Actually, yes. According to Wikipedia, this reactor is cooled by liquid sodium-potassium metal. The BBC mentions it several times as "liquid metal", but never by name, likely because "liquid metal" is a much cooler name than "sodium-potassium." Or because the less scientific might think "Sodium and potassium? You mean salt and the stuff in bananas?" This is BBC, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say the latter. Sadly, its also probably what most people would think. Never mind liquid sodium-potassium is flammable in air, and the idea of radioactive NaK burning gives me the heeblie-jeeblies, as much as I like nuclear power.
Long story short: bad nuclear reactor design, should never be done again. Also, its been being decommissioned since 1977. So, yeah, lets not do that again.
Maybe its flamebait, but at least its balanced flamebait. After all, you know its gonna come up in the comments, might as well take a stab at both sides. Might have actually stopped the flame war, since none of the other comments that I scanned even mention it. That is, except for yours. Hmmmm......
Not just "an artist rendering of what Vesta might look like", complete with red background nebula and alien laser installations? Congrats, Slashdot. Even the anaglyph picture in the 4th link is kinda cool, in a seriously retro way. Of course, the linked page has white text in gray boxes in a black background, complemented with color pictures of a gray rock in a way that seems deliberately designed to make my eyes bleed... but I can get over it. Can't believe we finally got an article on space with actual, real pictures. Yay!
The photos reveal a heavily-cratered gray surface.
Well, I no one ever said real photos would be terribly interesting to the non-scientist. For those who are interested, however, here is NASA's complete archive of Dawn photography.
We can. But, unless you, personally, look through the source code, you can't be sure that that is any more trustworthy than the version that already exists. In fact, it might even be less so, if simply because fewer people use it (and, as you say, nothing prevents someone making a malware version and calling it "FreeNoScript"). And frankly, I have little desire in having to do so.
Of course, being open source and popular means that I can usually trust someone to look at it and call out any problems, and I trust most open source sources, but its always possible for it to have malware behavior, and its part of the reason I am wary of ANY addons or extensions at all, though I do use a few in Opera. Extensions just happen to be particularly bad as they are usually done by one or two random people whom I have no particular reason to trust.
Maybe not. But, it definitely raises questions about the guy's integrity. And, you can't help but wonder if this hadn't been noticed and created massive outcry, whether he would have apologized at all, or whether he was just imitating large corporations policy of "hope they don't notice, apologize if they do."
Oh yeah, and why one addon is able to make changes to another in Firefox without notifying the user. I haven't used Firefox much (prefer Opera), but is this still possible? If it is, why? Seems like a pretty large security problem. The answer is obviously only to install trusted addons, but if even a major addon like this has a history of doing it, what can you really trust?
Because its an Apple product. And in case you haven't notice, Apple has one of the best PR machines on the planet. Only a Steve Jobs-magnitude iReality Distortion Field could say that phone "survived". It'd be a bit like saying a man "survived" a fall if, despite being dead, all his bones were still intact.
Case in point: the domain is actually goo.gl, not the goog.gl as you called it. GP messed it up too, so maybe he needs look no further than himself for the question to which g.co is the answer.
I realize this is a joke, but the comparison is surprisingly apt. Projects that are delayed like this are rarely, if ever, successful. After so long in development, half the code is probably designed for hardware that is 20 years old, and the remaining half is designed for hardware spread across those intervening 20 years. Since the project was continually under development but never released, by the time they finish updating old sections of the code, the hardware they revised it to support is already several years old. And the code that was modern is even older. And since no one is actually using it, they don't have a massive base of users modifying, testing, and updating it like real operating systems (i.e. Linux, FreeBSD, etc) do.
The result, if it ever gets released, is a cobbled together mess, most of which is outdated and barely works, and the rest is buggy and poorly coded because they were trying to shove it out the door. Any modern features that it has either don't work properly, or don't mesh with the rest of the project. Just like DNF. At this point, the Hurd developers should either admit defeat and close the project, or get enough people together that they can scrap everything, start from the ground up, and rewrite the whole thing within a few years. Otherwise, they will be constantly behind and never become relevant. Likely, they won't do this, which is why I doubt Hurd will ever really make any kind of impact. Being released might help, or it might just make people realize that this is essentially an operating system that was designed 20 years ago and should be abandoned. My money is on the latter.
And what would you prefer? The iOS way of locking everything down? Linux sure as hell lets users reduce their own security. I can easily run everything as root, under any distro I've ever used. OSX does the same. Any operating system that lets its users actually, you know, use it, will absolutely have to allow this. The easier this is to do, the better for most customers. And this will never change. Now, if its in an administrated environment the admin can set up Linux so that the user can't compromise the system, but you can do that in Windows too. You simply cannot create a security model in the practical world that doesn't allow the primary user to lower his own security. Unless, of course, you don't let the user modify the OS or install what he wants. Which is why Apple locks down the iPhone so heavily. Or rather, tries to.
By Chemisor. Quoted so as to be preserved for all antiquity. "Never" is a very long time. Yes, with current technology, there won't be. Thing is, technology never stays current. You're probably still right, but we'll see. Or, our great-great grandchildren will, at least.
Seriously? Its called "Nemesis", its a brown dwarf, and it throws asteroids at us.
Why does this sound like the plot from a video game?
Oh, and here is the link. Thought for a second you completely made it up, but apparently it was someone else who completely made it up. (That might be a little harsh, but it is purely hypothetical)
The problem is, if we can't see it, how do we know if its there or not? You can speculate, of course, and a surprisingly large amount of astrophysicists do precisely that. That's pretty much what "dark matter" is: pure speculation about something we can't see and haven't yet directly observed, but which happens to fulfill a certain role in our theory of the universe. This has the obvious problem of being rather unscientific: until we devise some method of testing for its existence, we can't, empirically, say it exists. Its not completely unscientific: it might be possible to prove it doesn't exist, in the form we currently envision it. In which case scientists basically just tweak the numbers till it can exist. Not a criticism: that's kind of how science works.
However, without some positive evidence, we can't simply assume something we can't see exists. You mention assuming every planet has stars. Of course, many of the ones we've observed do, but there are very many kinds of stars, and its a safe bet that entire classes probably don't have planets. Stars that formed early in the universe, for instance, might not have been able to form planets because of forces from other stars. Or stellar winds that some stars produce might have blown away all the material needed for planets. The possibilities are endless, and if we simply assume things without proof about the way the universe works, we can basically kiss all the knowledge we have of the universe goodbye. The key to any assumption is to first prove or disprove it, then move to the next assumption.
If you look closely, you'll discover that Wikipedia lists Vesta's diameter but Ceres radius. So, yes, Vesta has a bigger diameter than Ceres radius (by the 10% you mentioned). But that means Ceres diameter is a little less than twice the size of Vesta's (974km vs 529km). So, twice the diameter/radius, and 4 times the mass = identical surface gravity.
This. Also, seriously, trying to sue Google, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, AOL, Amazon, and pretty much every other major tech company all at once? I honestly think that this might have a serious chance of destroying software patents entirely. I mean, sure, the companies will be able to defend themselves, but the legal costs of having to do so against this obvious troll might finally drive them to push for fixing our damned patent system. Or maybe they'll just buy the patent (or something) and things will get worse. Judging by past experience, that seems most likely.
To the science-abled fellas in here: How would conditions for astronauts/cosmonauts visiting this bodies be? Can they walk up there or would they need some sort of exo-skeleton or something with more space for sponsors...?
Well, from Wikipedia the asteroid's gravitation field is.022g or about 1/50th of Earth's, so its basically micro-gravity. You could probably escape the gravitational field by jumping really hard, so tethers are probably a must for working outside. Exo-skeletons would probably hurt, rather than help, unless you meant just a space suit, which yes, is absolutely required. Not sure what "space for sponsors" even means, so....
There are so many cool things about this mission!
ION FREAKING ENGINES!
Yes. Ion engines are cool. Delta-v is a bit low though (0-60mph in 4 days, which makes it almost as bad as a Yugo... I kid, I kid). Very useful for deep-space missions, but I can't wait until we get plasma engines, which could potentially have the efficiency of ion thrusters AND the thrust of chemical rockets.
Dawn will remain in orbit around Vesta for a year, before gently boosting away to begin the trip to Ceres, the second half of its asteroid belt adventure.
That was actually my first thought: "Why is this visiting Vesta and not Ceres?" Ceres (might) have surface water and an atmosphere, so it makes more sense as a base. Its also larger (about 4 times the mass/size, although, surprisingly, it has nearly the same gravity,.027g to Vesta's.022g) and looks one hell of a lot more interesting. I mean, both are just big rocks in space, but Ceres is actually dwarf planet class and looks like it could serve as a quite effective base for more missions past the asteroid belt.
Of course, visiting both makes sense. Vesta may have also been a nice test run for gravitational capture, since it doesn't have an atmosphere and its smaller, but has similar gravity. Establishing a (manned) base in the asteroid belt seems like it could be an enormous step forward in space. The asteroids could potentially be mined, providing a financial incentive to visit, plus their low gravity makes them easy to escape after loading up on fuel/ore or for constructing spacecraft (anyone else think the idea of a spaceship factory in the asteroid belts is pretty cool?). All in all, this is a pretty cool (if pretty small) step forward in getting off this rock. I can see why Obama wants to send an astronaut to the belt by 2025, even if I know it'll probably take till 2040 or so.
Well, less money spent on nukes means more money spent on something else. Fewer nukes means less chances of one being stolen (might be a small chance, but still it could happen) or sabotage. Less chance of an accident involving radioactive materials. More fuel for nuclear ships. Basically, one you get above the 1,000 nuke point (and we're at 5,000+ ATM) you can already kill basically everyone, even with a fairly high failure rate, so more is actually bad. We kinda needed it during the Cold War because we didn't want the Russians to think they might have had an advantage (possibly preemptively destroying silo's, whatever). Or maybe we didn't, IDK. We certainly don't need it now.
The California National Primate Research Center (CNPRC) is a United States federal government funded biomedical research facility, dedicated to improving human and animal health, and located on the University of California, Davis, campus.
Yeah, sounds just like a private lab far away from the scrutiny of the public eye. Hell, the freshmen might even have trouble getting into the lab for late-night makeout/pot smoking sessions! Doubt it, though.
Personally, my view is that space transport overall should be much more of a private-public partnership, and that applies to heavy lift as well.
This. Commercial spaceflight hasn't really taken off because there hasn't been a financial reason for it to. On the other hand, NASA has a massive budget that only requires a scientific, not financial, return on investment.
The advantage is competition. With NASA having massive government resources and doing its development in-house, it ends up with inefficient designs like the shuttle, since there isn't the private sector's focus on results, or at least not since the moon landing. Its no coincidence that the Apollo missions made great strides in short time: by having a set goal that NASA was being pushed towards, they were forced to innovate. Since then, however, there has been very little drive to advance spaceflight. Hence, we were still using 40+ year old, and very expensive, tech.
Once you introduce private sector development, NASA can shop around for the best deal. This means that SpaceX is competing against Russia, etc, so they are forced to keep their development costs low while maintaining high safety records. If they didn't, NASA would simply go elsewhere. This kind of competition is highly effective for developing technology. Witness what happened to Intel after AMD released the Athlon 64: massive gains in speed and technology withing just a few years. Hopefully, something similar happens here too. This shouldn't be the end of the American space program, it should be the beginning of the effective American space program.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, yes. According to Wikipedia, this reactor is cooled by liquid sodium-potassium metal. The BBC mentions it several times as "liquid metal", but never by name, likely because "liquid metal" is a much cooler name than "sodium-potassium." Or because the less scientific might think "Sodium and potassium? You mean salt and the stuff in bananas?" This is BBC, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say the latter. Sadly, its also probably what most people would think. Never mind liquid sodium-potassium is flammable in air, and the idea of radioactive NaK burning gives me the heeblie-jeeblies, as much as I like nuclear power.
Long story short: bad nuclear reactor design, should never be done again. Also, its been being decommissioned since 1977. So, yeah, lets not do that again.
After all, the japanese managed to dismantle a reactor for free.
Too soon?
Maybe its flamebait, but at least its balanced flamebait. After all, you know its gonna come up in the comments, might as well take a stab at both sides. Might have actually stopped the flame war, since none of the other comments that I scanned even mention it. That is, except for yours. Hmmmm......
Not just "an artist rendering of what Vesta might look like", complete with red background nebula and alien laser installations? Congrats, Slashdot. Even the anaglyph picture in the 4th link is kinda cool, in a seriously retro way. Of course, the linked page has white text in gray boxes in a black background, complemented with color pictures of a gray rock in a way that seems deliberately designed to make my eyes bleed... but I can get over it. Can't believe we finally got an article on space with actual, real pictures. Yay!
The photos reveal a heavily-cratered gray surface.
Well, I no one ever said real photos would be terribly interesting to the non-scientist. For those who are interested, however, here is NASA's complete archive of Dawn photography.
We can. But, unless you, personally, look through the source code, you can't be sure that that is any more trustworthy than the version that already exists. In fact, it might even be less so, if simply because fewer people use it (and, as you say, nothing prevents someone making a malware version and calling it "FreeNoScript"). And frankly, I have little desire in having to do so.
Of course, being open source and popular means that I can usually trust someone to look at it and call out any problems, and I trust most open source sources, but its always possible for it to have malware behavior, and its part of the reason I am wary of ANY addons or extensions at all, though I do use a few in Opera. Extensions just happen to be particularly bad as they are usually done by one or two random people whom I have no particular reason to trust.
Maybe not. But, it definitely raises questions about the guy's integrity. And, you can't help but wonder if this hadn't been noticed and created massive outcry, whether he would have apologized at all, or whether he was just imitating large corporations policy of "hope they don't notice, apologize if they do."
Oh yeah, and why one addon is able to make changes to another in Firefox without notifying the user. I haven't used Firefox much (prefer Opera), but is this still possible? If it is, why? Seems like a pretty large security problem. The answer is obviously only to install trusted addons, but if even a major addon like this has a history of doing it, what can you really trust?
Because its an Apple product. And in case you haven't notice, Apple has one of the best PR machines on the planet. Only a Steve Jobs-magnitude iReality Distortion Field could say that phone "survived". It'd be a bit like saying a man "survived" a fall if, despite being dead, all his bones were still intact.
Case in point: the domain is actually goo.gl, not the goog.gl as you called it. GP messed it up too, so maybe he needs look no further than himself for the question to which g.co is the answer.
No, but if you're watching a borrowed movie, the MPAA might try. Or at least file suit against the sun for aiding infringement.
“We become like gods to those who come after us,” Rohrer told the crowd.
But gods with tin heads and cold hearts.
Jung. Look him up.
I realize this is a joke, but the comparison is surprisingly apt. Projects that are delayed like this are rarely, if ever, successful. After so long in development, half the code is probably designed for hardware that is 20 years old, and the remaining half is designed for hardware spread across those intervening 20 years. Since the project was continually under development but never released, by the time they finish updating old sections of the code, the hardware they revised it to support is already several years old. And the code that was modern is even older. And since no one is actually using it, they don't have a massive base of users modifying, testing, and updating it like real operating systems (i.e. Linux, FreeBSD, etc) do.
The result, if it ever gets released, is a cobbled together mess, most of which is outdated and barely works, and the rest is buggy and poorly coded because they were trying to shove it out the door. Any modern features that it has either don't work properly, or don't mesh with the rest of the project. Just like DNF. At this point, the Hurd developers should either admit defeat and close the project, or get enough people together that they can scrap everything, start from the ground up, and rewrite the whole thing within a few years. Otherwise, they will be constantly behind and never become relevant. Likely, they won't do this, which is why I doubt Hurd will ever really make any kind of impact. Being released might help, or it might just make people realize that this is essentially an operating system that was designed 20 years ago and should be abandoned. My money is on the latter.
And what would you prefer? The iOS way of locking everything down? Linux sure as hell lets users reduce their own security. I can easily run everything as root, under any distro I've ever used. OSX does the same. Any operating system that lets its users actually, you know, use it, will absolutely have to allow this. The easier this is to do, the better for most customers. And this will never change. Now, if its in an administrated environment the admin can set up Linux so that the user can't compromise the system, but you can do that in Windows too. You simply cannot create a security model in the practical world that doesn't allow the primary user to lower his own security. Unless, of course, you don't let the user modify the OS or install what he wants. Which is why Apple locks down the iPhone so heavily. Or rather, tries to.
There will never be any interstellar trade.
By Chemisor. Quoted so as to be preserved for all antiquity. "Never" is a very long time. Yes, with current technology, there won't be. Thing is, technology never stays current. You're probably still right, but we'll see. Or, our great-great grandchildren will, at least.
Seriously? Its called "Nemesis", its a brown dwarf, and it throws asteroids at us. Why does this sound like the plot from a video game?
Oh, and here is the link. Thought for a second you completely made it up, but apparently it was someone else who completely made it up. (That might be a little harsh, but it is purely hypothetical)
The problem is, if we can't see it, how do we know if its there or not? You can speculate, of course, and a surprisingly large amount of astrophysicists do precisely that. That's pretty much what "dark matter" is: pure speculation about something we can't see and haven't yet directly observed, but which happens to fulfill a certain role in our theory of the universe. This has the obvious problem of being rather unscientific: until we devise some method of testing for its existence, we can't, empirically, say it exists. Its not completely unscientific: it might be possible to prove it doesn't exist, in the form we currently envision it. In which case scientists basically just tweak the numbers till it can exist. Not a criticism: that's kind of how science works.
However, without some positive evidence, we can't simply assume something we can't see exists. You mention assuming every planet has stars. Of course, many of the ones we've observed do, but there are very many kinds of stars, and its a safe bet that entire classes probably don't have planets. Stars that formed early in the universe, for instance, might not have been able to form planets because of forces from other stars. Or stellar winds that some stars produce might have blown away all the material needed for planets. The possibilities are endless, and if we simply assume things without proof about the way the universe works, we can basically kiss all the knowledge we have of the universe goodbye. The key to any assumption is to first prove or disprove it, then move to the next assumption.
If you look closely, you'll discover that Wikipedia lists Vesta's diameter but Ceres radius. So, yes, Vesta has a bigger diameter than Ceres radius (by the 10% you mentioned). But that means Ceres diameter is a little less than twice the size of Vesta's (974km vs 529km). So, twice the diameter/radius, and 4 times the mass = identical surface gravity.
This. Also, seriously, trying to sue Google, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, AOL, Amazon, and pretty much every other major tech company all at once? I honestly think that this might have a serious chance of destroying software patents entirely. I mean, sure, the companies will be able to defend themselves, but the legal costs of having to do so against this obvious troll might finally drive them to push for fixing our damned patent system. Or maybe they'll just buy the patent (or something) and things will get worse. Judging by past experience, that seems most likely.
To the science-abled fellas in here: How would conditions for astronauts/cosmonauts visiting this bodies be? Can they walk up there or would they need some sort of exo-skeleton or something with more space for sponsors...?
Well, from Wikipedia the asteroid's gravitation field is .022g or about 1/50th of Earth's, so its basically micro-gravity. You could probably escape the gravitational field by jumping really hard, so tethers are probably a must for working outside. Exo-skeletons would probably hurt, rather than help, unless you meant just a space suit, which yes, is absolutely required. Not sure what "space for sponsors" even means, so....
There are so many cool things about this mission! ION FREAKING ENGINES!
Yes. Ion engines are cool. Delta-v is a bit low though (0-60mph in 4 days, which makes it almost as bad as a Yugo... I kid, I kid). Very useful for deep-space missions, but I can't wait until we get plasma engines, which could potentially have the efficiency of ion thrusters AND the thrust of chemical rockets.
FTFA:
Dawn will remain in orbit around Vesta for a year, before gently boosting away to begin the trip to Ceres, the second half of its asteroid belt adventure.
That was actually my first thought: "Why is this visiting Vesta and not Ceres?" Ceres (might) have surface water and an atmosphere, so it makes more sense as a base. Its also larger (about 4 times the mass/size, although, surprisingly, it has nearly the same gravity, .027g to Vesta's .022g) and looks one hell of a lot more interesting. I mean, both are just big rocks in space, but Ceres is actually dwarf planet class and looks like it could serve as a quite effective base for more missions past the asteroid belt.
Of course, visiting both makes sense. Vesta may have also been a nice test run for gravitational capture, since it doesn't have an atmosphere and its smaller, but has similar gravity. Establishing a (manned) base in the asteroid belt seems like it could be an enormous step forward in space. The asteroids could potentially be mined, providing a financial incentive to visit, plus their low gravity makes them easy to escape after loading up on fuel/ore or for constructing spacecraft (anyone else think the idea of a spaceship factory in the asteroid belts is pretty cool?). All in all, this is a pretty cool (if pretty small) step forward in getting off this rock. I can see why Obama wants to send an astronaut to the belt by 2025, even if I know it'll probably take till 2040 or so.
No, but there is a lot of photographic evidence.
tl;dr. By the time I got to the end, I forgot what you said at the begi
Well, less money spent on nukes means more money spent on something else. Fewer nukes means less chances of one being stolen (might be a small chance, but still it could happen) or sabotage. Less chance of an accident involving radioactive materials. More fuel for nuclear ships. Basically, one you get above the 1,000 nuke point (and we're at 5,000+ ATM) you can already kill basically everyone, even with a fairly high failure rate, so more is actually bad. We kinda needed it during the Cold War because we didn't want the Russians to think they might have had an advantage (possibly preemptively destroying silo's, whatever). Or maybe we didn't, IDK. We certainly don't need it now.
From Wikipedia:
The California National Primate Research Center (CNPRC) is a United States federal government funded biomedical research facility, dedicated to improving human and animal health, and located on the University of California, Davis, campus.
Yeah, sounds just like a private lab far away from the scrutiny of the public eye. Hell, the freshmen might even have trouble getting into the lab for late-night makeout/pot smoking sessions! Doubt it, though.
Elon Musk FTFA:
Personally, my view is that space transport overall should be much more of a private-public partnership, and that applies to heavy lift as well.
This. Commercial spaceflight hasn't really taken off because there hasn't been a financial reason for it to. On the other hand, NASA has a massive budget that only requires a scientific, not financial, return on investment.
The advantage is competition. With NASA having massive government resources and doing its development in-house, it ends up with inefficient designs like the shuttle, since there isn't the private sector's focus on results, or at least not since the moon landing. Its no coincidence that the Apollo missions made great strides in short time: by having a set goal that NASA was being pushed towards, they were forced to innovate. Since then, however, there has been very little drive to advance spaceflight. Hence, we were still using 40+ year old, and very expensive, tech.
Once you introduce private sector development, NASA can shop around for the best deal. This means that SpaceX is competing against Russia, etc, so they are forced to keep their development costs low while maintaining high safety records. If they didn't, NASA would simply go elsewhere. This kind of competition is highly effective for developing technology. Witness what happened to Intel after AMD released the Athlon 64: massive gains in speed and technology withing just a few years. Hopefully, something similar happens here too. This shouldn't be the end of the American space program, it should be the beginning of the effective American space program.
So what's 10Gbps? Ludicrous speed Ethernet?