I love that you consider racial slurs and defense of Hitler to be rightist ideology... I think you were trying to make a point about the anti-right bias of slashdot, but instead made it clear that you personally are right-wing, racist, and a Trump supporter. But then, I repeat myself.
Hmm... is it evil to shift taxation away from the wealthy and instead onto the backs of struggling single moms? I'd say so. Actions that disproportionately harm the poor and favor the rich are basically the way you set up someone as a villain in a Disney movie... if a 3-year-old can understand why that's bad, what is there to be confused about here?
Supposing a single-issue voter who wants campaign finance reform, I could imagine a Sanders>Trump>Others strategy, because they've both called for finance reform in different ways, and both have non-traditional financing for their campaigns. You'd have to hold your nose to Trump's blatant sexism, racism, and cluelessness though.
Note: I am not one of these voters, and will never, under any circumstances, vote for Trump. I do think Sanders is a stand-up dude, though.
the right that prefers compelling stories to truthful stories.
To be fair (and I say this as someone who strongly dislikes the right) this describes the vast majority of the electorate. How closely do you scrutinize articles that agree with your own bias? It's rare to find someone who challenges their own beliefs regularly, and the way to really be better than the Trump supporters isn't by poking holes in right-wing ideology: it's being committed to introspection and skepticism of our own beliefs, so that we can't be taken in by our own kind of Trump.
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool." - Richard P. Feynman
Waste heat is low-grade, and hard to employ in a way that makes it worth it. What do you do with that bit of extra heat from the water heater that is leaking into the utility closet that will be cheap enough to have a payoff time within decades, controllable so you don't heat your home up when you don't want to and make a significantly larger impact than just letting that heat disperse through the house naturally? There probably isn't anything viable.
The thing is, power plants aren't using heat to produce energy, they are using a heat differential. You need to have a very high temp heat reservoir and a low temp exhaust to efficiently extract energy from heat, and the larger the difference in temp the more efficient you can be. So, in the case of a water heater being a few degrees warmer than the surrounding air, there's very little that you can do that will be worth it.
What I've found from researching energy improvements is that the most effective savings to be found is also the most low-tech and boring: insulation. The other thing that's a real bear about optimizing energy use is that every improvement you make reduces the impact and increases the payoff time of future improvements. My house is insulated well enough that my gas bill is only ~$300 a year, so at this point anything exotic (read: expensive) isn't close to worth it... an air-source heat pump, radiant floor heating, solar powered heating, etc - even if they reduced my heating bill to zero it still would take over a decade to pay itself off and I'll probably move by that time.
Hoverslam is certainly a challenge, but even if they could throttle the engines to arbitrarily low levels they would still probably use a similar descent profile. It's inefficient to hover or come in gently - the best possible (read: most efficient) descent is the "suicide burn", where you wait until the last millisecond and then go full thrust. So, even if they didn't have to hoverslam because of throttling constraints, they would probably still do it to save fuel.
If you want kids to learn, then need teachers who have mastered the subject matter.
This. 100 times this. If we want quality education, we need quality educators. Teacher training programs are 95% busywork at this point, there are no wrong answers as long as you churn out your BS essays.
We need to train teachers better in the things that matter. We need to add a hell of a lot more rigor to education research. We need to pay teachers a competitive wage based on their background - I left teaching for a job in industry where my wage doubled, and now after a few years of engineering I make more than I would have after 30 years teaching at that school, even if I had gotten a PhD.
Give great ideas to mediocre people and you will get mediocre results. Give mediocre ideas to great people and you will get great results. Education reform in the U.S. is all about new curriculum, adding in laptops, getting rid of math, firing bad teachers. But where is the focus on training and retaining great teachers? That's the missing piece.
Why are you not invested in an index fund of some sort? Bank interest rates haven't kept up with inflation for a very long time, but the market tends to reliably return at least 5% after inflation, over the long term.
The problem with "market solutions" to discrimination is that the consumer isn't always informed. If I walk into a bakery that doesn't serve gays, how am I to know unless they have a "no gays allowed" sign posted in their window? Or, suppose that a mortgage lender always gives whites a 1% discount on interest rates - it would be very hard to prove that was happening, and it would absolutely be an unethical business practice.
Even then, forcing a business to be nondiscriminatory is very separate from individual rights to express opinions. When you open a business, you are doing so with the approval of the state, and you have to follow all sorts of additional regulations to continue to operate the business - don't work your employees in dangerous conditions, give them reasonable breaks and shifts and pay at least the minimum wage, etc, etc. An expectation that you render non-discriminatory service to customers isn't any more onerous than all the other things you must do to run a business legally.
This sounds like it's somewhere between innovative and a high-school science fair experiment. One of their examples is measuring temperature based on changes in the resistivity of aluminum foil... not exactly groundbreaking. While the physics makes it possible, and the materials may be cheap, the hardware you'll need to measure the tiny changes in the properties of these household materials is going to cost much more than the materials themselves, so the practical utility of this is minor, I'd suspect.
I'd be happy to be corrected, but there's a reason that existing electronic sensors are expensive and built the way they are. It's one of the classic 3-way problems: Cheap, Accurate, Reliable, pick any two. Except in this case, I'm thinking these things will be neither accurate nor reliable, and even being cheap isn't guaranteed if you have to use an expensive array of analog-digital-converters and microcontrollers to render a patch of this "paper skin" functional.
There's also this new American exceptionalism, when people look at stuff every other developed country is doing reasonably successfully and concluding that somehow we in the US are incapable of it. I really, really hate people who think that way.
Agreed. I wish that we could see ourselves as champions of democracy and progress once again, using the best ideas from around the world to inspire us to greater heights, but instead we've gotten isolationist and reticent.
As for gay marriage, if you want to say that the State has every right to define something like Civil Marriage, then I think you're on very solid ground constitutionally. If it starts moving towards forcing people to have to be happy about it... it starts to become more like the state telling you what to believe.
I don't disagree with your overall points, but it sounds like you think the government is squashing dissent where gay marriage is concerned.
The government has never told anybody that they have to agree with gay marriage, as far as I can tell. The freedom to say what you want about gays doesn't mean that everybody listening has to quietly assent. Being criticized for expressing regressive opinions regarding love between consenting adults isn't a violation of first amendment rights.
Did I ever claim that Hitler was religious? It's completely irrelevant in this context. The point is, a nostalgia for imagined "good ol' days" and a belief that we need to cleanse our society of corrupting influences describes the politics of U.S. evangelicals and WWII era Germany equally well, the main difference being whether you believe jews or gays are the cause of the country's downfall.
Please note: my beef is with the Religious Right. Not with Christianity (Catholics and liberal Christians don't generally think this way) or conservatives (many conservatives respect individual liberty more than the fundamentalist Moral Majority do), but with the unholy union of the two.
If you could somehow convince Americans, despite the evidence, that we are not great, and that we should be great again, you could generate a movement like this again.
Welcome to the religious right, lamenting the fall of society to the gays and nursing a wicked yet totally unsubstantiated persecution complex.
Am I the only one who reads this and thinks being a combat drone engineer would be a really cool job? How cool would it be to have some new enemy strategy (submerged IEDs in swamps or something) and be assigned to design and build a new robot on the fly to tackle the issue (robosharks with fricking lasers, perhaps?)
I'm just saying. Realism, practicality, and ethics aside - this would be a badass videogame.
I was hoping new Slashdot ownership would steer us away from these pro-regulation propaganda pieces.
Come on, now. I agree that the bit of opinion at the end there doesn't add anything to the conversation, but this is a legitimately interesting technical question, and a much-commented one as well. Painting this as a political piece is just tilting at windmills.
Good points. Add to that rotary valves, which don't have to deal with the extreme accelerations of reciprocating motion and so in principle could be far faster.
Hydraulic and pneumatic and electronic have been tried, and failed for various reasons. And nobody has had any success with new types of valves. The conditions inside a combustion chamber are just too rough.
False. The technology exists - it's been around in performance engines and non-automotive applications for quite some time. The barriers at this point are making it economical and reliable for production vehicles, but the fundamental concepts are sound and proven.
A total memory wipe and replacement is basically the same as killing you. Yes your body is still alive but what makes you "you" is your memories, your life.
Interesting contention, but I don't know that I agree. Certainly part of our identity is skills, habits, aptitudes, and preferences, all of which are at least in part decoupled from conscious memory. In fact, it might be possible that memory plays a pretty small part of the whole ensemble that is 'self'.
Sci-fi does great things to inspire people but inspired people have to educate themselves beyond the Star Trek to see what the real trek would even be like. They just hand-wave and say things like "technology is evolution" like somehow that makes a Mars base happen because reasons.
Hmm. Mars enthusiasts have to "educate themselves", you say. Can you tell me what the Sabatier reaction is, and what implications it has for in-situ resource utilization on Mars? Can you tell me how the radiation risk on Mars compares to that of, say, the Apollo missions or just living in a high-radiation environment like that of Colorado? How about we discuss the Linear-No-Threshold radiation risk model and whether it's a valid assumption? How about you expound for a bit on the Oberth Effect and how it impacts Delta-V requirements?
I'm far from an expert on spaceflight, but I have read a number of technical books on the topic, taken university courses, and attended a conference devoted to the question of Mars colonization. So, please do yourself a favor and read up on the REAL technical difficulties that exist with respect to human spaceflight, and don't randomly accuse people of being pie-in-the-sky Star Trek fans with no grounding in reality. There are lots of interesting questions to discuss and nobody thinks that interplanetary colonization will be easy, but human exploration has always occurred at the very limits of our technological capability.
If you have some real technical objections to human spaceflight, it would be interesting and useful to discuss them, but at this point it sounds like you're expounding about something that you haven't really taken the time to understand. The real thing I want to find out: how does supplying air for a modern space traveler with modern technology compare, in terms of actual difficulty, to supplying food for an colonist using colonial-era technology? I would much rather put my trust in the former than the latter, and it seems clear to me that the challenge is fundamentally the same in both cases: the application of technology to sustain human life away from major social infrastructure.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is Physics. You cannot make a REAL spacecraft that approaches any significant fraction of the speed of light.
Carl Sagan and Freeman Dyson, for starters, disagree with you. Do you even know what Project Orion is? It uses only conventional technology, no unobtainium. Gets to 0.1c in 36 days.
All the money in the world isn't going to get humans out of our solar system.
It would cost ~$400B. A lot of money, but less than what we spent on the bank bailouts or Iraq war.
That's entirely my point, though. Any launch vehicle that lives or dies at the whim of congress (and has design requirements forced on it to boot) is never going to be anything more than a jobs program. Space access is not the reason SLS exists. Keeping Alabamans employed is, and it is succeeding brilliantly at that task.
So, remove that aspect of control from congress. NASA offers $100M for a rocket, and buys it off the shelf when they need it vs dumping $4B on building the Senate Launch System. With the fixed launch price, industry is motivated to get cheaper because then their profit is larger. Congress doesn't get to force a vehicle to use obsolete, expensive hardware like the SRBs. If NASA has its plans upended every 8 years as presidents are wont to do, the vehicle is still there, it just flies somewhere different.
NASA should be doing fundamental research and launching missions that aren't commercially viable (no reasonable ROI) and LEO access (even heavy lift) doesn't fit - it's something we've known how to do for years. Even BLEO, do a couple small launches and do on-orbit assembly, or wait a bit for Falcon Heavy (which will likely fly before SLS anyhow). SLS is the absolutely worst place NASA could be spending money if we actually care about doing stuff in space.
You are right. We just build thick-roofed shelters out of rock and sand. What was I thinking? Hey Charlie, go dig up some rock and sand and build a roof ok? Did you bring the shovel?
You are trying to be facetious, but it is really no more complicated than that. Send a structure (inflatable or whatever) and then through good-old elbow grease bury it with rock and sand. What's the problem?
Slashdot Mirror
I love that you consider racial slurs and defense of Hitler to be rightist ideology... I think you were trying to make a point about the anti-right bias of slashdot, but instead made it clear that you personally are right-wing, racist, and a Trump supporter. But then, I repeat myself.
But surely you must admit that there are occasional prime comments by AC's. :)
Woah now. No reason to be so divisive.
Hmm... is it evil to shift taxation away from the wealthy and instead onto the backs of struggling single moms? I'd say so. Actions that disproportionately harm the poor and favor the rich are basically the way you set up someone as a villain in a Disney movie... if a 3-year-old can understand why that's bad, what is there to be confused about here?
Supposing a single-issue voter who wants campaign finance reform, I could imagine a Sanders>Trump>Others strategy, because they've both called for finance reform in different ways, and both have non-traditional financing for their campaigns. You'd have to hold your nose to Trump's blatant sexism, racism, and cluelessness though.
Note: I am not one of these voters, and will never, under any circumstances, vote for Trump. I do think Sanders is a stand-up dude, though.
the right that prefers compelling stories to truthful stories.
To be fair (and I say this as someone who strongly dislikes the right) this describes the vast majority of the electorate. How closely do you scrutinize articles that agree with your own bias? It's rare to find someone who challenges their own beliefs regularly, and the way to really be better than the Trump supporters isn't by poking holes in right-wing ideology: it's being committed to introspection and skepticism of our own beliefs, so that we can't be taken in by our own kind of Trump.
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool." - Richard P. Feynman
Waste heat is low-grade, and hard to employ in a way that makes it worth it. What do you do with that bit of extra heat from the water heater that is leaking into the utility closet that will be cheap enough to have a payoff time within decades, controllable so you don't heat your home up when you don't want to and make a significantly larger impact than just letting that heat disperse through the house naturally? There probably isn't anything viable.
The thing is, power plants aren't using heat to produce energy, they are using a heat differential. You need to have a very high temp heat reservoir and a low temp exhaust to efficiently extract energy from heat, and the larger the difference in temp the more efficient you can be. So, in the case of a water heater being a few degrees warmer than the surrounding air, there's very little that you can do that will be worth it.
What I've found from researching energy improvements is that the most effective savings to be found is also the most low-tech and boring: insulation. The other thing that's a real bear about optimizing energy use is that every improvement you make reduces the impact and increases the payoff time of future improvements. My house is insulated well enough that my gas bill is only ~$300 a year, so at this point anything exotic (read: expensive) isn't close to worth it... an air-source heat pump, radiant floor heating, solar powered heating, etc - even if they reduced my heating bill to zero it still would take over a decade to pay itself off and I'll probably move by that time.
Hoverslam is certainly a challenge, but even if they could throttle the engines to arbitrarily low levels they would still probably use a similar descent profile. It's inefficient to hover or come in gently - the best possible (read: most efficient) descent is the "suicide burn", where you wait until the last millisecond and then go full thrust. So, even if they didn't have to hoverslam because of throttling constraints, they would probably still do it to save fuel.
If you want kids to learn, then need teachers who have mastered the subject matter.
This. 100 times this. If we want quality education, we need quality educators. Teacher training programs are 95% busywork at this point, there are no wrong answers as long as you churn out your BS essays.
We need to train teachers better in the things that matter. We need to add a hell of a lot more rigor to education research. We need to pay teachers a competitive wage based on their background - I left teaching for a job in industry where my wage doubled, and now after a few years of engineering I make more than I would have after 30 years teaching at that school, even if I had gotten a PhD.
Give great ideas to mediocre people and you will get mediocre results. Give mediocre ideas to great people and you will get great results. Education reform in the U.S. is all about new curriculum, adding in laptops, getting rid of math, firing bad teachers. But where is the focus on training and retaining great teachers? That's the missing piece.
Why are you not invested in an index fund of some sort? Bank interest rates haven't kept up with inflation for a very long time, but the market tends to reliably return at least 5% after inflation, over the long term.
The problem with "market solutions" to discrimination is that the consumer isn't always informed. If I walk into a bakery that doesn't serve gays, how am I to know unless they have a "no gays allowed" sign posted in their window? Or, suppose that a mortgage lender always gives whites a 1% discount on interest rates - it would be very hard to prove that was happening, and it would absolutely be an unethical business practice.
Even then, forcing a business to be nondiscriminatory is very separate from individual rights to express opinions. When you open a business, you are doing so with the approval of the state, and you have to follow all sorts of additional regulations to continue to operate the business - don't work your employees in dangerous conditions, give them reasonable breaks and shifts and pay at least the minimum wage, etc, etc. An expectation that you render non-discriminatory service to customers isn't any more onerous than all the other things you must do to run a business legally.
This sounds like it's somewhere between innovative and a high-school science fair experiment. One of their examples is measuring temperature based on changes in the resistivity of aluminum foil... not exactly groundbreaking. While the physics makes it possible, and the materials may be cheap, the hardware you'll need to measure the tiny changes in the properties of these household materials is going to cost much more than the materials themselves, so the practical utility of this is minor, I'd suspect.
I'd be happy to be corrected, but there's a reason that existing electronic sensors are expensive and built the way they are. It's one of the classic 3-way problems: Cheap, Accurate, Reliable, pick any two. Except in this case, I'm thinking these things will be neither accurate nor reliable, and even being cheap isn't guaranteed if you have to use an expensive array of analog-digital-converters and microcontrollers to render a patch of this "paper skin" functional.
There's also this new American exceptionalism, when people look at stuff every other developed country is doing reasonably successfully and concluding that somehow we in the US are incapable of it. I really, really hate people who think that way.
Agreed. I wish that we could see ourselves as champions of democracy and progress once again, using the best ideas from around the world to inspire us to greater heights, but instead we've gotten isolationist and reticent.
As for gay marriage, if you want to say that the State has every right to define something like Civil Marriage, then I think you're on very solid ground constitutionally. If it starts moving towards forcing people to have to be happy about it... it starts to become more like the state telling you what to believe.
I don't disagree with your overall points, but it sounds like you think the government is squashing dissent where gay marriage is concerned.
The government has never told anybody that they have to agree with gay marriage, as far as I can tell. The freedom to say what you want about gays doesn't mean that everybody listening has to quietly assent. Being criticized for expressing regressive opinions regarding love between consenting adults isn't a violation of first amendment rights.
Did I ever claim that Hitler was religious? It's completely irrelevant in this context. The point is, a nostalgia for imagined "good ol' days" and a belief that we need to cleanse our society of corrupting influences describes the politics of U.S. evangelicals and WWII era Germany equally well, the main difference being whether you believe jews or gays are the cause of the country's downfall.
Please note: my beef is with the Religious Right. Not with Christianity (Catholics and liberal Christians don't generally think this way) or conservatives (many conservatives respect individual liberty more than the fundamentalist Moral Majority do), but with the unholy union of the two.
If you could somehow convince Americans, despite the evidence, that we are not great, and that we should be great again, you could generate a movement like this again.
Welcome to the religious right, lamenting the fall of society to the gays and nursing a wicked yet totally unsubstantiated persecution complex.
Am I the only one who reads this and thinks being a combat drone engineer would be a really cool job? How cool would it be to have some new enemy strategy (submerged IEDs in swamps or something) and be assigned to design and build a new robot on the fly to tackle the issue (robosharks with fricking lasers, perhaps?)
I'm just saying. Realism, practicality, and ethics aside - this would be a badass videogame.
I was hoping new Slashdot ownership would steer us away from these pro-regulation propaganda pieces.
Come on, now. I agree that the bit of opinion at the end there doesn't add anything to the conversation, but this is a legitimately interesting technical question, and a much-commented one as well. Painting this as a political piece is just tilting at windmills.
Opens outwards
Opens by sliding
Opens by iris action
Good points. Add to that rotary valves, which don't have to deal with the extreme accelerations of reciprocating motion and so in principle could be far faster.
Hydraulic and pneumatic and electronic have been tried, and failed for various reasons. And nobody has had any success with new types of valves. The conditions inside a combustion chamber are just too rough.
False. The technology exists - it's been around in performance engines and non-automotive applications for quite some time. The barriers at this point are making it economical and reliable for production vehicles, but the fundamental concepts are sound and proven.
A total memory wipe and replacement is basically the same as killing you. Yes your body is still alive but what makes you "you" is your memories, your life.
Interesting contention, but I don't know that I agree. Certainly part of our identity is skills, habits, aptitudes, and preferences, all of which are at least in part decoupled from conscious memory. In fact, it might be possible that memory plays a pretty small part of the whole ensemble that is 'self'.
Sci-fi does great things to inspire people but inspired people have to educate themselves beyond the Star Trek to see what the real trek would even be like. They just hand-wave and say things like "technology is evolution" like somehow that makes a Mars base happen because reasons.
Hmm. Mars enthusiasts have to "educate themselves", you say. Can you tell me what the Sabatier reaction is, and what implications it has for in-situ resource utilization on Mars? Can you tell me how the radiation risk on Mars compares to that of, say, the Apollo missions or just living in a high-radiation environment like that of Colorado? How about we discuss the Linear-No-Threshold radiation risk model and whether it's a valid assumption? How about you expound for a bit on the Oberth Effect and how it impacts Delta-V requirements?
I'm far from an expert on spaceflight, but I have read a number of technical books on the topic, taken university courses, and attended a conference devoted to the question of Mars colonization. So, please do yourself a favor and read up on the REAL technical difficulties that exist with respect to human spaceflight, and don't randomly accuse people of being pie-in-the-sky Star Trek fans with no grounding in reality. There are lots of interesting questions to discuss and nobody thinks that interplanetary colonization will be easy, but human exploration has always occurred at the very limits of our technological capability.
If you have some real technical objections to human spaceflight, it would be interesting and useful to discuss them, but at this point it sounds like you're expounding about something that you haven't really taken the time to understand. The real thing I want to find out: how does supplying air for a modern space traveler with modern technology compare, in terms of actual difficulty, to supplying food for an colonist using colonial-era technology? I would much rather put my trust in the former than the latter, and it seems clear to me that the challenge is fundamentally the same in both cases: the application of technology to sustain human life away from major social infrastructure.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is Physics. You cannot make a REAL spacecraft that approaches any significant fraction of the speed of light.
Carl Sagan and Freeman Dyson, for starters, disagree with you. Do you even know what Project Orion is? It uses only conventional technology, no unobtainium. Gets to 0.1c in 36 days.
All the money in the world isn't going to get humans out of our solar system.
It would cost ~$400B. A lot of money, but less than what we spent on the bank bailouts or Iraq war.
That's entirely my point, though. Any launch vehicle that lives or dies at the whim of congress (and has design requirements forced on it to boot) is never going to be anything more than a jobs program. Space access is not the reason SLS exists. Keeping Alabamans employed is, and it is succeeding brilliantly at that task.
So, remove that aspect of control from congress. NASA offers $100M for a rocket, and buys it off the shelf when they need it vs dumping $4B on building the Senate Launch System. With the fixed launch price, industry is motivated to get cheaper because then their profit is larger. Congress doesn't get to force a vehicle to use obsolete, expensive hardware like the SRBs. If NASA has its plans upended every 8 years as presidents are wont to do, the vehicle is still there, it just flies somewhere different.
NASA should be doing fundamental research and launching missions that aren't commercially viable (no reasonable ROI) and LEO access (even heavy lift) doesn't fit - it's something we've known how to do for years. Even BLEO, do a couple small launches and do on-orbit assembly, or wait a bit for Falcon Heavy (which will likely fly before SLS anyhow). SLS is the absolutely worst place NASA could be spending money if we actually care about doing stuff in space.
You are right. We just build thick-roofed shelters out of rock and sand. What was I thinking? Hey Charlie, go dig up some rock and sand and build a roof ok? Did you bring the shovel?
You are trying to be facetious, but it is really no more complicated than that. Send a structure (inflatable or whatever) and then through good-old elbow grease bury it with rock and sand. What's the problem?