Bullshit. A hell of a lot of fascinating, gripping, dramatic stuff happens in reality, and if you are free to choose a setup and some character personalities, you can make some incredible on-screen fiction that doesn't clash with realism at every turn. Someone mentioned Apollo 13 - a hell of a dramatic story that did indeed occur within boring old Reality.
I don't mind a bit of fudging in a movie myself, and I am willing to accept some unlikely premise on which a story can be built, but what drives me crazy are the things that are wrong for no good reason. The direction of an orbit could have been chosen correctly with no plot impact or cost (assuming this happened in the initial visual planning), most movie science errors are just dumb for no reason whatsoever, a tiny dialog change could resolve half of them. Even technobabble that demonstrates they know the error and are asking our indulgence to forward the plot is usually enough to maintain the suspension of disbelief.
Suspension of disbelief, btw, is a delicate balance, not a suit of armor you put on before entering the theater. It's the movie's responsibility to maintain it, and a movie that breaks it stops being entertaining. A movie that breaks it for no good reason at all deserves to be shit upon for it.
For the record it sounds like Tyson is not complaining about loss of S.O.D., and didn't dislike the film, but it's his job to educate, and big sciency movies are a good vehicle. It's not nitpicking, it's his job.
8 terabytes per day, according to TFA. Add the ability to effectively query, slice, dice and present that much data on a long-term basis... yeah, that's a hell of a lot of vacuum tubes.
For comparison, the LHC does upwards of 27TB/day[1], Hubble 3-5[2].
who on earth seriously believes that all mathematics exists in some universal psychic brain?* Is the Psychic Math Brain Theory (sorry, I mean Platonic Theory) really a serious contender among mathematicians as stated?
*As opposed, that is, to the idea that physical relationships that exist in our universe are sussed out through experimentation and logic and expressed in mathematical language.
Not only is it labeled with a stupid buzzword, it doesn't even conform to the definition of the buzzword, i.e. video on demand via rss or atom enclosures (podcasts but with video files). It's actually a plugin-dependent flash video presented on a web page. Might as well just name it now - these pilots are being youtubed.
With these stations becoming so popular, isn't it time to sell ads? After all, spy agencies can always use the extra cash, and the people who listen to these things probably constitute a solid geek demographic.
Or worse:
1) Create personal numbers station with especially intriguing sequences to draw audience 2) Sell ads on your personal number station 3) Profit!... why do I feel like I've missed a step there?
they wanted to go back to the drawing boards, but couldn't find them. Best guess is that retiring engineers took all the original drawing boards home with them, and they are gathering dust in garages and attics. The children and grandchildren of those engineers simply have no idea how essential drawing boards were to our space program, or how valuable they could be to it now.
With a suitable suspension I don't see why they would not do fine on stairs. If the balancing algorithm is good, it should recover fine on each step. A little laser rangefinding could even allow it to know it was going down stairs and adjust accordingly. Certainly a dynamicly balanced bot would fair better than a 4-wheeler going down the same stairs. If I can ride a motorcyle down the stairs, my new robotic biroid overlords should not have a problem.
Why is the assumption here that a) the space shuttle is the only method of getting material from the moon to earth (send the shuttle to the moon to pick it up? Are you nuts?) and b) that the only goal is mining "rock" from the moon to send back to earth?
Calculating the cost of mining the moon using the cost of launching a shuttle to earth orbit makes no sense. The shuttle is not the cheapest or most efficient way to get mass into orbit, and it sure as hell isn't the easiest way to get it back down (gravity does a good job of that). Why would getting material from the moon to earth require any launch at all from earth (once you are done building the mining base)? How about using the moon's massive solar power potential to railgun things into earth orbit? Maybe titanium, with its very expensive, earth-evironment unfriendly, power-hungry processing requirements?
Second, we need titanium and items made therefrom in space for making habitats, ships, exploration probes, and so on. Things which, if made on the moon, we don't have to ship up from earth orbit. You have it all backwards, the enormous cost of getting material into orbit from earth is the -pro- moon mining argument if you want to do anything interesting at all in space.
Want a big telescope on the moon? Make it there. Want a big orbital hotel for billionaire socialites to visit? Prefab the superstructure on the moon where power, titanium, and transportation are cheap. Want an orbital kinetic energy weapon to drop bullets on your enemies from above? Maybe not, but somebody does, and will be willing to pay for it. Make it on the moon, and load it with rocky ammo while you're at it, for free. I suspect a working moon mine/factory would pay for itself pretty easily, without a single gram exported to earth's surface.
Then there is the tremendous experimental value - learning to mine in space, learning to live there, etc. If we -ever- want to do any human space exploration, colonization, or teraforming, we have to start somewhere, learning the basics. The automation technology alone will be terribly useful back on earth, while lessening the number of humans we have to support on the moon.
Is moon mining economically feasible right now? I don't know, but I do know mining concerns invest a hell of a lot in an operation and expect their profits to come in after many years of mining, not today. Even if moon mining was break-even economically, it would be worth the learning experience - and would leave those profit-minded among us with the tools to do more profitable things in space. Even if it takes several generations of mining colony to get to that stage, the long view favors the first steps.
If your 21 million dollar contract hangs on being able to open a document in under 3 minutes, you may have issues other than your choice of office software.
No, it's transparent. The circuitry itself is transparent - a lot of research has gone into developing semiconductors with the correct band structure to pass most of the visible spectrum but still act as semiconductors. Translucency generally refers to materials that disperse light, rendering images blurry or unrecognisable, while transparent materials maintain the integrity of the transmitted image, even if dimmed or colored. (Your semantics may vary.)
These circuits are indeed made from transparent (over a wide range of the visible spectrum) semiconductors, and they are indeed printed on glass. I am not involved with the research, but I know Dr. Wager, whose team developed the circuits, and I know a few of the physicists who developed the actual materials used. Very neat stuff.
I'll group my question with this, as it is related - I often see situations on the show that could very obviously be validated or busted by any good engineer or physicist and a blackboard - but that wouldn't be very good TV (Walking vs Running in the rain, classic application of basic calculus...).
What is the science support for the show? Surely you must have some real scientists on the research team, what do they tell you, and how many of the results do you actually know ahead of time due to your research staff and just being good engineers yourselves?
Once in a while it would be nice to have a theory guy come in after the myth has been entertainingly tested to bolster the results with real science. Especially when the "testing" is often so paltry with real generalizable data. This would be especially neat when the physical testing seems to disagree with the science. I have noticed a bit more "Science Content" on recent episodes, but I think the show would be more interesting if for instance your declarations of busted or not were backed up with a really good explanation of why something is mathematically/physically plausible to begin with, as opposed to just saying, well, we blew it up, but it still didn't fly 200 yards, myth busted.
How do you guys feel about the science content of your show and your myths? What do you think about having a real scientist on the show to audit results?
Nothing wrong with editorial, my point was not to criticize his article, but the mindset that the entire site is one person's personal blog. In other words, a criticism of his article should have been met with a discussion of its merits or flaws, not with a flat statement that its his site and he can do whatever he wants. It is his site (more or less), and he can do what he wants, but that doesn't mean he always should, and the debate about how things -should- be done is not trivial. That debate should not be met with the flat statement "Its his personal blog, if you don't like it go start your own (enormously popular geek news site with millions of daily hits and a vibrant, if somewhat cultish, folllowing).
Editorial is good, I don't mean to criticise his posting, just the notion that slashdot is no more than Tacos's personal playground - maybe it was, once, but I think its time it grew up a little.
I am sorry I saw this so late into the discussion, I know there is little likelyhood I'll be read with this volume of comments. Still, this is something that has bugged me for a while, really since about the time I registered here (after reading for a long time, and putting some thought into whether registration was Good or Bad, otherwise my ID would not be as high as it is).
Let me preface this by saying it is not a critique of the above post. It is a critique of a mindset, a critique of a way of doing things. I don't find the artical that objectionable, but I find people's response to it annoying.
I first encountered Rob Malda while poking around the web for Gimp tidbits. Then there was Bits and Pieces (or Bits and Bytes? Its all hazy now) and then Slashdot. I remember the early days. Back when it was a cute domain name, and really was just CmdrTaco's personal blog. But is it still?
It is, to all appearances, a public forum. A newbie will not get any sense that it is a personal blog when they stop by (apropos of above comment). Its not called Tacos Blog, it doesn't have his name prominently displayed on the front page, the majority of the content is not by Rob. My own personal blog and domain names, I can turn off, sell or quit any time I like. Rob, how would OSDN feel if you decided you didn't want the hard work and abuse any more, and wanted to shut down the site, sell the domain and move on?
Everyone here has been invited to, by all appearances, a public forum.
Whenever someone complains about something like Rob's story above, there are two responses, agreement, and the flat statement that its his Personal Blog and he can do whatever he wants. That misses the point entirely. Anyone can start up a newspaper, and control its content completely, but that newspaper is not going to be taken seriously if they don't maintain journalistic standards. Do people who pick up that paper have no right whatsoever to point out the flaws? There are practical reasons for being a good editor of your own personal public forum. Credibility is one, respect another (how much respect does the content here get, compared to the respect the Slashdot Effect gets?).
Like it or not, Slashdot is huge, and taken semi-seriously (more for its massive geek-esque audience than content) around the world. We have no right to point out flaws? We have no right to point out abuses and silly behavior by its editors? (Hey, -my- personal blog doesn't have Editors!) Of course we have that right, and Rob, et al should listen, respectfully, and respond earnestly and respectfully, even if they don't agree. Rob should answer as much email personally as he can, and really thing about what people are telling him - he should be decent and responsive and thoughful. This site is nothing without the millions who read and post to his "Personal Blog", and those millions deserve a little respect. Like the GM, who has the power to be a jerk, we all know he doesn't have to be, and shouldn't be.
I have a lot of respect for what CmdrTaco has done here, (especially distributing moderator power and helping to prevent -that- kind of abuse) but I think this all boils down to something he said above (paraphrasing) - they have every right to make whatever rules they want, and every right to enforce them, it is -thier- game - but it was handled badly. In other words, you have every right to be an asshole in your private space, but that doesn't make you less of an asshole when you do it.
CmdrTaco is not an asshole, nor a fascist, but I don't know if he realizes how much his baby has grown, and how much responsibility goes with the power he has here. If hestill thinks of it as his private space, and half the readers here do to, things can never improve beyond the often laughable mess we have now.
Ideally, a battery with enough capacity and efficiency would be best. Ultimately, I think some kind of direct electrical storage is going to power everything we own.
But there's that capacity and efficiency issue... a lot of the power used to charge a battery is lost to heat, and not all the power "inside" the battery is usable. And batteries, per weight, can't store anywhere near the power gasoline can. (I use Power on purpose here, since it is not just an issue of energy storage, you have to be able to pull the energy out at a useful rate. I realize storage of power is not really a coherent concept.)
Someone will probably link to real data on efficiencies and densities - I could be wrong on the energy density for newer (very expensive) battery technologies, but I suspect nothing is coming close to gasoline yet (neither does hydrogen).
A big capacitor with no standing power drain would be perfect - high discharge rates, efficient charging, etc- but we don't have capacitors with the capacity or ability to hold charge forever while not in use. Some day, the entire hydrogen economy will be rendered obsolete by a better electrical storage device. Even then, there'll probably be a coal or deisel power plant somewhere, still generating the electricity we'll be storing in our portable supercapacitors.
Except, as you recall, Puddnhead Wilson was quite intelligent, and used the nascent science of fingerprinting to solve a complicated crime. His sardonic wit and odd intellectual habits led the uneducated people of the little town he moved to to assume he was a bit slow. Eventually, they concluded he wasn't just slow, he was a Puddnhead.
From The Tragedy of Puddnhead Wilson:
He was a homely, freckled, sandy-haired young fellow, with an intelligent blue eye that had frankness and comradeship in it and a covert twinkle of a pleasant sort. But for an unfortunate remark of his, he would no doubt have entered at once upon a successful career at Dawson's Landing. But he made his fatal remark the first day he spent in the village, and it "gaged" him. He had just made the acquaintance of a group of citizens when an invisible dog began to yelp and snarl and howl and make himself very comprehensively disagreeable, whereupon young Wilson said, much as one who is thinking aloud:
"I wish I owned half of that dog."
"Why?" somebody asked.
"Because I would kill my half."
The group searched his face with curiosity, with anxiety even, but found no light there, no expression that they could read. They fell away from him as from something uncanny, and went into privacy to discuss him. One said:
"'Pears to be a fool."
"'Pears?" said another. "Is, I reckon you better say."
"Said he wished he owned half of the dog, the idiot," said a third. "What did he reckon would become of the other half if he killed his half? Do you reckon he thought it would live?"
"Why, he must have thought it, unless he IS the downrightest fool in the world; because if he hadn't thought it, he would have wanted to own the whole dog, knowing that if he killed his half and the other half died, he would be responsible for that half just the same as if he had killed that half instead of his own. Don't it look that way to you, gents?"
"Yes, it does. If he owned one half of the general dog, it would be so; if he owned one end of the dog and another person owned the other end, it would be so, just the same; particularly in the first case, because if you kill one half of a general dog, there ain't any man that can tell whose half it was; but if he owned one end of the dog, maybe he could kill his end of it and -- "
"No, he couldn't either; he couldn't and not be responsible if the other end died, which it would. In my opinion that man ain't in his right mind."
"In my opinion he hain't got any mind."
No. 3 said: "Well, he's a lummox, anyway."
That's what he is;" said No. 4. "He's a labrick -- just a Simon-pure labrick, if there was one."
"Yes, sir, he's a dam fool. That's the way I put him up," said No. 5. "Anybody can think different that wants to, but those are my sentiments."
"I'm with you, gentlemen," said No. 6. "Perfect jackass -- yes, and it ain't going too far to say he is a pudd'nhead. If he ain't a pudd'nhead, I ain't no judge, that's all."
I rather liked Enterprise's ramdom excusrions away from ST canon (ok, I've only seen about 5 episodes, but still...)
Divergent histories are inevitable once time travel is discovered - and we've seen that it is pretty easily available to the Federation, the Borg, and others. Once the principle is discovered, the whole universe is doomed to a morass of revised histories, expeditions into the past to prevent other expeditions into the past, leakage of technology across time, etc, etc. There will always be someone going back to prevent some other guy from doing what he went back to do. This is just the sort of thing the Campaign for Real Time was founded to prevent.
The final episode ought to be a realizaition of this hopeless muddle of timelines and historical corruption - Riker, Kirk, and a few other far future Federation bigwigs come back, The Five Doctors style, to help Archer pinpoint the origin of their wildly disconnected universe and try to set things right. They eventually find the trouble all began with a young writer in the mid 20th century, trying hard to get a new concept TV show on the air. His name is Gene....
No, its not the plot discontinuity that bugs me. Its the fact that the writing, is lousy, the scientific concepts are stupid, the social critique is sophmoric at best, and the philosphy is untenable even across one episode. My suspension of disbelief gets visciously attacked on all sides, and usually gives up about 10 minutes in. But then, the whole franchise has that problem.
Throughout my years as a Unix admin, I have been a working blacksmith and woodworker in exotic woods. Recently I have branched into selling BDSM gear and sex toys, but that's beside the point.
I suspect many IT workers have a more artistic/creative outlet, whether it earns them any money or not. Its amazing how theraputic hammering hot metal is after a day dealing with computers and their users.
I don't mean to insult you personally, but I must take issue with that argument. It's idiotic, and I get sick of hearing it.
Personal pages are important and necessary, and they embody what the web is meant to be - a commons where anyone can communicate anything with anyone. A lousy web page demands no more bandwidth than it should, if its lousy, no one looks. They don't pollute good search engines, either, because good search engines index pages by how relevant is the information they contain (ok, I know thats an ideal, but the flaw is a flaw in the search engine, not the number of personal pages). I frequently find answers to technical questions in small blogs and personal web pages. I don't see bad poems or cat pictures, because I don't search for them.
Just to drive the point home, think about what it would take to 'fix' this 'problem'.
Let only geniuses put up web pages? Ok, who decides who is a genius, who vetts what is good content and what isn't? Corporations? Governemnts? Comittees? How do you enforce it, a web page license? Who issues it?
I think what you are looking for is not the Internet, but TV, where content is vetted and professionally produced, and delivered in easy to consume chunks.
The Internet is not a content delivery medium, it is a communications medium, and that means people communicating, whatever they damn well want to whoever will listen. And it has to be open to every idiot with a bad poem, too, because the alternative is for it to just becomes a one-way delivery system. You should revel and delight in the existance of personal web pages, they are a good and healthy sign of a properly functioning communications medium. Revel and delight in the fact that you can toss one up if you want, when you do have something to say - even if no one really cares what you have to say.
Futhermore, you don't have to look at anything on the web you don't want to, you don't even have to skip past it, or setup a filter to block it. Thats a glorious and amazing thing, think about it. Everyone on the world with access to a computer can toss anything they want into the pool of information, absolutely anything. And how much does this affect you finding or reading Slashdot? At the same time, if you want, you can read any one of those endless bits of information flying around, the bad poem, the cat picture, the firsthand account of the bombing in Bagdad. This would not be possible in any scheme where content was vetted, licensed or controlled.
Sigh. Sorry for the rant, just pisses me off when people think bad web pages are the web's big problem, when the alternative is corporate/government controlled content-delivery.
Anyway, I commend you on not putting a web page up if you have nothing to say. If only 1 person wants to read it, though, a web page is worth putting up, and if no one does, then putting it up isn't hurting the millions who aren't reading it.
Do we NEED any of it? No, you NEED nothing more than water, air, food and shelter. So destroy everythign that isn't food, water, air, shelter? Sheesh.
Ha! Thank you for the link, I had forgotten the Dr. Chronitis/Cambridge/Dr Who/Douglas Adams link... I recently re-read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and had completely forgotten the Dr. Who background to the story.
Everyone, go read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and Long Dark Teatime of the Soul. Quiz later.
I am surprised at the response this got, I want to clarify a little:
I do not mean to propose not 'punishing' people - my point is just that we should change how we look at what punishment is and should be. For instance, we should not put Bob the axe murderer in jail because he is a naughty boy and needs time out, because he has broken rules and must be made an example, he desrves to hurt the way he hurt people, or because the victims' families think it is fair for him to suffer for what he is done. We should put Bob in jail to keep him from hacking any more people to death.
I don't mean to advocate pre-emptive crime fighting, either, a la Minority Report - though I realize this scheme of protecting people does seem to suggest it more than the idea of vengeful punishment does - my answer is that the people we might pre-empt have to be protected as well. We should not act against anyone unless they have done something. Which is how this all relates to the possibly innaccurate crime database - the FBI should strive to protect people, including those it might harm through the pursuit of criminals. Innaccurate crime data is a terrible public threat, and it is being sidelined in the fight to find possible bad guys. Anyway, pre-emptive crime fighting is far outside the scope of what I was talking about.
Yes, of course, we cannot (and should not) protect everyone from anything bad happening. And yes, 'harm' is a term that is not straightforward, the word Justice is in the Constitution, and most laws really are an attempt to protect, not retribute.
My point is just that the government should not be in the business of judging what we deserve, morally, for our crimes - it should be about protecting us from crime. Perhaps demonstrable good and bad are more useful concepts than right and wrong in public policy.
I have long believed that the word Justice has no place in government. Seriously, Justice is a moral thing, defined by social mores and subjective judgments about fairness. That department's job should be protecting the people, not punishing the bad guys. If you take away this idea that a government can and should punish the bad guys, for 'Justice' and replace it with the idea that we should apprehend bad guys to keep them from doing harm to society, a lot of thorny questions get very straightforward.
For instance, what is the Just and Fair thing to happen to an American guy who things the taliban is morally correct and goes to Afghanistan to join them? Ok, now ask what should be done to prevent such a man from harming Americans. Different question, and a much more practical one.
Justice is institutional revenge. Our government should not be making such judgments about right and wrong, they should be making judgments on how to protect and serve the populace.
This isn't completely tangential to the topic, either - consider how this would turn out (in an ideal world) if the fbi did not look at these databases as a tool to punish the evildoers, hunt them down at any cost to deliver that punishment, but as a tool to protect those who would be victims of the evildoers - in that view (ideal world, remember) the accuracy of the data would be inherently important as a part of that protection.
In such a view, there would be no such thing as a Victimless Crime, since crime would be defined by its harm to society (no victims, no harm done).
Slashdot Mirror
Bullshit. A hell of a lot of fascinating, gripping, dramatic stuff happens in reality, and if you are free to choose a setup and some character personalities, you can make some incredible on-screen fiction that doesn't clash with realism at every turn. Someone mentioned Apollo 13 - a hell of a dramatic story that did indeed occur within boring old Reality.
I don't mind a bit of fudging in a movie myself, and I am willing to accept some unlikely premise on which a story can be built, but what drives me crazy are the things that are wrong for no good reason. The direction of an orbit could have been chosen correctly with no plot impact or cost (assuming this happened in the initial visual planning), most movie science errors are just dumb for no reason whatsoever, a tiny dialog change could resolve half of them. Even technobabble that demonstrates they know the error and are asking our indulgence to forward the plot is usually enough to maintain the suspension of disbelief.
Suspension of disbelief, btw, is a delicate balance, not a suit of armor you put on before entering the theater. It's the movie's responsibility to maintain it, and a movie that breaks it stops being entertaining. A movie that breaks it for no good reason at all deserves to be shit upon for it.
For the record it sounds like Tyson is not complaining about loss of S.O.D., and didn't dislike the film, but it's his job to educate, and big sciency movies are a good vehicle. It's not nitpicking, it's his job.
8 terabytes per day, according to TFA. Add the ability to effectively query, slice, dice and present that much data on a long-term basis... yeah, that's a hell of a lot of vacuum tubes.
For comparison, the LHC does upwards of 27TB/day[1], Hubble 3-5[2].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LHC_Computing_Grid
[2] http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope//hubble_essentials/
Spatula City already led this revolution, perhaps just a bit too far ahead of its time.
who on earth seriously believes that all mathematics exists in some universal psychic brain?*
Is the Psychic Math Brain Theory (sorry, I mean Platonic Theory) really a serious contender among mathematicians as stated?
*As opposed, that is, to the idea that physical relationships that exist in our universe are sussed out through experimentation and logic and expressed in mathematical language.
Not only is it labeled with a stupid buzzword, it doesn't even conform to the definition of the buzzword, i.e. video on demand via rss or atom enclosures (podcasts but with video files). It's actually a plugin-dependent flash video presented on a web page. Might as well just name it now - these pilots are being youtubed.
With these stations becoming so popular, isn't it time to sell ads? After all, spy agencies can always use the extra cash, and the people who listen to these things probably constitute a solid geek demographic.
... why do I feel like I've missed a step there?
Or worse:
1) Create personal numbers station with especially intriguing sequences to draw audience
2) Sell ads on your personal number station
3) Profit!
they wanted to go back to the drawing boards, but couldn't find them. Best guess is that retiring engineers took all the original drawing boards home with them, and they are gathering dust in garages and attics. The children and grandchildren of those engineers simply have no idea how essential drawing boards were to our space program, or how valuable they could be to it now.
With a suitable suspension I don't see why they would not do fine on stairs. If the balancing algorithm is good, it should recover fine on each step. A little laser rangefinding could even allow it to know it was going down stairs and adjust accordingly. Certainly a dynamicly balanced bot would fair better than a 4-wheeler going down the same stairs. If I can ride a motorcyle down the stairs, my new robotic biroid overlords should not have a problem.
Why is the assumption here that a) the space shuttle is the only method of getting material from the moon to earth (send the shuttle to the moon to pick it up? Are you nuts?) and b) that the only goal is mining "rock" from the moon to send back to earth?
Calculating the cost of mining the moon using the cost of launching a shuttle to earth orbit makes no sense. The shuttle is not the cheapest or most efficient way to get mass into orbit, and it sure as hell isn't the easiest way to get it back down (gravity does a good job of that). Why would getting material from the moon to earth require any launch at all from earth (once you are done building the mining base)? How about using the moon's massive solar power potential to railgun things into earth orbit? Maybe titanium, with its very expensive, earth-evironment unfriendly, power-hungry processing requirements?
Second, we need titanium and items made therefrom in space for making habitats, ships, exploration probes, and so on. Things which, if made on the moon, we don't have to ship up from earth orbit. You have it all backwards, the enormous cost of getting material into orbit from earth is the -pro- moon mining argument if you want to do anything interesting at all in space.
Want a big telescope on the moon? Make it there. Want a big orbital hotel for billionaire socialites to visit? Prefab the superstructure on the moon where power, titanium, and transportation are cheap. Want an orbital kinetic energy weapon to drop bullets on your enemies from above? Maybe not, but somebody does, and will be willing to pay for it. Make it on the moon, and load it with rocky ammo while you're at it, for free. I suspect a working moon mine/factory would pay for itself pretty easily, without a single gram exported to earth's surface.
Then there is the tremendous experimental value - learning to mine in space, learning to live there, etc. If we -ever- want to do any human space exploration, colonization, or teraforming, we have to start somewhere, learning the basics. The automation technology alone will be terribly useful back on earth, while lessening the number of humans we have to support on the moon.
Is moon mining economically feasible right now? I don't know, but I do know mining concerns invest a hell of a lot in an operation and expect their profits to come in after many years of mining, not today. Even if moon mining was break-even economically, it would be worth the learning experience - and would leave those profit-minded among us with the tools to do more profitable things in space. Even if it takes several generations of mining colony to get to that stage, the long view favors the first steps.
If your 21 million dollar contract hangs on being able to open a document in under 3 minutes, you may have issues other than your choice of office software.
No, it's transparent. The circuitry itself is transparent - a lot of research has gone into developing semiconductors with the correct band structure to pass most of the visible spectrum but still act as semiconductors. Translucency generally refers to materials that disperse light, rendering images blurry or unrecognisable, while transparent materials maintain the integrity of the transmitted image, even if dimmed or colored. (Your semantics may vary.)
These circuits are indeed made from transparent (over a wide range of the visible spectrum) semiconductors, and they are indeed printed on glass. I am not involved with the research, but I know Dr. Wager, whose team developed the circuits, and I know a few of the physicists who developed the actual materials used. Very neat stuff.
I'll group my question with this, as it is related - I often see situations on the show that could very obviously be validated or busted by any good engineer or physicist and a blackboard - but that wouldn't be very good TV (Walking vs Running in the rain, classic application of basic calculus...).
What is the science support for the show? Surely you must have some real scientists on the research team, what do they tell you, and how many of the results do you actually know ahead of time due to your research staff and just being good engineers yourselves?
Once in a while it would be nice to have a theory guy come in after the myth has been entertainingly tested to bolster the results with real science. Especially when the "testing" is often so paltry with real generalizable data. This would be especially neat when the physical testing seems to disagree with the science. I have noticed a bit more "Science Content" on recent episodes, but I think the show would be more interesting if for instance your declarations of busted or not were backed up with a really good explanation of why something is mathematically/physically plausible to begin with, as opposed to just saying, well, we blew it up, but it still didn't fly 200 yards, myth busted.
How do you guys feel about the science content of your show and your myths? What do you think about having a real scientist on the show to audit results?
PS: OSDN should be OSTG in above post, as most of you probably already figured out.
Nothing wrong with editorial, my point was not to criticize his article, but the mindset that the entire site is one person's personal blog. In other words, a criticism of his article should have been met with a discussion of its merits or flaws, not with a flat statement that its his site and he can do whatever he wants. It is his site (more or less), and he can do what he wants, but that doesn't mean he always should, and the debate about how things -should- be done is not trivial. That debate should not be met with the flat statement "Its his personal blog, if you don't like it go start your own (enormously popular geek news site with millions of daily hits and a vibrant, if somewhat cultish, folllowing).
Editorial is good, I don't mean to criticise his posting, just the notion that slashdot is no more than Tacos's personal playground - maybe it was, once, but I think its time it grew up a little.
I am sorry I saw this so late into the discussion, I know there is little likelyhood I'll be read with this volume of comments. Still, this is something that has bugged me for a while, really since about the time I registered here (after reading for a long time, and putting some thought into whether registration was Good or Bad, otherwise my ID would not be as high as it is).
Let me preface this by saying it is not a critique of the above post. It is a critique of a mindset, a critique of a way of doing things. I don't find the artical that objectionable, but I find people's response to it annoying.
I first encountered Rob Malda while poking around the web for Gimp tidbits. Then there was Bits and Pieces (or Bits and Bytes? Its all hazy now) and then Slashdot. I remember the early days. Back when it was a cute domain name, and really was just CmdrTaco's personal blog. But is it still?
It is, to all appearances, a public forum. A newbie will not get any sense that it is a personal blog when they stop by (apropos of above comment). Its not called Tacos Blog, it doesn't have his name prominently displayed on the front page, the majority of the content is not by Rob. My own personal blog and domain names, I can turn off, sell or quit any time I like. Rob, how would OSDN feel if you decided you didn't want the hard work and abuse any more, and wanted to shut down the site, sell the domain and move on?
Everyone here has been invited to, by all appearances, a public forum.
Whenever someone complains about something like Rob's story above, there are two responses, agreement, and the flat statement that its his Personal Blog and he can do whatever he wants. That misses the point entirely. Anyone can start up a newspaper, and control its content completely, but that newspaper is not going to be taken seriously if they don't maintain journalistic standards. Do people who pick up that paper have no right whatsoever to point out the flaws? There are practical reasons for being a good editor of your own personal public forum. Credibility is one, respect another (how much respect does the content here get, compared to the respect the Slashdot Effect gets?).
Like it or not, Slashdot is huge, and taken semi-seriously (more for its massive geek-esque audience than content) around the world. We have no right to point out flaws? We have no right to point out abuses and silly behavior by its editors? (Hey, -my- personal blog doesn't have Editors!)
Of course we have that right, and Rob, et al should listen, respectfully, and respond earnestly and respectfully, even if they don't agree. Rob should answer as much email personally as he can, and really thing about what people are telling him - he should be decent and responsive and thoughful. This site is nothing without the millions who read and post to his "Personal Blog", and those millions deserve a little respect. Like the GM, who has the power to be a jerk, we all know he doesn't have to be, and shouldn't be.
I have a lot of respect for what CmdrTaco has done here, (especially distributing moderator power and helping to prevent -that- kind of abuse) but I think this all boils down to something he said above (paraphrasing) - they have every right to make whatever rules they want, and every right to enforce them, it is -thier- game - but it was handled badly. In other words, you have every right to be an asshole in your private space, but that doesn't make you less of an asshole when you do it.
CmdrTaco is not an asshole, nor a fascist, but I don't know if he realizes how much his baby has grown, and how much responsibility goes with the power he has here. If hestill thinks of it as his private space, and half the readers here do to, things can never improve beyond the often laughable mess we have now.
Ideally, a battery with enough capacity and efficiency would be best. Ultimately, I think some kind of direct electrical storage is going to power everything we own.
But there's that capacity and efficiency issue... a lot of the power used to charge a battery is lost to heat, and not all the power "inside" the battery is usable. And batteries, per weight, can't store anywhere near the power gasoline can. (I use Power on purpose here, since it is not just an issue of energy storage, you have to be able to pull the energy out at a useful rate. I realize storage of power is not really a coherent concept.)
Someone will probably link to real data on efficiencies and densities - I could be wrong on the energy density for newer (very expensive) battery technologies, but I suspect nothing is coming close to gasoline yet (neither does hydrogen).
A big capacitor with no standing power drain would be perfect - high discharge rates, efficient charging, etc- but we don't have capacitors with the capacity or ability to hold charge forever while not in use. Some day, the entire hydrogen economy will be rendered obsolete by a better electrical storage device. Even then, there'll probably be a coal or deisel power plant somewhere, still generating the electricity we'll be storing in our portable supercapacitors.
Except, as you recall, Puddnhead Wilson was quite intelligent, and used the nascent science of fingerprinting to solve a complicated crime. His sardonic wit and odd intellectual habits led the uneducated people of the little town he moved to to assume he was a bit slow. Eventually, they concluded he wasn't just slow, he was a Puddnhead.
From The Tragedy of Puddnhead Wilson:
He was a homely, freckled, sandy-haired young fellow, with an intelligent blue eye that had frankness and comradeship in it and a covert twinkle of a pleasant sort. But for an unfortunate remark of his, he would no doubt have entered at once upon a successful career at Dawson's Landing. But he made his fatal remark the first day he spent in the village, and it "gaged" him. He had just made the acquaintance of a group of citizens when an invisible dog began to yelp and snarl and howl and make himself very comprehensively disagreeable, whereupon young Wilson said, much as one who is thinking aloud:
"I wish I owned half of that dog."
"Why?" somebody asked.
"Because I would kill my half."
The group searched his face with curiosity, with anxiety even, but found no light there, no expression that they could read. They fell away from him as from something uncanny, and went into privacy to discuss him. One said:
"'Pears to be a fool."
"'Pears?" said another. "Is, I reckon you better say."
"Said he wished he owned half of the dog, the idiot," said a third. "What did he reckon would become of the other half if he killed his half? Do you reckon he thought it would live?"
"Why, he must have thought it, unless he IS the downrightest fool in the world; because if he hadn't thought it, he would have wanted to own the whole dog, knowing that if he killed his half and the other half died, he would be responsible for that half just the same as if he had killed that half instead of his own. Don't it look that way to you, gents?"
"Yes, it does. If he owned one half of the general dog, it would be so; if he owned one end of the dog and another person owned the other end, it would be so, just the same; particularly in the first case, because if you kill one half of a general dog, there ain't any man that can tell whose half it was; but if he owned one end of the dog, maybe he could kill his end of it and -- "
"No, he couldn't either; he couldn't and not be responsible if the other end died, which it would. In my opinion that man ain't in his right mind."
"In my opinion he hain't got any mind."
No. 3 said: "Well, he's a lummox, anyway."
That's what he is;" said No. 4. "He's a labrick -- just a Simon-pure labrick, if there was one."
"Yes, sir, he's a dam fool. That's the way I put him up," said No. 5. "Anybody can think different that wants to, but those are my sentiments."
"I'm with you, gentlemen," said No. 6. "Perfect jackass -- yes, and it ain't going too far to say he is a pudd'nhead. If he ain't a pudd'nhead, I ain't no judge, that's all."
I rather liked Enterprise's ramdom excusrions away from ST canon (ok, I've only seen about 5 episodes, but still...)
Divergent histories are inevitable once time travel is discovered - and we've seen that it is pretty easily available to the Federation, the Borg, and others. Once the principle is discovered, the whole universe is doomed to a morass of revised histories, expeditions into the past to prevent other expeditions into the past, leakage of technology across time, etc, etc. There will always be someone going back to prevent some other guy from doing what he went back to do. This is just the sort of thing the Campaign for Real Time was founded to prevent.
The final episode ought to be a realizaition of this hopeless muddle of timelines and historical corruption - Riker, Kirk, and a few other far future Federation bigwigs come back, The Five Doctors style, to help Archer pinpoint the origin of their wildly disconnected universe and try to set things right. They eventually find the trouble all began with a young writer in the mid 20th century, trying hard to get a new concept TV show on the air. His name is Gene....
No, its not the plot discontinuity that bugs me. Its the fact that the writing, is lousy, the scientific concepts are stupid, the social critique is sophmoric at best, and the philosphy is untenable even across one episode. My suspension of disbelief gets visciously attacked on all sides, and usually gives up about 10 minutes in. But then, the whole franchise has that problem.
Throughout my years as a Unix admin, I have been a working blacksmith and woodworker in exotic woods. Recently I have branched into selling BDSM gear and sex toys, but that's beside the point.
I suspect many IT workers have a more artistic/creative outlet, whether it earns them any money or not. Its amazing how theraputic hammering hot metal is after a day dealing with computers and their users.
I don't mean to insult you personally, but I must take issue with that argument. It's idiotic, and I get sick of hearing it.
Personal pages are important and necessary, and they embody what the web is meant to be - a commons where anyone can communicate anything with anyone. A lousy web page demands no more bandwidth than it should, if its lousy, no one looks. They don't pollute good search engines, either, because good search engines index pages by how relevant is the information they contain (ok, I know thats an ideal, but the flaw is a flaw in the search engine, not the number of personal pages). I frequently find answers to technical questions in small blogs and personal web pages. I don't see bad poems or cat pictures, because I don't search for them.
Just to drive the point home, think about what it would take to 'fix' this 'problem'.
Let only geniuses put up web pages? Ok, who decides who is a genius, who vetts what is good content and what isn't? Corporations? Governemnts? Comittees? How do you enforce it, a web page license? Who issues it?
I think what you are looking for is not the Internet, but TV, where content is vetted and professionally produced, and delivered in easy to consume chunks.
The Internet is not a content delivery medium, it is a communications medium, and that means people communicating, whatever they damn well want to whoever will listen. And it has to be open to every idiot with a bad poem, too, because the alternative is for it to just becomes a one-way delivery system. You should revel and delight in the existance of personal web pages, they are a good and healthy sign of a properly functioning communications medium. Revel and delight in the fact that you can toss one up if you want, when you do have something to say - even if no one really cares what you have to say.
Futhermore, you don't have to look at anything on the web you don't want to, you don't even have to skip past it, or setup a filter to block it. Thats a glorious and amazing thing, think about it. Everyone on the world with access to a computer can toss anything they want into the pool of information, absolutely anything. And how much does this affect you finding or reading Slashdot? At the same time, if you want, you can read any one of those endless bits of information flying around, the bad poem, the cat picture, the firsthand account of the bombing in Bagdad. This would not be possible in any scheme where content was vetted, licensed or controlled.
Sigh. Sorry for the rant, just pisses me off when people think bad web pages are the web's big problem, when the alternative is corporate/government controlled content-delivery.
Anyway, I commend you on not putting a web page up if you have nothing to say. If only 1 person wants to read it, though, a web page is worth putting up, and if no one does, then putting it up isn't hurting the millions who aren't reading it.
Do we NEED any of it? No, you NEED nothing more than water, air, food and shelter. So destroy everythign that isn't food, water, air, shelter? Sheesh.
Ha! Thank you for the link, I had forgotten the Dr. Chronitis/Cambridge/Dr Who/Douglas Adams link... I recently re-read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and had completely forgotten the Dr. Who background to the story.
Everyone, go read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and Long Dark Teatime of the Soul. Quiz later.
I am surprised at the response this got, I want to clarify a little:
I do not mean to propose not 'punishing' people - my point is just that we should change how we look at what punishment is and should be. For instance, we should not put Bob the axe murderer in jail because he is a naughty boy and needs time out, because he has broken rules and must be made an example, he desrves to hurt the way he hurt people, or because the victims' families think it is fair for him to suffer for what he is done. We should put Bob in jail to keep him from hacking any more people to death.
I don't mean to advocate pre-emptive crime fighting, either, a la Minority Report - though I realize this scheme of protecting people does seem to suggest it more than the idea of vengeful punishment does - my answer is that the people we might pre-empt have to be protected as well. We should not act against anyone unless they have done something. Which is how this all relates to the possibly innaccurate crime database - the FBI should strive to protect people, including those it might harm through the pursuit of criminals. Innaccurate crime data is a terrible public threat, and it is being sidelined in the fight to find possible bad guys. Anyway, pre-emptive crime fighting is far outside the scope of what I was talking about.
Yes, of course, we cannot (and should not) protect everyone from anything bad happening. And yes, 'harm' is a term that is not straightforward, the word Justice is in the Constitution, and most laws really are an attempt to protect, not retribute.
My point is just that the government should not be in the business of judging what we deserve, morally, for our crimes - it should be about protecting us from crime. Perhaps demonstrable good and bad are more useful concepts than right and wrong in public policy.
When the Time Machine is ready, I will have gone back to have a talk with Mr. Jefferson about this.
I have long believed that the word Justice has no place in government. Seriously, Justice is a moral thing, defined by social mores and subjective judgments about fairness. That department's job should be protecting the people, not punishing the bad guys. If you take away this idea that a government can and should punish the bad guys, for 'Justice' and replace it with the idea that we should apprehend bad guys to keep them from doing harm to society, a lot of thorny questions get very straightforward.
For instance, what is the Just and Fair thing to happen to an American guy who things the taliban is morally correct and goes to Afghanistan to join them? Ok, now ask what should be done to prevent such a man from harming Americans. Different question, and a much more practical one.
Justice is institutional revenge. Our government should not be making such judgments about right and wrong, they should be making judgments on how to protect and serve the populace.
This isn't completely tangential to the topic, either - consider how this would turn out (in an ideal world) if the fbi did not look at these databases as a tool to punish the evildoers, hunt them down at any cost to deliver that punishment, but as a tool to protect those who would be victims of the evildoers - in that view (ideal world, remember) the accuracy of the data would be inherently important as a part of that protection.
In such a view, there would be no such thing as a Victimless Crime, since crime would be defined by its harm to society (no victims, no harm done).
"When and if Flying Saucers are real... National oil seals will protect their bearings."
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http://www.losthighways.org/rad_graphics/rad_co