Same reason you don't have back lighting on a book: it is an absorbtive, not emissive, technology. The coloured elements seem to be opaque, so backlighting wouldn't work.
There seems to be no reason why they couldn't scale the technology down to PC size. But I think they have targeted the big-ticket applications for their first market - not a stupid idea. If they can replace "million dollar" displays with "80,000 dollar" ones, there are some *big* shot term profits to make the money to fund the mass production line to manufacture cellphone displays at the millions/month level you need to get the costs down.
Sorry, somebody got lower. Apparently there are a couple of galaxies way out there hooting at a frequency of one cycle every 10 million years and a wavelength of 30,000 light years. Now that is Bass.
Its not the earth which flipped, it is the magnetic field. Every now and again, the eaths magnetic field drops to zero and re-emerges the other way up. Irrecularly, but about every 125000 years and taking about 5000 years to do it.
Continental drift might be more of a problem - in a hundred million years or so we might have to move it out of the way as Australia motors past. However, I think this one is far enoug off that we can leave it to the next generation
So you dislike steps up into an aircraft and would prefer to pole vault in from the ground? The elevator is just a way to get to the start point. It is no more part of spaceflight than the crawler from the VAB to the launch pad, or a runway is to an aircraft. Get out of the gravity well, then go space faring.
Constant linear velocity. Decreasing radius. Therefore increasing angu;lar velocity.
The equator is travelling at about 1000 mph (24000 miles circumferencce, one day to get back to the start point. Something on the end of a peice of stringis travelling faster, just to stay above the same point on the earth. As it falls, it doean't lose that speed, so it will get ahead of the original fastening point.
From the article: The prototypes will include four Trips processors, each containing 16 execution units laid out in a 4 x 4 grid. By the end of the decade, when 32-nanometer process technology is available, the goal is to have tens of processing units on a single die, delivering more than 1 trillion operations per second.
You've got a whole bunch of non-traditional processors and you try and divide the work between them.
The individual CPUs are, as you say, more flexible than current CPUs. Like hyperthreading and deep pipelining, that will bring a one-off performance improvement of perhaps, two, three or four times. Not to be sneered at - but most systems can get a four times improvement by the brute force method of throwing, say, ten processors at it. In the small number of processors range, overheads can be low enough that a multi-cpu system only loses a large fraction of its processing power on overheads. Given the economies of scale, it seems to me that it is cheaper to use off-the-shelf components, rather than do a lot of expensive development of a new chip - which you will probably have to manufacture using a process a cople of years older (and therefore slower) than the laytest, greates ptocess intel are using for the newest top-of-the-line CPU.
Parallelism won't do much unless we get tens of parallel units working at the same time.
Re:What about Transputers?
on
Grid Processing
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Obviously there's a lot of work to be done in parallel processing. You can hardly blame Inmos's problems on geography (or America for Inmos's problems). They looked very promising for awhile, but just didn't keep up.
Seconded, loudly. Inmos was a classic case of great engineering trashed by lousy management. When the transputer came out, it was fantastic, leading edge stuff. But inmos turned everybody off bay saying that you had to use it their way and no other.
The thing that shows how good the transputer was that it was still selling ten years after it first came out, when it had been overtaken and lapped several times by conventional CPUs. But that cannot go on for ever - by the time they died, you could simulate a tranputer in a conventional CPU that cost less but ran faster.
Deja Vu all over again
on
Grid Processing
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This is very much not new. The basic idea has come and gone several times in the last twenty years, to my knowledge. Both SIMD and MIMD systems have been tried several timed. NCR even had one called the Grid, IIRC. Thinking machines (as seen on Jurassic Park I). The Inmos tranputer was designed for exactly this sort of connectivity. Intel had a development machine (?iWarp?) which tried to use it. And I am sure there were others that I don't recall. (As a user and fan of the transputer, I used to follow the field from a distance).
But the problem has always been the programming. Ordinary software does not map very well onto these architectures. Certain specific problems can be mapped well onto them, which results in spectacular performance claims for the system. But generally such systems perform well only on those problems for which they were specifically designed.
Communications is a common reason for failure. They scale very badly. In the early days of development, the first few processors have any-to-any connectivity, so the application will really fly. But since the connectivity rises as the square of the nuymber of processors, this cannot hold for very long. As soon as connectivity becomes limited, communications bottlenecks start to appear, and you get processors being held up either sending messages or waiting for them to arrive. Buffering (which many did not implement in their communications architectures) helps, but itm doesn't solve the problem. (A bit like lubrication - a small amount brings a considerable improvement in performance, but past a certain point, it only adds to costs).
Another problem is load balancing. It is very difficult to design your system so you don't end up with most of the CPUs waiting for one, overloaded, CPU to finish its job. The only architectures which really worked were the farm model - a central dispatcher sends tasks to a "farm" of identical "workers", which therefore request work units as and when they need them. This means that the whole code for the system has to be loaded into each worker; not necessarily a killer at todays memory prices, but it would be nice to be more efficient. It also requires the task to be divisible into a vey large number of chunks, which can executed independently without too much communications. OK for large volume simulations etc., but a disaster for (say) database programming, image/voice recognition.
It also doesn't help that not may people really think multi-threaded in their program design. Again, no-one that I know has a good Object Oriented multi-threading model. Current models are analagous to either pre-structured programming or early structured programming. Which means that people, reasonably, approach multi-threading as a dangerous monster to be approached only whan absolutely necessary, with great care, and if possible in flame-proof armour. For this sort of system to be much use we need a development which does to current threading what inheritance did to pre-OO languages: something that makes is so simple that, one over the hump of initial unfamiliarity, people use it all the time without even thinking about it.
I designed one of the larger heterogenous transputer based system to ship - up to 100 transputers in 6 different roles. Load and communications balancing was a real hassle from the the day the system first started to work for real, and we were constantly tuning buffers, fiddling with routing algoirithms, movong bits or processing from this CPU to that to get the perfomance up. (Not to mention that inmos completely blew their second generation transputer, which we had been hoping would solve many of our problems).
If you think this is bad, you don't know the aviation industry. Thr aircraft speed was probably given in knots, fuel loaded in either pounds or kilograms (and they do get confused)but consumed in litres/hr. And altitudes in different ranges differ: something like under 10,000 ft, thery are measured in above local ground level, over 10,000 feet measured from sea level (This may not be right, but it is something equally confusing).
I don't think you are quite right about the plans for children. There is, AFAIK, no plan for ID cards, just an ID number. The idea is that police, social services, health services know they are talking about the same child. So when a child comes into hospital with bruises "falling out of bed", the hospital know if the parents have been tagged by social security as possible child abusers, or if it is a perfectly normal accident.
Don't get me wrong - this is a major breach of privacy with room for abuse both accidental (once given a black mark anywhare, it will spread everywhere) and deliberate (people trawling for mud to fling). But it does have its positive side - it *will* protect children. On balance, I am marginally against it because I think it is a knee-jerk reaction to one particularly awful case. Laws based on a single case are almost invariable bad laws. But if you piled up a dossier of, say, 200 cases over 5 years where such a system *would* have saved a child from severe abuse, then I would probably change my mind.
From the articler Home Office minister Caroline Flint said: "These proposals are about vital investigatory tools being used now to prevent and detect crime and, in some cases, save lives."
This is the kind of bland statement often used to justify invasions of privacy. We need evidence of the truth of this statement - evidence backed with numbers and convictions, not one-off anecdotes and hypothetical scenarios.
The strikes me as paying a high price in privacy. Not an impossible price, but whatever we are paying for had better be worth it - and the Powers That Be have not made that case yet.
On the other hand, what IS the difference between using a GPS device to track someone and just following him around?
What is the difference between tapping someones phone and just listening to their conversation? Inevitably, there is a huge grey area between the clearly acceptable and the clearly unacceptable.
There is no Right answer to this. The judgment given by this court accords with my prejudices. Trailing someone with GPS is intrusive and an infringement of privacy. OTOH it is a valuable way of detecting crime. The intermediate position of requiring a warrant from a court (which should be impartial; if it isn't, that is a different problem) seems to me a good balance.
I think "just following him around" for long periods is also intrusive. However, it would be very difficult to frame a ruling saying exactly how long it was justifiable for a policeman to follow a suspec. However, sheer economics works for us here: it is too expensive for police to put a 24 hour track on someone unless they have a really good reason. So, while purist theory might ask for a law, real world econmics mean thatit isn't necessary. But the GPS device (a) changes the economics completely, and (b) provides a nice simple, enforcable test.
So, IMO, this is the system working right in developing the application of the law to reflect new technology
I think it is what you were thinking of,, actually. The upper one is used to screen alternate columns of pixels from one eye or the other. When the upper is off, you have (say) 640 pixels on the line. Turn the upper one on, and the left eye can se the 320 even numbered pixels and the right eye can see the 320 odd numbered pixels - if the spacing is just right.
Suspect it will work only at the right distance and have rotten viewing angles. OK for PDAs, not for home TV or big monitors where people want to move around or look over shoulder. And it loses half the light. Back to the days of early "hold it just so" laptops?
Lots of people still think that there is nothing you can do on 2d Desktops that you cannot do on the command line. The 2D desktop is still settling in, 20 years or so after it ws first invented. I think a 3D desktop could well have a lot to offer.
What you will need is an improvement on the mouse. One of the reasons that my real-world desktop is easier to use than my GUI desktop is that I can move my head to see how thinkgs are stacked. For example, I have a couple of MySQL manuals stacked; the upper is larger, so on a 2D desktop I couldn't see the lower. But a tiny move of my head shows me the spint of the lower. We will need to replicate that functionality before a 3D desktop really works.
Actually, that functionality could be replicated on a 2D desktop - redraw a pseudo-3D desktop as move my viewpoint (Doom engin inside Windows?). So it is the mouse that needs improvement, not the screen.
Did you know that 90% of the cells in your body are actually bacterial, mostly but not entirely in your gut. They are far smaller than your own cells, so that 90% of your mass is "you" and only 10% bacteria. But if those bacteria are removed, you would die - they are essential for digestion.
Of course all products should be tested for safety. But, unless these bactera are some of the (very few) toxic ones, they are probably a lot safer than (e.g.) the lead in a lead-acid battery. Batteries tend to contain some pretty toxic chemicals ("Dispose Safely").
Sorry, what accusation? I didn't accuse the US of anything more than incomprehension.
It doesn't matter how you got in to this mess, you won't get out of it without understanding what the Arab in the street wants. He certainly doesn't want Saddam back - but he equally certainly doesn't want a govenment imposed by the occupying power - no matter how benevolent that occupying power.
Re:Nice technology - wrong forum to highlight it o
on
Bacteria Powered Batteries
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Women are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia. Al Jazeera comes freom Qatar, where women are allowed to drive - as they are in Iraq and most of the rest of the Arab world.
You prove my point - you are treating the Arab world as if it was a monolithic whole, then apply the worst of the worst to the whole. Of cvourse Al Quaida and Saddams thugs are murderous thugs. Bu they are no more typical of the whole Arab world than the Klu Klux Klan are typical of the USA.
Re:Nice technology - wrong forum to highlight it o
on
Bacteria Powered Batteries
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I know this will be modded OffTopic, but I think it important to reply to this (and I have karma to burn).
It is important to see the other man's point of view. One of the problems in Iraq at the moment is incomprehsnsion between the US forces and the locals. I agree that Al Jazeera does reflect an anti-US viewpoint. However, it does not create such a viewpoint - it reflects that of the world in which it lives. AJ is not killing US soldiers - is just speaks the same language as people who are. If you disregard all Arabs as "anti US terrorists", you will never achieve enough understanding if the Arab world to retire from Iraq gracefully.
Apart from the fact that the AJ piece is an amost exact dupe of the SpaceDaily article, it is an entirely impartial report about a piece of US innovation. It makes the US look good. What is bad about quoting an Arab source saying good things about the US? You need that - Arabs don't read the New York Times, they read Al Jazeera.
This was also covered in Flight International (subscribers - I read the paper version in the library), in a bit more depth. The classic sonic boom was described as "N-shaped" and gives a crack-crack effect. This modified it to more of a "table-top", and was said to sound like a long rumble.
If the probe had been a human instead of a lump of hardware, Hollywood would be fighting for the fim rights. Unwanted as a child, shuffled from unwilling carer to unwilling carer, finally sent onto its career by a distinctly second rate route. Suffered a dreadful injury as a result of it early-life neglect. But despite all this, triumphed against the odds and earned unimaginable scientific wealth. Now on its deathbead, surrounded by grieving friends and relatives.
Which raise the question: where is its successor? Hollywood will need the sequel: "Galileo II: The return to Jupiter".
But seriously, this one probe, seriously broken, seems to have done more good science than ISS is ever likely to do. And yet the successor has been canned for lack of funds. While not absoultely anti ISS, it does seem that value-for-money has got a bi distorted. Even on the emotional level, the human achievement of fixing and reprogramming the crippled spacecraft is something to be proud of.
I think this idea is post shuttle, not separate human/cargo shuttle flights. You design a small, safe dedicated people carrier. 4 seats, about the size of a small business jet. Payload - 4 human beings, kept very safe. Allow each human half a ton, including space suit, enough oxygen and water for a couple of days in orbit in case things go wrong. No food - you wont starve in two days - and minimal toilet facilities. Payload two tons. Keep one on standby for rescue duty; can launch unmanned, so can bring back 4 astronauts in a hurry. Don't compromise the design for military reasons, as the shuttle was; the cold war is over and anyway it will only carry people, so secret gismos.
Send the cargo up on disposables - Atlas, Delta, Ariane. We know how to build them, and their 99% reliability is acceptable for cargo whereas it would be totally unacceptable for freight.
The people carrier may be re-usable; it will be relatively light and will carry a lot of expsnsive safety equipment. But let the engineers decide, not the politicians. If disposable is cheaper, for the desired level of safety, go disposable. Probably not all disposable - it might have something like the Saturn's launch escape tower.
Once you have a component, rather than monlithic, system, you can start on other interesting developments like a dedicated Earth Orbit to Lunar Orbit ferry - and so on. You make rational decisions instead of being blinkered by a huge white elephant. The ISS, while (currently) needing the shuttle, also makes it obsolete: it provides a rendezvous point for people and cargo.
Long ago, I worked on a military project. One of the people in the same office was an army officer. He had a picture of himself in the full uniform of his rank - in the KGB. He had the uniform made up, and a pass - right colour, right photo, but otherwise entirely in Russian. He walked right into a highly securre area and went, in full KGB uniform, to tell the Head of Security what he thought of the security precautions.
As everybody knows, the UK drives on the left. Well, on the roads it does; on the rivers it drives on the right. So if this thing is going down a flooded road (a good reason to buy it), which side should it drive on? Every time the wheels float off or touch ground, it should change sides. And if, on boar mode, it meets (say) an agricultural tractor going the other way, you have a free fender bender right there.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen that in Las Vegas: a hugh plasma screen (perhaps 8 ft diagonal) displaying the BSOD on the outside of the MGM Grand.
Same reason you don't have back lighting on a book: it is an absorbtive, not emissive, technology. The coloured elements seem to be opaque, so backlighting wouldn't work.
There seems to be no reason why they couldn't scale the technology down to PC size. But I think they have targeted the big-ticket applications for their first market - not a stupid idea. If they can replace "million dollar" displays with "80,000 dollar" ones, there are some *big* shot term profits to make the money to fund the mass production line to manufacture cellphone displays at the millions/month level you need to get the costs down.
And the lowest note ever twanged.
Sorry, somebody got lower. Apparently there are a couple of galaxies way out there hooting at a frequency of one cycle every 10 million years and a wavelength of 30,000 light years. Now that is Bass.
Its not the earth which flipped, it is the magnetic field. Every now and again, the eaths magnetic field drops to zero and re-emerges the other way up. Irrecularly, but about every 125000 years and taking about 5000 years to do it.
Continental drift might be more of a problem - in a hundred million years or so we might have to move it out of the way as Australia motors past. However, I think this one is far enoug off that we can leave it to the next generation
So you dislike steps up into an aircraft and would prefer to pole vault in from the ground? The elevator is just a way to get to the start point. It is no more part of spaceflight than the crawler from the VAB to the launch pad, or a runway is to an aircraft. Get out of the gravity well, then go space faring.
Why should it increase its angular velocity.
Constant linear velocity. Decreasing radius. Therefore increasing angu;lar velocity.
The equator is travelling at about 1000 mph (24000 miles circumferencce, one day to get back to the start point. Something on the end of a peice of stringis travelling faster, just to stay above the same point on the earth. As it falls, it doean't lose that speed, so it will get ahead of the original fastening point.
From the article: The prototypes will include four Trips processors, each containing 16 execution units laid out in a 4 x 4 grid. By the end of the decade, when 32-nanometer process technology is available, the goal is to have tens of processing units on a single die, delivering more than 1 trillion operations per second.
You've got a whole bunch of non-traditional processors and you try and divide the work between them.
The individual CPUs are, as you say, more flexible than current CPUs. Like hyperthreading and deep pipelining, that will bring a one-off performance improvement of perhaps, two, three or four times. Not to be sneered at - but most systems can get a four times improvement by the brute force method of throwing, say, ten processors at it. In the small number of processors range, overheads can be low enough that a multi-cpu system only loses a large fraction of its processing power on overheads. Given the economies of scale, it seems to me that it is cheaper to use off-the-shelf components, rather than do a lot of expensive development of a new chip - which you will probably have to manufacture using a process a cople of years older (and therefore slower) than the laytest, greates ptocess intel are using for the newest top-of-the-line CPU.
Parallelism won't do much unless we get tens of parallel units working at the same time.
Obviously there's a lot of work to be done in parallel processing. You can hardly blame Inmos's problems on geography (or America for Inmos's problems). They looked very promising for awhile, but just didn't keep up.
Seconded, loudly. Inmos was a classic case of great engineering trashed by lousy management. When the transputer came out, it was fantastic, leading edge stuff. But inmos turned everybody off bay saying that you had to use it their way and no other.
The thing that shows how good the transputer was that it was still selling ten years after it first came out, when it had been overtaken and lapped several times by conventional CPUs. But that cannot go on for ever - by the time they died, you could simulate a tranputer in a conventional CPU that cost less but ran faster.
This is very much not new. The basic idea has come and gone several times in the last twenty years, to my knowledge. Both SIMD and MIMD systems have been tried several timed. NCR even had one called the Grid, IIRC. Thinking machines (as seen on Jurassic Park I). The Inmos tranputer was designed for exactly this sort of connectivity. Intel had a development machine (?iWarp?) which tried to use it. And I am sure there were others that I don't recall. (As a user and fan of the transputer, I used to follow the field from a distance).
But the problem has always been the programming. Ordinary software does not map very well onto these architectures. Certain specific problems can be mapped well onto them, which results in spectacular performance claims for the system. But generally such systems perform well only on those problems for which they were specifically designed.
Communications is a common reason for failure. They scale very badly. In the early days of development, the first few processors have any-to-any connectivity, so the application will really fly. But since the connectivity rises as the square of the nuymber of processors, this cannot hold for very long. As soon as connectivity becomes limited, communications bottlenecks start to appear, and you get processors being held up either sending messages or waiting for them to arrive. Buffering (which many did not implement in their communications architectures) helps, but itm doesn't solve the problem. (A bit like lubrication - a small amount brings a considerable improvement in performance, but past a certain point, it only adds to costs).
Another problem is load balancing. It is very difficult to design your system so you don't end up with most of the CPUs waiting for one, overloaded, CPU to finish its job. The only architectures which really worked were the farm model - a central dispatcher sends tasks to a "farm" of identical "workers", which therefore request work units as and when they need them. This means that the whole code for the system has to be loaded into each worker; not necessarily a killer at todays memory prices, but it would be nice to be more efficient. It also requires the task to be divisible into a vey large number of chunks, which can executed independently without too much communications. OK for large volume simulations etc., but a disaster for (say) database programming, image/voice recognition.
It also doesn't help that not may people really think multi-threaded in their program design. Again, no-one that I know has a good Object Oriented multi-threading model. Current models are analagous to either pre-structured programming or early structured programming. Which means that people, reasonably, approach multi-threading as a dangerous monster to be approached only whan absolutely necessary, with great care, and if possible in flame-proof armour. For this sort of system to be much use we need a development which does to current threading what inheritance did to pre-OO languages: something that makes is so simple that, one over the hump of initial unfamiliarity, people use it all the time without even thinking about it.
I designed one of the larger heterogenous transputer based system to ship - up to 100 transputers in 6 different roles. Load and communications balancing was a real hassle from the the day the system first started to work for real, and we were constantly tuning buffers, fiddling with routing algoirithms, movong bits or processing from this CPU to that to get the perfomance up. (Not to mention that inmos completely blew their second generation transputer, which we had been hoping would solve many of our problems).
If you think this is bad, you don't know the aviation industry. Thr aircraft speed was probably given in knots, fuel loaded in either pounds or kilograms (and they do get confused)but consumed in litres/hr. And altitudes in different ranges differ: something like under 10,000 ft, thery are measured in above local ground level, over 10,000 feet measured from sea level (This may not be right, but it is something equally confusing).
I don't think you are quite right about the plans for children. There is, AFAIK, no plan for ID cards, just an ID number. The idea is that police, social services, health services know they are talking about the same child. So when a child comes into hospital with bruises "falling out of bed", the hospital know if the parents have been tagged by social security as possible child abusers, or if it is a perfectly normal accident.
Don't get me wrong - this is a major breach of privacy with room for abuse both accidental (once given a black mark anywhare, it will spread everywhere) and deliberate (people trawling for mud to fling). But it does have its positive side - it *will* protect children. On balance, I am marginally against it because I think it is a knee-jerk reaction to one particularly awful case. Laws based on a single case are almost invariable bad laws. But if you piled up a dossier of, say, 200 cases over 5 years where such a system *would* have saved a child from severe abuse, then I would probably change my mind.
From the articler Home Office minister Caroline Flint said: "These proposals are about vital investigatory tools being used now to prevent and detect crime and, in some cases, save lives."
This is the kind of bland statement often used to justify invasions of privacy. We need evidence of the truth of this statement - evidence backed with numbers and convictions, not one-off anecdotes and hypothetical scenarios.
The strikes me as paying a high price in privacy. Not an impossible price, but whatever we are paying for had better be worth it - and the Powers That Be have not made that case yet.
On the other hand, what IS the difference between using a GPS device to track someone and just following him around?
What is the difference between tapping someones phone and just listening to their conversation? Inevitably, there is a huge grey area between the clearly acceptable and the clearly unacceptable.
There is no Right answer to this. The judgment given by this court accords with my prejudices. Trailing someone with GPS is intrusive and an infringement of privacy. OTOH it is a valuable way of detecting crime. The intermediate position of requiring a warrant from a court (which should be impartial; if it isn't, that is a different problem) seems to me a good balance.
I think "just following him around" for long periods is also intrusive. However, it would be very difficult to frame a ruling saying exactly how long it was justifiable for a policeman to follow a suspec. However, sheer economics works for us here: it is too expensive for police to put a 24 hour track on someone unless they have a really good reason. So, while purist theory might ask for a law, real world econmics mean thatit isn't necessary. But the GPS device (a) changes the economics completely, and (b) provides a nice simple, enforcable test.
So, IMO, this is the system working right in developing the application of the law to reflect new technology
I think it is what you were thinking of,, actually. The upper one is used to screen alternate columns of pixels from one eye or the other. When the upper is off, you have (say) 640 pixels on the line. Turn the upper one on, and the left eye can se the 320 even numbered pixels and the right eye can see the 320 odd numbered pixels - if the spacing is just right.
Suspect it will work only at the right distance and have rotten viewing angles. OK for PDAs, not for home TV or big monitors where people want to move around or look over shoulder. And it loses half the light. Back to the days of early "hold it just so" laptops?
Lots of people still think that there is nothing you can do on 2d Desktops that you cannot do on the command line. The 2D desktop is still settling in, 20 years or so after it ws first invented. I think a 3D desktop could well have a lot to offer.
What you will need is an improvement on the mouse. One of the reasons that my real-world desktop is easier to use than my GUI desktop is that I can move my head to see how thinkgs are stacked. For example, I have a couple of MySQL manuals stacked; the upper is larger, so on a 2D desktop I couldn't see the lower. But a tiny move of my head shows me the spint of the lower. We will need to replicate that functionality before a 3D desktop really works.
Actually, that functionality could be replicated on a 2D desktop - redraw a pseudo-3D desktop as move my viewpoint (Doom engin inside Windows?). So it is the mouse that needs improvement, not the screen.
Free speech: the right to express one's opinions publicly.
Indeed. My mailbox is not a public place. It is my private property. Spamming is like shouting your political opinions through my letterbox.
Free speech on your website - of course. Free speech on my private hard disk - certainly not.
Did you know that 90% of the cells in your body are actually bacterial, mostly but not entirely in your gut. They are far smaller than your own cells, so that 90% of your mass is "you" and only 10% bacteria. But if those bacteria are removed, you would die - they are essential for digestion.
Of course all products should be tested for safety. But, unless these bactera are some of the (very few) toxic ones, they are probably a lot safer than (e.g.) the lead in a lead-acid battery. Batteries tend to contain some pretty toxic chemicals ("Dispose Safely").
Sorry, what accusation? I didn't accuse the US of anything more than incomprehension.
It doesn't matter how you got in to this mess, you won't get out of it without understanding what the Arab in the street wants. He certainly doesn't want Saddam back - but he equally certainly doesn't want a govenment imposed by the occupying power - no matter how benevolent that occupying power.
Women are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia.
Al Jazeera comes freom Qatar, where women are allowed to drive - as they are in Iraq and most of the rest of the Arab world.
You prove my point - you are treating the Arab world as if it was a monolithic whole, then apply the worst of the worst to the whole. Of cvourse Al Quaida and Saddams thugs are murderous thugs. Bu they are no more typical of the whole Arab world than the Klu Klux Klan are typical of the USA.
I know this will be modded OffTopic, but I think it important to reply to this (and I have karma to burn).
It is important to see the other man's point of view. One of the problems in Iraq at the moment is incomprehsnsion between the US forces and the locals. I agree that Al Jazeera does reflect an anti-US viewpoint. However, it does not create such a viewpoint - it reflects that of the world in which it lives. AJ is not killing US soldiers - is just speaks the same language as people who are. If you disregard all Arabs as "anti US terrorists", you will never achieve enough understanding if the Arab world to retire from Iraq gracefully.
Apart from the fact that the AJ piece is an amost exact dupe of the SpaceDaily article, it is an entirely impartial report about a piece of US innovation. It makes the US look good. What is bad about quoting an Arab source saying good things about the US? You need that - Arabs don't read the New York Times, they read Al Jazeera.
This was also covered in Flight International (subscribers - I read the paper version in the library), in a bit more depth. The classic sonic boom was described as "N-shaped" and gives a crack-crack effect. This modified it to more of a "table-top", and was said to sound like a long rumble.
If the probe had been a human instead of a lump of hardware, Hollywood would be fighting for the fim rights. Unwanted as a child, shuffled from unwilling carer to unwilling carer, finally sent onto its career by a distinctly second rate route. Suffered a dreadful injury as a result of it early-life neglect. But despite all this, triumphed against the odds and earned unimaginable scientific wealth. Now on its deathbead, surrounded by grieving friends and relatives.
Which raise the question: where is its successor? Hollywood will need the sequel: "Galileo II: The return to Jupiter".
But seriously, this one probe, seriously broken, seems to have done more good science than ISS is ever likely to do. And yet the successor has been canned for lack of funds. While not absoultely anti ISS, it does seem that value-for-money has got a bi distorted. Even on the emotional level, the human achievement of fixing and reprogramming the crippled spacecraft is something to be proud of.
I think this idea is post shuttle, not separate human/cargo shuttle flights. You design a small, safe dedicated people carrier. 4 seats, about the size of a small business jet. Payload - 4 human beings, kept very safe. Allow each human half a ton, including space suit, enough oxygen and water for a couple of days in orbit in case things go wrong. No food - you wont starve in two days - and minimal toilet facilities. Payload two tons. Keep one on standby for rescue duty; can launch unmanned, so can bring back 4 astronauts in a hurry. Don't compromise the design for military reasons, as the shuttle was; the cold war is over and anyway it will only carry people, so secret gismos.
Send the cargo up on disposables - Atlas, Delta, Ariane. We know how to build them, and their 99% reliability is acceptable for cargo whereas it would be totally unacceptable for freight.
The people carrier may be re-usable; it will be relatively light and will carry a lot of expsnsive safety equipment. But let the engineers decide, not the politicians. If disposable is cheaper, for the desired level of safety, go disposable. Probably not all disposable - it might have something like the Saturn's launch escape tower.
Once you have a component, rather than monlithic, system, you can start on other interesting developments like a dedicated Earth Orbit to Lunar Orbit ferry - and so on. You make rational decisions instead of being blinkered by a huge white elephant. The ISS, while (currently) needing the shuttle, also makes it obsolete: it provides a rendezvous point for people and cargo.
Long ago, I worked on a military project. One of the people in the same office was an army officer. He had a picture of himself in the full uniform of his rank - in the KGB. He had the uniform made up, and a pass - right colour, right photo, but otherwise entirely in Russian. He walked right into a highly securre area and went, in full KGB uniform, to tell the Head of Security what he thought of the security precautions.
As everybody knows, the UK drives on the left. Well, on the roads it does; on the rivers it drives on the right. So if this thing is going down a flooded road (a good reason to buy it), which side should it drive on? Every time the wheels float off or touch ground, it should change sides. And if, on boar mode, it meets (say) an agricultural tractor going the other way, you have a free fender bender right there.