The study is flawed from a number of perspectives. First, as you mention, the current costs to consumers vastly exceed the costs to provide this mythical doubling in bandwidth. Secondly, network neutrality (to me) means that everyone gets the same experience and access as everyone else. This means that if you implement user-neutral traffic management (packet dropping schemes to minimize retransmits, throttling streams at congested points, fair service to ensure no connection is stagnant, smarter routing algorithms that avoid segments that are basically dead in the water) and user-neutral methods of improving data distribution (web caches, multicasting, SRM) then you gain virtually all of the benefits AT&T claim for their non-neutral system - and more besides - without harming a single user.
The above remedies would give all of the smoothing at peak times on heavily loaded routers, but in a manner that is entirely equitable and - get this - doesn't actually reduce the service provided to anyone. The peaks that kill the backbones are not particularly long-lived and contain a vast number of unnecessary retransmits, inflating the traffic levels. Schemes already exist that can potentially halve the retransmits and diffuse the load over just enough time that it can be handled. Other schemes already exist that can eliminate unnecessary repeat transmissions from source, massively reducing the load on the most burdened segments.
None of these require that any user be given priority or special privileges. None of these require that neutrality be compromised. Yet none of these require that either services or end-users experience any detectable delays (at worst) - and most of the time, both services and end-users will experience a much faster, smoother Internet.
Of course, you'll never get AT&T to admit that the reason they can't do any better is that they're not only greedy but also technologically incompetent. Nonetheless, that is the reality of the situation. It is also something missing from said "study".
I was copying the music on the radio
I had a feeling that something's not RIAA
The music was loud, we could still hear the crowd
From the covers that we played that night
We logged into an unsecure WAP network
Stopped awhile, Youtube'd around
But I still had a feeling that something's not RIAA
As we started on homeward bound
Stop, get out
We are the strong arm of the lore
Stop, get out
We are the strong arm of the lore
Into the night came a blue flashing light
A blast from the M60 to make sure
And we came to a stop behind the motorway cop
Who'd been pirating us for more than an hour
He pulled us out of the car on the side of the road
He questioned us one at a time
Where is the laptop we know that you use
We said the only shares we own are hedgefunds.
You should've seen the stupid smirk drop from his face
It was a negative exercise
The songs that we sing and the CDs that we own
They thought it was an easy hack
I will start by defining what I mean by a "Wonder": Something that was arguably beyond the means or skills of the builders prior to construction, required some sort of inventiveness or innovation to make what was available enough, could not easily be reproduced by cultures technically far superior (a weekend wonder is not much of a wonder - it should still produce real shock and awe hundreds or thousands of years later), and should inspire wonder in the majority of people, without regard to culture or nationality.
A wall of mud/straw bricks, a rather basic statue? The Colosseum wasn't counted by the Greeks and Romans, because they didn't see it as particularly spectacular. Machu Picchu and Petra I can understand. Those are genuinely wonders, in my books. The difficulty in construction was more tan just a matter of patience and time - there were genuinely major technological problems that required solving.
Then consider the marvels of their use. The Great Wall was a showpiece - it had negligible defensive value and did far more to engender paranoia within the culture. Not particularly marvelous - politicians create such illusions to feed paranoid tendencies all the time. Petra was the trading capital of the world, even into Roman times. It was to ancient commerce what the major ports and stock exchanges combined are to modern commerce. And it was built by a bunch of nomads who were tired of trail rations, not some major advanced civilization.
When you look at the Ancient Wonders, you look at things that maxed out (or exceeded) the capabilities of those building it. There are several that are so staggering that people are still unsure if they ever existed. The fact that the upper Pyramid blocks were poured like concrete hardly diminishes them - it shows how much they had to push their engineers that they had to invent a whole entire branch of material science to just finish the damn thing.
"Christ the Redeemer" needed what? Some reinforced concrete and a layer of soapstone. A big construction, sure, worthy of being considered a great feat of sculpting, but hardly in the same league as requiring entire new sciences and technologies.
I like the idea of seven new wonders, but they really should be wonders. They should highlight the true pinnacles of the human spirit. The list presented highlighted the pinnacle of what looks good on a postcard. Not exactly what I'd call wonders.
As for the question of whether they should have been decided by vote, I'd have split this up. I'd have given votes to people over the Internet/phone/whatever, but I'd have made some effort to limit it to one person one vote. I would THEN have given a panel of scientists/engineers an equal number of votes to represent the technological/scientific wonderfulness of each site. Finally, I'd have given another equal portion of votes to anthropologists, sociologists and cultural experts covering as many cultures and nations as possible.
The winning seven would then be decided by the merits of the awe in individuals, the awe in the achievement and the likely longevity and universality of that awe. Anything that can do well in all three categories is deserving of being called a Wonder. In practical terms, this means stepping through each list until you find seven that every group agrees is top. If you go more than a few percent without finding seven, you keep the winners so far, dump the rest of the list, and start with fresh achievements. And you keep going until you have achieved a universal agreement on the seven greatest Wonders.
They are not elected, but their backers are. The people who can get them promoted - or impeached, the people who can get the laws passed that the judge wants - these are all elected officials. Personally, I think judges should be required to be politically neutral - since they are outside of the democratic mechanisms, they should be wholly outside of political influence. (That's the reason that British members of the House of Lords, the Royal Family and other powerful members of the aristocracy were at one time denied the power to vote and have far fewer rights than commoners. Nobody gets a voice in multiple sections of Government.)
Personal world-view should never factor in -- we do not need a world filled with clones of Judge Pickles. When a judge is sitting on a case, they should be concerned with how the law is to be interpreted (by using some mix of the letter and spirit of the law, along with case law - ie: precedents) and with ensuring that all participants are behaving in accordance with recognized principles of behavior. If they're actually doing the deciding, they also need to weigh the merits of all sides. Neither popular opinion nor personal opinion should play a part. If either of those do, any conviction is automatically unsafe and unsatisfactory.
Those who can prove they were affected are mishandling classified material and are therefore terrorists
Those who can prove they were NOT affected must also be mishandling classified material, but since they're not terrorists, they must be traitors
Those who can reasonably conclude they were probably affected can't sue because probable cause is not proof
The remainder of the population is obviously hiding something and is probably being spied on by all the other agencies
Fortunately, the decision can be appealed. No guarantee that would do any good. Since we're in election season, judges are standing by their political affiliations on all sides. Even if the decision was favorable to the plaintiffs, though, there's no reason to believe that it'll do any good. How many Republican senators are going to want to look weak on national security right now? That means even if the matter does stay in the courts, it is very unlikely anything will happen before late in November 2008. Of course, if it does stay in the courts, the NSA could just plead guilty and have the President issue a full pardon the following day, rescinding the finding and penalties exacted.
You are right, but it has to be done in a way that is NOT based on outward symptoms that anyone can interpret how they like, but in neutral, repeatable, quantifiable ways that the kids can see, take part in the interpretation and relate to. Otherwise, it's your word against theirs, and who are they going to believe more?
(Kids are not stupid and attempts to control them will usually be counterproductive.)
You are also right that treatment is a moral responsibility, the problem is that society invests too much in treating only symptoms and doesn't look at what is underlying them. And, no, what the UK Govt wants to ban is not an underlying cause. If it's related at all, it's merely surface stuff, and there's no reason to believe a relationship exists at this time.
I don't care how someone behaves. My point is that if a kid is being bullied at home, you can teach the kid emotional self-defense, and if a kid needs a different style of education (Asperger kids learn differently and are often mis-labeled "problems" by teachers because of it), provide it.
Kids who are "problems" don't need to be changed, 999 times out of 1000. Kids who are "problems" are usually misunderstood (I hate that term, but it's the right one in this case).
You're right about the number. Hmmm. (*checks current memberships of Labor and Conservative parties...*) Well, maybe they're not that far off...
But you're right that screening would help. However, it would require some minor changes to the way people think. If a kid is mentally skewed, there's an excellent chance that this is because their entire family is totally wacko and that was simply the only way the kid could remain sane within those conditions. (See: "People of the Lie", by Scott Peck.) In order to do true prevention, it would require the family unit in such cases to change. That's not going to be an easy sell. Can it be detected by a screening program? Sure. The stress involved totally skews the production of chemicals within the brain and causes a number of key segments to go totally nuts. It should be trivial to spot, long before the kid's brain is permanently mangled.
Bipolar disorders generally won't become noticeable from mere observation until a child is about 9 or 10. It will show up under a high-resolution fMRI scan many years prior, but whether treatment is advisable at that stage is an open question. The last thing you want is for the brain to be desensitized to the treatment by the time it's actually needed.
Asperger's Syndrome can also be detected by fMRI again far earlier than it could be detected by observation. It's not treatable at all, but as it produces superb, brilliant engineers, that might be a good thing. However, you'll reduce behavioral problems by allowing for it and teaching accordingly.
Schizophrenia is another one that can be detected by fMRI long before it becomes a problem. I am unsure if there is any way of preventing it from bursting out, if detected early, but it's possible. Since schizophrenics make up a significant fraction of the homeless and those who carry out crimes of desperation, you should be able to eliminate two major problems if you could keep this neurological disorder from ever breaking out.
The people you "least expect" are usually the ones who (a) in a heavily co-dependent relationship with teachers (which is mentally unbalanced), (b) quiet workaholics with a gigantic IQ (a large percentage of the Asperger population), or (c) extremely timid and shy (because they've learned how dangerous and powerful abuse is). The first and last groups have already "gone bad" to some degree, the second - if not spotted and their abilities honed skillfully - will.
Can all of these people be spotted quickly enough and treated, in an affordable and sensible manner? Yes to the spotted, probably to the treated, no idea on the affordable - except that society can't really afford not to in the long term.
a small army of mental health experts scoured Britain's jails and prisons for people who are mentally ill
AND the Government there agreed that such people could have their remaining time to be served transferred to a mental health facility of equal security and comparable restrictions
AND such individuals received comprehensive assessments (psychological, neurological, whatever) of a high standard (there's a seven Tesla MRI facility in Britain, so why use the dime store models?)
AND any medical treatment is designed specifically and solely to correct the issues and nothing more (ie: no fobbing them off on ultra-powerful mind-altering substances to shut them up, the way South Carolina does with mentally ill medicare patients)
AND any psychological treatment is designed specifically and solely to eliminate compulsions with choice (even if that choice would work out to be exactly the same thing)
You would very likely reduce repeat violent offenses and maybe non-violent ones as well. You would also improve the mental health of the country substantially, reduce the overcrowding in prisons and improve the general morale of the country.
You'd also be looking at VERY stiff taxation to pay for all of this. It might, just might, pay for itself over a 20-40 year timeframe, as the environment to create crime diminishes, but that's not guaranteed. In the meantime, you're looking at replacing simple prison cells with multiple individuals in each and one guard to maybe a few hundred inmates with hospital rooms holding a single person and multiple highly-trained staff per inmate. Ignoring the cost of the medical equipment needed, and neither EEGs nor MRIs come cheap, you're still talking ten to a hundred time the setup cost, plus a hundred times the wages on an ongoing basis.
(It costs about $82,000 per year per prisoner in the UK, according to the Home Office. A hundred time that would be $8,200,000 per year per prisoner. The Home Office also reports 59.1 million people in prison in Britain. This would give you a total of $484.62 quadrillion per year.)
And what of the equipment costs? There's one 7 Tesla MRI at present. To have enough to be able to give quality checkups on tens of millions of prisoners in a reasonable space of time, you'd need maybe three or four thousand of them. Based on AIRC's factsheet on the cost of their high-power MRI systems, I'd estimate that 4000 7 Tesla MRIs would cost somewhere in the region of $14 billion. Maybe a little less, as the systems in Oregon were made in the UK, so you'd have lower transport costs. However, that's to build, not run or maintain.
England is not a poor country, by any means, but we're talking numbers that well outside the reach of any nation. Although some form of mental health program would seem essential to avoid the path America has followed (one of the highest prison populations per capita in the world, which implies one of the lowest available workforce per capita in the world, which in turn implies a high cost with less revenue generation to pay for it), a comprehensive high-quality system would seem to be financially impossible. It would be interesting to theorize what the results of such a system would be, but if you were to attempt cures and rehab to reduce violent offense, you'd have to use a different approach than this.
A single benchmark, no matter how good or bad, gives you no meaningful information. It is neither honest nor deceptive, although it can be correct or incorrect. To get total coverage of a system with N characteristics, you must make at least N(N+1)/2 measurements of the system, isolating every combination in turn. (Characteristics not being measured need to be held to a fixed, known value.) Because profiles are more useful than isolated points, you really need at least three times as many measurements - three points being the minimum needed to define a curve.
In practice, this is not a viable approach. There are far too many characteristics, which would lead to there being a gigantic number of combinations. What's more, different systems will have different numbers of characteristics, making it very difficult to do a direct comparison. You can't just ignore the differences, as they may reflect more efficient ways to do something, which will lead to an inaccurate comparison.
Benchmarking with any kind of meaningful accuracy requires considerable skill in determining an efficient number of subsets of characteristics and the number of samples per characteristic you'll need to get a good idea of the shape. It is not something you do in an afternoon, except in a trivial case or unless you're not intending to be honest or accurate.
Let's take a typical CPU. How many variables are of interest? Well, you've how fast the various I/O lines operate (instructions, data, any additional busses), caching speed for the different levels of cache, the speed of the different units as a whole (ALU, FPU, and so on), the speed of the visible registers, the speed of the internal registers, the speed of the pipeline, the performance of the cache dropping algorithm, cache strain when using multiple cores and/or when hyperthreading, performance degradation with temperature (error rates, clock errors, etc), heat generated by instructions, the latency when tranfering between units, etc.
300 benchmarks should be sufficient to describe the processor, but who is going to publish that many stats? Or read them? I imagine that a well-chosen 50 should be sufficient and still be publishable.
Re:Why US citizenship?
on
Explosives Camp
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Stop. Think. A Briton is in America, wanting American citizens - and only American citizens - to play with extremely dangerous explosives. There can be only one explanation. Revenge for The A-Team and Knight Rider.
...the Department of Defence has just announced the purchase of 10,000 tricycles of doom, to be issued to Iraqi troops without any other form of ammunition.
Oh, I fully understand what you mean, and agree that such a method may potentially exist. However, you would no longer have a sailing ship. The primary driving force would no longer be the sail, indeed you could dispense with it entirely. The framework would not be designed to maximize water displacement, but maximize the utility of the device. And so on.
I am not ruling out new technologies (I'd be an utter fool to do so) and I'm not ruling out the imaginative and creative use of technologies we have now (I've twisted too many software and hardware projects to bend to my will). What I can say is that some specific method X will have an upper limit of how far it can be taken. Past that, you will need something else, some method Y which may be a branch off of X or may be something entirely different.
The first key to futurology is to start by ignoring as many dead-wood method X's as you can. They may be popular today, they may be great today, but any futurologist who relies on today-ness has a maximum range of 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds. By using the same methods as I outlined earlier - listing the constraints and applying constraints analysis (SIMPLEX is your friend) - you can determine what sort of technology would be required. Even if you don't know the details, even if the underlying physics has not yet been discovered, you can know the parameters in which this future technology MUST exist, no matter how alien or bizarre.
The second key is a recognition that if no such parameters exist - that no matter how you tweak, push and poke the numbers, the constraints never agree - then that technology can never exist. That it's not about a lack of understanding. It is a logical contradiction that can never be resolved.
In terms on manned interstellar travel, a conventional vehicle will fall into the category of branch X. It's dead-wood. All alternatives currently examined are also dead-wood. It may be that this means it falls into the second key aspect, that no solution exists, but I am not convinced of that at this point. I am merely convinced that there is no practical technique known that would constitute a branch Y, although some theory may exist that points to such a branch.
Not everything we'd like to be able to do is possible. Not everything we think is impossible actually is. It takes a very, very sharp mind to correctly assign a level of solubility to a problem that has never been tackled, although since new problems are tackled, such minds do exist.
The very creative forces of the human mind that can propel humans out into space are the very same destructive forces that can propel humans into a premature grave. There is no distinction. The psychology that binds humans together can bind them for constructive purposes or destructive purposes. The spirit that drove civilians to sail into Dunkirk to rescue the allied forces from being massacred on the beaches is identical in all ways, shapes and forms, to the spirit that drives all fanatical and extremist movements.
Once those forces are tapped within humanity, you'd better damn well make sure they ARE for noble purposes, with no possibility of any other purpose just happening to stroll by. It's not quite mob psychology, but it's close enough. It's using the passion of the group to steer the group as a single entity.
The attack on Iraq used those psychological forces to engage in a stupid, childish vendetta (with the possibility of oil). The Apollo missions used those same forces to engage in a race to the moon, invoking fear of the Soviets getting there first. Politicians utilize this whole mechanism to get massive numbers of people who neither know nor care to vote the way the politician wants them to vote; the best psychologist wins. For that matter, do you think so many people would watch Super Bowl Sunday if there wasn't the very same kind of psyching-up?
These techniques are already being used for mundane purposes with terrible, destructive consequences. That's not going to change. Using these methods to do some good for society is certainly no worse than using the methods to rescue the men at Dunkirk - a genuinely noble and brave thing - and may result in populations too isolated from "mainstream" culture to be so perverted, which must help.
Oh, the Universe is indeed full of surprises. Which is why I won't rule out some method existing, in some form. But in the same way that it is impossible to build a sailing ship capable of escape velocity no matter how you design the sails or what materials you discover along the way, a conventional direct-flight method of interstellar travel is not going to be possible, no matter what laws of physics are discovered in the future.
Now, I'm not saying those laws won't permit us to circumvent the problem. I think it quite possible they will. But there's simply no point in working towards a bigger version of the Cutty Sark for the problem at hand. Even in Doctor Who, it took a whole bunch of Eternals to pull that one off, and we don't have the benefit of the creations of science fiction to help.
There are many problems in this world that simply cannot be solved. This doesn't generally cause a problem, because it's usually a trivial matter to apply suitable substitutions and transforms to convert the problem into a solvable form. This is the part that so many miss. Those who demand a solution seem determined to work on the unsolvable form, those determined that a solution to the unsolvable form doesn't exist seem unwilling to see if a suitable transform exists to create a form that can be solved.
The fringes (on both sides) seem to like the status quo. Someone actually reaching in and coming up with an idea would likely upset them just about equally.
Last I looked, space had fewer mountains. Before the advent of the artificial horizon (which would be a meaningless thing to have in deep space), pilots were forever crashing into lakes, snowy hilltops, etc. There's a canal in Europe that is packed full of World War II aircraft who mistook it for a runway or a road for emergency landings. The wrecks have lowered landing gear and seem to have largely made smooth but very unexpected and probably quite fatal splashdowns.
Besides, USAF pilots can fly for tens of thousands of miles but one still crashed and died in Oregon recently. I can't remember if it was last year's airshow or the one before in Hillsboro, OR, that a veteran pilot in a veteran aircraft in better-than-new condition ploughed into the ground at high speed.
Does this mean that the Roswell incident occurred? No. It is possible through the use of mathematics to prove that very long-range manned interstellar flight requires conflicting constraints, that no matter how good the technology of some pictured civilization, it will never be able to achieve such a goal. I believe such distances may be crossable, but they will never be crossed in that specific way. Because I believe the distances crossable, I believe that aliens could potentially visit Earth. Because I believe the method often described requires certain conditions to be simultaneously true and false, I do not believe that the observations attributed to aliens could possibly be so.
Personally, my biggest interest in the question is not whether we have been visited, but whether we can draw inspiration and imagination enough from the claims for us to go there. NASA had a 50 Km solar sail design over two decades ago that, had it been built at that time, would have reached Alpha Centauri and returned with a rock or ice sample. (It had a predicted top speed of a quarter of the speed of light at the midway point. Allowing for acceleration/deceleration time, it would have been approaching Earth about now.)
It was never built. The celebration of Columbus' voyage in the early 90s - by having a mini solar sail race - also never happened. The plans put forward for NASA in the present day lack, well, everything. Only now are people researching the effects of prolonged isolation on humans - long after the optimal point of launching a Mars mission. Because of cost? lluB. It costs virtually nothing to lock someone away in an isolation chamber. The CIA apparently has hundreds they're not using, and the CDC has many such chambers for isolating people with deadly, contageous diseases. You're going to be paying the person's salary anyway.
If the Roswell story gets people fired up about space, gets people motivated to find some "get up and go" that hasn't already got up and gone, then I don't care if it's real, fake or purple. If it achieves for society what society won't achieve for itself, then by all means declare it true.
The executive who made demands with menaces could well become the executive who used to be on the outside of prison walls. (Unless this was said at Speaker's Corner at Hyde Park, is on extremely thin ice. The fact that Prince is a wild eccentric is actually an added bonus in Britain, where that is often valued far above all else.)
BWB does indeed have decades in military service - first seeing action in the 1940s and then in a much more advanced configuration in the 1970s onwards in the form of the stealth bomber. Waveriders are a tougher proposition. They should be far more solid than BWB, far less subject to stresses, far easier to mass-produce, etc, yadda yadda yadda. However, I know of no mainstream waveriders in military or civilian use.
Safety is an odd one for passenger aviation. Maintenance is often done off-shore by American airlines to minimize costs, but that means that US requirements on components and maintenance engineers are likely nowhere near as scrutinized. There have been scandals involving using parts from wrecks, scandals involving dubious log entries, scandals involving wiring faults. Even when it comes to the crew, complaints by whistleblowers on unlawful demands by airlines that directly endangered passengers is at an all-time high. There have been crashes blamed on both pilot and copilot collapsing from exhaustion in the cockpit from over-flying under the threat of being sacked if they didn't.
If airlines were so risk-averse as people claim (and you're not the only one to claim it, either), Boeing would certainly never have built jet airliners and nobody would have flown in them. At that point, only one other company had built such airliners (DeHavilland) and they were crashing left, right and centre. No, they built the airliners anyway because the fantastic profits at stake negated all other factors, and the problems had largely been identified and fixed at that point.
Nor are maverick start-ups that rare in the airline industry. True, most are fairly short-range - Niki Lauda's airline has a limited number of destinations, as did the now-defunct Laker Airlines. Virgin Atlantic is not exactly a traditional airline either, but is doing extremely well for itself - sufficiently so that it's willing to invest in sub-orbital commercial operations.
Hell, there are even maverick airports. London's City Airport for STOL-capable airliners is hardly orthodox and as much as I detest Heathrow and Ringway, there can be no serious claims made for either being "normal". If anyone knows the architect(s) involved, check them for green blood and a tendency to talk Martian.
As hard as I look, I cannot find any real backing for the claims made for the conservatism of the industry. All I'm seeing is a cycle of profit-taking and paradigm-shifting. We've been in the profit-taking end of the loop for a while, but concerns over noise, pollution, super-saturation of air lanes, etc, are pushing us to the point where a sudden and dramatic shift is necessarily going to occur.
Oh, and Boeing/LaRC have at least one commercial airliner BWB design not just on the drawing board but into wind-tunnel testing. They were already doing CFD analysis in 1998 and the only reason I can think of for it not being in service today is that the pipeline has been too full. Even a giant of that size can't churn out new airline designs weekly. If Airbus' A400 is a massive success, then Boeing may try to divert resources into the BWB design to not just compete on carrying capacity but also access more airports as no changes would be needed.
Bull! The forces are exactly the same. The laws of physics do not change from aircraft to aircraft or when you enter military airspace.
Now, if the airline you fly with has extreme-altitude delta-wing supersonic STOL aircraft which routinely pull 6G turns and are heavy on the afterburners, then your point is well taken and I will seek to avoid said airline as much as possible. The laws of physics (by which you actually mean the Navier-Stokes equations, as physics is simply a model of the Universe and not an entity that exists apart from it) that apply do indeed change from aircraft to aircraft, speed to speed, altitude to altitude. This is what makes designing them so interesting.
Yes. But it is easy to predict and design a layup schedule that will account for it.
So easy to predict, in fact, that aerospace engineering companies regard CFD as little more than a paper-napkin calculation. There will be no meaningful effort to predict anything from CFD. They will build wind-tunnel models* for the predictions, and even those are usually so massively inaccurate that the full-scale test flights will be carried out by highly-skilled specialists in such work. Test flights are safer now than in, say, the 1960s - but not by a whole lot.
*Wind tunnel modeling is usually carried out in multiple phases. They will use smoke, but they will also place thin aluminium strips beneath the wings and record the sounds via an array of microphones.
Dude, you're freakin' out over there use of composite structures, and then you wonder why they don't introduce a completely radical flying-wing design? How about this.... none of the airlines would board the damn things because they think passengers would wonder if Boeing did all the proper testing, but "don't know for a fact what data they have".
Boeing and NASA Langley have been working on a blended wing civilian airliner for well over a decade. They had wind-tunnel testable designs in 2000. Do you know how expensive it is to carry out such testing? If you want to see freaking out, go talk to Boeing's accountants and shareholders and ask them what return they're seeing on all this money that has been spent. If they don't have a BWB civilian aircraft within four to five years for test flights, they are going to be under pressure to explain. We're talking about a project so costly that Boeing couldn't even afford to get this far without massive Government aid.
As for being radical - the first BWB was flown in the 1940s and the initial design work was carried out about the same time as the Wright Brothers' were building their first prototypes. This ain't new.
Nor are people nearly as afraid of new technologies as you might suppose. DeHaviland's Comet would have put Boeing out of business, if they'd not been so damn careless with the riveting. People flew on that plane, even after it started having accident after accident, because the newness of the technology didn't bother them. In fact, once the flaws had been determined by other airlines, that new technology was used by everyone else.
Lack of window seats hasn't bothered most airlines - think about the proportion of passengers to windows in a modern aircraft: 1 in 6 for a traditional airframe, much less than that for the A400. Hasn't stopped anyone yet and there's no evidence that it has caused passengers any hardships.
Ability to modify the internals would be easier in a BWB than in a conventional design, because it would be far less sensitive to the specifics of weight distribution and there would be far less stress on load-bearing parts.
Engines should also not be much of a problem. Because they're mounted on the top of the superstructure, you should be able to use a far greater range in engines, as you're not limited by what the wing's rivets can hold on the ground or by the angular forces involved (the wing is a lever). The twist created on any airframe requires modern aircraft to use either counter-rotational engines or s
Slashdot Mirror
The above remedies would give all of the smoothing at peak times on heavily loaded routers, but in a manner that is entirely equitable and - get this - doesn't actually reduce the service provided to anyone. The peaks that kill the backbones are not particularly long-lived and contain a vast number of unnecessary retransmits, inflating the traffic levels. Schemes already exist that can potentially halve the retransmits and diffuse the load over just enough time that it can be handled. Other schemes already exist that can eliminate unnecessary repeat transmissions from source, massively reducing the load on the most burdened segments.
None of these require that any user be given priority or special privileges. None of these require that neutrality be compromised. Yet none of these require that either services or end-users experience any detectable delays (at worst) - and most of the time, both services and end-users will experience a much faster, smoother Internet.
Of course, you'll never get AT&T to admit that the reason they can't do any better is that they're not only greedy but also technologically incompetent. Nonetheless, that is the reality of the situation. It is also something missing from said "study".
That's nothing. Get Slashdot running on an iPhone, and you'll have a story. Well, at least until it melts.
I had a feeling that something's not RIAA
The music was loud, we could still hear the crowd
From the covers that we played that night
We logged into an unsecure WAP network
Stopped awhile, Youtube'd around
But I still had a feeling that something's not RIAA
As we started on homeward bound
Stop, get out
We are the strong arm of the lore
Stop, get out
We are the strong arm of the lore
Into the night came a blue flashing light
A blast from the M60 to make sure
And we came to a stop behind the motorway cop
Who'd been pirating us for more than an hour
He pulled us out of the car on the side of the road
He questioned us one at a time
Where is the laptop we know that you use
We said the only shares we own are hedgefunds.
You should've seen the stupid smirk drop from his face
It was a negative exercise
The songs that we sing and the CDs that we own
They thought it was an easy hack
A wall of mud/straw bricks, a rather basic statue? The Colosseum wasn't counted by the Greeks and Romans, because they didn't see it as particularly spectacular. Machu Picchu and Petra I can understand. Those are genuinely wonders, in my books. The difficulty in construction was more tan just a matter of patience and time - there were genuinely major technological problems that required solving.
Then consider the marvels of their use. The Great Wall was a showpiece - it had negligible defensive value and did far more to engender paranoia within the culture. Not particularly marvelous - politicians create such illusions to feed paranoid tendencies all the time. Petra was the trading capital of the world, even into Roman times. It was to ancient commerce what the major ports and stock exchanges combined are to modern commerce. And it was built by a bunch of nomads who were tired of trail rations, not some major advanced civilization.
When you look at the Ancient Wonders, you look at things that maxed out (or exceeded) the capabilities of those building it. There are several that are so staggering that people are still unsure if they ever existed. The fact that the upper Pyramid blocks were poured like concrete hardly diminishes them - it shows how much they had to push their engineers that they had to invent a whole entire branch of material science to just finish the damn thing.
"Christ the Redeemer" needed what? Some reinforced concrete and a layer of soapstone. A big construction, sure, worthy of being considered a great feat of sculpting, but hardly in the same league as requiring entire new sciences and technologies.
I like the idea of seven new wonders, but they really should be wonders. They should highlight the true pinnacles of the human spirit. The list presented highlighted the pinnacle of what looks good on a postcard. Not exactly what I'd call wonders.
As for the question of whether they should have been decided by vote, I'd have split this up. I'd have given votes to people over the Internet/phone/whatever, but I'd have made some effort to limit it to one person one vote. I would THEN have given a panel of scientists/engineers an equal number of votes to represent the technological/scientific wonderfulness of each site. Finally, I'd have given another equal portion of votes to anthropologists, sociologists and cultural experts covering as many cultures and nations as possible.
The winning seven would then be decided by the merits of the awe in individuals, the awe in the achievement and the likely longevity and universality of that awe. Anything that can do well in all three categories is deserving of being called a Wonder. In practical terms, this means stepping through each list until you find seven that every group agrees is top. If you go more than a few percent without finding seven, you keep the winners so far, dump the rest of the list, and start with fresh achievements. And you keep going until you have achieved a universal agreement on the seven greatest Wonders.
You forgot abot the good caffeine/bad caffeine and transcaffinated acids.
After the ban on duping Slashdot's own articles, contributors now dupe other site's articles. Duh. :)
You might be writing in Perl.
Yes, but the lawyer will be shipped immediately to Gitmo, so it'll be thrown out for failure to turn up to court.
Personal world-view should never factor in -- we do not need a world filled with clones of Judge Pickles. When a judge is sitting on a case, they should be concerned with how the law is to be interpreted (by using some mix of the letter and spirit of the law, along with case law - ie: precedents) and with ensuring that all participants are behaving in accordance with recognized principles of behavior. If they're actually doing the deciding, they also need to weigh the merits of all sides. Neither popular opinion nor personal opinion should play a part. If either of those do, any conviction is automatically unsafe and unsatisfactory.
Fortunately, the decision can be appealed. No guarantee that would do any good. Since we're in election season, judges are standing by their political affiliations on all sides. Even if the decision was favorable to the plaintiffs, though, there's no reason to believe that it'll do any good. How many Republican senators are going to want to look weak on national security right now? That means even if the matter does stay in the courts, it is very unlikely anything will happen before late in November 2008. Of course, if it does stay in the courts, the NSA could just plead guilty and have the President issue a full pardon the following day, rescinding the finding and penalties exacted.
(Kids are not stupid and attempts to control them will usually be counterproductive.)
You are also right that treatment is a moral responsibility, the problem is that society invests too much in treating only symptoms and doesn't look at what is underlying them. And, no, what the UK Govt wants to ban is not an underlying cause. If it's related at all, it's merely surface stuff, and there's no reason to believe a relationship exists at this time.
Kids who are "problems" don't need to be changed, 999 times out of 1000. Kids who are "problems" are usually misunderstood (I hate that term, but it's the right one in this case).
But you're right that screening would help. However, it would require some minor changes to the way people think. If a kid is mentally skewed, there's an excellent chance that this is because their entire family is totally wacko and that was simply the only way the kid could remain sane within those conditions. (See: "People of the Lie", by Scott Peck.) In order to do true prevention, it would require the family unit in such cases to change. That's not going to be an easy sell. Can it be detected by a screening program? Sure. The stress involved totally skews the production of chemicals within the brain and causes a number of key segments to go totally nuts. It should be trivial to spot, long before the kid's brain is permanently mangled.
Bipolar disorders generally won't become noticeable from mere observation until a child is about 9 or 10. It will show up under a high-resolution fMRI scan many years prior, but whether treatment is advisable at that stage is an open question. The last thing you want is for the brain to be desensitized to the treatment by the time it's actually needed.
Asperger's Syndrome can also be detected by fMRI again far earlier than it could be detected by observation. It's not treatable at all, but as it produces superb, brilliant engineers, that might be a good thing. However, you'll reduce behavioral problems by allowing for it and teaching accordingly.
Schizophrenia is another one that can be detected by fMRI long before it becomes a problem. I am unsure if there is any way of preventing it from bursting out, if detected early, but it's possible. Since schizophrenics make up a significant fraction of the homeless and those who carry out crimes of desperation, you should be able to eliminate two major problems if you could keep this neurological disorder from ever breaking out.
The people you "least expect" are usually the ones who (a) in a heavily co-dependent relationship with teachers (which is mentally unbalanced), (b) quiet workaholics with a gigantic IQ (a large percentage of the Asperger population), or (c) extremely timid and shy (because they've learned how dangerous and powerful abuse is). The first and last groups have already "gone bad" to some degree, the second - if not spotted and their abilities honed skillfully - will.
Can all of these people be spotted quickly enough and treated, in an affordable and sensible manner? Yes to the spotted, probably to the treated, no idea on the affordable - except that society can't really afford not to in the long term.
You would very likely reduce repeat violent offenses and maybe non-violent ones as well. You would also improve the mental health of the country substantially, reduce the overcrowding in prisons and improve the general morale of the country.
You'd also be looking at VERY stiff taxation to pay for all of this. It might, just might, pay for itself over a 20-40 year timeframe, as the environment to create crime diminishes, but that's not guaranteed. In the meantime, you're looking at replacing simple prison cells with multiple individuals in each and one guard to maybe a few hundred inmates with hospital rooms holding a single person and multiple highly-trained staff per inmate. Ignoring the cost of the medical equipment needed, and neither EEGs nor MRIs come cheap, you're still talking ten to a hundred time the setup cost, plus a hundred times the wages on an ongoing basis.
(It costs about $82,000 per year per prisoner in the UK, according to the Home Office. A hundred time that would be $8,200,000 per year per prisoner. The Home Office also reports 59.1 million people in prison in Britain. This would give you a total of $484.62 quadrillion per year.)
And what of the equipment costs? There's one 7 Tesla MRI at present. To have enough to be able to give quality checkups on tens of millions of prisoners in a reasonable space of time, you'd need maybe three or four thousand of them. Based on AIRC's factsheet on the cost of their high-power MRI systems, I'd estimate that 4000 7 Tesla MRIs would cost somewhere in the region of $14 billion. Maybe a little less, as the systems in Oregon were made in the UK, so you'd have lower transport costs. However, that's to build, not run or maintain.
England is not a poor country, by any means, but we're talking numbers that well outside the reach of any nation. Although some form of mental health program would seem essential to avoid the path America has followed (one of the highest prison populations per capita in the world, which implies one of the lowest available workforce per capita in the world, which in turn implies a high cost with less revenue generation to pay for it), a comprehensive high-quality system would seem to be financially impossible. It would be interesting to theorize what the results of such a system would be, but if you were to attempt cures and rehab to reduce violent offense, you'd have to use a different approach than this.
In practice, this is not a viable approach. There are far too many characteristics, which would lead to there being a gigantic number of combinations. What's more, different systems will have different numbers of characteristics, making it very difficult to do a direct comparison. You can't just ignore the differences, as they may reflect more efficient ways to do something, which will lead to an inaccurate comparison.
Benchmarking with any kind of meaningful accuracy requires considerable skill in determining an efficient number of subsets of characteristics and the number of samples per characteristic you'll need to get a good idea of the shape. It is not something you do in an afternoon, except in a trivial case or unless you're not intending to be honest or accurate.
Let's take a typical CPU. How many variables are of interest? Well, you've how fast the various I/O lines operate (instructions, data, any additional busses), caching speed for the different levels of cache, the speed of the different units as a whole (ALU, FPU, and so on), the speed of the visible registers, the speed of the internal registers, the speed of the pipeline, the performance of the cache dropping algorithm, cache strain when using multiple cores and/or when hyperthreading, performance degradation with temperature (error rates, clock errors, etc), heat generated by instructions, the latency when tranfering between units, etc.
300 benchmarks should be sufficient to describe the processor, but who is going to publish that many stats? Or read them? I imagine that a well-chosen 50 should be sufficient and still be publishable.
Stop. Think. A Briton is in America, wanting American citizens - and only American citizens - to play with extremely dangerous explosives. There can be only one explanation. Revenge for The A-Team and Knight Rider.
...the Department of Defence has just announced the purchase of 10,000 tricycles of doom, to be issued to Iraqi troops without any other form of ammunition.
I am not ruling out new technologies (I'd be an utter fool to do so) and I'm not ruling out the imaginative and creative use of technologies we have now (I've twisted too many software and hardware projects to bend to my will). What I can say is that some specific method X will have an upper limit of how far it can be taken. Past that, you will need something else, some method Y which may be a branch off of X or may be something entirely different.
The first key to futurology is to start by ignoring as many dead-wood method X's as you can. They may be popular today, they may be great today, but any futurologist who relies on today-ness has a maximum range of 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds. By using the same methods as I outlined earlier - listing the constraints and applying constraints analysis (SIMPLEX is your friend) - you can determine what sort of technology would be required. Even if you don't know the details, even if the underlying physics has not yet been discovered, you can know the parameters in which this future technology MUST exist, no matter how alien or bizarre.
The second key is a recognition that if no such parameters exist - that no matter how you tweak, push and poke the numbers, the constraints never agree - then that technology can never exist. That it's not about a lack of understanding. It is a logical contradiction that can never be resolved.
In terms on manned interstellar travel, a conventional vehicle will fall into the category of branch X. It's dead-wood. All alternatives currently examined are also dead-wood. It may be that this means it falls into the second key aspect, that no solution exists, but I am not convinced of that at this point. I am merely convinced that there is no practical technique known that would constitute a branch Y, although some theory may exist that points to such a branch.
Not everything we'd like to be able to do is possible. Not everything we think is impossible actually is. It takes a very, very sharp mind to correctly assign a level of solubility to a problem that has never been tackled, although since new problems are tackled, such minds do exist.
Once those forces are tapped within humanity, you'd better damn well make sure they ARE for noble purposes, with no possibility of any other purpose just happening to stroll by. It's not quite mob psychology, but it's close enough. It's using the passion of the group to steer the group as a single entity.
The attack on Iraq used those psychological forces to engage in a stupid, childish vendetta (with the possibility of oil). The Apollo missions used those same forces to engage in a race to the moon, invoking fear of the Soviets getting there first. Politicians utilize this whole mechanism to get massive numbers of people who neither know nor care to vote the way the politician wants them to vote; the best psychologist wins. For that matter, do you think so many people would watch Super Bowl Sunday if there wasn't the very same kind of psyching-up?
These techniques are already being used for mundane purposes with terrible, destructive consequences. That's not going to change. Using these methods to do some good for society is certainly no worse than using the methods to rescue the men at Dunkirk - a genuinely noble and brave thing - and may result in populations too isolated from "mainstream" culture to be so perverted, which must help.
Now, I'm not saying those laws won't permit us to circumvent the problem. I think it quite possible they will. But there's simply no point in working towards a bigger version of the Cutty Sark for the problem at hand. Even in Doctor Who, it took a whole bunch of Eternals to pull that one off, and we don't have the benefit of the creations of science fiction to help.
There are many problems in this world that simply cannot be solved. This doesn't generally cause a problem, because it's usually a trivial matter to apply suitable substitutions and transforms to convert the problem into a solvable form. This is the part that so many miss. Those who demand a solution seem determined to work on the unsolvable form, those determined that a solution to the unsolvable form doesn't exist seem unwilling to see if a suitable transform exists to create a form that can be solved.
The fringes (on both sides) seem to like the status quo. Someone actually reaching in and coming up with an idea would likely upset them just about equally.
Besides, USAF pilots can fly for tens of thousands of miles but one still crashed and died in Oregon recently. I can't remember if it was last year's airshow or the one before in Hillsboro, OR, that a veteran pilot in a veteran aircraft in better-than-new condition ploughed into the ground at high speed.
Does this mean that the Roswell incident occurred? No. It is possible through the use of mathematics to prove that very long-range manned interstellar flight requires conflicting constraints, that no matter how good the technology of some pictured civilization, it will never be able to achieve such a goal. I believe such distances may be crossable, but they will never be crossed in that specific way. Because I believe the distances crossable, I believe that aliens could potentially visit Earth. Because I believe the method often described requires certain conditions to be simultaneously true and false, I do not believe that the observations attributed to aliens could possibly be so.
Personally, my biggest interest in the question is not whether we have been visited, but whether we can draw inspiration and imagination enough from the claims for us to go there. NASA had a 50 Km solar sail design over two decades ago that, had it been built at that time, would have reached Alpha Centauri and returned with a rock or ice sample. (It had a predicted top speed of a quarter of the speed of light at the midway point. Allowing for acceleration/deceleration time, it would have been approaching Earth about now.)
It was never built. The celebration of Columbus' voyage in the early 90s - by having a mini solar sail race - also never happened. The plans put forward for NASA in the present day lack, well, everything. Only now are people researching the effects of prolonged isolation on humans - long after the optimal point of launching a Mars mission. Because of cost? lluB. It costs virtually nothing to lock someone away in an isolation chamber. The CIA apparently has hundreds they're not using, and the CDC has many such chambers for isolating people with deadly, contageous diseases. You're going to be paying the person's salary anyway.
If the Roswell story gets people fired up about space, gets people motivated to find some "get up and go" that hasn't already got up and gone, then I don't care if it's real, fake or purple. If it achieves for society what society won't achieve for itself, then by all means declare it true.
The executive who made demands with menaces could well become the executive who used to be on the outside of prison walls. (Unless this was said at Speaker's Corner at Hyde Park, is on extremely thin ice. The fact that Prince is a wild eccentric is actually an added bonus in Britain, where that is often valued far above all else.)
Call that a cliffhanger? In my day, we had to make our own cliffhangers. With our bare hands! And we were grateful for it.
Safety is an odd one for passenger aviation. Maintenance is often done off-shore by American airlines to minimize costs, but that means that US requirements on components and maintenance engineers are likely nowhere near as scrutinized. There have been scandals involving using parts from wrecks, scandals involving dubious log entries, scandals involving wiring faults. Even when it comes to the crew, complaints by whistleblowers on unlawful demands by airlines that directly endangered passengers is at an all-time high. There have been crashes blamed on both pilot and copilot collapsing from exhaustion in the cockpit from over-flying under the threat of being sacked if they didn't.
If airlines were so risk-averse as people claim (and you're not the only one to claim it, either), Boeing would certainly never have built jet airliners and nobody would have flown in them. At that point, only one other company had built such airliners (DeHavilland) and they were crashing left, right and centre. No, they built the airliners anyway because the fantastic profits at stake negated all other factors, and the problems had largely been identified and fixed at that point.
Nor are maverick start-ups that rare in the airline industry. True, most are fairly short-range - Niki Lauda's airline has a limited number of destinations, as did the now-defunct Laker Airlines. Virgin Atlantic is not exactly a traditional airline either, but is doing extremely well for itself - sufficiently so that it's willing to invest in sub-orbital commercial operations.
Hell, there are even maverick airports. London's City Airport for STOL-capable airliners is hardly orthodox and as much as I detest Heathrow and Ringway, there can be no serious claims made for either being "normal". If anyone knows the architect(s) involved, check them for green blood and a tendency to talk Martian.
As hard as I look, I cannot find any real backing for the claims made for the conservatism of the industry. All I'm seeing is a cycle of profit-taking and paradigm-shifting. We've been in the profit-taking end of the loop for a while, but concerns over noise, pollution, super-saturation of air lanes, etc, are pushing us to the point where a sudden and dramatic shift is necessarily going to occur.
Oh, and Boeing/LaRC have at least one commercial airliner BWB design not just on the drawing board but into wind-tunnel testing. They were already doing CFD analysis in 1998 and the only reason I can think of for it not being in service today is that the pipeline has been too full. Even a giant of that size can't churn out new airline designs weekly. If Airbus' A400 is a massive success, then Boeing may try to divert resources into the BWB design to not just compete on carrying capacity but also access more airports as no changes would be needed.
Now, if the airline you fly with has extreme-altitude delta-wing supersonic STOL aircraft which routinely pull 6G turns and are heavy on the afterburners, then your point is well taken and I will seek to avoid said airline as much as possible. The laws of physics (by which you actually mean the Navier-Stokes equations, as physics is simply a model of the Universe and not an entity that exists apart from it) that apply do indeed change from aircraft to aircraft, speed to speed, altitude to altitude. This is what makes designing them so interesting.
Yes. But it is easy to predict and design a layup schedule that will account for it.
So easy to predict, in fact, that aerospace engineering companies regard CFD as little more than a paper-napkin calculation. There will be no meaningful effort to predict anything from CFD. They will build wind-tunnel models* for the predictions, and even those are usually so massively inaccurate that the full-scale test flights will be carried out by highly-skilled specialists in such work. Test flights are safer now than in, say, the 1960s - but not by a whole lot.
*Wind tunnel modeling is usually carried out in multiple phases. They will use smoke, but they will also place thin aluminium strips beneath the wings and record the sounds via an array of microphones.
Dude, you're freakin' out over there use of composite structures, and then you wonder why they don't introduce a completely radical flying-wing design? How about this .... none of the airlines would board the damn things because they think passengers would wonder if Boeing did all the proper testing, but "don't know for a fact what data they have".
Boeing and NASA Langley have been working on a blended wing civilian airliner for well over a decade. They had wind-tunnel testable designs in 2000. Do you know how expensive it is to carry out such testing? If you want to see freaking out, go talk to Boeing's accountants and shareholders and ask them what return they're seeing on all this money that has been spent. If they don't have a BWB civilian aircraft within four to five years for test flights, they are going to be under pressure to explain. We're talking about a project so costly that Boeing couldn't even afford to get this far without massive Government aid.
As for being radical - the first BWB was flown in the 1940s and the initial design work was carried out about the same time as the Wright Brothers' were building their first prototypes. This ain't new.
Nor are people nearly as afraid of new technologies as you might suppose. DeHaviland's Comet would have put Boeing out of business, if they'd not been so damn careless with the riveting. People flew on that plane, even after it started having accident after accident, because the newness of the technology didn't bother them. In fact, once the flaws had been determined by other airlines, that new technology was used by everyone else.
Lack of window seats hasn't bothered most airlines - think about the proportion of passengers to windows in a modern aircraft: 1 in 6 for a traditional airframe, much less than that for the A400. Hasn't stopped anyone yet and there's no evidence that it has caused passengers any hardships.
Ability to modify the internals would be easier in a BWB than in a conventional design, because it would be far less sensitive to the specifics of weight distribution and there would be far less stress on load-bearing parts.
Engines should also not be much of a problem. Because they're mounted on the top of the superstructure, you should be able to use a far greater range in engines, as you're not limited by what the wing's rivets can hold on the ground or by the angular forces involved (the wing is a lever). The twist created on any airframe requires modern aircraft to use either counter-rotational engines or s