Actually, the MT in Japan and the NT in Hong Kong doun't count on the real list because they are towers not commercializable space.
For that matter, the Petronas actually has only a mast taller than the Sears Tower and only a few feet at that. The top floor of the Sears would look down on the top floor of the Petronas.
If we wanted to do something about this, we should build a three foot tall mast on top of the Sears Tower, call it significant and reclaim the world's tallest building title from those Malyasian upstarts.
The lamprey's neural material is being used more for it's signal transmission properties and to demonstrate the interfaces than for any Cyborgean dream project. Lamprey's are pretty simple and have comparitively large neuronal complexes which can be easily gathered and manipulated. Besides, very few people complain for lamprey rights. When the neural material can be kept alive for long periods and can learn new processes then we might consider this more than the smallest of steps towards cyborgs.
Just because the US has so far managed to remain tax-free on e-commerce doesn't imply that the world will. Or that the US will continue to be so. Since ecommerce in the US does not pay sales taxes it is equivalent to a subsidy. As long as it doesn't threaten the conventional commerce methods it will remain so, but in Europe where VAT is often 25% it knocks a big hole in the tax gathering budget. Eventually, ecommerce will be taxed worldwide. It behooves the ecommunity to propose a reasonable and fair method of imposing this taxation. Although "no taxation without representation" is grounds for revolution, the obverse is not a meta-stable state and will not last. Either ecommerce needs to align with one political party (and I don't mean libertarians) or expect taxes to appear in the future.
Anytime you have a moving electrical current (as in solar wind) crossing a magnetic field (as in Earth) it generates heat. (Works the other way also.) Thus the Aurora is formed from the superheating of a portion of the atmosphere. During a period of global warming this can't help our heat balance to have these large solar storms boosting the heat balance of the planet. Of course, the superheating of polar gases may have some effect on the makeup of the atmosphere (as in burn off the nasties, or create more ozone.)
Athens had a true democracy for a time. Albeit only men and not slaves had a vote, but that still left a large chunk of the citizenry able to speak and vote in the assembly which made the decisions. Unfortunately, the system bogged down with brilliant orators (and bad decision makers) ruling the day. The US founding fathers were very much aware of this and hence compromised on a representative democracy. They probably did not forsee this giving rise to our current professional class of politicians however. In fact they attempted to shield the common folk from their own decisions. Senators were originally chosen by the state government and the electoral college was created to protect the people from the free press and popularity contests. The idea was, elect someone respected (and smart) from your area. He (realistically at that time) was supposed to know enough to avoid media influences and vote for the better man. How times have changed, eh!!
Oxford is just responding to the possibility of needing to defend itself against a frivolous lawsuit. In this case the lawsuit would be in English court which means that the loser pays the winner's legal bills. Since the university has the deep pockets, they would certainly be forced to pay. They are just trying to protect themselves. I don't like it but I understand why they do it.
I think that you are underestimating the amount of time that we have had to evolve parsing. I see parsing as a specialized case of communication. Other animals are able to communicate and seem to have the ability to use language in a limited capacity (e.g. Koko, some apes). In more primitive forms, many mammals are able to communicate in some form. These communications are structured. So I would consider our language abilities as a specialization of these communication abilities. If you buy this, then we have had quite a while to evolve structures to deal with parsing in some form.
Yes, but if you believe that then you have invalidated your original arguement that mathematics is less automated. Animals can count (to some degree) and we have had just as long to evolve those abilities.
Using a stochastic context free grammer lets you assign probabilities to production rules in the grammar. More generally you can assign probabilities to production rules in a context sensitive grammer to get a sense a of how often a given production is used.
When Prof Goldsmith presented that he was laughed off the stage. It's a poor approximation at best.
For example, most people are to identify the syntactic elements in a nonsense sentence such as "The sdfjklds aaadjed fdfjdfj to fdjlfkdj." I would think a psychological model of language would have problems with this and the ability of sentences/phrases to be perfectly correct while having no mean or a contradictory meaning.
That is precisely the strength of a psychological model. The syntatic words match a pattern so you can identify the subject, predicate . . .
In addition, using a computer to parse language means that ultimately you need to express the parsing in an algorithmic procedure. Regardless of whether language is a psychological construct or not, you will express it in terms of if/then or case statements. My assertion is that you can change these statements into a generative grammar with associated probabilities.
A point I do not deny. However, I prefer to use a fuzzy logic algorithm than the conventional predicate logic one. Then, this does not yield a generative grammar.
I think the reason that parsing seems easy and math problems seem to be difficult is because our brains have evolved to deal with parsing in an efficient manner.
Now here, I absolutely disagree with you. Our brains simply have not had enough time to develop for efficient language parsing. At best, language parsing is an 'arch'. Some of the features of phonetics have had the time (VOT for example) but not language parsing in general.
To tell the truth, using a generative grammer is probably the best method available in computer science.
Precisely what I'm attempting to get at. A generative grammar tells you only all the possibilities (at best) but never any of the probabilities. A prototype grammar, one appearing in the early 80s called the sausage machine, would provide you with the main possibilities and all the probabilities. This would be much more useful in attempting mechanical translation.
It has a solid theoretical/mathematical framework . . .
And you've shown yourself to have bought Chomsky's line hook line and sinker by arguing this point. Language is not a mathematical construct, it is a psychological one.
I'm sure that others have tried using other methods to do translations/parsing but so far it hasn't been very successful.
I did a masters thesis explicity trying to find any such effort. The idioms and cultural references problems are not as difficult as you think when approached via a thesarus method system.
Language processing really isn't that hard. Look at some of the people who do it. That may sound flippant but it obviously doesn't consume fast portions of normal people's brains to do it. Sure I slow down talking when dealing with complex driving problems but compare it to relatively basic mathematics which I can't do while driving (I mean more complex than long division.) Given an appropriate setting and some help, I could, by following several psycholinguistics methods that I worked on at the University of Chicago and access to an online thesarus based database, get working mechanical translation going within six months. Problem is I don't do generative linguistics and all of Noam Chomsky's followers would rather not have a working system than see his theories disproven.
The BIG problem is that no one has cracked the whole language problem so translation remains a very sketchy affair, typically a few coherent words, maybe a phrase or two occasionally a sentence comes out cogently. Nothing more even from the best of these systems. There's a guy at MIT called Chomsky who's gummed up the whole works on computer based translation for over 30 years. He and his minions conduct character assasination on anyone who dares to do linguistics differently than them. Unfortunately, until that old man dies, a practical computer translation device is something you can keep wishing for but will never get.
Hitler had some very unusual dental work and even though his body was burned before being buried, it was possible to identify the remains by matching to the dental records.
Actually, the man in the image is 5'10" tall. While large for the time, hardly likely to have made him remarkable for his height. The back and front image don't match in height, they miss by less than an inch. The details are spatially consistent if you lie a body down on a flat cloth. Basically, the front of your body is bumpier than the back. The head problem you mention is consistent with the Jewish 'chinstrap' or 'toothache wrap'. This was common in other contemporary cultures: Confucius mentions his father wearing one (at his funeral.) The Shroud is thought to have been brought back to Europe from Constantinople after the Fourth Crusade, c.1204. It was supposedly in the possesion of the Knights Templar. A descendant of one of their last officers is the first recorded owner of the Shroud. His widow did exhibit the Shroud quite frequently, much to the dismay of the local bishop who had less-spectacular relics to bring in pilgrims. The Shroud has been displayed at pretty much a constant rate (a few times a century) and if anything is now less displayed than in the 14th century. Artists are no longer permitted private showings as was typical several centuries. Incidently, unlike most of the other Shrouds, it is relatively easy to demonstrate thru both textile and pollen analysis that the Shroud of Turin was made, and exposed to air in the Middle East. Since it has never traveled there in it's recorded history, it must be about 50 years older than it's first showing. Thus pushing it's origins to the edges of it's supposed C-14 date.
How about locating the origins of the Ainu people (the original inhabitants of Japan) ? They appear almost Caucasian (at least to many Japanese) but they are really out of place for that. They now live mostly on Hokkaido in Japan.
How about trying to track down the descendants of the Anasazi people (Pueblo builders)? These ancient settlers of the American Southwest had an advanced culture and abandonded their cities very quickly (possibly due to drought.) Their name means 'ancient ones' implying that they are not direct progenitors of the current Native American population of the area. But this is a pretty hot topic.
Except for the fact that there are well-dated parchments with images of the Shroud of Turin from before the Carbon-14 date. This calls into question that process with two possible explanations of the error. Either, the Shroud's fibers have acquired a layer of bacteria on their external surface. Just a thin layer of relatively recent bacteria would throw the age calculations off precipitously. Because the origin of the image was a scorch and the Shroud has been nearly burnt several times in it's known history, the amount of carbon has been refreshed several times. This would fudge the date by several centuries. Keep in mind noone has done extensive C-14 dating on textiles of this age before. Very few actually survive as long as the Shroud has or apparantly has. The iron pigment is from the touching of sacred paintings to the surface of the cloth. A common method of blessing icons and other religous items. The amount supposedly recovered and examined was trivial.
I absolutely agree that numbers matter. You don't ignore 30% of your base without paying for it. I would point out that although a significant number of Virginia's GOP voters counted themselves among the 'religous right', the numbers are considerably lower in a lot of other states, particularly the battleground states for national elections. My point is that high-tech workers could provide a significant factor in many battleground states and certainly affect multiple key congressional races. Control of the house this year will probably be decided by fewer than 50 races. That sounds like a lot but there are 435 total, so 11% of voters can affect change in the nation. If we organized, identified our issues, compared candidates and put forth suggested voting information which affected say 1% of voters in those districts, I can guarentee we would be considered in subsequent elections. One percent of 11% is fewer than 150,000 voters. If that many people said they considered 'geek' issues (and we need a better name) then solid consideration is certain. Is this beyond geek organization skills???????
What about the possibilitity of forming a high-tech workers special interest group. Both parties are heavily laden with them. Everyone from Gay Republicans to Black Moslem Democrats have well-organized groups, which actually do coordinate putting delegate rosters together, raising money and tend to act as voting blocks both nationally and at conventions and the like. This has one huge advantage over going libertarian or anarchist: it actually puts together a group that gets listened to by the big boys. If it works for the religous right, why not for tech?
is that baked potato you put in the microwave during lunch still radioactive and exposing your stomach right now? no, of course not. basicly, same thing.
Well, basicly wrong. In fact, as a grunt grad student in space physics at UCLA in the 1980s, I helped perform these exact calculations. My background was radiation physics and radiation saftey (having just come from the IAEC in Vienna.) The baked potato was bombarded by relatively narrow bands of microwave energy and in a very moderate magnetic field. The Galileo probe has been continuously bombarded by everything from gamma radiation on down. Since metal is a crystaline structure, the metal atoms themselves have been taking a radioactive bombardment which has (if memory serves correctly) altered nearly one out of every 100 atoms in the crystal. I forget the tensile strength depression but it does mean that a substantial portion of the metal itself is now radioactive. The magnetic fields which Galileo has encountered have a cumulative molecular shearing effect on all the components which has further polarized the entire spacecraft. The net result being further molecular instability and radioactivity. Finally, because the engineers knew that no one would be coming near the plutonium reactor at the end of a boom on the probe, they didn't really bother to shield it particularly well. The leaking radiation from that alone would make the entire probe radioactive this long after launch. If you're going to try and take the piss outta someone, learn your facts first. Oh and put that potato in a nuclear reactor and then a plasma bath and then eat it. You won't be around to send out more inane comments.
While your idea sounds nice it's impratical. First, the technology is so old it's not worth reusing. I worked on PVO data back in the mid-eighties and was amazed how hard the programming was. The computer had less power than in most calculators. Galileo, for all of it's success, has basically an Apple II hooked to a car battery which downloads power from nuclear waste. It's value as a probe is only in where it is and has virtually nil outside of that. Second, the systems are designed for one way trips. Because Galileo has been exposed to a plutonium reactor for the entire length of it's mission and has flown through some of the most intense radiation fields ever experienced, the entire probe is highly radioactive and would be extremely poisonous. While space techs will work in bad conditions, I doubt OHSA would permit as toxic an object to be worked on anywhere in the US. Third, if we signal it to turn around it has to get away from Jupiter and then keep transmitting until it's in Earth orbit. Thus wasting a long time in which it could gather more data. A soft landing in Earth orbit is virtually impossible unless a bunch of mid course corrections could be made requiring probe-controller interaction.
Don't forget that Galileo was initiated under Carter and set up under Reagan, two presidents who didn't believe in the PC cr*p that runs NASA under our current clown, I mean president. Johnson and Nixon didn't really like all the people at NASA but they valued results over conformity to rules of how society was supposed to work. Carter may have wanted to be liked but eventually turned to 'just get it done', Reagan didn't care except for results, Bush knew a little more about the process but enough to stay out of it. Clinton has politicized NASA just like the INS, the FBI and nearly every other government agency. And he wonders why he'll be considered one of the worst presidents of all time.
The internet could be the greatest means of really bringing democracy into the third world. Most of the world population does not live in a true reponsive democracy. Many countries may have elections but an election does not make a democracy. A free press, a high degree of literacy and a government where representation is accountable to the citizens make a democracy. By this standard Serbia does not count as a democracy. The internet provides a mode of mass communication with, to be blunt, a fairly low level of literacy required. And it is relatively easy to examine the responsiveness of your representatives with the internet. Hey, if Bill Clinton really cared about leaving a legacy he would have promoted a Peace Corps ISP system, bringing the internet at zero cost to sub-Saharan Africa and working with their governments to eventually take over the ISP functions. If I won 10 million dollars on iwon, this is exactly what I'd do.
There are two basic problems getting people to Mars, or L4/5 or the moon or even the Space Station. One, getting people there, getting the stuff to support them there. If you want efficiency they should primarily be done on seperate systems. The Shuttle does little better than the Saturn for a hybrid system. People need fewer Gs and a generally safer ride. Stuff (a general other category) could most efficiently be launched via a linear acclerator. Bucket size is restricted and you need a system for catching in space but if Quark could do it why can't NASA.
Well, as if we needed another reason to throw the Clinton-Gore administration out. Here Clinton is trying to shore up support in the law enforcement community at the expense of individual rights. I support the librarian view of this. That is: what you read, if you can read, whom you leave letters for is your private business and cannot be used against you. Note that the phone lines do not give such privacy. For over 40 years both the Chicago Police Department and the Fire Department have had instant traces in place for every incoming call. Instead of choosing one way or the other we should have both. Truly anonymous accounts for everyone and personal, fully traceable accounts in parallel. Personal accounts having more privledges. Note: this is not my idea, I borrow it from Ender's Game.
This technology, if as they suggest would like to target entire tissues, could be brought to bear against diseases such as irregular heart beats, diabetes, Marfan's syndrome, MS, Parkinson's and if he lives long enough could pull the chair out from under Stephen Hawkings.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the MT in Japan and the NT in Hong Kong doun't count on the real list because they are towers not commercializable space.
For that matter, the Petronas actually has only a mast taller than the Sears Tower and only a few feet at that. The top floor of the Sears would look down on the top floor of the Petronas.
If we wanted to do something about this, we should build a three foot tall mast on top of the Sears Tower, call it significant and reclaim the world's tallest building title from those Malyasian upstarts.
Hey for those kind of prices you could hire a real Spaniard to tile your roof.
The lamprey's neural material is being used more for it's signal transmission properties and to demonstrate the interfaces than for any Cyborgean dream project. Lamprey's are pretty simple and have comparitively large neuronal complexes which can be easily gathered and manipulated. Besides, very few people complain for lamprey rights. When the neural material can be kept alive for long periods and can learn new processes then we might consider this more than the smallest of steps towards cyborgs.
Just because the US has so far managed to remain tax-free on e-commerce doesn't imply that the world will. Or that the US will continue to be so. Since ecommerce in the US does not pay sales taxes it is equivalent to a subsidy. As long as it doesn't threaten the conventional commerce methods it will remain so, but in Europe where VAT is often 25% it knocks a big hole in the tax gathering budget. Eventually, ecommerce will be taxed worldwide. It behooves the ecommunity to propose a reasonable and fair method of imposing this taxation. Although "no taxation without representation" is grounds for revolution, the obverse is not a meta-stable state and will not last. Either ecommerce needs to align with one political party (and I don't mean libertarians) or expect taxes to appear in the future.
Anytime you have a moving electrical current (as in solar wind) crossing a magnetic field (as in Earth) it generates heat. (Works the other way also.) Thus the Aurora is formed from the superheating of a portion of the atmosphere. During a period of global warming this can't help our heat balance to have these large solar storms boosting the heat balance of the planet. Of course, the superheating of polar gases may have some effect on the makeup of the atmosphere (as in burn off the nasties, or create more ozone.)
Athens had a true democracy for a time. Albeit only men and not slaves had a vote, but that still left a large chunk of the citizenry able to speak and vote in the assembly which made the decisions. Unfortunately, the system bogged down with brilliant orators (and bad decision makers) ruling the day. The US founding fathers were very much aware of this and hence compromised on a representative democracy. They probably did not forsee this giving rise to our current professional class of politicians however. In fact they attempted to shield the common folk from their own decisions. Senators were originally chosen by the state government and the electoral college was created to protect the people from the free press and popularity contests. The idea was, elect someone respected (and smart) from your area. He (realistically at that time) was supposed to know enough to avoid media influences and vote for the better man.
How times have changed, eh!!
Oxford is just responding to the possibility of needing to defend itself against a frivolous lawsuit. In this case the lawsuit would be in English court which means that the loser pays the winner's legal bills. Since the university has the deep pockets, they would certainly be forced to pay. They are just trying to protect themselves. I don't like it but I understand why they do it.
I think that you are underestimating the amount of time that we have had to evolve parsing. I see parsing as a specialized case of communication. Other
animals are able to communicate and seem to have the ability to use language in a limited capacity (e.g. Koko, some apes). In more primitive forms, many
mammals are able to communicate in some form. These communications are structured. So I would consider our language abilities as a specialization of
these communication abilities. If you buy this, then we have had quite a while to evolve structures to deal with parsing in some form.
Yes, but if you believe that then you have invalidated your original arguement that mathematics is less automated. Animals can count (to some degree) and we have had just as long to evolve those abilities.
Using a stochastic context free grammer lets you assign probabilities to production rules in the grammar. More generally you can assign probabilities to
production rules in a context sensitive grammer to get a sense a of how often a given production is used.
When Prof Goldsmith presented that he was laughed off the stage. It's a poor approximation at best.
For
example, most people are to identify the syntactic elements in a nonsense sentence such as "The sdfjklds aaadjed fdfjdfj to fdjlfkdj." I would think a
psychological model of language would have problems with this and the ability of sentences/phrases to be perfectly correct while having no mean or a
contradictory meaning.
That is precisely the strength of a psychological model. The syntatic words match a pattern so you can identify the subject, predicate . . .
In addition, using a computer to parse language means that ultimately you need to express the parsing in an algorithmic procedure. Regardless of whether
language is a psychological construct or not, you will express it in terms of if/then or case statements. My assertion is that you can change these statements
into a generative grammar with associated probabilities.
A point I do not deny. However, I prefer to use a fuzzy logic algorithm than the conventional predicate logic one. Then, this does not yield a generative grammar.
I think the reason that parsing seems easy and math problems seem to be difficult is because our brains have evolved to deal
with parsing in an efficient manner.
Now here, I absolutely disagree with you. Our brains simply have not had enough time to develop for efficient language parsing. At best, language parsing is an 'arch'. Some of the features of phonetics have had the time (VOT for example) but not language parsing in general.
To tell the truth, using a generative
grammer is probably the best method available in computer science.
Precisely what I'm attempting to get at. A generative grammar tells you only all the possibilities (at best) but never any of the probabilities. A prototype grammar, one appearing in the early 80s called the sausage machine, would provide you with the main possibilities and all the probabilities. This would be much more useful in attempting mechanical translation.
It has a solid theoretical/mathematical framework . . .
And you've shown yourself to have bought Chomsky's line hook line and sinker by arguing this point. Language is not a mathematical construct, it is a psychological one.
I'm sure that others have tried using other methods to do translations/parsing but so far it hasn't been very successful.
I did a masters thesis explicity trying to find any such effort. The idioms and cultural references problems are not as difficult as you think when approached via a thesarus method system.
By the way, who moderated you up?????
Language processing really isn't that hard. Look at some of the people who do it. That may sound flippant but it obviously doesn't consume fast portions of normal people's brains to do it. Sure I slow down talking when dealing with complex driving problems but compare it to relatively basic mathematics which I can't do while driving (I mean more complex than long division.) Given an appropriate setting and some help, I could, by following several psycholinguistics methods that I worked on at the University of Chicago and access to an online thesarus based database, get working mechanical translation going within six months. Problem is I don't do generative linguistics and all of Noam Chomsky's followers would rather not have a working system than see his theories disproven.
The BIG problem is that no one has cracked the whole language problem so translation remains a very sketchy affair, typically a few coherent words, maybe a phrase or two occasionally a sentence comes out cogently. Nothing more even from the best of these systems.
There's a guy at MIT called Chomsky who's gummed up the whole works on computer based translation for over 30 years. He and his minions conduct character assasination on anyone who dares to do linguistics differently than them. Unfortunately, until that old man dies, a practical computer translation device is something you can keep wishing for but will never get.
Hitler had some very unusual dental work and even though his body was burned before being buried, it was possible to identify the remains by matching to the dental records.
Actually, the man in the image is 5'10" tall. While large for the time, hardly likely to have made him remarkable for his height. The back and front image don't match in height, they miss by less than an inch. The details are spatially consistent if you lie a body down on a flat cloth. Basically, the front of your body is bumpier than the back. The head problem you mention is consistent with the Jewish 'chinstrap' or 'toothache wrap'. This was common in other contemporary cultures: Confucius mentions his father wearing one (at his funeral.)
The Shroud is thought to have been brought back to Europe from Constantinople after the Fourth Crusade, c.1204. It was supposedly in the possesion of the Knights Templar. A descendant of one of their last officers is the first recorded owner of the Shroud. His widow did exhibit the Shroud quite frequently, much to the dismay of the local bishop who had less-spectacular relics to bring in pilgrims.
The Shroud has been displayed at pretty much a constant rate (a few times a century) and if anything is now less displayed than in the 14th century. Artists are no longer permitted private showings as was typical several centuries.
Incidently, unlike most of the other Shrouds, it is relatively easy to demonstrate thru both textile and pollen analysis that the Shroud of Turin was made, and exposed to air in the Middle East. Since it has never traveled there in it's recorded history, it must be about 50 years older than it's first showing. Thus pushing it's origins to the edges of it's supposed C-14 date.
How about locating the origins of the Ainu people (the original inhabitants of Japan) ? They appear almost Caucasian (at least to many Japanese) but they are really out of place for that. They now live mostly on Hokkaido in Japan.
How about trying to track down the descendants of the Anasazi people (Pueblo builders)? These ancient settlers of the American Southwest had an advanced culture and abandonded their cities very quickly (possibly due to drought.) Their name means 'ancient ones' implying that they are not direct progenitors of the current Native American population of the area. But this is a pretty hot topic.
Except for the fact that there are well-dated parchments with images of the Shroud of Turin from before the Carbon-14 date. This calls into question that process with two possible explanations of the error. Either, the Shroud's fibers have acquired a layer of bacteria on their external surface. Just a thin layer of relatively recent bacteria would throw the age calculations off precipitously. Because the origin of the image was a scorch and the Shroud has been nearly burnt several times in it's known history, the amount of carbon has been refreshed several times. This would fudge the date by several centuries.
Keep in mind noone has done extensive C-14 dating on textiles of this age before. Very few actually survive as long as the Shroud has or apparantly has. The iron pigment is from the touching of sacred paintings to the surface of the cloth. A common method of blessing icons and other religous items. The amount supposedly recovered and examined was trivial.
I absolutely agree that numbers matter. You don't ignore 30% of your base without paying for it. I would point out that although a significant number of Virginia's GOP voters counted themselves among the 'religous right', the numbers are considerably lower in a lot of other states, particularly the battleground states for national elections. My point is that high-tech workers could provide a significant factor in many battleground states and certainly affect multiple key congressional races. Control of the house this year will probably be decided by fewer than 50 races. That sounds like a lot but there are 435 total, so 11% of voters can affect change in the nation. If we organized, identified our issues, compared candidates and put forth suggested voting information which affected say 1% of voters in those districts, I can guarentee we would be considered in subsequent elections. One percent of 11% is fewer than 150,000 voters. If that many people said they considered 'geek' issues (and we need a better name) then solid consideration is certain. Is this beyond geek organization skills???????
What about the possibilitity of forming a high-tech workers special interest group. Both parties are heavily laden with them. Everyone from Gay Republicans to Black Moslem Democrats have well-organized groups, which actually do coordinate putting delegate rosters together, raising money and tend to act as voting blocks both nationally and at conventions and the like. This has one huge advantage over going libertarian or anarchist: it actually puts together a group that gets listened to by the big boys. If it works for the religous right, why not for tech?
is that baked potato you put in
the microwave during lunch still radioactive and exposing your stomach right now? no, of course not. basicly, same thing.
Well, basicly wrong. In fact, as a grunt grad student in space physics at UCLA in the 1980s, I helped perform these exact calculations. My background was radiation physics and radiation saftey (having just come from the IAEC in Vienna.) The baked potato was bombarded by relatively narrow bands of microwave energy and in a very moderate magnetic field. The Galileo probe has been continuously bombarded by everything from gamma radiation on down. Since metal is a crystaline structure, the metal atoms themselves have been taking a radioactive bombardment which has (if memory serves correctly) altered nearly one out of every 100 atoms in the crystal. I forget the tensile strength depression but it does mean that a substantial portion of the metal itself is now radioactive. The magnetic fields which Galileo has encountered have a cumulative molecular shearing effect on all the components which has further polarized the entire spacecraft. The net result being further molecular instability and radioactivity. Finally, because the engineers knew that no one would be coming near the plutonium reactor at the end of a boom on the probe, they didn't really bother to shield it particularly well. The leaking radiation from that alone would make the entire probe radioactive this long after launch.
If you're going to try and take the piss outta someone, learn your facts first. Oh and put that potato in a nuclear reactor and then a plasma bath and then eat it. You won't be around to send out more inane comments.
While your idea sounds nice it's impratical. First, the technology is so old it's not worth reusing. I worked on PVO data back in the mid-eighties and was amazed how hard the programming was. The computer had less power than in most calculators. Galileo, for all of it's success, has basically an Apple II hooked to a car battery which downloads power from nuclear waste. It's value as a probe is only in where it is and has virtually nil outside of that. Second, the systems are designed for one way trips. Because Galileo has been exposed to a plutonium reactor for the entire length of it's mission and has flown through some of the most intense radiation fields ever experienced, the entire probe is highly radioactive and would be extremely poisonous. While space techs will work in bad conditions, I doubt OHSA would permit as toxic an object to be worked on anywhere in the US. Third, if we signal it to turn around it has to get away from Jupiter and then keep transmitting until it's in Earth orbit. Thus wasting a long time in which it could gather more data. A soft landing in Earth orbit is virtually impossible unless a bunch of mid course corrections could be made requiring probe-controller interaction.
Don't forget that Galileo was initiated under Carter and set up under Reagan, two presidents who didn't believe in the PC cr*p that runs NASA under our current clown, I mean president. Johnson and Nixon didn't really like all the people at NASA but they valued results over conformity to rules of how society was supposed to work. Carter may have wanted to be liked but eventually turned to 'just get it done', Reagan didn't care except for results, Bush knew a little more about the process but enough to stay out of it. Clinton has politicized NASA just like the INS, the FBI and nearly every other government agency. And he wonders why he'll be considered one of the worst presidents of all time.
The internet could be the greatest means of really bringing democracy into the third world. Most of the world population does not live in a true reponsive democracy. Many countries may have elections but an election does not make a democracy. A free press, a high degree of literacy and a government where representation is accountable to the citizens make a democracy. By this standard Serbia does not count as a democracy.
The internet provides a mode of mass communication with, to be blunt, a fairly low level of literacy required. And it is relatively easy to examine the responsiveness of your representatives with the internet.
Hey, if Bill Clinton really cared about leaving a legacy he would have promoted a Peace Corps ISP system, bringing the internet at zero cost to sub-Saharan Africa and working with their governments to eventually take over the ISP functions.
If I won 10 million dollars on iwon, this is exactly what I'd do.
There are two basic problems getting people to Mars, or L4/5 or the moon or even the Space Station. One, getting people there, getting the stuff to support them there. If you want efficiency they should primarily be done on seperate systems. The Shuttle does little better than the Saturn for a hybrid system. People need fewer Gs and a generally safer ride. Stuff (a general other category) could most efficiently be launched via a linear acclerator. Bucket size is restricted and you need a system for catching in space but if Quark could do it why can't NASA.
Well, as if we needed another reason to throw the Clinton-Gore administration out. Here Clinton is trying to shore up support in the law enforcement community at the expense of individual rights.
I support the librarian view of this. That is: what you read, if you can read, whom you leave letters for is your private business and cannot be used against you. Note that the phone lines do not give such privacy. For over 40 years both the Chicago Police Department and the Fire Department have had instant traces in place for every incoming call. Instead of choosing one way or the other we should have both. Truly anonymous accounts for everyone and personal, fully traceable accounts in parallel. Personal accounts having more privledges. Note: this is not my idea, I borrow it from Ender's Game.
This technology, if as they suggest would like to target entire tissues, could be brought to bear against diseases such as irregular heart beats, diabetes, Marfan's syndrome, MS, Parkinson's and if he lives long enough could pull the chair out from under Stephen Hawkings.