In fact, the definition of a field is something that assigns a value to every point in space. The EM field associated with a charged particle (which could be moving) assigns E and B vectors to every point in space, for example. You are probably thinking in terms of relativity, which involves the concepts of matter causing space-time to be curved. The trouble is that relativity needs to be reconciled with quantum mechanics - it doesn't give you any insight as to WHY there is gravity. The way to do that is by figuring out what causes gravitational fields, and the way to do that is to find the particle - Higgs - that mediates the field (in the same way that photons mediate the EM field). Space itself, though, isn't a field.
the scientific conclusion of Sardonix is that auditing is both demanding of high skill and tedious, and so karma/reputation/good will is not enough to motivate people to do it. You must pay them to do it, precisely as Microsoft does.
This does nothing at all to refute the "many eyes make all bugs shallow argument. It just says that in some cases, it's hard for FOSS projects to get many eyes. Linux kernel development, at least, is not one of those cases.
Plenty of people are getting paid to work on Linux. No doubt that includes auditors.
So if paying software developers means you get fewer bugs... how come Windows was so much buggier than Linux for so many years?
I'm sort of agnostic about the whole software choice thing - I use Linux, Mac, and Windows for various things. But the linked article is such self-serving bullshit it's hard to take it seriously.
Clearly, no matter what sort of machine the Olympic Committee obtained, if they just bought them new and kept them, they would have wasted a huge amount of money. One of two things is going on here: either a) they bought these machines and intend to resell them, or more likely b) they've leased them for some limited term. In either case, SOMEBODY is going to be using them long enough to where the investment to buy them will pay off. It's not like they're going to be scrapped after the Olympics. And either way, the net cost to the Olympic Committee != the purchase price.
And I'm with the other commenters on the underlying cause: I'll bet the real problem is with the refrigeration of the ice itself, not the Olympia/Zamboni machines. There's no way they're ALL failing.
That really does blow. It works fine from a Mac, but the Windows client is buggy as hell (or at least it was, haven't tried it in a while)... absolutely every time I tried to do anything with it, the router would lock up! And of course, no Linux client. Truly crappy way to administer the damn thing.
A couple of things: 1) your description of how you want the browser to behave while you're doing other things with the phone... that's exactly how Mobile Safari works. Read the web a while, then make/receive a call, read your e-mail, whatever, then go back to the browser - it's right where you left it. 2) Playing music while doing other things - works. The iPod application (and other Apple-provided apps) have multi-tasking enabled, so music keeps playing while you're doing other stuff. Similarly, e-mail and SMS messages keep coming in, incoming calls ring the phone... no matter what else you're doing with the device.
I used to be pretty up-in-arms about the multi-tasking thing too - but what I found was that in practice, I don't miss it much.
... for 20 years. They were called "Navy doctors". They had all the latest technology, were extremely skilled, and... free. Of course, taxpayer dollars were paying them, but 1) total costs per person in the military are a hell of a lot less than the mess we have going on in the world of private health insurance, and 2) for the cost of something like the Iraq war, we could have provided health coverage for the entire country for like 15 years. So it's not like we can't afford it.
People who bitch about "socialized medicine" should try it some time.
Aegis BMD is already pretty well-proven system (see the "Stellar" series of tests). Not to mention the fact the we've actually used it to shoot down the satellite - which was, you know, shooting a bullet with a bullet. Whether the system is cost-effective is another question, and one far more open to debate. And to be sure, more development is going to be required. But saying "it will never work" at this point just makes you look silly - it already HAS worked. Several times.
Surely, al Qaeda and similar organizations would dearly love to drop the big one on some US city (or sail/drive it in... whatever). So why haven't they? There are a couple of reasons. 1) all the concern about loose fissile material has had an effect - uranium/plutonium are actually pretty hard to get ahold of. The US has worked with the Russians for some time now to get their material cleaned up, and the various other countries with known or suspected nuclear capabilities have proved to be not so eager to provide nuclear bomb ingredients to a bunch of folks who are, well, crazy. 2) Even given the requisite materials, nuclear bombs are not so easy to build. Sure, there are plans out there on the internet, but plans only get you so far. You have to have either sufficient experience with executing the plans to be able to do so effectively, or you have to gain the experience via an RDT&E program. That's kind of hard to pull off when your organization amounts to a couple hundred guys living in caves in Afghanistan. The chance of AQ being able to put together a bomb that actually works, without any kind of testing program, are pretty damn small.
This is not to say that we shouldn't make preparations to defend against this sort of thing - we should. But it's important to establish reasonable expectations for what you can and should be able to do, and what the enemy's capabilities are, so you don't go overboard defending against something that's almost certainly not going to happen.
The only real question is whether or not protecting our cities from madmen in Tehran or Pyongyang is a worthwhile investment. I tend to think that it is.
Well, here's the thing. You can't just wave your hands and say "of course it's a worthwhile investment". Whether it's worthwhile depends on 1) how much it costs (including opportunity costs - in other words, what other good things could be done with the money), 2) how effective the defense system is, 3) how likely the threat is, and 4) the consequences if the threat actually manifests itself. If the consequence is "a major US city is wiped off the face of the earth"... well, that's pretty bad. But if the chances of that happening are 10^-9 over the next hundred years, the cost to defend against it would consume the entire US GDP for a hundred years, and said defense is only 10% effective anyway (to choose an extreme example), then clearly, this would not be a worthwhile investment.
Of course, in the real world the chances of an attack are probably somewhat higher (although realistically, pretty damn small), and GBM is probably more effective and certainly less costly than the extreme case discussed above. But does that mean it's worthwhile? Not necessarily. Although it's essentially a political question, we ought to at least approach it with facts to the extent we can. Discussing the consequences in isolation doesn't really help anyone make an informed decision about what to do.
And I'd hazard a guess that it would improve both the economy and health care (through technological advances) if we spent the $900 billion Obama is allocating for HCR on Orion vessels (we could build a fleet of ships the size of Star War's Star Destroyers!).
First of all, the "$900B Obama is allocating for HCR" is not, for the most part, taxpayer dollars. Yes, that's the total cost of the program... but much of it actually comes in the form of premiums, excise taxes on insurance products (which would be hard to divert to space exploration), etc. But more importantly:
Space Factories. Space Farms. Fleets of Solar Power Satellites. High Energy Risk Free Research Stations. Cities on the Moon. Cities on Mars. Massive Scale Asteroid Belt Mining. Construction and operation of additional vessels outside the Earth's magnetosphere.
And to what end? There's simply no reason to build factories, farms, or solar power stations in space, when we can do all of that on earth WITHOUT having to build giant, $130 billion, nuclear-bomb powered rockets. I'm not really sure what you mean by "high energy risk free research stations", but I'm here to tell you... there ain't nothing in life that's risk free. Cities on the moon and Mars? Why? What would people do there? Also, there's nothing in the asteroid belt that we can't get much, much more cheaply on earth, and again, without having to build the aforementioned $130B rockets (not to mention the expense of building freaking FACTORIES in space). If you don't agree, specify what you might mine that would justify the expense. Bear in mind that the asteroids are made of iron, nickel, and silicates. So is earth.
Freeman Dyson, group leader on the project, estimated back in the '60s that with conventional nuclear weapons, each launch would cause on average between 0.1 and 1 fatal cancers from the fallout.
A number he pulled out of his ass. Freeman Dyson is not a health professional.
Danger to human life was not a reason given for shelving the project - those included lack of mission requirement (no-one in the US Government could think of any reason to put thousands of tons of payload into orbit), the decision to focus on rockets (for the Moon mission) and, ultimately, the signature of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963.
Yeah, and we still don't have the mission requirement. Sure, sending multi-million ton ships into space would be cool. But we can't spend $130B just to do cool things. Finally, bear in mind that Project Orion really never got off the drawing board - there were numerous unsolved engineering problems (ablation of the pusher plate caused by turbulence in the plasma impinging on it, spalling of the pusher plate, etc, etc). Insoluble problems? Probably not (with the exception of that nuclear fallout thing). But you need a reason to do something like this, and frankly, we don't have one. Not at what it would cost.
... would take longer than I have, but for starters:
And why is defense spending missing from the picture? Could it be that maybe defense spending is the one sacred cow that the Federal government is actually responsible for, according to the Constitution? Naah. That would be silly.
Dude, seriously. Just because the Constitution gives the government the responsibility to do national defense doesn't mean that we have to spend more than the combined defense budgets of the entire rest of the world on it. We're spending way, way more than we need to on national security.
Oh, and the "make my day" sign? Great idea. Thanks for your thoughtful contribution to these weighty matters.
Right, because with all that time wasted running the gearshift and clutch, they could be writing the Great American Novel... while they're driving their automatic. Seriously, dude, I understand that some people would rather not bother with shifting, but it's not like they're "wasting time" that they could spend doing something else. They're DRIVING at the time.
Dude, it's not that hard. 1) start car, turn on defroster. 2) Scrape windshield. 3) by the time you're done, the inside of the windshield is already defogged, even if the defrost hasn't gotten up to temperature yet. It doesn't need to be warm to get the fog off the inside of the windshield, it just needs a few seconds of relatively dry air blowing over it... which you get from the first few seconds of defroster. It only needs to get warm at all to get the frost off the outside of the window, which, you know, you already scraped off.
I can't even believe we're having this discussion. The idea that not preheating your windshield inevitably means that it's impossible to see is mind-boggling.
I've owned and/or driven in a LOT of cars, and the problem of "the inside fogs over" clears up in about 30 seconds of running the defroster. So: hop in the car, start, turn on defroster. Put on seat belt. Turn on radio. Inside of the windshield is already defogged. Give me a freakin' break.
We are most certainly not talking about punitive damages here. Punitive damages happen as a result of a lawsuit, when a judge awards money from the defendant to the plaintiff because of some kind of bad behavior on the defendant's part. That's not at all what this is. This is purely asking the judge to award funds from the defendant to cover the actual costs of the legal work that had to go on to press the claim, as provided for in the DMCA. As far as I can tell, a lawsuit never even happened. And I really have a hard time believing that reasonable attorney's fees could amount to $400k for something like this - it involved a little research and then writing a letter. A friend of mine has been trying to get divorced for over four years, with regular attorney consultations, court appearances, etc, etc... and his total bill is about a tenth of this. Certainly we're talking about a much less high-power attorney here, but still - $400k is ridiculous, no matter how much you dislike the RIAA.
... is that reasonable? It's fine to make a claim for reasonable attorney's fees, but this really smacks of running up the score. Lawyers are supposed to not inflate their bills, no matter who is paying.
Of course, it's not done quite as crassly as all that - you actually just make campaign contributions to the important congressmen. But (as I've written elsewhere) the fact that none of the aerospace companies have bothered to do so speaks volumes - it's just not worth their while to do so. There's no conceivable way to actually make money in space.
If a company thought they could make trips to the moon worth the cost of developing and building the infrastructure to do it, you can bet they would pass a plodding and inefficient NASA in a New York minute.
That's a giant "if". Going to the moon is hideously expensive... and how do you recoup the money? The fact that companies haven't brushed NASA aside (which would be easy for companies with the lobbying might of LMCO and/or Raytheon) speaks volumes - private industry isn't going to the moon (or elsewhere in space) because there's no money to be made there.
... for pointing out the real issue here. If there was any money to be made from private industry doing "stuff" in space, no oversight panel in the universe would stop them. The Lockheeds and Boeings of the world would just buy themselves some Congressmen and make it happen. But in fact, there's no realistic way to make any money going into space. And given that, you might as well have NASA maintain their current role. The history of companies managing their own procurements has not been so great - read up on the Coast Guard Deepwater program for an example.
The Wikipedia entry for the slime mold species in question indicates that the organism actually does have some sort of primitive intelligence - it could, for example, solve mazes, and learn the pattern of a regularly reoccurring period of cold conditions (reacting appropriately). I see the stuff growing in my garden now and then... the fact that a patch of slime exhibits intelligent behavior is, I don't know, kind of weird.
The idea that rapid changes in the Y chromosome is somehow the equivalent to "males evolve faster than females" is 1) unjustified by the article, and 2) just plain dumb on its face. But given the choice between an accurate headline and a headline that will draw more page views... the choice is obvious, right?
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, the definition of a field is something that assigns a value to every point in space. The EM field associated with a charged particle (which could be moving) assigns E and B vectors to every point in space, for example. You are probably thinking in terms of relativity, which involves the concepts of matter causing space-time to be curved. The trouble is that relativity needs to be reconciled with quantum mechanics - it doesn't give you any insight as to WHY there is gravity. The way to do that is by figuring out what causes gravitational fields, and the way to do that is to find the particle - Higgs - that mediates the field (in the same way that photons mediate the EM field). Space itself, though, isn't a field.
I'm sort of agnostic about the whole software choice thing - I use Linux, Mac, and Windows for various things. But the linked article is such self-serving bullshit it's hard to take it seriously.
... they get a huge proportion of their power from hydroelectric. So it probably really is pretty green.
Clearly, no matter what sort of machine the Olympic Committee obtained, if they just bought them new and kept them, they would have wasted a huge amount of money. One of two things is going on here: either a) they bought these machines and intend to resell them, or more likely b) they've leased them for some limited term. In either case, SOMEBODY is going to be using them long enough to where the investment to buy them will pay off. It's not like they're going to be scrapped after the Olympics. And either way, the net cost to the Olympic Committee != the purchase price.
And I'm with the other commenters on the underlying cause: I'll bet the real problem is with the refrigeration of the ice itself, not the Olympia/Zamboni machines. There's no way they're ALL failing.
That really does blow. It works fine from a Mac, but the Windows client is buggy as hell (or at least it was, haven't tried it in a while)... absolutely every time I tried to do anything with it, the router would lock up! And of course, no Linux client. Truly crappy way to administer the damn thing.
A couple of things: 1) your description of how you want the browser to behave while you're doing other things with the phone... that's exactly how Mobile Safari works. Read the web a while, then make/receive a call, read your e-mail, whatever, then go back to the browser - it's right where you left it. 2) Playing music while doing other things - works. The iPod application (and other Apple-provided apps) have multi-tasking enabled, so music keeps playing while you're doing other stuff. Similarly, e-mail and SMS messages keep coming in, incoming calls ring the phone... no matter what else you're doing with the device.
I used to be pretty up-in-arms about the multi-tasking thing too - but what I found was that in practice, I don't miss it much.
... for 20 years. They were called "Navy doctors". They had all the latest technology, were extremely skilled, and... free. Of course, taxpayer dollars were paying them, but 1) total costs per person in the military are a hell of a lot less than the mess we have going on in the world of private health insurance, and 2) for the cost of something like the Iraq war, we could have provided health coverage for the entire country for like 15 years. So it's not like we can't afford it.
People who bitch about "socialized medicine" should try it some time.
Because the US military is just riddled with commie-loving leftists who want the US to be a giant, defenseless target.
Dude, you've got a ways to go before you're up to the Slashdot-troll standard. Try a little harder, willya?
Aegis BMD is already pretty well-proven system (see the "Stellar" series of tests). Not to mention the fact the we've actually used it to shoot down the satellite - which was, you know, shooting a bullet with a bullet. Whether the system is cost-effective is another question, and one far more open to debate. And to be sure, more development is going to be required. But saying "it will never work" at this point just makes you look silly - it already HAS worked. Several times.
Surely, al Qaeda and similar organizations would dearly love to drop the big one on some US city (or sail/drive it in... whatever). So why haven't they? There are a couple of reasons. 1) all the concern about loose fissile material has had an effect - uranium/plutonium are actually pretty hard to get ahold of. The US has worked with the Russians for some time now to get their material cleaned up, and the various other countries with known or suspected nuclear capabilities have proved to be not so eager to provide nuclear bomb ingredients to a bunch of folks who are, well, crazy. 2) Even given the requisite materials, nuclear bombs are not so easy to build. Sure, there are plans out there on the internet, but plans only get you so far. You have to have either sufficient experience with executing the plans to be able to do so effectively, or you have to gain the experience via an RDT&E program. That's kind of hard to pull off when your organization amounts to a couple hundred guys living in caves in Afghanistan. The chance of AQ being able to put together a bomb that actually works, without any kind of testing program, are pretty damn small.
This is not to say that we shouldn't make preparations to defend against this sort of thing - we should. But it's important to establish reasonable expectations for what you can and should be able to do, and what the enemy's capabilities are, so you don't go overboard defending against something that's almost certainly not going to happen.
Well, here's the thing. You can't just wave your hands and say "of course it's a worthwhile investment". Whether it's worthwhile depends on 1) how much it costs (including opportunity costs - in other words, what other good things could be done with the money), 2) how effective the defense system is, 3) how likely the threat is, and 4) the consequences if the threat actually manifests itself. If the consequence is "a major US city is wiped off the face of the earth"... well, that's pretty bad. But if the chances of that happening are 10^-9 over the next hundred years, the cost to defend against it would consume the entire US GDP for a hundred years, and said defense is only 10% effective anyway (to choose an extreme example), then clearly, this would not be a worthwhile investment.
Of course, in the real world the chances of an attack are probably somewhat higher (although realistically, pretty damn small), and GBM is probably more effective and certainly less costly than the extreme case discussed above. But does that mean it's worthwhile? Not necessarily. Although it's essentially a political question, we ought to at least approach it with facts to the extent we can. Discussing the consequences in isolation doesn't really help anyone make an informed decision about what to do.
Ok, a couple of rejoinders:
First of all, the "$900B Obama is allocating for HCR" is not, for the most part, taxpayer dollars. Yes, that's the total cost of the program... but much of it actually comes in the form of premiums, excise taxes on insurance products (which would be hard to divert to space exploration), etc. But more importantly:
And to what end? There's simply no reason to build factories, farms, or solar power stations in space, when we can do all of that on earth WITHOUT having to build giant, $130 billion, nuclear-bomb powered rockets. I'm not really sure what you mean by "high energy risk free research stations", but I'm here to tell you... there ain't nothing in life that's risk free. Cities on the moon and Mars? Why? What would people do there? Also, there's nothing in the asteroid belt that we can't get much, much more cheaply on earth, and again, without having to build the aforementioned $130B rockets (not to mention the expense of building freaking FACTORIES in space). If you don't agree, specify what you might mine that would justify the expense. Bear in mind that the asteroids are made of iron, nickel, and silicates. So is earth.
A number he pulled out of his ass. Freeman Dyson is not a health professional.
Yeah, and we still don't have the mission requirement. Sure, sending multi-million ton ships into space would be cool. But we can't spend $130B just to do cool things. Finally, bear in mind that Project Orion really never got off the drawing board - there were numerous unsolved engineering problems (ablation of the pusher plate caused by turbulence in the plasma impinging on it, spalling of the pusher plate, etc, etc). Insoluble problems? Probably not (with the exception of that nuclear fallout thing). But you need a reason to do something like this, and frankly, we don't have one. Not at what it would cost.
... would take longer than I have, but for starters:
Dude, seriously. Just because the Constitution gives the government the responsibility to do national defense doesn't mean that we have to spend more than the combined defense budgets of the entire rest of the world on it. We're spending way, way more than we need to on national security.
Oh, and the "make my day" sign? Great idea. Thanks for your thoughtful contribution to these weighty matters.
Right, because with all that time wasted running the gearshift and clutch, they could be writing the Great American Novel... while they're driving their automatic. Seriously, dude, I understand that some people would rather not bother with shifting, but it's not like they're "wasting time" that they could spend doing something else. They're DRIVING at the time.
Dude, it's not that hard. 1) start car, turn on defroster. 2) Scrape windshield. 3) by the time you're done, the inside of the windshield is already defogged, even if the defrost hasn't gotten up to temperature yet. It doesn't need to be warm to get the fog off the inside of the windshield, it just needs a few seconds of relatively dry air blowing over it... which you get from the first few seconds of defroster. It only needs to get warm at all to get the frost off the outside of the window, which, you know, you already scraped off.
I can't even believe we're having this discussion. The idea that not preheating your windshield inevitably means that it's impossible to see is mind-boggling.
I've owned and/or driven in a LOT of cars, and the problem of "the inside fogs over" clears up in about 30 seconds of running the defroster. So: hop in the car, start, turn on defroster. Put on seat belt. Turn on radio. Inside of the windshield is already defogged. Give me a freakin' break.
Umm, they have these things called windshield scrapers. They're, you know, a lot cheaper than a new engine.
We are most certainly not talking about punitive damages here. Punitive damages happen as a result of a lawsuit, when a judge awards money from the defendant to the plaintiff because of some kind of bad behavior on the defendant's part. That's not at all what this is. This is purely asking the judge to award funds from the defendant to cover the actual costs of the legal work that had to go on to press the claim, as provided for in the DMCA. As far as I can tell, a lawsuit never even happened. And I really have a hard time believing that reasonable attorney's fees could amount to $400k for something like this - it involved a little research and then writing a letter. A friend of mine has been trying to get divorced for over four years, with regular attorney consultations, court appearances, etc, etc... and his total bill is about a tenth of this. Certainly we're talking about a much less high-power attorney here, but still - $400k is ridiculous, no matter how much you dislike the RIAA.
... is that reasonable? It's fine to make a claim for reasonable attorney's fees, but this really smacks of running up the score. Lawyers are supposed to not inflate their bills, no matter who is paying.
Of course, it's not done quite as crassly as all that - you actually just make campaign contributions to the important congressmen. But (as I've written elsewhere) the fact that none of the aerospace companies have bothered to do so speaks volumes - it's just not worth their while to do so. There's no conceivable way to actually make money in space.
That's a giant "if". Going to the moon is hideously expensive... and how do you recoup the money? The fact that companies haven't brushed NASA aside (which would be easy for companies with the lobbying might of LMCO and/or Raytheon) speaks volumes - private industry isn't going to the moon (or elsewhere in space) because there's no money to be made there.
... for pointing out the real issue here. If there was any money to be made from private industry doing "stuff" in space, no oversight panel in the universe would stop them. The Lockheeds and Boeings of the world would just buy themselves some Congressmen and make it happen. But in fact, there's no realistic way to make any money going into space. And given that, you might as well have NASA maintain their current role. The history of companies managing their own procurements has not been so great - read up on the Coast Guard Deepwater program for an example.
The Wikipedia entry for the slime mold species in question indicates that the organism actually does have some sort of primitive intelligence - it could, for example, solve mazes, and learn the pattern of a regularly reoccurring period of cold conditions (reacting appropriately). I see the stuff growing in my garden now and then... the fact that a patch of slime exhibits intelligent behavior is, I don't know, kind of weird.
Does she roll her eyes when she says it?
The idea that rapid changes in the Y chromosome is somehow the equivalent to "males evolve faster than females" is 1) unjustified by the article, and 2) just plain dumb on its face. But given the choice between an accurate headline and a headline that will draw more page views... the choice is obvious, right?