Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (the airforce base just north of Cocoa Beach on the east coast of florida on a strip of land which is ultimatly called Cape Canaveral).
Kennedy Space Center (the nasa facility just to the north west of Cape Canaveral Air force station on nearby Merritt Island).
As you can see, Launch Complex 39 (located about 1/2 way between the two) and is technically part of the Kennedy Space Center.
The common confusion is that in 1963, Congress, in their infinite wisdom, renamed Cape Canaveral to Cape Kennedy. However, as it turned out, they didn't have the full authority to do that. Apparently the Cape's official name on international maps was under the juristiction of some international maritime treaty (UN, IHO?), so it could only be named Cape Kennedy on US-specific maps. Of course most of the US govt went along including the US Board on Geographic names (which means it got into some US official maps), but eventually everyone conceded and changed the name back in 1973 due to local pressure (there's actually a town called Cape Canaveral on the southern part of Cape Canaveral) and to avoid general confusion.
If you think naming of a place is just a silly argument, tell that to the people who live in New Amsterdam (aka New York), or are visiting Danali national park and looking at the "big-one" Mt Denali (or Mt McKinley to Ohio-ans), or maybe google Sea of Japan naming dispute to witness a naming dispute of international consequences...
When you see all those reporters at a morning launch, they often get a closer view and may actually be on the cape, rather than on KSC, so that may only add to the confusion.
Not a reason, per-se, but the rationale behind not looking a potentially classified information that came through multiple channels is the same problem you have with urban myths. Suppose it is your job to try to figure out some problem and you have multiple sources of information which have various degrees of accuracy and multiple channels from which that information came. If you weighted the validity of the information by the number of channels you got that information from that wouldn't give you a very reliable estimate would it? The information needs to be judged on the source only, not the channel from which it came for several reasons. First, the channels may or may not be reliable (probably not the problem in this case), secondly, the channels may be selective (e.g., google cherry-picked wmd)...
Unfortunatly, it's very hard for human beings to weight the source w/o unintentionally weighting the channels. Deliberatly informing yourself with multiple channels of information might seem a good way to get a better read of the "unfiltered" truth, but in reality, it doesn't seem to be the case. This is somewhat analgous to not having jurors watch the news when they are sitting for a trial. You may ask, how does it hurt to get more information from other channels, esp when they are public, however, people aren't very good at sorting through this as a general rule, so it's best not to have them "polluted" with multiple channels of information.
As a very stupid example, say there was a person, lets call him John, who was in a situation where 8 out of 10 of his friends told him there were 5 lights, and a couple of his friends said there were 4 lights and John saw 4 lights. John may choose to make a judgement that that incorporates the fact that there were 5 lights despite having direct access to the source of the information himself that there are in fact 4 lights...;^)
Sometimes information from multiple channels won't actually help... Sure this is a rationale, and not a reason, but it's my take on a reasonable rationale...
The real reason may be a primitive loyalty test (kind of like how you get into a gang), are you loyal enough to not look at wikileaks because "we" said so, well if so you aren't loyal enough, then you can't get into the "gang", but that doesn't make the rationale invalid (it just means it isn't the reason).
Nothing that is happening now with ICANN and DNS root servers couldn't happen with some other organization controlling root servers (the registrars are dumping wikileaks), this has nothing to do with root servers...
You are just crying wolf and taking advantage of this situation to push your agenda. If you think this has anything to do with root servers, you should go back to and retake internet 101.
There are many valid reason to have a more independent entity control DNS root servers, but the takedown of an individual site by persuading individual registrars to dump their clients is not one of them.
Film = petrol 11 = empty sleep/bordom = destination
One in a while, your petrol tank empty light goes on to tease you with the story that you are about to run out of petrol. Since you are usually never near a petrol station when this light comes on, it will continue to tease you until you reach your destination, or a petrol station to fill up so you can satisfy your desire to continue to your destination.
Gold? Cinnamon? It's a delicious discovery for science! See, it's not toxic at all, we can drink a ton of it!
Even without the toxic-by-the-ton ethyl-alcohol in Goldschläger, true cinnamon actually contains a small amount of coumarin (used as rat poison in concentrated forms, or processed into a blood thinner for heart surgery patients)...
And of course if Goldschläger cheaped out and uses the "fake" cassia cinnamon, it would actually have even more coumarin...
On the other hand, a Goldschläger challenge seems much less harmful than a cinnamon challenge (a description of which used to be on wikipedia, but apparently it's been edited out after this revision)
You don't have to go so far out like agave (something many folks never will encounter except in it's liquid tequila form). Many common foods have a very high fructose content...
Ironically, corn (as opposed to HFCS) really doesn't show up on this list because the sugar in actual corn is mostly glucose (they have to process the crap out of corn-glucose convert some of the glucose to fructose to make HFCS).
The corn "haters" out there that sweeten their drinks with honey and have their apple-a-day, really aren't really in a much superior situation when it comes to avoiding the problems associated with fructose (primarily that the fructose sugar isomer doesn't normally stimulate insulin production unlike the glucose isomer). Although if you actually eat an apple (as opposed to drinking apple juice or eating apple sauce), you probably get enough fiber to limit the intake of sugar.
Also, something that everyone should know is that a surprisingly common ailment is fructose intolerance/malabsorption where the symptoms are similar to lactose intolerance. Avoiding all foods high in fructose often provides relief for this ailment.
Yeah, we could try a new scheme where people can only own physical things...
Hope you like keeping gold bricks under your mattress.
Like it or not, we live in a world with non-tangible property. Most folks would still like to have real-estate deeds, stocks, bonds, and bank deposits, personal property be considered "owned".
Ah, but you say money is a physical thing, but sadly, this is often not true. If you deposit the money into a bank which can loan it out (as opposed to keeping in a big steel box in the basement), the money is not yours, all you "own" is a promise for the bank to honor your deposit (or a debt instrument to be more precise) . It is no longer a physical thing. If you borrow money for a car, the bank has the actual title to the car and you really own a piece of paper that represents a contract.
How about owning stock in a company? Well some companies may or may not have some tangible assest, but most companies have large amounts of "good-will" on their books, so in a way that is non-tangible as well.
If you wanted to get pedantic, if you own a "deed" or some other physical manifestation of a instrument of ownership, could you form it into whatever pattern you want w/o asking permission (say change the wording of a title), I think most folks wouldn't agree with that idea either.
SO... what we are left with is that perhaps there should be some limits on ownership of non-tangible items.
Almost all folks would probably agree that share drafts, debt instruments, titles to real property are things that should be ownable. Depending on your political persuasion, you might include partnerships, corporations, and other legal arraingments to fall into the "ownable" umbrella.
Of course then there are other non-tangible things that some folk debate should be ownable. For example ideas, inventions, creative works. Are these ownable? Well, they certainly aren't much different that the other non-tangible things which most folks would agree are ownable except whatever laws we make for them. During the majority of recorded history, these non-tangible things were not ownable. However at least in the USA, the founding fathers thought there was some economic advantage to allow these things to be owned for a limited period of time. You of course can debate the merits of this, but there is some historical evidence that there is some advantage to this.
On the other extreme, most folks might argue there are things that are detrimental to public policy and should NOT be allowed to be owned even if physical (e.g., slavery).
As with all things there are lots of grey in this whole idea of ownership. It's really just a matter of current law to say what is ownable and what is not ownable, but just drawing the line at physical objects does a big disservice to the complexity of the situation.
Of course it takes a local transformer tap to pull-out a neutral (and if the loads are unbalance you don't really get neutral), but that's how we do it over here (gotta save on that copper wire)...
...kernel space does not depend on anything in user space as of Win7. (If not Win7, certainly Win8 should be that way.)
Wow, this all (eventually) brought to you by the company that once put out a document with the phrase "Appy time is Happy Time" (or something like that) and later updated that OS based on lightweight microkernel messaging (LPC)... Times have sure changed...;^)
Not sure if people have the total concept of what a university looked like in the middle ages (despite looking it up on the wikipedia). Basically people who joined universities were mostly either clergy, civil servants, or what we would call today "professional" students.
Back in those days, other than the church, there were generally no need for preparatory degrees. Most good jobs that regular folks could aspire to didn't require degrees, they required lengthy apprenticeship which one could tackle by working for essentially peanuts for awhile or actually paying money to join various guilds.
However, if one had a patron (or a rich family) or if you wanted to dedicate your life to the institution (often associated with the church, but there were some secular institutions), you could instead attend a university and study law, medicine (usually reserved for rich folks), or theology. In the modern era, who would be paying for all this stuff over the 20 or so years that a typical university course of study would entail is quite an interesting problem.
Of course for those that have the attraction of becoming a professional student, maybe running a wiki-university like the middle ages is interesting, but I don't think it's what many folks had in mind.
I get the feeling that most folks are thinking about a "free" prep-education for business or engineering or some other trade. That's not really like a university from the middle ages, that is like a much more modern re-invention of the university into a trade-guild. Now, instead of joining the guild, you pay your tuition to a "university" and learn a trade or skill from someone there and get your guild-card/degree to hang out your shingle or to join a co-op/company.
I think that the folks interested in the "free" prep-education should instead just be questioning the whole concept of a guild that a university education has become and if a wiki-guild is actually more what some folks had in mind...
Now, granted, I'm not a physicist, but since when have real-world objects been able to be two-dimensional?
Although real-world objects cannot actually span only two dimensions (if you ignore possible theories about strings), the interaction of certain particles can be constrained to 2 spatial degrees of freedom (well plus the time dimension, but ignoring that for now). Two degrees of freedom can be basically lay-man-transliterated as 2-dimensional nature since many people don't really understand 2 degrees of freedom, but they can relate to 2 dimensions (like a sheet of paper to use your analogy).
In this case, the electrons that "move" in the (2d grid-like) lattice of carbon atoms are effectively constrained to 2 spatial degrees of freedom (can represent the position as x & y of the 2d grid of atoms) and will exhibit similar properties as being constrain to a 2 dimensional object even though the lattice of carbon atoms occupies 3 spatial dimensions since the electrons (of a certain energy) only have 2 actual degrees of freedom.
FWIW Quantum physics is usually weird and non-intuitive when you chop down the number of degrees of freedom of an object, although it can be sometimes be understood by using an analogy about reducing the number of dimensions.
The company in charge of a California project to extract vast amounts of renewable energy from deep, hot bedrock has removed its drill rig and informed federal officials that the government project will be abandoned.
The project by the company, AltaRock Energy, was the Obama administration's first major test of geothermal energy as a significant alternative to fossil fuels and the project was being financed with federal Department of Energy money at a site about 100 miles north of San Francisco called the Geysers.
...
The project's apparent collapse comes a day after Swiss government officials permanently shut down a similar project in Basel, because of the damaging earthquakes it produced in 2006 and 2007. Taken together, the two setbacks could change the direction of the Obama administration's geothermal program, which had raised hopes that the earth's bedrock could be quickly tapped as a clean and almost limitless energy source.
I wish it would be illegal to practice software engineering w/o professional credentials. I wish the law would hold software engineers and the companies that employ them professionally responsible for problems they create (like other professions). A professional board could then revoke the licensing credentials of the software engineers and put those companies that employ them out of business.
Oops, I mean bankers and politicians, not software engineers, sorry, wrong crowd;^)
SEC. 1106. WORKFORCE STABILIZATION AND CRITICAL SKILLS PRESERVATION. (a) LIMITATION.--Prior to receipt by the Congress of the strategy and implementation plan under section 1103(c), none of the funds authorized for use under this Act may be used to transfer the functions, missions, or activities, and associated civil service and contractor positions, from any NASA facility without authorization by the Congress to implement the proposed strategy. (b) PRESERVATION OF SKILLS AND COMPETENCIES.--The Administrator shall preserve the critical skills and competencies in place at NASA Centers prior to enactment of this Act in order to facilitate timely implementation of the requirements of this Act and to minimize disruption to the workforce. (c) PROHIBITION.--The Administrator may not implement any reduction-in-force or other involuntary separations of permanent, non-Senior-Executive-Service, civil servant employees any earlier than 6 months after the receipt of the study required under section 1102, except for cause on charges of misconduct, delinquency, or inefficiency.
Yet folks are still layed off after 2 days? I guess "may not implement any reduction-in-force" doesn't mean what it say, or maybe it doesn't apply to the current nasa administrator since he is above the law? What would (or could) the 'D's (or the 'R's for that matter) spin this obvious violation of the law?
Yeah, life is a bitch when you are in a recession and there's no money for your project. That's all there is in this story, nothing less, nothing more. Neither the 'D's or the 'R's care much about government employees or the money that they spend (for example, how about 'D's reducing the military staffing, don't members of the military spend money too and go on unemployment when they don't get a commission). Members of both parties mostly just care if the spendin' is in their state (or district), not what it is being spent on.
Remember dumping money in the private sector creates jobs too (which if you read the following part of the bill, you can see)...
SEC. 401. AFFIRMATION OF POLICY. The Congress affirms the policy of-- (1) making use of United States commercially provided ISS cargo, crew transportation, and crew rescue services to the maximum extent practicable; (2) prohibiting, to the extent practicable, any capability of the Space Launch System from competing with United States commercial providers that meet the requirements of this title for the provision of routine ISS crew and cargo transportation and rescue services; and (3) facilitating, to the maximum extent practicable, the transfer of NASA-developed technologies to United States commercial orbital human space transportation companies in order to help promote the development of commercially provided ISS crew transportation and crew rescue services.
This government technology giveaway to (and prohibition to compete with) companies that are in certain states and districts seems to be a prime example of trying to replace public jobs with private jobs. Might work, might not, but either way some companies in some districts are going to get some free bucks $$$... Hopefully they'll create a job or two instead of shipping them overseas...
Or maybe induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells which are reprogrammed, acquire more telomere transcripts which elongate the telomeres... Or maybe not... Who really knows for sure...
Summary Telomere shortening is associated with organismal aging. iPS cells have been recently derived from old patients; however, it is not known whether telomere chromatin acquires the same characteristics as in ES cells. We show here that telomeres are elongated in iPS cells compared to the parental differentiated cells both when using four (Oct3/4, Sox2, Klf4, cMyc) or three (Oct3/4, Sox2, Klf4) reprogramming factors and both from young and aged individuals. We demonstrate genetically that, during reprogramming, telomere elongation is usually mediated by telomerase and that iPS telomeres acquire the epigenetic marks of ES cells, including a low density of trimethylated histones H3K9 and H4K20 and increased abundance of telomere transcripts. Finally, reprogramming efficiency of cells derived from increasing generations of telomerase-deficient mice shows a dramatic decrease in iPS cell efficiency, a defect that is restored by telomerase reintroduction. Together, these results highlight the importance of telomere biology for iPS cell generation and functionality.
If you are CHURN-ing out Blu-ray players, the cost of HDCP keys is marginal. After a $15K annual fee, 1-million HDCP cost $5K. That works out to $20K/1Mkeys or about 2cents/each. I don't think HDCP being broken is going to make for a substantially cheaper CHURN-ed out Blu-ray players...
At the current price of a rescue, we should just make people that want a timely rescue purchase (or rent) a satellite phone.
The technology exists today, it's (relatively) cheap when compared to the price of a remote mountain rescue. If you think a rental business is out of the question, just look at the airport kiosk where you rent a dvd player to watch on a plane (they have you credit card number of course). Handsets are curently run about $1000 and the airtime costs about $3/min. You can already rent them for about $50/month. So you could probably make a day-trip rental business at the mouth of the grand canyon out of it for say $20 if you wanted to about the same price as the DVD player airport rental market.
Why isn't this a viable business today?
Well, it's because "tech is enabling stupidity". The same people you'd think should rent the phone to keep them out of trouple are actually too stupid to rent the phone because they don't understand how technology works.
So the answer is definitely NOT more tech. We already have enough tech to get stupid people into trouble, why add more tech to the mix?
In BFG's case (since that's what we're talking about here), the "limited-lifetime-warranty" in question clearly states is basically for the lifetime of the product (in the US and Canada), or 10 years from the date of purchase (outside US and Canada) against defects in material and workmanship for as long as the orignal purchaser owns the product when given normal wear and proper usage. Basically, this gives them the out that if the product isn't manufactured anymore, you're out of luck.
I'm pretty sure there's not an actual requirement to purchase insurance for this type of warranty claim as a business can always claim "self-insured". The only reason to not allow for self insured status is if the regulators could show that the warranty claim is likely fraudulent. This usually only happens to third-party extended warranty companies that don't have the resources to repair or replace and often go out of business after collecting money for while. Requirements for surety bonds (the kind of "insurance" you seem to be referring to) are generally not required of primary sellers that are presumed to have the ability to repair or replace (of course in this case, it wasn't a good presumption).
Of course even if the law said that a primary seller had to escrow money or pay insurance or face a heavy fine for deceptive advertising, I'm sure their bankrupcy conservator would now take such a claim by say the FTC (or appropriate country authority) and just put it in the "liability" paper stack when liquidating the business.
As a contemporary example of this problem you only need to look back a year when GM and Chrysler faced bankrupcy and people were wondering what would happen to their new car warranties. Of course GM and Chrysler were "self-insured" for their warranty claims and the government actually had to step in to guarantee the warranty (in bankrupcy, of course this warranty contract as all other contracts are subject to cancellation or modification). GM can Chrysler were not required to escrow money or pay for insurance to cover the new car warranties that they advertised because they (as a primary seller) were presumed to have the ability to repair or replace. If the aforementioned car companies had purchased such insurance, I'd bet you that they would have probably teetered on bankrupcy much soon (given the quality of some of their cars, I'm sure that such insurance would have been prohibitively expensive).
1. Cheap startup resources (e.g., cheap land in a reasonable climate initially) 2. Ambitious institutions (e.g., a university like Stanford) to recruit researchers 3. Money to start companies (be it funding from military contracts or industrial investment)
Also the silicon valley of today is really different in many ways from the silicon valley of the past (when it was starting up).
Most folks forget about the cheap resources aspect (because it's far from being cheap now). Originaly the land resource was cheap (stanford leased land cheaply to companies and the land in the orchards that were originally in the southbay was easy pickings for companies that wanted their own campus). Today the land is expensive, but it's still reasonably to start a company as it's easier to build "people" resource into critical mass quickly (there are lots of experienced folks to hire away from other companies). When you are burning money in a startup company, building critical mass quickly and getting access to experience people efficiently is still worth something, although this is becoming more of an issue in SV of today.
In addition to Stanford and UC Berkeley, corporations like IBM, Intel, HP, SGI, and Applied Materials (in the past), and now Google, Genentech, Gilead are recruiting researchers to the area. Researchers that may have originally been attracted to a low cost housing and weather, may now weigh the odds of continued employment in the same geographic location (and for a spouse if trying to solve the 2-body problem) if the original plans don't pan out.
The money has transtioned from military contracts, to venture capital (sand-hill), and in some ways to serial capital (e.g., someone made a bunch of money on one startup, and now does another startup).
In some sense, Silicon Valley rebuilt itself a few more times using the same ingredients, but a different formula. Seems like this could be recreated elsewhere, but as always, there's an element of perseverance. I think it's the preseverance that is the what is missing in most of the SV knock-offs. Often governments put money into it, fail to get critical mass, get impatient, then pull the plug. I'm guess you really need is something like military contracts and an ambitious institution who don't really care about economic efficiency to get the ball rolling.
Even if the ball is rolling, it'll eventually stop (as it has in SV many times), and somebody has to get it going again. That's often the element that is forgotten. Wasn't it Thomas Edison one of the folks that popularized this route to one of the precursors to SV, Menlo Park NJ?
Sadly this may only be one of the last steps in the hydrogen bomb era, not a first step...
Most "ultimate" weapons have a shelf life.
Take the history of the battleship for example, between WW-I and WW-II was the era of the the Naval limitation treaties which concentrated on battleships. Of course the war that finally erupted WW-II in the pacific, the nations took great advantage of the aircraft carriers, and in the atlantic, it was submarines. The battleships used during WW-II primarily came from upgraded WW-I battleships.
These types of arms limitation treaties have not be shown to prevent any historical conflicts as they just tend to lock-in the status quo (although poorly crafted treaties may cause big problems like WW-I and WW-II). You only need to start with the Hauge Convention of 1899 declaration II and how it didn't seem to affect chemical weapon usage in WW-I very much.
We may see this a sign that nations are recognizing on emminent transition to a new munitions era. We may see nations start developing a whole new class of armaments after this. MOP or MOAB style bombs or even anti-matter bombs. These new non-nuclear bombs seem to promise to be more useful in the next battle (or war on terror).
Maybe, fortunatly, we get the opportunity bypass the urge to use this generation's strategic weapons that cause massive collateral damage and concentrate on more tactical (and containable) munitions. Strategic weapons are historically only useful to prevent a country from sustaing a war effort (if you want a more "street-fight" analogy, basically a kick in the nuts). For many countries that have nuclear weapons, demoralization by "media" has replaced the need for strategic weapons. Of course there are some other countries (e.g., like North Korea, Sudan), where media influence is insufficient other strategic mechanisms may still be needed, but probably in lower amounts.
Although this might be a glimmer of hope that we may be make to the end of the hydrogen bomb era, who knows what the next era will bring us.
I am absolutely certain, that if you create a set of simulated life-forms based on "blank" neural nets of a sufficient size, including hormones / neurotransmitters, and let them evolve trough natural selection so they modify themselves, that it is only a matter of time, until you will come up with a working life-form of the same or higher intelligence than a human.
I doubt very much that this approach would work at all. It's been observed that many animals including humans have certain critical learning periods where their brains are most adapted to certain types of learning. Also social beings have also been observed to exhibit failure-to-thrive and other developmental delay symptoms when subject to emotional deprivation. Social animals have generally evolved social constructs to assist in this type development. It's the nurture part of nature.
Imagine raising a baby in a white-room with no contact with the same species during a critical development period. That's probably what you'd get with this your proposed self-modifying natural selection neural net. Probably what comes out the other side would likely not meet anyone's definition of intelligence (although it may be a useful as a case study of origins of socio-pathic behavior).
Things might be better if some family "adopted" this budding intelligence and raised it as their own, but unless it had some characteristic that were similar (e.g., when this happens in the wild, at least there are some modes of compatibility) not much learning could probably take place. Also it isn't likely that any evolution can take place outside of a multi-generational life-span duration. If that adopted family was human, you probably wouldn't live to see the result of the work and the very first generation family would probably have to deal with a developmentally challenged blob of neurons (might be hard to get someone to volunteer for that task)...
Local municipalities have been playing a similar scam for awhile.
1. Create a local municipal police force 2. Post artificially low speed limit signs and irrational parking meter zones and enforce it vigorously 3. ??? 4. Profit 5. Become addicted on the enforcement revenues, and do more of #2
Of Feynman's passing, Feynman's main contribution was to explain that engineers knew of the problem, but the management misunderstood the seriousness of the problem. In fact, Feynman speculated that he was fed the all of the information from a whistleblower via General Kutyna.
This may be the biggest issue for finding out what really happened. Someone really needs to seek out the disgruntled whistleblower inside of Toyota that knows what the real problem is and feels good about feeding it to someone with enough stature who can "discover" the problem. I doubt anyone at NASA-Langly has that level of independence that a Toyota whistle blower will trust them to not be political. And then you have the language problem and the fact that the most of the real NASA engineers are actually sub-contractors.
It would probably be better to send this problem to Argonne or Sandia, than NASA. But even if you chose NASA, it would have probably been better to pick NASA-IV&V (which specializes in mission critical software and was setup after the challenger disaster) instead of NASA-Langly (based in virgnina near all the pork barrel politicians in DC). This just smells of politics and that's why they may never get to the real answer (maybe they don't want to)...
Slashdot Mirror
Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (the airforce base just north of Cocoa Beach on the east coast of florida on a strip of land which is ultimatly called Cape Canaveral).
Kennedy Space Center (the nasa facility just to the north west of Cape Canaveral Air force station on nearby Merritt Island).
Here's a helpful map from the wikipedia...
As you can see, Launch Complex 39 (located about 1/2 way between the two) and is technically part of the Kennedy Space Center.
The common confusion is that in 1963, Congress, in their infinite wisdom, renamed Cape Canaveral to Cape Kennedy. However, as it turned out, they didn't have the full authority to do that. Apparently the Cape's official name on international maps was under the juristiction of some international maritime treaty (UN, IHO?), so it could only be named Cape Kennedy on US-specific maps. Of course most of the US govt went along including the US Board on Geographic names (which means it got into some US official maps), but eventually everyone conceded and changed the name back in 1973 due to local pressure (there's actually a town called Cape Canaveral on the southern part of Cape Canaveral) and to avoid general confusion.
If you think naming of a place is just a silly argument, tell that to the people who live in New Amsterdam (aka New York), or are visiting Danali national park and looking at the "big-one" Mt Denali (or Mt McKinley to Ohio-ans), or maybe google Sea of Japan naming dispute to witness a naming dispute of international consequences...
When you see all those reporters at a morning launch, they often get a closer view and may actually be on the cape, rather than on KSC, so that may only add to the confusion.
Not a reason, per-se, but the rationale behind not looking a potentially classified information that came through multiple channels is the same problem you have with urban myths. Suppose it is your job to try to figure out some problem and you have multiple sources of information which have various degrees of accuracy and multiple channels from which that information came. If you weighted the validity of the information by the number of channels you got that information from that wouldn't give you a very reliable estimate would it? The information needs to be judged on the source only, not the channel from which it came for several reasons. First, the channels may or may not be reliable (probably not the problem in this case), secondly, the channels may be selective (e.g., google cherry-picked wmd)...
Unfortunatly, it's very hard for human beings to weight the source w/o unintentionally weighting the channels. Deliberatly informing yourself with multiple channels of information might seem a good way to get a better read of the "unfiltered" truth, but in reality, it doesn't seem to be the case. This is somewhat analgous to not having jurors watch the news when they are sitting for a trial. You may ask, how does it hurt to get more information from other channels, esp when they are public, however, people aren't very good at sorting through this as a general rule, so it's best not to have them "polluted" with multiple channels of information.
As a very stupid example, say there was a person, lets call him John, who was in a situation where 8 out of 10 of his friends told him there were 5 lights, and a couple of his friends said there were 4 lights and John saw 4 lights. John may choose to make a judgement that that incorporates the fact that there were 5 lights despite having direct access to the source of the information himself that there are in fact 4 lights... ;^)
Sometimes information from multiple channels won't actually help... Sure this is a rationale, and not a reason, but it's my take on a reasonable rationale...
The real reason may be a primitive loyalty test (kind of like how you get into a gang), are you loyal enough to not look at wikileaks because "we" said so, well if so you aren't loyal enough, then you can't get into the "gang", but that doesn't make the rationale invalid (it just means it isn't the reason).
Nothing that is happening now with ICANN and DNS root servers couldn't happen with some other organization controlling root servers (the registrars are dumping wikileaks), this has nothing to do with root servers...
You are just crying wolf and taking advantage of this situation to push your agenda. If you think this has anything to do with root servers, you should go back to and retake internet 101.
There are many valid reason to have a more independent entity control DNS root servers, but the takedown of an individual site by persuading individual registrars to dump their clients is not one of them.
Film = petrol
11 = empty
sleep/bordom = destination
One in a while, your petrol tank empty light goes on to tease you with the story that you are about to run out of petrol. Since you are usually never near a petrol station when this light comes on, it will continue to tease you until you reach your destination, or a petrol station to fill up so you can satisfy your desire to continue to your destination.
Is that good enough for you?
Gold? Cinnamon? It's a delicious discovery for science! See, it's not toxic at all, we can drink a ton of it!
Even without the toxic-by-the-ton ethyl-alcohol in Goldschläger, true cinnamon actually contains a small amount of coumarin (used as rat poison in concentrated forms, or processed into a blood thinner for heart surgery patients)...
And of course if Goldschläger cheaped out and uses the "fake" cassia cinnamon, it would actually have even more coumarin...
On the other hand, a Goldschläger challenge seems much less harmful than a cinnamon challenge (a description of which used to be on wikipedia, but apparently it's been edited out after this revision)
You don't have to go so far out like agave (something many folks never will encounter except in it's liquid tequila form). Many common foods have a very high fructose content...
http://nutritiondata.self.com/foods-000011000000000000000.html
Ironically, corn (as opposed to HFCS) really doesn't show up on this list because the sugar in actual corn is mostly glucose (they have to process the crap out of corn-glucose convert some of the glucose to fructose to make HFCS).
The corn "haters" out there that sweeten their drinks with honey and have their apple-a-day, really aren't really in a much superior situation when it comes to avoiding the problems associated with fructose (primarily that the fructose sugar isomer doesn't normally stimulate insulin production unlike the glucose isomer). Although if you actually eat an apple (as opposed to drinking apple juice or eating apple sauce), you probably get enough fiber to limit the intake of sugar.
Also, something that everyone should know is that a surprisingly common ailment is fructose intolerance/malabsorption where the symptoms are similar to lactose intolerance. Avoiding all foods high in fructose often provides relief for this ailment.
Yeah, we could try a new scheme where people can only own physical things...
Hope you like keeping gold bricks under your mattress.
Like it or not, we live in a world with non-tangible property. Most folks would still like to have real-estate deeds, stocks, bonds, and bank deposits, personal property be considered "owned".
Ah, but you say money is a physical thing, but sadly, this is often not true. If you deposit the money into a bank which can loan it out (as opposed to keeping in a big steel box in the basement), the money is not yours, all you "own" is a promise for the bank to honor your deposit (or a debt instrument to be more precise) . It is no longer a physical thing. If you borrow money for a car, the bank has the actual title to the car and you really own a piece of paper that represents a contract.
How about owning stock in a company? Well some companies may or may not have some tangible assest, but most companies have large amounts of "good-will" on their books, so in a way that is non-tangible as well.
If you wanted to get pedantic, if you own a "deed" or some other physical manifestation of a instrument of ownership, could you form it into whatever pattern you want w/o asking permission (say change the wording of a title), I think most folks wouldn't agree with that idea either.
SO... what we are left with is that perhaps there should be some limits on ownership of non-tangible items.
Almost all folks would probably agree that share drafts, debt instruments, titles to real property are things that should be ownable. Depending on your political persuasion, you might include partnerships, corporations, and other legal arraingments to fall into the "ownable" umbrella.
Of course then there are other non-tangible things that some folk debate should be ownable. For example ideas, inventions, creative works. Are these ownable? Well, they certainly aren't much different that the other non-tangible things which most folks would agree are ownable except whatever laws we make for them. During the majority of recorded history, these non-tangible things were not ownable. However at least in the USA, the founding fathers thought there was some economic advantage to allow these things to be owned for a limited period of time. You of course can debate the merits of this, but there is some historical evidence that there is some advantage to this.
On the other extreme, most folks might argue there are things that are detrimental to public policy and should NOT be allowed to be owned even if physical (e.g., slavery).
As with all things there are lots of grey in this whole idea of ownership. It's really just a matter of current law to say what is ownable and what is not ownable, but just drawing the line at physical objects does a big disservice to the complexity of the situation.
> I'd like to see how you get two hots and a neutral out of 2 wires.
In the USA we do it like this
Of course it takes a local transformer tap to pull-out a neutral (and if the loads are unbalance you don't really get neutral), but that's how we do it over here (gotta save on that copper wire)...
Wow, this all (eventually) brought to you by the company that once put out a document with the phrase "Appy time is Happy Time" (or something like that) and later updated that OS based on lightweight microkernel messaging (LPC)... Times have sure changed... ;^)
Not sure if people have the total concept of what a university looked like in the middle ages (despite looking it up on the wikipedia). Basically people who joined universities were mostly either clergy, civil servants, or what we would call today "professional" students.
Back in those days, other than the church, there were generally no need for preparatory degrees. Most good jobs that regular folks could aspire to didn't require degrees, they required lengthy apprenticeship which one could tackle by working for essentially peanuts for awhile or actually paying money to join various guilds.
However, if one had a patron (or a rich family) or if you wanted to dedicate your life to the institution (often associated with the church, but there were some secular institutions), you could instead attend a university and study law, medicine (usually reserved for rich folks), or theology. In the modern era, who would be paying for all this stuff over the 20 or so years that a typical university course of study would entail is quite an interesting problem.
Of course for those that have the attraction of becoming a professional student, maybe running a wiki-university like the middle ages is interesting, but I don't think it's what many folks had in mind.
I get the feeling that most folks are thinking about a "free" prep-education for business or engineering or some other trade. That's not really like a university from the middle ages, that is like a much more modern re-invention of the university into a trade-guild. Now, instead of joining the guild, you pay your tuition to a "university" and learn a trade or skill from someone there and get your guild-card/degree to hang out your shingle or to join a co-op/company.
I think that the folks interested in the "free" prep-education should instead just be questioning the whole concept of a guild that a university education has become and if a wiki-guild is actually more what some folks had in mind...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_of_Chartres
"We are like dwarfs standing [or sitting] upon the shoulders of giants, and so able to see more and see farther than the ancients."
Gee, I think that sounds strangely familiar ;^)
For example, the flu is an RNA based virus... ;^)
Perhaps you might want to stick to writing computer programs
Although real-world objects cannot actually span only two dimensions (if you ignore possible theories about strings), the interaction of certain particles can be constrained to 2 spatial degrees of freedom (well plus the time dimension, but ignoring that for now). Two degrees of freedom can be basically lay-man-transliterated as 2-dimensional nature since many people don't really understand 2 degrees of freedom, but they can relate to 2 dimensions (like a sheet of paper to use your analogy).
In this case, the electrons that "move" in the (2d grid-like) lattice of carbon atoms are effectively constrained to 2 spatial degrees of freedom (can represent the position as x & y of the 2d grid of atoms) and will exhibit similar properties as being constrain to a 2 dimensional object even though the lattice of carbon atoms occupies 3 spatial dimensions since the electrons (of a certain energy) only have 2 actual degrees of freedom.
FWIW Quantum physics is usually weird and non-intuitive when you chop down the number of degrees of freedom of an object, although it can be sometimes be understood by using an analogy about reducing the number of dimensions.
[SARCASM]
Apparently the obama administration thinks it has more supporters in northern california than west virginia... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/science/earth/12quake.html
[/SARCASM]
I wish it would be illegal to practice software engineering w/o professional credentials. I wish the law would hold software engineers and the companies that employ them professionally responsible for problems they create (like other professions). A professional board could then revoke the licensing credentials of the software engineers and put those companies that employ them out of business.
Oops, I mean bankers and politicians, not software engineers, sorry, wrong crowd ;^)
Okay, I'll bite, I wonder how a certain political faction that starts with a 'D' will spin this one?
http://democrats.science.house.gov/Media/file/NASACompromiseText.pdf
Yet folks are still layed off after 2 days? I guess "may not implement any reduction-in-force" doesn't mean what it say, or maybe it doesn't apply to the current nasa administrator since he is above the law? What would (or could) the 'D's (or the 'R's for that matter) spin this obvious violation of the law?
Yeah, life is a bitch when you are in a recession and there's no money for your project. That's all there is in this story, nothing less, nothing more. Neither the 'D's or the 'R's care much about government employees or the money that they spend (for example, how about 'D's reducing the military staffing, don't members of the military spend money too and go on unemployment when they don't get a commission). Members of both parties mostly just care if the spendin' is in their state (or district), not what it is being spent on.
Remember dumping money in the private sector creates jobs too (which if you read the following part of the bill, you can see)...
This government technology giveaway to (and prohibition to compete with) companies that are in certain states and districts seems to be a prime example of trying to replace public jobs with private jobs. Might work, might not, but either way some companies in some districts are going to get some free bucks $$$... Hopefully they'll create a job or two instead of shipping them overseas...
Or maybe induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells which are reprogrammed, acquire more telomere transcripts which elongate the telomeres... Or maybe not... Who really knows for sure...
http://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/abstract/S1934-5909(09)00002-2
Summary
Telomere shortening is associated with organismal aging. iPS cells have been recently derived from old patients; however, it is not known whether telomere chromatin acquires the same characteristics as in ES cells. We show here that telomeres are elongated in iPS cells compared to the parental differentiated cells both when using four (Oct3/4, Sox2, Klf4, cMyc) or three (Oct3/4, Sox2, Klf4) reprogramming factors and both from young and aged individuals. We demonstrate genetically that, during reprogramming, telomere elongation is usually mediated by telomerase and that iPS telomeres acquire the epigenetic marks of ES cells, including a low density of trimethylated histones H3K9 and H4K20 and increased abundance of telomere transcripts. Finally, reprogramming efficiency of cells derived from increasing generations of telomerase-deficient mice shows a dramatic decrease in iPS cell efficiency, a defect that is restored by telomerase reintroduction. Together, these results highlight the importance of telomere biology for iPS cell generation and functionality.
If you are CHURN-ing out Blu-ray players, the cost of HDCP keys is marginal. After a $15K annual fee, 1-million HDCP cost $5K. That works out to $20K/1Mkeys or about 2cents/each. I don't think HDCP being broken is going to make for a substantially cheaper CHURN-ed out Blu-ray players...
At the current price of a rescue, we should just make people that want a timely rescue purchase (or rent) a satellite phone.
The technology exists today, it's (relatively) cheap when compared to the price of a remote mountain rescue. If you think a rental business is out of the question, just look at the airport kiosk where you rent a dvd player to watch on a plane (they have you credit card number of course). Handsets are curently run about $1000 and the airtime costs about $3/min. You can already rent them for about $50/month. So you could probably make a day-trip rental business at the mouth of the grand canyon out of it for say $20 if you wanted to about the same price as the DVD player airport rental market.
Why isn't this a viable business today?
Well, it's because "tech is enabling stupidity". The same people you'd think should rent the phone to keep them out of trouple are actually too stupid to rent the phone because they don't understand how technology works.
So the answer is definitely NOT more tech. We already have enough tech to get stupid people into trouble, why add more tech to the mix?
In BFG's case (since that's what we're talking about here), the "limited-lifetime-warranty" in question clearly states is basically for the lifetime of the product (in the US and Canada), or 10 years from the date of purchase (outside US and Canada) against defects in material and workmanship for as long as the orignal purchaser owns the product when given normal wear and proper usage. Basically, this gives them the out that if the product isn't manufactured anymore, you're out of luck.
I'm pretty sure there's not an actual requirement to purchase insurance for this type of warranty claim as a business can always claim "self-insured". The only reason to not allow for self insured status is if the regulators could show that the warranty claim is likely fraudulent. This usually only happens to third-party extended warranty companies that don't have the resources to repair or replace and often go out of business after collecting money for while. Requirements for surety bonds (the kind of "insurance" you seem to be referring to) are generally not required of primary sellers that are presumed to have the ability to repair or replace (of course in this case, it wasn't a good presumption).
Of course even if the law said that a primary seller had to escrow money or pay insurance or face a heavy fine for deceptive advertising, I'm sure their bankrupcy conservator would now take such a claim by say the FTC (or appropriate country authority) and just put it in the "liability" paper stack when liquidating the business.
As a contemporary example of this problem you only need to look back a year when GM and Chrysler faced bankrupcy and people were wondering what would happen to their new car warranties. Of course GM and Chrysler were "self-insured" for their warranty claims and the government actually had to step in to guarantee the warranty (in bankrupcy, of course this warranty contract as all other contracts are subject to cancellation or modification). GM can Chrysler were not required to escrow money or pay for insurance to cover the new car warranties that they advertised because they (as a primary seller) were presumed to have the ability to repair or replace. If the aforementioned car companies had purchased such insurance, I'd bet you that they would have probably teetered on bankrupcy much soon (given the quality of some of their cars, I'm sure that such insurance would have been prohibitively expensive).
More likely...
1. Cheap startup resources (e.g., cheap land in a reasonable climate initially)
2. Ambitious institutions (e.g., a university like Stanford) to recruit researchers
3. Money to start companies (be it funding from military contracts or industrial investment)
Also the silicon valley of today is really different in many ways from the silicon valley of the past (when it was starting up).
Most folks forget about the cheap resources aspect (because it's far from being cheap now). Originaly the land resource was cheap (stanford leased land cheaply to companies and the land in the orchards that were originally in the southbay was easy pickings for companies that wanted their own campus). Today the land is expensive, but it's still reasonably to start a company as it's easier to build "people" resource into critical mass quickly (there are lots of experienced folks to hire away from other companies). When you are burning money in a startup company, building critical mass quickly and getting access to experience people efficiently is still worth something, although this is becoming more of an issue in SV of today.
In addition to Stanford and UC Berkeley, corporations like IBM, Intel, HP, SGI, and Applied Materials (in the past), and now Google, Genentech, Gilead are recruiting researchers to the area. Researchers that may have originally been attracted to a low cost housing and weather, may now weigh the odds of continued employment in the same geographic location (and for a spouse if trying to solve the 2-body problem) if the original plans don't pan out.
The money has transtioned from military contracts, to venture capital (sand-hill), and in some ways to serial capital (e.g., someone made a bunch of money on one startup, and now does another startup).
In some sense, Silicon Valley rebuilt itself a few more times using the same ingredients, but a different formula. Seems like this could be recreated elsewhere, but as always, there's an element of perseverance. I think it's the preseverance that is the what is missing in most of the SV knock-offs. Often governments put money into it, fail to get critical mass, get impatient, then pull the plug. I'm guess you really need is something like military contracts and an ambitious institution who don't really care about economic efficiency to get the ball rolling.
Even if the ball is rolling, it'll eventually stop (as it has in SV many times), and somebody has to get it going again. That's often the element that is forgotten. Wasn't it Thomas Edison one of the folks that popularized this route to one of the precursors to SV, Menlo Park NJ?
Sadly this may only be one of the last steps in the hydrogen bomb era, not a first step...
Most "ultimate" weapons have a shelf life.
Take the history of the battleship for example, between WW-I and WW-II was the era of the the Naval limitation treaties which concentrated on battleships. Of course the war that finally erupted WW-II in the pacific, the nations took great advantage of the aircraft carriers, and in the atlantic, it was submarines. The battleships used during WW-II primarily came from upgraded WW-I battleships.
These types of arms limitation treaties have not be shown to prevent any historical conflicts as they just tend to lock-in the status quo (although poorly crafted treaties may cause big problems like WW-I and WW-II). You only need to start with the Hauge Convention of 1899 declaration II and how it didn't seem to affect chemical weapon usage in WW-I very much.
We may see this a sign that nations are recognizing on emminent transition to a new munitions era. We may see nations start developing a whole new class of armaments after this. MOP or MOAB style bombs or even anti-matter bombs. These new non-nuclear bombs seem to promise to be more useful in the next battle (or war on terror).
Maybe, fortunatly, we get the opportunity bypass the urge to use this generation's strategic weapons that cause massive collateral damage and concentrate on more tactical (and containable) munitions. Strategic weapons are historically only useful to prevent a country from sustaing a war effort (if you want a more "street-fight" analogy, basically a kick in the nuts). For many countries that have nuclear weapons, demoralization by "media" has replaced the need for strategic weapons. Of course there are some other countries (e.g., like North Korea, Sudan), where media influence is insufficient other strategic mechanisms may still be needed, but probably in lower amounts.
Although this might be a glimmer of hope that we may be make to the end of the hydrogen bomb era, who knows what the next era will bring us.
I doubt very much that this approach would work at all. It's been observed that many animals including humans have certain critical learning periods where their brains are most adapted to certain types of learning. Also social beings have also been observed to exhibit failure-to-thrive and other developmental delay symptoms when subject to emotional deprivation. Social animals have generally evolved social constructs to assist in this type development. It's the nurture part of nature.
Imagine raising a baby in a white-room with no contact with the same species during a critical development period. That's probably what you'd get with this your proposed self-modifying natural selection neural net. Probably what comes out the other side would likely not meet anyone's definition of intelligence (although it may be a useful as a case study of origins of socio-pathic behavior).
Things might be better if some family "adopted" this budding intelligence and raised it as their own, but unless it had some characteristic that were similar (e.g., when this happens in the wild, at least there are some modes of compatibility) not much learning could probably take place. Also it isn't likely that any evolution can take place outside of a multi-generational life-span duration. If that adopted family was human, you probably wouldn't live to see the result of the work and the very first generation family would probably have to deal with a developmentally challenged blob of neurons (might be hard to get someone to volunteer for that task)...
Local municipalities have been playing a similar scam for awhile.
1. Create a local municipal police force
2. Post artificially low speed limit signs and irrational parking meter zones and enforce it vigorously
3. ???
4. Profit
5. Become addicted on the enforcement revenues, and do more of #2
Of Feynman's passing, Feynman's main contribution was to explain that engineers knew of the problem, but the management misunderstood the seriousness of the problem. In fact, Feynman speculated that he was fed the all of the information from a whistleblower via General Kutyna.
This may be the biggest issue for finding out what really happened. Someone really needs to seek out the disgruntled whistleblower inside of Toyota that knows what the real problem is and feels good about feeding it to someone with enough stature who can "discover" the problem. I doubt anyone at NASA-Langly has that level of independence that a Toyota whistle blower will trust them to not be political. And then you have the language problem and the fact that the most of the real NASA engineers are actually sub-contractors.
It would probably be better to send this problem to Argonne or Sandia, than NASA. But even if you chose NASA, it would have probably been better to pick NASA-IV&V (which specializes in mission critical software and was setup after the challenger disaster) instead of NASA-Langly (based in virgnina near all the pork barrel politicians in DC). This just smells of politics and that's why they may never get to the real answer (maybe they don't want to)...