The U.S. government is forbidden by law to fund scientists who engage in cloning, therapeutic or otherwise, but privately funded scientists are legally able to do so.
So the majority of those who need organ transplants -- which are generally supplemented at least in part by government funds (Medicare) -- couldn't benefit from this new technology. OTOH, the individuals who could afford the process themselves would be free to use it.
I seem to recall something about "We, the People..."
If formed while rock was still overhead, underground pressures may have indeed been high enough to support liquid CO2. A crater is a surface defect caused by a collision.
For all we know, this is the Martian geological equivalent of termite tunnels through ironwood: we don't see the damage until we crack open the outer layers.
I doubt it: the features under discussion show typical mass wasting at the head of the formation, such as occurs when a spring undercuts the soil overlying the aquifer which feeds it. That, plus the delicacy of the features, argues strongly against them being formed underground and then being uncovered -- they're plainly erosion features, formed on the surface.
Further, some of these are very new features: they haven't been covered by the ubiquitous dust which generally blankets everything on the martian surface within a few years at most.
I can't figure out what the "liquid CO2" bit is all about; I suspect part of the explanation is missing from the popularization... I think I'll ask some of the folks doing the work.
OK, I pretty much agree with you but my bullshit dector went off on the following points:
Let me assure you that I'm not bullshitting -- I think you're just misunderstanding me.
You are certainly correct that ANZs with a veneeer of scientific credibility persuaded many ignorant people into fear, but that does not make the ignorant dupes ANZs
Ummmm... the ones "with a veneer of scientific credibility" are the ones I was calling ANZs; the dupes were the ones I said were afraid of the nuclear boogieman.:)
Not knowing your friends, I can't pass individual judgment; however, I've met no one who understands the subject matter and who isn't an ANZ, who opposed the launch. Some were even willing to admit privately that they deliberately inflated the disaster scenario, but they regarded it as important enough an arena that they were willing to do that. It's called politics, and it's not science.
2)it's orders of magnitude less than the risk of deciding to play golf and getting hit by lightning
Statistical bullshit, as I'm sure your are well aware - the chance of a golfer being hit by lightning on a perfectly clear day [snip]
You're changing the universe of discourse: the majority of the lightning-strike victims each year are indeed golfers, which demonstrates that some do decide to play golf in less-than-ideal conditions. This is as factual as the NASA environmental impact study.
The AEC detected SNAP 9-A radiation in the air and on the ground. The radiation levels were minimal but it is simply false to claim that the contents of SNAP 9-A's RTG did not reach the ground. That's why they did the redesign!
It's a fact that SNAP 9-A burned up in the upper atmosphere; it's the atmosphere which delivered some of the radioactive results to the ground. My statement was that the fuel elements didn't survive to impact the ground. Aside from that, you're right: that's why they did the redesign... I actually said that, I thought!
4)...might kill fewer than the number of people annually killed by lightning strikes...
The number of people killed in the US each year by lightning strikes is about 100. The number of fatalities in the NASA environmental impact studies was first 2,300 then 120.
The NASA worst-case estimates were spread over 50 years following the presumed accident; that's 46/year in the first case, 2.4/year in the second... both of which are less than 100/year, the second by two orders of magnitude. (I carefully chose that example so I could say "orders of magnitude...")
...the important distinction is that the lightning strike tally is the result of many events while the Cassini RTG scenario was for just one.
The Cassini worst-case scenario was the end result of many different events going wrong -- not a single event. If it would make you feel better, I'll substitute "flying on a commercial airliner" for "playing golf." The statement still stands, for the population of the planet.
That aside, my point was that people daily decide to take risks which are much more significant than the worst-case Cassini RTG accident; they do it without thinking about it, because they perceive the risk as minimal. The concern about Cassini was manufactured by a small group of people, and was blown way out of proportion by the media.
Your "mass murderer" analogy's just a straw man argument.
The magnitude of the perceived threat was great, hence the higher risk assessment, despite the low probability of a negative outcome.
This is a critical point: the "perceived" threat wasn't realistic -- it was a manufactured media manipulation. The actual threat was low, as I keep stating... that's been my whole point!
I think it's important to recognize the legitmacy of people's concern and to assuage it through rational dialog rather than ad hominem attacks and hyperbole -- even if they are all a bunch of ANZ wackos... after all, the ANZ-influenced herds of non-cognoscenti help to influence the science budget.
Oh, I do recognize the legitimacy of people's concerns, and I argue differently with them in person than I do with you on/. I'm generally a patient sort of guy -- but this must be the fifth or sixth RTG topic that I've met the false arguments on, and this time I was pretty tired of it.
Part of what makes it especially poignant is that I worked on Pathfinder, which was very nearly a waste of effort because the mission was deliberately crippled by choosing solar rather than RTG energy sources; if NASA had used RTGs, the lander would almost certainly still be operating, and the rover might well be. Instead, the whole thing was over in a couple of months. That's sad. By spreading the costs over a much longer mission, they could truly do faster, better, and cheaper.
Despite all that, my arguments weren't hyperbolic -- Jeff Cuzzi gave even more trivial risk levels, such as stating that the Cassini risk per individual was six orders of magnitude lower than that of driving a car one mile. And I certainly didn't intend to advance ad hominem arguments against the innocent dupes of the ANZs -- but I did intend to slam those who deliberately manufactured false arguments against the project.
I suspect you're right, in that you and I mostly agree; you were just unfortunate enough to be in the wrong post at the wrong time...:) [dead horse gets up and nonchalantly ambles away...]
My primary point was that you don't acknowledge that the magnitude of a negative outcome, not just its probability, is a significant factor in calculating risk.
When did I not acknowledge the magnitude? The magnitude is just very small -- that was one of my original points...
Not all those who raised concerns were mindless, ignorant anti-nuke zealots.
You're right: not all those concerned were mindless and ignorant. Some had specific agendas. They were all anti-nuclear zealots, and they fed the fears of those less knowledgeable... and those less knowledgeable are afraid of the nuclear boogieman.
You mention the integirty of the RTG in the Appollo 13 accident, but not the release of plutonium during the failure of SNAP 9-A in 1964. NASA's records indicate that in 22 missions with RTG power sources, there have been three accidents, one of which resulted in the release of radioactive material(NASA. Some might examine this record and draw the conclusion that NASA's methodology in determining accident probabilities is flawed.
The SNAP 9-A RTG performed as designed: it burned up in the upper atmosphere rather than delivering its contents to the surface (BTW, your link is broken and I can't make it work either; slashcode keeps throwing in spaces and returns). There is good argument that the design philosophy was flawed, and NASA did indeed redesign the RTG fuel elements to survive reentry and contain their fuel -- which they've done in all subsequent accidents, as I said.
For what it's worth, I clearly stated that I was talking about the Cassini RTGs -- that doesn't include the earlier (and obsolete) designs.
Before Challenger, the probability of catastrophic failure during shuttle launch was calculated as being very low. After the accident, the probability was recalculated and is now estimated to be much higher...
You're right -- that's why I said "they are far too conservative when estimating risk, at least since Challenger."
I'm not arguing that NASA's perfect (geez, those who know me think exactly the opposite!). They've been overconfident in the past; they are now paranoid. It'd be nice to see them adopt the middle course.
NASA's 1995 environmental impact study indicated that a potential Cassini failure could result in 2,300 fatalities over a 50 year period. This estimate was later reduced to 120 fatalities, but the studies seemed to be an official confirmation of the negative scenarios that alarmed some people.
This is the sort of thing I'm talking about: NASA does a detailed study, admits there is a trivially-small (less than 10E-6) chance of a problem which might kill fewer than the number of people annually killed by lightning strikes (for example), and the anti-nuclear faction screams, "See? We were right! Our scenarios are supported by NASA's study!" -- when in fact, the ANZ's are claiming that billions of people would die. NASA's study said no such thing -- and in fact they later downrated the risk, for good reasons (their initial assumptions were too generous).
I agree that the risk was worth taking, but I disagree that there was no risk.
One more time: I didn't say there was no risk, I said the risk was trivially small.
I work in the aerospace industry. Risk assessment is part of my daily life -- and in fact it affects me personally, every time I step out of an airplane with equipment I've designed on my back (I worked in the skydiving equipment industry before I got into aerospace work -- and I still use my "legacy" equipment).
The point I'm trying to make is that there's no such thing as zero risk, no matter what you do; some risks are so small that they can be reasonably ignored, others require a tradeoff study and some should require approval of the subject population. Flight of the Cassini RTGs falls into the first category (it's orders of magnitude less than the risk of deciding to play golf and getting hit by lightning), despite the fearmongering of a few biased individuals.
Does anyone else find it odd how all the "detectors" are refered to? Are they automated somehow? they each have names, but they refer to 'it thinks it has discovered' etc.. is there some algorithm for it to determine whether it (the detector) discover's something?
Yes, yes and yes...
The CERN LEP (Large Electron-Positron collider) works by creating two rings of particles -- electrons and their antiparticles, positrons -- which circle in opposite directions within an evacuated tunnel. They create huge numbers of each, then direct the particles into a collision. Naturally, there are large numbers of collisions each time they do this -- and only a tiny fraction of them have the interesting results they are looking for.
Rather than personally analyze and interpret all the collisions (most of which are "trivial" in the sense of being well-understood interactions), the researchers use computer algorithms to monitor the results and filter the huge amount of raw data down to a manageable few candidates for the sought interaction. Each of the detectors is looking for slightly different kinds of results (which is part of what makes this discovery questionable -- only two of four detectors see anything at all, and one sees only one event... but all four should be detecting Higgs particles, each with its own particular collisional outcome).
It's interesting to consider that the search for particles is "directed" in this fashion: what discoveries might there be if all the data were to be closely examined? The answer is that the algorithms are chosen to screen the predictable and common results out, and isolate the unpredicted results as well as the specifically sought-after ones. Still, it's interesting to speculate on what might be missed...
The anthropomorphization of the detectors -- "it thinks it has discovered..." -- is a very common phenomenon in science. If you reflect for a minute, you'll probably realize it's common with computers, too... your Linux box, running WINE, "thinks" it's a Windoze machine!
There's not much chance that an extra month of operation of the LEP collider will really cement the "discovery" of the Higgs boson: they've been running the machine at "overclocked" levels for months now, and one more month won't add many new events to the four they've already found -- maybe they'll double the count. Right now it's at best a three-sigma event -- three standard deviations, or about 99% certain -- and a few more candidate observations isn't going to bring that to five-sigma levels, which is the gold standard for discovery.
A recent article in Science discusses the fragility of even five-sigma results: rather than being wrong only once in a hundred times, three-sigma results are historically wrong about half the time, and five-sigma results are wrong much oftener than they "should" statistically be. As the article points out, the errors are often systematic: the experiment is designed to find a particular result, and if it doesn't give evidence quickly, it is often modified slightly and re-run; this can introduce large biases in the statistics.
So in the end, CERN isn't going to have "proof" of the Higgs discovery; basically, they're trying hard to get their names on the same page as those of the eventual credited discoverers, as precursors... not necessarily a bad thing, but also not worth the large penalties CERN will pay if they delay the start of LEP's replacement (the Large Hadron Collider) beyond another month.
The probability of an accident was low, but the potential loss of life of that hypothtical accident was high, hence the legitimate concern.
The potential loss of life is essentially zero, since there's no plausible way that the RTG fuel capsule can be disrupted. Fergawdsake, the ones on Apollo 13's Lunar Module re-entered the atmosphere at 7 miles per second, and they didn't break up, burn through, or otherwise fail.
I suppose you could take one apart with a small nuclear device, but then that'd sort of render the whole argument moot, wouldn't it?
The widely-quoted "statistic" that the contents of one RTG fuel capsule would give cancer to 2 billion people is misleading at best. It's like attributing the same danger to the sun: yeah, if everyone in the world goes outside and spends all day in the sun, every day, the accumulated sunburn might do that... but you know that would never happen. Similarly, there's no way a launch accident will produce the conversion conditions and dispersal mechanism to deliver the appropriate dose of RTG fuel to the world's population. Not even if the accident disrupted the capsule (which is highly unlikely in itself).
There's no legitimate concern; it's just fear of the nuclear boogieman.
There were also several more articulate explanations of the dangers involved...
Unfortunately, it takes more than just being articulate to be right. These people you link to, while articulate and even genuinely worried, don't happen to be right.
The risk was non-zero...
The risk was non-zero, but it was also trivially small. The biggest risk from a launch disaster involving RTGs is that one of 'em might hit you on the head as it lands (but you'd have to be in a boat off the coast during the launch, and in the launch path...).
The RTGs carried on Cassini are designed to withstand re-entry and impact without being disrupted and spreading their contents. There have been at least two cases where a booster carrying RTG-equipped payloads blew up, and the RTGs landed on earth. In both cases (one off Florida, the other off California) the RTGs were recovered intact, refurbished, and relaunched on other mission. There was no spill, nor a danger of one. There have been no cases where a hardened RTG has leaked.
...NASA does not have what I would call a good track record on risk estimation.
While I tend to agree with that, in my experience it's because they are far too conservative when estimating risk, at least since Challenger. I know that the programs I've worked on have cost more than they should, and weren't allowed to do things that were thoroughly desirable, because the risk was judged too great -- even though others have used the questioned technologies successfully.
Well, it looks like this topic is pretty much dead, and you asked for my solution, Josh... here 'tis:
PGP and E4M both have the same general problem: they store files within container files which are encrypted, but to move or work on a file it must come out of the container and is no longer encrypted. The same goes for the suggestion to use Samba and share the stored, encrypted files out to NT4 while working on them.
What makes this bad?
First, I work both at my home office and on the road, so the files go back and forth between my main machine and my notebook (not to mention my backups, which are pretty critical here -- and I'm not using tape for backups, but instead a disk farm of cheap drives on another box... much faster than tape, but it means the files don't inherently get stored in encrypted form). This has workarounds, especially for the backups -- just make the target of the file transfer another encrypted container file (which only means I have to change my whole filing system) -- except for the second problem.
Second, while I'm working on a file, many of the apps I use create *.tmp files as part of their autorecovery process; these files are not encrypted, and unless they're reliably destroyed after the work session is finished, they tend to linger on the drive in accessable and plaintext form (and reliably destroying them is a painstaking task). But if the file is initially encrypted via W2K's EFS, the temp file is also encrypted and therefore safe.
*Sigh*... The only solution I can find that meets both requirements is to switch to W2K on all boxen which might host the file in any form -- precisely the solution I didn't want to use, because I avoid M$ solutions where I can (one man's small stroke for freedom, huh?). It's either that, or piss off my customers... who basically don't see why I don't just switch OSes like they did. (Does anyone else see this as one of the reasons it's so hard to unseat Microsoft?)
Thanks, everyone, for responding. I know it's a tough problem, and I appreciate the variety of solutions which were proposed.
There were just too many changes to make to NT to warrant another service pack. It's time to move on from NT4
[Sigh] That's what I was trying to avoid -- not only would it cost me the upgrade license for each of the boxen 'round here (hey, it wouldn't be right to just buy one and do a multiple install, would it?;-) ), but I'd have to do some serious hardware upgrading to run it, and then I'd have to go through the learning curve (which I don't have the time for, right now).
The cost is high to go W2K -- not necessarily unbearable, but high -- and if I can avoid it for the time being, I'd like to. That's why I'm searching for an alternative.
I thought the issue for typical applications (like games) was _latency_. RDRAM has significant latency compared to SDRAM that only gets worse when you put more RAM into your system.
Right on both points -- but the i840 gets around the latency issue by interleaving access to the RDRAM alternately through the two channels, effectively cutting latency in half. That doesn't address the "more RAM" scaling issue, however, which is why Intel is reportedly producing its server boards with SDRAM support instead of RDRAM.
Yes, RDRAM is propbably more efficient for some uses, ie big matrix calculations. But not for typical desktop use.
Right again... and this point has been well-taken by the buying public, has it not?;) Poor Intel -- they swallowed the hook and most of the line!
Thanks, Josh -- I've checked out the PGP Desktop, Enterprise Edition product (which isn't that expensive -- certainly less than a W2K upgrade, and less hassle than learning a whole OS rev for one feature). The method they use appears to be encryption of files in a container file (effectively a virtual disk, or per-folder encryption)... which isn't quite as granular as I was hoping for.
If I can't find a better approach, I'll probably take this one; the downside is that I'd have to significantly rearrange my document-management system (it's a little... eccentric?). I really could use transparent per-file encryption.
The price premium is still around 30%-60%, for RAM which is usually slower.
The i840 chipset has two RAMBUS channels (which the article points out) and interleaves memory access, so in this case it is actually faster than SDRAM. (But maybe not faster than DDR DRAM.)
That would imply that they have a profitable product. Right now they're just a tool of Intel. Notice that Intel is actually offering RDRAM rebates to lower the cost of P4s when they come out.
I don't think Intel is driving this -- I think they're the first victim of RAMBUS, since they bought the hype and signed onto an agreement which requires they push RAMBUS and no other for several years.
They have had their fill of RAMBUS and its problems, and would get out from under that albatross if they could. The RDRAM rebates are a valiant (but probably doomed) effort to increase the production and therefore decrease the cost of the memory... not that it helps, when they can't even get the P4 out themselves!:)
Why else would they give VIA and AMD the information to produce DDR DRAM-compatible chipsets for their products? They won't sell anything much if it only works with RDRAM... so to maintain at least some sales, they have to help their competitors... best of a bad situation...
...if there was in fact a contract which bound participating JEDEC members to forgo patent and technology protection then why has no one challenged RAMBUS' patent claim? Especially the JEDEC members?
This is, in fact, one of the principal claims in Micron's suit against RAMBUS.
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Re:about the delta clipper experimental program.
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X-33 Shuttle Problems
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I'll stand by my judgement of vertical landers. Though skips and loops can be used for air breaking, you are sill left with the problem of descent. An exercise for the reader is to immagine how much fuel you would need to land safetly from the roof of the empire state building. I'd rather have a parachute.
Okay, slow down for a minute and calculate exactly what you've proposed; make sure you account for the fact that the vehicle is very lightweight and almost empty (hint: W/[Cd*S] is not large).
What you'll find is that the vehicle is its own parachute! Depending on the exact details, terminal velocity turns out to be around a couple of hundred feet/second -- it only takes a few seconds of thrust at a reasonable level (say 2 gees) immediately before landing to bring that to zero.
This is actually quite well-known -- I don't know why you aren't aware of it, unless you're just ignoring it. DC-X was a damned fine project, and it met its goals; only when NASA took the reins with DC-XA did things go to hell. I leave it to you to speculate on the reasons...
Cepheid variables are stars that have very predictable relationships between their absolute brightness and the frequency with which they brighten up. A Cepheid is useful for measuring distances because, if it is known how bright the star really is, then it is a simple task to measure how bright it appears on Earth and then calculate the distance.
While this is mostly true, there's not simply a "very predictable relationship" between luminosity and distance -- as demonstrated by new information on Polaris (the North Star, a Ceppheid variable). In particular, check this graphic, which shows two distinct period-luminosity relationships (differing in the zero-point offset), depending on whether the Cepheid is a fundamental-mode or first overtone pulsator (and note that there's arguably some evidence of other pulsation modes in the clustering of points off the main trends, in the lower right-hand corner of the plot).
Just knowing the brightness of the Cepheid variable won't tell you how far away it is; you also have to know the pulsation mode, which isn't always easy. But then, astronomy hasn't ever been really easy...:) This data on Polaris comes from ground-based interferometry, by the way -- just a different instrument than that mentioned in the article -- as well as measurements from the Hipparcos satellite.
[I hope everyone can get to those URLs without having to pay -- I can't check that from here, 'cause I'm already logged into Science Online by default. Some info's available to everyone, some requires a subscription.]
Um, I think you're misreading the law: what (a) says is this:
1) Mailing of unordered merchandise... constitutes an unfair method of competition and an unfair trade practice in violation of section 45(a)(1) of title 15.
and 2) that communications prohibited by subsection (c) [in other words, communicating to you that you owe money for this unordered merchandise] is also an unfair method of competition and an unfair trade practice etc.
DC has violated subsection (a)'s first part, but not the second part, and apparently not subsection (c).
The first Cringely was Rory O'Connor
The second Cringely was Laurie Flynn
I started writing the column in the first week of September, 1987
Aha! Now we know who the Dread Priate Roberts (X. Cringely) were
Maybe not... I had an email exchange about Stephens a while back with Jerry Pournelle, in which Pournelle commented that both he and Laurie Flynn had written the column before Stephens.
I have no reason to suspect this statement, as opposed to the statement of a man who admittedly lied about his PhD...
We just like to rant about the evil companies because they have the facilities to do it to more people. When the Mom & Pop shop on the corner overcharges you by four dollars, nobody cares, but when Amazon does it we get a flurry of Slashdot articles about it.
True -- but have you noticed that there are fewer Mom & Pop shops anymore? They can't compete against the big corporations, which will often move into a neighborhood and deliberately undercut M&P prices to be rid of the competition; they can afford the (to them) small temporary loss, but to M&P it's the whole business.
And when Mom & Pop are gone, what happens? Either the big corp goes back to what prices they feel like charging, or they get stomped by a yet-bigger corp. Don't believe me? Think about air fare prices and the airline industry shakeout of the last many years...
I'm far from anti-capitalist (hell, I'm a capitalist myself!), but there seems to be a balance lacking here. I blame much of it on the consumers: if we didn't ask for the absolute bottom dollar, this wouldn't happen. If we support Mom and Pop (your local small bookstore, for example) instead of the cheapest big corp (Amazon?), we'd have a small, local business where our comments would be more easily heard, and our own personal preferences would be given more attention.
It's about physical community, I think -- something that's harder to manage in this increasingly-connected world.
Yep, it's been there a long time. Hasn't killed anyone yet (scared 'em a bit -- but it was a US astronaut who's now trying to make big $$ on book sales, that it apparently scared the most... Shannon Lucid, OTOH, appears to have had bigger ovaries than the aforementioned astronaut did.
NASA has been insisting that the station has outlived it's operating lifetime.
Oh, yeah! It's just like when NASA scrapped the last couple of functional Saturn V launchers (literally laid 'em out as lawn exhibits), so they couldn't compete with the Shuttle... NASA doesn't want anything to compete with the IIS (and especially they don't want Russia to spend rubles on other stuff, seeing that they don't have very many of them, and their space funds have largely come from NASA anyhow!)
It has a decaying orbit.
Low Earth Orbit == Decaying Orbit. Mir has been reboosted several times, just as Salyut before it, and the IIS after it. SkyLab was supposed to be reboosted, too -- but Shuttle wasn't ready in time, so it sorta rained parts on Australia...
Reboosting is just part of what needs to be done, not a reason to avoid Mir.
Why in the world would ANYBODY in there right mind want to risk a trip up there?
Because it's there, just like Mt. Everest?
I suggest you ask people like climbers, skydivers, scuba divers, pilots... you'll find lots of people who can't figure out why you don't want to do it!
Apollo 1 burned on its launchpad together with 3 astronauts.
The Apollo spacecraft is very much distinct from the booster which launched it (matter of fact, there were several different boosters which launched Apollo capsules). The Soviet manned space program had a couple of fatal spacecraft failures, too... but those weren't launcher failures either.
I'm just talking sheer launch vehicle failures (manned missions being a small subset)...the numbers don't show high reliability.
It's not fair to lump the two categories together -- manrated boosters are a small subset of boosters, and they're much more reliable than the run-of-the-mill cargo launcher. Matter of fact, I can recall only one fatal manrated launcher failure: Challenger.
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Re:I don't want to believe, I want to be left alon
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Hackers And Mysticism?
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What you describe here is what I view as Agnostic, not as Atheist. You admit that there is the possibility of one of the current religions being right, but you think they are wrong, but you also admit the possibility of their being a deity of some sort.
When 'god' refers simply to some vague, undefined deity (or "philosopher's god"), I'm more likely to adopt the 'weak' position. However, when a deity is sufficiently well defined to get a handle on what is being described (Allah, YHVH, Shiva, Zeus, etc..) then I'm more likely to adopt the 'strong' position. An interesting thing that I often point out to theists is that they're 'strongly atheistic' towards just about every deity save one. Some then come to recognize that I've no reason to treat they're deity any differently.
[quoting from that link]
This was the point I was trying to make: when it comes to Allah, Jehovah and the Easter Bunny, I'm strongly atheistic -- I believe they do not exist, because of both lack of evidence in favor and the strong externally-confirmable evidence against it. Because of this long string of "strong" atheisms, then, I have a "weak" atheistic position on godhood of any variety. And I find this to be different from agnosticism, because agnostics believe you can't truly know, whereas I believe I do truly know, negatively. (If a god were to walk up to me on the street and introduce him/her/itsself, I'd demand several different ID's... and still have my doubts.)
...I believe there are other deities that exist as well as the Christian God. Also, my wife and I have developed a working theory for the coexistance of all religions based on the premise that all rewards and punishments are visited only on those who believe in them. Hence, Saved Christians go to heaven, unsaved go to Hell, worshippers of Satan go to Hell, everyone else is taken care of by their own deities, and Atheists and Agnostics if they are full 100% (Very difficult, most have some underlying background belief) simply cease to exist. It's not exactly scientific, but it's possible.
Huh. Interesting... and not exactly traditional Christian. Mind they don't burn you at the stake!
So where does that leave me? I was raised fundamentalist Christian, and actually preached the Word for a while... until my knowledge of science undermined the fundamentalist dogma, and I started a years-long study of religion from many different perspectives, beginning a long slide which ended in atheism when none of the basic tenants of religion itself proved reasonable to me. (In short, it seems to me that you can't maintain faith without deciding to believe in the first place -- but that first step can be taken in the direction of any religion, which makes the whole thing pointless precisely because there's no objective reason for it.)
Anyways, I don't think you are an Atheist, I think you are an Agnostic. You haven't found anything you believe is correct yet, but you admit the possibility of something coming along.
No, I honestly don't. I admit the possibility of there being more intelligent, more powerful entities in the universe than I, even to the point where they might not consider humans intelligent, but I wouldn't call such "gods." (They are perhaps a bit like the Greek gods, "men writ large," but not supernatural... Clarke's Third Law and all that.)
In spite of all this, I'm not antagonistic toward those with religious beliefs (well, as long as they aren't knocking on my door at 9:00 am Saturday morning... or any other time, for that matter;> ). I think religious beliefs are personal, and should be kept that way; I also think that folks ought to think about their religious beliefs, rather than blindly accepting what they've been told -- but this goes for all beliefs, IMHO. You obviously fall into that category of "thinking believer," so more power to you!
Slashdot Mirror
So the majority of those who need organ transplants -- which are generally supplemented at least in part by government funds (Medicare) -- couldn't benefit from this new technology. OTOH, the individuals who could afford the process themselves would be free to use it.
I seem to recall something about "We, the People..."
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I doubt it: the features under discussion show typical mass wasting at the head of the formation, such as occurs when a spring undercuts the soil overlying the aquifer which feeds it. That, plus the delicacy of the features, argues strongly against them being formed underground and then being uncovered -- they're plainly erosion features, formed on the surface.
Further, some of these are very new features: they haven't been covered by the ubiquitous dust which generally blankets everything on the martian surface within a few years at most.
I can't figure out what the "liquid CO2" bit is all about; I suspect part of the explanation is missing from the popularization... I think I'll ask some of the folks doing the work.
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uh... when the Chinese get there?
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Let me assure you that I'm not bullshitting -- I think you're just misunderstanding me.
Ummmm... the ones "with a veneer of scientific credibility" are the ones I was calling ANZs; the dupes were the ones I said were afraid of the nuclear boogieman. :)
Not knowing your friends, I can't pass individual judgment; however, I've met no one who understands the subject matter and who isn't an ANZ, who opposed the launch. Some were even willing to admit privately that they deliberately inflated the disaster scenario, but they regarded it as important enough an arena that they were willing to do that. It's called politics, and it's not science.
You're changing the universe of discourse: the majority of the lightning-strike victims each year are indeed golfers, which demonstrates that some do decide to play golf in less-than-ideal conditions. This is as factual as the NASA environmental impact study.
It's a fact that SNAP 9-A burned up in the upper atmosphere; it's the atmosphere which delivered some of the radioactive results to the ground. My statement was that the fuel elements didn't survive to impact the ground. Aside from that, you're right: that's why they did the redesign... I actually said that, I thought!
The NASA worst-case estimates were spread over 50 years following the presumed accident; that's 46/year in the first case, 2.4/year in the second... both of which are less than 100/year, the second by two orders of magnitude. (I carefully chose that example so I could say "orders of magnitude...")
The Cassini worst-case scenario was the end result of many different events going wrong -- not a single event. If it would make you feel better, I'll substitute "flying on a commercial airliner" for "playing golf." The statement still stands, for the population of the planet.
That aside, my point was that people daily decide to take risks which are much more significant than the worst-case Cassini RTG accident; they do it without thinking about it, because they perceive the risk as minimal. The concern about Cassini was manufactured by a small group of people, and was blown way out of proportion by the media.
Your "mass murderer" analogy's just a straw man argument.
This is a critical point: the "perceived" threat wasn't realistic -- it was a manufactured media manipulation. The actual threat was low, as I keep stating... that's been my whole point!
Oh, I do recognize the legitimacy of people's concerns, and I argue differently with them in person than I do with you on /. I'm generally a patient sort of guy -- but this must be the fifth or sixth RTG topic that I've met the false arguments on, and this time I was pretty tired of it.
Part of what makes it especially poignant is that I worked on Pathfinder, which was very nearly a waste of effort because the mission was deliberately crippled by choosing solar rather than RTG energy sources; if NASA had used RTGs, the lander would almost certainly still be operating, and the rover might well be. Instead, the whole thing was over in a couple of months. That's sad. By spreading the costs over a much longer mission, they could truly do faster, better, and cheaper.
Despite all that, my arguments weren't hyperbolic -- Jeff Cuzzi gave even more trivial risk levels, such as stating that the Cassini risk per individual was six orders of magnitude lower than that of driving a car one mile. And I certainly didn't intend to advance ad hominem arguments against the innocent dupes of the ANZs -- but I did intend to slam those who deliberately manufactured false arguments against the project.
I suspect you're right, in that you and I mostly agree; you were just unfortunate enough to be in the wrong post at the wrong time... :) [dead horse gets up and nonchalantly ambles away...]
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When did I not acknowledge the magnitude? The magnitude is just very small -- that was one of my original points...
You're right: not all those concerned were mindless and ignorant. Some had specific agendas. They were all anti-nuclear zealots, and they fed the fears of those less knowledgeable... and those less knowledgeable are afraid of the nuclear boogieman.
The SNAP 9-A RTG performed as designed: it burned up in the upper atmosphere rather than delivering its contents to the surface (BTW, your link is broken and I can't make it work either; slashcode keeps throwing in spaces and returns). There is good argument that the design philosophy was flawed, and NASA did indeed redesign the RTG fuel elements to survive reentry and contain their fuel -- which they've done in all subsequent accidents, as I said.
For what it's worth, I clearly stated that I was talking about the Cassini RTGs -- that doesn't include the earlier (and obsolete) designs.
You're right -- that's why I said "they are far too conservative when estimating risk, at least since Challenger."
I'm not arguing that NASA's perfect (geez, those who know me think exactly the opposite!). They've been overconfident in the past; they are now paranoid. It'd be nice to see them adopt the middle course.
This is the sort of thing I'm talking about: NASA does a detailed study, admits there is a trivially-small (less than 10E-6) chance of a problem which might kill fewer than the number of people annually killed by lightning strikes (for example), and the anti-nuclear faction screams, "See? We were right! Our scenarios are supported by NASA's study!" -- when in fact, the ANZ's are claiming that billions of people would die. NASA's study said no such thing -- and in fact they later downrated the risk, for good reasons (their initial assumptions were too generous).
One more time: I didn't say there was no risk, I said the risk was trivially small.
I work in the aerospace industry. Risk assessment is part of my daily life -- and in fact it affects me personally, every time I step out of an airplane with equipment I've designed on my back (I worked in the skydiving equipment industry before I got into aerospace work -- and I still use my "legacy" equipment).
The point I'm trying to make is that there's no such thing as zero risk, no matter what you do; some risks are so small that they can be reasonably ignored, others require a tradeoff study and some should require approval of the subject population. Flight of the Cassini RTGs falls into the first category (it's orders of magnitude less than the risk of deciding to play golf and getting hit by lightning), despite the fearmongering of a few biased individuals.
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Yes, yes and yes...
The CERN LEP (Large Electron-Positron collider) works by creating two rings of particles -- electrons and their antiparticles, positrons -- which circle in opposite directions within an evacuated tunnel. They create huge numbers of each, then direct the particles into a collision. Naturally, there are large numbers of collisions each time they do this -- and only a tiny fraction of them have the interesting results they are looking for.
Rather than personally analyze and interpret all the collisions (most of which are "trivial" in the sense of being well-understood interactions), the researchers use computer algorithms to monitor the results and filter the huge amount of raw data down to a manageable few candidates for the sought interaction. Each of the detectors is looking for slightly different kinds of results (which is part of what makes this discovery questionable -- only two of four detectors see anything at all, and one sees only one event... but all four should be detecting Higgs particles, each with its own particular collisional outcome).
It's interesting to consider that the search for particles is "directed" in this fashion: what discoveries might there be if all the data were to be closely examined? The answer is that the algorithms are chosen to screen the predictable and common results out, and isolate the unpredicted results as well as the specifically sought-after ones. Still, it's interesting to speculate on what might be missed...
The anthropomorphization of the detectors -- "it thinks it has discovered..." -- is a very common phenomenon in science. If you reflect for a minute, you'll probably realize it's common with computers, too... your Linux box, running WINE, "thinks" it's a Windoze machine!
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A recent article in Science discusses the fragility of even five-sigma results: rather than being wrong only once in a hundred times, three-sigma results are historically wrong about half the time, and five-sigma results are wrong much oftener than they "should" statistically be. As the article points out, the errors are often systematic: the experiment is designed to find a particular result, and if it doesn't give evidence quickly, it is often modified slightly and re-run; this can introduce large biases in the statistics.
So in the end, CERN isn't going to have "proof" of the Higgs discovery; basically, they're trying hard to get their names on the same page as those of the eventual credited discoverers, as precursors... not necessarily a bad thing, but also not worth the large penalties CERN will pay if they delay the start of LEP's replacement (the Large Hadron Collider) beyond another month.
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The potential loss of life is essentially zero, since there's no plausible way that the RTG fuel capsule can be disrupted. Fergawdsake, the ones on Apollo 13's Lunar Module re-entered the atmosphere at 7 miles per second, and they didn't break up, burn through, or otherwise fail.
I suppose you could take one apart with a small nuclear device, but then that'd sort of render the whole argument moot, wouldn't it?
The widely-quoted "statistic" that the contents of one RTG fuel capsule would give cancer to 2 billion people is misleading at best. It's like attributing the same danger to the sun: yeah, if everyone in the world goes outside and spends all day in the sun, every day, the accumulated sunburn might do that... but you know that would never happen. Similarly, there's no way a launch accident will produce the conversion conditions and dispersal mechanism to deliver the appropriate dose of RTG fuel to the world's population. Not even if the accident disrupted the capsule (which is highly unlikely in itself).
There's no legitimate concern; it's just fear of the nuclear boogieman.
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Unfortunately, it takes more than just being articulate to be right. These people you link to, while articulate and even genuinely worried, don't happen to be right.
The risk was non-zero, but it was also trivially small. The biggest risk from a launch disaster involving RTGs is that one of 'em might hit you on the head as it lands (but you'd have to be in a boat off the coast during the launch, and in the launch path...).
The RTGs carried on Cassini are designed to withstand re-entry and impact without being disrupted and spreading their contents. There have been at least two cases where a booster carrying RTG-equipped payloads blew up, and the RTGs landed on earth. In both cases (one off Florida, the other off California) the RTGs were recovered intact, refurbished, and relaunched on other mission. There was no spill, nor a danger of one. There have been no cases where a hardened RTG has leaked.
While I tend to agree with that, in my experience it's because they are far too conservative when estimating risk, at least since Challenger. I know that the programs I've worked on have cost more than they should, and weren't allowed to do things that were thoroughly desirable, because the risk was judged too great -- even though others have used the questioned technologies successfully.
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PGP and E4M both have the same general problem: they store files within container files which are encrypted, but to move or work on a file it must come out of the container and is no longer encrypted. The same goes for the suggestion to use Samba and share the stored, encrypted files out to NT4 while working on them.
What makes this bad?
First, I work both at my home office and on the road, so the files go back and forth between my main machine and my notebook (not to mention my backups, which are pretty critical here -- and I'm not using tape for backups, but instead a disk farm of cheap drives on another box... much faster than tape, but it means the files don't inherently get stored in encrypted form). This has workarounds, especially for the backups -- just make the target of the file transfer another encrypted container file (which only means I have to change my whole filing system) -- except for the second problem.
Second, while I'm working on a file, many of the apps I use create *.tmp files as part of their autorecovery process; these files are not encrypted, and unless they're reliably destroyed after the work session is finished, they tend to linger on the drive in accessable and plaintext form (and reliably destroying them is a painstaking task). But if the file is initially encrypted via W2K's EFS, the temp file is also encrypted and therefore safe.
*Sigh*... The only solution I can find that meets both requirements is to switch to W2K on all boxen which might host the file in any form -- precisely the solution I didn't want to use, because I avoid M$ solutions where I can (one man's small stroke for freedom, huh?). It's either that, or piss off my customers... who basically don't see why I don't just switch OSes like they did. (Does anyone else see this as one of the reasons it's so hard to unseat Microsoft?)
Thanks, everyone, for responding. I know it's a tough problem, and I appreciate the variety of solutions which were proposed.
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[Sigh] That's what I was trying to avoid -- not only would it cost me the upgrade license for each of the boxen 'round here (hey, it wouldn't be right to just buy one and do a multiple install, would it? ;-) ), but I'd have to do some serious hardware upgrading to run it, and then I'd have to go through the learning curve (which I don't have the time for, right now).
The cost is high to go W2K -- not necessarily unbearable, but high -- and if I can avoid it for the time being, I'd like to. That's why I'm searching for an alternative.
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Right on both points -- but the i840 gets around the latency issue by interleaving access to the RDRAM alternately through the two channels, effectively cutting latency in half. That doesn't address the "more RAM" scaling issue, however, which is why Intel is reportedly producing its server boards with SDRAM support instead of RDRAM.
Right again... and this point has been well-taken by the buying public, has it not? ;) Poor Intel -- they swallowed the hook and most of the line!
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If I can't find a better approach, I'll probably take this one; the downside is that I'd have to significantly rearrange my document-management system (it's a little... eccentric?). I really could use transparent per-file encryption.
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The i840 chipset has two RAMBUS channels (which the article points out) and interleaves memory access, so in this case it is actually faster than SDRAM. (But maybe not faster than DDR DRAM.)
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I don't think Intel is driving this -- I think they're the first victim of RAMBUS, since they bought the hype and signed onto an agreement which requires they push RAMBUS and no other for several years.
They have had their fill of RAMBUS and its problems, and would get out from under that albatross if they could. The RDRAM rebates are a valiant (but probably doomed) effort to increase the production and therefore decrease the cost of the memory... not that it helps, when they can't even get the P4 out themselves! :)
Why else would they give VIA and AMD the information to produce DDR DRAM-compatible chipsets for their products? They won't sell anything much if it only works with RDRAM... so to maintain at least some sales, they have to help their competitors... best of a bad situation...
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This is, in fact, one of the principal claims in Micron's suit against RAMBUS.
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Okay, slow down for a minute and calculate exactly what you've proposed; make sure you account for the fact that the vehicle is very lightweight and almost empty (hint: W/[Cd*S] is not large).
What you'll find is that the vehicle is its own parachute! Depending on the exact details, terminal velocity turns out to be around a couple of hundred feet/second -- it only takes a few seconds of thrust at a reasonable level (say 2 gees) immediately before landing to bring that to zero.
This is actually quite well-known -- I don't know why you aren't aware of it, unless you're just ignoring it. DC-X was a damned fine project, and it met its goals; only when NASA took the reins with DC-XA did things go to hell. I leave it to you to speculate on the reasons...
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While this is mostly true, there's not simply a "very predictable relationship" between luminosity and distance -- as demonstrated by new information on Polaris (the North Star, a Ceppheid variable). In particular, check this graphic, which shows two distinct period-luminosity relationships (differing in the zero-point offset), depending on whether the Cepheid is a fundamental-mode or first overtone pulsator (and note that there's arguably some evidence of other pulsation modes in the clustering of points off the main trends, in the lower right-hand corner of the plot).
Just knowing the brightness of the Cepheid variable won't tell you how far away it is; you also have to know the pulsation mode, which isn't always easy. But then, astronomy hasn't ever been really easy... :) This data on Polaris comes from ground-based interferometry, by the way -- just a different instrument than that mentioned in the article -- as well as measurements from the Hipparcos satellite.
[I hope everyone can get to those URLs without having to pay -- I can't check that from here, 'cause I'm already logged into Science Online by default. Some info's available to everyone, some requires a subscription.]
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1) Mailing of unordered merchandise ... constitutes an unfair method of competition and an unfair trade practice in violation of section 45(a)(1) of title 15.
and 2) that communications prohibited by subsection (c) [in other words, communicating to you that you owe money for this unordered merchandise] is also an unfair method of competition and an unfair trade practice etc.
DC has violated subsection (a)'s first part, but not the second part, and apparently not subsection (c).
Now, is that clear as mud, or what?
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Maybe not... I had an email exchange about Stephens a while back with Jerry Pournelle, in which Pournelle commented that both he and Laurie Flynn had written the column before Stephens.
I have no reason to suspect this statement, as opposed to the statement of a man who admittedly lied about his PhD...
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True -- but have you noticed that there are fewer Mom & Pop shops anymore? They can't compete against the big corporations, which will often move into a neighborhood and deliberately undercut M&P prices to be rid of the competition; they can afford the (to them) small temporary loss, but to M&P it's the whole business.
And when Mom & Pop are gone, what happens? Either the big corp goes back to what prices they feel like charging, or they get stomped by a yet-bigger corp. Don't believe me? Think about air fare prices and the airline industry shakeout of the last many years...
I'm far from anti-capitalist (hell, I'm a capitalist myself!), but there seems to be a balance lacking here. I blame much of it on the consumers: if we didn't ask for the absolute bottom dollar, this wouldn't happen. If we support Mom and Pop (your local small bookstore, for example) instead of the cheapest big corp (Amazon?), we'd have a small, local business where our comments would be more easily heard, and our own personal preferences would be given more attention.
It's about physical community, I think -- something that's harder to manage in this increasingly-connected world.
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Yep, it's been there a long time. Hasn't killed anyone yet (scared 'em a bit -- but it was a US astronaut who's now trying to make big $$ on book sales, that it apparently scared the most... Shannon Lucid, OTOH, appears to have had bigger ovaries than the aforementioned astronaut did.
Oh, yeah! It's just like when NASA scrapped the last couple of functional Saturn V launchers (literally laid 'em out as lawn exhibits), so they couldn't compete with the Shuttle... NASA doesn't want anything to compete with the IIS (and especially they don't want Russia to spend rubles on other stuff, seeing that they don't have very many of them, and their space funds have largely come from NASA anyhow!)
Low Earth Orbit == Decaying Orbit. Mir has been reboosted several times, just as Salyut before it, and the IIS after it. SkyLab was supposed to be reboosted, too -- but Shuttle wasn't ready in time, so it sorta rained parts on Australia...
Reboosting is just part of what needs to be done, not a reason to avoid Mir.
Because it's there, just like Mt. Everest?
I suggest you ask people like climbers, skydivers, scuba divers, pilots... you'll find lots of people who can't figure out why you don't want to do it!
Me, I'd go in a hot second.
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The Apollo spacecraft is very much distinct from the booster which launched it (matter of fact, there were several different boosters which launched Apollo capsules). The Soviet manned space program had a couple of fatal spacecraft failures, too... but those weren't launcher failures either.
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It's not fair to lump the two categories together -- manrated boosters are a small subset of boosters, and they're much more reliable than the run-of-the-mill cargo launcher. Matter of fact, I can recall only one fatal manrated launcher failure: Challenger.
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Ummmm... not exactly. There's a distinction commonly drawn between "strong" and "weak" atheism which applies here:
This was the point I was trying to make: when it comes to Allah, Jehovah and the Easter Bunny, I'm strongly atheistic -- I believe they do not exist, because of both lack of evidence in favor and the strong externally-confirmable evidence against it. Because of this long string of "strong" atheisms, then, I have a "weak" atheistic position on godhood of any variety. And I find this to be different from agnosticism, because agnostics believe you can't truly know, whereas I believe I do truly know, negatively. (If a god were to walk up to me on the street and introduce him/her/itsself, I'd demand several different ID's... and still have my doubts.)
Huh. Interesting... and not exactly traditional Christian. Mind they don't burn you at the stake!
So where does that leave me? I was raised fundamentalist Christian, and actually preached the Word for a while... until my knowledge of science undermined the fundamentalist dogma, and I started a years-long study of religion from many different perspectives, beginning a long slide which ended in atheism when none of the basic tenants of religion itself proved reasonable to me. (In short, it seems to me that you can't maintain faith without deciding to believe in the first place -- but that first step can be taken in the direction of any religion, which makes the whole thing pointless precisely because there's no objective reason for it.)
No, I honestly don't. I admit the possibility of there being more intelligent, more powerful entities in the universe than I, even to the point where they might not consider humans intelligent, but I wouldn't call such "gods." (They are perhaps a bit like the Greek gods, "men writ large," but not supernatural... Clarke's Third Law and all that.)
In spite of all this, I'm not antagonistic toward those with religious beliefs (well, as long as they aren't knocking on my door at 9:00 am Saturday morning... or any other time, for that matter ;> ). I think religious beliefs are personal, and should be kept that way; I also think that folks ought to think about their religious beliefs, rather than blindly accepting what they've been told -- but this goes for all beliefs, IMHO. You obviously fall into that category of "thinking believer," so more power to you!
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