Re:The reason he thinks IE 7 will spur more FF gro
on
The Future of Firefox
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· Score: 1
Even if Microsoft doesn't roll out a blockbuster with IE 7, I doubt that the release of a *competing* browser is going to somehow push people to switch to Firefox. With all the press Firefox has been getting, if you haven't at least tried out Firefox by now, you're not likely to so unless IE leaps out of your browser and stabs you in the forehead.
It is a well-known phenomenon in the software industry that competitor upgrades are a good time to shake their customers loose. If the upgraded product is too different (has so many new or changed features that it looks and feels like a different product) or is too heavy (requires new hardware or an OS upgrade from Win2000 to WinXP, say) then users will be motivated to look for other solutions to their problem.
I don't know what issues IE 6.0 has, because I only run it once on any machine (to download FF). But IF FireFox has the features users want that aren't in IE 6.0 there is a chance that they will consider FF over IE 7.0 as their next browser IF IE 7.0 is "too different" from IE 6.0 or is too heavyweight, or buggy or otherwise not good.
Just wondering why governments are so indifferent to Cold Fusion.
Because "traditional" paladium-based cold fusion of the kind "discovered" in the late '80's is nonsense. It requires that everything we know about nulcear physics is wrong, including very well established experimental (not theoretical) results. If cold fusion were true, fission reactors would stop working, because the basic observed behaviour of energetic particles in matter would have changed.
With regard to the case at hand, the requirement for "priming" the system with neutrons doesn't make any sense, and makes me extremely suspiscious. The neutron lifetime in matter is SHORT, because most stuff has an neutron absorption cross-section of a barn or so. And thermal neutron velocities are ~2200 m/s. So the odds of any neutrons sticking around are nil.
So what role do they have? Why are they required? And how do we know they aren't interacting with some other material in the new experiment (I am not willing to believe that changing to deuterated accetone was the only change they made--did they move their apparatus a metre closer to the wall of the lab, say? Or was their a sink full of water or a bottle of trichloroethylene nearby? All kinds of stuff changes from day to day in most labs, and with a neutron source around all of it has to be treated as a potential source for background radiation.
However, having different experiments prove and disprove the same hypothesis is *not* a normal part of a healthy scientific process. It indicates either an incorrectly formed hypothesis or errors in experimental methods.
Nonsense. Science is carried out by human beings, and human beings make mistakes. Healthy processes accomodate that fact.
Publishing the results of those mistakes, honestly and fully for the critique of others, is part of the scientific process. Having those mistakes corrected by later researchers who have the benefit of seeing what earlier researchers have done and the luxury of contemplating the problem from the perspective of "How do I improve on this?" rather than the vastly more difficult, "How do I do this the first time?" is also a healthy part of the scientific process.
The day no one ever publishes anything for fear it might not be the perfect, irrefutable experiment is the day that science is dead.
L3 is unstable on a timescale of 150 years. That is, it's pretty stable for satellites, just not for planetary bodies. Of course, it also happens to be a friggin' useless orbit, as it never has line of sight visibility with Earth.
Sounds like a good place to put a radiotelescope, particularly one dedicated to SETI.
maybe our support of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip?
bin Laden was very clear about the motivation for the 9/11 attacks. His primary motivation is to remove American troops from the "Land of the Two Holy Shrines". That is, Saudi Arabia. While he does mention the Israeli occupation of Palestine, that was not his primary motivation, and reducing U.S. support for Israel will not appease him.
It may be more economical, although modern industrial pig-farming is well-known for "using everything but the squeal". Very little of the pig goes to waste, although a good deal of it goes into non-food products.
It is important to realize that there may be quite different kinds of dark matter involved on different distance scales. For example, rotation curves of spiral galaxies can be explained by baryonic dark matter--that is, stuff that's pretty much what we are made out of. Baryons are protons and nuetrons, the building blocks of ordinary atoms.
But on larger scales, when one looks at the motions of clusters of galaxies, when one looks at galaxy formation in the early universe, when one looks at the flatness of space-time, it is apparent that there is more matter in the universe than can be accounted for by baryons.
We have a pretty good bound on the baryonic density of the universe because we know the primordial ratio of H to He pretty well. In the early universe there was an era in which the average baryon energy was greater than the average binding energy, so nuetrons were basically free. But free neutrons are unstable, with a lifetime of only about 15 minutes. So when the universe cooled to the point where neutrons could be captured onto protons to form D, He, etc, the actual amount of heavy (non-H) nuclei formed depends sensitively on the baryonic density. After an hour or so, any neutrons that didn't capture were gone.
It turns out that the baryonic density is sufficiently high to account for "galactic" dark matter, but not nearly enough to account for the dark matter seen on larger scales. Discovery of the nature of this non-baryonic dark matter is THE outstanding problem in cosmology.
I leave it as an excercise for the geek physicist reader - I'm a biologist (too much math for me ugh!).
Ugh is right--a person pretending to be a scientist who can't do math.
Really, please, do the world a favour and get out of the sciences entirely if you aren't willing or able to learn the basic tools of the trade.
Biology is currently in a serious mess because of the huge amount of genomics and proteomics data being generated by people who don't have the mathematical ability to analyze it, or the scientific capability of understanding the instruments that generate it. I have worked extensively in this area (I'm a physicist) and it didn't take long to realize that biologists are by-and-large people who think they like science but who can't handle math.
For some reason no other science has this problem--geology, astronomy, oceanography, climatology, chemistry... all these people have over the past century come to terms with the fact that their field of study demands a mathematical language to describe it, and developed mathematical toolkits as part of the basic training in the field. Only the biologists, who need it the most, are still holding out.
Consider someone of my grandmother's generation, who was born in 1886 and died in 1980. By the time she was my age, shortly before 1930, she had seen the creation of:
1) Heavier-than-air flight 2) The application of heavier-than-air flight to warfare 3) Commerical heavier-than-air flight 4) The airship industry 5) The mass-produced automobile 6) Radio (she was 10 when Marconi demonstrated his device in England) 7) Electrification of every-day life (Stanley's AC system for Great Barrington, MA, was installed the year she was born) 8) Commercial moving pictures 9) Audio recording technology (1887)
The laser was patented around the time I was born. The silicon transistor a decade before that. The sound barrier was broken a decade before that, more-or-less. In my lifetime we've gone to the Moon with mostly WW II technology, developed a range of really powerful applications of silicon transistors and a few applications of lasers, but relative to the masssive changes my grandmother saw in the same time-span things are pretty much the same now as when I was born.
Today, we drive cars powered by internal combustion engines, just the same as when I was born. We fly in sub-sonic jets, the same as when I was born. We watch TV and movies and listen to the radio, the same as when I was born. We power our homes using electricity mostly generated by burning fossil fuels, the same as when I was born.
Vinyl is pretty much dead, but other than that not a lot of tech has gone away in the past forty years. Mostly the technological advances have been refinements of pre-existing tech. Other than computers and software, including the internet, there have been no major technologies introduced in the past 40 years that have had more than a tiny fraction of the impact that heavier-than-air flight, the mass-produced automobile, and radio, TV and movies had on everyday life in the first 40 years of my grandmother's life.
Godel's Theorem shows that there exist true theorems that are unprovable
False. Godel's theorem shows that there exist true theorems that cannot be proven with a consistent formal system.
As virtually everything interesting we know is known by means other than formal derivation from arbitrary axioms, the relevance of Godel's theorem to any comparison between humans and computers is nil.
For example, consider Newton's proofs that "light from the sun consists of rays of differing refrangibility". While formal reasoning is used in his proofs, his proofs are not just formalisms. They are empirical results, derived positively and directly from experiment.
Nope, the big risk with fusion is that it'll never produce enough power to be interesting. Just because something is hot doesn't mean it's dangerous--density matters rather a lot as well.
"To reason, as the Court does, that the incidental public benefits resulting from the subsequent ordinary use of private property render economic development takings "for public use" is to wash out any distinction between private and public use of property--and thereby effectively to delete the words "for public use" from the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment."
There is an interesting technical name for the system of social organization that results from "washing out any distinction between private and public use of property." It is called "fascism".
In economic terms, fascism is distinct from communism precisely insofar as nominally private property still exists, but is deployed in such a way as to meet the purported needs of the public or state. Thus, fascist states still have "private" businesses, but they are run along lines that serve the ends of the state (and are rewarded with special priviledges accordingly).
The United States has exhibited a number of increasingly fascist tendencies in recent years--extreme nationalism, decrease in privacy, blurring of lines betweeen the interests of citizens and the interests of Haliburton, and now a very significant errosion of private property rights.
According to the Washington Times (http://washingtontimes.com/national/20050602-1205 16-4965r.htm) the Army and Marines are both far short of their recruiting goals for this year: "The Army missed goals in February and March by a few percentage points, then fell a much larger 42 percent behind in April.". The Navy and Air Force are doing better, but the ground forces are hurting already, and they are the forces that matter most in the kind of mess the U.S. has got itself in in Iraq.
If the military continues to fail to meet voluntary recruiting targets, some kind of coercive recruiting system will be used. It won't be called a draft, though. For example, access to certain types of government benefits may be restricted unless you've served. Most such moves will have to be very indirect, because the federal government doesn't directly fund welfare programs, for example--they are funded through the states or local governments. But a lot of the money ultimately derives from federal coffers, and there are plenty of ways to make it hard to get at unless you've served.
In the end, if the state of War on Everyone We Think Might Be Thinking About Maybe Being a Terrorist Someday continues, there will be a draft, pure and simple. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and simply because a draft would be stupid is no argument against it.
No argument of the form, "It would be stupid to do X, therefore no one will do X" is valid, as it depends on the hidden premise: "No one ever does anything stupid", which is trivially false. People, myself included, do amazingly stupid things every single day (I am at the moment, for example, wasting my time engaged in online debate, despite knowing that in ten years online the only person I have ever seen change their mind about anything is me.)
And yes, as the other poster points out, fortresses are also vulnerable to other kinds of attack than brute force
"The approach will not be easy. You are required to maneuver straight down this trench and skim the surface to this point. The target area is only two meters wide. It's a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor system. A precise hit will start a chain reaction which should destroy the station."
The vast, vast majority of geeks in the past were peasants, working themselves to death in a few short decades in subsistence farming.
Same with the majority of artists, musicians, etc.
I'm not sure if it's pretty depressing, or positively invigorating, to think that if I'd been born into my grandfather's generation I'd've had pretty much the same choices he did: join the British army and eventually settle in one of the colonies if I survived, or stay at home and work as a labourer of one kind or another.
Go to university? Accumulate wealth? Learn a trade? Not likely.
It turns out that it only takes about 5% of the fuel (or less) to get to the altitude that a typical airship flies - and that a reasonable size payload requires an airship twice the size of the Hindenburg to carry it.
But reducing fuel mass by 5% allows you to increase your payload mass by at least a factor of two for many launch vehicles. I'm not sure balloon-launch is the way to go, because as you say speed is the issue, but rockets are so enormously inefficient that relatively small percentage savings in fuel mass translates into very substantial increases in payload mass.
Basically, the books have some okay discussions (and cover a very WIDE range of subjects) but their code is crap
This assessment is insufficiently extreme on all counts. I have used Numerical Recipes for over a decade, including using it as a course textbook, where it was particularly good because students could buy it in the language they knew best and focus on the the algorithmic issues rather than learning a new language. But I can't get over how good and bad the book is.
They have extremely good discussions of algorithms--the basic text is probably the single clearest description of many numerical methods that you will find, anywhere. They also have good practical guidance on the application of many algorithms, and the range of subjects is breathtakingly huge.
But the code is worse than crap. It's slow, ugly, excessively complex and fragile. My first task when using any Numerical Recipes code is to translate it into something that is readable, faster and reasonably robust. Either that, or use LAPACK or some other package that is more highly optimized, robust, etc.
With regard to the site under discussion here, I found broken external links within a few minutes of clicking around. Why don't people bother to run link checkers?
Case 2: The new planet. Its orbital radius is about 2 billion meters, so the circumference is about 7 billion meters; if it travels that distance in a period of 2 days = 170,000 seconds, then it speed is about V = 40,000 m/s. The orbital centripetal acceleration is therefore of order (16 x 10^8)/(2 x 10^9) = 0.8 m/s^2. That's much larger than the Earth's orbital centripetal acceleration, but still far less than the likely gravitational acceleration at the surface (or cloudtops) of this planet.
But this is more than sufficient that if there were intelligent life (fabulously unlikely) then they would quickly notice that things were a few percent lighter at night than during the day.
The planet has about 7 times the mass of Earth and about twice the radius, so the surface gravity will be...pause for algebra...about 2g ~ 20 m/s**2. At night, the orbital centripetal acceleration acts against the surface gravity, so it would be a minimum at midnight of 19.2 m/s**2, and during the day they act together for a max at noon of 20.8 m/s**2, or a little less than a 10% difference.
This is conceptually closely related to tides, and this is another way of pointing out that the tidal effects on such a world are going to be wickedly large.
Well after two months of military boot camp, my stress tolerence was much higher. Furthermore, I knew that the results of the test would have no impact on my career. And taking the test was a lot more relaxing than marching around the parade square.
This makes a nice point: single-test evaluations are unscientific. I always remember a prof talking to a group of first years in a lab. He was a Chinese guy with a very direct approach, and he told them: "You got this desk. I ask you how wide it is. You take tape measure and measure it like this. You write down number. You hand it in. You do that, I fail you. You never measure anything just once."
Saying "it really may not be long" doesn't mean it will happen soon, just that it could.
Unfortunately, it is not the case that "it could". This is ordinary hot fusion without benefit of containment. The vast majority of accelerated (i.e. hot) nuclei slow down without fusing. This is a fundamental consequence of the ratio of the Coulomb scattering cross-section to the fusion cross-section.
Ergo, this cannot get close to break-even fusion power generation, any more than the Farnsworth-Hirsch device can. When you make a proton or dueteron go fast in a material (gas or solid or whatever) it can only do a small number of things. One of those things is scatter and lose energy. Another is fuse. The cross-sections give the probabilities of these things occuring.
So long as the scattering cross-section is much higher than the fusion cross-section, no uncontained hot fusion device will reach break-even. For a contained device, each particle has the opportunity for many encounters with other particles before being scattered out of containment, so it has a good overall chance of fusing.
One of the positive consequences of the original cold fusion flap was a careful recalculation of tunnelling cross-sections in various hydrogen isotopes. The conclusion was worthy of Hichhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--at least one of the cross-sections was revised upwards by something like a factor of 10E30, which moved it from "negligable" to "mostly negligable."
IIRC, Steve Koonin at Caltech did the work, and the result was a tunneling fusion rate per DD molecule at room temperature of something like 10E-40 per second, up from 10E-70 per second. The only place it has any even remotely significant effect is in brown dwarfs and Jupiter-size planets.
Not only is this old news, it still isn't cold fusion. From the article:
Warming the crystal by about 100 degrees (from -30 F to 45F) produced a huge electrical field of about 100,000 volts across the small crystal.
They are using a pyroelectric crystal to generate a strong electrical field to accelerate protons sufficiently to get fusion. Dumping a lot of energy into individual protons to get them to fuse is hot fusion.
This article has to be one of the worst examples of science reporting I've ever seen. It takes something basically simple and makes it appear very complicated, and ascribes to it properties it does not have.
1) The deeper you go, the faster you use up your air. SCUBA tanks have their size given by the volume of air at one atmosphere they contain--a standard tank these days is a single 80 cu. ft. (units courtesy of the U.S. lead in dive equipment.) You breathe about 1 cu. ft/minute at one atmosphere. At 2 atmospheres (32 ft/10 m) it's twice that, and so on. With a single 80 it's a race between the no-decompression time and the air available, particularly since you've got to have enough air to decompress if you go over the limit, unless you've planned for it and put out tanks on a line at your decompression stops.
2) "Rapture of the deep" is nitrogen narcosis, which would still be an issue with this apparatus, as it will generate air, not just oxygen.
3) Pure oxygen is toxic at any pressure much above one atmosphere (there will be a movement to ban the deady gas dioxide as soon as the worldwide ban on dihydrogen oxide is fully implemented.)
The big advantage of this technology is that it makes bottom time independent of depth, which would make diving a lot safer. If you did stay down past the decompression limit, the odds are good that you'd still have battery power left to decompress.
With a tank, if you do a dive to 120 ft with a single 80, and you get nitrogen narcosis and forget to check your time often enough, it doesn't take going over the no-decompression limit by very much before you're out of air, and well and truly screwed. With this system you'd still have the better part of an hour's air left. I like it.
That said, I'm not holding my breath (as it were:-) that I'll see it on the shelves of my local dive shop any time soon. Scaling up won't be fun, nor will re-designing it for the field rather than the lab. But who knows--it could happen, and it'll be really cool if it does.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't show any non-crewed landings. So what?
Even if Microsoft doesn't roll out a blockbuster with IE 7, I doubt that the release of a *competing* browser is going to somehow push people to switch to Firefox. With all the press Firefox has been getting, if you haven't at least tried out Firefox by now, you're not likely to so unless IE leaps out of your browser and stabs you in the forehead.
It is a well-known phenomenon in the software industry that competitor upgrades are a good time to shake their customers loose. If the upgraded product is too different (has so many new or changed features that it looks and feels like a different product) or is too heavy (requires new hardware or an OS upgrade from Win2000 to WinXP, say) then users will be motivated to look for other solutions to their problem.
I don't know what issues IE 6.0 has, because I only run it once on any machine (to download FF). But IF FireFox has the features users want that aren't in IE 6.0 there is a chance that they will consider FF over IE 7.0 as their next browser IF IE 7.0 is "too different" from IE 6.0 or is too heavyweight, or buggy or otherwise not good.
Just wondering why governments are so indifferent to Cold Fusion.
Because "traditional" paladium-based cold fusion of the kind "discovered" in the late '80's is nonsense. It requires that everything we know about nulcear physics is wrong, including very well established experimental (not theoretical) results. If cold fusion were true, fission reactors would stop working, because the basic observed behaviour of energetic particles in matter would have changed.
With regard to the case at hand, the requirement for "priming" the system with neutrons doesn't make any sense, and makes me extremely suspiscious. The neutron lifetime in matter is SHORT, because most stuff has an neutron absorption cross-section of a barn or so. And thermal neutron velocities are ~2200 m/s. So the odds of any neutrons sticking around are nil.
So what role do they have? Why are they required? And how do we know they aren't interacting with some other material in the new experiment (I am not willing to believe that changing to deuterated accetone was the only change they made--did they move their apparatus a metre closer to the wall of the lab, say? Or was their a sink full of water or a bottle of trichloroethylene nearby? All kinds of stuff changes from day to day in most labs, and with a neutron source around all of it has to be treated as a potential source for background radiation.
However, having different experiments prove and disprove the same hypothesis is *not* a normal part of a healthy scientific process. It indicates either an incorrectly formed hypothesis or errors in experimental methods.
Nonsense. Science is carried out by human beings, and human beings make mistakes. Healthy processes accomodate that fact.
Publishing the results of those mistakes, honestly and fully for the critique of others, is part of the scientific process. Having those mistakes corrected by later researchers who have the benefit of seeing what earlier researchers have done and the luxury of contemplating the problem from the perspective of "How do I improve on this?" rather than the vastly more difficult, "How do I do this the first time?" is also a healthy part of the scientific process.
The day no one ever publishes anything for fear it might not be the perfect, irrefutable experiment is the day that science is dead.
L3 is unstable on a timescale of 150 years. That is, it's pretty stable for satellites, just not for planetary bodies. Of course, it also happens to be a friggin' useless orbit, as it never has line of sight visibility with Earth.
Sounds like a good place to put a radiotelescope, particularly one dedicated to SETI.
"Oh please, then what triggered 9/11?"
maybe our support of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip?
bin Laden was very clear about the motivation for the 9/11 attacks. His primary motivation is to remove American troops from the "Land of the Two Holy Shrines". That is, Saudi Arabia. While he does mention the Israeli occupation of Palestine, that was not his primary motivation, and reducing U.S. support for Israel will not appease him.
It may be more economical, although modern industrial pig-farming is well-known for "using everything but the squeal". Very little of the pig goes to waste, although a good deal of it goes into non-food products.
It is important to realize that there may be quite different kinds of dark matter involved on different distance scales. For example, rotation curves of spiral galaxies can be explained by baryonic dark matter--that is, stuff that's pretty much what we are made out of. Baryons are protons and nuetrons, the building blocks of ordinary atoms.
But on larger scales, when one looks at the motions of clusters of galaxies, when one looks at galaxy formation in the early universe, when one looks at the flatness of space-time, it is apparent that there is more matter in the universe than can be accounted for by baryons.
We have a pretty good bound on the baryonic density of the universe because we know the primordial ratio of H to He pretty well. In the early universe there was an era in which the average baryon energy was greater than the average binding energy, so nuetrons were basically free. But free neutrons are unstable, with a lifetime of only about 15 minutes. So when the universe cooled to the point where neutrons could be captured onto protons to form D, He, etc, the actual amount of heavy (non-H) nuclei formed depends sensitively on the baryonic density. After an hour or so, any neutrons that didn't capture were gone.
It turns out that the baryonic density is sufficiently high to account for "galactic" dark matter, but not nearly enough to account for the dark matter seen on larger scales. Discovery of the nature of this non-baryonic dark matter is THE outstanding problem in cosmology.
I leave it as an excercise for the geek physicist reader - I'm a biologist (too much math for me ugh!).
Ugh is right--a person pretending to be a scientist who can't do math.
Really, please, do the world a favour and get out of the sciences entirely if you aren't willing or able to learn the basic tools of the trade.
Biology is currently in a serious mess because of the huge amount of genomics and proteomics data being generated by people who don't have the mathematical ability to analyze it, or the scientific capability of understanding the instruments that generate it. I have worked extensively in this area (I'm a physicist) and it didn't take long to realize that biologists are by-and-large people who think they like science but who can't handle math.
For some reason no other science has this problem--geology, astronomy, oceanography, climatology, chemistry... all these people have over the past century come to terms with the fact that their field of study demands a mathematical language to describe it, and developed mathematical toolkits as part of the basic training in the field. Only the biologists, who need it the most, are still holding out.
The thesis is almost trivially true.
Consider someone of my grandmother's generation, who was born in 1886 and died in 1980. By the time she was my age, shortly before 1930, she had seen the creation of:
1) Heavier-than-air flight
2) The application of heavier-than-air flight to warfare
3) Commerical heavier-than-air flight
4) The airship industry
5) The mass-produced automobile
6) Radio (she was 10 when Marconi demonstrated his device in England)
7) Electrification of every-day life (Stanley's AC system for Great Barrington, MA, was installed the year she was born)
8) Commercial moving pictures
9) Audio recording technology (1887)
The laser was patented around the time I was born. The silicon transistor a decade before that. The sound barrier was broken a decade before that, more-or-less. In my lifetime we've gone to the Moon with mostly WW II technology, developed a range of really powerful applications of silicon transistors and a few applications of lasers, but relative to the masssive changes my grandmother saw in the same time-span things are pretty much the same now as when I was born.
Today, we drive cars powered by internal combustion engines, just the same as when I was born. We fly in sub-sonic jets, the same as when I was born. We watch TV and movies and listen to the radio, the same as when I was born. We power our homes using electricity mostly generated by burning fossil fuels, the same as when I was born.
Vinyl is pretty much dead, but other than that not a lot of tech has gone away in the past forty years. Mostly the technological advances have been refinements of pre-existing tech. Other than computers and software, including the internet, there have been no major technologies introduced in the past 40 years that have had more than a tiny fraction of the impact that heavier-than-air flight, the mass-produced automobile, and radio, TV and movies had on everyday life in the first 40 years of my grandmother's life.
Godel's Theorem shows that there exist true theorems that are unprovable
False. Godel's theorem shows that there exist true theorems that cannot be proven with a consistent formal system.
As virtually everything interesting we know is known by means other than formal derivation from arbitrary axioms, the relevance of Godel's theorem to any comparison between humans and computers is nil.
For example, consider Newton's proofs that "light from the sun consists of rays of differing refrangibility". While formal reasoning is used in his proofs, his proofs are not just formalisms. They are empirical results, derived positively and directly from experiment.
Nope, the big risk with fusion is that it'll never produce enough power to be interesting. Just because something is hot doesn't mean it's dangerous--density matters rather a lot as well.
"To reason, as the Court does, that the incidental public benefits resulting from the subsequent ordinary use of private property render economic development takings "for public use" is to wash out any distinction between private and public use of property--and thereby effectively to delete the words "for public use" from the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment."
There is an interesting technical name for the system of social organization that results from "washing out any distinction between private and public use of property." It is called "fascism".
In economic terms, fascism is distinct from communism precisely insofar as nominally private property still exists, but is deployed in such a way as to meet the purported needs of the public or state. Thus, fascist states still have "private" businesses, but they are run along lines that serve the ends of the state (and are rewarded with special priviledges accordingly).
The United States has exhibited a number of increasingly fascist tendencies in recent years--extreme nationalism, decrease in privacy, blurring of lines betweeen the interests of citizens and the interests of Haliburton, and now a very significant errosion of private property rights.
According to the Washington Times (http://washingtontimes.com/national/20050602-1205 16-4965r.htm) the Army and Marines are both far short of their recruiting goals for this year: "The Army missed goals in February and March by a few percentage points, then fell a much larger 42 percent behind in April.". The Navy and Air Force are doing better, but the ground forces are hurting already, and they are the forces that matter most in the kind of mess the U.S. has got itself in in Iraq.
If the military continues to fail to meet voluntary recruiting targets, some kind of coercive recruiting system will be used. It won't be called a draft, though. For example, access to certain types of government benefits may be restricted unless you've served. Most such moves will have to be very indirect, because the federal government doesn't directly fund welfare programs, for example--they are funded through the states or local governments. But a lot of the money ultimately derives from federal coffers, and there are plenty of ways to make it hard to get at unless you've served.
In the end, if the state of War on Everyone We Think Might Be Thinking About Maybe Being a Terrorist Someday continues, there will be a draft, pure and simple. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and simply because a draft would be stupid is no argument against it.
No argument of the form, "It would be stupid to do X, therefore no one will do X" is valid, as it depends on the hidden premise: "No one ever does anything stupid", which is trivially false. People, myself included, do amazingly stupid things every single day (I am at the moment, for example, wasting my time engaged in online debate, despite knowing that in ten years online the only person I have ever seen change their mind about anything is me.)
And yes, as the other poster points out, fortresses are also vulnerable to other kinds of attack than brute force
"The approach will not be easy. You are required to maneuver straight down this trench and skim the surface to this point. The target area is only two meters wide. It's a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor system. A precise hit will start a chain reaction which should destroy the station."
The vast, vast majority of geeks in the past were peasants, working themselves to death in a few short decades in subsistence farming.
Same with the majority of artists, musicians, etc.
I'm not sure if it's pretty depressing, or positively invigorating, to think that if I'd been born into my grandfather's generation I'd've had pretty much the same choices he did: join the British army and eventually settle in one of the colonies if I survived, or stay at home and work as a labourer of one kind or another.
Go to university? Accumulate wealth? Learn a trade? Not likely.
(for which Bohm was awarded his doctorate after the endorsement by Einstine and eventually won the nobel prize)
The parent is a reasonably well-crafted troll, and me with no mod points.
For starters, Bohm didn't win a Nobel. Everything else the poster says is false, misleading or just plain weird.
--Tom
It turns out that it only takes about 5% of the fuel (or less) to get to the altitude that a typical airship flies - and that a reasonable size payload requires an airship twice the size of the Hindenburg to carry it.
But reducing fuel mass by 5% allows you to increase your payload mass by at least a factor of two for many launch vehicles. I'm not sure balloon-launch is the way to go, because as you say speed is the issue, but rockets are so enormously inefficient that relatively small percentage savings in fuel mass translates into very substantial increases in payload mass.
Basically, the books have some okay discussions (and cover a very WIDE range of subjects) but their code is crap
This assessment is insufficiently extreme on all counts. I have used Numerical Recipes for over a decade, including using it as a course textbook, where it was particularly good because students could buy it in the language they knew best and focus on the the algorithmic issues rather than learning a new language. But I can't get over how good and bad the book is.
They have extremely good discussions of algorithms--the basic text is probably the single clearest description of many numerical methods that you will find, anywhere. They also have good practical guidance on the application of many algorithms, and the range of subjects is breathtakingly huge.
But the code is worse than crap. It's slow, ugly, excessively complex and fragile. My first task when using any Numerical Recipes code is to translate it into something that is readable, faster and reasonably robust. Either that, or use LAPACK or some other package that is more highly optimized, robust, etc.
With regard to the site under discussion here, I found broken external links within a few minutes of clicking around. Why don't people bother to run link checkers?
Case 2: The new planet. Its orbital radius is about 2 billion meters, so the circumference is about 7 billion meters; if it travels that distance in a period of 2 days = 170,000 seconds, then it speed is about V = 40,000 m/s. The orbital centripetal acceleration is therefore of order (16 x 10^8)/(2 x 10^9) = 0.8 m/s^2. That's much larger than the Earth's orbital centripetal acceleration, but still far less than the likely gravitational acceleration at the surface (or cloudtops) of this planet.
But this is more than sufficient that if there were intelligent life (fabulously unlikely) then they would quickly notice that things were a few percent lighter at night than during the day.
The planet has about 7 times the mass of Earth and about twice the radius, so the surface gravity will be...pause for algebra...about 2g ~ 20 m/s**2. At night, the orbital centripetal acceleration acts against the surface gravity, so it would be a minimum at midnight of 19.2 m/s**2, and during the day they act together for a max at noon of 20.8 m/s**2, or a little less than a 10% difference.
This is conceptually closely related to tides, and this is another way of pointing out that the tidal effects on such a world are going to be wickedly large.
Well after two months of military boot camp, my stress tolerence was much higher. Furthermore, I knew that the results of the test would have no impact on my career. And taking the test was a lot more relaxing than marching around the parade square.
This makes a nice point: single-test evaluations are unscientific. I always remember a prof talking to a group of first years in a lab. He was a Chinese guy with a very direct approach, and he told them: "You got this desk. I ask you how wide it is. You take tape measure and measure it like this. You write down number. You hand it in. You do that, I fail you. You never measure anything just once."
Saying "it really may not be long" doesn't mean it will happen soon, just that it could.
Unfortunately, it is not the case that "it could". This is ordinary hot fusion without benefit of containment. The vast majority of accelerated (i.e. hot) nuclei slow down without fusing. This is a fundamental consequence of the ratio of the Coulomb scattering cross-section to the fusion cross-section.
Ergo, this cannot get close to break-even fusion power generation, any more than the Farnsworth-Hirsch device can. When you make a proton or dueteron go fast in a material (gas or solid or whatever) it can only do a small number of things. One of those things is scatter and lose energy. Another is fuse. The cross-sections give the probabilities of these things occuring.
So long as the scattering cross-section is much higher than the fusion cross-section, no uncontained hot fusion device will reach break-even. For a contained device, each particle has the opportunity for many encounters with other particles before being scattered out of containment, so it has a good overall chance of fusing.
One of the positive consequences of the original cold fusion flap was a careful recalculation of tunnelling cross-sections in various hydrogen isotopes. The conclusion was worthy of Hichhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--at least one of the cross-sections was revised upwards by something like a factor of 10E30, which moved it from "negligable" to "mostly negligable."
IIRC, Steve Koonin at Caltech did the work, and the result was a tunneling fusion rate per DD molecule at room temperature of something like 10E-40 per second, up from 10E-70 per second. The only place it has any even remotely significant effect is in brown dwarfs and Jupiter-size planets.
--Tom
Not only is this old news, it still isn't cold fusion. From the article:
Warming the crystal by about 100 degrees (from -30 F to 45F) produced a huge electrical field of about 100,000 volts across the small crystal.
They are using a pyroelectric crystal to generate a strong electrical field to accelerate protons sufficiently to get fusion. Dumping a lot of energy into individual protons to get them to fuse is hot fusion.
This article has to be one of the worst examples of science reporting I've ever seen. It takes something basically simple and makes it appear very complicated, and ascribes to it properties it does not have.
--Tom
Some facts about SCUBA:
:-) that I'll see it on the shelves of my local dive shop any time soon. Scaling up won't be fun, nor will re-designing it for the field rather than the lab. But who knows--it could happen, and it'll be really cool if it does.
1) The deeper you go, the faster you use up your air. SCUBA tanks have their size given by the volume of air at one atmosphere they contain--a standard tank these days is a single 80 cu. ft. (units courtesy of the U.S. lead in dive equipment.) You breathe about 1 cu. ft/minute at one atmosphere. At 2 atmospheres (32 ft/10 m) it's twice that, and so on. With a single 80 it's a race between the no-decompression time and the air available, particularly since you've got to have enough air to decompress if you go over the limit, unless you've planned for it and put out tanks on a line at your decompression stops.
2) "Rapture of the deep" is nitrogen narcosis, which would still be an issue with this apparatus, as it will generate air, not just oxygen.
3) Pure oxygen is toxic at any pressure much above one atmosphere (there will be a movement to ban the deady gas dioxide as soon as the worldwide ban on dihydrogen oxide is fully implemented.)
The big advantage of this technology is that it makes bottom time independent of depth, which would make diving a lot safer. If you did stay down past the decompression limit, the odds are good that you'd still have battery power left to decompress.
With a tank, if you do a dive to 120 ft with a single 80, and you get nitrogen narcosis and forget to check your time often enough, it doesn't take going over the no-decompression limit by very much before you're out of air, and well and truly screwed. With this system you'd still have the better part of an hour's air left. I like it.
That said, I'm not holding my breath (as it were
--Tom