You didn't, by chance, work for the prosecution in the Wen Ho Lee case, did you?
If you waited for a court case to reach completion (as well as optional appeals) before you formed an opinion on anything, you couldn't function. You use your judgement every day, why not here?
I think the accused has the right to a fair trial before we all go around calling him the "Spy of the Century," as was done in the Wen Ho Lee case. It is impossible, without complete access to all the data, to formulate an informed opinion of the guilt or innocence of Hanssen. While you may be hamstrung by the courts' moving slowly towards resolutions of disputes, I, for one, am content to wait and see what lies beneath the media spectacle.
True, if the guy is acquitted, he could sue those who said (or wrote) he was a spy....
Ah yes, we don't trust the legal system to help determine guilt or innocence, but we trust the courts to redress damages done by the overzealous press. How very consistent.
It should be noted that the Trailer Trash demographic also votes, complains to their Congresscritters, and generally questions the U.S.'s spending money on such "extravagances" as Apollo and the space program. NASA has to justify its existence every fiscal year in order to maintain even a skeleton-crew capability for space R&D. They have a terrible time recruiting young talent to work on the GS salary scale, and perhaps the only scientific organization whose credibility has suffered more in the eyes of the public of late is Los Alamos National Laboratory. With a proposed 1.6 trillion dollar tax reduction in the works, I think it is safe to say that scientific agencies in the U.S., including NASA, are in serious jeopardy when next year's budget comes out. Don't just take my word for it--read the Feb. 16 edition of the Wall Street Journal, where it was announced that the Bush Administration plans to chop the science investment to make room for a $1.6 trillion tax cut and rapid deployment of an NMD system.
Given the impending budgetary crisis, it is hard to imagine a worse time for NASA's integrity to be questioned--doubly so if Fox's re-airing of the show this summer opens with a voice-over: "We have learned from hundreds of viewers of our first showing of this documentary that NASA, when confronted with these allegations of fraud and impropriety, refused to comment. Perhaps what we have to say hits too close to home.... We will let you, the viewer, decide."
My brother and I used to switch off on that Atari 2600 great, Megamania (by Activision)--a game played by about three fewer people than Circus. Our record is three and a half hours on one game. We taped the joystick button down so that our hands wouldn't cramp up so badly from playing.
This should at least win an honorable mention for pathetic wastes of time. Speaking of which, does anyone remember the deal Activision used to have for their Atari 2600 games where, if you achieved a threshold score, you could take a picture of the television and send it in to get a free patch or badge or something identifying you as "Grand Master of Megamania" or somesuch? Those were so cool.
A scientist working for a corporation tends to lie to help the corporation.. Wouldn't a scientist who's funded by an environmental group also tend to lie to help that group?
Science in the U.S. is generally funded by public money and not by "environmental groups," unless you consider organizations like the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and NASA as being "environmental groups." The grants are obtained by applying for the money, and there is intense competition for each research dollar. A scientist who habitually lies about his or her results can expect that, eventually, the ruse will be discovered, and the scientist will lose all credibility in the eyes of his or her peers. The scientist will then be unable to secure research grants in the future. Let's "follow the money," as you say, and realize that credible studies are in most scientists' best interests; a scientist's currency is his or her reputation. You will find few who are reckless enough to risk that for a dubious immediate gain.
Has Paul Erhlik [sic. Ehrlich] a scientist ever admitted his mistaken predictions?
See a recent biographical article in Scientific American where Dr. Ehrlich indeed admits that many of his doomsday predictions did not come true. How is this relevant again?
Much of the evidence of global warming is in indicators; people who claim they can measure fractions of a degree in tree rings or atospheric gasses. That's something that makes me reluctant to trust them.
Please elaborate on the flaws in these lines of research and convince my why they shouldn't be taken any more seriously than, say, economic indicators that point to a recession on the horizon. Just why should I care about the CPI or the trade deficit or the number of new housing starts in a quarter? What relevance could these possibly have?
Face it. You are yourself biased because you do not wish to lose your beloved SUV or admit that your USA "consume and discard" lifestyle is at all damaging to the environment. You are eager to accuse those who have devoted their careers to answering the difficult questions of climate change of being as biased as you. You choose, instead of elevating yourself to their level by learning of the issues and debating the results of the studies, to dismiss all studies whose outcomes you don't like.
Rush Limbaugh claimed once on his radio show that global warming wouldn't matter anyway because (to paraphrase) ice melting in a glass of water doesn't change the level of the water.
Not only did the grad student make the first observations of a neutron star, but (IIRC) she even got to watch, chagrinned, as her thesis advisor claimed credit for the discovery, a discovery which later "earned" him the Nobel Prize.
Moral of the story: Choose your thesis advisor carefully.
...and I know for a fact that both Project Helios and Project Orion were not intended for use inside the atmosphere of Earth.
Some early incarnations of Orion actually did call for launch inside Earth's atmosphere. At the time it seemed (and still seems) the cheapest way to develop "very heavy launch" capability quickly. While there is still a fallout issue, one can envision scenarios where people would trade fallout for unpleasant consequences--e.g., to get equipment into space in order to prevent Earth's colliding with a large meteor.
Secondly, the ISS may be the biggest boon to interplanetary space travel we've come up with so far. With it, we have the possibility of starting from outside the gravity well, which is the biggest fuel burn we have with any space travel.
The ISS is in LEO. If the earth were a peach, then the ISS would lie somewhere in the fuzz. While I'll grant that it's higher than the ground, it's not enough to make a significant difference in cost. You might think to construct spacecraft in situ to reduce costs, but then there's still the expense of transporting the raw materials and/or parts up to the ISS.
You're not going to see routine trips to Mars for 10 years at least.
I'd push the date back even farther than that. Manned colonies on Mars are still pie-in-the-sky dreaming for the most part. Zubrin, while a visionary, is like most visionaries in that his ramblings need to be taken with a grain of salt and a healthy dose of reality. "Living off the land" sounds very appealing--very "Wild West" and "Lewis and Clark." But it's also foolhardy when you realize that we simply don't know what we need to know about Mars to be able to make such a scheme work. Lewis and Clark could make canoes when they needed to cross rivers. It's doubtful that a manned mission would ever have the resources to build, say, spare fuel cells or atmosphere-transmogrification-into-rocket-fuel facilities as Zubrin envisions. Then there's the problem of cosmic ray bombardment both in the trip to Mars and in the time spent on the surface. The most recent estimates based on our best information to date puts human exposure in the 0.5 heavy nuclei/year/cell in the body range for the trip there, and something like 0.1 heavy nuclei / year while there. This doesn't sound too healthy to me. Shielding won't work very well either. Unless it is very thick (and thus, very expensive), the result will just be bombardment by showers of secondary particles, rather like ricocheting bullets inside tanks.
We have to face the fact that unmanned space exploration is all there will be in the near future. When the robots teach us enough that we can bring the risk (financial and safety) down to acceptable levels, and when we find enough impetus to go there in person, then we might consider manned missions. Not until then, I'm afraid.
Your right. [sic] We should just let murderers go, lamenting the fact these people really are just misunderstood.
Setting aside all debate over the appropriateness of the death penalty, I'd like to note that I find it curiously inconsistent for GWB to call the shots (bad pun) on capital punishment using the argument "people have to learn that actions have consequences," yet he asks us to forget and forgive any transgressions he himself had prior to turning 40, a magical age before which one cannot be held accountable for one's actions. Am I to believe that no executions of prisoners under age 40 were held in Texas, or do we have a double standard here?
Some of us not born with a wealthy, well-connected pedigree have difficulty accepting his DWI, his long-time abuse of alcohol and drugs, his pathetic excuse for service in the Air Guard during Vietnam, and (if the Larry Flint comments on CNN are to be believed) the abortion he helped arrange for his girlfriend in pre-Roe v. Wade 1970 as mere "excesses of youth" that must be overlooked. For a party who seem to have cornered the market on morality (recall the indignant outrage during the impeachment proceedings not long ago) to rally behind such a candidate is, in my mind, the big joke of this election.
Regarding polling places, you're not missing out on much except frustration. In 1996 when I lived in LA it took me nearly two hours to drive five miles to get from my place of work (UCLA campus) to my polling place (somewhere in Culver City) and then find a place to park. Then I stood in line for about an hour before I was given a ballot. Though I left over three hours before the polls closed I was within half an hour of not being permitted to vote.
I, for one, think "no-fault" absentee voting is a good thing. It's how I voted in '98, and if I still lived in CA it's how I'd have voted in this election.
I personally feel that these people shouldn't even be voting. If you can't follow the arrow from the candidate's name to the corresponding hole/box/lever/split arrow, then you shouldn't be voting.
I personally hope that in your later years when your vision starts to fail you are handed a ballot that you cannot read easily. I hope the system they use then is arcane enough to make it difficult for you to understand it by inspection. I hope the people staffing the polling place are sufficiently surly and the lines long enough that you feel self-conscious having to ask for explicit directions and weather their pained stares and sighs.
I hope the youth of the future treat you with the same measure of respect you treat the elderly of the present.
I didn't see an actual ballot, but rather saw an image of it on various news sites. While you (and many others in this and other election threads) make a case that paying attention should have been enough to figure out the election, I can see where someone might make a mistake. Put yourself in the place of, say, my grandmother, an 80-year old voter with glaucoma. She doesn't see especially well, and she had difficulty voting on election day even with a better designed ballot. (She voted in Iowa).
I've even seen threads to the effect of "If you can't figure out the ballot you have no business voting." Elitist piffle. Being able to figure out an arcane system with unfamiliar equipment no more disqualifies one from voting eligibility than inability to pass a polling examination or pay a poll tax. Perhaps these same people wish to claim that "The president is on TV much of the time. Only voters with perfect vision, who can reliably gauge the president's comeliness are qualified to vote." Perhaps you should make the ballots "red writing on a green background" since colorblind people obviously can't gauge a candidate's sense of style and color coordination. Perhaps we should phrase the directions in a convoluted way so that those who don't have formal training in logic are exempted. Or, possibly, use 11 different languages to express each ballot, so that only extreme polyglots, who are, on average, smarter than your regular Joe, can vote. Having an unobfuscated system that all can use is undoubtedly the most fair system.
Human beings are trained to read from top to bottom of a page. They are not trained to read from left page to right page and back to left. With the center piece which guides the hole-punching apparatus in place on the ballot even the most cynical Bush supporter has to admit that it is unnatural to associate the second hole with the top entry on the right instead of the second entry on the left. In addition, according to CNN last night, the directions given indicated that one is to punch the hole next to the candidate's name, no reference being made to the guiding arrows. No reference being made to there being only one hole for each candidate. (Many ballots were voided when voters thought that "Gore has two holes. I had better punch them both to make sure I vote for him.")
As an experiment, print out the ballot yourself onto cream or grey paper. Hold it away from you at arm's length, darken the room, and blur your vision somewhat. Now you see things like many of the elderly voters do, and you can maybe appreciate that what is obvious and effortless to you may not necessarily be so to others.
I think it is safe to say that ballot design will receive much more attention in future elections. Few things are less democratic than having page layout cause a voter to unintentionally void a ballot or vote for the wrong candidate.
When John McCain dropped out of the GOP race I fantasized about a "McCain-Ventura" ticket. No doubt it would have run the table in both the tag-team steel cage matchup and the election proper.
Unfortunately, the standard joke around the office is when somebody asks "So how many people work around here?" to answer "About half." A fraction of hard working employees have to do the work of the rest.
This is an endemic problem with working in the government sector. It is nearly impossible to fire anyone, and management has their hands tied regarding compensating their staff: They simply are not allowed, in general, to lower the salaries of those who don't pull their own weight, and they cannot compensate their outstanding workers adequately. In the end everyone gets paid (roughly) the same regardless of job content and performance. Furthermore, unlike in industry where a poor manager can get axed if his or her team doesn't perform, government agencies often have few reliable metrics by which to determine whether a team and a manager are doing their jobs.
1% - Insightful commentary, such as a discussion of whether big, centralized systems are still relevant today, or whether the rankings in the top 500 list are based on the most appropriate criteria.
You must have rounded up.:)
For ASCI I think it is relevant to have big centralized machines such as these. They have been/are being built primarily for modelling nuclear weapons to address performance issues that would otherwise be impossible to resolve short of making craters at the NTS in Nevada. For security purposes alone it's better to have one big machine located behind a fence with armed guards than a bunch of machines scattered about a facility.
Of course the performance of simulation codes on machines as massively parallel as these is generally pretty poor. As a rule of thumb, most parallel radiation-hydrodynamics codes are at best using only 5% or so of the clock cycles, spending the bulk of their time waiting on message passing bottlenecks. While progress has been made in optimizing linear solvers on massively parallel machines, it is still a far cry from banishing the question of whether we getting our money's worth out of the multi-billion dollar ASCI project.
Extremely challenging, like in "it can't work and it won't ever work..."
...which makes for nice sounding rhetoric despite its being false. (Normally I hate being baited by trolls, but it's morning and I haven't finished my coffee...).
A quick search of the Physical Review Letters web site shows 20+ letters in the last five years alone deomonstrating the preparation of entangled quantum states in the laboratory. Furthermore, quantum computation (an application of Grover's algoritm--see, e.g., "Experimental Implementation of Fast Quantum Searching" by Chuang et al., Physical Review Letters Volume 80, Issue 15, pp. 3408-3411) has been demonstrated in the laboratory, so your claims of quantum computation being a mere "mathematical abstraction" do not appear to be valid.
I'm curious what motivates your objection to quantum mechanics. Do you reject the mathematical theory of quantum mechanics (in all of its various guises) which has held up rather well to experimental validation, or is it instead that the heuristic, post-Copenhagen interpretation of the theory (i.e. "spooky action at a distance") rubs you the wrong way? If the latter, then I think your objections are more semantic than substance.
If you ever find yourself in this situation, you're definitely best off getting a lawyer immediately, and you may want to try to get some legal assistance, possibly just a contact for your lawyer to talk to, at some place like EFF, if you're in this sort of situation.
I think it's appropriate to mention that if you are in a job where you feel at all vulnerable, then legal insurance is a must. I work for one of the U.S. National Laboratories, and most of my colleagues here and I have at least one form of legal insurance. (The inexpensive legal insurance available through the lab doesn't cover "on the job" occurrances that can land oneself in jail). After the Wen Ho Lee (who now faces many millions of dollars in legal fees) and the infamous Los Alamos hard drive incidents (where many employees have had to take out second mortgages on their houses to cover their attorney retainers), prudence suggests that the thirty bucks a month you'd spend on cable tv might be better spent on legal protection.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
Do political moderates constitute a faction?
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Should You Vote?
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I have been thinking of late of Federalist No. 10, The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection, attributed to Madison under the pen name Publius, where he defends a republican government as one being most immune to the passions of factious influences. "Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people." I am most intrigued by the following passage, which argues that large republics are safer than small republics:
In the next place, as each representative will be chosen by a greater number of citizens in the large than in the small republic, it will be more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried; and the suffrages of the people being more free, will be more likely to centre in men who possess the most attractive merit and the most diffusive and established characters.
It would seem that with the introduction of instant, global, pervasive, saturating media coverage of the election process the so-called "viscious arts" may indeed be practiced with wanton abandon. Witness Nixon and his "dirty tricks" and, as a more modern example, the allegations on both sides of this election of smear campaigns levied against them by their opponents. It would seem that, for better or worse, politics is changing as a consequence of the infusion of communications and information technology into the voting public. (Katz would argue that this is the end of politics, but I see it, rather, as a subtle change).
The question I have follows from the observation that the two political parties' platforms tend to asymptote toward one another as election day approaches in a strategic attempt to snag the vote of the undecided voter who is, generally speaking, a political moderate. With current technology we can categorize and poll these voters down to the minutiae. We know their age and income demographics. We know where they live. We know how many children they have, how frequently they watch television or listen to the radio, whether they work for big or small business. In the waning hours of the election we craft political platforms in a manner that captures their vote, and we see this pandering mirrored in the bills brought before Congress. Can we call a spade a spade and view these moderates as a faction?
I would argue that we may. They certainly receive a disproportionate amount of attention from both of the major parties, and their sometimes ill-informed concerns have surfaced in eleventh-hour Congressional resolutions, particularly appropriations bills. This year we have many such stingers, including appropriations bills laden with pork, a much-expanded polygraph program to "make our nuclear secrets safe again" by harrassing DOE scientists into resigning from their posts, and the inclusion of censorware on public computers "for the sake of children." Anything to keep the focus groups employed, safe, and keep salaciousness away from their children's eyes--at considerable cost to the good of the public. Even if no campaign promises are kept they have affected public policy in a manner incommensurate with their representation in the populace. The greatest potential tyrrany, according to Madison, was from factions who find themselves in the majority. No matter what the Fates decide for this election, these groups will indeed be members of the majority with public policy initiatives specifically crafted to appeal to their interests.
It is too bad that Gen-X chooses not to vote. We might otherwise use this to our advantage.
...and it did happen in Austria some weeks ago, with the result being that the extreme right won the election.
IIRC (and please correct me if I'm wrong since I'm just a provincial USAian and not a European) the extreme right in Belgium is championing primarily the separation of Belgium into Waloon and Flemish states. I find it curious that federalization of European countries seems to be in vogue even as the continent takes steps toward unification.
Has anybody on this site ever considered going into politics themselves to actually change something?
Most wouldn't qualify. "IANAL" is the most common abbreviation here on/., and I know that I for one am nowhere near pretty enough or sufficiently silvery tongued to pull it off.
You do it because the project is worthwhile in the first place.
This may come as a shock to many, but the ISS already fulfilled its primary mission before anything was launched: The intended purpose of the ISS was to keep Russia from providing India with long-range missile technology. In return from their halting the spread of the technology (IIRC Russia can sell missiles to India but not the technology for manufacturing long range missiles) we bought the Russian involvement in the program. We give the Russians half a billion dollars and they build some components for the ISS and let NASA fly a few astronauts on Mir to train for the ISS. (Information on the politics surrounding the ISS can be found in Dragonfly : Nasa and the Crisis Aboard Mir by Bryan Burrough). With the agreement we pay the low price of 20 billion dollars to slow down India's development of long-range missiles for a decade or so.
In addition the ISS is major pork, so it satisfies the second key component of its mission--that is, get some elected officials reelected. ISS construction brings revenue to over 40 states, and as a consequence it enjoys and will continue to enjoy broad support in Congress.
While I agree that a mission to Mars would probably be of higher scientific value than running a bunch of laps in low Earth orbit, it has to be recognized that science is not nor ever was a priority of the ISS mission. Any words to that effect were just subterfuge, ramblings of a disingenuous politician. Furthermore, a mission to Mars has the serious disadvantage from a practical point of view in that we don't know for certain whether or not we could pull it off--some technical issues, such as whether the amount of cosmic ray exposure the astronauts would be subjected to is manageable, have not yet been resolved. When the price of a program reaches a threshold the public becomes quite allergic to risk. (Cases in point: Apollo 1 almost killed the Apollo mission, and NASA still hasn't recovered fully from the Challenger explosion). Since with the ISS we are doing nothing besides applying tried-and-true technology in a low-risk environment, it's a slam dunk that the ISS will perform more-or-less to specs and that nobody will swing from the gallows over its failures.
Look at the bright side: We get to take some pretty photos, pat ourselves on our backs for a job well done, maybe watch a few seasons of "ISS Survivor," and then promptly lose interest in the whole "going to space" thing--that's for the next generation to struggle with as they combat the other problems we'll leave them with (depleted ecosystems, energy shortages, ozone depletion, global warming, etc).
Hey now, you don't know from his statement that he capitalized "internet." He could just have been talking about a little home LAN that he and Tipper wired up. Given all the smut out there and the danger of the Goregirls' (tm) learning to play the two-backed beast with *gasp* that Y-chromosome-endowed, I'm quite sure that he kept his home LAN from being hooked up to the real deal. He may just have been so excited at laying down all that CAT-5 cable that he felt compelled to brag a bit and toy with a trifle of inside humor to see if folks would bite....
Yeah right. It's about as likely as someone actually having read Ulysses cover to cover. "And monkeys might fly out of my butt." -- Wayne's World.
One of the long-standing complaints of the ISS consortium is how Energia and the Russian space agency have continued to support Mir while they have allowed deadlines for the ISS to slip. It would perhaps be advisable for the ISS to come up with the funds to de-orbit the facility--if for no other reason than because it'd be a cheap (only $60 mil) way to rid the program of a major distraction, and doing so would probably save them money in the long run.
The problem I've noticed with moderation is that it tends to snuff out alternative ideas, and the people who post them.
I agree. Furthermore, with metamoderation being able to nuke people's karma scores moderators have little incentive to try to stimulate discussion by promoting interesting, if unconventional or unpopular, ideas. Nearly every time I've done this I've lost karma in m2--people who oppose viscerally a viewpoint apparently have a difficult time swallowing the "interesting" tag I tack onto a post.
In short, I don't like karma at all. I think it's completely wrong. Each post should be unemcumbered by the quality of previous posts; judged on its own merit.
If I had more time to read posts I'd probably agree with you more. Karma/moderation helps boost the signal-to-noise to the point that it is sometimes worthwhile reading comments.
That being said, the moderation process often leaves a very bland set of posts at high moderation levels. As a proposed change, I'd like to see something where I could specify the percentage of posts at a given level that I want to read. E.g., "100% +3 to +5, 50% +2, 20% +1, 10% +0, 0% -1 to -3". That way I can still stumble across interesting "+0" ACs on occasion without having to wade through 100 unfiltered grits posts. Also, it would be nice to be able to "killfile" certain UIDs so when someone is an obvious kwhore (Sig11?) I could choose not to view any of his/her posts anymore.
I want to start a company whose sole business plan is to find the inane, everyday occurances that haven't been patented yet, (for example, masturbation) and just attack all people/companies that use them.
I'd suggest adding the proviso that you take these inane, everyday things and put "cyber-" "hyperlinked" or "web-based" in front of every third or fourth word. History suggest that then the idea is guaranteed to be genuinely novel and patentworthy even if it were banal to begin with. (E.g., "One-click shopping (tm)" which is little more than a "cyber-vending machine").
Patent your business model and also patent the process of copying or adapting the patented business model of another business. This should give you plenty of legal protection and meta-protection from your competitors. Your VCs will marvel at your acumen.
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Nice troll.
Yes, forget about "innocent until proven guilty".
You didn't, by chance, work for the prosecution in the Wen Ho Lee case, did you?
If you waited for a court case to reach completion (as well as optional appeals) before you formed an opinion on anything, you couldn't function. You use your judgement every day, why not here?
I think the accused has the right to a fair trial before we all go around calling him the "Spy of the Century," as was done in the Wen Ho Lee case. It is impossible, without complete access to all the data, to formulate an informed opinion of the guilt or innocence of Hanssen. While you may be hamstrung by the courts' moving slowly towards resolutions of disputes, I, for one, am content to wait and see what lies beneath the media spectacle.
True, if the guy is acquitted, he could sue those who said (or wrote) he was a spy....
Ah yes, we don't trust the legal system to help determine guilt or innocence, but we trust the courts to redress damages done by the overzealous press. How very consistent.
It should be noted that the Trailer Trash demographic also votes, complains to their Congresscritters, and generally questions the U.S.'s spending money on such "extravagances" as Apollo and the space program. NASA has to justify its existence every fiscal year in order to maintain even a skeleton-crew capability for space R&D. They have a terrible time recruiting young talent to work on the GS salary scale, and perhaps the only scientific organization whose credibility has suffered more in the eyes of the public of late is Los Alamos National Laboratory. With a proposed 1.6 trillion dollar tax reduction in the works, I think it is safe to say that scientific agencies in the U.S., including NASA, are in serious jeopardy when next year's budget comes out. Don't just take my word for it--read the Feb. 16 edition of the Wall Street Journal, where it was announced that the Bush Administration plans to chop the science investment to make room for a $1.6 trillion tax cut and rapid deployment of an NMD system.
Given the impending budgetary crisis, it is hard to imagine a worse time for NASA's integrity to be questioned--doubly so if Fox's re-airing of the show this summer opens with a voice-over: "We have learned from hundreds of viewers of our first showing of this documentary that NASA, when confronted with these allegations of fraud and impropriety, refused to comment. Perhaps what we have to say hits too close to home.... We will let you, the viewer, decide."
Just four words: Battle Bots in space.
My brother and I used to switch off on that Atari 2600 great, Megamania (by Activision)--a game played by about three fewer people than Circus. Our record is three and a half hours on one game. We taped the joystick button down so that our hands wouldn't cramp up so badly from playing.
This should at least win an honorable mention for pathetic wastes of time. Speaking of which, does anyone remember the deal Activision used to have for their Atari 2600 games where, if you achieved a threshold score, you could take a picture of the television and send it in to get a free patch or badge or something identifying you as "Grand Master of Megamania" or somesuch? Those were so cool.
A scientist working for a corporation tends to lie to help the corporation.. Wouldn't a scientist who's funded by an environmental group also tend to lie to help that group?
Science in the U.S. is generally funded by public money and not by "environmental groups," unless you consider organizations like the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and NASA as being "environmental groups." The grants are obtained by applying for the money, and there is intense competition for each research dollar. A scientist who habitually lies about his or her results can expect that, eventually, the ruse will be discovered, and the scientist will lose all credibility in the eyes of his or her peers. The scientist will then be unable to secure research grants in the future. Let's "follow the money," as you say, and realize that credible studies are in most scientists' best interests; a scientist's currency is his or her reputation. You will find few who are reckless enough to risk that for a dubious immediate gain.
Has Paul Erhlik [sic. Ehrlich] a scientist ever admitted his mistaken predictions?
See a recent biographical article in Scientific American where Dr. Ehrlich indeed admits that many of his doomsday predictions did not come true. How is this relevant again?
Much of the evidence of global warming is in indicators; people who claim they can measure fractions of a degree in tree rings or atospheric gasses. That's something that makes me reluctant to trust them.
Please elaborate on the flaws in these lines of research and convince my why they shouldn't be taken any more seriously than, say, economic indicators that point to a recession on the horizon. Just why should I care about the CPI or the trade deficit or the number of new housing starts in a quarter? What relevance could these possibly have?
Face it. You are yourself biased because you do not wish to lose your beloved SUV or admit that your USA "consume and discard" lifestyle is at all damaging to the environment. You are eager to accuse those who have devoted their careers to answering the difficult questions of climate change of being as biased as you. You choose, instead of elevating yourself to their level by learning of the issues and debating the results of the studies, to dismiss all studies whose outcomes you don't like.
Rush Limbaugh claimed once on his radio show that global warming wouldn't matter anyway because (to paraphrase) ice melting in a glass of water doesn't change the level of the water.
Not only did the grad student make the first observations of a neutron star, but (IIRC) she even got to watch, chagrinned, as her thesis advisor claimed credit for the discovery, a discovery which later "earned" him the Nobel Prize.
Moral of the story: Choose your thesis advisor carefully.
...and I know for a fact that both Project Helios and Project Orion were not intended for use inside the atmosphere of Earth.
Some early incarnations of Orion actually did call for launch inside Earth's atmosphere. At the time it seemed (and still seems) the cheapest way to develop "very heavy launch" capability quickly. While there is still a fallout issue, one can envision scenarios where people would trade fallout for unpleasant consequences--e.g., to get equipment into space in order to prevent Earth's colliding with a large meteor.
Secondly, the ISS may be the biggest boon to interplanetary space travel we've come up with so far. With it, we have the possibility of starting from outside the gravity well, which is the biggest fuel burn we have with any space travel.
The ISS is in LEO. If the earth were a peach, then the ISS would lie somewhere in the fuzz. While I'll grant that it's higher than the ground, it's not enough to make a significant difference in cost. You might think to construct spacecraft in situ to reduce costs, but then there's still the expense of transporting the raw materials and/or parts up to the ISS.
You're not going to see routine trips to Mars for 10 years at least.
I'd push the date back even farther than that. Manned colonies on Mars are still pie-in-the-sky dreaming for the most part. Zubrin, while a visionary, is like most visionaries in that his ramblings need to be taken with a grain of salt and a healthy dose of reality. "Living off the land" sounds very appealing--very "Wild West" and "Lewis and Clark." But it's also foolhardy when you realize that we simply don't know what we need to know about Mars to be able to make such a scheme work. Lewis and Clark could make canoes when they needed to cross rivers. It's doubtful that a manned mission would ever have the resources to build, say, spare fuel cells or atmosphere-transmogrification-into-rocket-fuel facilities as Zubrin envisions. Then there's the problem of cosmic ray bombardment both in the trip to Mars and in the time spent on the surface. The most recent estimates based on our best information to date puts human exposure in the 0.5 heavy nuclei/year/cell in the body range for the trip there, and something like 0.1 heavy nuclei / year while there. This doesn't sound too healthy to me. Shielding won't work very well either. Unless it is very thick (and thus, very expensive), the result will just be bombardment by showers of secondary particles, rather like ricocheting bullets inside tanks.
We have to face the fact that unmanned space exploration is all there will be in the near future. When the robots teach us enough that we can bring the risk (financial and safety) down to acceptable levels, and when we find enough impetus to go there in person, then we might consider manned missions. Not until then, I'm afraid.
Your right. [sic] We should just let murderers go, lamenting the fact these people really are just misunderstood.
Setting aside all debate over the appropriateness of the death penalty, I'd like to note that I find it curiously inconsistent for GWB to call the shots (bad pun) on capital punishment using the argument "people have to learn that actions have consequences," yet he asks us to forget and forgive any transgressions he himself had prior to turning 40, a magical age before which one cannot be held accountable for one's actions. Am I to believe that no executions of prisoners under age 40 were held in Texas, or do we have a double standard here?
Some of us not born with a wealthy, well-connected pedigree have difficulty accepting his DWI, his long-time abuse of alcohol and drugs, his pathetic excuse for service in the Air Guard during Vietnam, and (if the Larry Flint comments on CNN are to be believed) the abortion he helped arrange for his girlfriend in pre-Roe v. Wade 1970 as mere "excesses of youth" that must be overlooked. For a party who seem to have cornered the market on morality (recall the indignant outrage during the impeachment proceedings not long ago) to rally behind such a candidate is, in my mind, the big joke of this election.
Regarding polling places, you're not missing out on much except frustration. In 1996 when I lived in LA it took me nearly two hours to drive five miles to get from my place of work (UCLA campus) to my polling place (somewhere in Culver City) and then find a place to park. Then I stood in line for about an hour before I was given a ballot. Though I left over three hours before the polls closed I was within half an hour of not being permitted to vote.
I, for one, think "no-fault" absentee voting is a good thing. It's how I voted in '98, and if I still lived in CA it's how I'd have voted in this election.
I personally feel that these people shouldn't even be voting. If you can't follow the arrow from the candidate's name to the corresponding hole/box/lever/split arrow, then you shouldn't be voting.
I personally hope that in your later years when your vision starts to fail you are handed a ballot that you cannot read easily. I hope the system they use then is arcane enough to make it difficult for you to understand it by inspection. I hope the people staffing the polling place are sufficiently surly and the lines long enough that you feel self-conscious having to ask for explicit directions and weather their pained stares and sighs.
I hope the youth of the future treat you with the same measure of respect you treat the elderly of the present.
I didn't see an actual ballot, but rather saw an image of it on various news sites. While you (and many others in this and other election threads) make a case that paying attention should have been enough to figure out the election, I can see where someone might make a mistake. Put yourself in the place of, say, my grandmother, an 80-year old voter with glaucoma. She doesn't see especially well, and she had difficulty voting on election day even with a better designed ballot. (She voted in Iowa).
I've even seen threads to the effect of "If you can't figure out the ballot you have no business voting." Elitist piffle. Being able to figure out an arcane system with unfamiliar equipment no more disqualifies one from voting eligibility than inability to pass a polling examination or pay a poll tax. Perhaps these same people wish to claim that "The president is on TV much of the time. Only voters with perfect vision, who can reliably gauge the president's comeliness are qualified to vote." Perhaps you should make the ballots "red writing on a green background" since colorblind people obviously can't gauge a candidate's sense of style and color coordination. Perhaps we should phrase the directions in a convoluted way so that those who don't have formal training in logic are exempted. Or, possibly, use 11 different languages to express each ballot, so that only extreme polyglots, who are, on average, smarter than your regular Joe, can vote. Having an unobfuscated system that all can use is undoubtedly the most fair system.
Human beings are trained to read from top to bottom of a page. They are not trained to read from left page to right page and back to left. With the center piece which guides the hole-punching apparatus in place on the ballot even the most cynical Bush supporter has to admit that it is unnatural to associate the second hole with the top entry on the right instead of the second entry on the left. In addition, according to CNN last night, the directions given indicated that one is to punch the hole next to the candidate's name, no reference being made to the guiding arrows. No reference being made to there being only one hole for each candidate. (Many ballots were voided when voters thought that "Gore has two holes. I had better punch them both to make sure I vote for him.")
As an experiment, print out the ballot yourself onto cream or grey paper. Hold it away from you at arm's length, darken the room, and blur your vision somewhat. Now you see things like many of the elderly voters do, and you can maybe appreciate that what is obvious and effortless to you may not necessarily be so to others.
I think it is safe to say that ballot design will receive much more attention in future elections. Few things are less democratic than having page layout cause a voter to unintentionally void a ballot or vote for the wrong candidate.
Jesse Ventura, where are you?
When John McCain dropped out of the GOP race I fantasized about a "McCain-Ventura" ticket. No doubt it would have run the table in both the tag-team steel cage matchup and the election proper.
Unfortunately, the standard joke around the office is when somebody asks "So how many people work around here?" to answer "About half." A fraction of hard working employees have to do the work of the rest.
This is an endemic problem with working in the government sector. It is nearly impossible to fire anyone, and management has their hands tied regarding compensating their staff: They simply are not allowed, in general, to lower the salaries of those who don't pull their own weight, and they cannot compensate their outstanding workers adequately. In the end everyone gets paid (roughly) the same regardless of job content and performance. Furthermore, unlike in industry where a poor manager can get axed if his or her team doesn't perform, government agencies often have few reliable metrics by which to determine whether a team and a manager are doing their jobs.
1% - Insightful commentary, such as a discussion of whether big, centralized systems are still relevant today, or whether the rankings in the top 500 list are based on the most appropriate criteria.
:)
You must have rounded up.
For ASCI I think it is relevant to have big centralized machines such as these. They have been/are being built primarily for modelling nuclear weapons to address performance issues that would otherwise be impossible to resolve short of making craters at the NTS in Nevada. For security purposes alone it's better to have one big machine located behind a fence with armed guards than a bunch of machines scattered about a facility.
Of course the performance of simulation codes on machines as massively parallel as these is generally pretty poor. As a rule of thumb, most parallel radiation-hydrodynamics codes are at best using only 5% or so of the clock cycles, spending the bulk of their time waiting on message passing bottlenecks. While progress has been made in optimizing linear solvers on massively parallel machines, it is still a far cry from banishing the question of whether we getting our money's worth out of the multi-billion dollar ASCI project.
Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative.
Fwiw, ASCI Blue should outperform it by a factor of three or so when it comes online. Odd that "Big Blue" is a Compaq machine and not IBM....
Extremely challenging, like in "it can't work and it won't ever work..."
...which makes for nice sounding rhetoric despite its being false. (Normally I hate being baited by trolls, but it's morning and I haven't finished my coffee...).
A quick search of the Physical Review Letters web site shows 20+ letters in the last five years alone deomonstrating the preparation of entangled quantum states in the laboratory. Furthermore, quantum computation (an application of Grover's algoritm--see, e.g., "Experimental Implementation of Fast Quantum Searching" by Chuang et al., Physical Review Letters Volume 80, Issue 15, pp. 3408-3411) has been demonstrated in the laboratory, so your claims of quantum computation being a mere "mathematical abstraction" do not appear to be valid.
I'm curious what motivates your objection to quantum mechanics. Do you reject the mathematical theory of quantum mechanics (in all of its various guises) which has held up rather well to experimental validation, or is it instead that the heuristic, post-Copenhagen interpretation of the theory (i.e. "spooky action at a distance") rubs you the wrong way? If the latter, then I think your objections are more semantic than substance.
If you ever find yourself in this situation, you're definitely best off getting a lawyer immediately, and you may want to try to get some legal assistance, possibly just a contact for your lawyer to talk to, at some place like EFF, if you're in this sort of situation.
I think it's appropriate to mention that if you are in a job where you feel at all vulnerable, then legal insurance is a must. I work for one of the U.S. National Laboratories, and most of my colleagues here and I have at least one form of legal insurance. (The inexpensive legal insurance available through the lab doesn't cover "on the job" occurrances that can land oneself in jail). After the Wen Ho Lee (who now faces many millions of dollars in legal fees) and the infamous Los Alamos hard drive incidents (where many employees have had to take out second mortgages on their houses to cover their attorney retainers), prudence suggests that the thirty bucks a month you'd spend on cable tv might be better spent on legal protection.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
I have been thinking of late of Federalist No. 10, The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection, attributed to Madison under the pen name Publius, where he defends a republican government as one being most immune to the passions of factious influences. "Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people." I am most intrigued by the following passage, which argues that large republics are safer than small republics:
In the next place, as each representative will be chosen by a greater number of citizens in the large than in the small republic, it will be more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried; and the suffrages of the people being more free, will be more likely to centre in men who possess the most attractive merit and the most diffusive and established characters.
It would seem that with the introduction of instant, global, pervasive, saturating media coverage of the election process the so-called "viscious arts" may indeed be practiced with wanton abandon. Witness Nixon and his "dirty tricks" and, as a more modern example, the allegations on both sides of this election of smear campaigns levied against them by their opponents. It would seem that, for better or worse, politics is changing as a consequence of the infusion of communications and information technology into the voting public. (Katz would argue that this is the end of politics, but I see it, rather, as a subtle change).
The question I have follows from the observation that the two political parties' platforms tend to asymptote toward one another as election day approaches in a strategic attempt to snag the vote of the undecided voter who is, generally speaking, a political moderate. With current technology we can categorize and poll these voters down to the minutiae. We know their age and income demographics. We know where they live. We know how many children they have, how frequently they watch television or listen to the radio, whether they work for big or small business. In the waning hours of the election we craft political platforms in a manner that captures their vote, and we see this pandering mirrored in the bills brought before Congress. Can we call a spade a spade and view these moderates as a faction?
I would argue that we may. They certainly receive a disproportionate amount of attention from both of the major parties, and their sometimes ill-informed concerns have surfaced in eleventh-hour Congressional resolutions, particularly appropriations bills. This year we have many such stingers, including appropriations bills laden with pork, a much-expanded polygraph program to "make our nuclear secrets safe again" by harrassing DOE scientists into resigning from their posts, and the inclusion of censorware on public computers "for the sake of children." Anything to keep the focus groups employed, safe, and keep salaciousness away from their children's eyes--at considerable cost to the good of the public. Even if no campaign promises are kept they have affected public policy in a manner incommensurate with their representation in the populace. The greatest potential tyrrany, according to Madison, was from factions who find themselves in the majority. No matter what the Fates decide for this election, these groups will indeed be members of the majority with public policy initiatives specifically crafted to appeal to their interests.
It is too bad that Gen-X chooses not to vote. We might otherwise use this to our advantage.
Same thing just happened in Belgium.
/., and I know that I for one am nowhere near pretty enough or sufficiently silvery tongued to pull it off.
...and it did happen in Austria some weeks ago, with the result being that the extreme right won the election.
IIRC (and please correct me if I'm wrong since I'm just a provincial USAian and not a European) the extreme right in Belgium is championing primarily the separation of Belgium into Waloon and Flemish states. I find it curious that federalization of European countries seems to be in vogue even as the continent takes steps toward unification.
Has anybody on this site ever considered going into politics themselves to actually change something?
Most wouldn't qualify. "IANAL" is the most common abbreviation here on
You do it because the project is worthwhile in the first place.
This may come as a shock to many, but the ISS already fulfilled its primary mission before anything was launched: The intended purpose of the ISS was to keep Russia from providing India with long-range missile technology. In return from their halting the spread of the technology (IIRC Russia can sell missiles to India but not the technology for manufacturing long range missiles) we bought the Russian involvement in the program. We give the Russians half a billion dollars and they build some components for the ISS and let NASA fly a few astronauts on Mir to train for the ISS. (Information on the politics surrounding the ISS can be found in Dragonfly : Nasa and the Crisis Aboard Mir by Bryan Burrough). With the agreement we pay the low price of 20 billion dollars to slow down India's development of long-range missiles for a decade or so.
In addition the ISS is major pork, so it satisfies the second key component of its mission--that is, get some elected officials reelected. ISS construction brings revenue to over 40 states, and as a consequence it enjoys and will continue to enjoy broad support in Congress.
While I agree that a mission to Mars would probably be of higher scientific value than running a bunch of laps in low Earth orbit, it has to be recognized that science is not nor ever was a priority of the ISS mission. Any words to that effect were just subterfuge, ramblings of a disingenuous politician. Furthermore, a mission to Mars has the serious disadvantage from a practical point of view in that we don't know for certain whether or not we could pull it off--some technical issues, such as whether the amount of cosmic ray exposure the astronauts would be subjected to is manageable, have not yet been resolved. When the price of a program reaches a threshold the public becomes quite allergic to risk. (Cases in point: Apollo 1 almost killed the Apollo mission, and NASA still hasn't recovered fully from the Challenger explosion). Since with the ISS we are doing nothing besides applying tried-and-true technology in a low-risk environment, it's a slam dunk that the ISS will perform more-or-less to specs and that nobody will swing from the gallows over its failures.
Look at the bright side: We get to take some pretty photos, pat ourselves on our backs for a job well done, maybe watch a few seasons of "ISS Survivor," and then promptly lose interest in the whole "going to space" thing--that's for the next generation to struggle with as they combat the other problems we'll leave them with (depleted ecosystems, energy shortages, ozone depletion, global warming, etc).
Hey now, you don't know from his statement that he capitalized "internet." He could just have been talking about a little home LAN that he and Tipper wired up. Given all the smut out there and the danger of the Goregirls' (tm) learning to play the two-backed beast with *gasp* that Y-chromosome-endowed, I'm quite sure that he kept his home LAN from being hooked up to the real deal. He may just have been so excited at laying down all that CAT-5 cable that he felt compelled to brag a bit and toy with a trifle of inside humor to see if folks would bite....
Yeah right. It's about as likely as someone actually having read Ulysses cover to cover. "And monkeys might fly out of my butt." -- Wayne's World.
One of the long-standing complaints of the ISS consortium is how Energia and the Russian space agency have continued to support Mir while they have allowed deadlines for the ISS to slip. It would perhaps be advisable for the ISS to come up with the funds to de-orbit the facility--if for no other reason than because it'd be a cheap (only $60 mil) way to rid the program of a major distraction, and doing so would probably save them money in the long run.
The problem I've noticed with moderation is that it tends to snuff out alternative ideas, and the people who post them.
I agree. Furthermore, with metamoderation being able to nuke people's karma scores moderators have little incentive to try to stimulate discussion by promoting interesting, if unconventional or unpopular, ideas. Nearly every time I've done this I've lost karma in m2--people who oppose viscerally a viewpoint apparently have a difficult time swallowing the "interesting" tag I tack onto a post.
In short, I don't like karma at all. I think it's completely wrong. Each post should be unemcumbered by the quality of previous posts; judged on its own merit.
If I had more time to read posts I'd probably agree with you more. Karma/moderation helps boost the signal-to-noise to the point that it is sometimes worthwhile reading comments.
That being said, the moderation process often leaves a very bland set of posts at high moderation levels. As a proposed change, I'd like to see something where I could specify the percentage of posts at a given level that I want to read. E.g., "100% +3 to +5, 50% +2, 20% +1, 10% +0, 0% -1 to -3". That way I can still stumble across interesting "+0" ACs on occasion without having to wade through 100 unfiltered grits posts. Also, it would be nice to be able to "killfile" certain UIDs so when someone is an obvious kwhore (Sig11?) I could choose not to view any of his/her posts anymore.
I want to start a company whose sole business plan is to find the inane, everyday occurances that haven't been patented yet, (for example, masturbation) and just attack all people/companies that use them.
I'd suggest adding the proviso that you take these inane, everyday things and put "cyber-" "hyperlinked" or "web-based" in front of every third or fourth word. History suggest that then the idea is guaranteed to be genuinely novel and patentworthy even if it were banal to begin with. (E.g., "One-click shopping (tm)" which is little more than a "cyber-vending machine").
Patent your business model and also patent the process of copying or adapting the patented business model of another business. This should give you plenty of legal protection and meta-protection from your competitors. Your VCs will marvel at your acumen.