Only case in point you really need to know is that the guy who invented the cell phone (and I forget his name right now, one of the engineers at Motorola) has gone on record many times as saying the cell phone would not exist today if not for Star Trek. He set out to make the Star Trek communicator and that led to the first handheld cell phone.
There was actually a TV show on the Discovery Channel (IIRC) called "The Science of Star Trek" that talked about all this, and lots more.
He can claim that all he wants - doesn't make it true. Radiotelephones were invented in the 40's by Ma Bell, and the concept of cellular phones was invented by Ma Bell in 1970. What Martin Cooper did was create a handset using technology invented by someone else that worked with a system invented by someone else.
Now, creating a practical handset is important - but creating a handset isn't "inventing the cellular phone". The cellular system had already been invented, by someone else. Progress towards it had started twenty plus years before Star Trek aired.
Or, in other words, you shouldn't trust TV shows for science - or history.
If you've read enough Tom Clancy novels, you know that these types of satellites are terrific for passively recording movement of vehicles and (specks that are people), and running the tape backward after an event to see where the perpetrators originated from. Then you run the tape forward and catch the perp's.
There's all manner of things in Tom Clancy novels - some of them are even true. This particular one isn't, because satellites aren't over one area long enough to do so. (Only geosync birds are - and they have a resolution measured in meters. Not nearly good enough for tracking individual vehicles.)
Another type of satellite has super magnification, but a narrow field of view. These need to be targeted (which is expensive), but yes, they can tell if you need a haircut or not. These are the ones that cannot hover over an area.
No satellite has that kind of resolution - period. To do that, you need a resolution on the millimeter scale - which is at least two orders of magnitude greater than is physically possible. (I.E. in the realm of 'science fiction' rather than in the realm of 'well, maybe they can do it'.) No satellite can hover over an area except for geosync birds - see above.
But if the goal is to snap a photo of you holding evidence (or being in the presence of the wrong people), and DHS has an idea of when to monitor you, it is possible. Not likely, but absolutely possible.
Suuure it's possible - if your name is Jack Ryan and you are a character in a Tom Clancy novel. Otherwise, not.
Like the OP, you appear to have gotten your impression of what spy birds can do from Hollywood and tinfoil hat websites.
I prefer solutions that are a) generally in accord with known facts and reasonable assumptions (like the problems Vista has and potentially legacy apps) and, b) don't require tinfoil hat handwavings. (Especially since Microsoft hasn't shown a disinclination for 'handing over piles of cash' in the end - and right now they need all the positive publicity they can get.)
Reply because it *is* useful for some things. - for looking for/at tracks or camp locations in the wilderness (or any extended activity for that matter). For watching potential, um, agricultural sites. Etc... etc...
Just because it's not good enough for instantaneous and individual tracking doesn't mean it's not good for other purposes or that datamining might not yield information.
The vehicle could stay up longer in an unmanned configuration, but still has limited fuel resources to run the OMS. The shuttle just isn't designed to go anywhere but orbit and back.
The critical path item that controls longetivity on orbit is the cryogenics for the fuel cells - when that runs out, everything on the shuttle dies. (The shuttle has no batteries to speak of. [1]) Even with the fuel cells supplemented by power drawn from the station [2] and everything possible powered down, the cryogenics will run out somewhere around (IIRC) the 30 day mark. (Depending on how deeply and how early you power down the shuttle.)
The normal endurance for a solo shuttle is around 14 days maximum. They key parameters to endurance in a 'lifeboat' scenario are a) you've already 'burned' 4 days worth of cryogenics (roughly) just getting to the station, b) how soon and how deeply you power down the Shuttle [3] and c) keeping Shuttle life support operational as long as possible to avoid drawing on the station's supplies (while maintaining enough reserve to deorbit the damaged shuttle).
[1] Even with today's batteries, let alone those of the era the shuttle was designed, it simply is not possible for the shuttle to carry a big enough battery pack to be useful.
[2] The station cannot fully power the shuttle - neither the shuttle or station power distribution system is sized for it. (When the shuttle is drawing full external power, it comes in via umbilicals near the tail and distributed via buses located in the walls of the cargo bays.)
[3] There are limits to what you can and cannot turn off depending on your ultimate goal. And some things (like the heaters to the RCS system) simply cannot be turned off at all without irreversibly damaging the components. (The shuttle, like most spacecraft, is biased 'cold' (if it were completely passive) because it is much, much, easier and lighter to heat something than to cool it.)
I can run through a horror scenario and I'll even welcome the tinfoil hat comments.
You have a vastly overinflated idea of a) how much detail can be seen from satellites, and b) of how thorough the coverage is. (Much of Google's 'satellite' coverage actually comes from aerial photography.) And even so, the top of one car looks pretty much like another.
Long story short, it's not useful to 'discover' criminal activity
If it's not useful for detecting criminal activity - then it's also not useful for detailed tracking as required by your horror scenario.
you do realize that the largest sporting committee in the world choses Windows over Linux.
The Olympics is all about product placement and sponsorship. It is a place where the elite can toot their money horn of supremacy.
If that were true, we wouldn't be seeing the story "Olympics chooses XP over Vista" would we? We'd be seeing a Microsoft press release trumpeting the selection of Vista as the "official Operating System of the Olympic Games".
But we aren't, are we?
So, just maybe, there are other reasons why Linux wasn't chosen - not that Linux zealots can examine the situation rationally.
Possibly because the grandparent is the one who doesn't want attention drawn to his edits. One persons whitewash is another persons clarification. (Witness the part where the grandparent want to keep in details about the Club For Growth, rather than allowing the linked article to speak for itself. His bias is abundantly clear.)
Take SimCity for example - if you could adapt it to instead be used for city-planning in works departments (water, gas, civil/construction, hydro, etc.), it would make things more simple/easy, and it could simulate the future.
If SimCity were flexible enough to account for the myriad of variables that real life planners have to face. For example, planners here in the Pac NW have to account for the impact of their actions on salmon streams, which planners in the South don't have to. And planners in the South have 'blackwater' (because of the tannin in them from fallen oak leaves) streams to account for, which those here in the Pac NW don't. Planners in Florida have to account for the fact that (because the state is so flat) swampland and wetlands are damm near everywhere - while in Georgia their range is considerably less. (Nor do planners in FL have to account for earthquakes, while planners in much of the rest of the country are relieved of the need to account for hurricane evacuation routes.)
Etc... Etc...
SimCity is a game - not a city planning simulator (no matter what the PR says), and as such it's vastly oversimplified.
Even if the claim is true, we are just transferring the problem from how life originated on Earth? to How life originated in the universe?.
That makes a big difference, though. It's a question of probability. If life cannot spread through space, then it must have begun here of its own accord, and so we're looking for a theory that allows good odds that life will start on any planet chemically and environmentally favourable for it to do so.
That's the trick though - you don't actually need good odds at all. All you need is for the event to not be impossible even though it may be improbable.
Keep in mind - when you have the entire surface of the Earth (with all it's wildly varying conditions) to work with, you have a giant MIMD chemical paralell processor. Even if the event is improbable (per try), the odds of it happening at all go sharply up when you are trying millions (billions? googol?) of times per minute across millions of years. How this seems to generate (in the minds of some people) impossible odds - while accepting that it was a) not only possible somewhere else, and b) transferred to Earth by an even more unlikely event, escapes me.
That's awful shallow of you (and others who espouse this view) isn't it? You are far more concerned with what something looks like than over the quality of the services. Would honestly use a crappy search engine just because it's interface is cleaner and simpler?
If you haven't looked at Yahoo's front page in a while, you just might try. It's clean, fast, and all the important stuff is right at the top of the page.
Why should it be treated as satire? The 'tinfoil hat' theories are pretty much a staple of the Slashdot Hivemind's reaction to virtually all actions by 'big business' or the goverment. If the story was about Linux fans editing Linux articles, you can bet your bottom dollar that perjorative terms like 'whitewashing' wouldn't be used in the summary.
The fact is, when you read [Slashdot] articles like this one, you can plainly see where many people want to change the Wikipedia from being an encyclopedia "that anyone can edit" into being an encyclopeida that "that anyone (who we approve of) can edit".
All content contains a bias. Knowing that is a good starting point for interpreting the content. This project is fine, as far as it goes. But implying (as you seem to) that somehow Wikipedia wonks are more trustworthy and less biased than other editors is, well, silly.
I don't buy that. I can say "the Chinese government killed student protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989." There is no bias in that statement, its just a fact.
Sure, it's a fact. But your statement is still somewhat biased because the phrasing "the Chinese government" implies action by a broad group (I doubt the Chinese equivalent of the Depart of Commerce had much to do with the act), and neither the word "student" nor "demonstrators" is free of connotation. If you state it in any other language than a mathematical equation, bias is inherent.
No, they are not immune to the effects of a magnetic field. Nor however are they easily effected by them. But that has nothing to do with my point - the fusion inside a Stellarator *is* going to generate neutrons, and those neutrons have to go somewhere. They can't simply be trapped forever.
Here is my experience. Everyone is encouraged to take four years of math, science, english, and social studies. If one does this, then one can have full schedules for all four years of high school. Practically, however, students often skimp on the free, albeit not neccesirily relevant, education and try to minimize classes in the senior year.
That's the fallacy of the 'credit' system developed for college misapplied to high school.
At my high school you took four years of the relevant courses, plus enough electives to fill out a full school day. Period. if you didn't pick enough classes, you would be assigned to whichever one the school thought most appropriate.
Anyway, basically what I know about this is that stellarator designs avoids lots of the problems that are present in Tokamak - namely, degrading of the reaction chamber due to escaped neutrons.
So, where in the stellerator design does the unobtanium shielding goes that stops the neutrons?
This is a serious question. If you have [hot] fusion you have neutrons, and they have to go somewhere. Magnetic fields won't stop them.
I almost never called a cop. One time I did because neighbor was making noise after midnight, and nothing happened. The second time I wanted someone to mediate between a tenant and a landlord, they wouldn't do it.
I other words, you are unhappy with the cops not for failing to do their jobs - but for failing to accomodate your whims. (Hint: the two scenarios are not really in the cops job description, and they are waaay down on the priority list.)
The only cases that I actually talked to a policeman were on the highway, and I had to pay hundreds of dollars and time to show up in traffic court.
Of course, if you didn't speed or drive recklessly, or do whatever drew the cops attention - you wouldn't have those conversations. Once again, you blame the cops for something that is your own fault.
Some people don't go to places at peak time to avoid queues, if criminals realise the police know the peak times, they can anticipate the strength of guard and where police are? Knowledge like this can be used to both party's advantages. Some facts are obviously public knowledge such as weather.
I know the plural of anecdote isn't data, but I'll give you this food for thought; Out of the last six bank robberies in this county, four have been caught because the robber provided personal information leading to identification to the bank!. This includes a robber who wrote his stickup note on the back of his electric bill and a robber who, after handing over a check to cash and his drivers licence pulled a gun an announced a stickup. When I lived on the fringes of the local low rent district over the course of ten years I watched three different people be arrested for car theft because they drove home and parked the car on the street in front of their house. (A friend of mine who is a local cop once told me they solved about 1/3 of the local car thefts by the simple expedient of driving through this neighborhood and checking license plates of cars matching the description of the stolen ones.)
Criminals are by and large stupid.
I don't think it even takes well-organized crime to understand this.
That's the neat thing about data mining - if the criminals shift their patterns, it'll show up in data. But most people are creatures of habit not tactics, and the cops know this.
My friends had similar experiences and, not wanting to blow a year taking bonehead math like me, decided not to explore their interests in astronomy, physics, chemistry, and other math-intensive subjects. It's a shame, really.
No, it's not a shame at all, he saved himself tuition and failed to waste the time of their teachers. This is a good thing. Had they truly been interested in the topic(s) then spending a year in obtaining the prerequisites isn't 'blowing' a year - it's the first step in truly learning them.
Slashdot Mirror
He can claim that all he wants - doesn't make it true. Radiotelephones were invented in the 40's by Ma Bell, and the concept of cellular phones was invented by Ma Bell in 1970. What Martin Cooper did was create a handset using technology invented by someone else that worked with a system invented by someone else.
Now, creating a practical handset is important - but creating a handset isn't "inventing the cellular phone". The cellular system had already been invented, by someone else. Progress towards it had started twenty plus years before Star Trek aired.
Or, in other words, you shouldn't trust TV shows for science - or history.
There's all manner of things in Tom Clancy novels - some of them are even true. This particular one isn't, because satellites aren't over one area long enough to do so. (Only geosync birds are - and they have a resolution measured in meters. Not nearly good enough for tracking individual vehicles.)
No satellite has that kind of resolution - period. To do that, you need a resolution on the millimeter scale - which is at least two orders of magnitude greater than is physically possible. (I.E. in the realm of 'science fiction' rather than in the realm of 'well, maybe they can do it'.) No satellite can hover over an area except for geosync birds - see above.
Suuure it's possible - if your name is Jack Ryan and you are a character in a Tom Clancy novel. Otherwise, not.
Like the OP, you appear to have gotten your impression of what spy birds can do from Hollywood and tinfoil hat websites.
I prefer solutions that are a) generally in accord with known facts and reasonable assumptions (like the problems Vista has and potentially legacy apps) and, b) don't require tinfoil hat handwavings. (Especially since Microsoft hasn't shown a disinclination for 'handing over piles of cash' in the end - and right now they need all the positive publicity they can get.)
Reply because it *is* useful for some things. - for looking for/at tracks or camp locations in the wilderness (or any extended activity for that matter). For watching potential, um, agricultural sites. Etc... etc...
Just because it's not good enough for instantaneous and individual tracking doesn't mean it's not good for other purposes or that datamining might not yield information.
The critical path item that controls longetivity on orbit is the cryogenics for the fuel cells - when that runs out, everything on the shuttle dies. (The shuttle has no batteries to speak of. [1]) Even with the fuel cells supplemented by power drawn from the station [2] and everything possible powered down, the cryogenics will run out somewhere around (IIRC) the 30 day mark. (Depending on how deeply and how early you power down the shuttle.)
The normal endurance for a solo shuttle is around 14 days maximum. They key parameters to endurance in a 'lifeboat' scenario are a) you've already 'burned' 4 days worth of cryogenics (roughly) just getting to the station, b) how soon and how deeply you power down the Shuttle [3] and c) keeping Shuttle life support operational as long as possible to avoid drawing on the station's supplies (while maintaining enough reserve to deorbit the damaged shuttle).
[1] Even with today's batteries, let alone those of the era the shuttle was designed, it simply is not possible for the shuttle to carry a big enough battery pack to be useful.
[2] The station cannot fully power the shuttle - neither the shuttle or station power distribution system is sized for it. (When the shuttle is drawing full external power, it comes in via umbilicals near the tail and distributed via buses located in the walls of the cargo bays.)
[3] There are limits to what you can and cannot turn off depending on your ultimate goal. And some things (like the heaters to the RCS system) simply cannot be turned off at all without irreversibly damaging the components. (The shuttle, like most spacecraft, is biased 'cold' (if it were completely passive) because it is much, much, easier and lighter to heat something than to cool it.)
You have a vastly overinflated idea of a) how much detail can be seen from satellites, and b) of how thorough the coverage is. (Much of Google's 'satellite' coverage actually comes from aerial photography.) And even so, the top of one car looks pretty much like another.
If it's not useful for detecting criminal activity - then it's also not useful for detailed tracking as required by your horror scenario.
If that were true, we wouldn't be seeing the story "Olympics chooses XP over Vista" would we? We'd be seeing a Microsoft press release trumpeting the selection of Vista as the "official Operating System of the Olympic Games".
But we aren't, are we?
So, just maybe, there are other reasons why Linux wasn't chosen - not that Linux zealots can examine the situation rationally.
It's amazing how many people have taken a stab a designing a 'new and improved' house - and how very few actually lived in a 'new and improved' house.
I see - boneheadedly simple stereotypes FTW.
And you are 100% certain it wasn't a prideful employee of the company in question editing Wikipedia on his free time - how?
Possibly because the grandparent is the one who doesn't want attention drawn to his edits. One persons whitewash is another persons clarification. (Witness the part where the grandparent want to keep in details about the Club For Growth, rather than allowing the linked article to speak for itself. His bias is abundantly clear.)
If SimCity were flexible enough to account for the myriad of variables that real life planners have to face. For example, planners here in the Pac NW have to account for the impact of their actions on salmon streams, which planners in the South don't have to. And planners in the South have 'blackwater' (because of the tannin in them from fallen oak leaves) streams to account for, which those here in the Pac NW don't. Planners in Florida have to account for the fact that (because the state is so flat) swampland and wetlands are damm near everywhere - while in Georgia their range is considerably less. (Nor do planners in FL have to account for earthquakes, while planners in much of the rest of the country are relieved of the need to account for hurricane evacuation routes.)
Etc... Etc...
SimCity is a game - not a city planning simulator (no matter what the PR says), and as such it's vastly oversimplified.
That right there breaks your 'simple' calculation - we don't know the 'total amount of clay in all the comets' to any useful degree of precision.
That's the trick though - you don't actually need good odds at all. All you need is for the event to not be impossible even though it may be improbable.
Keep in mind - when you have the entire surface of the Earth (with all it's wildly varying conditions) to work with, you have a giant MIMD chemical paralell processor. Even if the event is improbable (per try), the odds of it happening at all go sharply up when you are trying millions (billions? googol?) of times per minute across millions of years. How this seems to generate (in the minds of some people) impossible odds - while accepting that it was a) not only possible somewhere else, and b) transferred to Earth by an even more unlikely event, escapes me.
That's awful shallow of you (and others who espouse this view) isn't it? You are far more concerned with what something looks like than over the quality of the services. Would honestly use a crappy search engine just because it's interface is cleaner and simpler?
If you haven't looked at Yahoo's front page in a while, you just might try. It's clean, fast, and all the important stuff is right at the top of the page.
Myself, I *like* having a single bookmark making available a wide range of resources.
Why should it be treated as satire? The 'tinfoil hat' theories are pretty much a staple of the Slashdot Hivemind's reaction to virtually all actions by 'big business' or the goverment. If the story was about Linux fans editing Linux articles, you can bet your bottom dollar that perjorative terms like 'whitewashing' wouldn't be used in the summary.
The fact is, when you read [Slashdot] articles like this one, you can plainly see where many people want to change the Wikipedia from being an encyclopedia "that anyone can edit" into being an encyclopeida that "that anyone (who we approve of) can edit".
Sure, it's a fact. But your statement is still somewhat biased because the phrasing "the Chinese government" implies action by a broad group (I doubt the Chinese equivalent of the Depart of Commerce had much to do with the act), and neither the word "student" nor "demonstrators" is free of connotation. If you state it in any other language than a mathematical equation, bias is inherent.
No, they are not immune to the effects of a magnetic field. Nor however are they easily effected by them. But that has nothing to do with my point - the fusion inside a Stellarator *is* going to generate neutrons, and those neutrons have to go somewhere. They can't simply be trapped forever.
That's the fallacy of the 'credit' system developed for college misapplied to high school.
At my high school you took four years of the relevant courses, plus enough electives to fill out a full school day. Period. if you didn't pick enough classes, you would be assigned to whichever one the school thought most appropriate.
So, where in the stellerator design does the unobtanium shielding goes that stops the neutrons?
This is a serious question. If you have [hot] fusion you have neutrons, and they have to go somewhere. Magnetic fields won't stop them.
I other words, you are unhappy with the cops not for failing to do their jobs - but for failing to accomodate your whims. (Hint: the two scenarios are not really in the cops job description, and they are waaay down on the priority list.)
Of course, if you didn't speed or drive recklessly, or do whatever drew the cops attention - you wouldn't have those conversations. Once again, you blame the cops for something that is your own fault.
I know the plural of anecdote isn't data, but I'll give you this food for thought; Out of the last six bank robberies in this county, four have been caught because the robber provided personal information leading to identification to the bank!. This includes a robber who wrote his stickup note on the back of his electric bill and a robber who, after handing over a check to cash and his drivers licence pulled a gun an announced a stickup. When I lived on the fringes of the local low rent district over the course of ten years I watched three different people be arrested for car theft because they drove home and parked the car on the street in front of their house. (A friend of mine who is a local cop once told me they solved about 1/3 of the local car thefts by the simple expedient of driving through this neighborhood and checking license plates of cars matching the description of the stolen ones.)
Criminals are by and large stupid.
That's the neat thing about data mining - if the criminals shift their patterns, it'll show up in data. But most people are creatures of habit not tactics, and the cops know this.
For my money it's less about privacy than sheilding the [cash|attention] cow that brings eyeballs and notoriety to CaG.
No, it's not a shame at all, he saved himself tuition and failed to waste the time of their teachers. This is a good thing. Had they truly been interested in the topic(s) then spending a year in obtaining the prerequisites isn't 'blowing' a year - it's the first step in truly learning them.