If Microsoft came up with something novel, non-obvious, and useful ABOUT editing a document represented entirely within a single XML file they would be entitled to a patent on THAT ASPECT
Which is indeed exactly what they have done. The first claim:
1. A method for creating a document in XML ("Extensible Markup Language") in a computing device that is understandable by many applications, comprising: accessing a published XSD ("XML Schema Definition") in said computing device, wherein the XSD defines rules relating to the XML file format for documents associated with an application having a rich set of features; determining an element to create in an XML file in said computing device, wherein the element is selected from a set of elements, including: a style element; a hints element that includes information to assist an external application in displaying text of the of the document; a bookmark element; wherein the bookmark element includes an identifier attribute that associates a start bookmark with an end bookmark element wherein two bookmark elements are used in book marking a portion of the document; wherein each of the two bookmark elements include an opening tag and an ending tag; a document properties element; a text element that contains text of the document; wherein all of the text of the document is stored within text elements such that only the text of the document is contained between start text tags and end text tags; wherein there are no intervening tags between each of the start text tags and each of the corresponding end text tags and wherein each of the start text tags do not include formatting information for the text between each of the start text tags and the end text tags; a text run element that includes the formatting information for the text within text elements; a font element; a formatting element; a section element; a table element; an outline element; and a proofing element; creating the document including the element in said computing device; and storing the document in said computing device.
To translate: they've patented a means of formating an XML document that takes all the formating information out, so the text appears as all your text belong in here with absolutely no styling or formating information, which is all run-encoded in other parts of the document.
Stupid, that this is patentable, yes, but a far cry from the false summary/. gives.
Note that it's entirely possible that the slashdot article misrepresented what was patented.
No, it is absolutely certain that the/. article misrepresented what was patented, because that is what/. does: spread patent falsehoods.
The one you have already may have passive water immersion sensors... little stickers that change color if they get wet.
Yeah, I immersed a cell phone a few years back, took it in for replacement and told them I had immersed it, and the first thing they did was pop that battery and say, "You sure did." There were a couple of stickers that were bright red, whereas the ones on the replacement phone were white.
That makes perfect sense to me, as lots of people will for some reason lie about this stuff, as I guess they are too stupid to realize that since everyone pays for the price of lying, their total cost, averaged over all of their economic activity, is the same either way: if everyone lies, everyone pays for everyone else's lies. If everyone tells the truth, everyone's average cost must be identical. The only thing that differs is the variance.
The fact that companies put simple sensors in devices like this tells you something: almost everyone lies. Ergo, there is not much point in anyone lying.
If you look at my original post you'll see that you've strangely edited what I wrote, incorrectly inferring racism behind the typo, "unless you're a back CEO in the US", which should have read, "unless you're a bank CEO in the US".
Given the context, it's hard to imagine anyone without race hatred on their mind (and apparently hatred of people whose sexuality is a bit more interesting than the average) inferring anything other than "bank". Perhaps you should come out of the closet, AC.
That is why parents inevitably ask their children the unanswerable question: Why did you do that?
No, parents ask that question because their job is to inform the moral character of their children. This is completely different from the role of the state, which is to violently enforce acceptable norms of behaviour.
People who fail to distinguish the role of the parent from the role of the state, and the structure of the state from the structure of the family, are almost always dangerous ideologues bent on totalitarian ends.
There is no such thing as a healthy free market because greed is an antagonist of good faith.
Adam Smith called. He'd like to know he has a 200 year old valid argument for you, if you could be bothered to learn something about economics, ethics and human behaviour rather than just making stuff up.
Our economic system, the free market, relies on good faith intent to operate efficiently.
Why isn't this modded funny?
You've clearly never been in business, in which a very significant fraction of agreements are not entered into in good faith, but for various strategic reasons, or in the hopes that something will happen that will allow them to be fulfilled.
You've also clearly never been in the United States, where there is no free market, but rather a repressive oligarchy of government-backed plutocrats.
Free markets do no depend on the goodness of individuals--this realization goes all the way back to Adam Smith himself. It does not depend on their honesty or uprightness. It depends on their willingness to enter into public and legally enforceable agreements, and nothing else. It doesn't matter if you're a sociopath or not--it matters if the cops can seize your assets when you renege on a deal, and so far as I know sociopathy doesn't protect you from that (unless you're a back CEO in the US, of course, but like I said... the US does not have a free market.)
At minimum, if someone commits heinous crimes due to brain problems it makes it ethically problematic to engage in essentially punitive imprisonment.
The notion of punitive imprisonment is always ethically problematic. There is no non-circular argument for "punishment" as a response to crimes, at least in my understanding of what "punishment" means, which is a harm that someone "deserves" because of their action.
The problem is that no one has ever given an account of what it means to "deserve" something other than, "I think or feel you ought to get it, and I have the power to give it to you, good and hard." To "deserve" something is not like having a contractual claim on it, on even a moral claim in the normal sense. Religious people can give an account based on the will of their favourite god or gods, but that doesn't hold much empirical water.
This is not an argument against harming people who have committed crimes for the purposes of social control, or isolating convicted criminals from other people for the purpose of our own protection. But I do not believe that punitive imprisonment, or other punitive action, is ever justified as "punishment", but rather as pragmatic measures for maintaining social stability in the face of anti-social people.
In this sense, it does not matter if people are anti-social because of disease or choice, because in no case should be be "punishing" them. The ones who commit crimes due to disease should be cured or isolated where they will do no harm. The ones who commit crimes by choice should be subject to negative conditioning or isolated where they will do no harm.
Besides, the people who do believe they have a choice are forced to not accept the evidence because they don't have the choice of accepting it:-)
The same observation is true of people who DO believe the "evidence", which demonstrates just how stupid the belief we lack choice is: it isn't even self-consistent to argue for the position, because the position assumes argument cannot have any affect on what people believe.
One neat thing that they didn't mention: having lithium exposed to a high radiation flux will breed more tritium
And having lead exposed to a high neutron flux will breed all kinds of long-lived nuclear waste, which has generally been one of the advantages of fusion (looking past the whole "doesn't actually exist" thing.) That said, the waste will should still be more managable than fission products, and the production of long-lived actinides will be small, if non-negligible.
Overall this looks like a really interesting concept, and even if they don't succeed it is wonderful (and typically Canadian) that they are taking on this high-risk project. Technological innovation tends to flourish in the penumbra of imperial powers. American culture has become too conservative to support an effort like this because imperial powers are far too sensitive to their image, and taking on something that is almost sure to fail is therefore rarely going to happen. That leave innovation to the peripheral powers who aren't afraid to fail because they have no image to live up to.
Comparing the delta-v required for any inter-orbital transfer to launch costs is a mistake because the technology used to affect them is--or should be--completely different.
It doesn't matter whether the transfer is a plane change or an apogee change. In both cases, the change can take place over months or years, which opens up all kinds of possibilities, quite unlike the situation with a booster.
It's an interesting question as to why no one would take this seriously, no matter how brain-dead stupid they are, but legions of the very same morons take equally idiotic claims of "wifi allergy" seriously.
It isn't like everyone loves PR people and hates wifi, so it isn't as simple as that (the affect of how much people like something is dramatic--ask people about post-op pain and there answer will tell you how much they like their surgeon, and nothing else.)
Wifi is relatively new, while PR stunts are ancient, which helps a bit, although cell phones and other forms of electromagnetic radiation have been around for long enough that it's clear to all but the completely vacuous that they have no negative effect on human health compared to their enormous positive effects.
So why do the anti-empirical morons insist on taking things like wifi allergy seriously, and not PR-stunt allergy?
And more importantly, how can we come up with something that a) only certifiably intelligent people suffer from and b) would result in massive class-action lawsuits against assholes like the clown who perpetrated this?
Re:hybrid nitrous oxide and rubber rocket engine-W
on
White Knight Two Unveiled
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· Score: 4, Informative
So, does this thing literally burn rubber?
Solid fuel compositions tend to be rubbery. This makes them insensitive to vibrations and thermal stresses which could lead to cracking in stiffer compositions. Cracking is a Very Bad Thing as it tends to produce sudden trust variations.
So if by "rubber" you mean "made from the sap of a rubber tree or a similar hydrocarbon synthetic designed primarily for flexibility and resilience", then no, it doesn't burn rubber. The fuel is designed primarily for high specific impulse, with the rubbery characteristics design in secondarily.
The use of a hybrid solid-fuel/fluid-oxidizer design allows the engine to be throttled, and yet is considerably cheaper than a comparably powerful liquid rocket design.
Aside: has anyone noticed that/. is even more borken than usual today, failing to recognize the text entry area for comments past about a 64 column limit?
Please show me a repeatable experiment in accordance with the scientific method to demonstrate anything whatsoever about alien life
Science is systematic empiricism, and there is no "scientific method" that universally applies to all areas. Most astronomy and astrophysics is based on careful observation and application of theory, not repeatable experiments.
In the case of ETs, the theory is mostly evolution by variation and natural selection, which requires only the laws of probability to operate, so it is really general and we can be very confident that it will be going on.
That means you can't just make up magical anti-Darwinian species that doesn't try to fill every available evolutionary niche because they have mysteriously got a gene to tell them to stay home. You have to give at least some plausible argument as to how such an anti-Darwinian gene would occur and spread in the population.
Maybe this is why these devices have vanished so completely from known history.
What is more likely is that devices like this were never widely known because there was very little that resembled a scientific community, so there was no way to make such knowledge public. By "no way" I mean there was neither the technical means of dissemination nor the social means of rewarding the creators of such knowledge.
Science is a public, communal activity. Until the founding of the Royal Society in the 1600's there was no way for the nascent scientific community to actualize itself in archival journals and shared results. Such "science" as there was was carried on by practitioners who swore oaths of secrecy (much of the actual text of the vaunted Hipocratic Oath is actually about not teaching anyone but the sons of physicians any trade secrets, and not stepping on the toes of any of the other medical services unions.)
It is therefore likely that similar techniques and ideas were rediscovered and lost many times during the past few thousand years, in a wide variety of fields. And extreme example of this is knowledge of the diameter of the Earth, which the Greeks knew pretty well, but which was sufficiently debatable 1500 years later that a nutjob like Columbus could convince people that it was about half the actual figure.
The lack of comprehensive, authoritative publications embedded in a living community of empirical investigators meant that knowledge tended to wither and die with time, resulting in relatively slow accumulation over the long term.
and as launch costs remain the major dominating factor in space activities, you might as well make a new station.
Piffle.
There are dozens of ways of moving the ISS into a higher orbit. Let's start experimenting with them today.
The only reason for decommissioning it in 2016 (or 2020) is the routine inability of the American government to actually do anything, coupled with the imperialist need to prevent anyone else from doing anything.
Launch costs are spread nicely across the various states, giving a political incentive to support the ISS while the shuttle is flying. Once it isn't, the political incentive dies and with it the support of the dysfunctional American government.
Oh, and does anyone believe that that same dysfunctional government is going to get a shuttle replacement flying with a 5 - 7 year gap? I'd like to hear RIGHT NOW from every self-righteous asshole who is waiting to tell us seven years from now that OF COURSE EVERYONE KNOWS that EVERY PROGRAM goes VASTLY over-schedule. If you know it right now, then put the correction factor in now. I'm betting 13 years for the shuttle replacement to fly, based on past NASA incompetence. Anyone who knows different, speak now or shut the fuck up in seven years when the program is still seven years from flight.
for making me click through to get to the actual patent
Yeah, you'd think that being told EVERY SINGLE TIME a patent story is put on/. that the only thing that matters is the claims, the loser "editors" here would stop repeating statements from a press release or the patent abstract and falsely claiming that they describe what is patented./. editors are either ignorant of the most basic facts about the American patent system, or wilful liars.
Maybe the reason he writes his books lacking technical authenticity is at least in part because that's what people want to read?
As others here have pointed out, his books also lack literary quality... although say that is a bit like saying positrons lack negative charge. Brown's books are the popular antithesis of good fiction. His big hit--whose title I don't recall, thankfully--is a characterless episodic melodrama based on a wild sub-academic speculation regarding the nature of the Holy Grail. The crazy book he ripped the speculation off from is called "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail." [*]
Brown posits an hallucinatory world that has as much to do with actual academia as "House M.D" has to do with real doctors, without the faintly redeeming feature of Hugh Laurie talking with an American accent.
And people eat it up. If anyone tried to do the same sort of thing without the egregious stupidities that pepper Brown's work (my favourite: referring to Arabic as "Islamic", and claiming medieval Christian scholars used it as a language to hide secrets because they believed it already profane) they would not get the same readership because Brown is writing for the ignorant majority
It is a truism of writing that when a struggling but competent author sees a badly written best-seller and says, "I can write way better than that!" their work will never see the light of day, because publishers see "better than that" every day of the year. They don't buy it because they know it won't sell as well as garbage like Brown's. Trying to best Brown by improving literary and factual quality is like trying to best McDonald's by improving nutritional and aesthetic quality. That's not what people in that market are looking for.
So yeah, you're right: Brown is writing garbage because that's what people want to read, which is kind of sad (for them.)
[*] Aside: we know that there is up to a 25% chance that a baby will be fathered by someone other than the mother's pair-bonded mate. Even if the crazy speculation is true, therefore, after 100 generations there is conservatively a 1 - 0.9**100 = 99.9973% chance that any nominal progeny of Jesus would not actually be the progeny of Jesus, but the descendant of some lucky medieval interloper. And since Jesus' bother James, and later his nephew, lead the revolutionary Jewish organization Jesus founded, it is not clear why other family members would have to be hidden away, particularly as other people of nominally royal descent were always available to lead as well.
I think it would generally be bad for everybody if a significant part of the world (ie. the equator and surrounding area) became uninhabitable.
Huh? Even if you do nothing more than take the unphysical GCM's at face value, you would conclude that the equator is the least effected region of the globe. EVERYTHING we know about GW strongly suggests that the polar regions will be far more strongly affected than anywhere else. NOTHING suggests that the equatorial regions will be strongly affected (there may be local disruptions in fresh water supply due to melting glaciers, but since the general trend all the unphysical models show is toward generally higher precipitation that's not a general effect.)
GCM's produce a diverse set of results, and alarmists selling fear, like you, are cherry-picking the scariest results, and going beyond that are making up results for which there is no scientific basis at all. There are people who are actually so uncritical that they think more frequent and severe hurricanes are likely due to GW!
GW is plausibly real and plausibly due to human activity, but it adds nothing to the debate to engage in unscientific scare-mongering.
Unacceptable to whom? That is the key question. The imperialist belief that there is exactly one single universal definition of "unacceptable" is a huge problem in this debate.
So why isn't there a significant, sustained effort to minimize air travel?
Because we like air travel and hate industry. Minimizing air travel would inconvenience too many of "the right kind of people."
The same kind of thinking can be seen in the summary: "It now appears that these clouds are simply the product of Shuttle launches." The key word here is "simply", implying that there's nothing to worry about, because shuttle launches are a Good Thing.
AGW may be real--the signal in ocean heat content is pretty damned interesting, if maybe not quite compelling--but the argument around it is almost entirely driven by social engineers who want to use the non-zero risk of a civilization-ending climate event to empower themselves and their friends.
Of course when we all have to go to Government run health care like Canada, we will have to wait in line for 3months for wound treatment and instead of nano-diamonds, we will have to make do with cubic zirconium dust covered in aspirin.
Don't confuse "American Government Run Care" with "Canadian Government Run Care."
Our system has its problems, but prompt treatment of acute issues isn't one of them. Like any system run by humans we sometimes drop the ball on critical issues, but it is by no means the systematic chaos and inefficiency that a similar system run by the American government would produce.
This is one of the many errors that ideology leads one into: you start to think that the difference between two classes of collective organization (governments vs corporations) somehow magically trumps the far larger difference between specific organizations (the staid, boring, democratic, efficient Canadian government, and the flamboyant, obnoxious, imperial, inefficient American government.)
I have some expertise in FEA computer simulations and the mathematical training to understand the algorithims
But you're not a computational physicist, or you would have noticed the lack of energy conservation in some models (it is added by hand as a correction on each time step) or unphysical boundary conditions in others (ocean surface in particular). If you were a computational physicist you'd know how big a deal these approximations are in long-term integrations of even very simple systems, much less complex ones like GCMs.
I was a lot more convinced by the AGW argument before I started looking at the models than I am now. I think the only real "smoking gun" in the current data sets is ocean heat content, which is a physically meaningful measure of warming ("average global temperature" is unthermodynamic gibberish) and which is pretty convincingly increasing. Polar ice coverage is a lot more problematic, comparatively.
On the other hand, have you looked at the data on variations in the Earth's albedo? It's worth googling around for: there was a very large drop (about 2.5%) in the late '90's, representing an additional forcing larger than all anthropogenic greenhouse gases released in the past 150 years. So far as I know, no one has run GCMs to see what the predicted effect of this would be, but it seems to me a nice juicy verification target that any decently self-critical scientist would be all over.
chances are that people with a predisposition to reject science on the basis of how well established that science is are nuts.
The problem is that the science on climate change is not nearly so well-established as its proponents (particularly in the popular press, but also in the climatologist community) claim. It is curious that this has resulted in nuts challenging the consensus before the scientific process has really produced robust conclusions.
The quality of climate science is not that great, in my view as a computational physicist who has looked at GCM's a bit (which are, remember, nothing but computational physics, so I am more qualified than a climatologist to look at them, because apparently it is the name of one's abstract academic category that makes one qualified to do things, not any actual concrete expertise.) GCMs are highly parameterized, quasi-linear approximations to an egregiously non-linear system. As such, they are very poor tools for prediction, although they may provide some broad insights.
The question is: are GCMs sufficiently accurate and precise and robust to serve as a basis of public policy. The Precautionary Principle suggests not, as there are huge, obvious and known dangers in widespread intervention in people's lives by self-righteous nitwits. On the other hand, there are far sounder arguments for curtailing our use of fossil fuels: we are running out of oil, and you'd have to be nuts to want to hand your children a world powered by coal.
With all due respect to an eminent and brilliant physicist, Freeman Dyson is not a climatologist.
God I get tired of this. I am a computational physicist. The people working on GCMs are climatologists. I guess their work is entirely worthless then, right? Because only a computational physicist is qualified to do computational physics. It's all in the NAME see, which carries with it a mysterious and eldrich power.
On the other hand, someone like Dyson has decades of experience in the strange dialectic between imperfect data and imperfect theory that is the basis of science at the individual level. Anyone who is so ignorant as to blithely dismiss him because some abstract label doesn't conform to their prejudices is contributing a whole lot of noise to this debate, but no signal whatsoever.
When you have something substantive to say about climate physics or GCMs (like their lack of energy conservation and artificial boundary conditions, particularly at the ocean surface) please feel free to contribute to the debate.
Slashdot Mirror
If Microsoft came up with something novel, non-obvious, and useful ABOUT editing a document represented entirely within a single XML file they would be entitled to a patent on THAT ASPECT
Which is indeed exactly what they have done. The first claim:
1. A method for creating a document in XML ("Extensible Markup Language") in a computing device that is understandable by many applications, comprising: accessing a published XSD ("XML Schema Definition") in said computing device, wherein the XSD defines rules relating to the XML file format for documents associated with an application having a rich set of features; determining an element to create in an XML file in said computing device, wherein the element is selected from a set of elements, including: a style element; a hints element that includes information to assist an external application in displaying text of the of the document; a bookmark element; wherein the bookmark element includes an identifier attribute that associates a start bookmark with an end bookmark element wherein two bookmark elements are used in book marking a portion of the document; wherein each of the two bookmark elements include an opening tag and an ending tag; a document properties element; a text element that contains text of the document; wherein all of the text of the document is stored within text elements such that only the text of the document is contained between start text tags and end text tags; wherein there are no intervening tags between each of the start text tags and each of the corresponding end text tags and wherein each of the start text tags do not include formatting information for the text between each of the start text tags and the end text tags; a text run element that includes the formatting information for the text within text elements; a font element; a formatting element; a section element; a table element; an outline element; and a proofing element; creating the document including the element in said computing device; and storing the document in said computing device.
To translate: they've patented a means of formating an XML document that takes all the formating information out, so the text appears as all your text belong in here with absolutely no styling or formating information, which is all run-encoded in other parts of the document.
Stupid, that this is patentable, yes, but a far cry from the false summary /. gives.
Note that it's entirely possible that the slashdot article misrepresented what was patented.
No, it is absolutely certain that the /. article misrepresented what was patented, because that is what /. does: spread patent falsehoods.
The one you have already may have passive water immersion sensors ... little stickers that change color if they get wet.
Yeah, I immersed a cell phone a few years back, took it in for replacement and told them I had immersed it, and the first thing they did was pop that battery and say, "You sure did." There were a couple of stickers that were bright red, whereas the ones on the replacement phone were white.
That makes perfect sense to me, as lots of people will for some reason lie about this stuff, as I guess they are too stupid to realize that since everyone pays for the price of lying, their total cost, averaged over all of their economic activity, is the same either way: if everyone lies, everyone pays for everyone else's lies. If everyone tells the truth, everyone's average cost must be identical. The only thing that differs is the variance.
The fact that companies put simple sensors in devices like this tells you something: almost everyone lies. Ergo, there is not much point in anyone lying.
Nice homophobia!
If you look at my original post you'll see that you've strangely edited what I wrote, incorrectly inferring racism behind the typo, "unless you're a back CEO in the US", which should have read, "unless you're a bank CEO in the US".
Given the context, it's hard to imagine anyone without race hatred on their mind (and apparently hatred of people whose sexuality is a bit more interesting than the average) inferring anything other than "bank". Perhaps you should come out of the closet, AC.
That is why parents inevitably ask their children the unanswerable question: Why did you do that?
No, parents ask that question because their job is to inform the moral character of their children. This is completely different from the role of the state, which is to violently enforce acceptable norms of behaviour.
People who fail to distinguish the role of the parent from the role of the state, and the structure of the state from the structure of the family, are almost always dangerous ideologues bent on totalitarian ends.
There is no such thing as a healthy free market because greed is an antagonist of good faith.
Adam Smith called. He'd like to know he has a 200 year old valid argument for you, if you could be bothered to learn something about economics, ethics and human behaviour rather than just making stuff up.
Our economic system, the free market, relies on good faith intent to operate efficiently.
Why isn't this modded funny?
You've clearly never been in business, in which a very significant fraction of agreements are not entered into in good faith, but for various strategic reasons, or in the hopes that something will happen that will allow them to be fulfilled.
You've also clearly never been in the United States, where there is no free market, but rather a repressive oligarchy of government-backed plutocrats.
Free markets do no depend on the goodness of individuals--this realization goes all the way back to Adam Smith himself. It does not depend on their honesty or uprightness. It depends on their willingness to enter into public and legally enforceable agreements, and nothing else. It doesn't matter if you're a sociopath or not--it matters if the cops can seize your assets when you renege on a deal, and so far as I know sociopathy doesn't protect you from that (unless you're a back CEO in the US, of course, but like I said... the US does not have a free market.)
At minimum, if someone commits heinous crimes due to brain problems it makes it ethically problematic to engage in essentially punitive imprisonment.
The notion of punitive imprisonment is always ethically problematic. There is no non-circular argument for "punishment" as a response to crimes, at least in my understanding of what "punishment" means, which is a harm that someone "deserves" because of their action.
The problem is that no one has ever given an account of what it means to "deserve" something other than, "I think or feel you ought to get it, and I have the power to give it to you, good and hard." To "deserve" something is not like having a contractual claim on it, on even a moral claim in the normal sense. Religious people can give an account based on the will of their favourite god or gods, but that doesn't hold much empirical water.
This is not an argument against harming people who have committed crimes for the purposes of social control, or isolating convicted criminals from other people for the purpose of our own protection. But I do not believe that punitive imprisonment, or other punitive action, is ever justified as "punishment", but rather as pragmatic measures for maintaining social stability in the face of anti-social people.
In this sense, it does not matter if people are anti-social because of disease or choice, because in no case should be be "punishing" them. The ones who commit crimes due to disease should be cured or isolated where they will do no harm. The ones who commit crimes by choice should be subject to negative conditioning or isolated where they will do no harm.
Besides, the people who do believe they have a choice are forced to not accept the evidence because they don't have the choice of accepting it :-)
The same observation is true of people who DO believe the "evidence", which demonstrates just how stupid the belief we lack choice is: it isn't even self-consistent to argue for the position, because the position assumes argument cannot have any affect on what people believe.
One neat thing that they didn't mention: having lithium exposed to a high radiation flux will breed more tritium
And having lead exposed to a high neutron flux will breed all kinds of long-lived nuclear waste, which has generally been one of the advantages of fusion (looking past the whole "doesn't actually exist" thing.) That said, the waste will should still be more managable than fission products, and the production of long-lived actinides will be small, if non-negligible.
Overall this looks like a really interesting concept, and even if they don't succeed it is wonderful (and typically Canadian) that they are taking on this high-risk project. Technological innovation tends to flourish in the penumbra of imperial powers. American culture has become too conservative to support an effort like this because imperial powers are far too sensitive to their image, and taking on something that is almost sure to fail is therefore rarely going to happen. That leave innovation to the peripheral powers who aren't afraid to fail because they have no image to live up to.
I stand corrected (although what I said is true of most solid booster compositions!) /. needs a "-5 I was wrong" mod!
He was talking about an orbital plane change.
I say again, piffle.
Comparing the delta-v required for any inter-orbital transfer to launch costs is a mistake because the technology used to affect them is--or should be--completely different.
It doesn't matter whether the transfer is a plane change or an apogee change. In both cases, the change can take place over months or years, which opens up all kinds of possibilities, quite unlike the situation with a booster.
So like I said: start experimenting now.
I'm allergic to PR stunts.
It's an interesting question as to why no one would take this seriously, no matter how brain-dead stupid they are, but legions of the very same morons take equally idiotic claims of "wifi allergy" seriously.
It isn't like everyone loves PR people and hates wifi, so it isn't as simple as that (the affect of how much people like something is dramatic--ask people about post-op pain and there answer will tell you how much they like their surgeon, and nothing else.)
Wifi is relatively new, while PR stunts are ancient, which helps a bit, although cell phones and other forms of electromagnetic radiation have been around for long enough that it's clear to all but the completely vacuous that they have no negative effect on human health compared to their enormous positive effects.
So why do the anti-empirical morons insist on taking things like wifi allergy seriously, and not PR-stunt allergy?
And more importantly, how can we come up with something that a) only certifiably intelligent people suffer from and b) would result in massive class-action lawsuits against assholes like the clown who perpetrated this?
So, does this thing literally burn rubber?
Solid fuel compositions tend to be rubbery. This makes them insensitive to vibrations and thermal stresses which could lead to cracking in stiffer compositions. Cracking is a Very Bad Thing as it tends to produce sudden trust variations.
So if by "rubber" you mean "made from the sap of a rubber tree or a similar hydrocarbon synthetic designed primarily for flexibility and resilience", then no, it doesn't burn rubber. The fuel is designed primarily for high specific impulse, with the rubbery characteristics design in secondarily.
The use of a hybrid solid-fuel/fluid-oxidizer design allows the engine to be throttled, and yet is considerably cheaper than a comparably powerful liquid rocket design.
Aside: has anyone noticed that /. is even more borken than usual today, failing to recognize the text entry area for comments past about a 64 column limit?
Please show me a repeatable experiment in accordance with the scientific method to demonstrate anything whatsoever about alien life
Science is systematic empiricism, and there is no "scientific method" that universally applies to all areas. Most astronomy and astrophysics is based on careful observation and application of theory, not repeatable experiments.
In the case of ETs, the theory is mostly evolution by variation and natural selection, which requires only the laws of probability to operate, so it is really general and we can be very confident that it will be going on.
That means you can't just make up magical anti-Darwinian species that doesn't try to fill every available evolutionary niche because they have mysteriously got a gene to tell them to stay home. You have to give at least some plausible argument as to how such an anti-Darwinian gene would occur and spread in the population.
Maybe this is why these devices have vanished so completely from known history.
What is more likely is that devices like this were never widely known because there was very little that resembled a scientific community, so there was no way to make such knowledge public. By "no way" I mean there was neither the technical means of dissemination nor the social means of rewarding the creators of such knowledge.
Science is a public, communal activity. Until the founding of the Royal Society in the 1600's there was no way for the nascent scientific community to actualize itself in archival journals and shared results. Such "science" as there was was carried on by practitioners who swore oaths of secrecy (much of the actual text of the vaunted Hipocratic Oath is actually about not teaching anyone but the sons of physicians any trade secrets, and not stepping on the toes of any of the other medical services unions.)
It is therefore likely that similar techniques and ideas were rediscovered and lost many times during the past few thousand years, in a wide variety of fields. And extreme example of this is knowledge of the diameter of the Earth, which the Greeks knew pretty well, but which was sufficiently debatable 1500 years later that a nutjob like Columbus could convince people that it was about half the actual figure.
The lack of comprehensive, authoritative publications embedded in a living community of empirical investigators meant that knowledge tended to wither and die with time, resulting in relatively slow accumulation over the long term.
and as launch costs remain the major dominating factor in space activities, you might as well make a new station.
Piffle.
There are dozens of ways of moving the ISS into a higher orbit. Let's start experimenting with them today.
The only reason for decommissioning it in 2016 (or 2020) is the routine inability of the American government to actually do anything, coupled with the imperialist need to prevent anyone else from doing anything.
Launch costs are spread nicely across the various states, giving a political incentive to support the ISS while the shuttle is flying. Once it isn't, the political incentive dies and with it the support of the dysfunctional American government.
Oh, and does anyone believe that that same dysfunctional government is going to get a shuttle replacement flying with a 5 - 7 year gap? I'd like to hear RIGHT NOW from every self-righteous asshole who is waiting to tell us seven years from now that OF COURSE EVERYONE KNOWS that EVERY PROGRAM goes VASTLY over-schedule. If you know it right now, then put the correction factor in now. I'm betting 13 years for the shuttle replacement to fly, based on past NASA incompetence. Anyone who knows different, speak now or shut the fuck up in seven years when the program is still seven years from flight.
for making me click through to get to the actual patent
Yeah, you'd think that being told EVERY SINGLE TIME a patent story is put on /. that the only thing that matters is the claims, the loser "editors" here would stop repeating statements from a press release or the patent abstract and falsely claiming that they describe what is patented. /. editors are either ignorant of the most basic facts about the American patent system, or wilful liars.
Either way, it gets awfully tiresome.
Maybe the reason he writes his books lacking technical authenticity is at least in part because that's what people want to read?
As others here have pointed out, his books also lack literary quality... although say that is a bit like saying positrons lack negative charge. Brown's books are the popular antithesis of good fiction. His big hit--whose title I don't recall, thankfully--is a characterless episodic melodrama based on a wild sub-academic speculation regarding the nature of the Holy Grail. The crazy book he ripped the speculation off from is called "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail." [*]
Brown posits an hallucinatory world that has as much to do with actual academia as "House M.D" has to do with real doctors, without the faintly redeeming feature of Hugh Laurie talking with an American accent.
And people eat it up. If anyone tried to do the same sort of thing without the egregious stupidities that pepper Brown's work (my favourite: referring to Arabic as "Islamic", and claiming medieval Christian scholars used it as a language to hide secrets because they believed it already profane) they would not get the same readership because Brown is writing for the ignorant majority
It is a truism of writing that when a struggling but competent author sees a badly written best-seller and says, "I can write way better than that!" their work will never see the light of day, because publishers see "better than that" every day of the year. They don't buy it because they know it won't sell as well as garbage like Brown's. Trying to best Brown by improving literary and factual quality is like trying to best McDonald's by improving nutritional and aesthetic quality. That's not what people in that market are looking for.
So yeah, you're right: Brown is writing garbage because that's what people want to read, which is kind of sad (for them.)
[*] Aside: we know that there is up to a 25% chance that a baby will be fathered by someone other than the mother's pair-bonded mate. Even if the crazy speculation is true, therefore, after 100 generations there is conservatively a 1 - 0.9**100 = 99.9973% chance that any nominal progeny of Jesus would not actually be the progeny of Jesus, but the descendant of some lucky medieval interloper. And since Jesus' bother James, and later his nephew, lead the revolutionary Jewish organization Jesus founded, it is not clear why other family members would have to be hidden away, particularly as other people of nominally royal descent were always available to lead as well.
I think it would generally be bad for everybody if a significant part of the world (ie. the equator and surrounding area) became uninhabitable.
Huh? Even if you do nothing more than take the unphysical GCM's at face value, you would conclude that the equator is the least effected region of the globe. EVERYTHING we know about GW strongly suggests that the polar regions will be far more strongly affected than anywhere else. NOTHING suggests that the equatorial regions will be strongly affected (there may be local disruptions in fresh water supply due to melting glaciers, but since the general trend all the unphysical models show is toward generally higher precipitation that's not a general effect.)
GCM's produce a diverse set of results, and alarmists selling fear, like you, are cherry-picking the scariest results, and going beyond that are making up results for which there is no scientific basis at all. There are people who are actually so uncritical that they think more frequent and severe hurricanes are likely due to GW!
GW is plausibly real and plausibly due to human activity, but it adds nothing to the debate to engage in unscientific scare-mongering.
if these consequences are unacceptable.
Unacceptable to whom? That is the key question. The imperialist belief that there is exactly one single universal definition of "unacceptable" is a huge problem in this debate.
So why isn't there a significant, sustained effort to minimize air travel?
Because we like air travel and hate industry. Minimizing air travel would inconvenience too many of "the right kind of people."
The same kind of thinking can be seen in the summary: "It now appears that these clouds are simply the product of Shuttle launches." The key word here is "simply", implying that there's nothing to worry about, because shuttle launches are a Good Thing.
AGW may be real--the signal in ocean heat content is pretty damned interesting, if maybe not quite compelling--but the argument around it is almost entirely driven by social engineers who want to use the non-zero risk of a civilization-ending climate event to empower themselves and their friends.
Of course when we all have to go to Government run health care like Canada, we will have to wait in line for 3months for wound treatment and instead of nano-diamonds, we will have to make do with cubic zirconium dust covered in aspirin.
Don't confuse "American Government Run Care" with "Canadian Government Run Care."
Our system has its problems, but prompt treatment of acute issues isn't one of them. Like any system run by humans we sometimes drop the ball on critical issues, but it is by no means the systematic chaos and inefficiency that a similar system run by the American government would produce.
This is one of the many errors that ideology leads one into: you start to think that the difference between two classes of collective organization (governments vs corporations) somehow magically trumps the far larger difference between specific organizations (the staid, boring, democratic, efficient Canadian government, and the flamboyant, obnoxious, imperial, inefficient American government.)
I have some expertise in FEA computer simulations and the mathematical training to understand the algorithims
But you're not a computational physicist, or you would have noticed the lack of energy conservation in some models (it is added by hand as a correction on each time step) or unphysical boundary conditions in others (ocean surface in particular). If you were a computational physicist you'd know how big a deal these approximations are in long-term integrations of even very simple systems, much less complex ones like GCMs.
I was a lot more convinced by the AGW argument before I started looking at the models than I am now. I think the only real "smoking gun" in the current data sets is ocean heat content, which is a physically meaningful measure of warming ("average global temperature" is unthermodynamic gibberish) and which is pretty convincingly increasing. Polar ice coverage is a lot more problematic, comparatively.
On the other hand, have you looked at the data on variations in the Earth's albedo? It's worth googling around for: there was a very large drop (about 2.5%) in the late '90's, representing an additional forcing larger than all anthropogenic greenhouse gases released in the past 150 years. So far as I know, no one has run GCMs to see what the predicted effect of this would be, but it seems to me a nice juicy verification target that any decently self-critical scientist would be all over.
chances are that people with a predisposition to reject science on the basis of how well established that science is are nuts.
The problem is that the science on climate change is not nearly so well-established as its proponents (particularly in the popular press, but also in the climatologist community) claim. It is curious that this has resulted in nuts challenging the consensus before the scientific process has really produced robust conclusions.
The quality of climate science is not that great, in my view as a computational physicist who has looked at GCM's a bit (which are, remember, nothing but computational physics, so I am more qualified than a climatologist to look at them, because apparently it is the name of one's abstract academic category that makes one qualified to do things, not any actual concrete expertise.) GCMs are highly parameterized, quasi-linear approximations to an egregiously non-linear system. As such, they are very poor tools for prediction, although they may provide some broad insights.
The question is: are GCMs sufficiently accurate and precise and robust to serve as a basis of public policy. The Precautionary Principle suggests not, as there are huge, obvious and known dangers in widespread intervention in people's lives by self-righteous nitwits. On the other hand, there are far sounder arguments for curtailing our use of fossil fuels: we are running out of oil, and you'd have to be nuts to want to hand your children a world powered by coal.
With all due respect to an eminent and brilliant physicist, Freeman Dyson is not a climatologist.
God I get tired of this. I am a computational physicist. The people working on GCMs are climatologists. I guess their work is entirely worthless then, right? Because only a computational physicist is qualified to do computational physics. It's all in the NAME see, which carries with it a mysterious and eldrich power.
On the other hand, someone like Dyson has decades of experience in the strange dialectic between imperfect data and imperfect theory that is the basis of science at the individual level. Anyone who is so ignorant as to blithely dismiss him because some abstract label doesn't conform to their prejudices is contributing a whole lot of noise to this debate, but no signal whatsoever.
When you have something substantive to say about climate physics or GCMs (like their lack of energy conservation and artificial boundary conditions, particularly at the ocean surface) please feel free to contribute to the debate.