There's perhaps a distinction between coding and programming being used that you missing (coding: Just writing code. Programming: Designing and building programs). You're right that coding is really accessible - and there's terrific tools that will write most of your code for you. However there's a huge number of people out there coding really awful programs, because the knowledge necessary to understand what the computer is really doing with your code is quite hard to come by, which I believe is necro81's point.
Except for one thing. If you want to build an infrastructure in space, getting materials off the moon is far cheaper than getting the same materials off Earth. If you're planning on a large enough infrastructure, spending a couple of trillion on moon mines may become the smart thing to do.
Interesting: engaging or exciting and holding the attention or curiosity.
Sure. Some of these may be "interesting" to a limited set of people, but for the most part they are about the same as the other couple of hundred planets already discovered.
There's a lot of planets out there. They were expecting to find a bunch of them. This is not news.
I'm pretty sure if there were interesting planets in the 32 they are announcing, they would have pointed them out.
Seriously, are any of these 32 new planets at all interesting? It was great that we've figured out how to detect the existence of these planets, but even the chilean team doesn't bother to single out any of them as being out of the ordinary.
Now that VASIMR technology seems to be coming of age, isn't it time to do a survey of everything within say, 20 light years to find stuff that may be potentially habitable?
The only thing that this being a "right" gets you is that if there is an ISP that services your area, they cannot refuse to connect you, the service must be reasonably priced and the connection must be at least this good 75% of the time.
This is really just establishing a legal minimum level of service than an ISP can provide in Finland.
No, you don't need the right to Internet Access to survive. You also don't need the right to vote to survive either, yet you have it. You have the right to an awful lot of things you probably know nothing about, think are entirely useless and never exercise.
I'm pretty sure they wouldn't just glue a whole bunch of solar car tops onto the Ares. The 40 pounds includes not only the solar panels but also the "carbon-fiber-and-Kevlar bodywork" and perhaps even a small section of "chrome-moly steel frame".
The point is that a 540 pound car can hit 90 miles an hour with less than 40 pounds of solar cells. The cells are not a substantial portion of the weight of the car.
Heavy? Tell that to the MIT team who built a solar powered car that does 90 miles an hour.
Everything is packaged in a chrome-moly steel frame wrapped in carbon-fiber-and-Kevlar bodywork. The car weighs just under 500 pounds, and the top half of the body weighs just 40 pounds - with the solar cells
What exactly do you mean by "bee-sting allergy". These nanobees are filled with melittin, which may or may not be the same thing.
Interestingly, if you inject melittin you'll cause "widespread destruction of red blood cells" but these things don't. That might be because they target "growing blood vessels". Presumably, if the only areas of growing blood cells are tumors, you might be able to get away with injecting someone who is allergic.
Or, assuming your friend is allergic to melittin and not one of the other fun things in a bee string, they might end up a writhing blob of agony.
Given that feathers are much less dense than water, everything else being equal it would cost more to get the feathers there since they enclosure required to contain them would be larger than the enclosure required to contain water.
Things not being equal, feathers are far more compressible than water so you could perhaps increase their density substantially.
You don't specify what condition you want the feathers in. It might be possible to just glue them to the outside of the craft, in which case there are no associated container requirements whereas the water must still be contained. In this case it's going to cost more to get the water there.
On the other hand, if the water was already in orbit it would be as ice, in which case you might be able to just glue a chunk of that to the outside of the craft.
If we're gluing random chunks of stuff to the outside of spaceships, it's probably going to come down to how much friction each material causes and what loss of material each substance would undergo due to space friction.
The original article was suggesting that there is so much wind around that wind power is a viable power generation method, not that this should actually be done. There's problems with every method of power generation - they all remove energy from the environment.
Maybe with all the deforestation going on there's now too much wind? Maybe we need some way of slowing it down.
You have a really valuable argument that people should spend a lot of time worrying about. It's a real shame that most people won't see it, since it's posted anonymously. Wind is essentially created by heat from the sun. Using all these wind turbines will obviously make the sun go out.
Some wind turbine designs are far more bird friendly than others. The standard "propeller" based designs tend to be pretty bad. Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (Pac Wind and Helix Wind) can be much more bird/bat friendly.
AvantGo created an incredibly powerful, platform independant web browser that was years ahead of it's time. It had features that still aren't in many of the browsers available for hand helds (HTML 4.0 compliance for one). The only downfall was that it converted the DOM into a proprietary storage format and never implemented the ability for the device to read raw HTML. AvantGo management steadfastly refused to allow on device conversion of HTML because they wanted to sell licenses for their server to do the conversion from HTML to the proprietary format.
Sybase apparently bought them for their huge customer base, and never cared about the technology at all - allowing the massive lead to disappear.
Newspapers would make more money if they actually did some up to date journalism. They fail to do even simple research that any idiot can do on Google. For the most part they simply recycle stories they get off the wire. You could probably find a blogger that has more relevant information about any news event you care to mention. These clowns want to get paid for the type of work they were doing 20 years ago, but it's just not worth anything. They are trying to compete in an information centric arena, but they don't provide any information. Case in point. Recently a JAL 747-400 at LAX sucked an empty baggage container into it's engine. It is inexcusable for the LA Times to not have a picture of the 747 with a baggage container lodged in it's engine in their story. It's inexcusable for them to not have interviewed a couple of workers/bystanders at the airport. I would lay odds that you can get exactly that sort of info by looking around the web at people's blogs. You can probably even get a discussion of the science surrounding the event. None of this appears in the local rag's story. There is no value added by looking at the newspaper.
Newspapers need to wake up and start doing some work.
SETI is probably a waste of time and resources. We (the human race) don't even generate the sort of signals that SETI looks for. Our communication technologies are verging on being indistinguishable from background noise, or even completely undetectable (photon entanglement).
If detecting an alien civilization from their signals is not going to happen, then the only way you're going to meet them is by close encounter. Since current theory says that FTL is impossible then you have to do some sub light speed generational ship type of thing. The human race tends to only do things that are profitable (you could argue that there's that whole survival trait thing kicking in), we're never likely to build one. Why would anyone else?
I'm thinking that even if there is some trick to achieving FTL travel, then number of races that live long enough and care enough to find it are probably pretty small. Let's say you do find it. Let's say you work out how to travel 100 times the speed of light. It's still a two week trip to our closest neighbor, and all shipwrecks are terminal. If there are other intelligent races in the universe, maybe interstellar travel is so hideously expensive and risky that those civilizations expand very very slowly, far slower than Fermi's paradox predicts.
You say "It doesn't really require that much effort", and you might be correct. The problem is that ANY effort must be paid for by someone. If the returns on that effort do not cover the cost, then people in general will not do it.
You assume the gain to society is great, when this is simply not true. If the gains were great, society would be already be doing it. The gains are only great for a very small subset of society.
It might seem mean spirited to you, but it's really just survival. If providing a service costs more than the income you receive from it, eventually you will no longer be in a position to provide that service.
Allowing people to subscribe to channels on an ala carte basis may actually improve programming. There are so many channels that are full of unmitigated trash, but get "sold" because they are bundled with channels that have a couple of good programs. Those channels would need to start doing some actual programming, or they will find themselves losing what advertisers they do have.
Physorg.org, an organization that apparently exercises little oversight over the articles it runs. Got any references to back this up?
Second, read this article by the same author, which says exactly the opposite of the present article: Antibacterial Cleaning Products and Drug Resistance. Actually, I believe you're incorrect. This article says two things (paraphrasing): "Antibacterial soap isn't any better than normal soap" and "Antibacterial soap may cause mutations that help bacteria resist Triclosan"
The article you linked says: "Antibacterial soap doesn't cause drug resistance" and "We don't know if it affects Triclosan, further research is needed"
This is hardly the opposite. In fact, I believe this new article is the "further research". If you put these together you get: "While antibacterial soap does not cause drug resistance, there is a small risk it will mutate bacteria to cause resistance to Triclosan. You're better off not using it since it's not any better than normal soap"
NO development of drug resistance or Triclosan resistance has been shown as a result of use of Triclosan, apparently This is patently incorrect. The article states that they found resistance when soaps with higher concentrations of Triclosan were used.
Hmm... then you invite the reader to infer that "This article is obviously wrong because it was written by someone who looks like she could be a bimbo".... fun implications that because something isn't certain it's just a guess and that the article was somehow including Triclosan as an antibacterial..... finally we have an appeal to misleading authority.
So... you work for a company that produces Triclosan, or maybe just a company that advertises for one, right? Got stock maybe? A little Triclosan stock? Yeah? Stock?
The article mentions that 30 psi is one third of the normal air pressure on earth. Don't really know where your figures are coming from (if you need 30 psi to be "safe" from a vacuum, then 16 is probably dangerous), but 48 psi is still only about half "normal" air pressure.
Even if they had the spacecraft interior at 50 psi, 80 is still less than normal. I wouldn't be surprised if 120 barely only makes it uncomfortable.
I moved from Australia to California around 10 years ago to be very unpleasantly surprised at the amount of old technology in use. Sure, there were certain companies where this definitely wasn't the case - but aside for the exceptional cases, for the most part the infrastructure was outdated even then. If California/Silicon Valley is backwards technologically then the rest of country must be worse off. As an example, when I moved here very few people had even heard of "direct deposit", let alone were using it - but it had been commonly in use in Australia for at least 10 or 15 years.
This sort of thing was even more shocking as America touts itself as being technologically advanced. Perhaps some of the companies in the US are, but the country itself certainly isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
There's perhaps a distinction between coding and programming being used that you missing (coding: Just writing code. Programming: Designing and building programs). You're right that coding is really accessible - and there's terrific tools that will write most of your code for you. However there's a huge number of people out there coding really awful programs, because the knowledge necessary to understand what the computer is really doing with your code is quite hard to come by, which I believe is necro81's point.
None of which is worth the cost of retrieval.
Except for one thing. If you want to build an infrastructure in space, getting materials off the moon is far cheaper than getting the same materials off Earth. If you're planning on a large enough infrastructure, spending a couple of trillion on moon mines may become the smart thing to do.
This is interesting: planet inside habitable zone, perhaps with liquid water
Interesting: engaging or exciting and holding the attention or curiosity.
Sure. Some of these may be "interesting" to a limited set of people, but for the most part they are about the same as the other couple of hundred planets already discovered.
There's a lot of planets out there. They were expecting to find a bunch of them. This is not news.
I'm pretty sure if there were interesting planets in the 32 they are announcing, they would have pointed them out.
Slow News Day.
Seriously, are any of these 32 new planets at all interesting? It was great that we've figured out how to detect the existence of these planets, but even the chilean team doesn't bother to single out any of them as being out of the ordinary.
Now that VASIMR technology seems to be coming of age, isn't it time to do a survey of everything within say, 20 light years to find stuff that may be potentially habitable?
The only thing that this being a "right" gets you is that if there is an ISP that services your area, they cannot refuse to connect you, the service must be reasonably priced and the connection must be at least this good 75% of the time.
This is really just establishing a legal minimum level of service than an ISP can provide in Finland.
No, you don't need the right to Internet Access to survive. You also don't need the right to vote to survive either, yet you have it. You have the right to an awful lot of things you probably know nothing about, think are entirely useless and never exercise.
Yes, you probably do. You also have the right to an electricity supply to power the computer and the right to have a house to put it in.
You also have the legal obligation to pay for the house, the computer, the electricity and the internet connection.
You do not have to avail yourself any of these rights if you don't want to.
I'm pretty sure they wouldn't just glue a whole bunch of solar car tops onto the Ares. The 40 pounds includes not only the solar panels but also the "carbon-fiber-and-Kevlar bodywork" and perhaps even a small section of "chrome-moly steel frame".
The point is that a 540 pound car can hit 90 miles an hour with less than 40 pounds of solar cells. The cells are not a substantial portion of the weight of the car.
Heavy? Tell that to the MIT team who built a solar powered car that does 90 miles an hour.
Everything is packaged in a chrome-moly steel frame wrapped in carbon-fiber-and-Kevlar bodywork. The car weighs just under 500 pounds, and the top half of the body weighs just 40 pounds - with the solar cells
What exactly do you mean by "bee-sting allergy". These nanobees are filled with melittin, which may or may not be the same thing.
Interestingly, if you inject melittin you'll cause "widespread destruction of red blood cells" but these things don't. That might be because they target "growing blood vessels". Presumably, if the only areas of growing blood cells are tumors, you might be able to get away with injecting someone who is allergic.
Or, assuming your friend is allergic to melittin and not one of the other fun things in a bee string, they might end up a writhing blob of agony.
Given that feathers are much less dense than water, everything else being equal it would cost more to get the feathers there since they enclosure required to contain them would be larger than the enclosure required to contain water.
Things not being equal, feathers are far more compressible than water so you could perhaps increase their density substantially.
You don't specify what condition you want the feathers in. It might be possible to just glue them to the outside of the craft, in which case there are no associated container requirements whereas the water must still be contained. In this case it's going to cost more to get the water there.
On the other hand, if the water was already in orbit it would be as ice, in which case you might be able to just glue a chunk of that to the outside of the craft.
If we're gluing random chunks of stuff to the outside of spaceships, it's probably going to come down to how much friction each material causes and what loss of material each substance would undergo due to space friction.
HTH
There are limits to the minimum you can be paid and still be considered exempt.
If you do so many hours that it drives your effective hourly rate below the threshold, you are no longer exempt.
The original article was suggesting that there is so much wind around that wind power is a viable power generation method, not that this should actually be done. There's problems with every method of power generation - they all remove energy from the environment.
Maybe with all the deforestation going on there's now too much wind? Maybe we need some way of slowing it down.
You have a really valuable argument that people should spend a lot of time worrying about. It's a real shame that most people won't see it, since it's posted anonymously. Wind is essentially created by heat from the sun. Using all these wind turbines will obviously make the sun go out.
That would be a real problem.
Some wind turbine designs are far more bird friendly than others. The standard "propeller" based designs tend to be pretty bad. Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (Pac Wind and Helix Wind) can be much more bird/bat friendly.
AvantGo created an incredibly powerful, platform independant web browser that was years ahead of it's time. It had features that still aren't in many of the browsers available for hand helds (HTML 4.0 compliance for one). The only downfall was that it converted the DOM into a proprietary storage format and never implemented the ability for the device to read raw HTML. AvantGo management steadfastly refused to allow on device conversion of HTML because they wanted to sell licenses for their server to do the conversion from HTML to the proprietary format.
Sybase apparently bought them for their huge customer base, and never cared about the technology at all - allowing the massive lead to disappear.
Now it's just stomping on the bits.
R.I.P AvantGo
Newspapers would make more money if they actually did some up to date journalism. They fail to do even simple research that any idiot can do on Google. For the most part they simply recycle stories they get off the wire. You could probably find a blogger that has more relevant information about any news event you care to mention.
These clowns want to get paid for the type of work they were doing 20 years ago, but it's just not worth anything. They are trying to compete in an information centric arena, but they don't provide any information.
Case in point. Recently a JAL 747-400 at LAX sucked an empty baggage container into it's engine. It is inexcusable for the LA Times to not have a picture of the 747 with a baggage container lodged in it's engine in their story. It's inexcusable for them to not have interviewed a couple of workers/bystanders at the airport. I would lay odds that you can get exactly that sort of info by looking around the web at people's blogs.
You can probably even get a discussion of the science surrounding the event. None of this appears in the local rag's story. There is no value added by looking at the newspaper.
Newspapers need to wake up and start doing some work.
We haven't met them?
Some might say "We are them".
SETI is probably a waste of time and resources. We (the human race) don't even generate the sort of signals that SETI looks for. Our communication technologies are verging on being indistinguishable from background noise, or even completely undetectable (photon entanglement).
If detecting an alien civilization from their signals is not going to happen, then the only way you're going to meet them is by close encounter. Since current theory says that FTL is impossible then you have to do some sub light speed generational ship type of thing. The human race tends to only do things that are profitable (you could argue that there's that whole survival trait thing kicking in), we're never likely to build one. Why would anyone else?
I'm thinking that even if there is some trick to achieving FTL travel, then number of races that live long enough and care enough to find it are probably pretty small. Let's say you do find it. Let's say you work out how to travel 100 times the speed of light. It's still a two week trip to our closest neighbor, and all shipwrecks are terminal. If there are other intelligent races in the universe, maybe interstellar travel is so hideously expensive and risky that those civilizations expand very very slowly, far slower than Fermi's paradox predicts.
You say "It doesn't really require that much effort", and you might be correct. The problem is that ANY effort must be paid for by someone. If the returns on that effort do not cover the cost, then people in general will not do it.
You assume the gain to society is great, when this is simply not true. If the gains were great, society would be already be doing it. The gains are only great for a very small subset of society.
It might seem mean spirited to you, but it's really just survival. If providing a service costs more than the income you receive from it, eventually you will no longer be in a position to provide that service.
.... the goggles ... they do nothing ....
Allowing people to subscribe to channels on an ala carte basis may actually improve programming. There are so many channels that are full of unmitigated trash, but get "sold" because they are bundled with channels that have a couple of good programs. Those channels would need to start doing some actual programming, or they will find themselves losing what advertisers they do have.
"Antibacterial soap isn't any better than normal soap"
and
"Antibacterial soap may cause mutations that help bacteria resist Triclosan"
The article you linked says:
"Antibacterial soap doesn't cause drug resistance"
and
"We don't know if it affects Triclosan, further research is needed"
This is hardly the opposite. In fact, I believe this new article is the "further research". If you put these together you get: "While antibacterial soap does not cause drug resistance, there is a small risk it will mutate bacteria to cause resistance to Triclosan. You're better off not using it since it's not any better than normal soap" NO development of drug resistance or Triclosan resistance has been shown as a result of use of Triclosan, apparently This is patently incorrect. The article states that they found resistance when soaps with higher concentrations of Triclosan were used.
Hmm
So
The article mentions that 30 psi is one third of the normal air pressure on earth. Don't really know where your figures are coming from (if you need 30 psi to be "safe" from a vacuum, then 16 is probably dangerous), but 48 psi is still only about half "normal" air pressure.
Even if they had the spacecraft interior at 50 psi, 80 is still less than normal. I wouldn't be surprised if 120 barely only makes it uncomfortable.
I moved from Australia to California around 10 years ago to be very unpleasantly surprised at the amount of old technology in use. Sure, there were certain companies where this definitely wasn't the case - but aside for the exceptional cases, for the most part the infrastructure was outdated even then. If California/Silicon Valley is backwards technologically then the rest of country must be worse off. As an example, when I moved here very few people had even heard of "direct deposit", let alone were using it - but it had been commonly in use in Australia for at least 10 or 15 years.
This sort of thing was even more shocking as America touts itself as being technologically advanced. Perhaps some of the companies in the US are, but the country itself certainly isn't.