I just want a journalist to tell me what happened. Do some research, so I can read it, because I don't have time to do it all myself. I don't want reporters to shove their ideology and viewpoint at me. That's what editorial pages are for.
Doesn't happen so much any more. Journalists are under far greater time pressure than they once were - editors expect them to write more in less time, to satisfy our new 24-hour news culture.
Doesn't happen so much any more? You're looking at the past with very rose tinted glasses - because it pretty much never happened. Newspapers have pretty much always been biased (any city of any size used to have both Democratic *and* Republican papers). The news cycle has been fast (trying to get scoops) for almost as long - especially back in the day when a newspaper might publish as many as eight issues in a single day, from the early edition (hitting the streets as early as 6AM) to the late edition (hitting the streets as late as 10-11PM).
The US has decided that the 6th Amendment was a bad idea. That jury trials just aren't worth it.
Um, no. It's not quite that simple. The US (the vox populi) doesn't like it's justice system to appear "soft on crime" - and the justice system doesn't like defendants going free on appeals because the court dockets are too full and they couldn't get a speedy trail because that too gives the appearance of being "soft on crime" (and not doing their jobs). Hence, the plea bargain system evolved to unclog the pipeline, save the taxpayer's money, and send the defendants to jail (all wildly popular with the vox populi).
Not to mention the increasing reluctance of the vox populi to actually serve on juries when called...
A Soviet invasion was also not that far out of the questions in the decades following WWII either.
Only if you consider an alien invasion not too far out of the question. The Soviets never really had any significant long range sealift or logistics capability*, or the aircraft carrier capability to provide the cover and support such an invasion would require.
* They pretty much had just enough to support a proxy war so long as they had access to an unopposed port (I.E. Haiphong), and that's about it.
The government (which is usually read "law enforcement" or "the court system") has *always* wanted your data - and via search warrant and/or subpoenas has *always* been able to either get it from third parties or to compel you to hand it over yourself. With increasing amounts of our lives involving the 'net, it should be about as surprising (and panic worthy) as the sun rising in the morning that the government is taking an interest in data located on the 'net.
As I said in reference to Google's transparency report the other day, the only surprising/interesting thing here is that the number is so small.
So first of all you've made a bunch of erroneous presumptions and the first is that I don't know what I'm talking about or bothered to study the subject.
When someone makes statements utterly at odds with reality, that's pretty clear evidence that they don't know what they're talking about. And do note that parroting buzzwords and misusing technological concepts (like heterodyning*, which does not work quite like you seem to think it does) is not the same as knowing what you're talking about.
there are folks here who are two and three sigma above average who will just embarrass you.
There are. You aren't one of them.
* Your link provides prima facie evidence that you lack the ability to discern the difference between idle and ill educated speculation and actual engineering possibility.
Basically, we're trading human life for slightly improved gas mileage, which certainly makes me want to fly on a carrier using airbus products instead of boeing products
If you think Airbus isn't doing the same thing, you're deluding yourself. Minimizing the fixed weight load is the name of the game in aircraft design, and has been for a very long time. (Ford, Mercedes-Benz, General Foods, and pretty much every other company too... You want cheap flights, cheap cars, and cheap breakfast cereal, you're going to pay for it.)
Even though every pound saved cuts thousands of pounds of fuel and carbon emissions over the plane's lifetime, this extra is small compared to the total plane mass, passengers and luggage.
*sigh* We've been through this before - yes, the total saved is small per flight. But multiply it out across the decades the plane will be in service and it adds up to a very substantial sum. To folks who have to actually pay the bills, this matters. Hell, to anyone with a basic understanding of accounting (rather than trying to "prove" how "smart" the are(n't)), this matters.
I would hope your thought is modded up. I had similar thoughts over the many years of both the Shuttle program and ISS. My goodness, those tanks could have been lifted that last leg and been retro-fitted as living or cargo space.
No, both of your "thoughts" should be modded down into oblivion - because they're fantasies borne of sheer ignorance.
To take a tank to orbit would require the Shuttle flying essentially empty of all other cargo. And once you've got the tanks in orbit, your problems have just begun... The ET's insulation isn't specced to survive on orbit, and it would take three to four flights (tossing away their tanks) just to put on a barrier to stop it from flaking off and becoming orbital debris. (And really, you want to remove and replace it, because it breaks down over time... so, yet more flights). Then you need some kind of robust debris protection, and thus another three to four flights (at least, and tossing their tanks away too). Now you need power, and environmental controls (five to eight flights, tossing their tanks)... And we haven't even started to consider attitude control and reboost, let alone installing anything useful inside the tank... (Oh, did I mention there's no airlock or other access? That will have to be provided too.)
Even if they did one out of ten the station would be far more robust.
Only if somehow, magically, it didn't require a dozen or more flights just to begin to turn the tank into something useful.
Logistics would be an issue in the beginning, but imagine just one tank turned into a hydroponics farm, another manufacturing.
Logistics never stops being an issue. A hydroponic farm would need steady inputs of various supplies to remain in operation. A manufacturing plant is pretty useless without raw materials, and pointless without a market...
Somewhere along the line We stopped thinking big.
No, using the tanks was examined several times in the early days... and the whole idea was eventually shelved when it became abundantly clear that it was much cheaper and easier to boost completed modules than it was to try and refit a tank on orbit.
Depends. What's the cost of something on Earth or in orbit? With $10k/lb (2.2 kilo-hectors I think) into orbit being low end for now, it could be worth it to set up mining and manufacturing in space.
What part of "There isn't a material known to exist in significant quantities in asteroids (let alone easily accessible to mining) that could possibly repay the cost of getting at it - even if access costs were a tenth of what they are." did you fail to understand?
There, everything is worth more so it may prove equitable to produce.
You seem to not have even the faintest grasp of basic economics.... it doesn't seem to have occurred to you that if there are no customers, it doesn't matter how cheap your output is in relationship to anyone else's output. (And spending a billion dollars to produce a few tons per year of output is equally stupid when there's just a few customers.)
Now, are there any economically feasible reasons to be up there, that would make financial sense to a banker on Earth? Probably not but bankers aren't the be-all and end-all of humanity. At least, I hope not.
Here in the real world, someone has to pay the bills. And that's the basic problem here, either you don't live in the real world, or you have absolutely no grasp of how it works.
Um, no. It doesn't work that way. In fact, that just makes your problem *worse* as now your output is more expensive because you have to pay for all that infrastructure.
There's no material present in significant quantities in asteroids that it's worth going and getting - period. Handwaving buzzwords about like a cargo cultist doesn't change that.
Building a large space station (say, 100x bigger than the ISS) would cost a silly amount of money if everything was lifted from Earth into orbit, but if you can get the raw materials into place from another source then some of the basics, like water and metals, become far, far cheaper, regardless of the Earthbound costs of these materials.
That's the theory - but given the cost of the infrastructure to convert those raw materials into a useful form... it's not at all clear that it will work out in reality. You can go down to your local home center and pick up bar stock cheap because they're turning out hundreds and thousands of tons a day (amortizing the cost of the infrastructure across decades of output) and power and transport is cheap. Neither condition applies on orbit.
It's not just about the price of minerals increasing...the cost of retrieval is decreasing at the same time. We're probably not there yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if we could come close to breaking even if we could snag a fairly large asteroid with a good composition.
There isn't a material known to exist in significant quantities in asteroids (let alone easily accessible to mining) that could possibly repay the cost of getting at it - even if access costs were a tenth of what they are.
This video is incredible in that it gives you a detailed peek at what is possible from a single aircraft and the amount of data-processing that can be done in real time.
There's no clear indication in the video that any processing (beyond possibly creating the mosaic, which is pretty straightforward computationally) is taking place in real time. They talk about ARGUS, but they're pretty cagey about differentiating between the front end on the UAV and the back end on the ground. (And there's no immediate way to tell if the data on the big screen is live or post processed or a rigged demo.) The system *is* impressive, but they actually tell you much less about it than you might think.
One would think there would be a way to convert the waste heat to let's say microwaves and shoot them at the moon.
Why would one think that?
The problem is, at the scale of a city, the waste heat is pretty low quality - both the delta and the density are very, very low. Even if you could capture it at the point source, the density is still very low and the delta generally not very large, meaning that there is no effective way to collect and concentrate it.
Create superconductive heat pipes under superconductive electrical transmission and maglev freeways for robot driven cars? Hey, if your going to think about the future, really think about the future. We now have high quality carbon thread, that has very high conductance (comparable to metal) and in theory could be the material upon which to base a room temperature superconductor (also thermal superconductor), and with the proper infrastructure surrounding cities the problems of power, heat and pollution would be technologically tractable problems.
Um... heat pipes don't work like that. They aren't solids that transmit heat hither and yon over significant distances like it was water. Nor could you effectively make one because of the massive amounts of insulation required to prevent most of the heat collected from re-radiating right back into the environment.
Hey, if your going to think about the future, really think about the future.
One cannot effectively or usefully think unless one has taken the effort to educate oneself on the necessary background material. If one is too lazy to do that, try asking questions rather than making statements.
Before the internet, PC's were a tool and not just a screen to get you to what someone else already had made. You got a PC because you wanted to make things.
TFTFY - you're not the first person to confuse PC's and computers.
All you could consume on computers in the pre-internet age were games
So actually what you meant - "before the internet you bought a PC to make stuff, unless you wanted to play games"... But, that's not really true. Long before the internet you could buy things like recipe databases, etc... (And though you dismiss them, people did buy PC's form game - by the truckload.)
Computers were mainly purchased by those who wanted to use them as a tool for creative and practical purposes.
You've also forgotten databases, and spreadsheets, and accounting programs.... and truckloads of other 'tool' software.
You either didn't actually live through the pre-internet PC days, or you're remembering a golden age that never actually existed.
the 'reasons to be skeptical' weren't by a journalist and had a bit more meat than "doesn't *quite* fit the received wisdom and thus is fodder for the deniers".
For young people (those still looking for a mate, in particular), taking a factory job would be a big blow to their status, regardless of the level of pay. Better an unemployed white collar professional than an employed manufacturing worker, welder, or truck driver.
And, at least in the US, that's a huge change over the last few decades. When I was growing up, having a job "down at the plant" was a huge status symbol and being unemployed was seen as being a failure.
To be fair, at 25 years old and over 200 games bought on steam I think I fit the target market for PC games pretty squarely
You're in the target market for PC games, but having a six your old computer - you're probably not in the target for high performance PC hardware. There's a great deal of overlap between the two, but they are not identical sets.
Do you re-write history, or just ignore history much?
If you're taking someone to task for ignoring or re-writing history... You shouldn't be committing the same error.
You're forgetting or ignoring the fact that Iraq did have and used chemical weapons. You're forgetting or ignoring the fact that Iraq did have an active WMD program, both nukes and chemicals. You're forgetting or ignoring the fact that Saddam took every action possible to frustrate and thwart the inspectors in such a manner as to give every impression he was continuing to hide something.
In the end, no, there were no WMD - but Saddam acted like a guy with a gun in his pocket (as opposed to just his hand formed into a gun-like shape) and did practically everything in his power to goad the West because he was threatened from within and without if he didn't. Let's not forget that fact and the other facts because they're inconvenient to your handwaving and smokeblowing.
The nearest NK ICBM bunker would be slightly more than 35 miles from Seoul. Please explain how these nukes work that could destroy such a bunker, but not kill most of the 2.4 million people in Seoul.
Trivially - because the nukes from an Ohio are at most 475kt. The proof is left to anyone with sufficient intelligence to google for a nuclear weapons effect calculator.
Their nukes are the still huge. Think old 40s nuclear test stands. You aren't walking that anywhere. It would never fit in a sub.
The largest and heaviest nukes ever built could easily be fit into something not significantly larger than North Korea's domestically produced Sang-O class submarine. It would require some modest re-engineering, and it wouldn't be a comfortable trip for the crew, but it would be doable.
There's a variety of very good reasons why they probably wouldn't... but the size of the weapon isn't among them.
Five multi-megaton warheads capable of hitting the US West Coast is serious.
It's extraordinarily unlikely that the North Koreans have weapons in that range. You can't get there with a pure fission weapon,or with boosted fission, or even with a crude ('Alarm Clock'/'Sloika') fusion device... The only way to get there, barring previously unknown physics, is a staged Teller-Ulam configuration - something that's essentially impossible without significant nuclear weapons experience or external assistance.
Furthermore, a multi-megaton weapon is *big* and *heavy*, bigger and heavier than could be boosted by any launch vehicle demonstrated to date by North Korea. Assuming they aren't entirely stupid (and I doubt they are on this matter), the best they can probably do is in the mid tens of kilotons, and the low tens is much more likely for a weaponized ballistically deliverable device. But the 2006 'fizzle' and the lack of demonstration of any delivery capability mitigate against both yield and deliverability.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't happen so much any more? You're looking at the past with very rose tinted glasses - because it pretty much never happened. Newspapers have pretty much always been biased (any city of any size used to have both Democratic *and* Republican papers). The news cycle has been fast (trying to get scoops) for almost as long - especially back in the day when a newspaper might publish as many as eight issues in a single day, from the early edition (hitting the streets as early as 6AM) to the late edition (hitting the streets as late as 10-11PM).
Um, no. It's not quite that simple. The US (the vox populi) doesn't like it's justice system to appear "soft on crime" - and the justice system doesn't like defendants going free on appeals because the court dockets are too full and they couldn't get a speedy trail because that too gives the appearance of being "soft on crime" (and not doing their jobs). Hence, the plea bargain system evolved to unclog the pipeline, save the taxpayer's money, and send the defendants to jail (all wildly popular with the vox populi).
Not to mention the increasing reluctance of the vox populi to actually serve on juries when called...
An equally old saying: "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time".
Only if you consider an alien invasion not too far out of the question. The Soviets never really had any significant long range sealift or logistics capability*, or the aircraft carrier capability to provide the cover and support such an invasion would require.
* They pretty much had just enough to support a proxy war so long as they had access to an unopposed port (I.E. Haiphong), and that's about it.
The government (which is usually read "law enforcement" or "the court system") has *always* wanted your data - and via search warrant and/or subpoenas has *always* been able to either get it from third parties or to compel you to hand it over yourself. With increasing amounts of our lives involving the 'net, it should be about as surprising (and panic worthy) as the sun rising in the morning that the government is taking an interest in data located on the 'net.
As I said in reference to Google's transparency report the other day, the only surprising/interesting thing here is that the number is so small.
When someone makes statements utterly at odds with reality, that's pretty clear evidence that they don't know what they're talking about. And do note that parroting buzzwords and misusing technological concepts (like heterodyning*, which does not work quite like you seem to think it does) is not the same as knowing what you're talking about.
There are. You aren't one of them.
* Your link provides prima facie evidence that you lack the ability to discern the difference between idle and ill educated speculation and actual engineering possibility.
If you think Airbus isn't doing the same thing, you're deluding yourself. Minimizing the fixed weight load is the name of the game in aircraft design, and has been for a very long time. (Ford, Mercedes-Benz, General Foods, and pretty much every other company too... You want cheap flights, cheap cars, and cheap breakfast cereal, you're going to pay for it.)
*sigh* We've been through this before - yes, the total saved is small per flight. But multiply it out across the decades the plane will be in service and it adds up to a very substantial sum. To folks who have to actually pay the bills, this matters. Hell, to anyone with a basic understanding of accounting (rather than trying to "prove" how "smart" the are(n't)), this matters.
can it read any of the modern camera RAW formats or use any modern plug ins? If not, what can it do that GIMP cannot? What's the point.
No, both of your "thoughts" should be modded down into oblivion - because they're fantasies borne of sheer ignorance.
To take a tank to orbit would require the Shuttle flying essentially empty of all other cargo. And once you've got the tanks in orbit, your problems have just begun... The ET's insulation isn't specced to survive on orbit, and it would take three to four flights (tossing away their tanks) just to put on a barrier to stop it from flaking off and becoming orbital debris. (And really, you want to remove and replace it, because it breaks down over time... so, yet more flights). Then you need some kind of robust debris protection, and thus another three to four flights (at least, and tossing their tanks away too). Now you need power, and environmental controls (five to eight flights, tossing their tanks)... And we haven't even started to consider attitude control and reboost, let alone installing anything useful inside the tank... (Oh, did I mention there's no airlock or other access? That will have to be provided too.)
Only if somehow, magically, it didn't require a dozen or more flights just to begin to turn the tank into something useful.
Logistics never stops being an issue. A hydroponic farm would need steady inputs of various supplies to remain in operation. A manufacturing plant is pretty useless without raw materials, and pointless without a market...
No, using the tanks was examined several times in the early days... and the whole idea was eventually shelved when it became abundantly clear that it was much cheaper and easier to boost completed modules than it was to try and refit a tank on orbit.
What part of "There isn't a material known to exist in significant quantities in asteroids (let alone easily accessible to mining) that could possibly repay the cost of getting at it - even if access costs were a tenth of what they are." did you fail to understand?
You seem to not have even the faintest grasp of basic economics.... it doesn't seem to have occurred to you that if there are no customers, it doesn't matter how cheap your output is in relationship to anyone else's output. (And spending a billion dollars to produce a few tons per year of output is equally stupid when there's just a few customers.)
Here in the real world, someone has to pay the bills. And that's the basic problem here, either you don't live in the real world, or you have absolutely no grasp of how it works.
Um, no. It doesn't work that way. In fact, that just makes your problem *worse* as now your output is more expensive because you have to pay for all that infrastructure.
There's no material present in significant quantities in asteroids that it's worth going and getting - period. Handwaving buzzwords about like a cargo cultist doesn't change that.
A lot of ice water in asteroids? Almost certainly not considering how vanishingly rare ice asteroids are to date.
Not that water could repay the cost of getting at it anyhow.
That's the theory - but given the cost of the infrastructure to convert those raw materials into a useful form... it's not at all clear that it will work out in reality. You can go down to your local home center and pick up bar stock cheap because they're turning out hundreds and thousands of tons a day (amortizing the cost of the infrastructure across decades of output) and power and transport is cheap. Neither condition applies on orbit.
There isn't a material known to exist in significant quantities in asteroids (let alone easily accessible to mining) that could possibly repay the cost of getting at it - even if access costs were a tenth of what they are.
There's no clear indication in the video that any processing (beyond possibly creating the mosaic, which is pretty straightforward computationally) is taking place in real time. They talk about ARGUS, but they're pretty cagey about differentiating between the front end on the UAV and the back end on the ground. (And there's no immediate way to tell if the data on the big screen is live or post processed or a rigged demo.) The system *is* impressive, but they actually tell you much less about it than you might think.
Why would one think that?
The problem is, at the scale of a city, the waste heat is pretty low quality - both the delta and the density are very, very low. Even if you could capture it at the point source, the density is still very low and the delta generally not very large, meaning that there is no effective way to collect and concentrate it.
Um... heat pipes don't work like that. They aren't solids that transmit heat hither and yon over significant distances like it was water. Nor could you effectively make one because of the massive amounts of insulation required to prevent most of the heat collected from re-radiating right back into the environment.
One cannot effectively or usefully think unless one has taken the effort to educate oneself on the necessary background material. If one is too lazy to do that, try asking questions rather than making statements.
TFTFY - you're not the first person to confuse PC's and computers.
So actually what you meant - "before the internet you bought a PC to make stuff, unless you wanted to play games"... But, that's not really true. Long before the internet you could buy things like recipe databases, etc... (And though you dismiss them, people did buy PC's form game - by the truckload.)
You've also forgotten databases, and spreadsheets, and accounting programs.... and truckloads of other 'tool' software.
You either didn't actually live through the pre-internet PC days, or you're remembering a golden age that never actually existed.
the 'reasons to be skeptical' weren't by a journalist and had a bit more meat than "doesn't *quite* fit the received wisdom and thus is fodder for the deniers".
And, at least in the US, that's a huge change over the last few decades. When I was growing up, having a job "down at the plant" was a huge status symbol and being unemployed was seen as being a failure.
You're in the target market for PC games, but having a six your old computer - you're probably not in the target for high performance PC hardware. There's a great deal of overlap between the two, but they are not identical sets.
If you're taking someone to task for ignoring or re-writing history... You shouldn't be committing the same error.
You're forgetting or ignoring the fact that Iraq did have and used chemical weapons. You're forgetting or ignoring the fact that Iraq did have an active WMD program, both nukes and chemicals. You're forgetting or ignoring the fact that Saddam took every action possible to frustrate and thwart the inspectors in such a manner as to give every impression he was continuing to hide something.
In the end, no, there were no WMD - but Saddam acted like a guy with a gun in his pocket (as opposed to just his hand formed into a gun-like shape) and did practically everything in his power to goad the West because he was threatened from within and without if he didn't. Let's not forget that fact and the other facts because they're inconvenient to your handwaving and smokeblowing.
Trivially - because the nukes from an Ohio are at most 475kt. The proof is left to anyone with sufficient intelligence to google for a nuclear weapons effect calculator.
The largest and heaviest nukes ever built could easily be fit into something not significantly larger than North Korea's domestically produced Sang-O class submarine. It would require some modest re-engineering, and it wouldn't be a comfortable trip for the crew, but it would be doable.
There's a variety of very good reasons why they probably wouldn't... but the size of the weapon isn't among them.
It's extraordinarily unlikely that the North Koreans have weapons in that range. You can't get there with a pure fission weapon,or with boosted fission, or even with a crude ('Alarm Clock'/'Sloika') fusion device... The only way to get there, barring previously unknown physics, is a staged Teller-Ulam configuration - something that's essentially impossible without significant nuclear weapons experience or external assistance.
Furthermore, a multi-megaton weapon is *big* and *heavy*, bigger and heavier than could be boosted by any launch vehicle demonstrated to date by North Korea. Assuming they aren't entirely stupid (and I doubt they are on this matter), the best they can probably do is in the mid tens of kilotons, and the low tens is much more likely for a weaponized ballistically deliverable device. But the 2006 'fizzle' and the lack of demonstration of any delivery capability mitigate against both yield and deliverability.