Windows on well made hardware, and with good drivers, is extremely stable. If your Windows installation is not stable, Windows is not the problem - it's either broken hardware or bad drivers.
Eh. NTFS's performance still goes to hell when it fragments heavily, which happens rapidly when the drive is near full. This sucks if you're moving around large amounts of data. Windows gets very, very unusable (and very unstable) when the filesystem starts to get seriously fragmented. Yah, you shouldn't fill NTFS volumes over 85% full - but it's not like the operating system even warns you that all hell is about to break loose.
ext2, on the other hand, I've taken up to near 100% capacity with no ill effects whatsoever.
So "Windows, on well made hardware, with good drivers, politely used, is very stable"?
The Gamecube controller is the first Nintendo controller which didn't do this.
Wireless.
The Wavebird really is the first wireless controller that works. (It's also the first first-party wireless controller). Unsurprisingly, the Xbox 360 and PS3 both have first-party wireless controllers.
To be fair, Spirit and Opportunity are nowhere near each other - which means that the panel cleaning events have to be pretty ubiquitous. They've also persisted for over two years, which, while it's still a small timespan, tells you that they're not extremely uncommon.
MSL might be a multi-rover mission (like MER) - which implies that solar panels/batteries might be a reasonable solution for some subset of the rovers.
To be honest, they're probably just a little surprised at how useful solar power has been for Spirit/Opportunity. There really is no reason other than politics to choose solar power over an RTG, I think. The main benefit RTGs have over solar power isn't keeping the electronics warm. It's the longevity. Viking 2 lasted 50% longer than Spirit and Opportunity have. We have no idea how long Viking 1 would've operated, since it was disabled with a faulty command.
Aren't the people whose names are on the bills the people who are considered to have initiated those bills? I think commonly they're said to have introduced the bill, but initiate is actually used on a few Congressional web sites.
that may have greased the wheels a bit. That's all.
Your opinion of what that bill did could have differed from his. And likely did.
Because in the context of the speech he was obviously trying to take credit for something...
Yah. He was trying to take credit for the bill that ultimately created the Internet as we know it.
"Took the initiative to create" and "invent" don't have the same connotation. In any case, however, he didn't say "invent", which makes it a misquote.
I can't understand why they insist on going back to the drawing board every time.
They don't.
Spirit and Opportunity reused:
Sojourner's obstacle avoidance system design.
Pathfinder's airbag landing system design.
Viking's aeroshell design.
Pathfinder's cruise stage design.
Pathfinder's APXS design (*).
And probably half a dozen other portions I'm not even suggesting here. Note that they didn't reuse them exactly the same - that'd be silly, they tweaked them, of course. But the Mars rovers missions have been reusing 'things which worked' for a while.
Keep in mind that a lot of the above designs are fatal if they don't work. Redesigning the rover itself isn't that big a deal in comparison - especially if you design the system redundantly.
*: Mostly, I think. Max Planck Institute built portions of the Pathfinder APXS, Spirit/Opportunity's, and will build part of the Mars Science Laboratory's as well. Chicago provided portions of Pathfinder's APXS as well.
Because there aren't any economies of scale to be had.
That's not entirely true. The biggest cost savings that a space project (the project, not the launch) can have is preventing systems failure - because a systems failure requires a new launch.
So while I agree that reusing the rovers is moderately silly, given that certain technologies have proven themselves very very well, I would be extremely upset if those (successful, proven) technologies weren't used in future rover missions.
In some sense, that is 'economies of scale'. It doesn't save you much money up front, but it reduces the chance that the mission will fail. Of course, this is in a lot of sense what NASA will do - and did do.
Why? Because Spirit and Opportunity are already beneficiaries of the economies of scale - they both succeeded because their landing gear design had already been tested, and the cruise stage design already has been tested as well. Oh, and the aeroshell design had been tested already, too. Almost thirty years previously. And if you want to talk about rover design? Automated obstacle avoidance, as well.
So I definitely agree with you that I'm not happy about people criticizing NASA for not massively replicating the Spirit/Opportunity design - that is, for not building off of successes. They are building off of successes. That's why Spirit and Opportunity worked so well in the first place.
Yes, Mars Science Laboratory will be greatly different than the previous three. But it's still going to build off of proven technologies. That's taking the best of 'economies of scale' - getting a proven design - while not being limited to the original's limitations.
Heck, MSL still states that solar power is under consideration. And I have little doubt that it's stayed under consideration because of Spirit and Opportunity's success.
It should also be noted that it is possible to prove that certain conditions had to exist in order for something to have been formed. Or at least, to support that supposition.
One thing that an ID 'researcher' could do is explore the conditions which are required for some process (that they don't believe can originate by chance) to exist. If you restrict those conditions to conditions that were unavailable in early Earth, then you've shown that something weird must've gone on.
While that won't prove their theory (which... you can't do anyway) it does lend credence to it, especially if the only other ways around the theory involve adding so much that the addition of an "unknown force" is minor in comparison.
Imagine, for instance, trying to prove that life on Earth didn't originate on Earth. This is similar. You just have to elucidate the mechanisms by which life can form, and show that those mechanisms were not available on early Earth.
But, like I said elsewhere: it's not like they give a crap about supporting their theory. Which is the main reason why it's not science. While they could make scientific claims and scientific experiments to support those claims, they're not doing so. Just making suppositions - suppositions which could be the precursor to claims, but aren't.
Note that ID researchers aren't doing such experiements.
Which is why they're not scientists.
They could do experiments to bolster their claim. For one thing, suppose you've got a multistep biological process: one easy way to support the claim that it couldn't've arisen by chance is to remove one of the steps in a large population, and see if that population all dies, or manages to survive somehow. If it survives somehow, and in a few generations (or many generations) a mechanism that produces the same effect as the original is recovered, your hypothesis is out the window. But if the entire population dies, then that supports your claim slightly.
I say slightly because you can't ever prove that it's impossible, as you pointed out. But the more experiments that show a negative possibility for evolving a complex machinery, the stronger the claim becomes.
The inability of a particular researcher to recreate a supposedly natural event only reflects on that researchers abilities, not the likelyhood of the event in nature. ID amounts to nothing more than mere incredulity.
In some sense, it does start to constrain the likelihood of the event in nature, because you start putting bounds on the conditions that had to happen. Macroevolution gives a possible mechanism for the way certain things came about, but that mechanism has to be verified. That could either be done via a fossil record (which is going to be obviously incomplete) or by active research showing a probable pathway.
There's a lot of research done this way, actually: the evolution of sex is one example. There are a lot of theories about how sexual reproduction evolved, but unfortunately most of them don't work in practical tests.
While you're right that you could never show that it's impossible for evolution to have produced such a mechanism, over time, continued failure starts to suggest that there may have been something else which caused the change.
The fact that ID people aren't doing these experiments (nor are they even funding them as far as I'm aware) is, in my mind, the big smoking gun that they're not scientists. I don't believe even they believe what they're saying is true. I just think they think there's enough open problems in research that they can attack it, and make a name for themselves.
Heck, I think if you even suggested doing said experiments, they would say no simply out of fear that they would be proven wrong. And that's the mark of someone who deserves to be nowhere near science.
Even the 'global warming isn't real' crowd has at least a few people who are trying to do science (bad science, but still science) to support their claim. ID isn't even bothering to do that.
Did you miss the point where I said that several studies have indicated that there is no significant amount of disagreement in literature about this point?
If you had done this then, with global cooling, that would not have been true.
While you could certainly set up a website saying whatever you want, you could not do a review of peer-reviewed journal articles and conclude that the majority of climate scientists do not believe in global warming.
When the airwaves were packed with scientists explaining that we're facing certain annihilation
I believe there's a name for trying to flood information channels with information that's not actually true, but that you would like the population to believe. I believe that name is "propaganda."
you can't handwave away the memories by saying that the real scientists didn't actually believe that.
Why not? You can prove what real scientists actually believed with a little research.
What's forcefed to you by the media versus what actually happened are two totally different things. Which is exactly what that link is trying to say. It's unfair to judge real scientists by propaganda that was produced by people completely unrelated to them in the past.
There are agricultural subsidies because it's easier for politicians to hand out our money than for people to deal with changes in the market.
That's a little tough to say. Certainly in the EU, for instance, agricultural subsidies were because there wasn't any demand for local milk at prices they could afford to produce at.
Then again, I guess what you're saying is "well, they shouldn't be making milk," which I guess is true, although the "cheap" vendors (such as Jamaica, in the EU case) couldn't really supply all of the EU.
But then again, it really depends: it might be more than just easier for politicians. It might be cheaper for the country overall. In the case of the huge agricultural subsidies (like in the EU's case) that's clearly not true: but on a smaller scale, it can be cheaper for a country to subsidize local agriculture to compete with other countries, based on the increased taxes it gets back from the local companies.
In any case, you still usually give subsidies if there's not enough demand to float the price high enough to support the cost, and you want production to continue. That's true if there's a glut on the market, or if there's external competition (which, in the end, is just, in a sense, a glut on the market still).
Engineering a climate is a far different thing from trying to decypher what is happening with one.
Lesson #1 on why we need to move off-planet: because it will give us other systems to actually work with. It also won't allow us to fall back onto an ecology that 'works' - it'll force you to 'make it work, or die'.
I've said to many people, if I was born right now, I'd go into ecological engineering. Not for money purposes - I couldn't care about money - but in terms of 'global need', ecological engineering is the one thing that we suck horrendously at.
It's naive to believe that we can't engineer ecologies/climates, but you are also right that we have no experience doing so. Our attempts at engineering climates and ecologies have so far been essentially unqualified disasters.
Yes, yes, they did. Perhaps you're too young to remember the scare, but I very clearly remember being terrified after listening to a scientist explaining to the viewing audience that we were all going to starve to death in the near future.
You were watching the scientist in the media. What the media thinks and what science actually thinks are two totally different things.
The media was convinced that cold fusion was real. Science was notably more skeptical.
Now, if you're trying to say that global warming is just "science in the media" again, that's a valid criticism - but it's also wrong, as many of the studies on 'is there scientific consensus regarding global warming' have shown.
Had you done the same studies in the 1970s, you would not have found the same result regarding global cooling. See the link. They specifically quote papers that say "yah, we don't have a clue."
I don't buy this. If it were true, why do we typically have an agricultural surplus?
Because we don't typically make the same sort of food that we demand. That's why there are agricultural subsidies - because there's no demand for certain types of foods.
Grain production is so high you have trouble finding a place to store it.
Americans don't typically eat only grain. That's not the problem - it's other forms of food: meat in particular, also vegetables that only grow in small areas of the country. A large amount of the food we eat is imported - even though there's arable land in the Midwest, they can't grow strawberries.
What if Einstein spent his whole career simply finding new ways to state that Newton was wrong intead of developing the theory of Relativity?
They're not targeting a specific theory. They're stating that it's impossible for it to happen by chance. This is agnostic to the opposing theory. 'Chance' is not 'macroevolution'.
In fact, curiously, that statement isn't even contrary to macroevolution, depending on your definition of 'chance'. If your definition of 'chance' is sitting in a pool of chemicals in a static environment with no outside influences, even that likely wouldn't evolve.
"Bodies moving at high velocity are so complex that Newtonian mechanics can't explain it."
What about "the dynamics of bodies moving at velocities close to the speed of light are impossible to mathematically represent"? That's more similar. And it's not a targetted opposing theory. It would also be wrong.
Note also that there are theories in quantum field theory which are similar, which say "no analytical solution of X is possible". Now, in those cases, it's possible to understand them perturbatively, but it's still a negative claim.
Ah, but if a researcher can produce blood clotting, that would only show that an intelligent designer (researcher) can produce blood clotting.
Note the by chance part. If the researcher's actions consist of setting up an experiment that has a strong statistical likelihood of occurring randomly in nature, then it's by chance, and the researcher is immaterial to the experiment.
Evaluating the 'statistical likelihood of something occurring randomly in nature' is often claimed in ID talks, and it's almost always wrong because they just throw around random numbers that have no statistical basis, and we have no idea the number of trials the Universe has gone through.
No, decay theory predicts that decay happens a certain way (a positive claim). A side effect of that prediction is that it can't happen any other way, but that isn't the main prediction.
Er? The claims aren't saying how a decay happens. Just that it never occurs in a certain way. And that is the main prediction of several theories, because it usually involves stuff like forbidden decays, etc. They don't care that the decay happens via other methods. If those other methods didn't exist, the particle'd be stable, and they'd be predicting nothing except a lack of decays.
Merely stating that another theory is wrong (or coudln't happen) is not a theory. ID doesn't predict anytihng.
Yes, it does. To pull out an example (that isn't used, but still), ID might say "blood clotting is so complex it could never have arisen from chance." Which is predicting that it is impossible to generate the blood clotting mechanism by chance.
If a researcher goes into a lab, and is unable to generate the blood clotting mechanism by chance, that supports that prediction. If, however, he is, then that falsifies it.
This is a theory. There are comparable theories in science: the explanation of certain particle decays, for instance, predict that certain decay paths should never be seen. They aren't. Which lends support to them.
It's a crappy theory, of course, because the statement "by chance" is retarded, and the explanation for how things were created is so weak that Occam's Razor chews it up like a meat grinder. A lot of times crappy statistics is used as well to justify things. Even macroevolution doesn't say things arose from chance. They arose from circumstance. Not knowing the circumstances means you don't know how it evolved.
There's another problem, however, which is something like what you're alluding to, which is that the leap from "cannot arise from chance implies intelligent design" is not obvious. But postulating a designer, and then saying "we shouldn't be able to produce these by chance" is a weak theory if the previous statement is true.
They're basically saying "Our theory is that your theory is wrong."
Nono - they're saying "our theory is that all theories which involve chance evolution are wrong." This is a much stronger statement.
Actually, what's often overlooked is that the intelligent design arguments are providing testable and predictable theories.
They're saying it's impossible for certain systems to have arisen by chance. They usually give examples of various complicated biological systems, etc.
That's a falsifiable statement.
Unsurprisingly, the examples given are usually falsified.
Somebody better tell that to this guy: he seems to think that there's no incompatibility there.
Only a small minority of Christian religions believe there's any incompatibility between the two, and they tend to be a little bit loony overprotective about the literal wording of the Bible (why, I have no idea: it's not like the words have a unique, unambiguous meaning - and it's not like the people at the time even had the words to write down some of the concepts).
One being the idea that man is created in God's image
You think the idea of 'man being created in God's image' had anything to do with our physical bodies? You think our physical bodies mean diddly squat to God?
Did you ever think that maybe, just maybe, it might have to do with that whole soul thing?
Radiometric dating points to the earth's inception being ~4.6 billion years ago. I want to know if the U238 that exists today was created as a result of the supernova that blew apart the solar system that provided all the matter for this one.
The U238 was definitely formed in a supernova. Basically all heavy elements were.
It should be noted, however, that this implies that the solar system is at least 4.5 billion years old. It can't be less.
This is what's stated by radiometric dating, anyway. They can only date to when the radioactive material was deposited.
Sounds like an excuse somebody made up to cover the fact that they lost half of the exams.
If it was, they went to a lot of trouble - namely, shredding half of the exams and bringing them into the class. I think he might still have one of them...
Which raises the question of why the buyer was ever allowed to be alone with the ballots, unobserved, or if the buyer wasn't alone during this operation, why no one thought the buyer's actions questionable.
Why would they have to be unobserved? They could embed the UV lamp in their glasses. It'd be pretty straightforward to make something that looks harmless. It can't be considered questionable just to ask to examine the ballots. Besides, if it is, that also removes any possibility of vote buying even with IDs.
There shouldn't be any opportunity for someone to verify hidden marks
Wouldn't the action of verifying hidden marks be indistinguishable from looking for evidence of a fake ballot?
Except that IDs create other problems.
That's the part I don't agree with. IDs allow overcoming paper's biggest flaw: the fact that it can't be duplicated. The downside is mitigatable, and it's not clear that it's actually a worse downside than what paper already has.
You agree that software is cheaper and easier, but don't appear to give the point much weight. Why not?
Because I only mentioned that you don't need software in the case where software bugs might have an impact on the count. If you design a system like that, then don't use software.
Unsurprisingly, the reason why I quote that example is because when I was an undergrad, one of my friend's classes had to retake a test because the scantron machine ate half of the entire class's batch of exams.
Granted, I doubt that it's common. It's the only time it's happened in my life. But given that it's possible to store a record of a vote, I think it's simply silly to allow a possibility like that to happen.
In that case there's no way to prove the ballot represents the vote actually cast, so it's okay.
The person could videotape dropping the ballot in the box. Or, similarly, the person could simply tag the ballot with UV visible ink, and fingerprint the ballot. That's essentially identical to the system I'm saying. The person could write a number on the ballot in UV visible ink and it'd be identical to what I'm saying.
I think it's fairly safe to say that if you want to be extremely vigilant about vote buying, you have to accept some responsibility on the volunteers.
An easy enough practical deterrent would simply be to not allow the voter to spend a significant amount of time with the printed ballot. Heck, this has to exist in any case for security reasons.
Or hold their coat over it.
I note that you did not try to defeat my radioactive tagging system.:)
You'd still need some software for managing the display and operating the printer
Why? It's stateful. The printer doesn't need software. It could just be sent a clocked byte stream. It just needs to print letters, which are all known a priori, so again, it's just a bunch of flip flops.
As for managing the display? Still nope. The PROM would contain bitmaps of the screens to display, which would simply be clocked to the display when the appropriate state transition happens. Again, it's stateful. The only thing that needs to be programmatically determined are the state transitions: when a user pushes a button, etc. But that could all be done in analog.
As for it being cheaper and easier? Of course. And especially if you can link the counting process on the machine to the counting process of the ballots (via the IDs above) then paper becomes an effective crosscheck.
It's not as bad as all that, actually.
I know that. And other countries have managed to convince their population as well. But part of the problem is that there are subtle details, and you can confuse the population by introducing them. You can imagine, for instance, that the Republican and Democratic parties would spread a whole amount of information as to why it's "not a perfect solution", and some of their points may be valid, but still trivial.
It's not unlike the global warming debate, for instance. You can spread a lot of uncertainty by pointing out weak flaws in the original research.
There's a mathematically deducible minimum level of crosschecking required to guarantee the effects of manipulation are smaller than the win margin of the closest race.
I'm not suggesting you would ever reduce the amount of crosschecking. Just the quality. That's the worry - that as time goes on, the paper crosschecking seems less important, and so there's less attention to detail.
Ahh, now you're beginning to understand why it's so important that we not use the electronic results from the voting machines.
That was the idea, yeah. However, as I pointed out, you can still trust them if you can link the individual votes to ballots (but not to voters).
I'm not a fan of mechanical machine reading being the only vote counting method. Keep in mind that many precincts do not even have the legal machinery to reconduct a vote: so one machine reader malfunctioning and shredding an entire voting precinct's ballots is permanent and irrecoverable. And given the fact that you're taking a fragile medium (paper) and shoving it through a machine reader that's processing lots of ballots, it's entirely possible that this will happen.
However, one very good compromise might be to have machine reading be the primary vote counting, and then the electronic copy (linked to the ballots) be a backup, with human verification being the crosscheck.
I think that gets you "best of all worlds."
So the voter can carry a small flashlight with a UV lamp in it. I suppose we could require voters to be searched before going into the voting booth.
The voter could bring a digital camera in and record their vote currently. We're not perfect about this. If we want to be, then we would have to search voters going into the booth.
Heck, what would happen if a voter voted on a paper ballot, and took a digital camera out and photographed it? Would they confiscate it? This isn't much different.
In any case, however, there are already voting precincts that forbid bringing certain things into the voting area (like cellphones). So this isn't exactly a serious restriction.
Besides, not only would they have to bring in a UV lamp, they'd have to turn off the lights. Good luck doing that.
You could get even more ridiculously safe if you wanted: imagine implanting capsules in such a way to form numbers on a photographic plate that slowly leak radioactive material into the surroundings. The numbers wouldn't form until, say, 12 hours later, and the radioactivity levels at the time when they have the ballot would be too low for a radiation detector to resolve in less than, say, 10 minutes, which is the only time they'd have the ballot.
Good luck beating that one.:) I think the UV ID is probably enough anyway: especially if it's like 32 hexadecimal digits or something equally unrememberable.
I think you're talking about a much less featureful UI than I am. Keep in mind that you have to drive the video display, read the touch interface, walk the user through dozens of choices, allowing the user to verify each choice and to go back and change choices before finalizing the ballot. All of the information has to be presented in large, easy-to-read fonts. It would also be a good idea to provide a screen reader to audibly read the choices for the vision-impaired. Oh, and don't forget that the range of choices has to be reconfigured for every election, so you have to have a moderately sophisticated configuration system; can't hardwire everything. Actually, the configuration often has to be slightly different across different precincts within the same county, since municipal elections are held on the same ballots.
One month, at best. Your entire design is extremely simple: it's still stateful (going backwards is just another state transition) and there's only a fixed number of states. There's nothing that needs to be developed programmatically. There's no need for a processor - hence, no need for software.
If you include water vapor as a greenhouse gas, humanity contributes 0.28% of the total greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, of which 0.117% is CO2. It's not likely that such a small amount is significant.
Using the concentrations in the atmosphere as a percentage is silly: the forcing potential of each of the gasses is different.
See the IPCC report on the relative contributions of each gas. If CO2 was the only greenhouse gas present, the radiative forcing would be 25% of what it currently is. Humanity has increased the concentration of CO2 by 35%.
The forcing of each of the gasses isn't additive, so it's not entirely fair to say upping the CO2 fraction by 35% will up the atmospheric forcing by ~8%. Still, saying "it's insignificant" is very misleading - the radiative forcing of water vapor is small compared to carbon dioxide.
And incidentally, while the methane emissions from living plants will likely be significant, it would (at most) reduce anthropogenic methane emissions to about a third of the total.
are having more impact on this planet than a thermonuclear furnace with the mass of 1.3 million earths outputting 2.8 x 10^26 Watts a meere eight light-minutes away?
Mere eight light-minutes? Why don't you go out and run that for me? We'll see how 'mere' it is after you've jogged it, kay?
Anyway: the Earth's atmosphere is a very significant player in determining the Earth's temperature. The Sun generates most of it: the Earth's blackbody temperature is ~250 K, and its actual temperature is ~280 K (to two significant digits). So the Sun generates about ~90% and the greenhouse effect about 10%.
So in order to have more impact than that "thermonuclear furnace", we need to change our atmospheric forcing by 1% to 5%.
Remind me again why you think this is so preposterous? We've raised the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide on this planet by 35%. Thirty-five percent! Yah. I think that might outdo a 0.1 to 0.5% increase in the solar constant.
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Windows on well made hardware, and with good drivers, is extremely stable. If your Windows installation is not stable, Windows is not the problem - it's either broken hardware or bad drivers.
Eh. NTFS's performance still goes to hell when it fragments heavily, which happens rapidly when the drive is near full. This sucks if you're moving around large amounts of data. Windows gets very, very unusable (and very unstable) when the filesystem starts to get seriously fragmented. Yah, you shouldn't fill NTFS volumes over 85% full - but it's not like the operating system even warns you that all hell is about to break loose.
ext2, on the other hand, I've taken up to near 100% capacity with no ill effects whatsoever.
So "Windows, on well made hardware, with good drivers, politely used, is very stable"?
The Gamecube controller is the first Nintendo controller which didn't do this.
Wireless.
The Wavebird really is the first wireless controller that works. (It's also the first first-party wireless controller). Unsurprisingly, the Xbox 360 and PS3 both have first-party wireless controllers.
To be fair, Spirit and Opportunity are nowhere near each other - which means that the panel cleaning events have to be pretty ubiquitous. They've also persisted for over two years, which, while it's still a small timespan, tells you that they're not extremely uncommon.
MSL might be a multi-rover mission (like MER) - which implies that solar panels/batteries might be a reasonable solution for some subset of the rovers.
To be honest, they're probably just a little surprised at how useful solar power has been for Spirit/Opportunity. There really is no reason other than politics to choose solar power over an RTG, I think. The main benefit RTGs have over solar power isn't keeping the electronics warm. It's the longevity. Viking 2 lasted 50% longer than Spirit and Opportunity have. We have no idea how long Viking 1 would've operated, since it was disabled with a faulty command.
He got his name on a few bills
Aren't the people whose names are on the bills the people who are considered to have initiated those bills? I think commonly they're said to have introduced the bill, but initiate is actually used on a few Congressional web sites.
that may have greased the wheels a bit. That's all.
Your opinion of what that bill did could have differed from his. And likely did.
Because in the context of the speech he was obviously trying to take credit for something...
Yah. He was trying to take credit for the bill that ultimately created the Internet as we know it.
"Took the initiative to create" and "invent" don't have the same connotation. In any case, however, he didn't say "invent", which makes it a misquote.
They don't.
Spirit and Opportunity reused:
And probably half a dozen other portions I'm not even suggesting here. Note that they didn't reuse them exactly the same - that'd be silly, they tweaked them, of course. But the Mars rovers missions have been reusing 'things which worked' for a while.
Keep in mind that a lot of the above designs are fatal if they don't work. Redesigning the rover itself isn't that big a deal in comparison - especially if you design the system redundantly.
*: Mostly, I think. Max Planck Institute built portions of the Pathfinder APXS, Spirit/Opportunity's, and will build part of the Mars Science Laboratory's as well. Chicago provided portions of Pathfinder's APXS as well.
Because there aren't any economies of scale to be had.
That's not entirely true. The biggest cost savings that a space project (the project, not the launch) can have is preventing systems failure - because a systems failure requires a new launch.
So while I agree that reusing the rovers is moderately silly, given that certain technologies have proven themselves very very well, I would be extremely upset if those (successful, proven) technologies weren't used in future rover missions.
In some sense, that is 'economies of scale'. It doesn't save you much money up front, but it reduces the chance that the mission will fail. Of course, this is in a lot of sense what NASA will do - and did do.
Why? Because Spirit and Opportunity are already beneficiaries of the economies of scale - they both succeeded because their landing gear design had already been tested, and the cruise stage design already has been tested as well. Oh, and the aeroshell design had been tested already, too. Almost thirty years previously. And if you want to talk about rover design? Automated obstacle avoidance, as well.
So I definitely agree with you that I'm not happy about people criticizing NASA for not massively replicating the Spirit/Opportunity design - that is, for not building off of successes. They are building off of successes. That's why Spirit and Opportunity worked so well in the first place.
Yes, Mars Science Laboratory will be greatly different than the previous three. But it's still going to build off of proven technologies. That's taking the best of 'economies of scale' - getting a proven design - while not being limited to the original's limitations.
Heck, MSL still states that solar power is under consideration. And I have little doubt that it's stayed under consideration because of Spirit and Opportunity's success.
but to keep denying that is what he said
Great-grandparent: "Gore invented the Internet."
Grandparent: "misquote"
Parent: "took the initiative in creating the Internet"
took the initiative in creating != invented
It's a misquote. Was it well worded? No. But the misquote (which... it is) makes it seem worse than it was.
It should also be noted that it is possible to prove that certain conditions had to exist in order for something to have been formed. Or at least, to support that supposition.
One thing that an ID 'researcher' could do is explore the conditions which are required for some process (that they don't believe can originate by chance) to exist. If you restrict those conditions to conditions that were unavailable in early Earth, then you've shown that something weird must've gone on.
While that won't prove their theory (which... you can't do anyway) it does lend credence to it, especially if the only other ways around the theory involve adding so much that the addition of an "unknown force" is minor in comparison.
Imagine, for instance, trying to prove that life on Earth didn't originate on Earth. This is similar. You just have to elucidate the mechanisms by which life can form, and show that those mechanisms were not available on early Earth.
But, like I said elsewhere: it's not like they give a crap about supporting their theory. Which is the main reason why it's not science. While they could make scientific claims and scientific experiments to support those claims, they're not doing so. Just making suppositions - suppositions which could be the precursor to claims, but aren't.
Note that ID researchers aren't doing such experiements.
Which is why they're not scientists.
They could do experiments to bolster their claim. For one thing, suppose you've got a multistep biological process: one easy way to support the claim that it couldn't've arisen by chance is to remove one of the steps in a large population, and see if that population all dies, or manages to survive somehow. If it survives somehow, and in a few generations (or many generations) a mechanism that produces the same effect as the original is recovered, your hypothesis is out the window. But if the entire population dies, then that supports your claim slightly.
I say slightly because you can't ever prove that it's impossible, as you pointed out. But the more experiments that show a negative possibility for evolving a complex machinery, the stronger the claim becomes.
The inability of a particular researcher to recreate a supposedly natural event only reflects on that researchers abilities, not the likelyhood of the event in nature. ID amounts to nothing more than mere incredulity.
In some sense, it does start to constrain the likelihood of the event in nature, because you start putting bounds on the conditions that had to happen. Macroevolution gives a possible mechanism for the way certain things came about, but that mechanism has to be verified. That could either be done via a fossil record (which is going to be obviously incomplete) or by active research showing a probable pathway.
There's a lot of research done this way, actually: the evolution of sex is one example. There are a lot of theories about how sexual reproduction evolved, but unfortunately most of them don't work in practical tests.
While you're right that you could never show that it's impossible for evolution to have produced such a mechanism, over time, continued failure starts to suggest that there may have been something else which caused the change.
The fact that ID people aren't doing these experiments (nor are they even funding them as far as I'm aware) is, in my mind, the big smoking gun that they're not scientists. I don't believe even they believe what they're saying is true. I just think they think there's enough open problems in research that they can attack it, and make a name for themselves.
Heck, I think if you even suggested doing said experiments, they would say no simply out of fear that they would be proven wrong. And that's the mark of someone who deserves to be nowhere near science.
Even the 'global warming isn't real' crowd has at least a few people who are trying to do science (bad science, but still science) to support their claim. ID isn't even bothering to do that.
Did you miss the point where I said that several studies have indicated that there is no significant amount of disagreement in literature about this point?
If you had done this then, with global cooling, that would not have been true.
While you could certainly set up a website saying whatever you want, you could not do a review of peer-reviewed journal articles and conclude that the majority of climate scientists do not believe in global warming.
When the airwaves were packed with scientists explaining that we're facing certain annihilation
I believe there's a name for trying to flood information channels with information that's not actually true, but that you would like the population to believe. I believe that name is "propaganda."
you can't handwave away the memories by saying that the real scientists didn't actually believe that.
Why not? You can prove what real scientists actually believed with a little research.
What's forcefed to you by the media versus what actually happened are two totally different things. Which is exactly what that link is trying to say. It's unfair to judge real scientists by propaganda that was produced by people completely unrelated to them in the past.
There are agricultural subsidies because it's easier for politicians to hand out our money than for people to deal with changes in the market.
That's a little tough to say. Certainly in the EU, for instance, agricultural subsidies were because there wasn't any demand for local milk at prices they could afford to produce at.
Then again, I guess what you're saying is "well, they shouldn't be making milk," which I guess is true, although the "cheap" vendors (such as Jamaica, in the EU case) couldn't really supply all of the EU.
But then again, it really depends: it might be more than just easier for politicians. It might be cheaper for the country overall. In the case of the huge agricultural subsidies (like in the EU's case) that's clearly not true: but on a smaller scale, it can be cheaper for a country to subsidize local agriculture to compete with other countries, based on the increased taxes it gets back from the local companies.
In any case, you still usually give subsidies if there's not enough demand to float the price high enough to support the cost, and you want production to continue. That's true if there's a glut on the market, or if there's external competition (which, in the end, is just, in a sense, a glut on the market still).
Or if there's political corruption, of course.
Engineering a climate is a far different thing from trying to decypher what is happening with one.
Lesson #1 on why we need to move off-planet: because it will give us other systems to actually work with. It also won't allow us to fall back onto an ecology that 'works' - it'll force you to 'make it work, or die'.
I've said to many people, if I was born right now, I'd go into ecological engineering. Not for money purposes - I couldn't care about money - but in terms of 'global need', ecological engineering is the one thing that we suck horrendously at.
It's naive to believe that we can't engineer ecologies/climates, but you are also right that we have no experience doing so. Our attempts at engineering climates and ecologies have so far been essentially unqualified disasters.
Yes, yes, they did. Perhaps you're too young to remember the scare, but I very clearly remember being terrified after listening to a scientist explaining to the viewing audience that we were all going to starve to death in the near future.
You were watching the scientist in the media. What the media thinks and what science actually thinks are two totally different things.
The media was convinced that cold fusion was real. Science was notably more skeptical.
Now, if you're trying to say that global warming is just "science in the media" again, that's a valid criticism - but it's also wrong, as many of the studies on 'is there scientific consensus regarding global warming' have shown.
Had you done the same studies in the 1970s, you would not have found the same result regarding global cooling. See the link. They specifically quote papers that say "yah, we don't have a clue."
I don't buy this. If it were true, why do we typically have an agricultural surplus?
Because we don't typically make the same sort of food that we demand. That's why there are agricultural subsidies - because there's no demand for certain types of foods.
Grain production is so high you have trouble finding a place to store it.
Americans don't typically eat only grain. That's not the problem - it's other forms of food: meat in particular, also vegetables that only grow in small areas of the country. A large amount of the food we eat is imported - even though there's arable land in the Midwest, they can't grow strawberries.
What if Einstein spent his whole career simply finding new ways to state that Newton was wrong intead of developing the theory of Relativity?
They're not targeting a specific theory. They're stating that it's impossible for it to happen by chance. This is agnostic to the opposing theory. 'Chance' is not 'macroevolution'.
In fact, curiously, that statement isn't even contrary to macroevolution, depending on your definition of 'chance'. If your definition of 'chance' is sitting in a pool of chemicals in a static environment with no outside influences, even that likely wouldn't evolve.
"Bodies moving at high velocity are so complex that Newtonian mechanics can't explain it."
What about "the dynamics of bodies moving at velocities close to the speed of light are impossible to mathematically represent"? That's more similar. And it's not a targetted opposing theory. It would also be wrong.
Note also that there are theories in quantum field theory which are similar, which say "no analytical solution of X is possible". Now, in those cases, it's possible to understand them perturbatively, but it's still a negative claim.
Ah, but if a researcher can produce blood clotting, that would only show that an intelligent designer (researcher) can produce blood clotting.
Note the by chance part. If the researcher's actions consist of setting up an experiment that has a strong statistical likelihood of occurring randomly in nature, then it's by chance, and the researcher is immaterial to the experiment.
Evaluating the 'statistical likelihood of something occurring randomly in nature' is often claimed in ID talks, and it's almost always wrong because they just throw around random numbers that have no statistical basis, and we have no idea the number of trials the Universe has gone through.
No, decay theory predicts that decay happens a certain way (a positive claim). A side effect of that prediction is that it can't happen any other way, but that isn't the main prediction.
Er? The claims aren't saying how a decay happens. Just that it never occurs in a certain way. And that is the main prediction of several theories, because it usually involves stuff like forbidden decays, etc. They don't care that the decay happens via other methods. If those other methods didn't exist, the particle'd be stable, and they'd be predicting nothing except a lack of decays.
Merely stating that another theory is wrong (or coudln't happen) is not a theory. ID doesn't predict anytihng.
Yes, it does. To pull out an example (that isn't used, but still), ID might say "blood clotting is so complex it could never have arisen from chance." Which is predicting that it is impossible to generate the blood clotting mechanism by chance.
If a researcher goes into a lab, and is unable to generate the blood clotting mechanism by chance, that supports that prediction. If, however, he is, then that falsifies it.
This is a theory. There are comparable theories in science: the explanation of certain particle decays, for instance, predict that certain decay paths should never be seen. They aren't. Which lends support to them.
It's a crappy theory, of course, because the statement "by chance" is retarded, and the explanation for how things were created is so weak that Occam's Razor chews it up like a meat grinder. A lot of times crappy statistics is used as well to justify things. Even macroevolution doesn't say things arose from chance. They arose from circumstance. Not knowing the circumstances means you don't know how it evolved.
There's another problem, however, which is something like what you're alluding to, which is that the leap from "cannot arise from chance implies intelligent design" is not obvious. But postulating a designer, and then saying "we shouldn't be able to produce these by chance" is a weak theory if the previous statement is true.
They're basically saying "Our theory is that your theory is wrong."
Nono - they're saying "our theory is that all theories which involve chance evolution are wrong." This is a much stronger statement.
What can ID/Creationism "predict"?
Actually, what's often overlooked is that the intelligent design arguments are providing testable and predictable theories.
They're saying it's impossible for certain systems to have arisen by chance. They usually give examples of various complicated biological systems, etc.
That's a falsifiable statement.
Unsurprisingly, the examples given are usually falsified.
but Christianity and evolution are.
Somebody better tell that to this guy: he seems to think that there's no incompatibility there.
Only a small minority of Christian religions believe there's any incompatibility between the two, and they tend to be a little bit loony overprotective about the literal wording of the Bible (why, I have no idea: it's not like the words have a unique, unambiguous meaning - and it's not like the people at the time even had the words to write down some of the concepts).
One being the idea that man is created in God's image
You think the idea of 'man being created in God's image' had anything to do with our physical bodies? You think our physical bodies mean diddly squat to God?
Did you ever think that maybe, just maybe, it might have to do with that whole soul thing?
Radiometric dating points to the earth's inception being ~4.6 billion years ago. I want to know if the U238 that exists today was created as a result of the supernova that blew apart the solar system that provided all the matter for this one.
The U238 was definitely formed in a supernova. Basically all heavy elements were.
It should be noted, however, that this implies that the solar system is at least 4.5 billion years old. It can't be less.
This is what's stated by radiometric dating, anyway. They can only date to when the radioactive material was deposited.
Sounds like an excuse somebody made up to cover the fact that they lost half of the exams.
If it was, they went to a lot of trouble - namely, shredding half of the exams and bringing them into the class. I think he might still have one of them...
Which raises the question of why the buyer was ever allowed to be alone with the ballots, unobserved, or if the buyer wasn't alone during this operation, why no one thought the buyer's actions questionable.
Why would they have to be unobserved? They could embed the UV lamp in their glasses. It'd be pretty straightforward to make something that looks harmless. It can't be considered questionable just to ask to examine the ballots. Besides, if it is, that also removes any possibility of vote buying even with IDs.
There shouldn't be any opportunity for someone to verify hidden marks
Wouldn't the action of verifying hidden marks be indistinguishable from looking for evidence of a fake ballot?
Except that IDs create other problems.
That's the part I don't agree with. IDs allow overcoming paper's biggest flaw: the fact that it can't be duplicated. The downside is mitigatable, and it's not clear that it's actually a worse downside than what paper already has.
You agree that software is cheaper and easier, but don't appear to give the point much weight. Why not?
Because I only mentioned that you don't need software in the case where software bugs might have an impact on the count. If you design a system like that, then don't use software.
Have you ever operated a scantron machine?
:)
Unsurprisingly, the reason why I quote that example is because when I was an undergrad, one of my friend's classes had to retake a test because the scantron machine ate half of the entire class's batch of exams.
Granted, I doubt that it's common. It's the only time it's happened in my life. But given that it's possible to store a record of a vote, I think it's simply silly to allow a possibility like that to happen.
In that case there's no way to prove the ballot represents the vote actually cast, so it's okay.
The person could videotape dropping the ballot in the box. Or, similarly, the person could simply tag the ballot with UV visible ink, and fingerprint the ballot. That's essentially identical to the system I'm saying. The person could write a number on the ballot in UV visible ink and it'd be identical to what I'm saying.
I think it's fairly safe to say that if you want to be extremely vigilant about vote buying, you have to accept some responsibility on the volunteers.
An easy enough practical deterrent would simply be to not allow the voter to spend a significant amount of time with the printed ballot. Heck, this has to exist in any case for security reasons.
Or hold their coat over it.
I note that you did not try to defeat my radioactive tagging system.
You'd still need some software for managing the display and operating the printer
Why? It's stateful. The printer doesn't need software. It could just be sent a clocked byte stream. It just needs to print letters, which are all known a priori, so again, it's just a bunch of flip flops.
As for managing the display? Still nope. The PROM would contain bitmaps of the screens to display, which would simply be clocked to the display when the appropriate state transition happens. Again, it's stateful. The only thing that needs to be programmatically determined are the state transitions: when a user pushes a button, etc. But that could all be done in analog.
As for it being cheaper and easier? Of course. And especially if you can link the counting process on the machine to the counting process of the ballots (via the IDs above) then paper becomes an effective crosscheck.
It's not as bad as all that, actually.
I know that. And other countries have managed to convince their population as well. But part of the problem is that there are subtle details, and you can confuse the population by introducing them. You can imagine, for instance, that the Republican and Democratic parties would spread a whole amount of information as to why it's "not a perfect solution", and some of their points may be valid, but still trivial.
It's not unlike the global warming debate, for instance. You can spread a lot of uncertainty by pointing out weak flaws in the original research.
There's a mathematically deducible minimum level of crosschecking required to guarantee the effects of manipulation are smaller than the win margin of the closest race.
:) I think the UV ID is probably enough anyway: especially if it's like 32 hexadecimal digits or something equally unrememberable.
I'm not suggesting you would ever reduce the amount of crosschecking. Just the quality. That's the worry - that as time goes on, the paper crosschecking seems less important, and so there's less attention to detail.
Ahh, now you're beginning to understand why it's so important that we not use the electronic results from the voting machines.
That was the idea, yeah. However, as I pointed out, you can still trust them if you can link the individual votes to ballots (but not to voters).
I'm not a fan of mechanical machine reading being the only vote counting method. Keep in mind that many precincts do not even have the legal machinery to reconduct a vote: so one machine reader malfunctioning and shredding an entire voting precinct's ballots is permanent and irrecoverable. And given the fact that you're taking a fragile medium (paper) and shoving it through a machine reader that's processing lots of ballots, it's entirely possible that this will happen.
However, one very good compromise might be to have machine reading be the primary vote counting, and then the electronic copy (linked to the ballots) be a backup, with human verification being the crosscheck.
I think that gets you "best of all worlds."
So the voter can carry a small flashlight with a UV lamp in it. I suppose we could require voters to be searched before going into the voting booth.
The voter could bring a digital camera in and record their vote currently. We're not perfect about this. If we want to be, then we would have to search voters going into the booth.
Heck, what would happen if a voter voted on a paper ballot, and took a digital camera out and photographed it? Would they confiscate it? This isn't much different.
In any case, however, there are already voting precincts that forbid bringing certain things into the voting area (like cellphones). So this isn't exactly a serious restriction.
Besides, not only would they have to bring in a UV lamp, they'd have to turn off the lights. Good luck doing that.
You could get even more ridiculously safe if you wanted: imagine implanting capsules in such a way to form numbers on a photographic plate that slowly leak radioactive material into the surroundings. The numbers wouldn't form until, say, 12 hours later, and the radioactivity levels at the time when they have the ballot would be too low for a radiation detector to resolve in less than, say, 10 minutes, which is the only time they'd have the ballot.
Good luck beating that one.
I think you're talking about a much less featureful UI than I am. Keep in mind that you have to drive the video display, read the touch interface, walk the user through dozens of choices, allowing the user to verify each choice and to go back and change choices before finalizing the ballot. All of the information has to be presented in large, easy-to-read fonts. It would also be a good idea to provide a screen reader to audibly read the choices for the vision-impaired. Oh, and don't forget that the range of choices has to be reconfigured for every election, so you have to have a moderately sophisticated configuration system; can't hardwire everything. Actually, the configuration often has to be slightly different across different precincts within the same county, since municipal elections are held on the same ballots.
One month, at best. Your entire design is extremely simple: it's still stateful (going backwards is just another state transition) and there's only a fixed number of states. There's nothing that needs to be developed programmatically. There's no need for a processor - hence, no need for software.
As for the c
If you include water vapor as a greenhouse gas, humanity contributes 0.28% of the total greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, of which 0.117% is CO2. It's not likely that such a small amount is significant.
Using the concentrations in the atmosphere as a percentage is silly: the forcing potential of each of the gasses is different.
See the IPCC report on the relative contributions of each gas. If CO2 was the only greenhouse gas present, the radiative forcing would be 25% of what it currently is. Humanity has increased the concentration of CO2 by 35%.
The forcing of each of the gasses isn't additive, so it's not entirely fair to say upping the CO2 fraction by 35% will up the atmospheric forcing by ~8%. Still, saying "it's insignificant" is very misleading - the radiative forcing of water vapor is small compared to carbon dioxide.
And incidentally, while the methane emissions from living plants will likely be significant, it would (at most) reduce anthropogenic methane emissions to about a third of the total.
are having more impact on this planet than a thermonuclear furnace with the mass of 1.3 million earths outputting 2.8 x 10^26 Watts a meere eight light-minutes away?
Mere eight light-minutes? Why don't you go out and run that for me? We'll see how 'mere' it is after you've jogged it, kay?
Anyway: the Earth's atmosphere is a very significant player in determining the Earth's temperature. The Sun generates most of it: the Earth's blackbody temperature is ~250 K, and its actual temperature is ~280 K (to two significant digits). So the Sun generates about ~90% and the greenhouse effect about 10%.
The solar constant - flux from the Sun - changes about a tenth of a percent over the solar cycle. Over the past 300 years, that's about the same order of magnitude as the total systematic change: about a tenth of a percent to a half a percent.
So in order to have more impact than that "thermonuclear furnace", we need to change our atmospheric forcing by 1% to 5%.
Remind me again why you think this is so preposterous? We've raised the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide on this planet by 35%. Thirty-five percent! Yah. I think that might outdo a 0.1 to 0.5% increase in the solar constant.