A nuclear power plant generates about 1000 times as much power as this thing
Actually, a nuclear power plant generates about FIVE THOUSAND times as much power as this thing--you forgot to include the standard duty factor for wind turbines, which is typically about 20%. Really good ones can get up to about 33%, so in fairness a nuclear power plant may generate only about 3000 times as much power as this thing, but no non-experimental reactor is going to generate as little as 1000 times.
Nuclear plants typically generate full power over 90% of the time. Wind turbines generate on average 20 to 30% of their peak production. The idiot press, unfortunately, has yet to cotton on to this, and continues to report peak production numbers for wind farms as if they were remotely interesting or relevant.
Since the expected capacity factor for any given wind farm is known well in advance of construction, there is no reason not to provide the public with the more accurate estimate of the farm's production, if anyone in the media is actually interested in informing the public.
But then, if anyone in the media were interested in informing the public they would focus on the economic issues with nuclear power, not the safety issues (Very small errors on the part of operators can write-off a nuclear plant even though the public is perfectly safe--some new designs may improve on this over PWRs, but none of them are running yet.)
You're given a barren field with pennies scattered in it.
Your example has nothing to do with this case. She diagnosed herself looking at a slide a pathologist had already looked at.
So your example should be, "You're given a barren field with pennies scattered in it. A highly paid, highly trained expert with a legal monopoly on searching for pennies takes some samples and declares them all penny-free. You later look yourself, and find a penny."
Now do you start to see why a pathologist may miss it?
No, I don't. Not on slides that the girl used to diagnose herself, which had already been screened by a pathologist.
Stop making excuses. This is an all-too-common case of medical failure. I'm betting the primary reason it took so long to diagnose is that no single individual took responsibility for her care, so she got shunted from department to department without anyone really realizing how long things had been going on for.
And no one anywhere here as suggested "slapping her with a Crohn's diagnosis and medicating her for it" without having a proof of that diagnosis.
And how these neutrinos are supposed have an ionizing effect, exactly?
Charged current interaction, which is one aspect of the weak nuclear force. If you think about it, electrons must feel the week force, otherwise beta decay wouldn't happen.
Most neutrino detectors use see solar neutrinos this way: Cherenkov light from electrons kicked out by the charged current interaction. (The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, in contrast, was also sensitive to the neutral current interaction, which is what made it possible to determine that neutrinos have mass.)
That's the first I've ever heard of neutrinos being deadly to anything at all. I'm understandably sceptical.
The neutrino emissions from a supernova would be lethal to humans out to a light year or so. Really. Cross-section is ~10e-40 cm^2, average energy is 1 MeV-ish. You work it out.
How do you know this is the fault of the scientists?
Because they titled the paper, "Existence of collisional trajectories of Mercury, Mars and Venus with the Earth" and not "Long-term integration of inner-planet orbits including general-relativistic effects".
This one is on the scientists, not the press.
The previously wide-spread belief that the solar system is chaotic is no longer universally held, and there are significant parts of the community who believe that the chaotic results were due entirely to numerical instabilities in the simulations, not the physics at all. See for example: http://www.math.auckland.ac.nz/Research/Reports/Series/527.pdf which deals primarily with outer solar system dynamics.
So this is just someone pushing an idea that may well be false in the most sensationalistic way possible. I have to admit, the hype does do a pretty good job of distracting people from the more interesting scientific question, which is: is the inner solar system chaotic, or is that result too a numerical artifact?
The vast majority of people will not do something unless there's a tangible reward attached.
Your post is an illustration of exactly my point--you have so diminished the value of education in your own eyes that you can't even imagine society as a whole treating it as a tangible reward. To me, there is nothing more tangible (to the individual who receives it) than education. It's like saying "increased strength from working out is not a tangible reward"--that's absurd. Even those of us who don't gain visible bulk do gain strength from working out, and that makes us feel better and lets us do more stuff. Can't get more tangible than that.
What we value is a choice, not a law of nature. Social structures that honour and reward education will get educated people. Social structures that can't imagine anything but cash as a tangible reward will get people who pursue cash at any price.
Note that I did not say anything about education getting you a good job, either: that's just an incorrect inference you've made. A choice of jobs, not all of them good, is what education gives you, but that is not the point of it. The point of education is to make you a better human being, broader of mind, more enlightened, more understanding, more loving--of yourself, the world and others.
When my kids were growing up, "knowing stuff" was the tangible reward they got from education. It wasn't hard for them to understand that, particularly since I was always engaged with them, in some cases learning along with them (and in the case of French, falling rapidly behind them...)
Kids who are raised that way will for the most part love learning. Not all of them, but most of them, although they'll all be keen on different things--a friend's kid is absolutely nuts about cooking, and is having a ball taking cooking courses, studying everything from kitchen technique to recipes. He's just a normal kid, who has been given a normal upbringing by someone who values learning.
Kids who are brought up to value only money will mostly turn out valuing only money. This is not a law of nature. It's just a reflection of kids valuing what they are taught to value.
Their 15km version would need ten years of the entire world's helium production to fill it.
I don't understand this article at all. The headline is about a tower to "the edge of space" but the article is about something completely unrelated.
I don't get it. It's almost as if the editors at the New Scientist posted a completely unrelated text under a headline for a totally different article.
As you say, their tower is 15 km high. Where is the article about a tower to the edge of space? It's not there.
Read His Master's Voice for dense philosophy presented as a science mystery. This is his masterpiece.
Second that. It is one of the very few science fiction stories that gets the process of how scientists actually think basically correct.
Amongst his more accessible books--after you get through the lengthy wandering through the spaceport stuff at the beginning--is "Return From the Stars", which is more optimistic than most. It's the story of a returning starfarer trying to adapt to a society that has changed radically in his absence.
Lem is not the just "arguably the greatest non-English SF writer" he is arguably the greatest SF writer of the 20th century, in any language.
They would tell me that it was expected of me to get good grades, and I didn't deserve a reward for doing what I was supposed to be doing anyways.
This still seems wrong to me. I didn't tell my kids they were expected to get good grades. I told them that KNOWLEDGE WAS VALUABLE, gave them lots of evidence that this is the case, and let them figure out the rest themselves. Although now they are in high school they know that grades have taken on a new significance because they are used as inputs to the university entrance process, they've internalized the value system that it isn't the grades that are important, it's the knowledge, the skills, the breadth of mind.
Paying for grades is a logical outcome for a society that values neither education nor knowledge, but is interested in presenting itself as a meritocratic plutocracy. Grades are valued because they will get you into "good" schools, which are not the ones that teach the most but which generate the social connections and job opportunities to put you on the road to financial success. The value of eduction never enters into the equation.
Societies get what they reward. Teaching kids that the only thing worth pursing is money results in a society where the only way to get kids to do anything is to pay them. That's a bad thing.
The output of that is split and amplified to make the 192 beams. Pretty amazing when you think about it.
What's even more amazing is that the program will never result in controlled fusion for peaceful power generation. How can I predict this with certainty? Because the American government is running it. There are some things the American government does really well: build weapons (although they've been falling down on that lately, too), send spacecraft to Mars (so long as they don't screw up the units) and "defend" places back into the stone age.
What they don't do is finish domestic projects. The Yucca Mountain closure was just one more example of the American government in action. Or should that be inaction?
For all the cool research the American government has done over the years, it is clear that the basic institutions are so completely dysfunctional that it doesn't matter which of your Tweedledum or Tweedledee parties is in power in any particular branch, your government will still be unable to actually complete any long-term project. At least not without massive help from Europeans and and a bit from Canadians, as in the case of the ISS.
What will likely happen is JPL will be forced to follow the law ith regards to termination
Wow, a federally funded organization being FORCED TO FOLLOW THE LAW! Sure sounds like socialism to me! (I'm being sarcastic, for the folks to brain-dead to know it.)
I was once offered employment at JPL--it was my dream job, working in the Advanced Propulsion Group to design and build the next generation of unlaunchable engines (unlaunchable because NASA is on such a shoe-string budget for that they don't dare deviate from conventional tech for a wide range of things, particularly propulsion tech.)
There were strings attached: I'm not an American and would have had to become one, which I wasn't willing to do for a whole bunch of reasons. It was hands-down the single best choice I have ever made in my life. I had doubts and second thoughts for about five years after, but in the past decade or so have really come to realize what I nightmare I avoided. Stories like this about JPL's management and culture really help reinforce that belief.
Besides, it's stupid to think that Armstrong and Aldrin wouldn't have messed up the first footprint since it was, you know, right at the bottom of the ladder and in a high traffic area.
To say nothing of being right underneath a rocket that was launched less than 24 hours later! Doesn't anyone remember the images that came back from a camera left on the moon during one of the later missions, with dust blowing everywhere as the ascent stage engine of the LM fired? The whole area around the site will almost certainly be scoured clean.
I can see some scientific value in the sites: having pristine stuff exposed to lunar conditions for fifty years will probably provide a wealth of data on materials behaviour in space. But anyone who talks about Armstrong's first bootprint as if it's still there is preaching unicorns.
"Coalition military intelligence officials estimated that 70% to 90% of prisoners detained in Iraq since the war began last year 'had been arrested by mistake
The calculation in my.sig is based on the assumption that error rates amongst the detainees are no greater than those made by American police officers who shoot the wrong person when discharging a weapon after arriving at the scene of an altercation. That left-wing America-hating organization, the NRA, has done research to document that the cops shoot the wrong person about 10% of the time, as opposed to Real Americans, who shoot the wrong person about 2% of the time.
Of course, given the "fog of war" and the incentives to use non-judicial detainment as a way of getting back at your enemies, the probable fraction of innocents in Guantanamo is much higher. And to the anonymous coward who claims below that we can't infer anything about the fraction of innocents in Guantanamo Bay based on the astonishingly high fraction of innocent detainees in Afghanistan: what are the judicial procedures employed by American forces to ensure guilt prior to incarceration in Guantanamo?
Many centuries of blood-soaked history have taught us that a public and speedy trial by a judge who is applying more-or-less clearly defined laws is the only thing that is remotely likely to protect the innocent accused from zealous cowards who would otherwise see them punished without trial. No one who is in touch with reality at all can think that there are not many innocents in Guantanamo Bay, and anyone who loves America and the principles for which it once stood should be clamouring to have everyone either tried in public in the normal American system of courts, or released.
Advocating anything else is evidence of a profound hatred for everything that once made America a great and admirable republic.
Nobody can change anything no matter how hard they try
If you studied history rather than philosophy or whatever it is you mean by "this stuff" you'd realize there are only two constants: change and hope.
Everyone changes stuff all the time. That's why homosexuals can get married now (here, anyway--they may not yet in your benighted part of the world) and black people don't have to ride at the back of the bus. It's why I can say the Prime Minister is an idiot and not have to worry about reprisals. It's why we can have this conversation over the wire when twenty years ago we'd never be aware of each other's existence.
And for the logically disabled, "Some things have not changed" does not imply "nothing ever changes", so don't be bothering me with counter-examples.
The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists.
This was published at more-or-less the mid-point of the most active part of my scientific career, counting from the end of my M.Sc. to the end of my last post-doc. In that relatively short span of years I encountered at least two cases of outright scientific fraud: pure fabrication of data, either from experiments that were never done, or from data that had peaks put into it by hand during the analysis stage. Based on that experience I would have to say that scientific fraud is far more prevalent than generally acknowledged, and certainly more than a few percent.
There were several internal factors that contributed to these frauds. In the case of the fabricated peaks one graduate student was responsible for all the analysis that saw peaks. His bosses didn't look too closely at the details of the analysis because the results were exciting, and they sparked a hunt for a novel particle state that lasted ten years and wasted a lot of time, including mine. After another experiment that was almost completely independent found nothing at ten times the sensitivity of the original the community quietly admitted that the original results were most probably fraudulent, but no one was ever really held responsible for it. It is very hard to prove anything definitely, although I personally believe fraud was committed, as do some others who were more deeply involved in the question than I was.
In the case of the purely fabricated data, poor supervision of a post-doc who was careful to generate results that his supervisor wanted made it possible. As someone who did a subsequent experiment in the same area it was very hard to get past reviewer's questions as to why my results were not as good as the other guy's. Again, proof that was sufficient to stand up to public scrutiny was difficult to come by (how do you prove something has not been done? Possible, but not easy.)
These things tend to happen at the very best places--top tier American and European labs, where the degree of external scrutiny is low due to huge egos and carefully protected reputations. The only cure for this is better-run research groups that practise more self-criticism, which is very unlikely to happen due to the ego-driven nature of science at the individual level, just as free markets are welcome mats to fraud because of individual's propensity to make ego-driven judgements about what they are able to get away with (Vioxx anyone?).
The communal scientific process will always catch these frauds in the end, just as the legal system generally catches up to market frauds, but we don't do enough to address the dysfunctional conditions that encourage them.
I've spent a stupid amount of time reading patents, and this is one of the worst I've ever seen. The third item in the list isn't even coherent, as it suddenly starts talking about storing some map in a "metacode storage means" which is hitherto undefined.
I defy anyone to show me a class diagram and pseudo-code that unambiguously instantiates this claim.
A compliant JVM is certainly not precluded from doing so (though it still must handle cyclic references, so it needs something apart from pure refcounting)
Actually, a compliant garbage collector in Java doesn't have to do anything except support the GC interface. Unless the spec has been updated (it's been six years since I cared, thank heaven) the GC can be implemented such that it never actually collects garbage (I suspected one particular JVM was like this, back in the day...)
To put it another way, the spec leaves the question of when to collect garbage up to policy, and a perfectly valid policy would be "when the program exits." There is an interface to allow clients to suggest that actually collecting garbage might be a good idea right now, but GCs are free to ignore those suggestions, and there is no interface to say, "Collect my garbage now goddamnitIreallymeanit!"
Most developers have a pretty good idea when such a thing would be useful (like, say, when they've just had an allocation failure because the lazy garbage collector can't be bothered to run) but unfortunately the writers of the Java spec figure that the implementors of GCs know better than the application developers when the GC should run, because of course the implementors of the GC have so much more information about what the application's needs are than the application developers...
I have no doubt things are better now, but as Java was a lot of people's first introduction to a GC'd language in the '90's it put a lot of us off GC for a long time.
but don't think for a moment that the judgments you make matter to anyone else, or even have any validity other than creating a false sense of superiority. and your feeling of superiority is truly false, and you are truly no better than the masses, and are in fact are somewhat inferior to them, for your haughty sense of superiority based on nothing more than your insecurities and need to feed your ego
populists always beat elitists
And you should see what people who use standard capitalization and punctuation can do!:-P
even better, positive karma and meaningful contributions will allow you to disable ad on/.
Yeah, I noticed that checkbox thingy on my user page a while back, and thought... oh yeah, some people see ads here!
I bet almost everyone who gets that "extra" is already using FF and AdBlock and/or NoScript, so the marketing droids have created an incentive which is just about perfectly calibrated to give nothing at all to the people it is supposed to reward.
There's probably some kind of lesson there about making money on the Web, or the failure of suits to understand the medium, but I'm damned if I know what it is.
Keep in mind if people can't pay via their advertising, they'll likely start charging again.
Which will drive people to free sites.
Once upon a time it was possible to make a living by being the only literate person in town, reading and writing letters for people and the like. Universal literacy killed that business model.
The Web was never designed nor intended as a tool for commercial enterprises--it was intended to allow academics to share information, and however far it evolves under commercial pressure, there is not much that can be done about that fundamental aspect of its architecture. To try to use the Web, which was designed for free and open information sharing, as a tool for restricted information sales is probably going to fail.
The past decade has seen a number of successful businesses based on Web revenue models. There is no promise from anyone that those models will continue to be viable. That's what markets are like, and while it may be a pity that certain things are not available to users because there is no viable way to pay for it, we're still all better off for having the Web than not.
Addiction is a persistent physiological or psychological state that deprives a person of the ability to make certain choices.
A game can be compelling without being addicting. The boundary line, like every boundary line everywhere, is blurry (dunno why it is necessary to point that out, but too many people pipe up with, "Yeah, but where is the absolutely precise boundary line?" if you don't--not sure what universe they are living in, which has these absolutely precise boundary lines everywhere. I've never seen one.)
Some people are more susceptible to some kinds of addiction than others, just like every other disease. Every time game addiction comes up on/. some idiot (not you, but there is a post like this up the way) declares that the very concept of game addiction is a crock because HE didn't get addicted. This is like saying that no one gets broken bones because once you were in a car accident and didn't break anything.
Addiction is a product of the interaction between a person and an external influence. It is neither "in the person" nor "in the influence". Some things are sufficiently addictive (nicotine, for example) that there are grounds for keeping them far away from children, and possibly even young adults. But those are statistical judgements, necessarily approximate and imperfect.
The biggest danger to Earth is fear-mongering assholes.
Dunno why everyone makes jokes about the LHC killing people, when everyone who is capable of doing a rudimentary calculation of probability based on empirically measured distributions knows that spreading hysteria kills far more people than hypothetical imaginary magic killer particle beam effects.
So do both parties enjoy plutocratic embraces? Sure. But it's largely different groups of plutocrats, and quite often their bread is buttered on different sides.
The analogy I like to use is that of the offensive and defensive lines of an American football team. People who get all partisan about the Democrats vs the Republicans are like people who've missed the point of the game entirely, and instead of recognizing the game for what it is, insist that the offensive line of one team is "their team" and spend all their energy cheering for it while running down the defence of the same team, blissfully unaware that there is a whole 'nother contest going on.
It looks ludicrous to anyone who understands what the game is actually about, to see people insisting, "but they're different people!" as if they weren't essentially the same kind of people, all on the same team, all headed in the same direction (toward more powerful government.)
I understand that if you look closely enough at them you'll see differences, but if you don't think the differences between Them and Us are far larger than the difference between Them and Them, you've been blinded by the dazzle and the hype.
Slashdot Mirror
A nuclear power plant generates about 1000 times as much power as this thing
Actually, a nuclear power plant generates about FIVE THOUSAND times as much power as this thing--you forgot to include the standard duty factor for wind turbines, which is typically about 20%. Really good ones can get up to about 33%, so in fairness a nuclear power plant may generate only about 3000 times as much power as this thing, but no non-experimental reactor is going to generate as little as 1000 times.
Nuclear plants typically generate full power over 90% of the time. Wind turbines generate on average 20 to 30% of their peak production. The idiot press, unfortunately, has yet to cotton on to this, and continues to report peak production numbers for wind farms as if they were remotely interesting or relevant.
Since the expected capacity factor for any given wind farm is known well in advance of construction, there is no reason not to provide the public with the more accurate estimate of the farm's production, if anyone in the media is actually interested in informing the public.
But then, if anyone in the media were interested in informing the public they would focus on the economic issues with nuclear power, not the safety issues (Very small errors on the part of operators can write-off a nuclear plant even though the public is perfectly safe--some new designs may improve on this over PWRs, but none of them are running yet.)
You're given a barren field with pennies scattered in it.
Your example has nothing to do with this case. She diagnosed herself looking at a slide a pathologist had already looked at.
So your example should be, "You're given a barren field with pennies scattered in it. A highly paid, highly trained expert with a legal monopoly on searching for pennies takes some samples and declares them all penny-free. You later look yourself, and find a penny."
Better pick your monopolist wisely.
Now do you start to see why a pathologist may miss it?
No, I don't. Not on slides that the girl used to diagnose herself, which had already been screened by a pathologist.
Stop making excuses. This is an all-too-common case of medical failure. I'm betting the primary reason it took so long to diagnose is that no single individual took responsibility for her care, so she got shunted from department to department without anyone really realizing how long things had been going on for.
And no one anywhere here as suggested "slapping her with a Crohn's diagnosis and medicating her for it" without having a proof of that diagnosis.
And how these neutrinos are supposed have an ionizing effect, exactly?
Charged current interaction, which is one aspect of the weak nuclear force. If you think about it, electrons must feel the week force, otherwise beta decay wouldn't happen.
Most neutrino detectors use see solar neutrinos this way: Cherenkov light from electrons kicked out by the charged current interaction. (The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, in contrast, was also sensitive to the neutral current interaction, which is what made it possible to determine that neutrinos have mass.)
That's the first I've ever heard of neutrinos being deadly to anything at all. I'm understandably sceptical.
The neutrino emissions from a supernova would be lethal to humans out to a light year or so. Really. Cross-section is ~10e-40 cm^2, average energy is 1 MeV-ish. You work it out.
How do you know this is the fault of the scientists?
Because they titled the paper, "Existence of collisional trajectories of Mercury, Mars and Venus with the Earth" and not "Long-term integration of inner-planet orbits including general-relativistic effects".
This one is on the scientists, not the press.
The previously wide-spread belief that the solar system is chaotic is no longer universally held, and there are significant parts of the community who believe that the chaotic results were due entirely to numerical instabilities in the simulations, not the physics at all. See for example: http://www.math.auckland.ac.nz/Research/Reports/Series/527.pdf which deals primarily with outer solar system dynamics.
So this is just someone pushing an idea that may well be false in the most sensationalistic way possible. I have to admit, the hype does do a pretty good job of distracting people from the more interesting scientific question, which is: is the inner solar system chaotic, or is that result too a numerical artifact?
The vast majority of people will not do something unless there's a tangible reward attached.
Your post is an illustration of exactly my point--you have so diminished the value of education in your own eyes that you can't even imagine society as a whole treating it as a tangible reward. To me, there is nothing more tangible (to the individual who receives it) than education. It's like saying "increased strength from working out is not a tangible reward"--that's absurd. Even those of us who don't gain visible bulk do gain strength from working out, and that makes us feel better and lets us do more stuff. Can't get more tangible than that.
What we value is a choice, not a law of nature. Social structures that honour and reward education will get educated people. Social structures that can't imagine anything but cash as a tangible reward will get people who pursue cash at any price.
Note that I did not say anything about education getting you a good job, either: that's just an incorrect inference you've made. A choice of jobs, not all of them good, is what education gives you, but that is not the point of it. The point of education is to make you a better human being, broader of mind, more enlightened, more understanding, more loving--of yourself, the world and others.
When my kids were growing up, "knowing stuff" was the tangible reward they got from education. It wasn't hard for them to understand that, particularly since I was always engaged with them, in some cases learning along with them (and in the case of French, falling rapidly behind them...)
Kids who are raised that way will for the most part love learning. Not all of them, but most of them, although they'll all be keen on different things--a friend's kid is absolutely nuts about cooking, and is having a ball taking cooking courses, studying everything from kitchen technique to recipes. He's just a normal kid, who has been given a normal upbringing by someone who values learning.
Kids who are brought up to value only money will mostly turn out valuing only money. This is not a law of nature. It's just a reflection of kids valuing what they are taught to value.
Their 15km version would need ten years of the entire world's helium production to fill it.
I don't understand this article at all. The headline is about a tower to "the edge of space" but the article is about something completely unrelated.
I don't get it. It's almost as if the editors at the New Scientist posted a completely unrelated text under a headline for a totally different article.
As you say, their tower is 15 km high. Where is the article about a tower to the edge of space? It's not there.
Read His Master's Voice for dense philosophy presented as a science mystery. This is his masterpiece.
Second that. It is one of the very few science fiction stories that gets the process of how scientists actually think basically correct.
Amongst his more accessible books--after you get through the lengthy wandering through the spaceport stuff at the beginning--is "Return From the Stars", which is more optimistic than most. It's the story of a returning starfarer trying to adapt to a society that has changed radically in his absence.
Lem is not the just "arguably the greatest non-English SF writer" he is arguably the greatest SF writer of the 20th century, in any language.
They would tell me that it was expected of me to get good grades, and I didn't deserve a reward for doing what I was supposed to be doing anyways.
This still seems wrong to me. I didn't tell my kids they were expected to get good grades. I told them that KNOWLEDGE WAS VALUABLE, gave them lots of evidence that this is the case, and let them figure out the rest themselves. Although now they are in high school they know that grades have taken on a new significance because they are used as inputs to the university entrance process, they've internalized the value system that it isn't the grades that are important, it's the knowledge, the skills, the breadth of mind.
Paying for grades is a logical outcome for a society that values neither education nor knowledge, but is interested in presenting itself as a meritocratic plutocracy. Grades are valued because they will get you into "good" schools, which are not the ones that teach the most but which generate the social connections and job opportunities to put you on the road to financial success. The value of eduction never enters into the equation.
Societies get what they reward. Teaching kids that the only thing worth pursing is money results in a society where the only way to get kids to do anything is to pay them. That's a bad thing.
The output of that is split and amplified to make the 192 beams. Pretty amazing when you think about it.
What's even more amazing is that the program will never result in controlled fusion for peaceful power generation. How can I predict this with certainty? Because the American government is running it. There are some things the American government does really well: build weapons (although they've been falling down on that lately, too), send spacecraft to Mars (so long as they don't screw up the units) and "defend" places back into the stone age.
What they don't do is finish domestic projects. The Yucca Mountain closure was just one more example of the American government in action. Or should that be inaction?
For all the cool research the American government has done over the years, it is clear that the basic institutions are so completely dysfunctional that it doesn't matter which of your Tweedledum or Tweedledee parties is in power in any particular branch, your government will still be unable to actually complete any long-term project. At least not without massive help from Europeans and and a bit from Canadians, as in the case of the ISS.
What will likely happen is JPL will be forced to follow the law ith regards to termination
Wow, a federally funded organization being FORCED TO FOLLOW THE LAW! Sure sounds like socialism to me! (I'm being sarcastic, for the folks to brain-dead to know it.)
I was once offered employment at JPL--it was my dream job, working in the Advanced Propulsion Group to design and build the next generation of unlaunchable engines (unlaunchable because NASA is on such a shoe-string budget for that they don't dare deviate from conventional tech for a wide range of things, particularly propulsion tech.)
There were strings attached: I'm not an American and would have had to become one, which I wasn't willing to do for a whole bunch of reasons. It was hands-down the single best choice I have ever made in my life. I had doubts and second thoughts for about five years after, but in the past decade or so have really come to realize what I nightmare I avoided. Stories like this about JPL's management and culture really help reinforce that belief.
Besides, it's stupid to think that Armstrong and Aldrin wouldn't have messed up the first footprint since it was, you know, right at the bottom of the ladder and in a high traffic area.
To say nothing of being right underneath a rocket that was launched less than 24 hours later! Doesn't anyone remember the images that came back from a camera left on the moon during one of the later missions, with dust blowing everywhere as the ascent stage engine of the LM fired? The whole area around the site will almost certainly be scoured clean.
I can see some scientific value in the sites: having pristine stuff exposed to lunar conditions for fifty years will probably provide a wealth of data on materials behaviour in space. But anyone who talks about Armstrong's first bootprint as if it's still there is preaching unicorns.
"Coalition military intelligence officials estimated that 70% to 90% of prisoners detained in Iraq since the war began last year 'had been arrested by mistake
The calculation in my .sig is based on the assumption that error rates amongst the detainees are no greater than those made by American police officers who shoot the wrong person when discharging a weapon after arriving at the scene of an altercation. That left-wing America-hating organization, the NRA, has done research to document that the cops shoot the wrong person about 10% of the time, as opposed to Real Americans, who shoot the wrong person about 2% of the time.
Of course, given the "fog of war" and the incentives to use non-judicial detainment as a way of getting back at your enemies, the probable fraction of innocents in Guantanamo is much higher. And to the anonymous coward who claims below that we can't infer anything about the fraction of innocents in Guantanamo Bay based on the astonishingly high fraction of innocent detainees in Afghanistan: what are the judicial procedures employed by American forces to ensure guilt prior to incarceration in Guantanamo?
Many centuries of blood-soaked history have taught us that a public and speedy trial by a judge who is applying more-or-less clearly defined laws is the only thing that is remotely likely to protect the innocent accused from zealous cowards who would otherwise see them punished without trial. No one who is in touch with reality at all can think that there are not many innocents in Guantanamo Bay, and anyone who loves America and the principles for which it once stood should be clamouring to have everyone either tried in public in the normal American system of courts, or released.
Advocating anything else is evidence of a profound hatred for everything that once made America a great and admirable republic.
Nobody can change anything no matter how hard they try
If you studied history rather than philosophy or whatever it is you mean by "this stuff" you'd realize there are only two constants: change and hope.
Everyone changes stuff all the time. That's why homosexuals can get married now (here, anyway--they may not yet in your benighted part of the world) and black people don't have to ride at the back of the bus. It's why I can say the Prime Minister is an idiot and not have to worry about reprisals. It's why we can have this conversation over the wire when twenty years ago we'd never be aware of each other's existence.
And for the logically disabled, "Some things have not changed" does not imply "nothing ever changes", so don't be bothering me with counter-examples.
The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists.
This was published at more-or-less the mid-point of the most active part of my scientific career, counting from the end of my M.Sc. to the end of my last post-doc. In that relatively short span of years I encountered at least two cases of outright scientific fraud: pure fabrication of data, either from experiments that were never done, or from data that had peaks put into it by hand during the analysis stage. Based on that experience I would have to say that scientific fraud is far more prevalent than generally acknowledged, and certainly more than a few percent.
There were several internal factors that contributed to these frauds. In the case of the fabricated peaks one graduate student was responsible for all the analysis that saw peaks. His bosses didn't look too closely at the details of the analysis because the results were exciting, and they sparked a hunt for a novel particle state that lasted ten years and wasted a lot of time, including mine. After another experiment that was almost completely independent found nothing at ten times the sensitivity of the original the community quietly admitted that the original results were most probably fraudulent, but no one was ever really held responsible for it. It is very hard to prove anything definitely, although I personally believe fraud was committed, as do some others who were more deeply involved in the question than I was.
In the case of the purely fabricated data, poor supervision of a post-doc who was careful to generate results that his supervisor wanted made it possible. As someone who did a subsequent experiment in the same area it was very hard to get past reviewer's questions as to why my results were not as good as the other guy's. Again, proof that was sufficient to stand up to public scrutiny was difficult to come by (how do you prove something has not been done? Possible, but not easy.)
These things tend to happen at the very best places--top tier American and European labs, where the degree of external scrutiny is low due to huge egos and carefully protected reputations. The only cure for this is better-run research groups that practise more self-criticism, which is very unlikely to happen due to the ego-driven nature of science at the individual level, just as free markets are welcome mats to fraud because of individual's propensity to make ego-driven judgements about what they are able to get away with (Vioxx anyone?).
The communal scientific process will always catch these frauds in the end, just as the legal system generally catches up to market frauds, but we don't do enough to address the dysfunctional conditions that encourage them.
In this case, Claim 1 is quite understandable:
Why isn't this modded funny?
I've spent a stupid amount of time reading patents, and this is one of the worst I've ever seen. The third item in the list isn't even coherent, as it suddenly starts talking about storing some map in a "metacode storage means" which is hitherto undefined.
I defy anyone to show me a class diagram and pseudo-code that unambiguously instantiates this claim.
A compliant JVM is certainly not precluded from doing so (though it still must handle cyclic references, so it needs something apart from pure refcounting)
Actually, a compliant garbage collector in Java doesn't have to do anything except support the GC interface. Unless the spec has been updated (it's been six years since I cared, thank heaven) the GC can be implemented such that it never actually collects garbage (I suspected one particular JVM was like this, back in the day...)
To put it another way, the spec leaves the question of when to collect garbage up to policy, and a perfectly valid policy would be "when the program exits." There is an interface to allow clients to suggest that actually collecting garbage might be a good idea right now, but GCs are free to ignore those suggestions, and there is no interface to say, "Collect my garbage now goddamnitIreallymeanit!"
Most developers have a pretty good idea when such a thing would be useful (like, say, when they've just had an allocation failure because the lazy garbage collector can't be bothered to run) but unfortunately the writers of the Java spec figure that the implementors of GCs know better than the application developers when the GC should run, because of course the implementors of the GC have so much more information about what the application's needs are than the application developers...
I have no doubt things are better now, but as Java was a lot of people's first introduction to a GC'd language in the '90's it put a lot of us off GC for a long time.
but don't think for a moment that the judgments you make matter to anyone else, or even have any validity other than creating a false sense of superiority. and your feeling of superiority is truly false, and you are truly no better than the masses, and are in fact are somewhat inferior to them, for your haughty sense of superiority based on nothing more than your insecurities and need to feed your ego
populists always beat elitists
And you should see what people who use standard capitalization and punctuation can do! :-P
even better, positive karma and meaningful contributions will allow you to disable ad on /.
Yeah, I noticed that checkbox thingy on my user page a while back, and thought... oh yeah, some people see ads here!
I bet almost everyone who gets that "extra" is already using FF and AdBlock and/or NoScript, so the marketing droids have created an incentive which is just about perfectly calibrated to give nothing at all to the people it is supposed to reward.
There's probably some kind of lesson there about making money on the Web, or the failure of suits to understand the medium, but I'm damned if I know what it is.
Keep in mind if people can't pay via their advertising, they'll likely start charging again.
Which will drive people to free sites.
Once upon a time it was possible to make a living by being the only literate person in town, reading and writing letters for people and the like. Universal literacy killed that business model.
The Web was never designed nor intended as a tool for commercial enterprises--it was intended to allow academics to share information, and however far it evolves under commercial pressure, there is not much that can be done about that fundamental aspect of its architecture. To try to use the Web, which was designed for free and open information sharing, as a tool for restricted information sales is probably going to fail.
The past decade has seen a number of successful businesses based on Web revenue models. There is no promise from anyone that those models will continue to be viable. That's what markets are like, and while it may be a pity that certain things are not available to users because there is no viable way to pay for it, we're still all better off for having the Web than not.
I just had a Slashdot page load wait 9 seconds for "bs.serving-sys.com".
NoScript (FireFox extension: http://noscript.net/)
I don't run AdBlock, just NoScript, and the only reason I know that /. has ads now is that people not running NoScript talk about it.
My mom gets addicted to simple games very easily
That word you keep using...
Addiction is a persistent physiological or psychological state that deprives a person of the ability to make certain choices.
A game can be compelling without being addicting. The boundary line, like every boundary line everywhere, is blurry (dunno why it is necessary to point that out, but too many people pipe up with, "Yeah, but where is the absolutely precise boundary line?" if you don't--not sure what universe they are living in, which has these absolutely precise boundary lines everywhere. I've never seen one.)
Some people are more susceptible to some kinds of addiction than others, just like every other disease. Every time game addiction comes up on /. some idiot (not you, but there is a post like this up the way) declares that the very concept of game addiction is a crock because HE didn't get addicted. This is like saying that no one gets broken bones because once you were in a car accident and didn't break anything.
Addiction is a product of the interaction between a person and an external influence. It is neither "in the person" nor "in the influence". Some things are sufficiently addictive (nicotine, for example) that there are grounds for keeping them far away from children, and possibly even young adults. But those are statistical judgements, necessarily approximate and imperfect.
Or till Earth is destroyed.
The biggest danger to Earth is fear-mongering assholes.
Dunno why everyone makes jokes about the LHC killing people, when everyone who is capable of doing a rudimentary calculation of probability based on empirically measured distributions knows that spreading hysteria kills far more people than hypothetical imaginary magic killer particle beam effects.
So do both parties enjoy plutocratic embraces? Sure. But it's largely different groups of plutocrats, and quite often their bread is buttered on different sides.
The analogy I like to use is that of the offensive and defensive lines of an American football team. People who get all partisan about the Democrats vs the Republicans are like people who've missed the point of the game entirely, and instead of recognizing the game for what it is, insist that the offensive line of one team is "their team" and spend all their energy cheering for it while running down the defence of the same team, blissfully unaware that there is a whole 'nother contest going on.
It looks ludicrous to anyone who understands what the game is actually about, to see people insisting, "but they're different people!" as if they weren't essentially the same kind of people, all on the same team, all headed in the same direction (toward more powerful government.)
I understand that if you look closely enough at them you'll see differences, but if you don't think the differences between Them and Us are far larger than the difference between Them and Them, you've been blinded by the dazzle and the hype.