If only: 1. Everyone were meticulous in following the guidelines which require passwords being more shift+number than letters, and capable of memorizing new ones on a regular schedule. 2. Everyone kept better care of their computers (regular updates) than they do for their own bodies (regular physicals, anyone?). Then we could have prevented this whole thing!
Real world implications of having to remember numerous non-dictionary passwords, and expecting those who see the computer as a magic box to the interwebs to treat it better than many of them probably do their cars as far as maintenance goes, is far beyond simple.
They might as well be saying that mentally wiring humanity differently is simple. And that's just silly for Microsoft to say (because that's Apple's mindset!).
And you think using the word "compete" gives you some sense of a valid argument because it implies something about "capitalism"? I think that makes you the idiot. Generalizations with key words are what got the republicans as far as they did.
Don't bother. It's like the bandwagon on./ hears the words "monopoly" and suddenly the 99% of the too-helpless-to-get-a-job-unless-someone-calls-and-offers-it-to-them crowd rise up.
It's not like people aren't capable of finding their own jobs.
A giant "anti-trust" lawsuit regarding only a "no cold-call" policy? This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
All that means is that when someone is happily working at the job they actually applied for, they wouldn't be teased by some other company offering them more money. It says NOTHING about if an employee was fired, and once again applied for a job at a competitor, whether they would take him/her or not (which would most likely be a resounding yes). Nor does it imply anything in the situation where an employee was working at their job, but (knowing they themselves are hot shit) applied to another company flouting their skills, and trying to negotiate a higher pay.
Honestly, the fact that it "fixed salaries" only means that tech companies were such dicks about poaching in the first place, with absolutely no regard to the culture of the workplace that they not only suck an employee out of due to greed (think about those left behind), as well as the company's own culture (hiring a competitor who is there out of greed). They probably realized it was bad practice for a lot of reasons other than just the indirect effect of money. Finally, I can easily imagine a company with a lot of spare cash (Apple) using this method to hire ever good engineer out of every other company just for shits, having them not develop anything, and crush the competition in that manner.
Economies of scale aside (which would imply order of magnitude 10x gains rather than a 2x gain for the population of this country), you also have to keep in mind that the U.S. Government isn't supplying all of us with top of the line (Remember: 4 years ago, and teens have to be willing to use them) cell phones for 4 years.
And even then, if you do the math, it was a pretty big waste of money just for these 175 teens.
In short, the bigger you go, the more money you blow when it comes to the government and how it does its funding.
Definitely, I think given the economies of scale (especially in the thermodynamics side), the target market of this device is definitely not a commercial replacement for large (more efficient) moisture extraction units in well-industrialized areas, but rather to offer a self-contained, plug-n-play moisture/power generating 'oasis' of sorts in areas of little development (and possibly no connection to any grid) otherwise.
I don't get it. Why does it have to heat the air up ("to produce steam") ??
Why can't it just take the air and cool it down, instead of wasting energy for heating?
It claims to heat the (hot, desert) air to "produce steam" which is then condensed. The water is already in the air, you don't need to heat it, just cool it to grab the water out.
Either this is a crap article, or its one of those over-unity perpetual motion scams.
To everyone questioning the snake-oil of having to steamify this mysterious water vapour before recondensing it, please keep in mind the following:
I. Just because the water molecule is in the air (via most likely evaporation), it does not imply that the water vapor has a lot of kinetic energy (it's not hot water vapor like steam is). An analogous situation to this is how the water vapor coming out of a kettle can cook your hand, but a muggy day only ruins your hair.
II. Next, we want to consider efficiency. As this article (first link when googling for "steam condense efficiency") http://www.engineersedge.com/heat_exchanger/large_steam_condenser.htm mentions, the laws of thermodynamics dictate that the largest temperature difference is the most efficient for mechanisms such as condensation.
III. -Finally, thermodynamics also dictates two last details about generating temperature differences: 1. That it's much more efficient to cool to a temperature close to ambient (same reason why low-TC superconducting magnets are bathed in multiple blankets of cryo-fluids with different boiling points, rather than just liquid helium blanket and room temperature on the other side), 2. That heat is very cheap and easy to make (often referred to as the "dirtiest" form of energy because it's maximized in entropy).
IV. Put all those things together, and one arrives at the following: -I want to condense water, and to do it well I need a huge temperature difference between the vapor in the air and my condenser coil. -It's really hard, costly, and wasteful to make a super good air-conditioner inside a turbine for no reason. -I'll just heat (remember, it's P=IR heating coil easy!) the water first, and then make a mediocre condenser, and get just the same gains as having a phenomenal condenser.
As interesting as that is, I remain pretty convinced it was an ignorant statement used in an attempt to belittle another culture's work and interpretation of beer, with little regard to whatever the fuck is really going on.
Furthermore, while I highly doubt Budweiser is adding rice to enhance the wonderosity of its brews, real rice lagers and wines (the ones in question here, and wine being sake) actually repeatedly polish the rice until only the core remains to maximize the starch and minimize protein. It's very labor intensive and actually a bit wasteful, but done for the purposes of quality. http://www.sawanotsuru.net/products/index.htm
Might make flavorless rice lagers easier to go down, but what about real beer?
Considering how this is a pretty neat idea that is not only a pretty big step beyond just ice-cubes made of beer both texturally (frozen foam), and thermodynamically, I'm not sure why the author felt it would be necessary to even remotely knock it in such a retarded manner when...
I'm not sure if OP has ever tried such a beer, but it's pretty flavorful compared to the 5 variants of piss I just listed. And considering how well the Japanese rice beers actually pair with sushi (which is probably where 99% of that exposure will occur in the states), I'd say it's pretty well suited to its purpose.
Then again, it's also fair to say that the domestic Top5 is pretty well suited to their purpose, given that they all pair pretty well with ping-pong balls.
If you factor out the super-loyal Toyota Prius buyers, the repurchase rate drops to under 25%.
The numbers are interesting indeed... but factoring out "the super-loyal Toyota Prius buyers" just to drop it from 35% to 25% doesn't really help the argument as much as make the reader question the research methods involved.. considering any laymen already has in the notion hiding in the back of their mind that that Pri'i make up for quite a bit of the cumulative hybrid market share (it's got ~3 generations head start on all other "mainstream" hybrids).
Regular Prius and Prius V combined [represent] 58 percent of total hybrid sales.
... Well it's like saying death rates are dropping, if we factor out the "super deadly" causes of death such as heart disease and cancer. The super-loyal-ty-ness-ess of Pri'i owners here obviously shouldn't be considered a factor that would affect the results, as much as they are a key metric in determining such a result (loyalty begets repurchase as it is an indicator of some set of factors said survey is attempting to measure in the first place... duh?)
And it's that wonderful 99% that ends up repeating a mis-understanding of said information in subsequent articles until we end up with every thread looking like those nuclear powerplant ones where most likely humanities majors have already set their religion on either thorium or pebble or TW reactors with no understanding of the physics nor the real-world nuclear proliferation implications.
And as a scientist, I really hope you don't think you're qualified to be a "purse string puller", given that you seem to prefer complacency and the defense of ignorance to any semblance of proper understanding if a subject.
But the snark is there for a reason. He posed a silly thought, and was instantly modded to +3 with worthless comments otherwise. I post something factual with a shit attitude, and everyone spends additional effort trying their best to prove me wrong. Which one got the general public to do more thinking? Even the other (non AC) response to mine tried to at least mention some high school physics and bring up regimes where my EMP example might not completely hold.
The real problem isn't that comments are misleading, but that too many people blindly eat up whatever sounds important or right without doing their own due diligence, as OP demonstrated first hand.
There was a link on./ a week ago regarding online comment sections being completely worthless. It was almost ironic that it was posted in./, probably best known for its comments sections, and I refuse to let the same thing happen here without a fight.
And it's pretty clear that high school physics was where your understanding ended.
Re: closed loops Grab a plasma physics text (which is highly applicable in the regime of astrphysical charged particles) and learn about the conservation of magnetic moment. This was the basis for Z-pinch style devices attempting fusion towards the end of the cold war, and it's also the basis for why charged particles stuck in the earth's magnetic field DON'T just completely fry the northern and southern poles, but rather bounce around from the north to the south magnetic poles (I'm sure you've learned this in your high school classes as well?)
Also, try to understand how modern day fusion devices such as tokamaks do not contain all of the closed loop magnetic field lines within the containment vessel itself, but are able to direct leakage particles to areas specifically designed for high energy charged particle impacts (divertors).
Re: EMP: The whole point was that OP's excitement was based on a complete lack of understanding of just how differently steady-state and transient responses can be in the realm of physics. This experiment in question being at one end of highly transient, and the avoidance of EMP related chip frying being on the other. That you can wonderfully point out the grey area that occurs between the two extremes deserves almost a pat on the back I guess... but if that were the case people could make careers out of just stating the obvious.
Master's in plasma physics and I have a moron who can't do math try to bluff while quoting shit from high school, really?
It's great that you can quote a few numbers you recall being important and draw inferences from them, but please leave the science to people who didn't just read the summary of an article, and go "hey that number I just read is bigger than another one I remember reading about somewhere else, so I'm close to discovering a solution!"
This is like if you find out that if you place a 50lb bag on a 100 foot lever, you can generate 5000ft-lb of torque, and holy crap how far away are we from sandbag-lever arm car engines!?
First off: This is a transient field generated by an electric current that was created through the discharge of capacitor banks. The banks themselves probably took a few minutes to charge up, at a power draw unsustainable for any space vehicle, and discharged a "short lived" pulse, which from the video, was order of seconds. Regardless, the point of mentioning "short-lived" is obviously that this cannot run in steady state, which wouldn't do much for protection.
Second (and you and whoever modded you up have probably heard of this exciting term too): The physics behind an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) is exactly what this magnet would create: a large magnetic flux change through closed conducting circuits. That means that if you can't generate this type of magnetic field in steady state (remember the words "short-lived"?), you'd end up frying more components than whatever charged particles you want to protect against.
Third: Does anyone know how standard magnetic fields are generated, or at least bother to take a look at the pretty pictures in the article? The 100T that was quoted was undoubtedly in the center of the giant metal solenoid (new buzzword for the pseudoscientists out there!). To "protect" a space vehicle from more science words using this specific methodology basically means building a giant metal sewer pipe around every space shuttle to begin with. The technology required to be useful in stellar flight requires small modular field generators that can create magnetic fields external to itself (and anything it wants to protect), not internal (where once again dFlux/dt would fry your circuits).
Finally: "Non-EM ionizing radiation" is a cute and exciting phrase, but really that just means other "ions". And yes, if a magnetic field can stop a proton (a hydrogen ion) from that "non-EM" solar wind, it'll stop other forms of ions as well, as they all follow the same physics of being a massive (i.e. having mass) charged particle.
I mean, obviously we can all see the logic in this as we have so much practice on a daily basis comparing the relative cost/value of cars based purely on gas money! Hell I think we'd all hard-pressed to find even a fraction of the transportationally-inclined population that gauged costs of automotive travel based on silly things like initial investment capital or maintenance fees!
It's only a logical leap (nay, barely a hop!) to assume that stellar travel will be just as reliable as our maintenance-free and sunk-cost-obviated automobile technology!
I love how projected "breakeven" and "ignition" in 2012 has suddenly been extrapolated to MW powerplants on the grid within a decade.
Nevermind that we don't capture the energy yet, which might give us best-case 50% efficiency. Nevermind we need 3x breakeven the breakeven energy for converting heat into steam to power a turbine. Nevermind just about every factor of 2-3 efficiency loss out there. I'm going to post one goddamn link that was true when I interned there, and is still consistent today and then I want to see what the "scientists" who projected this commercial powerplant planned to do about this minor detail:
By contrast, a large commercial power plant using ICF will require around five shots per second. Laser drivers also have low efficiencies, currently around 1% for solid-state lasers such as those to be used in NIF.
99% efficiency loss right off the bat. What's left for these people to even argue about?
Considering it is still utilized in USB specification ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_On-The-Go ), and that Master/Slave annoyances that all of us have lived with from disk (disc?;) drives have thankfully been obsoleted with SATA, I'd say Author of TFA is doing a fine job of drawing on currently relevant subject matter, rather than trying to relate content in Microsoft's latest style manual to someone who's stuck in the days of IDE.
There is a potential "man-in-the-middle" attack for just about anything, depending on your level of paranoia, and what you consider sensitive information. FB is an opt-in service.
Now, if you throw away those two a-priori considerations, go on to suggest that pictures of someone getting drunk is highly private and sensitive information, and ignore the fact that the user specifically clicked "OK" on the terms of service to have that data be utilized for purposes other than communication, then a resounding YES comes forth presenting FB as a malicious attack on private user information.
But if you step back from the idiocy and realize that the user basically agrees to his or her own information being used in such a way, how the hell is it an attack, as much as it is complacency on the end of the user in allowing FB (or any other corporation) to do something possibly unethical?
The only real difference is that with the post office, they aren't opting to do anything really unethical (and hence don't need the complacency EULA) with the information they could potentially harvest, store, and data-mine. And that's just the USPS. Other countries with more strict tariffs and import/export regulations will often open parcels and inspect the contents to insure nobody is trying to send or receive expensive goods duty-free (Very similar to what TSA does with your international baggage FYI). But is this a surprise? Nope, customs (and TSA) even leaves you a pretty little note informing you that this has occurred. And with the author's phenomenally insightful capability to ignore the concept of user-complacency, suddenly half the world's government-instituted postal systems are raging "man-in-the-middle" attacks.
You're right, your personal address, how often you send/receive letters, whether it's private or commercial or parcel, and where/when you move to a new residence, they don't have access to anything important like that, really.
How shortsightedly-inane-for-the-sake-of-a-headline can you get? At least making a facebook account and having your data shared is an option.
According to the author's logic, the United States Postal Service, for the service of getting our mail delivered, has EVERY SINGLE ONE OF OUR PHYSICAL ADDRESSES, regardless of whether we opted in to begin with! Holy shit.
Slashdot Mirror
If only:
1. Everyone were meticulous in following the guidelines which require passwords being more shift+number than letters, and capable of memorizing new ones on a regular schedule.
2. Everyone kept better care of their computers (regular updates) than they do for their own bodies (regular physicals, anyone?).
Then we could have prevented this whole thing!
Real world implications of having to remember numerous non-dictionary passwords, and expecting those who see the computer as a magic box to the interwebs to treat it better than many of them probably do their cars as far as maintenance goes, is far beyond simple.
They might as well be saying that mentally wiring humanity differently is simple. And that's just silly for Microsoft to say (because that's Apple's mindset!).
And you think using the word "compete" gives you some sense of a valid argument because it implies something about "capitalism"? I think that makes you the idiot. Generalizations with key words are what got the republicans as far as they did.
Don't bother. It's like the bandwagon on ./ hears the words "monopoly" and suddenly the 99% of the too-helpless-to-get-a-job-unless-someone-calls-and-offers-it-to-them crowd rise up.
It's not like people aren't capable of finding their own jobs.
A giant "anti-trust" lawsuit regarding only a "no cold-call" policy? This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
All that means is that when someone is happily working at the job they actually applied for, they wouldn't be teased by some other company offering them more money.
It says NOTHING about if an employee was fired, and once again applied for a job at a competitor, whether they would take him/her or not (which would most likely be a resounding yes).
Nor does it imply anything in the situation where an employee was working at their job, but (knowing they themselves are hot shit) applied to another company flouting their skills, and trying to negotiate a higher pay.
Honestly, the fact that it "fixed salaries" only means that tech companies were such dicks about poaching in the first place, with absolutely no regard to the culture of the workplace that they not only suck an employee out of due to greed (think about those left behind), as well as the company's own culture (hiring a competitor who is there out of greed). They probably realized it was bad practice for a lot of reasons other than just the indirect effect of money.
Finally, I can easily imagine a company with a lot of spare cash (Apple) using this method to hire ever good engineer out of every other company just for shits, having them not develop anything, and crush the competition in that manner.
Well, no.
Economies of scale aside (which would imply order of magnitude 10x gains rather than a 2x gain for the population of this country), you also have to keep in mind that the U.S. Government isn't supplying all of us with top of the line (Remember: 4 years ago, and teens have to be willing to use them) cell phones for 4 years.
And even then, if you do the math, it was a pretty big waste of money just for these 175 teens.
In short, the bigger you go, the more money you blow when it comes to the government and how it does its funding.
Definitely, I think given the economies of scale (especially in the thermodynamics side), the target market of this device is definitely not a commercial replacement for large (more efficient) moisture extraction units in well-industrialized areas, but rather to offer a self-contained, plug-n-play moisture/power generating 'oasis' of sorts in areas of little development (and possibly no connection to any grid) otherwise.
I don't get it. Why does it have to heat the air up ("to produce steam") ??
Why can't it just take the air and cool it down, instead of wasting energy for heating?
It claims to heat the (hot, desert) air to "produce steam" which is then condensed. The water is already in the air, you don't need to heat it, just cool it to grab the water out.
Either this is a crap article, or its one of those over-unity perpetual motion scams.
To everyone questioning the snake-oil of having to steamify this mysterious water vapour before recondensing it, please keep in mind the following:
I. Just because the water molecule is in the air (via most likely evaporation), it does not imply that the water vapor has a lot of kinetic energy (it's not hot water vapor like steam is). An analogous situation to this is how the water vapor coming out of a kettle can cook your hand, but a muggy day only ruins your hair.
II. Next, we want to consider efficiency. As this article (first link when googling for "steam condense efficiency") http://www.engineersedge.com/heat_exchanger/large_steam_condenser.htm mentions, the laws of thermodynamics dictate that the largest temperature difference is the most efficient for mechanisms such as condensation.
III. -Finally, thermodynamics also dictates two last details about generating temperature differences:
1. That it's much more efficient to cool to a temperature close to ambient (same reason why low-TC superconducting magnets are bathed in multiple blankets of cryo-fluids with different boiling points, rather than just liquid helium blanket and room temperature on the other side),
2. That heat is very cheap and easy to make (often referred to as the "dirtiest" form of energy because it's maximized in entropy).
IV. Put all those things together, and one arrives at the following:
-I want to condense water, and to do it well I need a huge temperature difference between the vapor in the air and my condenser coil.
-It's really hard, costly, and wasteful to make a super good air-conditioner inside a turbine for no reason.
-I'll just heat (remember, it's P=IR heating coil easy!) the water first, and then make a mediocre condenser, and get just the same gains as having a phenomenal condenser.
Yeah, I hate it when H2O gets into my water.
As interesting as that is, I remain pretty convinced it was an ignorant statement used in an attempt to belittle another culture's work and interpretation of beer, with little regard to whatever the fuck is really going on.
Furthermore, while I highly doubt Budweiser is adding rice to enhance the wonderosity of its brews, real rice lagers and wines (the ones in question here, and wine being sake) actually repeatedly polish the rice until only the core remains to maximize the starch and minimize protein. It's very labor intensive and actually a bit wasteful, but done for the purposes of quality.
http://www.sawanotsuru.net/products/index.htm
Might make flavorless rice lagers easier to go down, but what about real beer?
Considering how this is a pretty neat idea that is not only a pretty big step beyond just ice-cubes made of beer both texturally (frozen foam), and thermodynamically, I'm not sure why the author felt it would be necessary to even remotely knock it in such a retarded manner when...
Let's take a look at America's top 5 domestics shall we:
1. Bud light
2. Budweiser
3. Miller Light
4. Coors Light
5. Corona Extra
http://www.fiveoclockdallas.com/five-most-popular-beers-us
I'm not sure if OP has ever tried such a beer, but it's pretty flavorful compared to the 5 variants of piss I just listed. And considering how well the Japanese rice beers actually pair with sushi (which is probably where 99% of that exposure will occur in the states), I'd say it's pretty well suited to its purpose.
Then again, it's also fair to say that the domestic Top5 is pretty well suited to their purpose, given that they all pair pretty well with ping-pong balls.
But still, everyone knows that an electrostatic travelling pebble-bed-thorium-wave reactor is the way to go!
If you factor out the super-loyal Toyota Prius buyers, the repurchase rate drops to under 25%.
The numbers are interesting indeed... but factoring out "the super-loyal Toyota Prius buyers" just to drop it from 35% to 25% doesn't really help the argument as much as make the reader question the research methods involved.. considering any laymen already has in the notion hiding in the back of their mind that that Pri'i make up for quite a bit of the cumulative hybrid market share (it's got ~3 generations head start on all other "mainstream" hybrids).
And when said laymen goes to google such a statistic and finds that even last year ( http://www.hybridcars.com/market-dashboard.html ):
Regular Prius and Prius V combined [represent] 58 percent of total hybrid sales.
... Well it's like saying death rates are dropping, if we factor out the "super deadly" causes of death such as heart disease and cancer.
The super-loyal-ty-ness-ess of Pri'i owners here obviously shouldn't be considered a factor that would affect the results, as much as they are a key metric in determining such a result (loyalty begets repurchase as it is an indicator of some set of factors said survey is attempting to measure in the first place... duh?)
My guess, the looming potential apocalypse towards the end of 2012 overrides any patience OP may have wanted to exercise in waiting for the big 6-0.
As an aside, if read without pauses or inflection, the subject line gives the same analysis as the body of this post C;
From the few lines at the end of TFA, something like "Rats abandoning ship after having chewing through own hull" sounds more appropriate.
And it's that wonderful 99% that ends up repeating a mis-understanding of said information in subsequent articles until we end up with every thread looking like those nuclear powerplant ones where most likely humanities majors have already set their religion on either thorium or pebble or TW reactors with no understanding of the physics nor the real-world nuclear proliferation implications.
And as a scientist, I really hope you don't think you're qualified to be a "purse string puller", given that you seem to prefer complacency and the defense of ignorance to any semblance of proper understanding if a subject.
Good point.
But the snark is there for a reason. He posed a silly thought, and was instantly modded to +3 with worthless comments otherwise. I post something factual with a shit attitude, and everyone spends additional effort trying their best to prove me wrong. Which one got the general public to do more thinking? Even the other (non AC) response to mine tried to at least mention some high school physics and bring up regimes where my EMP example might not completely hold.
The real problem isn't that comments are misleading, but that too many people blindly eat up whatever sounds important or right without doing their own due diligence, as OP demonstrated first hand.
There was a link on ./ a week ago regarding online comment sections being completely worthless. It was almost ironic that it was posted in ./, probably best known for its comments sections, and I refuse to let the same thing happen here without a fight.
Ming
And it's pretty clear that high school physics was where your understanding ended.
Re: closed loops
Grab a plasma physics text (which is highly applicable in the regime of astrphysical charged particles) and learn about the conservation of magnetic moment. This was the basis for Z-pinch style devices attempting fusion towards the end of the cold war, and it's also the basis for why charged particles stuck in the earth's magnetic field DON'T just completely fry the northern and southern poles, but rather bounce around from the north to the south magnetic poles (I'm sure you've learned this in your high school classes as well?)
Also, try to understand how modern day fusion devices such as tokamaks do not contain all of the closed loop magnetic field lines within the containment vessel itself, but are able to direct leakage particles to areas specifically designed for high energy charged particle impacts (divertors).
Re: EMP:
The whole point was that OP's excitement was based on a complete lack of understanding of just how differently steady-state and transient responses can be in the realm of physics. This experiment in question being at one end of highly transient, and the avoidance of EMP related chip frying being on the other. That you can wonderfully point out the grey area that occurs between the two extremes deserves almost a pat on the back I guess... but if that were the case people could make careers out of just stating the obvious.
Master's in plasma physics and I have a moron who can't do math try to bluff while quoting shit from high school, really?
It's great that you can quote a few numbers you recall being important and draw inferences from them, but please leave the science to people who didn't just read the summary of an article, and go "hey that number I just read is bigger than another one I remember reading about somewhere else, so I'm close to discovering a solution!"
This is like if you find out that if you place a 50lb bag on a 100 foot lever, you can generate 5000ft-lb of torque, and holy crap how far away are we from sandbag-lever arm car engines!?
First off:
This is a transient field generated by an electric current that was created through the discharge of capacitor banks. The banks themselves probably took a few minutes to charge up, at a power draw unsustainable for any space vehicle, and discharged a "short lived" pulse, which from the video, was order of seconds. Regardless, the point of mentioning "short-lived" is obviously that this cannot run in steady state, which wouldn't do much for protection.
Second (and you and whoever modded you up have probably heard of this exciting term too):
The physics behind an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) is exactly what this magnet would create: a large magnetic flux change through closed conducting circuits. That means that if you can't generate this type of magnetic field in steady state (remember the words "short-lived"?), you'd end up frying more components than whatever charged particles you want to protect against.
Third:
Does anyone know how standard magnetic fields are generated, or at least bother to take a look at the pretty pictures in the article? The 100T that was quoted was undoubtedly in the center of the giant metal solenoid (new buzzword for the pseudoscientists out there!). To "protect" a space vehicle from more science words using this specific methodology basically means building a giant metal sewer pipe around every space shuttle to begin with. The technology required to be useful in stellar flight requires small modular field generators that can create magnetic fields external to itself (and anything it wants to protect), not internal (where once again dFlux/dt would fry your circuits).
Finally:
"Non-EM ionizing radiation" is a cute and exciting phrase, but really that just means other "ions". And yes, if a magnetic field can stop a proton (a hydrogen ion) from that "non-EM" solar wind, it'll stop other forms of ions as well, as they all follow the same physics of being a massive (i.e. having mass) charged particle.
+3 interesting?? What the fuck, mods.
Well duh!
I mean, obviously we can all see the logic in this as we have so much practice on a daily basis comparing the relative cost/value of cars based purely on gas money! Hell I think we'd all hard-pressed to find even a fraction of the transportationally-inclined population that gauged costs of automotive travel based on silly things like initial investment capital or maintenance fees!
It's only a logical leap (nay, barely a hop!) to assume that stellar travel will be just as reliable as our maintenance-free and sunk-cost-obviated automobile technology!
I love how projected "breakeven" and "ignition" in 2012 has suddenly been extrapolated to MW powerplants on the grid within a decade.
Nevermind that we don't capture the energy yet, which might give us best-case 50% efficiency. Nevermind we need 3x breakeven the breakeven energy for converting heat into steam to power a turbine. Nevermind just about every factor of 2-3 efficiency loss out there. I'm going to post one goddamn link that was true when I interned there, and is still consistent today and then I want to see what the "scientists" who projected this commercial powerplant planned to do about this minor detail:
http://www.ieer.org/reports/fusion/chap3.html
By contrast, a large commercial power plant using ICF will require around five shots per second. Laser drivers also have low efficiencies, currently around 1% for solid-state lasers such as those to be used in NIF.
99% efficiency loss right off the bat. What's left for these people to even argue about?
Considering it is still utilized in USB specification ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_On-The-Go ), and that Master/Slave annoyances that all of us have lived with from disk (disc? ;) drives have thankfully been obsoleted with SATA, I'd say Author of TFA is doing a fine job of drawing on currently relevant subject matter, rather than trying to relate content in Microsoft's latest style manual to someone who's stuck in the days of IDE.
I believe you are actually missing my point(s):
There is a potential "man-in-the-middle" attack for just about anything, depending on your level of paranoia, and what you consider sensitive information.
FB is an opt-in service.
Now, if you throw away those two a-priori considerations, go on to suggest that pictures of someone getting drunk is highly private and sensitive information, and ignore the fact that the user specifically clicked "OK" on the terms of service to have that data be utilized for purposes other than communication, then a resounding YES comes forth presenting FB as a malicious attack on private user information.
But if you step back from the idiocy and realize that the user basically agrees to his or her own information being used in such a way, how the hell is it an attack, as much as it is complacency on the end of the user in allowing FB (or any other corporation) to do something possibly unethical?
The only real difference is that with the post office, they aren't opting to do anything really unethical (and hence don't need the complacency EULA) with the information they could potentially harvest, store, and data-mine. And that's just the USPS. Other countries with more strict tariffs and import/export regulations will often open parcels and inspect the contents to insure nobody is trying to send or receive expensive goods duty-free (Very similar to what TSA does with your international baggage FYI). But is this a surprise? Nope, customs (and TSA) even leaves you a pretty little note informing you that this has occurred. And with the author's phenomenally insightful capability to ignore the concept of user-complacency, suddenly half the world's government-instituted postal systems are raging "man-in-the-middle" attacks.
And finally, here's a link of VISA predicting your probability of divorce with 90% accuracy, just for shits.
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/visa-predicts-divorce/story?id=10320638#.TzBo1rEgekQ
You're right, your personal address, how often you send/receive letters, whether it's private or commercial or parcel, and where/when you move to a new residence, they don't have access to anything important like that, really.
How shortsightedly-inane-for-the-sake-of-a-headline can you get? At least making a facebook account and having your data shared is an option.
According to the author's logic, the United States Postal Service, for the service of getting our mail delivered, has EVERY SINGLE ONE OF OUR PHYSICAL ADDRESSES, regardless of whether we opted in to begin with! Holy shit.