the idea that a billionaire could possibly be entitled to the swag he has extracted from the larger economy? Having done so, to who's true benefit is the notion that this grotesque bolus of capital should be passed down to succeeding generations?
It appears that the banks have recently lost more than the bankers ever "earned" from us. What fraction of financial whizzes will ultimately benefit from the game they've devoted their life to?
Laws exist to govern systems of conduct. Those systems have a set of goals, whether such are ever overtly enumerated. There is nothing "of course" about any set of legal constructs - it certainly has never been deemed a question of what is fair.
"IP is not property; not the patent or copyright holder's property, anyway. If it is in fact property, it's owned by the general public, as patented and copyrighted works go into the public domain once their terms expire."
Suggesting that everything that exists is property, as you are implicitly doing so here by excluding the middle way, is patently absurd. The Earth and the Moon and the Sun and the Stars did not spring into being as property of anyone. Seizing wealth from the land or the sea does not magically create ownership. If "property" - of any sort - exists, it is as a work product of some civilization that is itself only a temporary tenant of the land where the property happens to reside. Why precisely, for instance, is the Great Pyramid considered to "belong" to the modern country of Egypt?
This isn't just a question of individual property. Why assert that the general public (whoever that is) has any inherent property rights? Is "public domain" an assertion of joint ownership? Or rather an assertion of non-ownership?
Reject the premise. Always reject the premise.
Returning to the topic of the article, one is skeptical that eliminating copyright and patent - even if such an absurd notion were possible - will result in any better outcome than congress kowtowing to Disney every time Mickey's contract is up for renegotiation.
Your bank balance, your PIN number, your account number, are not "intellectual property" in the context of the topic of discussion - patents and copyrights.
Broadening the context of the discussion is the precise point I'm making. Hence the subject "Reject the premise".
[T]he term "intellectual property" itself is not only a lie, but a damned one.
This is the position taken by the free software cliche. It differs, for instance, from that of the open source folks. In fact, copyleft is layered on copyright. I'm merely asserting that the evident and egregious failures of the concept of "Intellectual Property" are broad failures of the notion of property generally, not just the intellectual/virtual/intangible part of the term.
To gain productive traction on addressing the failures of systems like copyright or patent, one must engage with a theory of their nature that is rooted in reality. Simply chanting that IP is a damned lie is unlikely to realize your goals.
Yes, real estate and real cars are "real property". We understand what "real" means. At issue was the meaning of "property". Your response uses words like "yours" and "mine". Putting aside the philosophical questions of physical reality (what is a car but a bundle of quantum wave functions?), we are still left with the legal issues.
I can put "my" factory on "my" real estate, but data ("intellectual property") managed by the banks and government still limit the uses of this physical property. In fact, without such IP and such organizations, what does ownership mean other than the opportunity to defend something with force?
There is a legal theory underlying property. Perhaps copyright law and patent law (severally or together) have absolutely nothing to do with property law. More likely, however, the real issue here is broader than IP.
Such a reply was expected. Note that I said no such things as you are asserting. Rather, I stated that all property is intellectual property. The extreme free software position is based on an assertion that the term "intellectual property" is an oxymoron, that IP is a meaningless idea. Rather the opposite is true.
Consider - the "purchase" of Manhattan has survived a third party transfer twice - first from the Dutch to the English and second from English colony to the United States. What possible theory of legal ownership survives the extinction of the laws under which the contracts were made?
As these words flow from my keystrokes, I assert a class of ownership of them. I expect that others will honor that ownership through proper quotation. I assent to whatever joint ownership this forum implies in order to gain the benefits (sometimes obscure) of Slashdot.
I don't know about you, but the bank retains more ownership of my house than I do - and state law has quite a bit to say about the uses to which I can put my car. To reject all other historical notions of ownership - oh, say, the Potlatch - for either far right or far left absolutism is to miss the entire point of property in the third millennium.
The issue here isn't "intellectual property". The issue is the property paradigm itself. Whether or not the proprietary period has been lengthened ridiculously to benefit Disney, we all agree that intellectual property eventually returns to the public domain that nourished its creation. Newton wasn't the only one who has stood on the shoulders of giants.
Why then do we assume completely and utterly that "real" property never expires? Why assume that once Manhattan was stol...er...purchased, that it remains purchased - not for 14 years - not for 100 years - not for the lifetime of Peter Minuit plus 75 years - not even for as long as the original Dutch nation retained possession - but rather, for ever and ever and ever?
The concept behind inheritance taxes is that the wealthy got that way by receiving special benefits from the body politic. Thus there is an end to wealth of all types. At issue isn't how "intellectual property" differs from other types of property - perhaps to the extent of not even representing property - but how we have all bought into the absurd proposition that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are somehow entitled - could possibly be entitled - to squat on billions in filthy lucre.
All property is intellectual property. What is real estate but a deed? What is a car but its title?
This debate is not about the pluses and minuses of gasoline. The time for that discussion would have been decades ago. The debate is about what comes next. I pointed out that gasoline has never been a single solution. For some reason you feel obligated to serve as a booster for the one industry that is still making obscene profits in this economy. Rather, I can disprove your implication by simply pointing out that gasoline has always shared the market with that other petroleum fuel. Diesel wouldn't exist if gasoline filled all transportation niches.
The debate is also not limited to automobiles. Public transportation, whether on road or rail, has always managed to survive even given the insane (literally insane) counter-pressure from oil industry lobbyists. Simply slacking off on the kowtowing to the lobbyists should permit public transportation solutions (however powered) to occupy their natural niches.
Recent efforts, as anemic as they have been, to promote alternative fuels have been fairly successful. Cities wouldn't have fleets of CNG powered buses, etc., if it didn't make some sort of economic sense. I also doubt that hydrogen powered cars will take over the highways. But hydrogen buses may well replace some of the cars. Heck - I was talking about "all transportation needs" - the Apollo CM was powered by hydrogen fuel cells 40 years ago.
In the absence of details, it is hard to have an opinion about appropriate punishment. Presumably this was an inadvertent act and the contractor will face only "normal" legal sanctions. Seizing or scrubbing the computer to ensure nothing else is divulged seems like it might be a proportionate response.
There are a couple or three other issues here:
Was the information actually classified?
Was it actually exposed using this mechanism? One is skeptical.
If so, what about the legal responsibility of the programmers? This would be a privacy issue, not just a national security issue.
What about the legal responsibility of the network administrators who would (if this tall tale is true) have permitted such non-work related software to be installed?
What about the laughable professionalism of MSNBC that doesn't immediately ask questions like these?
We don't have an energy crisis, it's a power crisis.
As others have said, the question is energy transport as well as generation. It is very unlikely that a single solution will do the job. These debates about looking for a single replacement for gasoline are puerile. The real point is that gasoline has never been a single solution to all transportation needs. That we continue to treat it this way is just a testament to the effectiveness of the oil industries PR flacks (starting back with Standard Oil).
Surely there will be niches for several variations of hydrogen, ethanol and electric transport as well as CNG and the others? In particular, most driving is local. The tradeoffs for powering local traffic are very different than the tradeoffs for long distance transport.
Insulting chemists for having discovered new ways to do chemistry is really pretty silly. Folks who don't understand the difference between the technique described and electrolysis might want to demonstrate a bit of humility when posting.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder, does it account for leap seconds and the slowing rotation of the Earth?
Not to mention continental drift...
The design includes a mechanism for setting the clock using diurnal and seasonal variations. Leap seconds only matter in comparison to atomic timekeeping. Mother Earth takes care of her own.
One doubts the reliability of the study - after all, one of the investigators is on Facebook!
"Could it be that the same quiet kids in high school that kept to themselves, studied and did well in school, are the same kids that are less likely to get into anything with the word social in it? I think its just more likely that facebook attracts the social people who spend less time worrying about schooling, and shows no interest to the people who are brainy loners."
Many on slashdot will have pertinent experience here - from my own pointed experience it is obvious that loners are more desperate than they are uninterested about socializing. The "brainy loners" are going to be the ones who social networking fails. They seem very likely to be among the first who try to make Facebook work. Their nascent social networks will simply die on the vine.
The operative quote is not "correlation does not imply causation". The operative quote is "you can lead a horse to water, ..."
One doubts the reliability of the study - but if there is any validity here, it is likely that the most highly socially skilled individuals avoid gimmicks and build their own networks, extending their own influence over the world directly. Interpersonal skill is another type of braininess.
Like Hendrix said, "Gimmicks, here we go again, gimmicks man..."
Why is NASA getting grief here? Vast amounts of data from other organizations are deleted every day without comment. Rather, the space and astronomy communities are eager archivists precisely because the picture in question is a unique snapshot of the Earth and Moon at that moment and time - once deleted, irretrievably lost.
That budgets often fail to provide for long term maintenance is nothing to be surprised about. The real story here - as usual with NASA - is the strength of the organization's spirited staff. These data were saved - as all things of value are ultimately saved - due to their intrinsic value, not their monetary valuation.
The other naive thing about many replies to this thread is the thought that - har, har, har - those folks back in the '60's sure didn't know what they was doin'! Rather, today's archivists are facing a vastly larger problem. Presumably the current technology choice would involve spinning storage at multiple sites, perhaps with a tape robot at a supercomputer center serving as deep storage. Those spinning disks will eventually halt - will inevitably halt - very quickly after funding runs out. The copy in deep storage relies on migrating data to new media with a cadence of something like every few years - this, too, requires an ongoing funding commitment.
Even data that are explicitly committed to optical or magnetic media with the intent of long term offline storage in a salt mine require some sort of perpetual maintenance. Modern high-density storage is no more permanent that tapes from the 60's - perhaps less so since it has been demonstrated that those old NASA tapes are still readable half a century later. These are nearly time capsule sorts of time scales.
In any event, just as with these NASA data, any attempt at permanent storage requires saving readers for the media, not just the media themselves. And this just pushes the question one level deeper as those tape drives or optical readers have to be compatible with appropriate computer technology. Save the computers? Then you have to be compatible with the evolving network standards.
Very few organization pay attention to such issues.
The real news was that this was announced on the NASA Facebook page. The medium is always the message - as Colbert's success demonstrates.
One of the more interesting aspects is that a different group engineered the defense from the offense.
Human sports are often decomposable in similar fashions. A team may have separate coaches for attacking and defending, but more generally a sport could have a complete separation of roles. Instead of two teams each responsible for both offense and defense, a game could involve four teams in two pairs. Award points to the defenders according to saves.
This would be trivial in sports like baseball and American football that separate the game modally - two different teams take the field each half inning, for instance. For sports like basketball or soccer, the four teams would be on the field (or court) throughout the game.
Martial sports like Karate and fencing could become tag team events.
A little of this nonsense would go a long way, but it might be rather entertaining in some cases.
When Earth becomes completely overpopulated and/or runs into resource shortages, that's when we'll see space flight really take off.
How is that, exactly? Population is governed by compound interest. Our population today is 6.6 billion souls. The current growth rate is 1.167% per annum. (Data via CIA.) Do the math. Today there were 213,000 more souls and 6000 tons more human flesh pressing inward on Mother Earth than yesterday. Tomorrow there will be 213,000 more. The day after - another 213,000. In six months that will be 214,000 per day - six months later, 215,000 per day, and so forth and so on. Less than a year from now there will be another 1.8 million tons of human flesh literally shouldering other species into extinction. That's not 1.8 million tons total - that's just the additional growth of skin and hair and sinew and good red meat locked up in your mama's Soylent Green recipe.
For space to matter in the solution of this problem, we have to build a fleet of ships capable of offloading 213,000 people - a new space fleet every day, year after year - forever. A space shuttle carries a crew of seven - so we need 30,000 space shuttles a day or 35,000 Orions. (Of course, that only gets you to low Earth orbit.) Each year we would have to move 1.8 million tons of human cold cuts - that's the equivalent of 18 Nimitz class aircraft carriers of flesh - to some other distant, unwelcoming world.
And then, of course, you've just shifted the horizon of the always looming catastrophe to a collection of planets rather than a single planet. Since this is a doubling issue, colonizing another planet - say, a terraformed Venus - just buys you an additional 60 years. If you want to push the inevitable collapse of civilization off for 240 years (roughly the duration of the American Experiment to date) - well, you need 15 additional Earth clones.
Our population problem will be solved on Earth - one way or another.
...won't this be a burden to those of us who barely learned English as our native language?
Does fluency in code really correspond to fluency in any natural language?
Instamatic was Kodak's cartridge loading technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instamatic), not Polaroid.
Each company's products evolved through many generations. Large cartridges, small cartridges, flash cubes, flash bars, wet developer/fixer, dry process. We gave my dad a Polaroid SX-70 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SX-70) when it first came out. Something very satisfying about the whirr and thunk of the ejection mechanism. The batteries were contained in the film cartridge.
I recall some Japanese tourists stopping him to take a look at the camera - this may have been the last cool technology that the U.S. saw before Japan.
I used juggling to make a different point once at a staff meeting. The soul of juggling is passing objects between two or more jugglers (I humbly assert). When we juggle (or work) in partnership, our actions must accommodate this simple mirroring in the workflow.
It's all in the throw, not in the catch. If the throw is perfect, the catch happens without any corrections or concious thought.
Rather, corrections happen all the time, both in juggling objects and in juggling time management tasks. A throw is never perfect. Even a simple three ball cascade (a pattern/sequence that is wired into our brains) involves constantly correcting varying throwing mistakes.
Jugglers just peep at the object as it arcs over and downwards, and that's enough to tell them where and when to stick out a hand and catch it.
And as you imply, the throw isn't perfect, rather a quick glimpse is enough to correct within a window of possibilities. So when a single juggler tosses a little bit too far in front, the catching hand is directed to the new landing area and then the next throw compensates to return the ball (or club or ring) back to the stationary position. Without these corrections it is commonplace to see a newly taught juggler chasing the evolving pattern across the room.
This very different, however, when juggling with a partner. Imagine juggler A tosses too short. In this case, juggler B receives the throw too far from the body. The natural response is reversed. Juggler A's mistake is compounded if juggler B makes the natural correction of receiving short so throwing long. The errors quickly accumulate as one throws shorter and shorter and the other longer and longer.
Rather, both in juggling and in task management, the response should be calibrated in terms of energy levels. If one juggler (or coworker) throws too hard, the other must convey that fact through their own actions - but without triggering an escalation of reactions.
Let's make sure I understand this correctly, since maybe I'm not following. Not only did the hospital not actually move and the Daleks moved the planet out from under it, but they achieved this by moving the episodes out from under the planet, which they did by moving the seasons out from under the episodes, the sidekicks, and the villians?
Sounds like a typical Doctor Who episode...
So, let me get this straight... The hospital didn't actually move, the Daleks moved the planet out from under it?
Different episode, different villains and different seasons, different (at least, extra) sidekicks, for that matter:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/s4/episodes/S3_01 versus http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/s4/episodes/S4_12
People live where they have the means to live. This implies that we all live in a "centre of excellence" of some technology or other. A few hundred yards over my left shoulder sits the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab with huge rotating ovens for making the world's largest telescope optics. This makes Tucson fancy itself "Optics Valley" - at least, we'd undoubtedly appear on the top ten list for optics centers.
Someone has already mentioned Nebraska's claim as "Corn Valley". Think this is silly? Farming is a far more critical infrastructure than IT. What about biotechnologies in general? These will surely have as much to do with writing the history of the 21st century as IT.
Or generalize this to pure research - the fundamental engine of all technology. Obviously Boston would appear on that list, too, as well as the Bay area. L.A., or at least Pasadena, would jump into place. The original Cambridge and/or Oxford. A lot of IT centers would drop right off this list. Let the current recession linger a little too long and the IT centers buoyed up purely by commerce will collapse under the own weight. Those driven by basic innovation will survive just as the ivory towers did during the middle ages.
There are topics the Slashdot community is good at handling. And there are topics that Slashdot simply doesn't gain any traction on. This is obviously one of the latter.
The real issue is that the survey in question is insipid. It is unsurprising that when the political climate is such that some position needs to be justified that surveys and articles and opinion pieces will appear in the press supporting one side or another of the issue. The President (rightly or wrongly) appears to want to pursue a new strategy for funding education. Therefore PR is needed to raise the priority of this issue relative to the vast numbers of other critically important issues.
The semiotics of the survey are to say 1) science is important, and 2) we suck at teaching science.
If there were some scientific reason to study the public's knowledge of basic oceanographic facts, an appropriate question for narrowing in on our grasp of the fact that the Earth is about twice as much covered by the oceans as by the continents would likely have broader bins. Or perhaps it would ask for a sliding scale and then bin the data after the fact. I'm personally rather impressed that almost half the sample would have been within +/- 5 percentage points (not "percent") of the "right" answer.
...which begs the question of how the right answer is defined. Are we talking salt water or liquid of any type? What about the ice caps - ain't they water? Water to what depth? Seasonal variations? Variations with climate change?
Those who are concerned about science education can actually do something about it rather than kvetch about teachers. Schools are often willing to work with parents and community members to provide resources they can't afford in their budget. Schools have extracurricular programs like Science Olympiad (and many others) that are usually staffed by volunteers. Universities and labs often partner with local schools. A few hundred volunteers will be judging our regional science fair this Tuesday. You don't even need to do it "for the kids" - they'll feed you breakfast and lunch paid for by TI or a utility company - and personally, my take on the state of the world is always bettered by the experience.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but why precisely do we think everybody needs to be flogged into math and science (even if such could possibly succeed)? There are also language fairs, art fairs, dance and music and theater - and auto shop and carpentry and... One of my best experiences in a rather dreadful HS career was print shop - the technologies have all changed, but the diversity of niches still remain. We used to have neighbors - she was a PhD in the University French department. He was a (successful) baker from Switzerland with no college education.
Take the solution into your own hands.
If that had hit the Soyuz, it would have went in one side and out the other likely without even slowing down much, vaporizing a significant chunk of the hull - think white-hot metal shrapnel and shredded astronauts.
It wouldn't have been a good situation, but the design of the Soyuz actually provides some extra protection depending on its orientation with respect to the incoming object:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Soyus_craft_on_Display_at_the_Kennedy_Space_Center.jpg
They would presumably have been sitting in the descent module, sandwiched between the orbital module (docked to the space station) and the service module (with the solar panels). Oriented the long axis along the crossing orbit and the debris would have to traverse one or the other. It wouldn't be good to shred either the airlock or the retrorockets, but what are you gonna do?
And of course the space station itself could provide cover for the Soyuz. It would be nice if for once one of these reports actually described the full situation, orientation of the spacecraft relative to the orbiting debris, etc., not just the sensational version...Cosmonauts Cower in Soyuz! News at 11!
The chances of something from an entirely different orbit impacting a craft are still infinitesimal.
Much more likely than infinitesimal. As someone else commented, this has already happened. You must not have been watching the news lately.
The odds are either identically zero if the orbits do not intersect, or are small but significant if they do intersect. Orbits are not static and basically are never perfect closed ellipses, so there is a fair amount of fuzziness about whether two close orbits do or do not intersect. And, of course, every pair of orbits (about the same primary) cross twice on opposite sides of the planet - the two questions to ask are 1) whether they cross at the same altitude, and 2) whether the two objects are at the crossing at the same time.
Since an object in LEO completes about 15 orbits per day and each orbit crosses ALL others twice per orbit, there are many opportunities daily for collision. Most close passes are quite distant. Even if the two objects are near the particular crossing point the altitude may differ. Do the math, however, and you will find that there are several passages of two large objects within a few kilometers every single day. The odds of an actual collision then just scale as the volumes of the spacecraft divided by the volume of a unit cube. Wait long enough and they are guaranteed to collide.
All else being equal, the odds are about even that two large objects (spacecraft sized or so) will collide once per decade. There are hundreds of such orbiting objects, of course, so the odds for a specific satellite are something like once per a few millennia - for a collision with a similarly sized object. The odds are correspondingly larger for a collision between a spacecraft and the much more numerous pieces of small orbital debris.
So mashups are legally ambiguous. Try this variation. YouTube releases an API that permits indexing into any video at any point. Further, the API allows displaying the video within a region-of-interest on the screen. The API is multi-threaded.
Under this scenario exactly the same artistic presentation could result, but without any prior editing. All that is being orchestrated is the simultaneous presentation of several works that were released precisely with the intent of display on remote desktops.
It would only be at the point that an end-user captured the performance into a permanent file, thus completing the remix, that any possible infringement would occur. (Although then an argument of private use might pertain.)
The art here (whatever one thinks of this New Elvis) is in the remix, not the permanent copy. These remixes could be traded as YouTube "scripts" - a form of extreme data compression - preserving the freedom of expression. Live performances could be organized using video projectors from laptops.
If YouTube manages to make any money from my idea, I reserve the right to beg for my fair share. But then, maybe I should remix this message as a script that samples other messages.
There can't be a huge lot of commercial use cases for rapid discharge. Tasers?
Rapid charge, on the other hand, makes a lot of applications much easier to market. Gasoline has one big advantage over electric powered cars - you can drive into and out of a gas station in 3 minutes as opposed to having to plug the car in overnight.
And I'll expand. I understand your point. I'm no knee jerk lover of copyright and/or patent as they are currently formulated.
However, ownership of real property is no more clear cut than assertions of ownership of intangible property (whether such actually exists). Most of the shortcomings attributed to malformed notions of "intellectual property" are actually shortcomings of applying the notion of ownership to anything whatsoever.
"You have a limited time monopoly on your rented house, your landlord has ownership."
A landlord's "ownership" is itself a complex legal entity. In particular, such notions have not historically scaled well to the very wealthy. Why, particularly, is it to either society's or the individual's benefit to promote the idea that a billionaire could possibly be entitled to the swag he has extracted from the larger economy? Having done so, to who's true benefit is the notion that this grotesque bolus of capital should be passed down to succeeding generations?
It appears that the banks have recently lost more than the bankers ever "earned" from us. What fraction of financial whizzes will ultimately benefit from the game they've devoted their life to?
Laws exist to govern systems of conduct. Those systems have a set of goals, whether such are ever overtly enumerated. There is nothing "of course" about any set of legal constructs - it certainly has never been deemed a question of what is fair.
"IP is not property; not the patent or copyright holder's property, anyway. If it is in fact property, it's owned by the general public, as patented and copyrighted works go into the public domain once their terms expire."
Suggesting that everything that exists is property, as you are implicitly doing so here by excluding the middle way, is patently absurd. The Earth and the Moon and the Sun and the Stars did not spring into being as property of anyone. Seizing wealth from the land or the sea does not magically create ownership. If "property" - of any sort - exists, it is as a work product of some civilization that is itself only a temporary tenant of the land where the property happens to reside. Why precisely, for instance, is the Great Pyramid considered to "belong" to the modern country of Egypt?
This isn't just a question of individual property. Why assert that the general public (whoever that is) has any inherent property rights? Is "public domain" an assertion of joint ownership? Or rather an assertion of non-ownership?
Reject the premise. Always reject the premise.
Returning to the topic of the article, one is skeptical that eliminating copyright and patent - even if such an absurd notion were possible - will result in any better outcome than congress kowtowing to Disney every time Mickey's contract is up for renegotiation.
Your bank balance, your PIN number, your account number, are not "intellectual property" in the context of the topic of discussion - patents and copyrights.
Broadening the context of the discussion is the precise point I'm making. Hence the subject "Reject the premise".
[T]he term "intellectual property" itself is not only a lie, but a damned one.
This is the position taken by the free software cliche. It differs, for instance, from that of the open source folks. In fact, copyleft is layered on copyright. I'm merely asserting that the evident and egregious failures of the concept of "Intellectual Property" are broad failures of the notion of property generally, not just the intellectual/virtual/intangible part of the term.
To gain productive traction on addressing the failures of systems like copyright or patent, one must engage with a theory of their nature that is rooted in reality. Simply chanting that IP is a damned lie is unlikely to realize your goals.
Yes, real estate and real cars are "real property". We understand what "real" means. At issue was the meaning of "property". Your response uses words like "yours" and "mine". Putting aside the philosophical questions of physical reality (what is a car but a bundle of quantum wave functions?), we are still left with the legal issues.
I can put "my" factory on "my" real estate, but data ("intellectual property") managed by the banks and government still limit the uses of this physical property. In fact, without such IP and such organizations, what does ownership mean other than the opportunity to defend something with force?
There is a legal theory underlying property. Perhaps copyright law and patent law (severally or together) have absolutely nothing to do with property law. More likely, however, the real issue here is broader than IP.
Such a reply was expected. Note that I said no such things as you are asserting. Rather, I stated that all property is intellectual property. The extreme free software position is based on an assertion that the term "intellectual property" is an oxymoron, that IP is a meaningless idea. Rather the opposite is true.
Consider - the "purchase" of Manhattan has survived a third party transfer twice - first from the Dutch to the English and second from English colony to the United States. What possible theory of legal ownership survives the extinction of the laws under which the contracts were made?
As these words flow from my keystrokes, I assert a class of ownership of them. I expect that others will honor that ownership through proper quotation. I assent to whatever joint ownership this forum implies in order to gain the benefits (sometimes obscure) of Slashdot.
I don't know about you, but the bank retains more ownership of my house than I do - and state law has quite a bit to say about the uses to which I can put my car. To reject all other historical notions of ownership - oh, say, the Potlatch - for either far right or far left absolutism is to miss the entire point of property in the third millennium.
The issue here isn't "intellectual property". The issue is the property paradigm itself. Whether or not the proprietary period has been lengthened ridiculously to benefit Disney, we all agree that intellectual property eventually returns to the public domain that nourished its creation. Newton wasn't the only one who has stood on the shoulders of giants.
Why then do we assume completely and utterly that "real" property never expires? Why assume that once Manhattan was stol...er...purchased, that it remains purchased - not for 14 years - not for 100 years - not for the lifetime of Peter Minuit plus 75 years - not even for as long as the original Dutch nation retained possession - but rather, for ever and ever and ever?
The concept behind inheritance taxes is that the wealthy got that way by receiving special benefits from the body politic. Thus there is an end to wealth of all types. At issue isn't how "intellectual property" differs from other types of property - perhaps to the extent of not even representing property - but how we have all bought into the absurd proposition that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are somehow entitled - could possibly be entitled - to squat on billions in filthy lucre.
All property is intellectual property. What is real estate but a deed? What is a car but its title?
This debate is not about the pluses and minuses of gasoline. The time for that discussion would have been decades ago. The debate is about what comes next. I pointed out that gasoline has never been a single solution. For some reason you feel obligated to serve as a booster for the one industry that is still making obscene profits in this economy. Rather, I can disprove your implication by simply pointing out that gasoline has always shared the market with that other petroleum fuel. Diesel wouldn't exist if gasoline filled all transportation niches.
The debate is also not limited to automobiles. Public transportation, whether on road or rail, has always managed to survive even given the insane (literally insane) counter-pressure from oil industry lobbyists. Simply slacking off on the kowtowing to the lobbyists should permit public transportation solutions (however powered) to occupy their natural niches.
Recent efforts, as anemic as they have been, to promote alternative fuels have been fairly successful. Cities wouldn't have fleets of CNG powered buses, etc., if it didn't make some sort of economic sense. I also doubt that hydrogen powered cars will take over the highways. But hydrogen buses may well replace some of the cars. Heck - I was talking about "all transportation needs" - the Apollo CM was powered by hydrogen fuel cells 40 years ago.
In the absence of details, it is hard to have an opinion about appropriate punishment. Presumably this was an inadvertent act and the contractor will face only "normal" legal sanctions. Seizing or scrubbing the computer to ensure nothing else is divulged seems like it might be a proportionate response.
There are a couple or three other issues here:
We don't have an energy crisis, it's a power crisis.
As others have said, the question is energy transport as well as generation. It is very unlikely that a single solution will do the job. These debates about looking for a single replacement for gasoline are puerile. The real point is that gasoline has never been a single solution to all transportation needs. That we continue to treat it this way is just a testament to the effectiveness of the oil industries PR flacks (starting back with Standard Oil).
Surely there will be niches for several variations of hydrogen, ethanol and electric transport as well as CNG and the others? In particular, most driving is local. The tradeoffs for powering local traffic are very different than the tradeoffs for long distance transport.
Insulting chemists for having discovered new ways to do chemistry is really pretty silly. Folks who don't understand the difference between the technique described and electrolysis might want to demonstrate a bit of humility when posting.