"[I am] inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really."
"[There is a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but] people who have to deal with black employees find this not true"
He never specified which tests he was referring to in the first quote - I for one have not seen any studies of intelligence that showed any statistically significant link between race and intelligence, only between education and intelligence, or wealth and intelligence (unfortunately race and wealth are linked for historical reasons - given our low large-scale class mobility, it will be centuries before we can study one without concern for the effects of the other).
The constant pressure isn't what produces the heat, it's the act of compression. You compress it, it heats up, you remove that heat, and now you have high pressure and low temperature.
Last I'd heard, the Long March 9 was so early in development that they hadn't yet decided on two options: either a LOX+RP1 first stage with liquid boosters, or a LOX+LH2 first stage with more powerful solid boosters.
Current Long March rockets, by the way, use N2O4+UDMH exclusively (save for the very first few, which used RFNA+UDMH). Very military design.
If you're not into rocket science, those are different enough that you can't just swap out the fuels. You'd be changing the engines, the fuel pumps, the tankage, the whole frame, pretty much everything. Normally this is one of the first things you settle. Car analogy: this is like deciding how many wheels to have when building a car. You can't really just throw another pair on there.
Then again, China's got the budget, they could design and even test both, then decide which is better and declare that CZ-9.
Also significant: of the last three virus infections I've had, all originated from malicious ads, two of them on sites that I considered trustworthy (one I had specifically exempted from Adblock).
I think they're claiming it's extortion, since you can pay to be removed from the block list. That might actually work (depending on how French law is), but might also be a good thing since it would mean adblockers just block everything (which would still presumably be legal).
There's not much left that can be done to North Korea, but there are some options.
South Korea could shut down their part of Kaesong, and the handful of other cross-border joint ventures. That would mildly inconvenience the South Korean companies, but would seriously hurt the North Korean economy. South Korea doesn't really have any dogs in this fight, though, so unlikely.
China could stop their trade. It's a drop in the bucket for them, but would basically destroy North Korea (particularly if they have farm problems again). But again, if all the other shit North Korea has done hasn't made them stop propping them up, I doubt this will.
And of course, military action is always an option. North Korea's army is massive, but they're almost all just cannon fodder. Some analyses I've read of a hypothetical Korean war have South Korea annihilating the North before any of its allies can even get political approval. Again, though: disproportionate response to this incident, and it ignores the entire reason *why* China is propping them up - they want a buffer between them and South Korea (and the American armies stationed there). So any war attacking North Korea implicitly means attacking China, which is very much a bad idea. China's got a big army, generally well-equipped. Their only real weakness is an inability to project power, and when you're fighting on their doorstep, that's not a hindrance.
The 501st Legion started as the costume group, the nerds who dress up in Stormtrooper costumes for fun. They were later incorporated into canon, starting with a Zahn novel I can't remember the name of, and later with Episode 3 (not mentioned in the movie, but the Clone Troopers Anikin led into the Jedi temple became the core of the 501st Legion), the Clone Wars TV series, and the game Battlefront II.
My biggest hope for this new series is that it acts as a condensation of the best of the Expanded Universe, sort of like how the Marvel and TDK movies take the best storylines and elements from the decades of comics, and condenses it into a handful of cohesive stories. The EU had a lot of bad and even just mediocre shit in it, but it also had a ton of good stuff. Disney would be foolish to slavishly follow continuity, yes, but they'd also be foolish to completely ignore the best stories of it. Sure, nobody outside the hardcode Star Wars nerds know who Thrawn is or why we should be excited for his movie, but nobody outside the hardcore comic nerds knew who Rocket Raccoon was, and how much money did GotG make? Take Thrawn, X-Wing, Corellia, the two Han Solo trilogies, maybe some of the New Jedi Order (it was a good idea, just unevenly executed and too continuity-laden), and distill those down to a decade's worth of movies. Mix in some original stuff, and you'll be printing money.
My biggest fear is that this turns out like Abram's Star Trek reboot - it copies the superficial elements, ticks off all the checkboxes for the series, but completely misses the point.
For Star Trek, it was the optimism and the science. Roddenberry genuinely believed the future was going to be good, and the best Trek showed us a future that had its problems, but was overall optimistic. The science was often laughable, but they at least *tried* to figure out where the future might go. The reboots had Kirk and Spock, they had the Enterprise, they had Klingons, they had time travel and warp drives, but it didn't have optimism (just lens flare), and didn't have either a retro-futurist science, or a modern scientific outlook (either of which would have been acceptable).
For Star Wars, it's the heroism. Clear-cut bad guys, archetypal Hero's Journey, and a heavy dose of fantasy on top of the sci-fi foundation. Other than the zweihander-esque lightsaber, I didn't see any of that - although such a short trailer can hardly be expected to. So my fears were neither proven valid, not assuaged. We'll have to wait and see.
However, this should have been a very easy case for the jury.
This was the indictment, not the trial proper. They could easily have just passed the buck upward - indict him, let another jury sort it out, and hopefully the mob will have died down in the year or two it takes to try him. Even if they thought he was innocent, that would probably have been for the greater good. As it is now, I expect the jurors will have to flee town if their identities are ever leaked.
The current F9 second stage is not designed to be reusable, although there are plans to redesign it to do so. However, that will be done after the first stage reuse is regularly functioning, and they currently have nothing to show.
Dragon V2 is planned to land on, well, land. It has legs for just that reason, along with beefed-up maneuvering thrusters to serve double-duty as descent rockets.
There is a significant difference between "giving up privacy to a company that is legally constrained in what they can do with it" and "having privacy taken from you by a government that is already ignoring its self-imposed legal limitations".
The worst Google can do with my data is serve me bad ads or publicly release it. I'm not important enough for anyone to really care about my indiscretions, and I've not done anything that would make me infamous if it were announced. Unless Google were to try very hard to ruin me, I basically can't be significantly harmed. And why would Google do that? They gain nothing, and in fact hurt themselves by weakening their customers' trust.
The worst the government can do with my data is use it as a justification for throwing me in Gitmo. They even have a reason to do so - it makes them look better, gives them a PR victory of throwing another terrorist in the brig.
Since Yahoo uses Bing now, I assume my Bing experience will basically carry over.
Google sometimes detects my entire ISP as bots (I think we're carrier-NATed to a handful of IPs). When that happens, I use Bing rather than fill out a CAPTCHA for every query.
It's not bad. It doesn't have the same level of "this is what I think you're trying to do so have a special box of whatever I think is appropriate", which is sometimes a good thing, sometimes a bad thing. I do eventually go back to Google, mostly because I do web and Android work and Google has better results for that (Bing does better with.NET and DirectX, though). But it's not a big enough deal that I keep checking - I only go back either when Bing gives me crappy results, or when I restart Firefox and the search box goes back to the default Google.
Build a swarm of drones. Cheap (~$40K, so you can fly thousands of them for the cost of one F-35), single-engine, unmanned, specialized and above all, networked. While autonomous on an individual level, the swarm itself is controlled by human operators. Not too many, just a half-dozen or so. The humans dictate objectives and terms of engagement.
Give the swarm three alert levels, green, yellow and red.
Under green alert, they take no offensive actions autonomously. They relay data to the operators, who designate targets to engage. This would be for what we currently use drones for, ground-attack in friendly, civilian-heavy airspace.
Under yellow alert, the swarm identifies potential hostiles, prioritizes targets, and automatically moves in to engage. All the human operators need to do is confirm targets, which lets the drones go weapons-free against those targets. This is for smaller engagements between large powers, the saber-rattling that's been going on for decades, or for full-on war against smaller (but still armed) countries.
Under red alert, the swarm acts as under yellow alert, but with two differences. First, it will attack on its own initiative - given a target, it will not need human orders in order to fire. Second, it will assume an aircraft is an enemy unless deemed otherwise (either by IFF, operator override, or recognizing it as an unarmed civilian aircraft). This is for the WW3 scenario, full-on war with a major world power. You declare the area a combat zone, and hope that civilians are smart enough not to enter it.
Extending this design to naval and ground combat is left as an exercise to the reader. The main problem will be red-alert ground combat. Getting civilians to stay out of a shooting war is easy in the air or on the sea. Not so on the ground, since that's where people live, rather than just where people travel.
How about this - we can block posts by particular editors. Next time one posts a Benshit post, we add them to the list. If enough of them are posting his crap, and enough of us are blocking it, they'll pretty quickly see pageviews go down.
Let's look at the strengths and weaknesses of each type of power:
Coal/Oil/Gas: + Fast to spin up + Can produce exactly the amount of power needed - Makes Captain Planet cry
Nuclear (fission): + Produces a lot of energy - Doesn't throttle well - Pollution problems solvable, but not currently solved
Hydro/Tidal: + Relatively reliable output of power + Hydro dams can be used as storage (pump water back up when it's cheap, let it drop again when needed) - Reliant on geography - Hydro dams are expensive - Hurts fish
Geothermal: + Reliable power output + Usually no pollution - Only works in some areas
Solar/Wind: + The greenest - Not reliable - Tends to produce most when price is cheapest
From this, you can easily see that you can only get a homogenous power grid that works by using fossil fuels or massive storage. Everything else has problems either with reliability (solar/wind/tidal), throttling (nuclear), or geography (hydro/tidal/geothermal). Since storing electricity is hard, it is obvious that some sort of hybrid system is necessary.
The base load should be handled by geothermal, tidal, hydro, and nuclear, in that order (which is both how green they are, and how strict they are in where they have to be located). These produce reliable amounts of power. Tidal is a bit weird in that it's cyclical and not continuous, but that's not as much buffering needed, and it doesn't synch up with solar/wind.
Peak load should be handled by solar and wind, buffered by a reasonable amount of storage. Long-distance superconducting lines might also mitigate the problems - if it's cloudy in Paris, see if it's sunny in Tripoli.
And yes, there's still a place for fossil fuels. They're your last-line-of-defense system. Keep a few plants idling, to handle any peak load that spills over from solar/wind. Keep another few mothballed, able to be brought up within, say, a week. That way if your wind production gets wrecked by a hurricane, you can get back on your feet quickly.
They did do things backward, but switching engines would be much easier if they hadn't settled on such a tiny craft. If they could deal with larger fuel tanks, they could use an RD-0124 - higher thrust (290kN vs. 270kN), and I can't see how it can have lower specific impulse. The only hurdle I can see is that liquid fuel takes up a lot more space than solid fuels, and they've got a pretty small craft.
However, you missed an important part of the feather problem. The pilot erroneously unlocked it, but DID NOT deploy it. That is clearly an engineering problem.
Honestly, I think they're fucked right now no matter what the problem is. It could have literally been Space Jesus shooting it with lightning - they're in the tourism business, and rich tourists are pretty risk-averse. Any failure is probably going to be enough to kill the business.
If it had been the engine, it would have been forgettable. Rocket engines explode all the time, because they're funneling huge amounts of extremely volatile fuels and oxidizers into a high-pressure, high-temperature chamber. SS2 was also testing a new design - new engines are particularly failure-prone, because there's still stuff rocket scientists don't know. While it would have been worse than "not exploding at all", if the problem had been the engine, they could fix it and move on.
The news that it was the wing, and not the engine, that caused the failure is, in my mind, worse. It means they fucked up on a relatively simple, well-understood problem. Part of the blame can be assigned on the pilot disabling the safety early, but it still activated spontaneously and catastrophically. That makes me suspicious of what other simple things they've screwed up.
I voted for one Libertarian, one Independent, and two Democrats. The first Democrat was running unopposed, and the other was opposed only by a Republican, and both were for minor local offices only. I didn't use write-ins only because I didn't actually know of anyone worth writing in.
No, yesterday's election message was "fuck Democrats", just as 2008's was "fuck Republicans". The system just doesn't really allow a message of "fuck BOTH of them", probably because the system was made by both of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, it's the insurance rates that really killed that project.
Apparently the videos were CC, so they should be available elsewhere. MIT just doesn't want their name associated with him anymore.
"[I am] inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really."
"[There is a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but] people who have to deal with black employees find this not true"
He never specified which tests he was referring to in the first quote - I for one have not seen any studies of intelligence that showed any statistically significant link between race and intelligence, only between education and intelligence, or wealth and intelligence (unfortunately race and wealth are linked for historical reasons - given our low large-scale class mobility, it will be centuries before we can study one without concern for the effects of the other).
The constant pressure isn't what produces the heat, it's the act of compression. You compress it, it heats up, you remove that heat, and now you have high pressure and low temperature.
Last I'd heard, the Long March 9 was so early in development that they hadn't yet decided on two options: either a LOX+RP1 first stage with liquid boosters, or a LOX+LH2 first stage with more powerful solid boosters.
Current Long March rockets, by the way, use N2O4+UDMH exclusively (save for the very first few, which used RFNA+UDMH). Very military design.
If you're not into rocket science, those are different enough that you can't just swap out the fuels. You'd be changing the engines, the fuel pumps, the tankage, the whole frame, pretty much everything. Normally this is one of the first things you settle. Car analogy: this is like deciding how many wheels to have when building a car. You can't really just throw another pair on there.
Then again, China's got the budget, they could design and even test both, then decide which is better and declare that CZ-9.
Also significant: of the last three virus infections I've had, all originated from malicious ads, two of them on sites that I considered trustworthy (one I had specifically exempted from Adblock).
I think they're claiming it's extortion, since you can pay to be removed from the block list. That might actually work (depending on how French law is), but might also be a good thing since it would mean adblockers just block everything (which would still presumably be legal).
There's not much left that can be done to North Korea, but there are some options.
South Korea could shut down their part of Kaesong, and the handful of other cross-border joint ventures. That would mildly inconvenience the South Korean companies, but would seriously hurt the North Korean economy. South Korea doesn't really have any dogs in this fight, though, so unlikely.
China could stop their trade. It's a drop in the bucket for them, but would basically destroy North Korea (particularly if they have farm problems again). But again, if all the other shit North Korea has done hasn't made them stop propping them up, I doubt this will.
And of course, military action is always an option. North Korea's army is massive, but they're almost all just cannon fodder. Some analyses I've read of a hypothetical Korean war have South Korea annihilating the North before any of its allies can even get political approval. Again, though: disproportionate response to this incident, and it ignores the entire reason *why* China is propping them up - they want a buffer between them and South Korea (and the American armies stationed there). So any war attacking North Korea implicitly means attacking China, which is very much a bad idea. China's got a big army, generally well-equipped. Their only real weakness is an inability to project power, and when you're fighting on their doorstep, that's not a hindrance.
If you're not experiencing brain damage from excessive *headdesk* in D&D, your players are doing something horribly wrong.
Or horribly right. Hard to tell in most games.
The 501st Legion started as the costume group, the nerds who dress up in Stormtrooper costumes for fun. They were later incorporated into canon, starting with a Zahn novel I can't remember the name of, and later with Episode 3 (not mentioned in the movie, but the Clone Troopers Anikin led into the Jedi temple became the core of the 501st Legion), the Clone Wars TV series, and the game Battlefront II.
My biggest hope for this new series is that it acts as a condensation of the best of the Expanded Universe, sort of like how the Marvel and TDK movies take the best storylines and elements from the decades of comics, and condenses it into a handful of cohesive stories. The EU had a lot of bad and even just mediocre shit in it, but it also had a ton of good stuff. Disney would be foolish to slavishly follow continuity, yes, but they'd also be foolish to completely ignore the best stories of it. Sure, nobody outside the hardcode Star Wars nerds know who Thrawn is or why we should be excited for his movie, but nobody outside the hardcore comic nerds knew who Rocket Raccoon was, and how much money did GotG make? Take Thrawn, X-Wing, Corellia, the two Han Solo trilogies, maybe some of the New Jedi Order (it was a good idea, just unevenly executed and too continuity-laden), and distill those down to a decade's worth of movies. Mix in some original stuff, and you'll be printing money.
My biggest fear is that this turns out like Abram's Star Trek reboot - it copies the superficial elements, ticks off all the checkboxes for the series, but completely misses the point.
For Star Trek, it was the optimism and the science. Roddenberry genuinely believed the future was going to be good, and the best Trek showed us a future that had its problems, but was overall optimistic. The science was often laughable, but they at least *tried* to figure out where the future might go. The reboots had Kirk and Spock, they had the Enterprise, they had Klingons, they had time travel and warp drives, but it didn't have optimism (just lens flare), and didn't have either a retro-futurist science, or a modern scientific outlook (either of which would have been acceptable).
For Star Wars, it's the heroism. Clear-cut bad guys, archetypal Hero's Journey, and a heavy dose of fantasy on top of the sci-fi foundation. Other than the zweihander-esque lightsaber, I didn't see any of that - although such a short trailer can hardly be expected to. So my fears were neither proven valid, not assuaged. We'll have to wait and see.
Have you tried version 2.0 yet? It replaced those with loaves and fishes. Has a recurring 3-day downtime though.
However, this should have been a very easy case for the jury.
This was the indictment, not the trial proper. They could easily have just passed the buck upward - indict him, let another jury sort it out, and hopefully the mob will have died down in the year or two it takes to try him. Even if they thought he was innocent, that would probably have been for the greater good. As it is now, I expect the jurors will have to flee town if their identities are ever leaked.
The legal constraints are on Google, not on the government.
The current F9 second stage is not designed to be reusable, although there are plans to redesign it to do so. However, that will be done after the first stage reuse is regularly functioning, and they currently have nothing to show.
Dragon V2 is planned to land on, well, land. It has legs for just that reason, along with beefed-up maneuvering thrusters to serve double-duty as descent rockets.
There is a significant difference between "giving up privacy to a company that is legally constrained in what they can do with it" and "having privacy taken from you by a government that is already ignoring its self-imposed legal limitations".
The worst Google can do with my data is serve me bad ads or publicly release it. I'm not important enough for anyone to really care about my indiscretions, and I've not done anything that would make me infamous if it were announced. Unless Google were to try very hard to ruin me, I basically can't be significantly harmed. And why would Google do that? They gain nothing, and in fact hurt themselves by weakening their customers' trust.
The worst the government can do with my data is use it as a justification for throwing me in Gitmo. They even have a reason to do so - it makes them look better, gives them a PR victory of throwing another terrorist in the brig.
Since Yahoo uses Bing now, I assume my Bing experience will basically carry over.
Google sometimes detects my entire ISP as bots (I think we're carrier-NATed to a handful of IPs). When that happens, I use Bing rather than fill out a CAPTCHA for every query.
It's not bad. It doesn't have the same level of "this is what I think you're trying to do so have a special box of whatever I think is appropriate", which is sometimes a good thing, sometimes a bad thing. I do eventually go back to Google, mostly because I do web and Android work and Google has better results for that (Bing does better with .NET and DirectX, though). But it's not a big enough deal that I keep checking - I only go back either when Bing gives me crappy results, or when I restart Firefox and the search box goes back to the default Google.
I'll start with the simpler case of air combat.
Build a swarm of drones. Cheap (~$40K, so you can fly thousands of them for the cost of one F-35), single-engine, unmanned, specialized and above all, networked. While autonomous on an individual level, the swarm itself is controlled by human operators. Not too many, just a half-dozen or so. The humans dictate objectives and terms of engagement.
Give the swarm three alert levels, green, yellow and red.
Under green alert, they take no offensive actions autonomously. They relay data to the operators, who designate targets to engage. This would be for what we currently use drones for, ground-attack in friendly, civilian-heavy airspace.
Under yellow alert, the swarm identifies potential hostiles, prioritizes targets, and automatically moves in to engage. All the human operators need to do is confirm targets, which lets the drones go weapons-free against those targets. This is for smaller engagements between large powers, the saber-rattling that's been going on for decades, or for full-on war against smaller (but still armed) countries.
Under red alert, the swarm acts as under yellow alert, but with two differences. First, it will attack on its own initiative - given a target, it will not need human orders in order to fire. Second, it will assume an aircraft is an enemy unless deemed otherwise (either by IFF, operator override, or recognizing it as an unarmed civilian aircraft). This is for the WW3 scenario, full-on war with a major world power. You declare the area a combat zone, and hope that civilians are smart enough not to enter it.
Extending this design to naval and ground combat is left as an exercise to the reader. The main problem will be red-alert ground combat. Getting civilians to stay out of a shooting war is easy in the air or on the sea. Not so on the ground, since that's where people live, rather than just where people travel.
How about this - we can block posts by particular editors. Next time one posts a Benshit post, we add them to the list. If enough of them are posting his crap, and enough of us are blocking it, they'll pretty quickly see pageviews go down.
Mass.
An RTG is heavy. Solar panels are much lighter, and the comet is currently on a sun approach.
Let's look at the strengths and weaknesses of each type of power:
Coal/Oil/Gas:
+ Fast to spin up
+ Can produce exactly the amount of power needed
- Makes Captain Planet cry
Nuclear (fission):
+ Produces a lot of energy
- Doesn't throttle well
- Pollution problems solvable, but not currently solved
Hydro/Tidal:
+ Relatively reliable output of power
+ Hydro dams can be used as storage (pump water back up when it's cheap, let it drop again when needed)
- Reliant on geography
- Hydro dams are expensive
- Hurts fish
Geothermal:
+ Reliable power output
+ Usually no pollution
- Only works in some areas
Solar/Wind:
+ The greenest
- Not reliable
- Tends to produce most when price is cheapest
Nuclear (fusion):
+ Clean, reliable and powerful
- Doesn't exist yet
From this, you can easily see that you can only get a homogenous power grid that works by using fossil fuels or massive storage. Everything else has problems either with reliability (solar/wind/tidal), throttling (nuclear), or geography (hydro/tidal/geothermal). Since storing electricity is hard, it is obvious that some sort of hybrid system is necessary.
The base load should be handled by geothermal, tidal, hydro, and nuclear, in that order (which is both how green they are, and how strict they are in where they have to be located). These produce reliable amounts of power. Tidal is a bit weird in that it's cyclical and not continuous, but that's not as much buffering needed, and it doesn't synch up with solar/wind.
Peak load should be handled by solar and wind, buffered by a reasonable amount of storage. Long-distance superconducting lines might also mitigate the problems - if it's cloudy in Paris, see if it's sunny in Tripoli.
And yes, there's still a place for fossil fuels. They're your last-line-of-defense system. Keep a few plants idling, to handle any peak load that spills over from solar/wind. Keep another few mothballed, able to be brought up within, say, a week. That way if your wind production gets wrecked by a hurricane, you can get back on your feet quickly.
They did do things backward, but switching engines would be much easier if they hadn't settled on such a tiny craft. If they could deal with larger fuel tanks, they could use an RD-0124 - higher thrust (290kN vs. 270kN), and I can't see how it can have lower specific impulse. The only hurdle I can see is that liquid fuel takes up a lot more space than solid fuels, and they've got a pretty small craft.
However, you missed an important part of the feather problem. The pilot erroneously unlocked it, but DID NOT deploy it. That is clearly an engineering problem.
Honestly, I think they're fucked right now no matter what the problem is. It could have literally been Space Jesus shooting it with lightning - they're in the tourism business, and rich tourists are pretty risk-averse. Any failure is probably going to be enough to kill the business.
If it had been the engine, it would have been forgettable. Rocket engines explode all the time, because they're funneling huge amounts of extremely volatile fuels and oxidizers into a high-pressure, high-temperature chamber. SS2 was also testing a new design - new engines are particularly failure-prone, because there's still stuff rocket scientists don't know. While it would have been worse than "not exploding at all", if the problem had been the engine, they could fix it and move on.
The news that it was the wing, and not the engine, that caused the failure is, in my mind, worse. It means they fucked up on a relatively simple, well-understood problem. Part of the blame can be assigned on the pilot disabling the safety early, but it still activated spontaneously and catastrophically. That makes me suspicious of what other simple things they've screwed up.
I voted for one Libertarian, one Independent, and two Democrats. The first Democrat was running unopposed, and the other was opposed only by a Republican, and both were for minor local offices only. I didn't use write-ins only because I didn't actually know of anyone worth writing in.
No, yesterday's election message was "fuck Democrats", just as 2008's was "fuck Republicans". The system just doesn't really allow a message of "fuck BOTH of them", probably because the system was made by both of them.