The following exchange took place at the Chicago airport between Robert I.
Sherman of American Atheist Press and George
Bush, on August 27 1987. Sherman is a fully accredited reporter, and was
present by invitation as a member of the press corps. The Republican
presidential nominee was there to announce federal disaster relief for
Illinois. The discussion turned to the presidential primary:
RS:"What will you do to win the votes of Americans who are
atheists?"
GB:"I guess I'm pretty weak in the atheist community. Faith
in God is important to me."
RS:"Surely you recognize the equal citizenship and
patriotism of Americans who are atheists?"
GB:"No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as
citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation
under God."
RS:"Do you support as a sound constitutional principle the
separation of state and church?"
GB:"Yes, I support the separation of church and state. I'm
just not very high on atheists."
UPI reported on May 8, 1989, that various atheist organizations were
still angry over the remarks.
I bet you drive an electric car too... no?
Hypocrite.
Well, actually, I don't own a car at all. Being a grad student in a reasonable town, I find that public transport and my bike meet most of my needs. I'm happy for you, though, in your little bubble of complacency...
The Viridian Archive commentary on this concept is here... check out the Viridian page for some cool eco-slanted stuff - and hey, it's run by Bruce Sterling.
It's a well-written page, almost eloquent, and very wistful and sad... ah, what a mess. And W wants to drill away, full steam ahead, in spite of repeated opinion polls showing that the majority of gas-guzzling Americans still value wildlife over oil comapny profits. (There's still some hope, though.)
But the rest of the respondents are correct, the anglo-saxons are not much different from others: you only have to look at the mess the Chinese have made, or the emergent situation in India. When population pressure and wildlife habitat collide, wildlife always loses, because animals don't vote, now do they?
If Corporation X payes college Y to do research in Z, not only does the college have more funds to spend, the researchers get to do interesting work.
Bingo: you've nailed the problem exactly. The stuff the researchers get to do is selected by the company. Do you think Monsanto is going to select a project demonstrating the dangers of genetically engineered crops? Do you thing Pfizer is going to finance a study to prove that Americans are over-medicated? When you control the questions that can be asked, you've undermined the very basic idea of unfettered inquiry.
The real world butts into your cozy scenario when Hertz and National and everyone else all install these devices and set a $150 per incident "speeding fee" too... Then what? (ANd I promise you, if ACME can get away with it, these guys will follow suit faster than you can say "erosion of personal liberties.")
Yes, you claim, but there will be a market for the one firm that provides cars with no speeding restrictions. Really? What if there isn't quite that much demand? What if their insurance company refuses to insure their cars? (Well, everyone else limits their speed, so your cars are obviously more liable to accidents now...)
What next? Do you set up your own rental company, and an insurance company to insure it? I hate it when people spout off their infinite faith in capitalism without thinking through the consequences... The companies are out to get your money, and they don't give a damn about your liberties or rights or anything. Just something to think about. And I won't even bother to extend my analogy to casual genetic screening, for example.
Okay, so I understand "Troll" and maybe even "Interesting", and I'd rate it "Funny" myself. But Informative? Insightful? Who let the monkeys out again?
Returned to/. after a long break, and man it's good to see Jon Erikson still going great guns!
And Reality Master 101! Wow, this is still the same old crapdot - though I notice Jon E has been promoted to "Senior" consultant of Natalie Portman Technologies...:)
Sadly, the press (and the public?) love to dissect the failures more than they love to laud the successes, so from the PR perspective (and only from that perspective) Faster Cheaper Better has been a failure.
That was precisely my viewpoint too, until I heard out one of the profs in our department (he ran the CONTOUR mission, FWIW). His point was this: we have lots of Mars data, but even now, our best non-sexy data (e.g. the atmospheric composition) comes from the Vikings (1970s). Yes, the Mars Orbiter and the Sojourner Rover provided gorgeous pictures, and some useful science data too, but there were too many compromises built into the mission due to weight/fuel/cost constraints to do really comprehensive science.
OTOH, I agree with you that some science is better than none at all: when the billion dollar Mars Orbiter vanished, that was a lot of time and effort with nothing left to show. So the concept of F/B/C is, indeed, good. And I agree with you that the American public is way too risk intolerant (try swimming in a public place!), and the media loves failure (compare Apollo 12 coverage to Apollo 13).
But: the pendulum has swung too far. The missions now are too fast, too cheap, and better only from the pretty-picture perspective. We're building not one, but two identical Athena rovers for Mars - and you know what? The best science can't make it there, due to weight and payload volume limitations. This is not good science.
Of course, I personally do radio astronomy, and all this is corridor gossip, so feel free to add salt to taste...
The ESA people built both the Huygens transmitter and the receiver for it on Cassini - and it is sad, but true, that they "forgot" to provide a means to compensate for the variable (?) Doppler shift. So there's simply not going to be any way to get the full bandwidth of data back from Cassini.
I was talking to a member of the orbit planning committee (yeah, these things get done in the mother of all committees) and she said, right now, the US groups are going ahead with planning as if there is no problem. It's ESA's baby and ESA's fault, so they can deal with it...
Unfortunately, the only way to "deal with it" and get data volumes greater than zero is to (a) reduce transmitted data (low bandwidth) and repeat it all over the band, and (b) do fancy moves with velocity component matching between Huygens and Cassini - completely outside the spec.
Add to this, Cassini is the size of a bus, and a fixed platform - so phoning home requires all (or most) instruments to stop looking, and the instruments look in mutually exclusive directions. Fights over orbit planning are predicted to come to blows easily this time.
But hey, we can do Faster Cheaper Better (pick two) missions now - they carry very few instruments and none are worth fighting over, see? There's progress for you.
Show me a document that you've created using vi that has all the formatting features of Word. Don't tell me to use LaTeX, because that's a pain in the ass and is "inefficient."
Oh man, you need to get a clue.
Do you realize that most scientific journals out there (definitely all in the physical sciences) require submissions in TeX? Yes, it's not the best tool for writing letters to Grandma, but for anything that needs correct formatting, it is simply incomparable. And as a bonus, it looks gorgeous too - none of those nasty inter-word spaces or poor hyphenations or kludged equations that Word serves up, and a completely transparent format to boot (check out latex2html, for instance).
I suggest looking at LyX if you're interested in: I hear they are doing good work combining WYSIWYG with TeX. For me, Emacs works just fine...
Perhaps I should have referred to Asimov's science writing instead. (But no doubt
that would get me shot down for something I didn't know about Asimov.)
Yeah, don't you know about his great work on the "Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline"?
(j/k - but there's a great story, if you haven't read it already, about how this short story got published with his name on it a few days before he defended his PhD in Chemistry. And one of his committee members actually read it - but he knew his defence was okay when he got asked, "So, how about those endochronic properties of Thiotimoline, Dr. Asimov?")
Oh well. Sagan bashing is one of my peeves ever since I read Chris McKeay's exteremely negative biography of him. No offence.
But he's no more a thought-leader in that than Carl Sagan was in astronomy--he's just the person who can pull together existing best processes and write them down.
It is quite beyond me why Sagan-bashing is so fashionable, but as an astronomer, I can assure you that Sagan's science was impeccable. ADS archives 307 articles by him, including 184 peer-reviewed journal articles:
this link should work (unless lameness filter intervenes) -- or just go to adswww.harvard.edu and search for yourself.
Specifically note papers like this one in Nature: "Cometary Organics but no Evidence for Bacteria". That was him, claiming that the evidence was not there for one of his pet theories. In science, at least, being able to say that you have disproved your own pet theory counts as good work.
As to the appropriateness of the analogy with PhilG, I have no comment one way or the other. It just gets me pissed off that people are so willing to take the mutterings of pissed-off journalists and smear Sagan's work without even knowing what he did!
That's what it means: the stories are supposed to be follow-ups, related items, updates, etc. I don't know how the CNN story fits this, but the rest definitely look familiar.
...and since I have no mod points today, I'll do my bit by quoting the entire post. It's not my post, I'm quoting an AC.
This is it:
Who cares about the position of the Earth right after the push? The main thing
happening is a change of velocity of v=a*520. The difference in position is then a
function of time, roughly x(t) = v*t. (think t = days or weeks)
...That's assuming we forgot about the engine exhaust going the other way that will
hit air molecules which in turn will hit other air molecules, etc, until the exhaust
momentum is ultimately transfered to the Earth.
I didn't want to write anything long because your posts will get archived while mine
will disappear (unless you quote what I say). But given the effort that you put, I think
that you deserve something in return.
You're not hopeless. You're quite knowledgeble, and you can undoubtedly solve many
physics problems involving mass, momentum, and the like. But that's not enough. To
be a Jedi, you need the feel conservation of energy and conservation of momentum as
second nature. These are the two most important concepts in mechanics, and will save
your butt countless times.
You mentioned 5 other things to take into account, and accurately said that it wasn't
an exhaustive list, but sometimes there's a trick. If I ask you what is
(exp(sin(Pi/9))+sqrt(17+log(23))) - (exp(sin(Pi/9))+sqrt(17+log(23))), you're still busy
parsing the first few calculations while anyone with a global view will immediately
say this is equal to zero, without even worrying whether I meant log base-10 or
base-e.
Same here. In the rocket engine problem, you put a big box around the Earth such that
the boundary of the box will be space. That's a closed system. The total momentum
inside of that box doesn't change, as long as nothing gets out of the box (which is the
case since I chose a large box, going halfway to the moon, say). Conservation of linear
momentum says that the integral of density(x,y,z)*velocity(x,y,z) over that box
remains a constant, unchanged by rocket engines, volcanos, or people jumping up and
down.
Now you can say "ah ha but I don't count people or the air to be part of Earth". Fine,
but you still have: integral of density(x,y,z)*velocity(x,y,z) over the Earth + integral of
density(x,y,z)*velocity(x,y,z) over not-Earth = constant. In other words, the average
velocity of the Earth times Earth's mass + the average velocity of the non-Earth times
non-Earth is a constant. But these two average velocities are equals, else the Earth
and people would be spreading apart and be completely separated given enough time.
It really makes no difference if you don't count people and air, as long as people and
air don't fly off the Earth.
The upshot: Earth's orbit won't change at all, and you don't need to worry about the
deformation of the steel frame and concrete block or anything else to get that answer.
That is why you should worship conservation of momentum as your new God.
"Breaking" some
of these "amazingly-wonderfully-powerful gonna-save-music-as-we-know-it"
schemes was trivial. No wonder they want to hide it.
Then again, the end of the presentation makes this point: Ultimately, if it is possible for a consumer to hear or see protected content, then it will be technically possible for the consumer to copy that content.
At that point, it doesn't much matter what the encryption/protection scheme actually is: their only hope is to use the DMCA bludgeon on their own customers. And unfortuantely, customers only have patience for so long before they say "F*** it..."
I'm using Netscape 4.7x on Solaris, and I get frozen out of the site too... the funniest thing is, after I deliberately mangled the URL, it took me to a "page not found" page with alist of links. After that, I could navigate the site - it would render a page, then replace it with the "Sorry, OS not supported" page.
So if I cared enough, I could read parts of their site by hitting Stop really quickly as the page rendered, or by looking through my cache.
Sadly, I don't even care enough to send them hate mail.
Making voting easier is only empowering the stupid (and by virtue of which, those apathetic to the future of our world).
Yeah, the stupid, the niggers, the slit-eyed chinks, those evil breed-like-rabbits Latinos - how presumptuous of them to think that they should have the same rights as us clever people! And those Jews - contaminating our pure Aryan blood - what cheek! I hope you voted for Buchanan.
Of course, I could have everything completely wrong...
Indeed. India has been launching satellites since the late 70s - the INSATs, Rohini, etc. This is merely the test of a launch vehicle capable of reaching geosynchronous orbits (hence GSLV, as opposed to the polar orbits PSLV, the last generation, could reach).
OTOH, Pakistan already has missiles that can reach well into the Indian heartland, so sending up a few million people in a puff of nuclear smoke is not such a difficult task for them either. Especially when you consider that India has 1.02 billion people now.
Not an option for some of us
on
New Linux Worm
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately, some of us do not have the option of shutting off services to the world. For example: I'm an astronomy grad - I run linux at home and on my laptop, so I informally administer our workgroup's linux machines. They crunch data mindlessly, but they must support: NIS, so we can get network logins; NFS, so we can share our 0.5 TB disk storage; SSH and FTP for collaborators in other continents; and whatever other services are required for the network to function, including portmap and ypbind.
So for us non-specialists, its not an option to say "Turn everyything off" - and while I'm competent, I'm not an expert, and I don't have the time (or the energy!) to check bugtraq once a day.
Sigh - what we need is a sysadmin who'll take care of our linux machines along with the "supported" Solaris boxen...
Anyway - at least I'm not running sendmail! (Always look on the brii--iight side...")
Correct me if Im wrong but we are not going to be capable of imaging the actual planet body but instead be capable of detecting the influence of smaller planets on their stars...?
No, the goal of future pie-in-the-sky NASA missions like the TPF (Terrestrial Planet Finder)
is to directly image other planets by nulling the light from the star. This is not the indirect wobble detection that Marcy and Butler are doing so successfully on the ground now: rather, you image the planet, maybe as a dot, get a spectrum, and - holy smoke - there's free oxygen in the spectrum!! Life! Little green men! More funding!:)
The Keck interferometer, OTOH - it's not going to resolve small earth-like planets. But its a step in the right direction, and should resolve brown-dwarf companions and maybe giant planets too...
Essentially you would need to
record the phase of the incoming light at (point in the image of) each telescope as
well as its intensity.
Just in case you read repies: you're right in what it would take, but it cannot be done.
The problem is related to the Heisenberg principle - "light"
behaves as a much more quantum phenomenon than radio waves do, since radio waves have much longer wavelength. For the same total energy (E=n_photon*h*c/lambda) there are many many more radio photons (by the ratio cm/nm = 10^7) and so radio waves can be classically detected and amplified without loss of phase info.
Optical photons cannot be detected and amplified without loss of coherence unless you have a laser beam shining at you from a star: so you require HUGE photon buckets (10m Kecks, 8m VLTs) which collect enough photons to share and split amongst themselves for intereferomtry. So radio astronomers can do interferometry routinely, but optically, its very very hard to do.
... and they're doing very well - over budget and waaay behind schedule, but not bad considering that they have to eliminate vibrations from footfalls and distant trucks before they can begin to detect what they're looking for. (The displacements are of the order of a fraction of an atomic diameter.)
You can read their latest news here, if you so want.
The New York Times did a piece on this a couple of days ago, called "Robin Hoods of Cyberspace: A Philosopher Examines the Difference Between Good and Bad Hackers". The article (free regn reqd yadda yadda) also includes a link to the entire first chapter, in case you want to get a feel for it.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought exactly the same thing. The best ref I found: http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/arguments.htm l#bush .
(Watch out for the slashcode URL munging!)
The excerpt:
The following exchange took place at the Chicago airport between Robert I. Sherman of American Atheist Press and George Bush, on August 27 1987. Sherman is a fully accredited reporter, and was present by invitation as a member of the press corps. The Republican presidential nominee was there to announce federal disaster relief for Illinois. The discussion turned to the presidential primary:
RS:"What will you do to win the votes of Americans who are atheists?" GB:"I guess I'm pretty weak in the atheist community. Faith in God is important to me." RS:"Surely you recognize the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists?" GB:"No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." RS:"Do you support as a sound constitutional principle the separation of state and church?" GB:"Yes, I support the separation of church and state. I'm just not very high on atheists."UPI reported on May 8, 1989, that various atheist organizations were still angry over the remarks.
Hypocrite.
Well, actually, I don't own a car at all. Being a grad student in a reasonable town, I find that public transport and my bike meet most of my needs. I'm happy for you, though, in your little bubble of complacency...
But the rest of the respondents are correct, the anglo-saxons are not much different from others: you only have to look at the mess the Chinese have made, or the emergent situation in India. When population pressure and wildlife habitat collide, wildlife always loses, because animals don't vote, now do they?
Bingo: you've nailed the problem exactly. The stuff the researchers get to do is selected by the company. Do you think Monsanto is going to select a project demonstrating the dangers of genetically engineered crops? Do you thing Pfizer is going to finance a study to prove that Americans are over-medicated? When you control the questions that can be asked, you've undermined the very basic idea of unfettered inquiry.
Yes, you claim, but there will be a market for the one firm that provides cars with no speeding restrictions. Really? What if there isn't quite that much demand? What if their insurance company refuses to insure their cars? (Well, everyone else limits their speed, so your cars are obviously more liable to accidents now...)
What next? Do you set up your own rental company, and an insurance company to insure it?
I hate it when people spout off their infinite faith in capitalism without thinking through the consequences... The companies are out to get your money, and they don't give a damn about your liberties or rights or anything. Just something to think about. And I won't even bother to extend my analogy to casual genetic screening, for example.
Okay, so I understand "Troll" and maybe even "Interesting", and I'd rate it "Funny" myself. But Informative? Insightful? Who let the monkeys out again?
That was precisely my viewpoint too, until I heard out one of the profs in our department (he ran the CONTOUR mission, FWIW). His point was this: we have lots of Mars data, but even now, our best non-sexy data (e.g. the atmospheric composition) comes from the Vikings (1970s). Yes, the Mars Orbiter and the Sojourner Rover provided gorgeous pictures, and some useful science data too, but there were too many compromises built into the mission due to weight/fuel/cost constraints to do really comprehensive science.
OTOH, I agree with you that some science is better than none at all: when the billion dollar Mars Orbiter vanished, that was a lot of time and effort with nothing left to show. So the concept of F/B/C is, indeed, good. And I agree with you that the American public is way too risk intolerant (try swimming in a public place!), and the media loves failure (compare Apollo 12 coverage to Apollo 13).
But: the pendulum has swung too far. The missions now are too fast, too cheap, and better only from the pretty-picture perspective. We're building not one, but two identical Athena rovers for Mars - and you know what? The best science can't make it there, due to weight and payload volume limitations. This is not good science.
Of course, I personally do radio astronomy, and all this is corridor gossip, so feel free to add salt to taste...
I was talking to a member of the orbit planning committee (yeah, these things get done in the mother of all committees) and she said, right now, the US groups are going ahead with planning as if there is no problem. It's ESA's baby and ESA's fault, so they can deal with it...
Unfortunately, the only way to "deal with it" and get data volumes greater than zero is to (a) reduce transmitted data (low bandwidth) and repeat it all over the band, and (b) do fancy moves with velocity component matching between Huygens and Cassini - completely outside the spec.
Add to this, Cassini is the size of a bus, and a fixed platform - so phoning home requires all (or most) instruments to stop looking, and the instruments look in mutually exclusive directions. Fights over orbit planning are predicted to come to blows easily this time.
But hey, we can do Faster Cheaper Better (pick two) missions now - they carry very few instruments and none are worth fighting over, see? There's progress for you.
Don't tell me to use LaTeX, because that's a pain in the ass and is "inefficient."
Oh man, you need to get a clue.
Do you realize that most scientific journals out there (definitely all in the physical sciences) require submissions in TeX? Yes, it's not the best tool for writing letters to Grandma, but for anything that needs correct formatting, it is simply incomparable. And as a bonus, it looks gorgeous too - none of those nasty inter-word spaces or poor hyphenations or kludged equations that Word serves up, and a completely transparent format to boot (check out latex2html, for instance).
I suggest looking at LyX if you're interested in: I hear they are doing good work combining WYSIWYG with TeX. For me, Emacs works just fine ...
Yeah, don't you know about his great work on the "Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline"?
(j/k - but there's a great story, if you haven't read it already, about how this short story got published with his name on it a few days before he defended his PhD in Chemistry. And one of his committee members actually read it - but he knew his defence was okay when he got asked, "So, how about those endochronic properties of Thiotimoline, Dr. Asimov?")
Oh well. Sagan bashing is one of my peeves ever since I read Chris McKeay's exteremely negative biography of him. No offence.
It is quite beyond me why Sagan-bashing is so fashionable, but as an astronomer, I can assure you that Sagan's science was impeccable. ADS archives 307 articles by him, including 184 peer-reviewed journal articles: this link should work (unless lameness filter intervenes) -- or just go to adswww.harvard.edu and search for yourself.
Specifically note papers like this one in Nature: "Cometary Organics but no Evidence for Bacteria". That was him, claiming that the evidence was not there for one of his pet theories. In science, at least, being able to say that you have disproved your own pet theory counts as good work.
As to the appropriateness of the analogy with PhilG, I have no comment one way or the other. It just gets me pissed off that people are so willing to take the mutterings of pissed-off journalists and smear Sagan's work without even knowing what he did!
This is it:
Who cares about the position of the Earth right after the push? The main thing happening is a change of velocity of v=a*520. The difference in position is then a function of time, roughly x(t) = v*t. (think t = days or weeks)
I didn't want to write anything long because your posts will get archived while mine will disappear (unless you quote what I say). But given the effort that you put, I think that you deserve something in return.
You're not hopeless. You're quite knowledgeble, and you can undoubtedly solve many physics problems involving mass, momentum, and the like. But that's not enough. To be a Jedi, you need the feel conservation of energy and conservation of momentum as second nature. These are the two most important concepts in mechanics, and will save your butt countless times.
You mentioned 5 other things to take into account, and accurately said that it wasn't an exhaustive list, but sometimes there's a trick. If I ask you what is (exp(sin(Pi/9))+sqrt(17+log(23))) - (exp(sin(Pi/9))+sqrt(17+log(23))), you're still busy parsing the first few calculations while anyone with a global view will immediately say this is equal to zero, without even worrying whether I meant log base-10 or base-e.
Same here. In the rocket engine problem, you put a big box around the Earth such that the boundary of the box will be space. That's a closed system. The total momentum inside of that box doesn't change, as long as nothing gets out of the box (which is the case since I chose a large box, going halfway to the moon, say). Conservation of linear momentum says that the integral of density(x,y,z)*velocity(x,y,z) over that box remains a constant, unchanged by rocket engines, volcanos, or people jumping up and down.
Now you can say "ah ha but I don't count people or the air to be part of Earth". Fine, but you still have: integral of density(x,y,z)*velocity(x,y,z) over the Earth + integral of density(x,y,z)*velocity(x,y,z) over not-Earth = constant. In other words, the average velocity of the Earth times Earth's mass + the average velocity of the non-Earth times non-Earth is a constant. But these two average velocities are equals, else the Earth and people would be spreading apart and be completely separated given enough time. It really makes no difference if you don't count people and air, as long as people and air don't fly off the Earth.
The upshot: Earth's orbit won't change at all, and you don't need to worry about the deformation of the steel frame and concrete block or anything else to get that answer.
That is why you should worship conservation of momentum as your new God.
Then again, the end of the presentation makes this point:
Ultimately, if it is possible for a consumer to hear or see protected content, then it will be technically possible for the consumer to copy that content.
At that point, it doesn't much matter what the encryption/protection scheme actually is: their only hope is to use the DMCA bludgeon on their own customers. And unfortuantely, customers only have patience for so long before they say "F*** it..."
So if I cared enough, I could read parts of their site by hitting Stop really quickly as the page rendered, or by looking through my cache.
Sadly, I don't even care enough to send them hate mail.
Yeah, the stupid, the niggers, the slit-eyed chinks, those evil breed-like-rabbits Latinos - how presumptuous of them to think that they should have the same rights as us clever people! And those Jews - contaminating our pure Aryan blood - what cheek! I hope you voted for Buchanan.
Yes, okay, so IHBT. So f***ing what?
Indeed. India has been launching satellites since the late 70s - the INSATs, Rohini, etc. This is merely the test of a launch vehicle capable of reaching geosynchronous orbits (hence GSLV, as opposed to the polar orbits PSLV, the last generation, could reach).
OTOH, Pakistan already has missiles that can reach well into the Indian heartland, so sending up a few million people in a puff of nuclear smoke is not such a difficult task for them either. Especially when you consider that India has 1.02 billion people now.
So for us non-specialists, its not an option to say "Turn everyything off" - and while I'm competent, I'm not an expert, and I don't have the time (or the energy!) to check bugtraq once a day. Sigh - what we need is a sysadmin who'll take care of our linux machines along with the "supported" Solaris boxen...
Anyway - at least I'm not running sendmail! (Always look on the brii--iight side...")
No, the goal of future pie-in-the-sky NASA missions like the TPF (Terrestrial Planet Finder) is to directly image other planets by nulling the light from the star. This is not the indirect wobble detection that Marcy and Butler are doing so successfully on the ground now: rather, you image the planet, maybe as a dot, get a spectrum, and - holy smoke - there's free oxygen in the spectrum!! Life! Little green men! More funding! :)
The Keck interferometer, OTOH - it's not going to resolve small earth-like planets. But its a step in the right direction, and should resolve brown-dwarf companions and maybe giant planets too...
(Yes, IAAAstronomer)
Just in case you read repies: you're right in what it would take, but it cannot be done.
The problem is related to the Heisenberg principle - "light" behaves as a much more quantum phenomenon than radio waves do, since radio waves have much longer wavelength. For the same total energy (E=n_photon*h*c/lambda) there are many many more radio photons (by the ratio cm/nm = 10^7) and so radio waves can be classically detected and amplified without loss of phase info.
Optical photons cannot be detected and amplified without loss of coherence unless you have a laser beam shining at you from a star: so you require HUGE photon buckets (10m Kecks, 8m VLTs) which collect enough photons to share and split amongst themselves for intereferomtry. So radio astronomers can do interferometry routinely, but optically, its very very hard to do.
(Yes, IAAPA - a radio interferometrist, even)
You can read their latest news here, if you so want.
(Yes, IAAPA)
Ita a bit tooo wordy for me, personally.