I agree that stating that God couldn't is utterly stupid, however the question is on whether evolution occured or not.
This statement shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the term "evolution". In the biological sense, evolution is a process, not an event. One debates whether a process occurs and whether an event occurred.
I can and do study (and thereby demonstrate the existence of) evolution every day in my research. These days, evolutionary scientists seek to understand and characterize the properties and mathematics of the process of evolution. We observe and characterize it, day in and day out.
The phrase "...whether or not evolution occurred..." is not even lexically coherent. It's equivalent to "whether or not oxidation occurred" or "whether or not gravitation occurred". If someone wants to debate the existence of the process, feel free. But creationists gave up that lane of attack decades ago in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence. They pretend that the difference is now a debate between "microevolution" and "macroevolution" - a distiction which does not exist and cannot be defined.
If instead you want to debate whether the dual processes of evolution and speciation have led, over the course of several billion years, to the particular phylogeny biological species which currently inhabit the Earth, feel free. At that point, we're out of the realm of strict science (meaning the scientific method) and into the realm of observation, speculation, and logical argument because we can't, of course, conduct a controlled experiment.
But for goodness' sake, at least please take the time to understand the terms about which you're debating.
Aren't Saturn Vs just magnificent? They're magnificent! I reckon it's time for them to make a come-back. Please?
This is next to impossible. Besides the fact that the plans and blueprints are no longer complete, tens of thousands of parts in the Saturn-V were off-the-shelf in 1968 but are not manufactured anymore. Some don't have any modern equivalent, meaning extensive redesign would be necessary. Where equivalent-function parts exist, they may be of different size, requiring re-layout of panels and boards.
And since human spaceflight requires extensive testing of integrated components, *every* system would have to be tested against *all* of these changes.
Also, we'd want to do most of the design in CAD, of course, for rapid development and because that's what current engineers know. But none of the existing blueprints are in CAD, so they'd have to be laboriously redrawn in the computer and checked.
Given the availability of modern engines like those in the Delta rockets and technologies (like computers) it would be of similar expense (and maybe even cheaper) to design a new heavy lifter with modern components than to rebuild a saturn-V. And cheaper to operate, to boot.
This entire problem is solved the same way the real-world saccade problem is solved.
Your visual processing system (more specifically, the transferral of visual cortex information into your internal "world-map" representation) is for the most part shut down during a saccade. Whatever comes in is assumed "irrelevant" by your attention system.
This is why you have to play focus games like the ones you describe in order to notice the effects of artifacts during saccades. You don't notice this stuff much unless you're actively looking for it, as the parent post instructed us to do.
Besides, it's not "zero persistance". The response of your receptor cells to incident light rays is neither instantaneous nor of zero duration. There's an implicit persistance in the time during which a rod or cone will fire action potentials after receiving a burst of light.
Scan your system significantly faster than that duration, and you can't see transient effects, even with a laser. You don't see flicker with an LED cycling at 1000Hz; even though an LED is just as instantaneous as a laser. Your neurons simply don't respond that fast. I believe the cutoff for absolutely flickerless images is around 120Hz.
Though, you can still get fun effects if you vibrate your head in frequencies near the refresh rate. If you happen to be a bass, you can sing notes near 60Hz for cool rippling effects with LED clocks and the like.:-)
Of course, this shouldn't affect a head-mounted laser display very much.
What ever happened to the supersonic spaceplanes that they were working on that were to eventually replace the shuttle? I seem to remember reading about them years ago...
An equivalent question: "What happened to the rapid adoption of 90nm wafers that was going to bring us all 6GHz processors by late 2003?" Or "what happened to fusion power, which has been 20 years away since 1960?"
The answer to all of them: it turned out to be a shitload harder than we expected.
New operating regimes (higher speed, pressure, temperature, smaller manufacturing scales, whatever) sometimes bring new problems, and things have to slow down until the scientists and engineers solve them or find workarounds.
At the same time, nobody in 1960 even considered that you might be able to buy a gigaflop CPU for $300 at walmart in 2004. Nobody predicts the future very well.
The lobbyists pushed for stupid laws that ruined their own business -- but don't make the claim that we paid life support and neglect to mention that we paid the life support against our will as well. It was only done because the lobbyists convinced Washington that the airline's inability to run their own businesses is our fault.
It may have been their fault, but honestly we had to pay the life support. I'm pissed as hell about it, but I would have voted for the airline bailout, and faced with the same decision now I'd do it again.
Why?
If we don't, most of the airlines go out of business. Air travel in the U.S. drops by 75% and takes a decade to recover, impacting business in every sector all over the whole economy. Simultaneously 200,000 airline employees are suddenly dumped into the jobless pool.
The U.S. economy takes a header and sits in the crapper for about five or ten years.
As shitty as it is, the airline bailout was worth it to the rest of us.
And the airlines know that.
Which is part of why they feel okay lobbying for lower security (even today! they're still at it!), because they know the rest of us have no choice but to bail them out if a huge accident occurs.
The exact same thing applies to any major privately-held industry that is a foundation of our economy. Power, water, ports, petrochemicals, farming, food distribution, telecommunications. If any of these industries (and others, I'm sure) were to totally shit themselves due to accident or terrorist attack, as would have happened to post-9/11 air travel sans bailout, our economy turns to sewage for a decade.
Which is consequently exactly why we need some level of regulation up-front, forcing the safety/infrastructure/integrity issues they won't do themselves. Because the cost down the line is much higher for everyone if we don't.
Full deregulation of anything on which our economy depends is suicide, because business/industry, while fantastic at competition, innovation, and cost-reduction, is notorious for selfishness, shortsightedness and poor planning.
Right now next my big worries (for the US) are power and water. These are far more fragile than the others, at the moment.
On the other hand, you have to acknowledge that the private approach is typically to put profits first, last, and mostly in-between, and if that means cutting corners, well what's a few accidents?
There are a couple other ways to look at this phenomenon.
First, it's not just the profits even. Imagine reputable company A (A1 Advanced Rocketry, say) that actually wants to build a safer rocket, and they're willing to go to the expense. Unfortunately, budget company B (Bobs-discount-spaceflight.com) leaves out the escape hatch feature and offers a ride for 25% less.
So most of the consumers ignore company A, in favor of the cheaper product from B. Now A has two choices: cut safety features or go out of business. Even the good companies are forced by the market to cut expensive safety features. Ergo, an outside force is needed to correct the market.
Second, an accident is something that's impossible to value in dollars, assuming it's the kind of thing that destroys your company. And businesses make decisions by the bottom line. So they're faced with a decision like "ten million dollars vs. a 10% chance that we go out of business entirely". And something vague like a 10% chance of a one-shot total-fail event is impossible to value in a cost-benefit analysis. Thus, it's really easy to let that percentage risk continually creep up, even for a reputable company. If letting the chance creep from 10% to 15% saves you another two million... you see where this goes.
(Incidentally, this is the same reason companies cheat on accounting, etc. "Increased profits vs. some percent chance the government catches us and we go to jail" isn't amenable to cost-benefit analysis, and so a business will nearly always come down on the side of "increased profits". This is why business regulation is much more effective and likely to be followed when it's enforced via financial incentive rather than by threat of imprisonment.)
Without any regulation, businesses get very opportunistic and start cutting corners. In the space tourism industry, opportunism and cost-cutting ultimately leads to an accident. Imagine: five passengers die in a rocket explosion. Or a booster lands on a neighborhood in west bumfuck, killing thirty people and burning down half a dozen houses.
The market responds exactly the way you expect: people stop going into space, fearing for their own safety. And now the public is clamoring for very tight controls, so instead of moderate, early regulation, we get draconian after-the-fact regulation. The space launch industry is set back decades.
Industry is well known for making stupid, self-destructive decisions in the name of short-term profit and competition. In fact you can hardly blame them. If their competitors can cut margins by shaving safety to the bone, they have two choices: 1) do the same or 2) go out of business. Often, regulation is an attempt to keep an industry alive, saved from its own stupidity.
Remember, it was the airlines who lobbied year after year against tighter security precautions like secure pressurized doors on cockpits. And sure enough, nineteen assholes with boxcutters took advantage of that to kill 3000 people, a couple years back. And what happened? Because they were desperate to save the hundred million it might take to upgrade the cabin doors, the airlines took a fifty-billion-dollar decrease in business in the year after 9/11, and the taxpayers had to freaking bail them out.
By pushing for fewer regulations, the industry killed itself. It only survived because the rest of us paid for life support.
Same with airbags, unleaded gasoline, safety belts: these things save hundreds of thousands of lives every year. But they would never have happened without government regulation: every time, the industry screamed that it would put them out of business. But you tell me, how's the automobile industry doing? Did it go out of business recently as a result of government regulation? No, in fact now many manufacturers use safety as a selling point.
I'm as wary of unnecessary regulation as anybody. I'm a card-carrying EFF dude with a lot of libertarian values. But it's time to pull your uninformed-anarchist head out of the sand and learn some civics. Believe it or not, government and regulations actually exist for a reason, and used wisely can benefit everyone including the businesses being regulated.
Replacing Windows, while it can be about money, I think in this day and age of JPEG exploits, really should be about safety.
And lets, face it, MacOS is going to be safer than Windows. Less Users, Less Virus/Exploits. It's got an interface that kicks ass, and a real OS underneath.
Far more important is the security upgrade cycle.
When a new exploit (say the recent PNG or JPG exploits) is found...
With Windows, you have to wait six months for the next Service Pack, and hope that the exploit in question is one of the ones patched. (Or in some cases, wait a month and visit M$' website for a very painful scan-download-install-reboot cycle for the patch). SP2 only fixed something like 60% of the IE exploits that were already known for months.
With Linux, the community has a patch out within days. But you have to be in the know, and actively go get the.tgz or.rpm for it and install it. This is fabulous for geeks who subscribe to the right mailing lists, not so great for users.
With OS X, Apple has a patch out within a week, almost as fast as the linux community. (The libpng patch was within 48 hours) A dialog pops up on the user screen saying they have a security update. One click, type your password, it's installed. Grandma can do it. It works every time and requires absolutely no technical knowledge.
Oh, Longhorn might have something like this. Assuming it's not one of the features they cut. And assuming it ships before the end of the decade.
Seriously, if you're not a geek or developer (i.e. you're one of most of humanity) and you want a secure OS that will stay up to date versus the latest security exploits and holes, OS X cannot be beat at the moment.
No.:-) I'm not the hosting agency, just the web geek.
But Ecliptic does like visibility among technologically-savvy people, so slashdot crowds are quite welcome at the website. Since we went dedicated server instead of shared account a couple of years ago, I've managed to keep the site up during slashdot events.
The SpaceShipOne footage is available along with a lot of other cool space launch footage including the June SS1 first flight into space at Ecliptic Enterprises' RocketCam Videos page.
I just uploaded MPEG conversions, as well, so Linux users (and Macs without Windows Media Player) get to join in the fun.
MPEG and QT conversions of the WMV will be going up in a few minutes, as well, for all you linux and mac users. (As of 12:30pm PST, should be up by 1:00PST/4:00EST).
Disclaimer: I'm Ecliptic's webmaster by subcontract.
"Perhaps you'd like to explain how jettisoning a solar sail has enough force to slow down the craft."
Read the parent more carefully. He's not claiming the jettisoning of the sail slows you down.
The solar wind of the star you're approaching slows you back down. You use Sol to accelerate to interstellar speeds, and target star to slow you back down. You arrive in the destination system with reasonable interplanetary speed. You jettison the sail because you don't need it anymore. (Or, as he said, you use it to cruise around inside the new solar system, assuming your sail is built for that).
This pump is a "left ventricular assist" device; it doesn't replace the heart, just adds to the left ventricle's pumping effectiveness.
Which, incidentally, may mean the problem my post's grandparent was discussing may not be an issue. Depending on where/how they connect it, perhaps part of the aorta is still intact, allowing the coronaries to do their job.
As another neuroscientist, I'm going to agree with Polkyb, here. I don't think precise rewiring of each of the optical nerve axons is necessary. We know, for example, that even normal humans whose vision is reversed vertically through prisms will learn to interpret the new visual information appropriately within a few days.
We also know (or think we know) that much of the functionality within visual cortex is built through some self-organizational algorithm during early development. (Witness horrible experiments with kittens that show kittens deprived of normal visual stimuli for the first few months cannot see objects correctly in adulthood).
So, especially if it were done very young, I suspect that any wiring of a transplant eye's optic nerve axons to the axons of the optic nerve in the patient would ultimately be configured more-or-less appropriately. The patient might not learn to see the way we do, but they would learn to interpret the optical signals in a useful way.
However, this still begs the question: when will we be able to rewire nerves at all? Whether or not the brain can learn to interpret the new signals, transplanting a whole eye means cutting the optic nerve and reattaching 100,000 broken cell axons to 100,000 other broken cell axons, even if we don't care which one goes to which. Axons are about a micron in diameter; these aren't the kind of structures you can do surgery on.
So far, we can't even reconnect a single axon, and I don't see any emerging technologies that show promise for making this possible. I suspect we'll have success by growing new retinal neurons from stem cells and teaching them to grow axons down a "scaffold" optic nerve before we can sever and reconnect a grown optic nerve. And I'd put that stem cell approach 25-50 years off.
Dragging the disk to the trash/recycle can always seemed
In OS X, when you grab an ejectable volume, your Trash disappears. In its place appears an eject button, like the one you describe.
And when you grab a blank CD volume on which you've placed files (actually handled as a disc image, but this is transparent to the user), the trash is replaced with a nuclear symbol, the system-wide icon for "burn disk".
what about a button on the case labeled "Eject?"
Uhh... it's on the keyboard, dude. This is easier to reach. F12 works if you have a 3rd-party keyboard.
Wake up, Toto! We're not in 1999 anymore, but you're complaining about the limitations of that era's Macintoshes.
It's 2004 and Apple's UI engineers are still half a decade in front of everyone else. Check out Expose, for example... godDAMN it's amazing how much time that one feature can save a simple developer...
...saturated with carbon, mixed with salt, and diluted by water!
How the hell does one dilute oil with water?
You can get oil and water to mix if you add a little egg white and vinegar... this is called mayonnaise, but I don't think anyone's suggesting putting it in your gas tank.
There are hundreds of such companies in the U.S. alone. The government didn't bid these contracts - they awarded them without competition. Normally, government bids are extremely competitive because of large numbers of companies. Raytheon is a false analogy - missiles are not the same as civil engineering and logistics. Far more companies are available to provide the latter.
Government work has half the margins of private sector work, its slum and the companies that take it suck.
Au contraire. In many, many fields private sector margins have been cut to the bone since 1990 as competition resulted in efficiency, process redesign, downsizing, and mergers.
What government contracts offer is steady guarantees, with reasonable margins, which is why they are so desperately competed for by many companies.
However, the deals Halliburton and Bechtel have in Iraq are nearly unprecedented. They are cost-plus deals. Meaning, Halliburton tells the army how much they spent... on salaries, materiel, subcontractors, everything. And the army pays them X% more than that. Period. Meaning the more it costs them and the longer it takes them, the more money they make.
The private sector figured out a hundred years the obvious reasons why this doesn't work: your contractor now has incentive to screw you. They get rewarded for sloppy performance and procrastination, or even outright conscious delay. And human nature is what it is.
This is why private sector contracts - and better goverment contracts - bid for a set price and deadline. Now it becomes the contractor's job to figure out how to make a profit by getting the work done under the cost cap.
The cost-plus no-bid deals handed out for Iraq are unheard of in the business world, because it's a stupid, stupid way to do business, from a purely economic perspective. But, the nature of politics today seems to make it impossible to even discuss these things without getting called a "commie librul". You know the world's screwed up when smart business sense = communist liberalism.
Another suggestion of a "company that would take the work"... try the Army. Until a few years ago, they provided almost all of their own logistics. It's not at all clear that it's cheaper to do it with private companies.
It also means the military now depends on civilian companies that can and will cut and run if the security situation gets too bad... leaving the Army up the proverbial sh*t creek without laundry, trucking, or food.
Imagine how fast Halliburton would be gone if some terrorist DID set off a stolen nuke in Iraq, killing 1000 of their employees. But nuke or no nuke, someone's got to feed our troops. This is why Army logistics should stay in the Army.
2. There's a public phone line attached to it. Yeah, right.
You know, I'm not so sure. Yesterday, if someone had said, "the nuke launch security code was set to 000000000 on all systems for many years", I would have said "Yeah, right".
How much stupider is attaching a public phone line? Starting to seem possible.
Re:Reminds me off the great novel by Bruce Sterlin
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Mechanical Computing
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"Great novel"? Um.. it's a beatiful, incredibly well-realized world. But it has a sad excuse for a plot (a communist plot to steal a deck of punched cards that can win you the lottery) and mostly two-dimensional characters. The contents of the last page (I won't spoil it, but it's kinda lame) have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the plot, anywhere. It's a totally gimmicky post-ending element with no function in the story.
Great novels require more than amazing world building. Both Sterling and Gibson have written far better books than that one, though I personally think Gibson has never really matched Neuromancer in his later work.
Seriously folks, as silly as ewoks are they are a prtty powerful image of the asymmetric warfare the US will face in the next century. We have an arsenal of the most high-tech weapons anywhere; Saddam's army melted away before them. Why fight when you don't have a chance?
A year later they've killed six times as many US soldiers as during the war proper, using entirely low-tech weapons combined with stealth.
The most deadly attack on the US in two generations was perpetrated with a set of quarter-inch-long knifeblades; the only technology used was our own (the planes).
I think these weapons are as cool from a geek perspective as the next guy. But you hide from a space-based kinetic energy weapon the same way you hide from a cruise missile, tank, or humvee: in plainclothes in a crowded building.
These things will be useful in some scenarios, but better intelligence, better cultural knowledge, psychological and group-psychological action, and actually-effective nonlethal weapons are going to be the far more important military needs of the US for the next few decades.
No nation will pick a hardware-based fight with the US. It's all going to turn on boots on the ground, among the people. As yet, we're nowhere near as good at that.
Slashdot Mirror
This statement shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the term "evolution". In the biological sense, evolution is a process, not an event. One debates whether a process occurs and whether an event occurred.
I can and do study (and thereby demonstrate the existence of) evolution every day in my research. These days, evolutionary scientists seek to understand and characterize the properties and mathematics of the process of evolution. We observe and characterize it, day in and day out.
The phrase "...whether or not evolution occurred..." is not even lexically coherent. It's equivalent to "whether or not oxidation occurred" or "whether or not gravitation occurred". If someone wants to debate the existence of the process, feel free. But creationists gave up that lane of attack decades ago in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence. They pretend that the difference is now a debate between "microevolution" and "macroevolution" - a distiction which does not exist and cannot be defined.
If instead you want to debate whether the dual processes of evolution and speciation have led, over the course of several billion years, to the particular phylogeny biological species which currently inhabit the Earth, feel free. At that point, we're out of the realm of strict science (meaning the scientific method) and into the realm of observation, speculation, and logical argument because we can't, of course, conduct a controlled experiment.
But for goodness' sake, at least please take the time to understand the terms about which you're debating.
This is next to impossible. Besides the fact that the plans and blueprints are no longer complete, tens of thousands of parts in the Saturn-V were off-the-shelf in 1968 but are not manufactured anymore. Some don't have any modern equivalent, meaning extensive redesign would be necessary. Where equivalent-function parts exist, they may be of different size, requiring re-layout of panels and boards.
And since human spaceflight requires extensive testing of integrated components, *every* system would have to be tested against *all* of these changes.
Also, we'd want to do most of the design in CAD, of course, for rapid development and because that's what current engineers know. But none of the existing blueprints are in CAD, so they'd have to be laboriously redrawn in the computer and checked.
Given the availability of modern engines like those in the Delta rockets and technologies (like computers) it would be of similar expense (and maybe even cheaper) to design a new heavy lifter with modern components than to rebuild a saturn-V. And cheaper to operate, to boot.
Ev
This entire problem is solved the same way the real-world saccade problem is solved.
:-)
Your visual processing system (more specifically, the transferral of visual cortex information into your internal "world-map" representation) is for the most part shut down during a saccade. Whatever comes in is assumed "irrelevant" by your attention system.
This is why you have to play focus games like the ones you describe in order to notice the effects of artifacts during saccades. You don't notice this stuff much unless you're actively looking for it, as the parent post instructed us to do.
Besides, it's not "zero persistance". The response of your receptor cells to incident light rays is neither instantaneous nor of zero duration. There's an implicit persistance in the time during which a rod or cone will fire action potentials after receiving a burst of light.
Scan your system significantly faster than that duration, and you can't see transient effects, even with a laser. You don't see flicker with an LED cycling at 1000Hz; even though an LED is just as instantaneous as a laser. Your neurons simply don't respond that fast. I believe the cutoff for absolutely flickerless images is around 120Hz.
Though, you can still get fun effects if you vibrate your head in frequencies near the refresh rate. If you happen to be a bass, you can sing notes near 60Hz for cool rippling effects with LED clocks and the like.
Of course, this shouldn't affect a head-mounted laser display very much.
An equivalent question: "What happened to the rapid adoption of 90nm wafers that was going to bring us all 6GHz processors by late 2003?" Or "what happened to fusion power, which has been 20 years away since 1960?"
The answer to all of them: it turned out to be a shitload harder than we expected.
New operating regimes (higher speed, pressure, temperature, smaller manufacturing scales, whatever) sometimes bring new problems, and things have to slow down until the scientists and engineers solve them or find workarounds.
At the same time, nobody in 1960 even considered that you might be able to buy a gigaflop CPU for $300 at walmart in 2004. Nobody predicts the future very well.
Well, lion comes to mind.
Don't discount the upcoming OS X 10.9 "Thundercat".
But of course I'm eagerly waiting for the Mac branded PDA phone that runs OS X "Kitten".
The lobbyists pushed for stupid laws that ruined their own business -- but don't make the claim that we paid life support and neglect to mention that we paid the life support against our will as well. It was only done because the lobbyists convinced Washington that the airline's inability to run their own businesses is our fault.
It may have been their fault, but honestly we had to pay the life support. I'm pissed as hell about it, but I would have voted for the airline bailout, and faced with the same decision now I'd do it again.
Why?
If we don't, most of the airlines go out of business. Air travel in the U.S. drops by 75% and takes a decade to recover, impacting business in every sector all over the whole economy. Simultaneously 200,000 airline employees are suddenly dumped into the jobless pool.
The U.S. economy takes a header and sits in the crapper for about five or ten years.
As shitty as it is, the airline bailout was worth it to the rest of us.
And the airlines know that.
Which is part of why they feel okay lobbying for lower security (even today! they're still at it!), because they know the rest of us have no choice but to bail them out if a huge accident occurs.
The exact same thing applies to any major privately-held industry that is a foundation of our economy. Power, water, ports, petrochemicals, farming, food distribution, telecommunications. If any of these industries (and others, I'm sure) were to totally shit themselves due to accident or terrorist attack, as would have happened to post-9/11 air travel sans bailout, our economy turns to sewage for a decade.
Which is consequently exactly why we need some level of regulation up-front, forcing the safety/infrastructure/integrity issues they won't do themselves. Because the cost down the line is much higher for everyone if we don't.
Full deregulation of anything on which our economy depends is suicide, because business/industry, while fantastic at competition, innovation, and cost-reduction, is notorious for selfishness, shortsightedness and poor planning.
Right now next my big worries (for the US) are power and water. These are far more fragile than the others, at the moment.
There are a couple other ways to look at this phenomenon.
First, it's not just the profits even. Imagine reputable company A (A1 Advanced Rocketry, say) that actually wants to build a safer rocket, and they're willing to go to the expense. Unfortunately, budget company B (Bobs-discount-spaceflight.com) leaves out the escape hatch feature and offers a ride for 25% less.
So most of the consumers ignore company A, in favor of the cheaper product from B. Now A has two choices: cut safety features or go out of business. Even the good companies are forced by the market to cut expensive safety features. Ergo, an outside force is needed to correct the market.
Second, an accident is something that's impossible to value in dollars, assuming it's the kind of thing that destroys your company. And businesses make decisions by the bottom line. So they're faced with a decision like "ten million dollars vs. a 10% chance that we go out of business entirely". And something vague like a 10% chance of a one-shot total-fail event is impossible to value in a cost-benefit analysis. Thus, it's really easy to let that percentage risk continually creep up, even for a reputable company. If letting the chance creep from 10% to 15% saves you another two million
(Incidentally, this is the same reason companies cheat on accounting, etc. "Increased profits vs. some percent chance the government catches us and we go to jail" isn't amenable to cost-benefit analysis, and so a business will nearly always come down on the side of "increased profits". This is why business regulation is much more effective and likely to be followed when it's enforced via financial incentive rather than by threat of imprisonment.)
Allow me to play devil's advocate for a moment.
Without any regulation, businesses get very opportunistic and start cutting corners. In the space tourism industry, opportunism and cost-cutting ultimately leads to an accident. Imagine: five passengers die in a rocket explosion. Or a booster lands on a neighborhood in west bumfuck, killing thirty people and burning down half a dozen houses.
The market responds exactly the way you expect: people stop going into space, fearing for their own safety. And now the public is clamoring for very tight controls, so instead of moderate, early regulation, we get draconian after-the-fact regulation. The space launch industry is set back decades.
Industry is well known for making stupid, self-destructive decisions in the name of short-term profit and competition. In fact you can hardly blame them. If their competitors can cut margins by shaving safety to the bone, they have two choices: 1) do the same or 2) go out of business. Often, regulation is an attempt to keep an industry alive, saved from its own stupidity.
Remember, it was the airlines who lobbied year after year against tighter security precautions like secure pressurized doors on cockpits. And sure enough, nineteen assholes with boxcutters took advantage of that to kill 3000 people, a couple years back. And what happened? Because they were desperate to save the hundred million it might take to upgrade the cabin doors, the airlines took a fifty-billion-dollar decrease in business in the year after 9/11, and the taxpayers had to freaking bail them out.
By pushing for fewer regulations, the industry killed itself. It only survived because the rest of us paid for life support.
Same with airbags, unleaded gasoline, safety belts: these things save hundreds of thousands of lives every year. But they would never have happened without government regulation: every time, the industry screamed that it would put them out of business. But you tell me, how's the automobile industry doing? Did it go out of business recently as a result of government regulation? No, in fact now many manufacturers use safety as a selling point.
I'm as wary of unnecessary regulation as anybody. I'm a card-carrying EFF dude with a lot of libertarian values. But it's time to pull your uninformed-anarchist head out of the sand and learn some civics. Believe it or not, government and regulations actually exist for a reason, and used wisely can benefit everyone including the businesses being regulated.
Far more important is the security upgrade cycle.
When a new exploit (say the recent PNG or JPG exploits) is found...
With Windows, you have to wait six months for the next Service Pack, and hope that the exploit in question is one of the ones patched. (Or in some cases, wait a month and visit M$' website for a very painful scan-download-install-reboot cycle for the patch). SP2 only fixed something like 60% of the IE exploits that were already known for months.
With Linux, the community has a patch out within days. But you have to be in the know, and actively go get the
With OS X, Apple has a patch out within a week, almost as fast as the linux community. (The libpng patch was within 48 hours) A dialog pops up on the user screen saying they have a security update. One click, type your password, it's installed. Grandma can do it. It works every time and requires absolutely no technical knowledge.
Oh, Longhorn might have something like this. Assuming it's not one of the features they cut. And assuming it ships before the end of the decade.
Seriously, if you're not a geek or developer (i.e. you're one of most of humanity) and you want a secure OS that will stay up to date versus the latest security exploits and holes, OS X cannot be beat at the moment.
So, to what depths of the seventh-level-of-stupid-hell do we ascribe the information that comes as a .EXE attachment?
No. :-) I'm not the hosting agency, just the web geek.
But Ecliptic does like visibility among technologically-savvy people, so slashdot crowds are quite welcome at the website. Since we went dedicated server instead of shared account a couple of years ago, I've managed to keep the site up during slashdot events.
Ev
The SpaceShipOne footage is available along with a lot of other cool space launch footage including the June SS1 first flight into space at Ecliptic Enterprises' RocketCam Videos page.
I just uploaded MPEG conversions, as well, so Linux users (and Macs without Windows Media Player) get to join in the fun.
Disclaimer: I'm Ecliptic's webmaster.
Ecliptic Enterprises, who makes the onboard videocamera used for much of that footage, has two mirrors of the video footage:
RocketCam (TM) Videos
RocketCam (TM) Video Mirror at RocketCam.Space.TV
MPEG and QT conversions of the WMV will be going up in a few minutes, as well, for all you linux and mac users. (As of 12:30pm PST, should be up by 1:00PST/4:00EST).
Disclaimer: I'm Ecliptic's webmaster by subcontract.
Enjoy.
-Ev
"Perhaps you'd like to explain how jettisoning a solar sail has enough force to slow down the craft."
Read the parent more carefully. He's not claiming the jettisoning of the sail slows you down.
The solar wind of the star you're approaching slows you back down. You use Sol to accelerate to interstellar speeds, and target star to slow you back down. You arrive in the destination system with reasonable interplanetary speed. You jettison the sail because you don't need it anymore. (Or, as he said, you use it to cruise around inside the new solar system, assuming your sail is built for that).
The hard part is keeping the loose, cut ends of the nerve cells from dying and withering away.
RTFA, RTFA...
This pump is a "left ventricular assist" device; it doesn't replace the heart, just adds to the left ventricle's pumping effectiveness.
Which, incidentally, may mean the problem my post's grandparent was discussing may not be an issue. Depending on where/how they connect it, perhaps part of the aorta is still intact, allowing the coronaries to do their job.
As another neuroscientist, I'm going to agree with Polkyb, here. I don't think precise rewiring of each of the optical nerve axons is necessary. We know, for example, that even normal humans whose vision is reversed vertically through prisms will learn to interpret the new visual information appropriately within a few days.
We also know (or think we know) that much of the functionality within visual cortex is built through some self-organizational algorithm during early development. (Witness horrible experiments with kittens that show kittens deprived of normal visual stimuli for the first few months cannot see objects correctly in adulthood).
So, especially if it were done very young, I suspect that any wiring of a transplant eye's optic nerve axons to the axons of the optic nerve in the patient would ultimately be configured more-or-less appropriately. The patient might not learn to see the way we do, but they would learn to interpret the optical signals in a useful way.
However, this still begs the question: when will we be able to rewire nerves at all? Whether or not the brain can learn to interpret the new signals, transplanting a whole eye means cutting the optic nerve and reattaching 100,000 broken cell axons to 100,000 other broken cell axons, even if we don't care which one goes to which. Axons are about a micron in diameter; these aren't the kind of structures you can do surgery on.
So far, we can't even reconnect a single axon, and I don't see any emerging technologies that show promise for making this possible. I suspect we'll have success by growing new retinal neurons from stem cells and teaching them to grow axons down a "scaffold" optic nerve before we can sever and reconnect a grown optic nerve. And I'd put that stem cell approach 25-50 years off.
Dragging the disk to the trash/recycle can always seemed
... godDAMN it's amazing how much time that one feature can save a simple developer...
In OS X, when you grab an ejectable volume, your Trash disappears. In its place appears an eject button, like the one you describe.
And when you grab a blank CD volume on which you've placed files (actually handled as a disc image, but this is transparent to the user), the trash is replaced with a nuclear symbol, the system-wide icon for "burn disk".
what about a button on the case labeled "Eject?"
Uhh... it's on the keyboard, dude. This is easier to reach. F12 works if you have a 3rd-party keyboard.
Wake up, Toto! We're not in 1999 anymore, but you're complaining about the limitations of that era's Macintoshes.
It's 2004 and Apple's UI engineers are still half a decade in front of everyone else. Check out Expose, for example
Correlation != causation.
Perhaps high birth rate and high death rate are both the result of other factors that are connected, like poverty and lack of education?
...saturated with carbon, mixed with salt, and diluted by water!
... this is called mayonnaise, but I don't think anyone's suggesting putting it in your gas tank.
How the hell does one dilute oil with water?
You can get oil and water to mix if you add a little egg white and vinegar
Bechtel.
Less snarkily:
Washington Group International
Transportation and Logistics Directory
Commercial Contractors Directory
There are hundreds of such companies in the U.S. alone. The government didn't bid these contracts - they awarded them without competition. Normally, government bids are extremely competitive because of large numbers of companies. Raytheon is a false analogy - missiles are not the same as civil engineering and logistics. Far more companies are available to provide the latter.
Au contraire. In many, many fields private sector margins have been cut to the bone since 1990 as competition resulted in efficiency, process redesign, downsizing, and mergers.
What government contracts offer is steady guarantees, with reasonable margins, which is why they are so desperately competed for by many companies.
However, the deals Halliburton and Bechtel have in Iraq are nearly unprecedented. They are cost-plus deals. Meaning, Halliburton tells the army how much they spent
The private sector figured out a hundred years the obvious reasons why this doesn't work: your contractor now has incentive to screw you. They get rewarded for sloppy performance and procrastination, or even outright conscious delay. And human nature is what it is.
This is why private sector contracts - and better goverment contracts - bid for a set price and deadline. Now it becomes the contractor's job to figure out how to make a profit by getting the work done under the cost cap.
The cost-plus no-bid deals handed out for Iraq are unheard of in the business world, because it's a stupid, stupid way to do business, from a purely economic perspective. But, the nature of politics today seems to make it impossible to even discuss these things without getting called a "commie librul". You know the world's screwed up when smart business sense = communist liberalism.
Another suggestion of a "company that would take the work"... try the Army. Until a few years ago, they provided almost all of their own logistics. It's not at all clear that it's cheaper to do it with private companies.
It also means the military now depends on civilian companies that can and will cut and run if the security situation gets too bad
Imagine how fast Halliburton would be gone if some terrorist DID set off a stolen nuke in Iraq, killing 1000 of their employees. But nuke or no nuke, someone's got to feed our troops. This is why Army logistics should stay in the Army.
It was determined that it was better that a few missiles not leave the silos during a nuclear exchange than a few leave a silo during peace-time
Yes, that determination was so important that they took pains to create safe passwords.
2. There's a public phone line attached to it. Yeah, right.
You know, I'm not so sure. Yesterday, if someone had said, "the nuke launch security code was set to 000000000 on all systems for many years", I would have said "Yeah, right".
How much stupider is attaching a public phone line? Starting to seem possible.
"Great novel"? Um.. it's a beatiful, incredibly well-realized world. But it has a sad excuse for a plot (a communist plot to steal a deck of punched cards that can win you the lottery) and mostly two-dimensional characters. The contents of the last page (I won't spoil it, but it's kinda lame) have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the plot, anywhere. It's a totally gimmicky post-ending element with no function in the story.
Great novels require more than amazing world building. Both Sterling and Gibson have written far better books than that one, though I personally think Gibson has never really matched Neuromancer in his later work.
Seriously folks, as silly as ewoks are they are a prtty powerful image of the asymmetric warfare the US will face in the next century. We have an arsenal of the most high-tech weapons anywhere; Saddam's army melted away before them. Why fight when you don't have a chance?
A year later they've killed six times as many US soldiers as during the war proper, using entirely low-tech weapons combined with stealth.
The most deadly attack on the US in two generations was perpetrated with a set of quarter-inch-long knifeblades; the only technology used was our own (the planes).
I think these weapons are as cool from a geek perspective as the next guy. But you hide from a space-based kinetic energy weapon the same way you hide from a cruise missile, tank, or humvee: in plainclothes in a crowded building.
These things will be useful in some scenarios, but better intelligence, better cultural knowledge, psychological and group-psychological action, and actually-effective nonlethal weapons are going to be the far more important military needs of the US for the next few decades.
No nation will pick a hardware-based fight with the US. It's all going to turn on boots on the ground, among the people. As yet, we're nowhere near as good at that.