We're all saying "well thank goodness it's not a manned spacecraft, no big deal."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a Progress basically a Soyuz with the seats ripped out? Which is to say, don't unmanned Progress mission failures tell you something important about the likelihood of manned Soyuz disasters?
Someone already said it, and I'll say it again: WHERE DOES THE LASER ENERGY COME FROM? I am *so* sick of this sort of lazy, pathetic science reporting.
How to be a popular science reporter in three easy steps:
Step 1: start by describing a serious real-world issue. Step 2: write a bridge that makes a mockery of the laws of physics to: Step 3: describe minor scientific result which has nothing to do with Step 1.
You can try this at home!
"Millions of people in the world are malnourished. But perhaps that can all change, with the help of astronomers who have discovered amino acids -- the building blocks of delicious protein -- in the asteroid belt!"
"Automobile crashes kill thousands of people in the U.S. every year. In this year's IEEE annual meeting, engineers describe new progress in using carbon nanotubes as part of semiconductor circuits. These could eventually lead to faster, more reliable electronic circuitry in many fields, including crash sensors in cars."
"The promise of nuclear energy is clear, but the problem of long-term waste disposal has not yet been solved. The long-half-lives of radioactive waste means it remains lethal for centuries. In this week's Journal of Cosmology, theoretical physicists describe how, by rapidly orbiting a black hole, the flow of time can be made to apparently stretch or contract. So perhaps those centuries won't be so long after all!
Yes, I realize that in this case, it's the business owner who's drawing the ridiculous parallel, and he's doing it to attract military funding to his no-name little project. But the story's reporter just takes him at his word, and doesn't ask even the most basic critical questions. ARGH!
" — and compared how the Mac would do versus Windows 7. "
I was promised a comparison between Mac vs Windows 7. The article totally failed to deliver. Sure, you can hack a Mac. But is it easier or harder than Windows?
This is cute, but it won't let you beat information theory limits on signal bandwidth. After all, no matter how these signals are intended to be combined through spatial interference, each antenna is emitting a signal which varies only in time. So the more signals you try to pack into one antenna's output, the more those signals project onto one another ("overlap"), and so the more they get mixed together. From each antenna's perspective, this is just a baroque form of time-domain multiplexing (TDMA) -- more accurately it's phase-domain multiplexing (PDMA) -- and all the usual rules about maximum bandwidth per user per antenna still apply.
This is a terrible idea. But if Congress continues to be deadlocked, this may be the *only* legal option available to the administration.
The news is full of people saying that, come August Xth, the Treasury will have to "pick and choose which bills to pay." But I don't think that's legal. The 2011 budget is a *law*. The administration must pay the amounts listed in that law to the correct parties, or it is breaking that law. The administration must also obey the tax code laws, and the debt limit law.
If the administration wishes to obey all three of these laws, its *only* legal option is seigniorage. Yes, it will create inflation. But it might be the only way out.
This is awful. The Forbes article, and the University of Alabama press release, say exactly the opposite of what the scientific article in Remote Sensing is claiming. From the Remote Sensing article's abstract:
Here we present further evidence that the uncertainty [in feedback strength] from an observational perspective is largely due to the masking of the radiative feedback signal by internal radiative forcing... While the satellite-based metrics for the period 2000–2010 depart substantially in the direction of lower climate sensitivity from those similarly computed from coupled climate models, we find that, with traditional methods, it is not possible to accurately quantify this discrepancy in terms of the feedbacks which determine climate sensitivity. It is concluded that atmospheric feedback diagnosis of the climate system remains an unsolved problem, due primarily to the inability to distinguish between radiative forcing and radiative feedback in satellite radiative budget observations.
To summarize: the satellite observations of climate sensitivity disagree with the models because the observations include extra factors which throw off the analysis. This implies that the satellite observations should be doubted.
But the summaries linked here say that the mismatch implies that the *models* should be doubted -- just the opposite!
The question of how they can manage to launch it from a point of view of politics and negative publicity was my real question
A combination of low profile and good engineering. As a general rule, the public doesn't know or care much about plutonium on spacecraft. The issues come to the public's attention when engineers recognize serious potential problems and talk about them to the media.
Case in point, the last plutonium-powered spacecraft most people remember was Cassini. This got a lot of attention because engineers pointed out that while the power source it used was designed to survive if the rocket blew up during launch, it wasn't designed to survive re-entry from escape velocity: since Cassini did an Earth gravity assist maneuver a couple years after launch, if someone messed up the flyby there was a risk of loss-of-containment. The press overblew the issues, as they always do, but the point is that there was a real issue which provoked some real engineers to raise real concerns to get the story running.
In this case, all the engineers who know enough about MSL's nuclear safety design to critique it are satisfied that it's not going to be a problem, so nobody is whispering in the media's ear. Same goes for other plutonium-powered missions since Cassini, which you probably haven't heard about.
Original poster here. I'm an oceanographer -- a physicist, not an ocean engineer, but I've talked with enough marine engineers to know about the issues. Designing instruments that operate unattended for long periods of time in the ocean without getting covered with barnacles, slime, worms, algae, and all manner of crap is one of the big unsolved problems in our field. Our best solution to the problem is to minimize the number of moving parts, and to keep most of the equipment well below the photic zone (the sunlit shallows where most of the life hangs out). Neither of these is possible for a hydrokinetic marine turbine.
(Random anecdote: another problem we have is that devices that carry electric current tend to get attacked by sharks, which have delicate electrosensory organs, so cables need special anti-shark armor.)
Another commenter mentioned corrosion: that's fairly easy to deal with using a sacrificial anode (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_anode). But biofouling is a lot harder to deal with. I'm willing to believe that the designers of this system have a solution, but only after they've successfully operated a turbine for several years without problems.
Thing is, it's not like every kid who's coddled by a hyperprotective society ends up schizophrenic as an adult, just like not every kid who plays on a steel-bar jungle gym ends up paraplegic.
Which is a bigger problem? I dunno, but at least we have some statistics on childhood playground injuries. The folks who argue that the psychological damage is a big deal are bringing *zero* data to the table.
Like most of Tierney's articles, this one is iconoclastic but has no evidence to back it up. The "study" he cites is just one psychologist's opinion, with no actual data behind it.
Speaking for myself, I do think I'm more well-adjusted psychologically as a result of all the dangerous stuff I did as a little kid, but given the medical bills and the permanent scars, I can't honestly say it was worth it overall.
One could argue that Google went beyond the court order to a punitive extreme. But remember how Google works: it associates phrases and sentences with websites, and returns snippets of text along with the search results. I'd argue that their search engine *can't work* without storing at least fragmentary pieces of the newspapers' content, and they have no way of knowing whether a court will consider those fragments large enough to be a copyright violation. So nuking the sites from orbit is the only way to be sure.
On the other side of the coin, the attitude people are copping here, that Google has every right to remove sites from its searches whenever it wants, is flat-out wrong. Google is not a telecom provider, but the principles of data equality and "common carrier" status absolutely apply to a service as omnipresent as Google Search. And to be honest, since Google has been loudly demanding network neutrality from the telecoms, it's going to look like a total betrayal of its principles if it starts using search-engine blackmail as a business model.
Subs - Even boomers have quite a few uses other than flinging nukes.
No they don't. Sure you can fire cruise missiles out of them, but a guided missile cruiser does a better job at 1/5 the price.
Aircraft - Same thing. The B-2 has been successfully used in many conflicts, none of which were its original design purpose (penetrating Soviet airspace with a nuclear payload)
And coincidentally, the aircraft leg of the nuclear tripod is the weakest. B2s are hard to shoot down, but not as hard as a ballistic missile. And the B-1s and B-52s still in service are a complete waste of time.
Missiles - OK, hard to justify that one
So basically, the only kind of nuclear weapons platform that's useful for conventional warfare is the one that's least useful for nuclear weapons.
Three reasons: 1) NASA gets paid to do *new* things. Regardless of the science gains, sending another copy of the same rover to Mars is hard to sell to Congress. Especially since congresscritters don't understand that Olympus Mons and Hellas Basin are different places.
2) The cost of launch vehicles is so high that there's less economy of scale gained by mass-producing space probes. Other space resources, like deep-space communications dishes and plutonium fuel, are also very limited, which forces an emphasis on quality over quantity.
3) Many spacecraft *do* reuse components, concepts, and software, even if the overall spacecraft is "new".
Come on, Slashdotters. I thought you cared about science. This "study" is awful.
1) Experimental controls. According to the article, lots of shift workers think their work impacts their lives, and are worried about their weight and their sex lives. Guess what? EVERYBODY hates their work, and is worried about their weight and their sex lives. How about asking people who *aren't* shift workers, and seeing if shift workers have bigger problems than the average Joe?
2) Conflict of interest. The summary says the study is by "Men's Health Network", but the linked article says it's by "Men's Health Network and Cephalon". Who's this "Cephalon"? Oh, they're a drug company. What sort of drugs do they make? take a wild freakin' guess.
So, congrats on sucking down free advertising from a drug company trying to turn your life into a treatable medical condition, without a single moment of skepticism.
a detector more than likely wouldn't work as most of theses trackers are placed and they listen
I'm not up on GPS technology, but many radio receivers use a "heterodyne" system in which they generate an internal radio signal which they use to filter out the incoming radio signal. If GPS receivers do this, they could be tracked at short range from their internal signal, even if they're not deliberately transmitting anything.
You've clearly never been married. "proof of guilt" is not a moral or psychological issue: it's a *financial* one. If you can't prove your wife cheated on you, you may find yourself in a position where your ex-wife's now shacking up with your boss, your kids are taken away from you, your ex-wife has half your stuff and you owe alimony for the rest of your life.
I'm not making any moral judgements on anyone involved here, but the reason the knives come out during divorces is not because people are petty and vindictive. Well, they are petty and vindictive, but things get really vicious because gigantic piles of cash are involved.
I've got a proposition for you. You ante up $1, and I'll ante up $1000. I'll give you 1000% of what you put in, if you give me 40% of what I put in. Sound like a good deal for you?
Slashdot Mirror
We're all saying "well thank goodness it's not a manned spacecraft, no big deal."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a Progress basically a Soyuz with the seats ripped out? Which is to say, don't unmanned Progress mission failures tell you something important about the likelihood of manned Soyuz disasters?
AMD's factories are in China, Malaysia, and Singapore. Intel's are in the US, Ireland, Israel, China, Malaysia, Vietnam and Costa Rica.
I seriously doubt you can claim any moral high ground by using AMD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_sites
http://www.amd.com/US/ABOUTAMD/CONTACT-US/Pages/locations-type.aspx
Someone already said it, and I'll say it again: WHERE DOES THE LASER ENERGY COME FROM?
I am *so* sick of this sort of lazy, pathetic science reporting.
How to be a popular science reporter in three easy steps:
Step 1: start by describing a serious real-world issue.
Step 2: write a bridge that makes a mockery of the laws of physics to:
Step 3: describe minor scientific result which has nothing to do with Step 1.
You can try this at home!
"Millions of people in the world are malnourished. But perhaps that can all change, with the help of astronomers who have discovered amino acids -- the building blocks of delicious protein -- in the asteroid belt!"
"Automobile crashes kill thousands of people in the U.S. every year. In this year's IEEE annual meeting, engineers describe new progress in using carbon nanotubes as part of semiconductor circuits. These could eventually lead to faster, more reliable electronic circuitry in many fields, including crash sensors in cars."
"The promise of nuclear energy is clear, but the problem of long-term waste disposal has not yet been solved. The long-half-lives of radioactive waste means it remains lethal for centuries. In this week's Journal of Cosmology, theoretical physicists describe how, by rapidly orbiting a black hole, the flow of time can be made to apparently stretch or contract. So perhaps those centuries won't be so long after all!
Yes, I realize that in this case, it's the business owner who's drawing the ridiculous parallel, and he's doing it to attract military funding to his no-name little project. But the story's reporter just takes him at his word, and doesn't ask even the most basic critical questions. ARGH!
" — and compared how the Mac would do versus Windows 7. "
I was promised a comparison between Mac vs Windows 7. The article totally failed to deliver. Sure, you can hack a Mac. But is it easier or harder than Windows?
This is cute, but it won't let you beat information theory limits on signal bandwidth. After all, no matter how these signals are intended to be combined through spatial interference, each antenna is emitting a signal which varies only in time. So the more signals you try to pack into one antenna's output, the more those signals project onto one another ("overlap"), and so the more they get mixed together. From each antenna's perspective, this is just a baroque form of time-domain multiplexing (TDMA) -- more accurately it's phase-domain multiplexing (PDMA) -- and all the usual rules about maximum bandwidth per user per antenna still apply.
This is a terrible idea. But if Congress continues to be deadlocked, this may be the *only* legal option available to the administration.
The news is full of people saying that, come August Xth, the Treasury will have to "pick and choose which bills to pay." But I don't think that's legal. The 2011 budget is a *law*. The administration must pay the amounts listed in that law to the correct parties, or it is breaking that law. The administration must also obey the tax code laws, and the debt limit law.
If the administration wishes to obey all three of these laws, its *only* legal option is seigniorage. Yes, it will create inflation. But it might be the only way out.
Who said anything about abruptly? Ramp up the fossil fuel tax between now and 2025, just like they're doing with CAFE standards.
This is awful. The Forbes article, and the University of Alabama press release, say exactly the opposite of what the scientific article in Remote Sensing is claiming. From the Remote Sensing article's abstract:
To summarize: the satellite observations of climate sensitivity disagree with the models because the observations include extra factors which throw off the analysis. This implies that the satellite observations should be doubted.
But the summaries linked here say that the mismatch implies that the *models* should be doubted -- just the opposite!
A combination of low profile and good engineering. As a general rule, the public doesn't know or care much about plutonium on spacecraft. The issues come to the public's attention when engineers recognize serious potential problems and talk about them to the media.
Case in point, the last plutonium-powered spacecraft most people remember was Cassini. This got a lot of attention because engineers pointed out that while the power source it used was designed to survive if the rocket blew up during launch, it wasn't designed to survive re-entry from escape velocity: since Cassini did an Earth gravity assist maneuver a couple years after launch, if someone messed up the flyby there was a risk of loss-of-containment. The press overblew the issues, as they always do, but the point is that there was a real issue which provoked some real engineers to raise real concerns to get the story running.
In this case, all the engineers who know enough about MSL's nuclear safety design to critique it are satisfied that it's not going to be a problem, so nobody is whispering in the media's ear. Same goes for other plutonium-powered missions since Cassini, which you probably haven't heard about.
Corrosion is a solved problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_anode
Original poster here. I'm an oceanographer -- a physicist, not an ocean engineer, but I've talked with enough marine engineers to know about the issues. Designing instruments that operate unattended for long periods of time in the ocean without getting covered with barnacles, slime, worms, algae, and all manner of crap is one of the big unsolved problems in our field. Our best solution to the problem is to minimize the number of moving parts, and to keep most of the equipment well below the photic zone (the sunlit shallows where most of the life hangs out). Neither of these is possible for a hydrokinetic marine turbine.
(Random anecdote: another problem we have is that devices that carry electric current tend to get attacked by sharks, which have delicate electrosensory organs, so cables need special anti-shark armor.)
Another commenter mentioned corrosion: that's fairly easy to deal with using a sacrificial anode (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_anode). But biofouling is a lot harder to deal with. I'm willing to believe that the designers of this system have a solution, but only after they've successfully operated a turbine for several years without problems.
One word: biofouling.
Thing is, it's not like every kid who's coddled by a hyperprotective society ends up schizophrenic as an adult, just like not every kid who plays on a steel-bar jungle gym ends up paraplegic.
Which is a bigger problem? I dunno, but at least we have some statistics on childhood playground injuries. The folks who argue that the psychological damage is a big deal are bringing *zero* data to the table.
Like most of Tierney's articles, this one is iconoclastic but has no evidence to back it up. The "study" he cites is just one psychologist's opinion, with no actual data behind it.
Speaking for myself, I do think I'm more well-adjusted psychologically as a result of all the dangerous stuff I did as a little kid, but given the medical bills and the permanent scars, I can't honestly say it was worth it overall.
Handwavey ethical principles, not legal principles. No citation needed.
One could argue that Google went beyond the court order to a punitive extreme. But remember how Google works: it associates phrases and sentences with websites, and returns snippets of text along with the search results. I'd argue that their search engine *can't work* without storing at least fragmentary pieces of the newspapers' content, and they have no way of knowing whether a court will consider those fragments large enough to be a copyright violation. So nuking the sites from orbit is the only way to be sure.
On the other side of the coin, the attitude people are copping here, that Google has every right to remove sites from its searches whenever it wants, is flat-out wrong. Google is not a telecom provider, but the principles of data equality and "common carrier" status absolutely apply to a service as omnipresent as Google Search. And to be honest, since Google has been loudly demanding network neutrality from the telecoms, it's going to look like a total betrayal of its principles if it starts using search-engine blackmail as a business model.
No they don't. Sure you can fire cruise missiles out of them, but a guided missile cruiser does a better job at 1/5 the price.
And coincidentally, the aircraft leg of the nuclear tripod is the weakest. B2s are hard to shoot down, but not as hard as a ballistic missile. And the B-1s and B-52s still in service are a complete waste of time.
So basically, the only kind of nuclear weapons platform that's useful for conventional warfare is the one that's least useful for nuclear weapons.
Three reasons:
1) NASA gets paid to do *new* things. Regardless of the science gains, sending another copy of the same rover to Mars is hard to sell to Congress. Especially since congresscritters don't understand that Olympus Mons and Hellas Basin are different places.
2) The cost of launch vehicles is so high that there's less economy of scale gained by mass-producing space probes. Other space resources, like deep-space communications dishes and plutonium fuel, are also very limited, which forces an emphasis on quality over quantity.
3) Many spacecraft *do* reuse components, concepts, and software, even if the overall spacecraft is "new".
Come on, Slashdotters. I thought you cared about science. This "study" is awful.
1) Experimental controls. According to the article, lots of shift workers think their work impacts their lives, and are worried about their weight and their sex lives. Guess what? EVERYBODY hates their work, and is worried about their weight and their sex lives. How about asking people who *aren't* shift workers, and seeing if shift workers have bigger problems than the average Joe?
2) Conflict of interest. The summary says the study is by "Men's Health Network", but the linked article says it's by "Men's Health Network and Cephalon". Who's this "Cephalon"? Oh, they're a drug company. What sort of drugs do they make? take a wild freakin' guess.
So, congrats on sucking down free advertising from a drug company trying to turn your life into a treatable medical condition, without a single moment of skepticism.
You want to go off the Internet, so your first instinct for advice is to POST TO SLASHDOT?
A) You've come to the wrong place.
B) You'll never make it anyway.
I'm not up on GPS technology, but many radio receivers use a "heterodyne" system in which they generate an internal radio signal which they use to filter out the incoming radio signal. If GPS receivers do this, they could be tracked at short range from their internal signal, even if they're not deliberately transmitting anything.
You've clearly never been married. "proof of guilt" is not a moral or psychological issue: it's a *financial* one. If you can't prove your wife cheated on you, you may find yourself in a position where your ex-wife's now shacking up with your boss, your kids are taken away from you, your ex-wife has half your stuff and you owe alimony for the rest of your life.
I'm not making any moral judgements on anyone involved here, but the reason the knives come out during divorces is not because people are petty and vindictive. Well, they are petty and vindictive, but things get really vicious because gigantic piles of cash are involved.
I've got a proposition for you. You ante up $1, and I'll ante up $1000. I'll give you 1000% of what you put in, if you give me 40% of what I put in. Sound like a good deal for you?
Percentages are not always useful.
It is interesting indeed, but continuing exponential growth curves indefinitely is a sucker's game. We shall see where we end up.
The graph shows price *per unit energy produced*, so the fact that wind and solar are a small part of the energy mix doesn't affect the economics.