Struggling for financial support, a research group releases preliminary results showing the importance of further investigation. The results
are interesting, but the scientists seem to be much less sure about this than the BBC reporter.
This is more common in medicine. How many times
a year you see news like 'Pine needles cure cancer' or 'Cat hair causes strokes'. They are
always preliminary, the most important result
being 'We need more data'.
Perhaps the funding of scientific research should be more stable. That would prevent these 'preliminary' news.
The British government certainly seems more bent on monitoring its subjects than other governments are.
Compared to what? At least everyone in UK is allowed to say what they think of the goverment. The above statement would be enough to get you jailed in some countries.
In UK, the people have some rights after all.
In many countries, the idea of 'citizen'
is not even understood. In many post-soviet
countries of the Eastern Europe it is still
thought that citizens are not allowed to critisise
the laws or try to change them.
Perhaps 'Everything you say can be used against you' should be said to newborn babies.
Perhaps the money should be spent on hiring
new policemen instead of cameras. It really
does not help you when someone watches a film where you are being mugged, and this one week after you were bleeding to death.
London, 2084. MicroCop(tm) software is scanning the city, detecting crimes and filing them.
Crimes are also displayed on-screen at the local police station.
On screen, a man is stabbed to death.
MicroCop(tm) status is "orange"
Copper 1: Ouch! That really must hurt.
Copper 2: I'm getting tired of this. Switch the channel.
The screen shows a pickpocket
MicroCop(tm) status drops to "yellow"
Copper 1: Sheesh, this is not even a real crime.
Copper 2: Next channel, please.
On the screen, a young girl is getting raped.
MicroCop status is "orange"
Copper 1 (Drools)
Copper 2 (to coppers 3-8): Hey, guys, look at this!
A few minutes later the MicorCop(tm) lauches the
"red alert sequence".
On another channel, it has detected a "real" crime: UNLICENSED SOFTWARE
Copper 2 (picks his gun): Damn!
Copper 1: Lets beat the shit out of 'em.
They are using insurance salesmen as crash test dummies when testing astronaut equipment?
Nice idea. Perhaps GM and Ford could use this one.
I hope it is not patented.
National Geographic says the landing point will be within 30 miles from the takeoff point, as Feed says the official guess is 50 feet. Maybe they used NASA unit conversion convetion? I hope other numbers in the articles are more accurate.
For a newbie, Linux is a pain, just like any new OS. Linux is quite hard in the beginning, but
when you know it, you can do lot's of things
you'll never be able to do in Windows.
If you add flexibility, you lose in simplicity,
and the other way round. This is true for both
the user and the OS. A few examples:
My boss is still having trouble managing his bookmarks. He couldn't care less about the setup of the system. He can't change the desktop wallpaper without help. He can't even tell the difference between Solaris and Windows. If the user does not understand the concept of OS, he really should use Windows. When he crashes
the system, you can always blame Microsoft.
As an example of the more advanced computer skills, I started programming on my Commodore 64 when I was twelve. After I first tried Linux,
Windows has been my 'games-only' OS.
I agree that linux is terrific for it's endless configurability, but that is it's death knell.
That's the point!
Linux will never make an economical success
comparable to M$.
The success of a hacker is not measured as $$.
It's the quality of the programs he has written
that matters. The Linux community is
actually interested in writing a stable and
flexible OS. They are not trying to become another Microsoft. Spending programming hours on
adding extra features will never be an economical
success, especially if you distribute it for free. Selling an OS that sucks for an outrageous price will be as long as someone is willing to pay.
Now, think about success. Bill Gates is the richest man in US. Read slashdot a few weeks
and you start wondering if he has friends at all.
On the other hand, does anyone really hate
Linus Torvalds? Both have started a succesful
OS, but they measure the success in differetn ways.
(I know about Xconfigurator now, but they were laughing at me in the slashdot irc forum)
There are always wannabe-hackers who know one or two microscopic details more than a newbie. They are just boosting their ego by laughing at the
newbies. You meet those guys everywhere, slashdot
is no expection. They are not worth your attention. In a few months, you know more about Linux than they ever will.
Combining all these technologies offers some
awesome possibilities.
I'd really like to see this kind of technology
applied to search engines. My experience on
speech recognition and computer translation is
rather limited, but I think the available software does needs lots of refinement before it can be applied to things like this. They (CIA, FBI, DEA) are after fool-proof evidence to be used in court, after all.
An experiment with normal translation software
English-RANDOM()-English shows that sayings
like 'Oh dear' may convert to likes of
'Butter love'. And this with grammatically
correct and polished english. If the language
used is less correct, what do you get?
Imagine all the errors a typical speech-recognition software does.
Now, if this is applied in practise:
1. Tape all cell-phone calls of a suspect terrorist or drug-smuggler. Now, these might be in
grammatically less-correct heavy-dialect spanish or arabic or sanskrit or whatever...
2. Let your speech-recognition software convert
this to text.
3. Translate the text to english with
translation software.
4. Arrest the guy and try to convice the jury
he deserves a prison sentence.
In related news, the company X is worried as competition from other companies in the same field of industry does not allow them to fulfill their
vision of "$$ for company X"
Just one sample from the article:
"FACT:"Until spectrum caps and other regulatory barriers are eliminated, neither wireless nor
satellite high-speed services can fulfill the vision of 3G wire-free access to the Internet.
Radio waves have a lot more use than just wireless
net. TV, commercial radio, communications (for aviation, coast guard, ships, police, military, satellites), radio astronomy, HAMS, etc. This is just why there are spectrum caps.
Radio spectral ranges are a natural resource
that could be used at least 100 times more than
there is available bandwidth. So, everyone using
radio bandwidth would like to have some more.
Whining about that is hardly "news for nerds".
...eliminating an entire generation of
weapons-development programs...
Like NMD, I hope. However, Reagan and Bush senior
did spend an awful lot of money on weapons development. Bush Jr:s advisors should realize
that the world has changed a lot after USSR
collapsed. However, people like Ashcroft and Helms
are having a hard time getting to the 20th century, let alone 21st. NMD is boosting the
militaristic factions is Russia. Do you think
that would lead to overseas interventions?
If, it would be more like Vietnam (in a larger scale), not Kosovo.
I think overseas interventions are generating anti-US sentiment (at least in Europe they do)
and should therefore be reduced.
We Europeans should take care of Balkans.
After all it is a part of Europe.
It's amazing how ignorant the left seems to be of what Bush has been saying for the last eighteen months.
The vocabulary of politics is a little different
in Europe. When we say 'Fundamentalist' we mean
someone _really_ nuts, like Ayatollah Khomeini. Not much of your American 'Conservative Christian' type. So, what do you mean with left??
Bush Jr. doesn't get much press coverage in Europe. (Yes, there are actual human beigns even outside America. Some even write to slashdot.)
We are much more intrested in people like Putin,
who really could become a problem. There is not much Bush Jr. actually has said about US-European relations. If you have links, I'd really like to
check it.
I think the old division to 'left' and 'right' is something I can not discuss. Here in Europe most
people agree that the division to 'left' and 'right' is purely artificial. We used to have real communist parties striving for pro-Soviet foreign
policy and against private property. Now these
former 5th cols can not be distinguished from
what used to be the 'right'.
Now we have a large center (white) and very marginal wings (green, red and black). I think our 'white' corresponds to democrats and moderate republicans. The black-wingers include everything
from Bible-thumping 'conservatives' to real Nazis
to Islamic militants to Nationalist
militants (ETA, IRA,...).
Red-wingers include anarchist militants, many old and dying commie extremist schools (maoists, stalinists, brezhnevists, trotskians, etc.)
Green-wingers are representing the new
'Environmental NIMBY'-type, that demands a better,
cleaner world, but opposing every change.
I think its time that the debt be paid back. Rather than focusing on theoretical work, it is time for scientists to submit to their natural social role of technology providers.
I agree. It is really time to pay back.
Consider the following theoretical work:
quantum mechanics is completely incomprehensible to a layman. Still, it has
some quite useful applications, e.g. all modern
computers. Without transistors, building a coffee
machine or a microwave owen would be quite a trick.
electrodynamic theory is another good example of theoretical work. Design of AC devices
would be almost impossible without it.
Of course, some engineers have done a hell of a
work to apply these theories to real life.
Perhaps we all should pay back to scientist
and engineers. After having developed all the hardware needed for slashdot, do scientist and
engineers deserve something better than trollish posts advicing how they should do their work?
That they allowed the stuff to be used for
internet suggest that they actually don't.
Every time politicians touch the NASA budget,
they do it the wrong way. I think US should spend more money on space research and less on military.
(US has the largest 'defence' budget in the world, and four others in world's six largest military budgets are those of US allies, so what's the point?) With the Bush administration, this is
not a realistic option.
However, this seems to have some good details.
More money on space-based propulsion research
(solar-electric and nuclear) and 'more robust' Mars explorers, for example. These are both quite important things. A big advance in propulsion could lower the cost of all solar system exploration and open up new possibilities.
I'd really like to see some more succesful Mars missions like the Pathfinder.
I think the Pluto-Kuiper mission could not give
much valuable information, when compared to the
Europa Mission and Solar Probe. The Solar
Probe was also cancelled. IMHO the Europa
Mission is the most important of these three.
NASA could have already made Mars viable for at least semi-sustaining human life... it would have taken around 5 years to oxygenate the atmosphere.
The air pressure on Martian surface is less than
1% of the normal Eath sea-level values.
Normal human body has a temperature of 310 Kelvin,
so a human in an "oxygenated Martian atmosphere" would boil to death before running out of oxygen.
The idea of replacing heavy cables with light
superconducting ones sounds great for space
applications, but thermal problems are only one thing in spacecraft design. This solves those
quite well. A few others do not sound that easy:
Radiation is a big problem in space. A lot of materials can not be used in orbit because they
deteriorate very rapidly when getting a large dose
of high-energy radiation. (The same applies to e.g. nuclear reactor design.)
Maintenance: if a copper wire or whatever they are using now breaks (space debris collision etc.), it is quite easy to fix. Just turn off voltage and replace the broken part. These superconducting cables are made of granules in a tube. Then, you would have plenty of superconducting granules floating around, short-circuiting everything. Nice?
Vacuum: Out-gassing the tube
with little granules inside sounds a little more difficult than a normal wire. How does the ceramic stuff and the coating behave in vacuum?
Attitude control and orbit: the spacecraft would have some additional constraints as the side with superconductors should be kept out of sunlight all the time. This is possible, and done often, but not always, as e.g. ground links give other constraints.
I think silver-coated wire is on the list of absolutely forbidden materials in space, so the design they are using is not directly applicable.
These are only toys, as this 200 feet per second the Texans get is a lousy projectile speed.
Have they heard about gunpowder?
An AK-47 gives about 2000 feet per second,
it weighs about 15 lbs, and it is more
than 50 years old design.
The new German G-3 punches about 10000 feet
per second, which is enough to pierce about one foot of steel, and it should be about the same weight as an AK-47.
For infantry, railguns will never be better than
the ordinary chemicallly powered ammunition.
OTOH, put a railgun in a submarine. It could be about the same length as the sub, of the order
100 meters, with not much extra weight added.
Normal ships could also use this.
before we can answer the big question:
Are we alone?
I think there are still several big unsolved problems before we know the answer, such as:
How do single-cell organisms evolve to multi-cell ones? and: How common are Earth-like planets?
However, this is a very important step toward
answering the big question. I think the most important thing is that the question has been
asked, and some people are trying to find the answer.
Earth and humanity are still unique.
Hope that there is intelligent life somewhere
up in space, because there's bugger all down here on Earth.
- Monty Python
This black hole is close to the centre of the
Galaxy, so there's plenty of other radiating stuff
around (the supernova leftovers mentioned in the article, lots of stars, insterstellar matter)
Also, they mention that this is a supermassive black hole, millions of solar masses. The Hawking
radiation, or evaporation, is weaker for more
massive black holes. The temperature of the
event horizon of this black hole like this is propably
much smaller than the 3 Kelvin cosmic background,
so the evaporation can not be observed from earth.
Perhaps a particle detector near the event horizon
might be able to do it.
They have a billion people to move around billions of square km's and they build a 20 mile line for 600 people?
This sounds like the Chinese will propably only buy this from the west, reverse-engineer the whole thing and start later building new rails and trains on their own. Think about the difference between the price of a train built by german or chinese engineers. Wages are a bit lower in China,
so they will save $$ this way.
The chinese politicians don't have to explain this kind of spending to the voters. That's why maglevs
are not common in Europe or USA. The track would
not be operational at next election, so you
would not get elected if you spent public money
on this kind of projects instead of tax cuts.
At least here the major bottleneck for web connections is the "last mile" of copper wire between the user and the optical fibres already used by the phone companies.
So, what would really help is to put down the cost of fibre installation. (or ADSL)
I think the major cost in fibre installation is wages of the guys doing it. This will not bring
down the costs of setting a fibre connection.
After setting, one only gets more bps than before.
So, this will not give web access to those who
can not afford it now. I think wider web access is
more important than more bps. Also, this will not
increase the quality of the web, except for
those who 'Download large image files from the busiest servers of the web'.
...a finding that could one day halt the development of cancer...
What scares me about this is that in the 1930's and 1940's, radium was touted as the cure for many similar diseases. Unfortunately, radiation
poisoning proved them all wrong.
Gamma radiation is often used to treat e.g. leukemia and bone cancer. Some types of cancer cells are much more sensitive to radiation than healthy ones. I sure hope history repeats itself, and some better cures for cancer are developed.
I think sending a 500-kilo copper weight to space is waste of money. How much science would you do
with 500 kg instruments? A lot.
At first sight, this seems to have more PR value
and less scientific output.
The European Rosetta mission makes much
more sense. It tries to land on a comet. How much
can we learn if the 1st idea is to
everything we do not understand?
X-ray novae are caused by
ignition of fusion in the accretion discs
[Kwatz!]
Fusion is not an important factor in X-ray novae. Hydrogen-to-Helium fusion yields about 0.7% of the rest mass (E = mc2). Dropping something to a neutron star yields about 20% of rest mass, or about 280 times more energy than fusion. For black holes the yield is about 10%, as there is no solid
surface to slam against.
X-ray novae are ignited when the accretion disk
gets ionised. This makes the gas more viscous, leading to a faster lose of angular momentum and thus a faster infall. Eventually, most of the disk
falls on the neutron star, producing an X-ray nova
outburst.
Slashdot Mirror
This is more common in medicine. How many times a year you see news like 'Pine needles cure cancer' or 'Cat hair causes strokes'. They are always preliminary, the most important result being 'We need more data'.
Perhaps the funding of scientific research should be more stable. That would prevent these 'preliminary' news.
Compared to what? At least everyone in UK is allowed to say what they think of the goverment. The above statement would be enough to get you jailed in some countries. In UK, the people have some rights after all. In many countries, the idea of 'citizen' is not even understood. In many post-soviet countries of the Eastern Europe it is still thought that citizens are not allowed to critisise the laws or try to change them.
Perhaps 'Everything you say can be used against you' should be said to newborn babies.
London, 2084. MicroCop(tm) software is scanning the city, detecting crimes and filing them.
Crimes are also displayed on-screen at the local police station.
On screen, a man is stabbed to death.
MicroCop(tm) status is "orange"
Copper 1: Ouch! That really must hurt.
Copper 2: I'm getting tired of this. Switch the channel.
The screen shows a pickpocket
MicroCop(tm) status drops to "yellow"
Copper 1: Sheesh, this is not even a real crime.
Copper 2: Next channel, please.
On the screen, a young girl is getting raped.
MicroCop status is "orange" Copper 1 (Drools)
Copper 2 (to coppers 3-8): Hey, guys, look at this!
A few minutes later the MicorCop(tm) lauches the "red alert sequence".
On another channel, it has detected a "real" crime: UNLICENSED SOFTWARE
Copper 2 (picks his gun): Damn!
Copper 1: Lets beat the shit out of 'em.
Nice idea. Perhaps GM and Ford could use this one. I hope it is not patented.
National Geographic says the landing point will be within 30 miles from the takeoff point, as Feed says the official guess is 50 feet. Maybe they used NASA unit conversion convetion? I hope other numbers in the articles are more accurate.
If you add flexibility, you lose in simplicity, and the other way round. This is true for both the user and the OS. A few examples:
My boss is still having trouble managing his bookmarks. He couldn't care less about the setup of the system. He can't change the desktop wallpaper without help. He can't even tell the difference between Solaris and Windows. If the user does not understand the concept of OS, he really should use Windows. When he crashes the system, you can always blame Microsoft.
As an example of the more advanced computer skills, I started programming on my Commodore 64 when I was twelve. After I first tried Linux, Windows has been my 'games-only' OS.
I agree that linux is terrific for it's endless configurability, but that is it's death knell.
That's the point!
Linux will never make an economical success comparable to M$. The success of a hacker is not measured as $$. It's the quality of the programs he has written that matters. The Linux community is actually interested in writing a stable and flexible OS. They are not trying to become another Microsoft. Spending programming hours on adding extra features will never be an economical success, especially if you distribute it for free. Selling an OS that sucks for an outrageous price will be as long as someone is willing to pay.
Now, think about success. Bill Gates is the richest man in US. Read slashdot a few weeks and you start wondering if he has friends at all. On the other hand, does anyone really hate Linus Torvalds? Both have started a succesful OS, but they measure the success in differetn ways.
(I know about Xconfigurator now, but they were laughing at me in the slashdot irc forum)
There are always wannabe-hackers who know one or two microscopic details more than a newbie. They are just boosting their ego by laughing at the newbies. You meet those guys everywhere, slashdot is no expection. They are not worth your attention. In a few months, you know more about Linux than they ever will.
I'd really like to see this kind of technology applied to search engines. My experience on speech recognition and computer translation is rather limited, but I think the available software does needs lots of refinement before it can be applied to things like this. They (CIA, FBI, DEA) are after fool-proof evidence to be used in court, after all.
An experiment with normal translation software English-RANDOM()-English shows that sayings like 'Oh dear' may convert to likes of 'Butter love'. And this with grammatically correct and polished english. If the language used is less correct, what do you get? Imagine all the errors a typical speech-recognition software does.
Now, if this is applied in practise:
1. Tape all cell-phone calls of a suspect terrorist or drug-smuggler. Now, these might be in grammatically less-correct heavy-dialect spanish or arabic or sanskrit or whatever...
2. Let your speech-recognition software convert this to text.
3. Translate the text to english with translation software.
4. Arrest the guy and try to convice the jury he deserves a prison sentence.
5. Get (literally) laughed out of court.
Just one sample from the article:
"FACT:"Until spectrum caps and other regulatory barriers are eliminated, neither wireless nor satellite high-speed services can fulfill the vision of 3G wire-free access to the Internet.
Radio waves have a lot more use than just wireless net. TV, commercial radio, communications (for aviation, coast guard, ships, police, military, satellites), radio astronomy, HAMS, etc. This is just why there are spectrum caps.
Radio spectral ranges are a natural resource that could be used at least 100 times more than there is available bandwidth. So, everyone using radio bandwidth would like to have some more. Whining about that is hardly "news for nerds".
Like NMD, I hope. However, Reagan and Bush senior did spend an awful lot of money on weapons development. Bush Jr:s advisors should realize that the world has changed a lot after USSR collapsed. However, people like Ashcroft and Helms are having a hard time getting to the 20th century, let alone 21st. NMD is boosting the militaristic factions is Russia. Do you think that would lead to overseas interventions? If, it would be more like Vietnam (in a larger scale), not Kosovo.
I think overseas interventions are generating anti-US sentiment (at least in Europe they do) and should therefore be reduced. We Europeans should take care of Balkans. After all it is a part of Europe.
It's amazing how ignorant the left seems to be of what Bush has been saying for the last eighteen months.
The vocabulary of politics is a little different in Europe. When we say 'Fundamentalist' we mean someone _really_ nuts, like Ayatollah Khomeini. Not much of your American 'Conservative Christian' type. So, what do you mean with left??
Bush Jr. doesn't get much press coverage in Europe. (Yes, there are actual human beigns even outside America. Some even write to slashdot.) We are much more intrested in people like Putin, who really could become a problem. There is not much Bush Jr. actually has said about US-European relations. If you have links, I'd really like to check it.
I think the old division to 'left' and 'right' is something I can not discuss. Here in Europe most people agree that the division to 'left' and 'right' is purely artificial. We used to have real communist parties striving for pro-Soviet foreign policy and against private property. Now these former 5th cols can not be distinguished from what used to be the 'right'.
Now we have a large center (white) and very marginal wings (green, red and black). I think our 'white' corresponds to democrats and moderate republicans. The black-wingers include everything from Bible-thumping 'conservatives' to real Nazis to Islamic militants to Nationalist militants (ETA, IRA, ...).
Red-wingers include anarchist militants, many old and dying commie extremist schools (maoists, stalinists, brezhnevists, trotskians, etc.)
Green-wingers are representing the new
'Environmental NIMBY'-type, that demands a better,
cleaner world, but opposing every change.
I agree. It is really time to pay back. Consider the following theoretical work:
quantum mechanics is completely incomprehensible to a layman. Still, it has some quite useful applications, e.g. all modern computers. Without transistors, building a coffee machine or a microwave owen would be quite a trick.
electrodynamic theory is another good example of theoretical work. Design of AC devices would be almost impossible without it.
Of course, some engineers have done a hell of a work to apply these theories to real life.
Perhaps we all should pay back to scientist and engineers. After having developed all the hardware needed for slashdot, do scientist and engineers deserve something better than trollish posts advicing how they should do their work? That they allowed the stuff to be used for internet suggest that they actually don't.
However, this seems to have some good details.
More money on space-based propulsion research (solar-electric and nuclear) and 'more robust' Mars explorers, for example. These are both quite important things. A big advance in propulsion could lower the cost of all solar system exploration and open up new possibilities. I'd really like to see some more succesful Mars missions like the Pathfinder.
I think the Pluto-Kuiper mission could not give much valuable information, when compared to the Europa Mission and Solar Probe. The Solar Probe was also cancelled. IMHO the Europa Mission is the most important of these three.
The air pressure on Martian surface is less than 1% of the normal Eath sea-level values. Normal human body has a temperature of 310 Kelvin, so a human in an "oxygenated Martian atmosphere" would boil to death before running out of oxygen.
Radiation is a big problem in space. A lot of materials can not be used in orbit because they deteriorate very rapidly when getting a large dose of high-energy radiation. (The same applies to e.g. nuclear reactor design.)
Maintenance: if a copper wire or whatever they are using now breaks (space debris collision etc.), it is quite easy to fix. Just turn off voltage and replace the broken part. These superconducting cables are made of granules in a tube. Then, you would have plenty of superconducting granules floating around, short-circuiting everything. Nice?
Vacuum: Out-gassing the tube with little granules inside sounds a little more difficult than a normal wire. How does the ceramic stuff and the coating behave in vacuum?
Attitude control and orbit: the spacecraft would have some additional constraints as the side with superconductors should be kept out of sunlight all the time. This is possible, and done often, but not always, as e.g. ground links give other constraints.
I think silver-coated wire is on the list of absolutely forbidden materials in space, so the design they are using is not directly applicable.
An AK-47 gives about 2000 feet per second, it weighs about 15 lbs, and it is more than 50 years old design.
The new German G-3 punches about 10000 feet per second, which is enough to pierce about one foot of steel, and it should be about the same weight as an AK-47.
For infantry, railguns will never be better than the ordinary chemicallly powered ammunition.
OTOH, put a railgun in a submarine. It could be about the same length as the sub, of the order 100 meters, with not much extra weight added. Normal ships could also use this.
I think there are still several big unsolved problems before we know the answer, such as: How do single-cell organisms evolve to multi-cell ones? and: How common are Earth-like planets? However, this is a very important step toward answering the big question. I think the most important thing is that the question has been asked, and some people are trying to find the answer.
Earth and humanity are still unique.
Hope that there is intelligent life somewhere up in space, because there's bugger all down here on Earth. - Monty Python
Also, they mention that this is a supermassive black hole, millions of solar masses. The Hawking radiation, or evaporation, is weaker for more massive black holes. The temperature of the event horizon of this black hole like this is propably much smaller than the 3 Kelvin cosmic background, so the evaporation can not be observed from earth. Perhaps a particle detector near the event horizon might be able to do it.
This sounds like the Chinese will propably only buy this from the west, reverse-engineer the whole thing and start later building new rails and trains on their own. Think about the difference between the price of a train built by german or chinese engineers. Wages are a bit lower in China, so they will save $$ this way.
The chinese politicians don't have to explain this kind of spending to the voters. That's why maglevs are not common in Europe or USA. The track would not be operational at next election, so you would not get elected if you spent public money on this kind of projects instead of tax cuts.
So, this will not give web access to those who can not afford it now. I think wider web access is more important than more bps. Also, this will not increase the quality of the web, except for those who 'Download large image files from the busiest servers of the web'.
What scares me about this is that in the 1930's and 1940's, radium was touted as the cure for many similar diseases. Unfortunately, radiation poisoning proved them all wrong.
Gamma radiation is often used to treat e.g. leukemia and bone cancer. Some types of cancer cells are much more sensitive to radiation than healthy ones. I sure hope history repeats itself, and some better cures for cancer are developed.
I think sending a 500-kilo copper weight to space is waste of money. How much science would you do with 500 kg instruments? A lot. At first sight, this seems to have more PR value and less scientific output.
The European Rosetta mission makes much more sense. It tries to land on a comet. How much can we learn if the 1st idea is to everything we do not understand?
Even if US and EU banned spamming, what would be the result?
Small spamming companies would be founded in Cayman Islands, I guess.
[Kwatz!]
Fusion is not an important factor in X-ray novae. Hydrogen-to-Helium fusion yields about 0.7% of the rest mass (E = mc2). Dropping something to a neutron star yields about 20% of rest mass, or about 280 times more energy than fusion. For black holes the yield is about 10%, as there is no solid surface to slam against.
X-ray novae are ignited when the accretion disk gets ionised. This makes the gas more viscous, leading to a faster lose of angular momentum and thus a faster infall. Eventually, most of the disk falls on the neutron star, producing an X-ray nova outburst.