I seem to remember ogo being a full replacement and that's been out for a while. Also, although you want to provide compatibility with Exchange, don't you want to provide additional capabilities so that Exchange systems are forced to upgrade to you, rather than the other way round? (Embrace-and-extend, but non-toxic.)
Small, low-cost investigator-led missions in an atmosphere. In other words, robotic hang-gliders, gliders and microlights. And this is going to cost $485 million? How many does NASA expect to get for that? The Germans had mastered the basic technology in the 40s, with rocket-launched glider bombs, radiation-proofing by better shielding rather than expensive layouts has been used in space vehicles for ages now, and UAVs have become practically commonplace. Yes, you need more reliable unfurling systems, as you can't rely on astronauts to make repairs on Mars missions just yet, and the Martian atmosphere is sufficiently thin that you really do need excellent lift to maintain flight, but I see nothing here that is technologically revolutionary. It looks like a basic evolution from existing hardware, along with a little repackaging. So long as you've a good supply of ultra-light materials, access to an aircraft hanger you can seal up and reduce air pressure to Martian levels, and some serious aviation geeks, you should be able to design, develop and mass-produce such systems at a fraction of the cost.
I've no objection to NASA paying serious money for serious work, or paying Really Big Money for Really New Inventions, but when you're talking something that is almost at the point where anyone with encyclopedic knowledge of the 1,500+ public domain airfoils, the experience gathered by biplane and triplane designers, an Open Source CFD package and say a couple of the really freakish designs (I'd go with the DH98 Mosquito, Barnes Wallice's aircraft, and/or one of the round-the-world aircraft) could be expected to be able to come up with something workable... Someone outside of the top research groups probably won't come up with the best design, but if the margin between "it works" and "it's perfect" is sufficiently small, you don't NEED the "best" design. I don't see any proofs here that Lockheed can do better than a bunch of MIT engineers or even a sufficiently geeky high-schooler. I certainly don't see any proofs here that Lockheed'll do anything other than pull up a pre-existing design for exactly this kind of work (they've plenty to draw from - including a prior proposed shuttle replacement), re-badge it so they can pass it off as new, and spend the remaining $484M on drinks.
Hell, in the Martian atmosphere, all you really need for this kind of stuff is a collapsible, inflatable R100, the 3D solar panels that high-schooler DID design, and some ultra-light electric motors. (Definitely the R100, not the R101. You do NOT want the R101. I know this is Mars and there are traditions to uphold, but think of the Martian children.) Definitely a Zepplin derivative, not a modern blimp. There's a big difference. The R100 is probably still one of the best airship designs ever. So long as you can reassemble and inflate at destination, such a design could hop from point to point on the planet with the greatest of ease, be far less prone to mechanical fatigue than even the spectacular rovers out there at present, and potentially be scooped back up for a trip to another planet or a return to Earth.
And NASA will pay Lockheed HOW MUCH to build something almost any Slashdotter could assemble out of Japanese craft paper, the carbon fibre rods used in high-end LARP swords, and some Blue Peter sticky-back plastic? John Noakes probably has a dozen he made earlier.
By removing the nitrogen, you obviously eliminate the formation of oxides of nitrogen in the combustion, which then eliminates the formation of nitric acid (one component of acid rain, sulphuric acid being another). Not sure it helps a vast amount if you're just going to store the waste gasses anyway. One idea I've pondered over (yes, Pinky, go play in the corner with the chainsaw) depends on extremely efficient nitrogen removal and I've never been sure how you'd achieve that. The combustion of nitrogen in a car engine uses more energy than it releases (endothermic reaction), so the more nitrogen you have, the less efficient your car is.
I've looked at electrostatic methods - nitrogen holds onto electrons much more strongly than oxygen, so if you pass air over a charged grid, oxygen will be charged but nitrogen won't. You can then use a grid of the opposite charge to steer the charged oxygen at an angle into the engine, the nitrogen would however travel in a straight line. However, electrostatic methods are inefficient. You also need one hell of a charge to separate out the oxygen, if the car is traveling at any serious speed.
On the other hand, a coal power station - even a thirty megawatt one - is going to demand a LOT of oxygen and at far greater volume. It also has to be extremely efficient if it is to not use more power than the generator generates. Yes, they don't have problems with weight limits (provided it's not made of neutron star matter) or space consumed (provided it doesn't interfere too much with air traffic), problems that obviously do apply to vehicles. However, provided their method can be scaled down enough and still meet the constraints a vehicle imposes, that might be a doable approach.
The thing is, there are far more road vehicles than there are 30 megawatt coal power stations near CO2 stores, and oxides of nitrogen are a greater greenhouse problem and a greater health risk to humans than CO2 ever was. Besides, if vehicles could be made more efficient using some derivative of this idea, you'd reduce CO2 output indirectly anyway (by being far more fuel-efficient), whereas the generate-and-store method isn't guaranteed to help at all. (It takes a lot of energy to compress CO2 enough to be worth storing and there are enough major earthquakes away from any known fault-line or plate boundary to place any such deposit on land at high risk. You'd have to dump the CO2 into the oceanic trenches, which would acidify the oceans but at least carbonic acid gets converted to calcium carbonate in the long-term. Make things interesting for geologists in a million or so years, too, as opposed to lethal.)
Another approach is to increase the availability of fresh water. "Huh?" you might say. Well, plants convert CO2 to O2 only when there is sufficient water to deal with the temperature conditions. If the temperature goes up and fresh water goes down, plants are net CO2 producers. Putting all the energy that would be used on filtering/compressing into H2O production might (note, only a might) assist plant-life sufficiently to remain net O2 producers rather than go into drought mode. So long as there is a net O2 production gain, even after fresh H2O production is taken into consideration, you win. As things stand, most of the CO2-to-O2 conversion is done in extremely hot climates which are becoming hot and dry climates. That's bad news. Net O2 production shuts down, we've more problems than a few greenhouse gasses.
...is the one with the newspaper over its face, snoring in the corner, cans of soda piled up on the desk. The functional language is the one that has finished psychotherapy, is fully alert and active, and has a far higher risk of suffering a heart attack from overwork.
Well, most are. When I was working at the (then SERC) Daresbury Nuclear Structure Facility, we were basically sitting under a really big tank of SF6 (Sulpher Hexafluoride) which is not stuff you want to be breathing. It's not poisonous. It doesn't do much other than sit there and be really really inert, but that makes it a superb gas for accelerators. It also makes it hard to detect and really bad for oxygen-breathing lifeforms.
But, yes, things would go wrong all the time with that, and it was a child's toy compared to the LHC - in terms of power (Darebury's tandem accelerator was a puny 20 MeV), technology, scale, rarity/availability of skills, innovativeness, etc. Not only did things go wrong, but it routinely arced. If you thought a Van De Graaf generator or a Tesla Coil was impressive, you've never seen an accelerator when the insulating gas fails.
However, another thing to consider is the European attitude to emergencies. I got to see the operators of the facility during an SF6 leak. Those guys weren't casual by any means but they kept their cool better than most refrigerators. Working their way through the emergency drills methodically and and calmly. And that was a potentially life-threatening emergency. A mere transformer?! Pah. Bet the only ones who even flinched were the accountants. The main scientists weren't expecting to run experiments for a while yet, as it wasn't even considered as burned-in.
If the news channels thought this was significant, they've clearly never visited a laboratory after high-school and skipped classes there.
Easy to test. If N% of those lean in some direction D, then you could subtract N% from those who picked the candidate representing direction D. If the result is negative, then more who lean in direction D oppose that candidate's direction than there are who lean in other directions who support that candidate's direction. If it's positive, then there is at least one more outsider who supports that candidate's views than insiders who do not.
Option 2: Add half the "don't cares" to each side, then divide by the percentage of supporters. (This treats don't cares as a wildcard with an even distribution.)
Option 3: Plot the different opinions. Treat Obama's results as the area under the curve for the range of political views he represents. (The left is not a point, is it a broad spectrum, as is the right.) Likewise, the "McCain" results are the area under the curve for the range of spectrum he represents. The "equal" is the area under the curve representing views that lie to the right of Obama and to the left of McCain. You'll need to guess what distribution to use, to generate the curve, but I'd say gaussian with a chopped tail near the center makes sense for Obama and McCain, and the center segment is whatever you need to get the two bell curves to join up. You should end up with three turning points. You want to know how far into a candidate the undecideds cut into. You also want to know which candidate has the maximum value for the function (who represents the typical view the best) and which candidate has acceptable appeal (pick a threshold) over the broadest range. If a candidate has both broad appeal, typifies the consensus and has minimal cut-in on that issue, then that candidate is strong on that issue within their wing. Repeat, normalizing the data according to the percentages of people leaning that way. If you get the same result, then that opinion is shared by both political wings. If you get the opposite result, the view is strong but partisan.
Option 4: Decide that the Vice President and the Civil Service have the real power, that most people are stupid anyway, and that it's far more interesting to hunt for that episode of Doctor Who you were planning to watch on the weekend but didn't.
Option 5: Samne as 4, but involving lolcats and cheezburgers.
At the deep RISC level, they probably wouldn't be. In fact, they'd certainly not be, or you'd simply have an SMP cluster with some emulation on top. If you're going for the migrating code, you'd need binary compatibility at the emulated mode (think Transmeta or IBM's DAISY project) but the underlying specialization would give you the improvement over a homogeneous cluster. If you're going for the totally heterogeneous design - basically the Cell approach but on a far, far larger scale - you need endian compatibility and bus protocol compatibility but nothing more.
This Cell-like approach gives the greatest room for innovation but also imposes the greatest development costs and greatest purchase costs. It also makes ABI backwards compatibility extremely hard or impossible, so you'd end up with a proliferation of builds of the same code for any binary packages (including all closed-source) and a far more complex build and optimization process for all source packages (gentoo users beware). It also makes bus design far more complex, as the more specialized the decentralized processor units (DPUs) get, the more synchronization headaches you will get.
A DPU cluster should logically give the best performance, for the same reason pure RISC outperforms pure CISC - fewer overheads, tighter logic and also (in consequence) more real-estate for optimizations, parallelizations, cache and other goodies. Distances would be greater between processing units, which will have an impact, but so long as the mean gain across the DPUs exceeded the mean loss due to extra distance and extra communication layers, you'd gain overall. This means a DPU computer cannot be flat beyond a certain scale. As SMP clusters cannot exceed 16 processors due to locking issues with shared resources, DPU computers cannot exceed 16 DPUs for a single resource and would probably avoid sharing resources if at all physically possible. This means a DPU computer must be heavy on duplicate resources. But for duplication to beat the deadlocking issue, bus bandwidth needs to be extremely high and bus latency needs to be almost non-existent.
Cell processors are much too basic to run into these sorts of problems, but if you wanted to scale the concept up by, oh, an order of magnitude and beat the design limitations in the Cell processor, you'd need to be spending serious time and money. I expect further "specialist" *PUs to be developed for some time, but the truly RISC, truly distributed DPU is unlikely to exist outside of theory or maybe a research lab or two for at least a decade and I don't expect DPU home machines for at least 30+ years.
I'm more reading it that if you have a heterogeneous set of ultra high-performance specialized CPUs, you don't need to separate them out into CPU, GPU, or whatever. You have a cluster, where sub-tasks are migrated to the CPUs best designed for those sub-tasks, with no artificial designation of what goes where. There is no central control or central data store, and no transfer of thread control. Messages containing data would be passed, but you wouldn't be looking at a traditional API in which flow control passes from caller to callee, it would be much closer to a MIMD-style high-performance computing architecture.
However, I could be being influenced strongly by the fact that I've used such architectures in the past and happen to think that they're usually superior to sequential software designs or over-generalized processors, provided you can shift the data fast enough. (There have been some designs which reversed the entire concept: as code is generally smaller than data, there have been projects in which the functions are migrated to where the data is, only duplicating the data if absolutely necessary to support multiple read/write threads. If you had a high-enough performance RISC core, a good enough compiler, a very efficient microcode layer and something analogous to Transmeta's software instruction set, you could do this at the CPU level, but I suspect it's only beneficial if different threads almost always work on different data.)
Given the increasing performance and increasing availability of kernel-bypass and even CPU-bypass technologies, data-driven hardware is bound to eventually supersede purely procedural hardware - at least in some things. Whether graphics would be included is unproven. As the PCI bus is designed to work from host nodes to peripheral nodes, it is NOT designed to work host-to-host or peripheral-to-peripheral, such a design might require a really perverse PCI architecture or even force the eventual abandonment of PCI in order to support a more fluid layout rather than a pure hierarchy. That might happen - over the next decade or two. Until PCI Express 2.x (double rate) becomes the standard - or is superseded - on home desktop machines, this would not seem to be even a remote possibility. You don't have the functions, the multi-mastering, the virtualizing or the data rate to move to a wholly distributed internal architecture otherwise.
Sadly, I do not have the Voice. I'm not so sure about the candidates. Does anyone know if candidates are tested for Spice addiction prior to taking office?
Which you undoubtedly will, at some point, where the prices have gone up to cover the cost of paying for the patents and make a healthy(?) profit on top. I don't disapprove of companies making money, or of companies using NASA patents, but I am definitely not keen on anything that turns a potential benefit to society into an exclusive benefit for a board of directors and select shareholders.
No, you don't sound bitter. Bitter, preferably draught and in the form of three pints (with plenty of peanuts) might be a good thing right now. I would argue that you sound perceptive.
Fighter jets from that era were fairly manual, but they use the faster, autonomous parts of the brain. The conscious mind is simply too slow to operate any kind of aircraft. It's too slow to operate any kind of bicycle, perform martial arts, play sports, etc. This part of the brain pre-dates the evolution of mammals, it is by far the oldest portion of the brain and is often referred to as the "reptilian" part as it shares a common origin with reptilian brains and serves a similar purpose. It's reflexive, extremely precise, has retention capabilities far beyond the mammalian layers of the brain, and does not require any level of understanding. If you need precise answers in tenths, hundredths or even thousandths of a second, this is the part of the mind you work on. The layers dealing with feelings and thoughts are subject to latency and far less determinism.
I suspect that, as has actually been demonstrated with London cab drivers, areas of the brain handling navigation and rapid decision-making are also much larger and much more developed than for people who don't need or use those kinds of skills continuously, in life-or-death situations.
The feelings layer of the brain, the old mammalian layer, is probably irrelevant as politicians don't have feelings.
The youngest portion of the brain, which is believed to be the seat of actual high-level consciousness, rational thought and abstract thinking (although animals lacking this component do seem to possess one or more of these, somewhat complicating the model), is also the slowest part of the brain. It has clearly evolved for decisions that are less time-critical but are far more critical to get right overall, where decisions cannot be based on the "trivial" if/then logic of the reptilian brain but require far more elaborate analysis, herustics and fuzzy logic. (Oh, and by "trivial", I refer to each step. You can do a hell of a lot of very complicated things with nothing but if/then logic - essentially anything computable that will fit into the processor-in-memory architecture of this part of the brain.)
The reptilian portion of the brain is your first-line of defense against physical attack. The mammalian portions are usually better at the psychological attacks, as they are capable of treating the data with skepticism, whereas the lowest part of the brain must trust all data implicitly.
As John McCain survived extreme treatment, it is fair to say that the upper levels of his brain must be advanced enough to cope with massively conflicting information and be able to filter out sensory information that conflicts with his internal model of the world. He'd not have survived otherwise. This is undeniably a superb achievement, both of John McCain and of nature. However, the ability to place the internal model over and above anything external is probably a Bad Thing for a President, as the President's primary function is to weigh information that is different from what was previously believed. The ability to spot when prior beliefs were wrong is far more critical than simply applying old patterns fast.
In essence, the first responders in society function in the role of the reptilian brain. They need to be fast, follow old, well-rehearsed patterns, and be totally predictable and dependable in their roles. The higher levels of society and politics functions in the role of the old mammalian brain, acting as the feeling and social consciousness part of the societal brain. The Governors, Lt. Governors, Presidents and Vice Presidents are the new mammalian brain, the thinking part that must afford to take the time to not make mistakes.
John McCain, therefore, is a superb role-model for Congress and for Representatives. He performs the old mammalian brain functions faultlessly, although I totally oppose just about everything he stands for and represents. What he stands for is not that important in comparison to the fact that he satisfies the requirements of the role, in just the same way as he satisfied the role as a military first-responder.
In politics, where you stand depends on where you sit. And who you sit with, who happens to sponsor that decision, which way the wind is blowing and the length of time to the next election. There are fMRI research results that suggest that it is possible to know when a person knows they are lying, and getting them to fill out such a questionnaire hooked up to such a device (provided the results are correct) may give you some idea of whether they believe what they are saying, but even if they do, there is no device on Earth that can tell you if they'll believe the same thing tomorrow. When Douglas Adams wrote about Electronic Monks who would believe things for you to save you the effort of believing them yourself, he could easily have been writing about politicians. They are professional Believers.
I believe we should expect candidates who ARE experts in at least one non-political field, AND who have a good grounding in many different subjects. This used to be called "Classical Education" and is entirely possible. (It is also something Plato argued was a prerequisite to having an actual democracy, rather than proxy dictatorship or anarchy.) I also believe you are correct in arguing they should be competent enough to know when to listen and who to listen to. This means recognizing real credentials and real experience, as opposed to rewarding celebrities or even just very skilled talkers. Not entirely sure how you'd quantify this, though.
Ideally, people should be barred from office or official adviser positions if they have lack intelligence, wisdom, education or respect for those who do in the subject they represent. True, this would eliminate 98% of the current political class and the remaining 2% would only just qualify for answering the phones. It would also eliminate all representation in the US for the percentage of the population who are Creationists, Fundamentalists, Flat Earthers or door-to-door salesmen, but I'm not convinced this would be a bad thing either.
There have been political tensions between Ireland and what would become the UK since 6,000 BC. Possibly earlier. Given the intensity of blood feuds and the fact that violence was always the solution used, I'm damn impressed with the way things are going in Ireland today. The differences are still very visible, and the whole thing could still fall apart if someone sneezes the wrong way, but I honestly never expected things to even reach this point in my lifetime.
There have been a few suicides (and a few involuntary commitments - no, not me) in my family, so I feel vaguely qualified to comment. Yes, by far the majority of suicides are by the mentally ill. There are probably a fair few due to extreme adversity, but those tend to be a minority of cases, and one could argue that those are due to a mental illness in the social structure itself. You see the "high profile" suicides, but only because they're high profile and not because of some self-gratification. Some are burned out and mentally destroyed by society's demands, others are celebrities because their mental illness grants them the genius as well as the means of destruction. Some religions and philosophies decry suicides, but usually it is defects in the support system they denounce, not the individual. Some sects and denominations twist it to blame the victim, but that's insanity in itself.
If you look at some of the early "revolutionary" games (eg: Colossal Cave, Dungeon, MUD, Elite, Revs, Wolfenstein 3D) they are almost invariably produced by one or two superbly talented programmers. Some of these ideas are then "enhanced" by the software houses and gaming companies, and some are "sponsored", re-badged, and so on, by such people, but generally the sweatshops are not the place to find real, cutting-edge innovation. Improved graphics, perhaps, but not core invention of whole new concepts. It happens, but the individuals and the couple of friends MUST invent if they are to be competitive and pay the bills, whereas a software house only needs to sell a few of each of a few hundred minor variants of the same core to stay in business. They have zero incentive to do something radical. If anything, radical stuff is riskier, as one failure impacts every single spin-off. Garage developers know that everything is risky, so differentiation becomes a higher priority.
More than a few are pre-published for free, but aren't peer-reviewed and can potentially therefore deviate substantially from what is actually published. Since an entire science journal doesn't usually cost $18, except perhaps for something truly arcane, and as most scientists can't afford to buy their own journals, relying on the University library to do it for them, the odds are extremely high that you'll find a cheaper version somewhere.
I read the summary as more of a better feedback system. The earlier you can detect abnormalities, the earlier you can correct them. If the loops are only stable when the plasma is correctly configured, then your feedback becomes almost instantaneous from the time the plasma begins to destabilize, rather than being a rather slow interpretation of data from sensors that will only spot a problem once it passes the error threshold for that sensor. It would be like using the interference pattern from a tuning fork, rather than trying to copy the sound - the feedback loop becomes a part of the system.
Society is highly inter-dependent. That means you depend on the actions of others, whether you like it or not. Assuming a gaussian distribution, 50% of the population would have a below-average intelligence, average being 100. However, there are more people alive with an IQ of 150 than there are with an IQ of 50, which means that more than 50% must have an IQ of below 100 for that to be the mean IQ. That should be obvious anyway as only one tail is open-ended. Dunno about you, but I sure as hell don't want to put my fate in the hands of the financial decisions of those with an IQ of 80 or 90. As for education, yes, well-educated people should be making sound financial decisions. What percentage of Americans actually graduate from an accredited University with a higher degree that also includes a mathematical element? (ie: Degrees in Jedi-ology don't count.) Probably not a vast number, I suspect. Far smaller than what it should be or could be, though you're never going to get 100% no matter what you do.
But even if you transformed America into a race of super-geniuses tomorrow, the majority of Americans live on a diet of macaroni and cheese. Even if they never got taxed again in their life, how much of the road system could they sensibly maintain on their own? How long would it take to pay off even the cost of the school equipment their kids use? A lifetime wouldn't be enough for many. But collectively, they've more than enough resources to move mountains. The key being "collectively". It's incredibly hard to get any group of people to work well together, and given the obsessive paranoia over the myth of "communism" in America, it's amazing anything collective ever happens at all. Ideally, that is the sum total of what Government is - a mechanism by which people can delegate the means and the money to get the hard stuff done.
But the hard stuff is only worth doing if it pays back, in the long run, where the long run can easily be in terms of centuries. (A thatched roof made from Australian water reeds can last up to one century. The roof of one house is short-term, when it comes to the interests of a nation of a few hundred million people. The steam pipes in New York and the drainage system in London are both well over a hundred years old and are only now in need of maintenance. A popular motor race in Britain, The Brighton Run, doesn't even allow cars that are less than 100 years old to take part. A century isn't a long time, and nations that intend to last longer than that need to think longer than that.
If done right, these projects are horrifically expensive at the outset but are infinitely more affordable for the populace as a whole than doing the same thing a hundred times over shabbily. 95% of Americans can't afford to think that way, though. Still has to be done, or they won't be able to afford to think at all. The cost of living will be too high for them to live.
(Yes, I'm an advocate of tax-and-spend, so long as it actually makes a greater difference in the long term to get the job done right than to merely get something that can be rubber-stamped as the job done.)
That would be fair if (a) you were not likely running SMP and/or multi-core, and (b) most server software is horribly bloated - I swear Oracle and IBM assume you've 10 gigs of RAM and a terabyte RAID array. Because you're likely to be running a LOT of seriously heavyweight software, especially if virtualizing the machine, you really do need hefty swap.
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I seem to remember ogo being a full replacement and that's been out for a while. Also, although you want to provide compatibility with Exchange, don't you want to provide additional capabilities so that Exchange systems are forced to upgrade to you, rather than the other way round? (Embrace-and-extend, but non-toxic.)
Small, low-cost investigator-led missions in an atmosphere. In other words, robotic hang-gliders, gliders and microlights. And this is going to cost $485 million? How many does NASA expect to get for that? The Germans had mastered the basic technology in the 40s, with rocket-launched glider bombs, radiation-proofing by better shielding rather than expensive layouts has been used in space vehicles for ages now, and UAVs have become practically commonplace. Yes, you need more reliable unfurling systems, as you can't rely on astronauts to make repairs on Mars missions just yet, and the Martian atmosphere is sufficiently thin that you really do need excellent lift to maintain flight, but I see nothing here that is technologically revolutionary. It looks like a basic evolution from existing hardware, along with a little repackaging. So long as you've a good supply of ultra-light materials, access to an aircraft hanger you can seal up and reduce air pressure to Martian levels, and some serious aviation geeks, you should be able to design, develop and mass-produce such systems at a fraction of the cost.
I've no objection to NASA paying serious money for serious work, or paying Really Big Money for Really New Inventions, but when you're talking something that is almost at the point where anyone with encyclopedic knowledge of the 1,500+ public domain airfoils, the experience gathered by biplane and triplane designers, an Open Source CFD package and say a couple of the really freakish designs (I'd go with the DH98 Mosquito, Barnes Wallice's aircraft, and/or one of the round-the-world aircraft) could be expected to be able to come up with something workable... Someone outside of the top research groups probably won't come up with the best design, but if the margin between "it works" and "it's perfect" is sufficiently small, you don't NEED the "best" design. I don't see any proofs here that Lockheed can do better than a bunch of MIT engineers or even a sufficiently geeky high-schooler. I certainly don't see any proofs here that Lockheed'll do anything other than pull up a pre-existing design for exactly this kind of work (they've plenty to draw from - including a prior proposed shuttle replacement), re-badge it so they can pass it off as new, and spend the remaining $484M on drinks.
Hell, in the Martian atmosphere, all you really need for this kind of stuff is a collapsible, inflatable R100, the 3D solar panels that high-schooler DID design, and some ultra-light electric motors. (Definitely the R100, not the R101. You do NOT want the R101. I know this is Mars and there are traditions to uphold, but think of the Martian children.) Definitely a Zepplin derivative, not a modern blimp. There's a big difference. The R100 is probably still one of the best airship designs ever. So long as you can reassemble and inflate at destination, such a design could hop from point to point on the planet with the greatest of ease, be far less prone to mechanical fatigue than even the spectacular rovers out there at present, and potentially be scooped back up for a trip to another planet or a return to Earth.
And NASA will pay Lockheed HOW MUCH to build something almost any Slashdotter could assemble out of Japanese craft paper, the carbon fibre rods used in high-end LARP swords, and some Blue Peter sticky-back plastic? John Noakes probably has a dozen he made earlier.
By removing the nitrogen, you obviously eliminate the formation of oxides of nitrogen in the combustion, which then eliminates the formation of nitric acid (one component of acid rain, sulphuric acid being another). Not sure it helps a vast amount if you're just going to store the waste gasses anyway. One idea I've pondered over (yes, Pinky, go play in the corner with the chainsaw) depends on extremely efficient nitrogen removal and I've never been sure how you'd achieve that. The combustion of nitrogen in a car engine uses more energy than it releases (endothermic reaction), so the more nitrogen you have, the less efficient your car is. I've looked at electrostatic methods - nitrogen holds onto electrons much more strongly than oxygen, so if you pass air over a charged grid, oxygen will be charged but nitrogen won't. You can then use a grid of the opposite charge to steer the charged oxygen at an angle into the engine, the nitrogen would however travel in a straight line. However, electrostatic methods are inefficient. You also need one hell of a charge to separate out the oxygen, if the car is traveling at any serious speed. On the other hand, a coal power station - even a thirty megawatt one - is going to demand a LOT of oxygen and at far greater volume. It also has to be extremely efficient if it is to not use more power than the generator generates. Yes, they don't have problems with weight limits (provided it's not made of neutron star matter) or space consumed (provided it doesn't interfere too much with air traffic), problems that obviously do apply to vehicles. However, provided their method can be scaled down enough and still meet the constraints a vehicle imposes, that might be a doable approach. The thing is, there are far more road vehicles than there are 30 megawatt coal power stations near CO2 stores, and oxides of nitrogen are a greater greenhouse problem and a greater health risk to humans than CO2 ever was. Besides, if vehicles could be made more efficient using some derivative of this idea, you'd reduce CO2 output indirectly anyway (by being far more fuel-efficient), whereas the generate-and-store method isn't guaranteed to help at all. (It takes a lot of energy to compress CO2 enough to be worth storing and there are enough major earthquakes away from any known fault-line or plate boundary to place any such deposit on land at high risk. You'd have to dump the CO2 into the oceanic trenches, which would acidify the oceans but at least carbonic acid gets converted to calcium carbonate in the long-term. Make things interesting for geologists in a million or so years, too, as opposed to lethal.) Another approach is to increase the availability of fresh water. "Huh?" you might say. Well, plants convert CO2 to O2 only when there is sufficient water to deal with the temperature conditions. If the temperature goes up and fresh water goes down, plants are net CO2 producers. Putting all the energy that would be used on filtering/compressing into H2O production might (note, only a might) assist plant-life sufficiently to remain net O2 producers rather than go into drought mode. So long as there is a net O2 production gain, even after fresh H2O production is taken into consideration, you win. As things stand, most of the CO2-to-O2 conversion is done in extremely hot climates which are becoming hot and dry climates. That's bad news. Net O2 production shuts down, we've more problems than a few greenhouse gasses.
...is the one with the newspaper over its face, snoring in the corner, cans of soda piled up on the desk. The functional language is the one that has finished psychotherapy, is fully alert and active, and has a far higher risk of suffering a heart attack from overwork.
Well, most are. When I was working at the (then SERC) Daresbury Nuclear Structure Facility, we were basically sitting under a really big tank of SF6 (Sulpher Hexafluoride) which is not stuff you want to be breathing. It's not poisonous. It doesn't do much other than sit there and be really really inert, but that makes it a superb gas for accelerators. It also makes it hard to detect and really bad for oxygen-breathing lifeforms. But, yes, things would go wrong all the time with that, and it was a child's toy compared to the LHC - in terms of power (Darebury's tandem accelerator was a puny 20 MeV), technology, scale, rarity/availability of skills, innovativeness, etc. Not only did things go wrong, but it routinely arced. If you thought a Van De Graaf generator or a Tesla Coil was impressive, you've never seen an accelerator when the insulating gas fails. However, another thing to consider is the European attitude to emergencies. I got to see the operators of the facility during an SF6 leak. Those guys weren't casual by any means but they kept their cool better than most refrigerators. Working their way through the emergency drills methodically and and calmly. And that was a potentially life-threatening emergency. A mere transformer?! Pah. Bet the only ones who even flinched were the accountants. The main scientists weren't expecting to run experiments for a while yet, as it wasn't even considered as burned-in. If the news channels thought this was significant, they've clearly never visited a laboratory after high-school and skipped classes there.
Easy to test. If N% of those lean in some direction D, then you could subtract N% from those who picked the candidate representing direction D. If the result is negative, then more who lean in direction D oppose that candidate's direction than there are who lean in other directions who support that candidate's direction. If it's positive, then there is at least one more outsider who supports that candidate's views than insiders who do not.
Option 2: Add half the "don't cares" to each side, then divide by the percentage of supporters. (This treats don't cares as a wildcard with an even distribution.)
Option 3: Plot the different opinions. Treat Obama's results as the area under the curve for the range of political views he represents. (The left is not a point, is it a broad spectrum, as is the right.) Likewise, the "McCain" results are the area under the curve for the range of spectrum he represents. The "equal" is the area under the curve representing views that lie to the right of Obama and to the left of McCain. You'll need to guess what distribution to use, to generate the curve, but I'd say gaussian with a chopped tail near the center makes sense for Obama and McCain, and the center segment is whatever you need to get the two bell curves to join up. You should end up with three turning points. You want to know how far into a candidate the undecideds cut into. You also want to know which candidate has the maximum value for the function (who represents the typical view the best) and which candidate has acceptable appeal (pick a threshold) over the broadest range. If a candidate has both broad appeal, typifies the consensus and has minimal cut-in on that issue, then that candidate is strong on that issue within their wing. Repeat, normalizing the data according to the percentages of people leaning that way. If you get the same result, then that opinion is shared by both political wings. If you get the opposite result, the view is strong but partisan.
Option 4: Decide that the Vice President and the Civil Service have the real power, that most people are stupid anyway, and that it's far more interesting to hunt for that episode of Doctor Who you were planning to watch on the weekend but didn't.
Option 5: Samne as 4, but involving lolcats and cheezburgers.
At the deep RISC level, they probably wouldn't be. In fact, they'd certainly not be, or you'd simply have an SMP cluster with some emulation on top. If you're going for the migrating code, you'd need binary compatibility at the emulated mode (think Transmeta or IBM's DAISY project) but the underlying specialization would give you the improvement over a homogeneous cluster. If you're going for the totally heterogeneous design - basically the Cell approach but on a far, far larger scale - you need endian compatibility and bus protocol compatibility but nothing more.
This Cell-like approach gives the greatest room for innovation but also imposes the greatest development costs and greatest purchase costs. It also makes ABI backwards compatibility extremely hard or impossible, so you'd end up with a proliferation of builds of the same code for any binary packages (including all closed-source) and a far more complex build and optimization process for all source packages (gentoo users beware). It also makes bus design far more complex, as the more specialized the decentralized processor units (DPUs) get, the more synchronization headaches you will get.
A DPU cluster should logically give the best performance, for the same reason pure RISC outperforms pure CISC - fewer overheads, tighter logic and also (in consequence) more real-estate for optimizations, parallelizations, cache and other goodies. Distances would be greater between processing units, which will have an impact, but so long as the mean gain across the DPUs exceeded the mean loss due to extra distance and extra communication layers, you'd gain overall. This means a DPU computer cannot be flat beyond a certain scale. As SMP clusters cannot exceed 16 processors due to locking issues with shared resources, DPU computers cannot exceed 16 DPUs for a single resource and would probably avoid sharing resources if at all physically possible. This means a DPU computer must be heavy on duplicate resources. But for duplication to beat the deadlocking issue, bus bandwidth needs to be extremely high and bus latency needs to be almost non-existent.
Cell processors are much too basic to run into these sorts of problems, but if you wanted to scale the concept up by, oh, an order of magnitude and beat the design limitations in the Cell processor, you'd need to be spending serious time and money. I expect further "specialist" *PUs to be developed for some time, but the truly RISC, truly distributed DPU is unlikely to exist outside of theory or maybe a research lab or two for at least a decade and I don't expect DPU home machines for at least 30+ years.
I'm more reading it that if you have a heterogeneous set of ultra high-performance specialized CPUs, you don't need to separate them out into CPU, GPU, or whatever. You have a cluster, where sub-tasks are migrated to the CPUs best designed for those sub-tasks, with no artificial designation of what goes where. There is no central control or central data store, and no transfer of thread control. Messages containing data would be passed, but you wouldn't be looking at a traditional API in which flow control passes from caller to callee, it would be much closer to a MIMD-style high-performance computing architecture.
However, I could be being influenced strongly by the fact that I've used such architectures in the past and happen to think that they're usually superior to sequential software designs or over-generalized processors, provided you can shift the data fast enough. (There have been some designs which reversed the entire concept: as code is generally smaller than data, there have been projects in which the functions are migrated to where the data is, only duplicating the data if absolutely necessary to support multiple read/write threads. If you had a high-enough performance RISC core, a good enough compiler, a very efficient microcode layer and something analogous to Transmeta's software instruction set, you could do this at the CPU level, but I suspect it's only beneficial if different threads almost always work on different data.)
Given the increasing performance and increasing availability of kernel-bypass and even CPU-bypass technologies, data-driven hardware is bound to eventually supersede purely procedural hardware - at least in some things. Whether graphics would be included is unproven. As the PCI bus is designed to work from host nodes to peripheral nodes, it is NOT designed to work host-to-host or peripheral-to-peripheral, such a design might require a really perverse PCI architecture or even force the eventual abandonment of PCI in order to support a more fluid layout rather than a pure hierarchy. That might happen - over the next decade or two. Until PCI Express 2.x (double rate) becomes the standard - or is superseded - on home desktop machines, this would not seem to be even a remote possibility. You don't have the functions, the multi-mastering, the virtualizing or the data rate to move to a wholly distributed internal architecture otherwise.
Sadly, I do not have the Voice. I'm not so sure about the candidates. Does anyone know if candidates are tested for Spice addiction prior to taking office?
Which you undoubtedly will, at some point, where the prices have gone up to cover the cost of paying for the patents and make a healthy(?) profit on top. I don't disapprove of companies making money, or of companies using NASA patents, but I am definitely not keen on anything that turns a potential benefit to society into an exclusive benefit for a board of directors and select shareholders.
So long as it's not free Bane (slightly obscure Sarah Jane Adventures #1 ref).
No, you don't sound bitter. Bitter, preferably draught and in the form of three pints (with plenty of peanuts) might be a good thing right now. I would argue that you sound perceptive.
Nonono, User-Friendly means Illiad gets a discount.
Fighter jets from that era were fairly manual, but they use the faster, autonomous parts of the brain. The conscious mind is simply too slow to operate any kind of aircraft. It's too slow to operate any kind of bicycle, perform martial arts, play sports, etc. This part of the brain pre-dates the evolution of mammals, it is by far the oldest portion of the brain and is often referred to as the "reptilian" part as it shares a common origin with reptilian brains and serves a similar purpose. It's reflexive, extremely precise, has retention capabilities far beyond the mammalian layers of the brain, and does not require any level of understanding. If you need precise answers in tenths, hundredths or even thousandths of a second, this is the part of the mind you work on. The layers dealing with feelings and thoughts are subject to latency and far less determinism.
I suspect that, as has actually been demonstrated with London cab drivers, areas of the brain handling navigation and rapid decision-making are also much larger and much more developed than for people who don't need or use those kinds of skills continuously, in life-or-death situations.
The feelings layer of the brain, the old mammalian layer, is probably irrelevant as politicians don't have feelings.
The youngest portion of the brain, which is believed to be the seat of actual high-level consciousness, rational thought and abstract thinking (although animals lacking this component do seem to possess one or more of these, somewhat complicating the model), is also the slowest part of the brain. It has clearly evolved for decisions that are less time-critical but are far more critical to get right overall, where decisions cannot be based on the "trivial" if/then logic of the reptilian brain but require far more elaborate analysis, herustics and fuzzy logic. (Oh, and by "trivial", I refer to each step. You can do a hell of a lot of very complicated things with nothing but if/then logic - essentially anything computable that will fit into the processor-in-memory architecture of this part of the brain.)
The reptilian portion of the brain is your first-line of defense against physical attack. The mammalian portions are usually better at the psychological attacks, as they are capable of treating the data with skepticism, whereas the lowest part of the brain must trust all data implicitly.
As John McCain survived extreme treatment, it is fair to say that the upper levels of his brain must be advanced enough to cope with massively conflicting information and be able to filter out sensory information that conflicts with his internal model of the world. He'd not have survived otherwise. This is undeniably a superb achievement, both of John McCain and of nature. However, the ability to place the internal model over and above anything external is probably a Bad Thing for a President, as the President's primary function is to weigh information that is different from what was previously believed. The ability to spot when prior beliefs were wrong is far more critical than simply applying old patterns fast.
In essence, the first responders in society function in the role of the reptilian brain. They need to be fast, follow old, well-rehearsed patterns, and be totally predictable and dependable in their roles. The higher levels of society and politics functions in the role of the old mammalian brain, acting as the feeling and social consciousness part of the societal brain. The Governors, Lt. Governors, Presidents and Vice Presidents are the new mammalian brain, the thinking part that must afford to take the time to not make mistakes.
John McCain, therefore, is a superb role-model for Congress and for Representatives. He performs the old mammalian brain functions faultlessly, although I totally oppose just about everything he stands for and represents. What he stands for is not that important in comparison to the fact that he satisfies the requirements of the role, in just the same way as he satisfied the role as a military first-responder.
In politics, where you stand depends on where you sit. And who you sit with, who happens to sponsor that decision, which way the wind is blowing and the length of time to the next election. There are fMRI research results that suggest that it is possible to know when a person knows they are lying, and getting them to fill out such a questionnaire hooked up to such a device (provided the results are correct) may give you some idea of whether they believe what they are saying, but even if they do, there is no device on Earth that can tell you if they'll believe the same thing tomorrow. When Douglas Adams wrote about Electronic Monks who would believe things for you to save you the effort of believing them yourself, he could easily have been writing about politicians. They are professional Believers.
I believe we should expect candidates who ARE experts in at least one non-political field, AND who have a good grounding in many different subjects. This used to be called "Classical Education" and is entirely possible. (It is also something Plato argued was a prerequisite to having an actual democracy, rather than proxy dictatorship or anarchy.) I also believe you are correct in arguing they should be competent enough to know when to listen and who to listen to. This means recognizing real credentials and real experience, as opposed to rewarding celebrities or even just very skilled talkers. Not entirely sure how you'd quantify this, though.
Ideally, people should be barred from office or official adviser positions if they have lack intelligence, wisdom, education or respect for those who do in the subject they represent. True, this would eliminate 98% of the current political class and the remaining 2% would only just qualify for answering the phones. It would also eliminate all representation in the US for the percentage of the population who are Creationists, Fundamentalists, Flat Earthers or door-to-door salesmen, but I'm not convinced this would be a bad thing either.
Wait a minute - since when do Imperial Star Destroyers use warp drives? They use Bistromath. That's why the commanders always seem drunk.
There have been political tensions between Ireland and what would become the UK since 6,000 BC. Possibly earlier. Given the intensity of blood feuds and the fact that violence was always the solution used, I'm damn impressed with the way things are going in Ireland today. The differences are still very visible, and the whole thing could still fall apart if someone sneezes the wrong way, but I honestly never expected things to even reach this point in my lifetime.
There have been a few suicides (and a few involuntary commitments - no, not me) in my family, so I feel vaguely qualified to comment. Yes, by far the majority of suicides are by the mentally ill. There are probably a fair few due to extreme adversity, but those tend to be a minority of cases, and one could argue that those are due to a mental illness in the social structure itself. You see the "high profile" suicides, but only because they're high profile and not because of some self-gratification. Some are burned out and mentally destroyed by society's demands, others are celebrities because their mental illness grants them the genius as well as the means of destruction. Some religions and philosophies decry suicides, but usually it is defects in the support system they denounce, not the individual. Some sects and denominations twist it to blame the victim, but that's insanity in itself.
If you look at some of the early "revolutionary" games (eg: Colossal Cave, Dungeon, MUD, Elite, Revs, Wolfenstein 3D) they are almost invariably produced by one or two superbly talented programmers. Some of these ideas are then "enhanced" by the software houses and gaming companies, and some are "sponsored", re-badged, and so on, by such people, but generally the sweatshops are not the place to find real, cutting-edge innovation. Improved graphics, perhaps, but not core invention of whole new concepts. It happens, but the individuals and the couple of friends MUST invent if they are to be competitive and pay the bills, whereas a software house only needs to sell a few of each of a few hundred minor variants of the same core to stay in business. They have zero incentive to do something radical. If anything, radical stuff is riskier, as one failure impacts every single spin-off. Garage developers know that everything is risky, so differentiation becomes a higher priority.
More than a few are pre-published for free, but aren't peer-reviewed and can potentially therefore deviate substantially from what is actually published. Since an entire science journal doesn't usually cost $18, except perhaps for something truly arcane, and as most scientists can't afford to buy their own journals, relying on the University library to do it for them, the odds are extremely high that you'll find a cheaper version somewhere.
I read the summary as more of a better feedback system. The earlier you can detect abnormalities, the earlier you can correct them. If the loops are only stable when the plasma is correctly configured, then your feedback becomes almost instantaneous from the time the plasma begins to destabilize, rather than being a rather slow interpretation of data from sensors that will only spot a problem once it passes the error threshold for that sensor. It would be like using the interference pattern from a tuning fork, rather than trying to copy the sound - the feedback loop becomes a part of the system.
I always wondered what the "Vice" in "Vice President" meant.
Society is highly inter-dependent. That means you depend on the actions of others, whether you like it or not. Assuming a gaussian distribution, 50% of the population would have a below-average intelligence, average being 100. However, there are more people alive with an IQ of 150 than there are with an IQ of 50, which means that more than 50% must have an IQ of below 100 for that to be the mean IQ. That should be obvious anyway as only one tail is open-ended. Dunno about you, but I sure as hell don't want to put my fate in the hands of the financial decisions of those with an IQ of 80 or 90. As for education, yes, well-educated people should be making sound financial decisions. What percentage of Americans actually graduate from an accredited University with a higher degree that also includes a mathematical element? (ie: Degrees in Jedi-ology don't count.) Probably not a vast number, I suspect. Far smaller than what it should be or could be, though you're never going to get 100% no matter what you do.
But even if you transformed America into a race of super-geniuses tomorrow, the majority of Americans live on a diet of macaroni and cheese. Even if they never got taxed again in their life, how much of the road system could they sensibly maintain on their own? How long would it take to pay off even the cost of the school equipment their kids use? A lifetime wouldn't be enough for many. But collectively, they've more than enough resources to move mountains. The key being "collectively". It's incredibly hard to get any group of people to work well together, and given the obsessive paranoia over the myth of "communism" in America, it's amazing anything collective ever happens at all. Ideally, that is the sum total of what Government is - a mechanism by which people can delegate the means and the money to get the hard stuff done.
But the hard stuff is only worth doing if it pays back, in the long run, where the long run can easily be in terms of centuries. (A thatched roof made from Australian water reeds can last up to one century. The roof of one house is short-term, when it comes to the interests of a nation of a few hundred million people. The steam pipes in New York and the drainage system in London are both well over a hundred years old and are only now in need of maintenance. A popular motor race in Britain, The Brighton Run, doesn't even allow cars that are less than 100 years old to take part. A century isn't a long time, and nations that intend to last longer than that need to think longer than that.
If done right, these projects are horrifically expensive at the outset but are infinitely more affordable for the populace as a whole than doing the same thing a hundred times over shabbily. 95% of Americans can't afford to think that way, though. Still has to be done, or they won't be able to afford to think at all. The cost of living will be too high for them to live.
(Yes, I'm an advocate of tax-and-spend, so long as it actually makes a greater difference in the long term to get the job done right than to merely get something that can be rubber-stamped as the job done.)
That would be fair if (a) you were not likely running SMP and/or multi-core, and (b) most server software is horribly bloated - I swear Oracle and IBM assume you've 10 gigs of RAM and a terabyte RAID array. Because you're likely to be running a LOT of seriously heavyweight software, especially if virtualizing the machine, you really do need hefty swap.