That's almost certainly one thing SpaceX was hoping to help determine with this landing. If it'd landed properly, they'd take it apart to see where there was wear and tear, and what needed replacing/fixing (or redesigning) as a result. That'll have to have to wait for the next launch, now, though they may be able to still recover some of the rocket for analysis (it fell over, but I'm assuming it's still physically on the barge).
What? Seriously? Did you follow any political news over the past few months? Cause I mostly avoid politics entirely and I bloody heard about it. She completely admitted it here. Hell, she didn't even have an official government address, and apparently never did. And yes, keeping all your email on a private server grossly violates government record laws. The Bush administration apparently did something similar. But of course they did it only "for convenience". The fact that it left them completely in control of their email records never even crossed their mind!/s
Everyone's focusing on the first part of that sentence, and not the 2nd...
Take two people who negotiate equally strongly; the one with the penis is called confident and achieving, the one with the vagina is pushy and catty.
So too late, some people (the one's with the vaginas) are already being punished for being good at something.
Then the problem is that attitude, not the negotiation. Removing the negotiation just allows the attitude to continue unnoticed. In other words, it treats the symptoms, not the disease. This may (or may not) be advantageous for women in the short term, but it'll hurt them in the long run: both the individuals, because now they're working for a (at least somewhat) sexist boss, and how much do you think they're gonna get when it comes time for a raise? And for women in general, as sexism persists in the manager culture.
Her proposal is sexist and will probably be bad for both sexes. Good for the short-term bottom line for Reddit, though, since salaries will be lower! Which I suspect may be her actual goal (gotta boost those profits).
Killing MRSA is easy. Trivial, even. You can do it with steam, alcohol, or dozens of other disinfecting agents. The key is to be able to kill it inside an infected individual, without also killing the host (or damaging a significant amount of the host's tissues). That's why we use antibiotics in the first place. While it wasn't entirely clear from skimming TFA, it very much sounds like this is (currently, at least) only a topical treatment (i.e. it's applied to the skin). It might be superior to other modern topical treatments in some cases, but I personally doubt it.
Dear mother, smoking, drinking and having tattoos are not good traits, but they are not necessary for someone to be a nasty criminal.
Curious - what is necessarily wrong with those traits? Obviously, from the story, one can be quite devastatingly evil (causing an incident resulting in innocents at gunpoint) without them.
Smoking gives you cancer, drinking ruins your liver and can result in uncontrolled behavior (brawls, DUIs, etc), and tattoos basically ruin your chance at a lot of jobs. They're also all correlated somewhat with anti-social behavior (of various kinds) in general, which I think was the point the mother was relying on. "Because he lacks traits correlated with bad behavior, he must not have engaged in bad behavior." Obviously, this is faulty, but mothers often aren't rational when it comes to defending their kids.
Quantum crypto. Isn't of much use to the industry.... compared to say....... getting 100 Terabits of second worth of data down a single fiber optic cable.
Bulk data transmission and quantum crypto have somewhat different target industries (though anyone using quantum cryptography is probably using it to secure high-speed fiber lines). Quantum crypto is used (as in used, right now, today) for quantum key distribution in environments that need/want extremely high security so they can communicate extremely securely over regular (but fast) channels.
That's great, but totally worthless for quantum cryptography. Quantum cryptography relies on quantum properties of the photons (spin/polarization/orbital angular momentum), so that someone in the middle who makes a measurement will disturb the system. Using spectral encoding or modulation or any one of a dozen other ways of encoding data will result in a much higher data rate than the one given in TFA, but almost all of those are worthless for quantum cryptography.
Well, if we want to extend the analogy of SpaceShipTwo vs. Falcon 9 + Dragon (with delta-V as range), compared to a baseline Model S, then Virgin's car would go about 30 miles with a top speed of 20mph and would cost $750.
In short, Virgin's electric "car" would actually be an electric bike.
Electric vehicles with more or less those specs already exist: they're called golf carts. They're actually reasonably popular as a method of transport in a few communities.
And it does not say anything against going faster than light, just about accelerating from below the speed of light to the speed of light. Which would need unlimited energy. But actually just going faster than light is no problem at all.
No, it says nothing can go faster than the speed of light. At the speed of light, objects with mass would have infinite energy, and anything faster than light would require imaginary space-time to exist (since the factor for transformations involved a sqrt(1-v^2/c^2), if v is greater than c that means the object under the square root is negative, and you get an imaginary number, which is an unphysical result, i.e. it cannot happen).
the EPA can worry about the environment, leave NASA to what NASA is supposed to do. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Arguably, the "aeronautics" bit could be taken as justification for NASA to study the planet. Even if you disagree, NASA's job is to study planets in general, and the easiest example of that is the Earth itself. I mean, the Earth is in space just as much as Mars or the Sun is, after all. And the effects of various gases in the atmosphere is definitely of interest to planetary science, even aside from any general human concerns over climate change.
Valve already had a pair of position-detecting wands for your hands (similar to the playstation Move system). The bigger problem is movement. Movement by pressing a button detaches your apparent movement from your physical movement, which is going to be incredibly disorienting. The treadmill-style system someone else has been working on will probably work as a solution, but it's likely to be very expensive.
Volume. Well, maybe area, TFA isn't terribly clear (or possibly even radius, now I read it again. Size could refer any of the three. Pretty sure they mean radius, though, now I look at it closer). Not mass, though, that'd be a hell of a lot of extra mass. Basically, the problem is there is a ring of stars around the outer edge of the Milky Way. Astronomers aren't entirely sure where it comes from: if it originated from the Milky Way, and therefore is part of our galaxy properly speaking, or if it's the remnants of a dwarf galaxy that was scattered when it ran into us, or came from some other source. That would tell us a bit more about galaxy formation (or raise more questions about formation, which is almost the same thing).
Sticking things to other people's vehicles is probably illegal (IANAL, but it's a fairly good guess), and certainly could get you in a whole hell of a lot of trouble. Now, sticking it in the mail, OTOH, probably isn't illegal, and achieves much the same result.
The fact the you just blamed the victim by saying it's their fault shows that it is common in the States. Most rapes are about control, so the messed up people who are rapists think that have to put women (and men) in their place. It's not the victim's actions but how people react to them that is the problem-worldwide.
No, he didn't "blame the victim by saying it's their fault", and the fact you claimed he did means you are part of the problem. Look at it this way: if I drive a Porsche into a bad neighborhood, leave it unlocked with the keys inside, and it gets stolen, are you going to say I didn't mess up? No, of course I messed up, because failing to lock the doors on your car is stupid. That doesn't mean I'd bear the responsibility for the car being stolen, but it does mean what I did was stupid, and I would partially bear responsibility for a chain of action that lead to the car being stolen, and I could maybe have prevented the car being stolen. Since I cannot control the actions of other people, only my own, what I can do to prevent my car from being stolen is to take the proper precautions: lock the doors, don't park in bad neighborhoods, install a tracking system, etc.
For women (or men: rape works in both directions, though it's generally a vastly worse problem for women, especially attractive ones), that means not wearing revealing clothing while drunk at 3AM in a bad alley, watching their drinks closely, only hanging out with groups of people they trust and know well, etc. None of that means they're the ones responsible for the rape if they do get raped: but it does mean they can lower the probability of rape happening by being smart, and since the goal is to stop rapes from happening, we should encourage them to be smart, and discourage them from being stupid.
In other words: we can't blame the women for being raped, but we certainly can blame them for being stupid. Yes, everyone should be able to be as stupid as they want with no fear of other people doing bad things to them, but so long as we live in the real world, that will never happen (though we can still strive towards it, of course), so we should tell people to stop being stupid, because that means bad things are less likely to happen to them.
And of course, where the bloody hell is Half Life 3? Or the steambox? Or a stable release ready version of steamOS?
No news on HL3 (and that's actually kinda a fact a lot of people miss: no news. They've never announced they've been working on it at all, all the expectation is fan hype, not DNF-style vaporware... which, as a Half-Life fan, is annoying, true). As far as the Steambox goes, well, they've got a release data. SteamOS they've been working on with fairly regular patches, apparently, and I'd assume the November date holds for that too. As far as the internal drama goes: that was almost two years ago, by a fired employee: not exactly an objective source, generally speaking. They've shown few signs of being internally fractured otherwise.
The thing about Valve is: they do a lot of experimentation. Some of it doesn't work out. Some of it works out fantastically. But they're actually experimenting, and in the world of video gaming, that's not all that common from AAA game developers.
Basically, anything that violates International law almost always also violates National laws. Genocide is multiple counts of murder, War Crimes are torture, rape and murder.
And if the nation has no laws against those crimes? Because the people in charge of the laws are the people who committed the action? And yes, that does happen. Frequently. I'm not even going to give examples, because if you can't think of them, you really need to open a history text sometime.
No offense, but the idea that a country can't prosecute someone for anything they did outside the country is just plain stupid.
Actually there is no legal requirement to take cash, debt or no debt. You can refuse to accept cash if you want.
Actually, there is, sort of. You can refuse to accept cash: however, they are valid legal payment for the debt, so if you refuse the payment, you are either de facto implying the debt no longer exists (because you're not accepting repayment for it), or you're breaking the law by refusing legal payment. You cannot refuse repayment in cash and then claim the debt still exists. IANAL, so I'm sure there are subtleties involved with, for e.g., contracts (i.e. you agree to give them 10 widgets later in exchange for 5 doohickeys now, offering cash instead would be a violation of the contract), but generally, creditors must accept cash in repayment of debts.
Like what? It's designed to detect gravitational waves. It's not designed to detect not-gravitational waves. Since we can't produce artificial gravitational waves (the detector would be almost pointless if we could, since it's meant to prove the existence of gravitational waves), we can't use a known test to confirm it's detecting gravitational waves and only gravitational waves, but since all our theory and all our observation says it should be detecting them and only them, it's fairly safe to assume it's actually doing so (assuming no systematic errors: a large assumption, but not an unreasonable one if everyone involved did their job). In fact, if what it detects isn't gravitational waves, it's almost more interesting, because that means it's detecting something else which isn't accounted for in our theory. If it detects nothing at all, well, that too would be interesting, since (again) our theory says it should. Either way, interesting.
every dual slit experiment shows light behaving as both particle and wave, because every photon only interferes with itself. Two or more photons never interfere with each other.
Uhh, yes they do? All the time? Hell, I could have laser beams from two completely independent sources and generate an interference pattern. The dual slit experiment shows absolutely nothing about the wave/particle duality of light, and is in fact absolutely completely 100% explained by classical electromagnetism. Seriously, this comment is simply dead wrong. The dual-slit experiment in it's classical form only shows that something is propagating as a wave, not anything about the particle nature (of course, you can modify it with detectors at each slit to show the particle behavior, but that's really a different experiment).
The various sensors (IR and optical) on the thing would probably notice a massive amount of electromagnetic radiation hitting it. It's possible the frequency used was invisible to the onboard detectors, but that seems fairly unlikely. Much more probably it just had some kind of malfunction: the thing is probably loaded with mono-propellant and of course it has a battery, either of which could easily spontaneously explode if something went wrong.
Everyone who looks at the photo will see the dress as *some* color. That's the point. It's not a conscious judgment, you see what your eyes/brain are telling you is there. Some people see it as white, some people see it as blue (and some people have seen it as both).
There isn't actually enough information in the picture to make that call.
But your brain does it anyways, because that's what your brain does.
Yeah, and that's kinda the whole point: everyone who looks at the photo is automatically (and completely subconsciously, without realizing it) applying color-correction to the dress, based on the brain's similar experiences with color-correcting and the visual clues in the picture. What makes the picture interesting is that it's so close to the edge between white/gold and blue/black that different people can perceive it differently, even on the exact same screen. Actually, I've seen it both ways, though I believe the picture that I saw as white/gold was ever so slightly lightened (based on a totally not scientific color picking of the blue areas). The picture was also a smaller version, which may have made the difference. The point is, the picture is a fascinating example of how what humans really perceive is not what they're actually seeing, but a heavily interpreted version based on context and various visual clues. In fact, humans would be effectively blind without that processing (imagine face blindness, but for everything you see).
I'm missing something here - is it OK if it blinds soldiers so long as the *intent* is not to blind soldiers?
Yes? Obviously? I mean, a pistol fired right next to the face can blind you as well (or deafen you if fired next to the ear, possibly permanently). That's not banned, because the point of the pistol is to kill people with bullets, not cripple them. In fact, virtually any weapon (and most tools, such as tanks, planes, etc.) can cause all kinds of debilitating damage if used in the wrong way or if someone ends up in the wrong situation, even if they're not designed to do that. Hell, a pair of binoculars can cause permanent blindness if you look at the sun through them. Can cause blindness isn't a good reason to ban anything.
That's why there is a little thing called "peer review". If his observations are incorrect then a peer review will discover it.
A common misconception. Peer review does not verify that the data is correct, that the methodology in the paper is followed, or in general that the results are reliable. It looks at the methods outlined in the paper and tries to spot obvious flaws or oversights, as well as any major problems with the structure of the paper. It can't detect fraud, cherry-picking data, or a host of other problems. Some "scientists" have gotten away for years with made up data or other fraud. And of course the quality of the peer review (or even if it is peer reviewed, in some cases) depends heavily on the journal that publishes it. Anyone can make the "Journal of American Climate Study" or some other professional sounding name and publish total garbage.
If his experiments can't be reproduced then the paper will be discredited (along with his career)
This has pretty much already happened. He's published papers with deeply flawed methodology that has misrepresented the work of other scientists, espouses a scientific viewpoint (that solar variation causes most observed climate changes) that has been shown wrong years ago, and has failed to disclose the source of his funding, a fairly major ethical violation.
By definition the private sector has to be more expensive at achieving a goal than the public one.
Not at all. The public sector tends not to care about costs, since they take the money more or less by force (implied force, if nothing else), and they have little to no threat of competition to force overheads to remain low. And of course one government providing a service for money to another government also has the motive of profit, making this situation more or less the worst of all possible worlds. In a theoretical optimum world, public sector would be by definition cheaper. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, which isn't always quite so nice (a tiny snag that many political philosophers/economists/et al often overlook).
In this case, for example, SpaceX is attempting to lower costs through a practical reusable design, whereas the Space Shuttle (in practice) ended up raising them considerably, despite being reusable, due to a number of ridiculous design constraints enforced on it by various government interests.
Slashdot Mirror
That's almost certainly one thing SpaceX was hoping to help determine with this landing. If it'd landed properly, they'd take it apart to see where there was wear and tear, and what needed replacing/fixing (or redesigning) as a result. That'll have to have to wait for the next launch, now, though they may be able to still recover some of the rocket for analysis (it fell over, but I'm assuming it's still physically on the barge).
What? Seriously? Did you follow any political news over the past few months? Cause I mostly avoid politics entirely and I bloody heard about it. She completely admitted it here. Hell, she didn't even have an official government address, and apparently never did. And yes, keeping all your email on a private server grossly violates government record laws. The Bush administration apparently did something similar. But of course they did it only "for convenience". The fact that it left them completely in control of their email records never even crossed their mind! /s
Everyone's focusing on the first part of that sentence, and not the 2nd... Take two people who negotiate equally strongly; the one with the penis is called confident and achieving, the one with the vagina is pushy and catty. So too late, some people (the one's with the vaginas) are already being punished for being good at something.
Then the problem is that attitude, not the negotiation. Removing the negotiation just allows the attitude to continue unnoticed. In other words, it treats the symptoms, not the disease. This may (or may not) be advantageous for women in the short term, but it'll hurt them in the long run: both the individuals, because now they're working for a (at least somewhat) sexist boss, and how much do you think they're gonna get when it comes time for a raise? And for women in general, as sexism persists in the manager culture.
Her proposal is sexist and will probably be bad for both sexes. Good for the short-term bottom line for Reddit, though, since salaries will be lower! Which I suspect may be her actual goal (gotta boost those profits).
Killing MRSA is easy. Trivial, even. You can do it with steam, alcohol, or dozens of other disinfecting agents. The key is to be able to kill it inside an infected individual, without also killing the host (or damaging a significant amount of the host's tissues). That's why we use antibiotics in the first place. While it wasn't entirely clear from skimming TFA, it very much sounds like this is (currently, at least) only a topical treatment (i.e. it's applied to the skin). It might be superior to other modern topical treatments in some cases, but I personally doubt it.
Dear mother, smoking, drinking and having tattoos are not good traits, but they are not necessary for someone to be a nasty criminal.
Curious - what is necessarily wrong with those traits? Obviously, from the story, one can be quite devastatingly evil (causing an incident resulting in innocents at gunpoint) without them.
Smoking gives you cancer, drinking ruins your liver and can result in uncontrolled behavior (brawls, DUIs, etc), and tattoos basically ruin your chance at a lot of jobs. They're also all correlated somewhat with anti-social behavior (of various kinds) in general, which I think was the point the mother was relying on. "Because he lacks traits correlated with bad behavior, he must not have engaged in bad behavior." Obviously, this is faulty, but mothers often aren't rational when it comes to defending their kids.
Quantum crypto. Isn't of much use to the industry.... compared to say....... getting 100 Terabits of second worth of data down a single fiber optic cable.
Bulk data transmission and quantum crypto have somewhat different target industries (though anyone using quantum cryptography is probably using it to secure high-speed fiber lines). Quantum crypto is used (as in used, right now, today) for quantum key distribution in environments that need/want extremely high security so they can communicate extremely securely over regular (but fast) channels.
That's great, but totally worthless for quantum cryptography. Quantum cryptography relies on quantum properties of the photons (spin/polarization/orbital angular momentum), so that someone in the middle who makes a measurement will disturb the system. Using spectral encoding or modulation or any one of a dozen other ways of encoding data will result in a much higher data rate than the one given in TFA, but almost all of those are worthless for quantum cryptography.
Well, if we want to extend the analogy of SpaceShipTwo vs. Falcon 9 + Dragon (with delta-V as range), compared to a baseline Model S, then Virgin's car would go about 30 miles with a top speed of 20mph and would cost $750.
In short, Virgin's electric "car" would actually be an electric bike.
Electric vehicles with more or less those specs already exist: they're called golf carts. They're actually reasonably popular as a method of transport in a few communities.
And it does not say anything against going faster than light, just about accelerating from below the speed of light to the speed of light. Which would need unlimited energy. But actually just going faster than light is no problem at all.
No, it says nothing can go faster than the speed of light. At the speed of light, objects with mass would have infinite energy, and anything faster than light would require imaginary space-time to exist (since the factor for transformations involved a sqrt(1-v^2/c^2), if v is greater than c that means the object under the square root is negative, and you get an imaginary number, which is an unphysical result, i.e. it cannot happen).
the EPA can worry about the environment, leave NASA to what NASA is supposed to do. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Arguably, the "aeronautics" bit could be taken as justification for NASA to study the planet. Even if you disagree, NASA's job is to study planets in general, and the easiest example of that is the Earth itself. I mean, the Earth is in space just as much as Mars or the Sun is, after all. And the effects of various gases in the atmosphere is definitely of interest to planetary science, even aside from any general human concerns over climate change.
Valve already had a pair of position-detecting wands for your hands (similar to the playstation Move system). The bigger problem is movement. Movement by pressing a button detaches your apparent movement from your physical movement, which is going to be incredibly disorienting. The treadmill-style system someone else has been working on will probably work as a solution, but it's likely to be very expensive.
Volume. Well, maybe area, TFA isn't terribly clear (or possibly even radius, now I read it again. Size could refer any of the three. Pretty sure they mean radius, though, now I look at it closer). Not mass, though, that'd be a hell of a lot of extra mass. Basically, the problem is there is a ring of stars around the outer edge of the Milky Way. Astronomers aren't entirely sure where it comes from: if it originated from the Milky Way, and therefore is part of our galaxy properly speaking, or if it's the remnants of a dwarf galaxy that was scattered when it ran into us, or came from some other source. That would tell us a bit more about galaxy formation (or raise more questions about formation, which is almost the same thing).
Sticking things to other people's vehicles is probably illegal (IANAL, but it's a fairly good guess), and certainly could get you in a whole hell of a lot of trouble. Now, sticking it in the mail, OTOH, probably isn't illegal, and achieves much the same result.
The fact the you just blamed the victim by saying it's their fault shows that it is common in the States. Most rapes are about control, so the messed up people who are rapists think that have to put women (and men) in their place. It's not the victim's actions but how people react to them that is the problem-worldwide.
No, he didn't "blame the victim by saying it's their fault", and the fact you claimed he did means you are part of the problem. Look at it this way: if I drive a Porsche into a bad neighborhood, leave it unlocked with the keys inside, and it gets stolen, are you going to say I didn't mess up? No, of course I messed up, because failing to lock the doors on your car is stupid. That doesn't mean I'd bear the responsibility for the car being stolen, but it does mean what I did was stupid, and I would partially bear responsibility for a chain of action that lead to the car being stolen, and I could maybe have prevented the car being stolen. Since I cannot control the actions of other people, only my own, what I can do to prevent my car from being stolen is to take the proper precautions: lock the doors, don't park in bad neighborhoods, install a tracking system, etc.
For women (or men: rape works in both directions, though it's generally a vastly worse problem for women, especially attractive ones), that means not wearing revealing clothing while drunk at 3AM in a bad alley, watching their drinks closely, only hanging out with groups of people they trust and know well, etc. None of that means they're the ones responsible for the rape if they do get raped: but it does mean they can lower the probability of rape happening by being smart, and since the goal is to stop rapes from happening, we should encourage them to be smart, and discourage them from being stupid.
In other words: we can't blame the women for being raped, but we certainly can blame them for being stupid. Yes, everyone should be able to be as stupid as they want with no fear of other people doing bad things to them, but so long as we live in the real world, that will never happen (though we can still strive towards it, of course), so we should tell people to stop being stupid, because that means bad things are less likely to happen to them.
And of course, where the bloody hell is Half Life 3? Or the steambox? Or a stable release ready version of steamOS?
No news on HL3 (and that's actually kinda a fact a lot of people miss: no news. They've never announced they've been working on it at all, all the expectation is fan hype, not DNF-style vaporware... which, as a Half-Life fan, is annoying, true). As far as the Steambox goes, well, they've got a release data. SteamOS they've been working on with fairly regular patches, apparently, and I'd assume the November date holds for that too. As far as the internal drama goes: that was almost two years ago, by a fired employee: not exactly an objective source, generally speaking. They've shown few signs of being internally fractured otherwise.
The thing about Valve is: they do a lot of experimentation. Some of it doesn't work out. Some of it works out fantastically. But they're actually experimenting, and in the world of video gaming, that's not all that common from AAA game developers.
Basically, anything that violates International law almost always also violates National laws. Genocide is multiple counts of murder, War Crimes are torture, rape and murder.
And if the nation has no laws against those crimes? Because the people in charge of the laws are the people who committed the action? And yes, that does happen. Frequently. I'm not even going to give examples, because if you can't think of them, you really need to open a history text sometime.
No offense, but the idea that a country can't prosecute someone for anything they did outside the country is just plain stupid.
Actually there is no legal requirement to take cash, debt or no debt. You can refuse to accept cash if you want.
Actually, there is, sort of. You can refuse to accept cash: however, they are valid legal payment for the debt, so if you refuse the payment, you are either de facto implying the debt no longer exists (because you're not accepting repayment for it), or you're breaking the law by refusing legal payment. You cannot refuse repayment in cash and then claim the debt still exists. IANAL, so I'm sure there are subtleties involved with, for e.g., contracts (i.e. you agree to give them 10 widgets later in exchange for 5 doohickeys now, offering cash instead would be a violation of the contract), but generally, creditors must accept cash in repayment of debts.
Like what? It's designed to detect gravitational waves. It's not designed to detect not-gravitational waves. Since we can't produce artificial gravitational waves (the detector would be almost pointless if we could, since it's meant to prove the existence of gravitational waves), we can't use a known test to confirm it's detecting gravitational waves and only gravitational waves, but since all our theory and all our observation says it should be detecting them and only them, it's fairly safe to assume it's actually doing so (assuming no systematic errors: a large assumption, but not an unreasonable one if everyone involved did their job). In fact, if what it detects isn't gravitational waves, it's almost more interesting, because that means it's detecting something else which isn't accounted for in our theory. If it detects nothing at all, well, that too would be interesting, since (again) our theory says it should. Either way, interesting.
every dual slit experiment shows light behaving as both particle and wave, because every photon only interferes with itself. Two or more photons never interfere with each other.
Uhh, yes they do? All the time? Hell, I could have laser beams from two completely independent sources and generate an interference pattern. The dual slit experiment shows absolutely nothing about the wave/particle duality of light, and is in fact absolutely completely 100% explained by classical electromagnetism. Seriously, this comment is simply dead wrong. The dual-slit experiment in it's classical form only shows that something is propagating as a wave, not anything about the particle nature (of course, you can modify it with detectors at each slit to show the particle behavior, but that's really a different experiment).
The various sensors (IR and optical) on the thing would probably notice a massive amount of electromagnetic radiation hitting it. It's possible the frequency used was invisible to the onboard detectors, but that seems fairly unlikely. Much more probably it just had some kind of malfunction: the thing is probably loaded with mono-propellant and of course it has a battery, either of which could easily spontaneously explode if something went wrong.
Everyone who looks at the photo will see the dress as *some* color. That's the point. It's not a conscious judgment, you see what your eyes/brain are telling you is there. Some people see it as white, some people see it as blue (and some people have seen it as both).
There isn't actually enough information in the picture to make that call.
But your brain does it anyways, because that's what your brain does.
Yeah, and that's kinda the whole point: everyone who looks at the photo is automatically (and completely subconsciously, without realizing it) applying color-correction to the dress, based on the brain's similar experiences with color-correcting and the visual clues in the picture. What makes the picture interesting is that it's so close to the edge between white/gold and blue/black that different people can perceive it differently, even on the exact same screen. Actually, I've seen it both ways, though I believe the picture that I saw as white/gold was ever so slightly lightened (based on a totally not scientific color picking of the blue areas). The picture was also a smaller version, which may have made the difference. The point is, the picture is a fascinating example of how what humans really perceive is not what they're actually seeing, but a heavily interpreted version based on context and various visual clues. In fact, humans would be effectively blind without that processing (imagine face blindness, but for everything you see).
I'm missing something here - is it OK if it blinds soldiers so long as the *intent* is not to blind soldiers?
Yes? Obviously? I mean, a pistol fired right next to the face can blind you as well (or deafen you if fired next to the ear, possibly permanently). That's not banned, because the point of the pistol is to kill people with bullets, not cripple them. In fact, virtually any weapon (and most tools, such as tanks, planes, etc.) can cause all kinds of debilitating damage if used in the wrong way or if someone ends up in the wrong situation, even if they're not designed to do that. Hell, a pair of binoculars can cause permanent blindness if you look at the sun through them. Can cause blindness isn't a good reason to ban anything.
That's why there is a little thing called "peer review". If his observations are incorrect then a peer review will discover it.
A common misconception. Peer review does not verify that the data is correct, that the methodology in the paper is followed, or in general that the results are reliable. It looks at the methods outlined in the paper and tries to spot obvious flaws or oversights, as well as any major problems with the structure of the paper. It can't detect fraud, cherry-picking data, or a host of other problems. Some "scientists" have gotten away for years with made up data or other fraud. And of course the quality of the peer review (or even if it is peer reviewed, in some cases) depends heavily on the journal that publishes it. Anyone can make the "Journal of American Climate Study" or some other professional sounding name and publish total garbage.
If his experiments can't be reproduced then the paper will be discredited (along with his career)
This has pretty much already happened. He's published papers with deeply flawed methodology that has misrepresented the work of other scientists, espouses a scientific viewpoint (that solar variation causes most observed climate changes) that has been shown wrong years ago, and has failed to disclose the source of his funding, a fairly major ethical violation.
By definition the private sector has to be more expensive at achieving a goal than the public one.
Not at all. The public sector tends not to care about costs, since they take the money more or less by force (implied force, if nothing else), and they have little to no threat of competition to force overheads to remain low. And of course one government providing a service for money to another government also has the motive of profit, making this situation more or less the worst of all possible worlds. In a theoretical optimum world, public sector would be by definition cheaper. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, which isn't always quite so nice (a tiny snag that many political philosophers/economists/et al often overlook).
In this case, for example, SpaceX is attempting to lower costs through a practical reusable design, whereas the Space Shuttle (in practice) ended up raising them considerably, despite being reusable, due to a number of ridiculous design constraints enforced on it by various government interests.