Of course the car thieves will have no way to just remove that chip on stolen cars...
That depends on the type of thief doesn't it? Dumb ass thieves, the same kind that don't change out license plates won't change out chips either. Smarter thieves however, will.
Not really. You assume that the decision is left to the computer, which is obviously nonsense.
No, I assume that there exists many situations where the human won't be paying attention - and thus the decision is by default left to the computer.
apparently, statistically speaking, the robot is still driving safer than an average human.
That's like flipping a coin once and judging that since you came up heads the coin has two of them. I.E. you're judging from a ridiculously small sample size.
I've noticed that non-geeks seem to have a very difficult time separating facts from opinions or feelings.
Read Slashdot for a week or two, and you'll notice that geeks, except on fanboi topics, are really no different than normal people..
On the other hand those on the autism spectrum tend to have an internal citations list.
Those properly diagnosed with autism, or those self diagnosed? I.E., you pretty much fail your own claim that geeks are somehow better than normal people - because you've already decided that geeks have "feature x" and "feature x" makes people behave in "manner y".
By driving with a human inside who can be notified and take over when the robot is confused.
This is one of those things that sounds like it can be handled easily - resulting in smart ass quips like yours. The reality is rather different however.
Autonomous driving does not mean that the car is out on its own.
No, it doesn't. But it also doesn't mean the driver is sitting at the controls instantly ready to take over on a moments notice.
Making the assumption that the system is capable of detecting the situation and correctly evaluating it as anomalous (a non trivial assumption)... Then the key problem is time, as in "is there enough of it for the human to take over?". Unless the driver already has his hands on the wheel and sufficient situational awareness to avoid the situation, it's going to take as much as ten to twenty seconds for the driver to be able to take over. (Put down tablet and/or coffee, scan the surrounding while reaching for the controls, etc.. etc...) That's a very long time.
We don't even know half the nuclear stuff that the Pentagon did back in the '60s, why are you so sure that we know everything that the Kremlin did?
Because of the various test ban treaty requirements - we know a great deal of what both Kremlin and Pentagon did back in 60's. (I.E. just because you don't know, doesn't mean bomb geeks and specialists don't.) In addition, the US released a great deal of information because public (I.E. Soviet) knowledge of things like yields and general accuracy are part of what made deterrence and MAD work.
I would actually be shocked to find that the US hadn't built something similar or larger, just because of the eternal dick-wagging competition that every general spends his life doing.
I would be - because such a weapon is practically useless from a military point of view. (Remember, weight scales [roughly] linearly with yield, but destructive power scales with the square root of yield.) Additionally, it consumes the nuclear fuel that can much more usefully be employed in a considerable number of smaller bombs. (There's a reason why the US has, generally speaking, steadily replaced large bombs with smaller ones.) And then, once again, we run up against the problem that keeping such a weapon secret runs counter to the general doctrines of deterrence and MAD. Or to put it another way, there's every reason to believe that the US didn't build such a bomb, and outside of general ignorance and stereotyping... no reason to assume they did.
Actually, there was a real, sensible (as things go in the field of nuclear deterrent) reason for them: The USSR did not at the time have anything that could deliver a payload with precision.
True. But while the size and weight of a weapon scale (roughly) linearly with yield (within a design generation), the destructive power scales with the square root of the yield. Or, to but it another way, bombs get bigger and heavier faster than they get more destructive. Which means that really big bombs hurt you by compromising delivery capability (I.E. heavier bombs reduce range) far more than they aid you by adding additional destructive power. On top of that, 5-10 megatons is sufficient to destroy most non hardened targets, even with a miss distance on the order of 5 miles or so. (And most targets of interest are in fact non hardened.)
If you examine a list of Soviet atmospheric tests (covering most of the "limited accuracy" and "large slow bombers" phase), this is borne out. Most weapons they tested were far smaller, and the next largest after Tsar Bomba has barely half the yield.
In the fashion, if you examine a list of US nuclear weapons, you find that even the most inaccurate delivery systems only have a yield in the low megaton range.
No, the OP is correct - large weapons, and especially the Tsar Bomba, were largely lunacy... their sizes driven by dick waving rather than military requirements.
Well, I am a bomb geek and Tsar Bomba (the bomb geeks name for Big Ivan), or at least the 50MT version, is in fact the largest bomb known to be ever made. Only a single 50MT device was ever assembled, and no full yield (100MT) was ever assembled.
I've been watching climate change debates most of my life.
You may been watching, but you haven't been paying attention. The "new Ice Age" came first, and was completely media hype - with absolutely no evidence. Nuclear winter came next, but with only a modest amount of data (which relied on some pretty big assumptions) and great deal of hype.
I think Katrina demonstrated that a properly aimed cat 3 can do tons of damage.
Along the coastline and in low lying areas - yes. On higher ground and far from the coast (I.E. where Amazon and Facebook's servers are).... not so much.
Flickr does have a great deal of momentum and first class (or near first class) status- but it's among the more serious photographers rather than the cell phone toting crowd. Yahoo! is currently in the process of squandering that momentum and reputation though, through a series of ill-conceived and ill-executed UI changes.
Eh. So it was Carter turned off ALSEP rather than Reagan, thanks for the correction. Still a frelling politician decided for no logical reason that rather than leave it running and able to transmit data to anyone with an antenna.
Which part of non functional and practically dying were you too stoned to grasp? Not that 'anyone with an antenna' could have received the signals anyhow, they were extremely low power.
The Society rounded up funding and temporary storage in a race against the politicians (I know, I contributed).
Your memory and grasp on reality has already been shown to be faulty. I've been following space issues for decades, and never heard any such thing. So, sans cite, I'm writing this off as another of your delusions.
I mean that's cool and all, but I think the more significant piece is that the landing was accurate to within 2km with a journey covering nine months and somewhere roughly around 200m km.
Well, they weren't "accurate within 2km" in the conventional sense - which would mean they came down within 2km of a designated point. Curiosity didn't have a designated point, it had an eclipse and NASA would have been "on target" and considered a success regardless of where it landed in the eclipse. (The far edge of the landing eclipse was almost 10km from the touchdown point.)
Scale that down to something we can actually comprehend, and it's using autopilot for 100km and being accurate to within 1mm.
Not quite. There were several course corrections calculated on the ground and sent to and executed by the probe - the last of which was on July 29th. On top of that, the last update of the guidance and flight control system parameters was on August 4th. So, it was only really on autopilot for a little over a week - and still the landing depended on last minute updates to the data used by the autopilot.
Don't get me wrong, it's still a fantastic accomplishment... but let's get our facts straight.
I was too young to have known about that happening, but I remember Ronnie Raygun ordering the siesmometers on the Moon turned off.
Well, your memory is false - the ALSEP packages were turned off in 1977. (They were dying and practically non functional anyways.)
The only reason that they have a likely solution to the Pioneer Anomaly is that some NASA administrators disobeyed orders and handed the tapes over to the Planetary Society.
Um, no. NASA provided the tapes for the Planetary Society because NASA didn't have the budget (or the interest) in converting the old tapes. After the conversion, it was JPL (a NASA agency) that performed the analysis.
This sort of thing always confuses me, as I can't think of any rational reason for it.
You're not "confused", you're "utterly and completely disconnected from reality".
No, I'm a fan of proper writing and understand (as you obviously do not) the difference between a question and a statement - the post title is irrelevant.
Yes and no. The slingshot or "free-return" method was taken out of the default mission starting with Apollo 12 because it was believed that they could achieve a more accurate orbital path, and thereby lunar landing, that way. Remember that the Apollo 11 landing occurred roughly four miles off target, but it was the only one of the six eventual landings that didn't land where they'd planned.
Yes and no. Apollo 12 and subsequent missions departed from free return because free return sharply limited the available landing sites.
Apollo 11 landed off target for a variety of reasons (not fully understanding the effects of mascons, and some errors in powered descent trajectory programming among them), but the free return trajectory was not a factor.
This isn't anything new, anytime you take something from the extreme cold and bring it inside you risk condensation. This is usually dealt with by simply letting something sit at room temperature for several hours before powering it on.
True. But what you're forgetting (generously assuming you knew it in the first place) is that condensation isn't the only issue. Servers are made of a variety of materials - all of which expand and contract with temperature at different rates. Extreme cold can actually physically damage equipment by pulling pins from sockets, cracking PCB traces, etc... etc... That damage (obviously) can't be fixed just by letting it sit in at room temperature for several hours.
Just a bit of trivia since Mars landers and rovers are in the news today... it was the lenses in the PanCams that set the lower temperature bound for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers - the lens mounts shrunk faster than the lenses, and eventually would shrink enough to crack the lenses.
So is your entire post. No orders came from any president to 'destroy the documentation', it all went into archives where engineers and historians have happily mining it ever since. NASA has also put tons of it online in various places. Here's the results of a search for "Apollo Guidance" on just one of them... Here's a story about NASA using Apollo era documentation for the Constellation program. (And here's a link to some of the experience reports mentioned in the story.)
Sling shot was always the option for emergency and in fact was actually tested on Apollo 8.
Um, no it wasn't. Apollo 8 went into orbit, it did not slingshot.
As to using the LEM for lifeboat, that sort of was invented by the Astronauts at the time.
No, it wasn't. The LEM Lifeboat scenario was first studied around (IIRC) 1967 and was well documented.
Etc... etc...
We see all sorts of rewrite of history crap going on now days and I wish people would quit listening to it.
This from the guy who got almost every single claim verifiable against historical references wrong?
But you blew it by phrasing your text the way you did - which states that you believe it to be true. No questions, just a flat statement that you hope NASA releases the name.
Well, it did have something to do with the explosion and it's aftermath... they had deep doubts about the condition of the service module's engine and control systems - and to use it, they'd have to power up the command module anyhow. Which actually makes the story even more dubious, as it's unlikely some MIT student knew the details and condition of the spacecraft's guts (at a time when Mission Control was still figuring it out). From the explosion to the first course correction (which put them back on the free-return slingshot) was only five hours... and IIRC the decision was made within two or three hours.
The good science fiction writers merely use the future to explore the issues of the present and their implications as a background to a story he hopes to sell so he can pay the rent and buy food.
There, fixed that for you.
Science fiction keeps getting put up on some kind of pedestal, and people keep forgetting that it's primary goal is to be entertaining enough to induce people to part with their hard earned cash. Science fiction authors are neither mystics nor prophets, they're entertainers.
Not to mention, they've missed far more often than they hit.
I hope NASA does the right thing and releases the fellow's name.
What I find dismaying is that you, and Reddit, and probably most of the rest of the 'net have already judged that a junior PR staffer not connected with mission control is telling the truth - and without any evidence or even bothering to ask if this is plausible, are pronouncing NASA guilty.
Slashdot Mirror
That depends on the type of thief doesn't it? Dumb ass thieves, the same kind that don't change out license plates won't change out chips either. Smarter thieves however, will.
No, I assume that there exists many situations where the human won't be paying attention - and thus the decision is by default left to the computer.
That's like flipping a coin once and judging that since you came up heads the coin has two of them. I.E. you're judging from a ridiculously small sample size.
Read Slashdot for a week or two, and you'll notice that geeks, except on fanboi topics, are really no different than normal people..
Those properly diagnosed with autism, or those self diagnosed? I.E., you pretty much fail your own claim that geeks are somehow better than normal people - because you've already decided that geeks have "feature x" and "feature x" makes people behave in "manner y".
This is one of those things that sounds like it can be handled easily - resulting in smart ass quips like yours. The reality is rather different however.
No, it doesn't. But it also doesn't mean the driver is sitting at the controls instantly ready to take over on a moments notice.
Making the assumption that the system is capable of detecting the situation and correctly evaluating it as anomalous (a non trivial assumption)... Then the key problem is time, as in "is there enough of it for the human to take over?". Unless the driver already has his hands on the wheel and sufficient situational awareness to avoid the situation, it's going to take as much as ten to twenty seconds for the driver to be able to take over. (Put down tablet and/or coffee, scan the surrounding while reaching for the controls, etc.. etc...) That's a very long time.
Because of the various test ban treaty requirements - we know a great deal of what both Kremlin and Pentagon did back in 60's. (I.E. just because you don't know, doesn't mean bomb geeks and specialists don't.) In addition, the US released a great deal of information because public (I.E. Soviet) knowledge of things like yields and general accuracy are part of what made deterrence and MAD work.
I would be - because such a weapon is practically useless from a military point of view. (Remember, weight scales [roughly] linearly with yield, but destructive power scales with the square root of yield.) Additionally, it consumes the nuclear fuel that can much more usefully be employed in a considerable number of smaller bombs. (There's a reason why the US has, generally speaking, steadily replaced large bombs with smaller ones.) And then, once again, we run up against the problem that keeping such a weapon secret runs counter to the general doctrines of deterrence and MAD. Or to put it another way, there's every reason to believe that the US didn't build such a bomb, and outside of general ignorance and stereotyping... no reason to assume they did.
True. But while the size and weight of a weapon scale (roughly) linearly with yield (within a design generation), the destructive power scales with the square root of the yield. Or, to but it another way, bombs get bigger and heavier faster than they get more destructive. Which means that really big bombs hurt you by compromising delivery capability (I.E. heavier bombs reduce range) far more than they aid you by adding additional destructive power. On top of that, 5-10 megatons is sufficient to destroy most non hardened targets, even with a miss distance on the order of 5 miles or so. (And most targets of interest are in fact non hardened.)
If you examine a list of Soviet atmospheric tests (covering most of the "limited accuracy" and "large slow bombers" phase), this is borne out. Most weapons they tested were far smaller, and the next largest after Tsar Bomba has barely half the yield.
In the fashion, if you examine a list of US nuclear weapons, you find that even the most inaccurate delivery systems only have a yield in the low megaton range.
No, the OP is correct - large weapons, and especially the Tsar Bomba, were largely lunacy... their sizes driven by dick waving rather than military requirements.
You're wrong. Just sayin'.
"The biggest bomb ever detonated on earth" is the biggest one ever built - the full yield version was never built.
Well, I am a bomb geek and Tsar Bomba (the bomb geeks name for Big Ivan), or at least the 50MT version, is in fact the largest bomb known to be ever made. Only a single 50MT device was ever assembled, and no full yield (100MT) was ever assembled.
You may been watching, but you haven't been paying attention. The "new Ice Age" came first, and was completely media hype - with absolutely no evidence. Nuclear winter came next, but with only a modest amount of data (which relied on some pretty big assumptions) and great deal of hype.
Maybe in the part of Canada you're in. But do keep in mind that Canada spans an entire continent...
Along the coastline and in low lying areas - yes. On higher ground and far from the coast (I.E. where Amazon and Facebook's servers are).... not so much.
Flickr does have a great deal of momentum and first class (or near first class) status- but it's among the more serious photographers rather than the cell phone toting crowd. Yahoo! is currently in the process of squandering that momentum and reputation though, through a series of ill-conceived and ill-executed UI changes.
Which part of non functional and practically dying were you too stoned to grasp? Not that 'anyone with an antenna' could have received the signals anyhow, they were extremely low power.
Your memory and grasp on reality has already been shown to be faulty. I've been following space issues for decades, and never heard any such thing. So, sans cite, I'm writing this off as another of your delusions.
Well, they weren't "accurate within 2km" in the conventional sense - which would mean they came down within 2km of a designated point. Curiosity didn't have a designated point, it had an eclipse and NASA would have been "on target" and considered a success regardless of where it landed in the eclipse. (The far edge of the landing eclipse was almost 10km from the touchdown point.)
Not quite. There were several course corrections calculated on the ground and sent to and executed by the probe - the last of which was on July 29th. On top of that, the last update of the guidance and flight control system parameters was on August 4th. So, it was only really on autopilot for a little over a week - and still the landing depended on last minute updates to the data used by the autopilot.
Don't get me wrong, it's still a fantastic accomplishment... but let's get our facts straight.
Well, your memory is false - the ALSEP packages were turned off in 1977. (They were dying and practically non functional anyways.)
Um, no. NASA provided the tapes for the Planetary Society because NASA didn't have the budget (or the interest) in converting the old tapes. After the conversion, it was JPL (a NASA agency) that performed the analysis.
You're not "confused", you're "utterly and completely disconnected from reality".
No, I'm a fan of proper writing and understand (as you obviously do not) the difference between a question and a statement - the post title is irrelevant.
Yes and no. Apollo 12 and subsequent missions departed from free return because free return sharply limited the available landing sites.
Apollo 11 landed off target for a variety of reasons (not fully understanding the effects of mascons, and some errors in powered descent trajectory programming among them), but the free return trajectory was not a factor.
True. But what you're forgetting (generously assuming you knew it in the first place) is that condensation isn't the only issue. Servers are made of a variety of materials - all of which expand and contract with temperature at different rates. Extreme cold can actually physically damage equipment by pulling pins from sockets, cracking PCB traces, etc... etc... That damage (obviously) can't be fixed just by letting it sit in at room temperature for several hours.
Just a bit of trivia since Mars landers and rovers are in the news today... it was the lenses in the PanCams that set the lower temperature bound for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers - the lens mounts shrunk faster than the lenses, and eventually would shrink enough to crack the lenses.
No, we have the same type of humor here in America too. I wouldn't expect provincial jackasses to understand that though.
So is your entire post. No orders came from any president to 'destroy the documentation', it all went into archives where engineers and historians have happily mining it ever since. NASA has also put tons of it online in various places. Here's the results of a search for "Apollo Guidance" on just one of them... Here's a story about NASA using Apollo era documentation for the Constellation program. (And here's a link to some of the experience reports mentioned in the story.)
Um, no it wasn't. Apollo 8 went into orbit, it did not slingshot.
No, it wasn't. The LEM Lifeboat scenario was first studied around (IIRC) 1967 and was well documented.
Etc... etc...
This from the guy who got almost every single claim verifiable against historical references wrong?
Had I mentioned Picasso, or any of the others, you'd have a point. But, in actuallity, you're just blowing ignorant bullshit.
Sometimes. Other times Democrat or Independent. Never Libertarian and only rarely for fringe one plank parties.
But you blew it by phrasing your text the way you did - which states that you believe it to be true. No questions, just a flat statement that you hope NASA releases the name.
Well, it did have something to do with the explosion and it's aftermath... they had deep doubts about the condition of the service module's engine and control systems - and to use it, they'd have to power up the command module anyhow. Which actually makes the story even more dubious, as it's unlikely some MIT student knew the details and condition of the spacecraft's guts (at a time when Mission Control was still figuring it out). From the explosion to the first course correction (which put them back on the free-return slingshot) was only five hours... and IIRC the decision was made within two or three hours.
There, fixed that for you.
Science fiction keeps getting put up on some kind of pedestal, and people keep forgetting that it's primary goal is to be entertaining enough to induce people to part with their hard earned cash. Science fiction authors are neither mystics nor prophets, they're entertainers.
Not to mention, they've missed far more often than they hit.
What I find dismaying is that you, and Reddit, and probably most of the rest of the 'net have already judged that a junior PR staffer not connected with mission control is telling the truth - and without any evidence or even bothering to ask if this is plausible, are pronouncing NASA guilty.