Nope. Tilt the sail so there is thrust against the direction of orbital motion and the ship will fall inward toward the sun. Think of the spacecraft with the sail at 45 degrees to the radial direction ot the sun, so light is reflected along a tangent to orbit in the direction of motion.
So long as a solar sail craft is in orbit, it can either raise or lower its orbit more-or-less at will, although it is easier nearer the sun than further out. Once it is out of orbit, however, it can't ever return.
The allusions to Nazis or Soviet Russia come spewing out of the marching morons like projectile diarrhea at a salmonella festival.
Thank you. This description made my day.
It isn't the just the libtards who are spewing nonsesne here, though: read the comments approving this law and you'll find the level of ignorance is comparable on both sides.
How does providing an example where Ogg does work well in any way counter the multiple cases we've seen referenced in this thread where it does not?
Demonstrating that Ogg is capable of not sucking doesn't mean there aren't severe problems with the usability of the format if hardly anyone anywhere is actually able to use it in that narrowly defined way, which demonstrably they are not.
So thanks for making it clear that Ogg is incredibly fragile, and therefore unusable for most users most of the time.
And there you go. I don't know WTF is wrong with your players, but really, how can a total of four seeks bring your system to a crawl?
This reminds me so much of Java speed discussions before Java's practical performance reached an acceptable threshold. People kept on pointing out that it was possible to write fast Java code (which I agree with--I had a team writing Java code that was so fast no one who saw it believed it was in Java) but ignored the fact that it was easy to write slow Java code.
It appears that while in some theoretical universe it is possible to use Ogg in a way that doesn't suck, but in the universe we actually happen to inhabit Ogg is closely associated with suckage. Figuring out why this is so and addressing the actual problems that users have, either via better docs, better example code, or making doing the right thing easier, is the sane and sensible response.
Complaining that "your players are borken" is not.
What possible use could you have for obtaining time stamps within a video stream that you cannot decode?
Right, so much for Ogg.
This kind of answer, which amounts to "You shouldn't want to do that", is an absolutely certain indicator of a product that doesn't solve the problem that poeople actually have and never will, because when the inadequacies of the solution are pointed out, users are told they should have a different problem.
Every time I have ever been told by anyone anything like that it has been a sure indication that they have simply failed to understand the domain I am working in.
Since you clearly believe in "an eye for an eye" you must think the US "deserves" pretty much all the random death it can get, as the US has randomly bombed people all over the place for years.
The inevitable end of that logic is a world in which everyone hates the US and has a moral right to randomly bomb them. Why do you hate America so much?
It only has to work once. The Nineteen Nitwits from Saudi Arabia trained in Afghanistan and crashed into the twin towers, causing the US to invade Peru, or some other random country with four letters in its name that was totally unrelated to the 9/11 attacks and no threat to America.
If I hated the US I'd love these weapons, as Americans can clearly be provoked into completely irrational and self-destructive action almost trivially. A weapons system like this, used once, would be practically ideal. Americans would close their ports, for a start, which would ruin their economy. Then they would invade Peru or someplace like it, adding the huge deadweight loss of war on top of the other drags on their economy.
Seriously, the arms race combined with galloping technology progress is just the same as a death wish for everyone.
I wish I could mod you "sane".
The summary says, "This is a scary new development..." and that pretty much sums up the whole story. "New! Scary! Be afraid! Be 'orange' afraid!"
The development of new weapons is driven by the fear of old weapons, and of other people's new weapons. Look down the page a bit and you'll find a story on a US weapons systemt that is designed to blow up and kill people anywhere on Earth an hour after launch from the continental US.
Now apply the Law of Common Humanity ("THEY are just like US") and conclude that people like the Russians are thinking about weapons like this because people like the Americans are thinking about weapons like that.
Anti-American idiots will then say it's all the US's fault, as if this endless cycle somehow magically starts with the US, but it doesn't: it starts with most people being cowards, and therefore reaching for the least effective, least efficient solution to any problem (violence and the military) because it is also the one that makes them feel safe.
Only when people have the courage to renounce the deadweight loss of new weapons developments will the world have a chance for peace. That said, it's worth noting in passing that solution to the problem of foreign invasion is not pacifism but something that someone once called "a well-ordered militia..."
To me, the most disturbing thing that this research seems to suggest is that subliminal frames actually work.
Since the reasoning power of the average reader is shown by the summary's entirely unjustified statement, "So, basically, driving past a McDonald's on the highway... will make you more likely to buy two-for-one Pantene Pro-V Shampoo and Conditioner the next time you go to Duane Reade" I don't see that there's any point in going after the other falsehoods implied the study.
People are both innumerate and what I call "probability blind", which is like colour-blindness but for the way chance actually works. Thus, a study that concludes there is a tiny but objectively real positive effect that is statisically significant is interpreted by the average person to mean that the effect is universal, powerful and enternal, so if you walked past a McD's as a child you are more likely to pull and gun and shoot someone as an eighty-year-old.
I'm almost at that point in life where I'm going to stop trying to explain this kind of error to people, and instead go off and start taking money from them on the basis of their ignorance...
This such a perfect example of a loser with attitude that I deserves comment. Look at the breakdown of points, hitting every checkbox:
1) Implies that anyone who criticizes his failure to do this job is ignorant of his difficult working conditions.
2) Implies that doing is job is an unreasonable burden that no one could expect, despite other people managing it, sometimes under conditions that he has no idea how difficult they are.
3) Implies that he did absolutely nothing wrong: his configuration was not an issue--that it was right and reasonable to have his servers configured to crash on failure of this "low priority" component, like a mechanic telling you it's right and reasonable for the wheels to fall off if the radio stops working, because the radio operating correctly is a low priority.
4) Implies that he's a hero for fixing a problem he caused by his neglect and incompetence. Despite his low pay he's on call all the time, and worked for hours fixing things brilliantly and heroically, despite having mis-configured a low-priority component as a critical system whose incidental failure could crash the whole works.
5) Blames someone else who did thier job well, and for free. Accuses a supplier of a free service who have been filling his logs with messages for six months of not filling his logs with messages for six months, and then accuses them of deliberately crashing his incompetently configured servers.
6) Re-iterates how over-worked he is and how much he has to do.
7) Proclaims he's going to look for another free service to blame his next failure on Real Soon Now.
Classic, classic whiner. Your job may suck, man, and that may not be all your fault, but if you don't fix the attitude you'll be stuck in the suck for a long, long time...
It's a scary thought should they decide to make it a weapons platform.
Dead-weight-loss is what the Air Force does, so we can take it for granted that that's what they will do in this case. They may do some science along the way that has value--military organizations the world over have occassionally managed to rise above themselves and do something that isn't a pure drain on the economy.
But your read on the situation is correct: this is the end of the US civil space program for anything other than robotic exploration and joint missions to the ISS. At the same time the American military is going to rapidly expand into LEO, and probably beyond. I expect that when the next American stands on the Moon they will be an actively serving member of the American armed forces, sent there as part of a purely and obviously military mission.
President Obama is obviously on-board with this shift from America as a scientific and exploratory leader in space to America as a military colonizer of space.
Oh, and he just agreed to a treaty that FORBIDS us to modernize our weapons technology, and has canceled the missile shield for Eastern Europe.
And for some reason you call this reduction of tax-payer-funded dead-weight-loss programs "making America weaker". It isn't clear to any thinking person here why you believe that. We aren't cowards, you know. We don't need to cower behind bluff and bluster and missile shields, proclaiming ourselves the baddest of bad-asses with whom no one ought to mess.
Strong people aren't afraid of others, and don't need to make huge investments in dead-weight-loss programmes, despite the false sense of security those programmes give to stupid people. Obama is showing genuine strength, not bullying cowardice. It's a nice change from the Amerika so many of us were coming to know and hate.
military and SCIENCE! are basically big money pits which achieve nothing but international prestige
Right, because pure science never produced results that eventually allowed us to cure disease, or allowed us to do incredibly accurate location based on satellite signals despite living in a curved space-time, or enabled clean almost limitless energy production...
I'm glad no one ever wasted any money spending it on scientists who did useless things like grow bugs in the lab, or scatter invisible particles off things, or build some ridiculous 'interferometer' to measure how fast the Earth was moving through the lumineferous aether. What a waste all that would have been!
Now excuse me, I have to use my GPS to figure out the fastest way to the hospital so I can get some x-rays, and then off to the pharmacist to get some anti-biotics, and then pay my electric bill, which is reasonably low because 40% of the power comes from nuclear plants... and if you had asked the people who were behind the SCIENCE that makes each of those things possible, "What good is it?" they would have shrugged, or told you anyone who believed their work had practical application was talking moonshine.
This is a different problem than liquor, just like carrying a small rocket launcher is a different problem than carrying a 6 bullet revolver.
Fortunately both are equally protected by the 2nd Amendment, if you're an American.
The question is not whether heroin or whatever is good or bad. The question is the appropriate public policy response to it. In particular, given the certain fact that some people will desire it, and others will meet that desire with supply, are we better off to legalize and regulate the trade and medicalize personal and social problems associated with use the way we do with alcohol; or do something insanely counter-productive like criminalize the supply and use, stigmatize and ostrasize users, and create a hugely costly, unproductive and dangerous narco-security state to combat the criminal gangs the such criminalization will inevitably and predictably produce?
The OP was suggesting for some reason that killing dealers would somehow solve some problem, but it isn't clear how. Shift from medical to criminal focus in the UK in the '70's certainly didn't reduce drug use, and Portugal's recent blanket legalization hasn't brought about the end of the world.
Retributive violence makes stupid people feel good. It's a basic monkey reflex. Fortunately, most of us are no longer quite so much in the grip of our reflexes that we fall prey to them while setting public policy, although clearly we still have a long way to go with regard to rational and effective drug policy, because it is still an area where stupid people promoting ineffective, destructive policies are still holding sway.
There is a lot of money in the narco-security state, which probably explains why stupid people have been so successful in this: they spend a lot of the taxpayer's hard-earned cash to promote their ineffective, destructive policies. But the rest of us are getting a little tired of it, and even more tired of the anti-conservative radicals like Glenn Beck who want to give the cops and the military even more power than they already have to regulate the behaviour of adults.
As noted in the linked article we, the world population, are facing a population bomb and the rise of states like India, Brazil and China.
While it is true that the population will bomb in our lifetimes, you should probably use a different word for it. Back in the '60's and '70's (when "Small is Beautiful" really got started--see the book of that title from back then) people were worried about over-population.
Now that urbanization, industrialization and the rights of women have resulted in such a dramatic decrease in rates of population growth, it is widely understood that many areas of the world will suffer significant population declines in the 21st century, and the world population will probably peak sometime in the next few decades.
However, given that it takes ten or twenty years for the general public to give up on a long-held collection of carefully nurtured fears, most people don't realize that under-population, not over-population, is going to be the major issue of the 21st century, so we really should not be calling this issue "the population bomb", as it will confuse those who are still mired in thirty-year-old concerns that have proven to be chimera time and again.
Allowing public intervention on terms that are being negotiated is counter-productive.
Huh? Counter-productive for whom? Coming to tentative agreement on terms that will cause howls of protest from the public everywhere is surely far more counter-productive, if you have any intention of listening to those voices of dissent and disagreement, because you'll have to go back to the beginning and start over again.
The only way early public participation could be counter-productive is if you never intend to listen to the public. Then indeed it is a lot more difficult to pretend to pay attention to them, and a lot more difficult to claim that you can't change anything because it was all set in stone before the public got to see it.
If a politician thinks "no matter what I do, I'll be voted out" there's not much reason for him to care about the voters, is there?
You aren't thinking it through: a system with defacto one-term lifetime on political office would attract a very different kind of person to run in the first place.
Hard SF is generally populated with plausible science and believable if somewhat limited characters, not magical spacecraft and people who were clearly hand-picked for the most important mission ever out of the leavings of a psychiatric hospital.
I'm also surprised Hollywood hasn't latched onto John Brunner, too.
Eh, how much mileage can you get from endless variations of "a bunch of stuff happens and then for no readily discernible reason everybody dies", which is what I remember Brunner's books all being like. Maybe I just got a bad initial selection, but after reading three whose plot could be summarized pretty much that way I stopped.
If solar cells were free, than this would indeed be more efficient, and if there's limited space thay MAY be more practical.
Or one could go with concentrators, which have the same effect and don't require any more solar cell surface (in fact they require less.)
I wouldn't be the least surprised if his fancy genetic algorithms came up with something pretty close to the Winston cone, which is pretty much the ideal concentrator shape. Cover the interior of one with semi-reflective solar cells and you'd get considerably greater efficiency per opening area than you'd get with a flat panel.
So scientists of the future take note: your idea doesn't have to be any good, or even very original. But if you "take inspiration from nature" (which engineers have been doing for centuries, so why anyone mentions it is beyond me) and invoke an obscure oriental art that has nothing at all to do with your results other than a superficial resemblance in form, you'll get noticed.
So, serving the interests of the real valued customer, the stockholder, they proclaim a holy jihad against the users of their service who don't give them good enough return in terms of contracted usage of service.
But it's what "the market" wants!
Whenever I hear one of these wankers talking about "the market" I want to reach for my sidearm. They're just saying, "What I want matters. No one else counts for anything, and we'll do anything we damn well please and no one can stop us."
Temple Grandin, an animal welfare advocate and autistic
In fairness to the current researchers, igoring previous work from someone who is known primarily as a marketing genius who can sell absurd ideas to the incredibly credulous is probably not a big oversight.
I mean really, claiming that you can think like a cow because you're autistic? Yet somehow she has managed to sell that idiotic idea, to the extent of turning her personal brand into a highly lucrative business. Apparently no one has bothered to ask any cows if she thinks like them, which would be the only reasonable way to ascertain the degree of truth in her silly claim.
But I guess you don't get paid the big bucks for designing better slaughterhouses if you merely design better slaughterhouses. You've gotta sell them with a ridiculous marketing package that makes every thinking person quite rightfully dismiss the rest of your work as (most likely) equally hyped nonsense.
And yes, I know there have been some "peer reviewed" studies of her hug box, but I also know what "peer reviewed" actually means in practice...
Haven't had time to read the article but it would amazing if force measurements at these levels could be conducted between well characterized masses to validate general relativity at low mass short distance scales.
The value of G is 6.67x10-11 N*m**2/kg**2
So the Newtonian force between 1 kg masses as 1 m is 12 or so orders of magnitude larger than this device can measure... BUT, there is no way of coupling six atoms gravitationally--they have masses ~10-25 kg. And using the Earth or something like that as the test mass won't do, at least not easily, as it is full of non-idealities.
GR has already been tested pretty well at terrestrial scales--GPS accuracy depends on getting the GR corrections right, for example. This kind of thing might eventually push those limits down from 1000's of m to m, and that's always a good thing, but gravity is such a weak force that even with this kind of astonishing sensitivity it is going to be tricky.
With regard to the silly concern about prefixes, which seems to be about the only aspect of this work accessible to the average reader here, the usual thing physicists do is invent new units of convenience, like the "barn" for cross-sections.
It seems that all forms of journalism feel the need to be more and more biased these days.
You are massively ignorant of the history of journalism, which has always been a hotbed of bias and sensationalism.
It ain't perfect, but it's what we've got, and your argument is a textbook example of "the best is the enemy of the good", which as every engineer knows is one of the very worst characteristics a person can have.
Is Wikileaks pure and blinding white, unadulterated by any baser motives than the desire to tell the truth? Of course not. Only an idiot would expect them to be, and only an idiot would think that it is any way interesting to point out that they aren't. Nothing is. Everyone who has been paying attention to anything knows this, and yet banal critics keep trotting it out as if was new and interesting whenever they have nothing substantive to say, but want to try to sway public opinion regardless.
Oh, did FOX fail to mention that small detail in their quest to cover the complete story?
Of course not. Conservatives (who aren't actually conservative at all, but wild-eyed radicals who want to make government more invasive and intrusive than ever before) are liars and cowards.
The rightwingnutjob press has covered every little detail of the video except the part where the soldiers open fire on the unarmed noncombatant from the van who is exercising his natural right--protected under all recognized laws of war--to give aid to the wounded.
If Conservatives weren't liars and cowards they would face that part of the video openly. But they don't have the guts.
Slashdot Mirror
This thing goes away from the Sun, not nearer it.
Nope. Tilt the sail so there is thrust against the direction of orbital motion and the ship will fall inward toward the sun. Think of the spacecraft with the sail at 45 degrees to the radial direction ot the sun, so light is reflected along a tangent to orbit in the direction of motion.
So long as a solar sail craft is in orbit, it can either raise or lower its orbit more-or-less at will, although it is easier nearer the sun than further out. Once it is out of orbit, however, it can't ever return.
The allusions to Nazis or Soviet Russia come spewing out of the marching morons like projectile diarrhea at a salmonella festival.
Thank you. This description made my day.
It isn't the just the libtards who are spewing nonsesne here, though: read the comments approving this law and you'll find the level of ignorance is comparable on both sides.
Seeking was instantaneous.
How does providing an example where Ogg does work well in any way counter the multiple cases we've seen referenced in this thread where it does not?
Demonstrating that Ogg is capable of not sucking doesn't mean there aren't severe problems with the usability of the format if hardly anyone anywhere is actually able to use it in that narrowly defined way, which demonstrably they are not.
So thanks for making it clear that Ogg is incredibly fragile, and therefore unusable for most users most of the time.
And there you go. I don't know WTF is wrong with your players, but really, how can a total of four seeks bring your system to a crawl?
This reminds me so much of Java speed discussions before Java's practical performance reached an acceptable threshold. People kept on pointing out that it was possible to write fast Java code (which I agree with--I had a team writing Java code that was so fast no one who saw it believed it was in Java) but ignored the fact that it was easy to write slow Java code.
It appears that while in some theoretical universe it is possible to use Ogg in a way that doesn't suck, but in the universe we actually happen to inhabit Ogg is closely associated with suckage. Figuring out why this is so and addressing the actual problems that users have, either via better docs, better example code, or making doing the right thing easier, is the sane and sensible response.
Complaining that "your players are borken" is not.
What possible use could you have for obtaining time stamps within a video stream that you cannot decode?
Right, so much for Ogg.
This kind of answer, which amounts to "You shouldn't want to do that", is an absolutely certain indicator of a product that doesn't solve the problem that poeople actually have and never will, because when the inadequacies of the solution are pointed out, users are told they should have a different problem.
Every time I have ever been told by anyone anything like that it has been a sure indication that they have simply failed to understand the domain I am working in.
Since you clearly believe in "an eye for an eye" you must think the US "deserves" pretty much all the random death it can get, as the US has randomly bombed people all over the place for years.
The inevitable end of that logic is a world in which everyone hates the US and has a moral right to randomly bomb them. Why do you hate America so much?
This would work. Once.
It only has to work once. The Nineteen Nitwits from Saudi Arabia trained in Afghanistan and crashed into the twin towers, causing the US to invade Peru, or some other random country with four letters in its name that was totally unrelated to the 9/11 attacks and no threat to America.
If I hated the US I'd love these weapons, as Americans can clearly be provoked into completely irrational and self-destructive action almost trivially. A weapons system like this, used once, would be practically ideal. Americans would close their ports, for a start, which would ruin their economy. Then they would invade Peru or someplace like it, adding the huge deadweight loss of war on top of the other drags on their economy.
That's a lot of destruction for a single missile.
Seriously, the arms race combined with galloping technology progress is just the same as a death wish for everyone.
I wish I could mod you "sane".
The summary says, "This is a scary new development..." and that pretty much sums up the whole story. "New! Scary! Be afraid! Be 'orange' afraid!"
The development of new weapons is driven by the fear of old weapons, and of other people's new weapons. Look down the page a bit and you'll find a story on a US weapons systemt that is designed to blow up and kill people anywhere on Earth an hour after launch from the continental US.
Now apply the Law of Common Humanity ("THEY are just like US") and conclude that people like the Russians are thinking about weapons like this because people like the Americans are thinking about weapons like that.
Anti-American idiots will then say it's all the US's fault, as if this endless cycle somehow magically starts with the US, but it doesn't: it starts with most people being cowards, and therefore reaching for the least effective, least efficient solution to any problem (violence and the military) because it is also the one that makes them feel safe.
Only when people have the courage to renounce the deadweight loss of new weapons developments will the world have a chance for peace. That said, it's worth noting in passing that solution to the problem of foreign invasion is not pacifism but something that someone once called "a well-ordered militia..."
To me, the most disturbing thing that this research seems to suggest is that subliminal frames actually work.
Since the reasoning power of the average reader is shown by the summary's entirely unjustified statement, "So, basically, driving past a McDonald's on the highway... will make you more likely to buy two-for-one Pantene Pro-V Shampoo and Conditioner the next time you go to Duane Reade" I don't see that there's any point in going after the other falsehoods implied the study.
People are both innumerate and what I call "probability blind", which is like colour-blindness but for the way chance actually works. Thus, a study that concludes there is a tiny but objectively real positive effect that is statisically significant is interpreted by the average person to mean that the effect is universal, powerful and enternal, so if you walked past a McD's as a child you are more likely to pull and gun and shoot someone as an eighty-year-old.
I'm almost at that point in life where I'm going to stop trying to explain this kind of error to people, and instead go off and start taking money from them on the basis of their ignorance...
This such a perfect example of a loser with attitude that I deserves comment. Look at the breakdown of points, hitting every checkbox:
1) Implies that anyone who criticizes his failure to do this job is ignorant of his difficult working conditions.
2) Implies that doing is job is an unreasonable burden that no one could expect, despite other people managing it, sometimes under conditions that he has no idea how difficult they are.
3) Implies that he did absolutely nothing wrong: his configuration was not an issue--that it was right and reasonable to have his servers configured to crash on failure of this "low priority" component, like a mechanic telling you it's right and reasonable for the wheels to fall off if the radio stops working, because the radio operating correctly is a low priority.
4) Implies that he's a hero for fixing a problem he caused by his neglect and incompetence. Despite his low pay he's on call all the time, and worked for hours fixing things brilliantly and heroically, despite having mis-configured a low-priority component as a critical system whose incidental failure could crash the whole works.
5) Blames someone else who did thier job well, and for free. Accuses a supplier of a free service who have been filling his logs with messages for six months of not filling his logs with messages for six months, and then accuses them of deliberately crashing his incompetently configured servers.
6) Re-iterates how over-worked he is and how much he has to do.
7) Proclaims he's going to look for another free service to blame his next failure on Real Soon Now.
Classic, classic whiner. Your job may suck, man, and that may not be all your fault, but if you don't fix the attitude you'll be stuck in the suck for a long, long time...
It's a scary thought should they decide to make it a weapons platform.
Dead-weight-loss is what the Air Force does, so we can take it for granted that that's what they will do in this case. They may do some science along the way that has value--military organizations the world over have occassionally managed to rise above themselves and do something that isn't a pure drain on the economy.
But your read on the situation is correct: this is the end of the US civil space program for anything other than robotic exploration and joint missions to the ISS. At the same time the American military is going to rapidly expand into LEO, and probably beyond. I expect that when the next American stands on the Moon they will be an actively serving member of the American armed forces, sent there as part of a purely and obviously military mission.
President Obama is obviously on-board with this shift from America as a scientific and exploratory leader in space to America as a military colonizer of space.
Oh, and he just agreed to a treaty that FORBIDS us to modernize our weapons technology, and has canceled the missile shield for Eastern Europe.
And for some reason you call this reduction of tax-payer-funded dead-weight-loss programs "making America weaker". It isn't clear to any thinking person here why you believe that. We aren't cowards, you know. We don't need to cower behind bluff and bluster and missile shields, proclaiming ourselves the baddest of bad-asses with whom no one ought to mess.
Strong people aren't afraid of others, and don't need to make huge investments in dead-weight-loss programmes, despite the false sense of security those programmes give to stupid people. Obama is showing genuine strength, not bullying cowardice. It's a nice change from the Amerika so many of us were coming to know and hate.
military and SCIENCE! are basically big money pits which achieve nothing but international prestige
Right, because pure science never produced results that eventually allowed us to cure disease, or allowed us to do incredibly accurate location based on satellite signals despite living in a curved space-time, or enabled clean almost limitless energy production...
I'm glad no one ever wasted any money spending it on scientists who did useless things like grow bugs in the lab, or scatter invisible particles off things, or build some ridiculous 'interferometer' to measure how fast the Earth was moving through the lumineferous aether. What a waste all that would have been!
Now excuse me, I have to use my GPS to figure out the fastest way to the hospital so I can get some x-rays, and then off to the pharmacist to get some anti-biotics, and then pay my electric bill, which is reasonably low because 40% of the power comes from nuclear plants... and if you had asked the people who were behind the SCIENCE that makes each of those things possible, "What good is it?" they would have shrugged, or told you anyone who believed their work had practical application was talking moonshine.
This is a different problem than liquor, just like carrying a small rocket launcher is a different problem than carrying a 6 bullet revolver.
Fortunately both are equally protected by the 2nd Amendment, if you're an American.
The question is not whether heroin or whatever is good or bad. The question is the appropriate public policy response to it. In particular, given the certain fact that some people will desire it, and others will meet that desire with supply, are we better off to legalize and regulate the trade and medicalize personal and social problems associated with use the way we do with alcohol; or do something insanely counter-productive like criminalize the supply and use, stigmatize and ostrasize users, and create a hugely costly, unproductive and dangerous narco-security state to combat the criminal gangs the such criminalization will inevitably and predictably produce?
The OP was suggesting for some reason that killing dealers would somehow solve some problem, but it isn't clear how. Shift from medical to criminal focus in the UK in the '70's certainly didn't reduce drug use, and Portugal's recent blanket legalization hasn't brought about the end of the world.
Retributive violence makes stupid people feel good. It's a basic monkey reflex. Fortunately, most of us are no longer quite so much in the grip of our reflexes that we fall prey to them while setting public policy, although clearly we still have a long way to go with regard to rational and effective drug policy, because it is still an area where stupid people promoting ineffective, destructive policies are still holding sway.
There is a lot of money in the narco-security state, which probably explains why stupid people have been so successful in this: they spend a lot of the taxpayer's hard-earned cash to promote their ineffective, destructive policies. But the rest of us are getting a little tired of it, and even more tired of the anti-conservative radicals like Glenn Beck who want to give the cops and the military even more power than they already have to regulate the behaviour of adults.
As noted in the linked article we, the world population, are facing a population bomb and the rise of states like India, Brazil and China.
While it is true that the population will bomb in our lifetimes, you should probably use a different word for it. Back in the '60's and '70's (when "Small is Beautiful" really got started--see the book of that title from back then) people were worried about over-population.
Now that urbanization, industrialization and the rights of women have resulted in such a dramatic decrease in rates of population growth, it is widely understood that many areas of the world will suffer significant population declines in the 21st century, and the world population will probably peak sometime in the next few decades.
However, given that it takes ten or twenty years for the general public to give up on a long-held collection of carefully nurtured fears, most people don't realize that under-population, not over-population, is going to be the major issue of the 21st century, so we really should not be calling this issue "the population bomb", as it will confuse those who are still mired in thirty-year-old concerns that have proven to be chimera time and again.
Allowing public intervention on terms that are being negotiated is counter-productive.
Huh? Counter-productive for whom? Coming to tentative agreement on terms that will cause howls of protest from the public everywhere is surely far more counter-productive, if you have any intention of listening to those voices of dissent and disagreement, because you'll have to go back to the beginning and start over again.
The only way early public participation could be counter-productive is if you never intend to listen to the public. Then indeed it is a lot more difficult to pretend to pay attention to them, and a lot more difficult to claim that you can't change anything because it was all set in stone before the public got to see it.
If a politician thinks "no matter what I do, I'll be voted out" there's not much reason for him to care about the voters, is there?
You aren't thinking it through: a system with defacto one-term lifetime on political office would attract a very different kind of person to run in the first place.
That was about as hard sci-fi as it gets.
Nope. It was a fantasy film with spaceships.
Hard SF is generally populated with plausible science and believable if somewhat limited characters, not magical spacecraft and people who were clearly hand-picked for the most important mission ever out of the leavings of a psychiatric hospital.
I'm also surprised Hollywood hasn't latched onto John Brunner, too.
Eh, how much mileage can you get from endless variations of "a bunch of stuff happens and then for no readily discernible reason everybody dies", which is what I remember Brunner's books all being like. Maybe I just got a bad initial selection, but after reading three whose plot could be summarized pretty much that way I stopped.
If solar cells were free, than this would indeed be more efficient, and if there's limited space thay MAY be more practical.
Or one could go with concentrators, which have the same effect and don't require any more solar cell surface (in fact they require less.)
I wouldn't be the least surprised if his fancy genetic algorithms came up with something pretty close to the Winston cone, which is pretty much the ideal concentrator shape. Cover the interior of one with semi-reflective solar cells and you'd get considerably greater efficiency per opening area than you'd get with a flat panel.
So scientists of the future take note: your idea doesn't have to be any good, or even very original. But if you "take inspiration from nature" (which engineers have been doing for centuries, so why anyone mentions it is beyond me) and invoke an obscure oriental art that has nothing at all to do with your results other than a superficial resemblance in form, you'll get noticed.
So, serving the interests of the real valued customer, the stockholder, they proclaim a holy jihad against the users of their service who don't give them good enough return in terms of contracted usage of service.
But it's what "the market" wants!
Whenever I hear one of these wankers talking about "the market" I want to reach for my sidearm. They're just saying, "What I want matters. No one else counts for anything, and we'll do anything we damn well please and no one can stop us."
Temple Grandin, an animal welfare advocate and autistic
In fairness to the current researchers, igoring previous work from someone who is known primarily as a marketing genius who can sell absurd ideas to the incredibly credulous is probably not a big oversight.
I mean really, claiming that you can think like a cow because you're autistic? Yet somehow she has managed to sell that idiotic idea, to the extent of turning her personal brand into a highly lucrative business. Apparently no one has bothered to ask any cows if she thinks like them, which would be the only reasonable way to ascertain the degree of truth in her silly claim.
But I guess you don't get paid the big bucks for designing better slaughterhouses if you merely design better slaughterhouses. You've gotta sell them with a ridiculous marketing package that makes every thinking person quite rightfully dismiss the rest of your work as (most likely) equally hyped nonsense.
And yes, I know there have been some "peer reviewed" studies of her hug box, but I also know what "peer reviewed" actually means in practice...
Haven't had time to read the article but it would amazing if force measurements at these levels could be conducted between well characterized masses to validate general relativity at low mass short distance scales.
The value of G is 6.67x10-11 N*m**2/kg**2
So the Newtonian force between 1 kg masses as 1 m is 12 or so orders of magnitude larger than this device can measure... BUT, there is no way of coupling six atoms gravitationally--they have masses ~10-25 kg. And using the Earth or something like that as the test mass won't do, at least not easily, as it is full of non-idealities.
GR has already been tested pretty well at terrestrial scales--GPS accuracy depends on getting the GR corrections right, for example. This kind of thing might eventually push those limits down from 1000's of m to m, and that's always a good thing, but gravity is such a weak force that even with this kind of astonishing sensitivity it is going to be tricky.
With regard to the silly concern about prefixes, which seems to be about the only aspect of this work accessible to the average reader here, the usual thing physicists do is invent new units of convenience, like the "barn" for cross-sections.
It seems that all forms of journalism feel the need to be more and more biased these days.
You are massively ignorant of the history of journalism, which has always been a hotbed of bias and sensationalism.
It ain't perfect, but it's what we've got, and your argument is a textbook example of "the best is the enemy of the good", which as every engineer knows is one of the very worst characteristics a person can have.
Is Wikileaks pure and blinding white, unadulterated by any baser motives than the desire to tell the truth? Of course not. Only an idiot would expect them to be, and only an idiot would think that it is any way interesting to point out that they aren't. Nothing is. Everyone who has been paying attention to anything knows this, and yet banal critics keep trotting it out as if was new and interesting whenever they have nothing substantive to say, but want to try to sway public opinion regardless.
Oh, did FOX fail to mention that small detail in their quest to cover the complete story?
Of course not. Conservatives (who aren't actually conservative at all, but wild-eyed radicals who want to make government more invasive and intrusive than ever before) are liars and cowards.
The rightwingnutjob press has covered every little detail of the video except the part where the soldiers open fire on the unarmed noncombatant from the van who is exercising his natural right--protected under all recognized laws of war--to give aid to the wounded.
If Conservatives weren't liars and cowards they would face that part of the video openly. But they don't have the guts.