Yeah, I was wondering about that as well. Oh well. Fundamentally this isn't really the greatest forum for discussion. Memes persist and opinions aren't altered. WE go back and forth using words like "academic freedom" and "tentative" but they are blunt instruments, and we don't know their full purpose. Unfortunately this doesn't stop the fact that science is under assault be religious figures who are upset that fact collides with the literal interpretation of the bible. Their attacks have grown progressively more subtle and more effective over the years. We have gone from attempting to jail science teachers to presenting a religious opinion side by side with scientific explanation in order to grant the former some shred of acceptability--like a contact buzz. We now have people claiming that the debate (if there is one) over the purpose of ID needs to be held in K-12 classrooms. Anyone who feels otherwise is accused of shirking from a debate on the subject in general or in the most twisted irony, accused of fundamentalism and intolerance.
This is a full force fight. There isn't room for a compromise. This is about science but it is also about the teaching of critical thinking. If we accept and teach fiction in science classrooms we must do so by abrogating most of our core principles about science--chief among those the notion that skepticism and inquiry should guide the path to knowledge, not intuition.
Wasn't the time to complain about Google's evil street view months/years (?) ago when they introduced it? I mean...it's not like concerns are suddenly no longer valid, they just aren't really topical or 'news' anymore.
I'm torn about Google street view. It isn't like it is filling a valid need (although neither was google earth, but that was cool). I don't have a burning desire to see what the storefront to X restaurant looks like. I should expect that the restaurant will be at the address listed. I could look for my own house or my work, but it seems to me that the marginal cost of providing that service (per road, not per user) is absurdly high. While google earth can populate its database with one purchase of remote imaging data, they need to send out GPS equipped trucks in order to get a single street.
On the other hand...it isn't really violating privacy. It is aggregating information and that aggregation in itself is possibly a privacy violation, but on face, things in public view are not private. If google catches you wanking it on the street corner and you get fired then maybe you shouldn't have been wanking it on the street corner. I am prepared to accept that it is not an unalloyed good. I understand that public information, once converted to an easily accessible form, may cease to be public. If your license plate held your name and address on it instead of a number that resolves to your name and address, you would be much, much less willing to display it. The same may be true here.
Creationism wrapped up in the guise of scientific knowledge and academic freedom. This is an OBVIOUS effort by members of the FL legislature to pander to religious groups. It just happens to be couched in an "academic freedom" argument. Don't buy it. It isn't value neutral and it isn't fair.
Students already face an uphill battle in getting over unscientific hunches formed in childhood. Evolution, in its fullness, is a rejection of those hunches. This bill clouds the issue by allowing teachers to present a curriculum that plays to those hunches in order to serve as religious indoctrination. Think about some of the main "tenets" of ID: the notion that complexity cannot occur from iterated evaluations of simple rules--they claim things like the eye are "too complex" to have been formed via "random" mutation. This SOUNDS reasonable, until you realize that it is just a play on our intuition. It isn't true in the slightest. The same with the claim that animals or humans were elegantly designed. While there is what some scientists would call elegance in plenty of biological forms, their implementation shows signs of prior adaptations. It takes a lot of careful study to learn exactly how and why our endocrine system or our vascular system is imperfectly adapted let alone begin to think about how pregnancy is an imperfect adaptation. This is why ID is primed for the 8-12 crowd. Those critical thinking skill are just solidifying. There isn't a large movement to teach ID in colleges because the material would be rejected at greater rates.
This is religious nonsense packages as science. Nothing more.
That's a pretty fair response. I didn't even think of it that way. I guess slashdot could be considered a wikipedia type starting point for some more particular questions like that even if it does seem very much based on the luck of the draw.
You you really listen to legal advice on slashdot? I wouldn't. I would not listen to advice that came from someone where I had no means of verifying their credentials, no recourse if they were wrong and no good way to show people later that I operated in good faith.
are you serious? Do you really think the fundamental problem cited in the article is the existence of the blog? While I conceed the point that students in more hard science fields see corporate sponsorship more regularly, the issue here was that the IACC was obviously dictating course content as well as monitoring the professor for compliance. On top of that, students were forced to do unpaid marketing work for the IACC and not allowed to explore in class the possibility that such a demand might not be right.
I mean please tell me that you read the article (or even some of the comments explaining it) and you came up with "academic research" and "experimenting with a fake blog". Because if you did, I've got a bridge in brooklyn to sell you.
I HIGHLY doubt this. Remember, "never attribute to conspiracy what may be explained by incompetence" (or words to that effect, I dodn't remember the exact quote). Although the people responsible for this might not have been stupid, that isn't a necessary condition. They clearly had the administration by the balls on this one, so why not pursue any goal? They were probably sponsoring a course and some research at the university, so why not move it along?
The backlash inherent to astroturfing is not something that is well realized by corporate figures who are just starting to figure this shit out. Smart marketing companies have this figured out already. They don't bother with astroturfing this obvious. They also know better than to do it in such an obvious way. Most companies aren't that smart. Most are just figuring out this whole 'series of tubes' and are trying to work against it or around it. They are slowly coming to realize the power of the web, but they haven't yet realized the depth of it. This is patently obvious from their attempt here.
Also, as a rule, don't assume that anything on slashdot matters.
That's the accidental lesson here. The course COULD be taught critically. in other words, company materials could be used alongside materials from people critical of international copyright consortiums. Or, 1/2 the class could write a fake blog about the subject with clever but clear hints that it is fake and the other half could be assigned a paper on it (assuming they didn't communicate). Each side could get a bonus for tricking the other or ferreting out trickery.
Do you propose that there is a tradeoff? Does the debate over academic integrity somehow preclude a debate over textbook pricing? Also, it is patently clear how and why textbook price increases world. Textbooks are durable goods, but are used only once (usually) by the first owner. The owner then has a strong incentive to resell the book to the next student in line. Textbook makers KNOW this, so it is in their interest to get schools to push to "student editions", "editions with added material" and new editions for each class. Schools are in a position to agree because that means more money for professors who write the textbooks and they don't front the cost. It isn't an ethical problem. It is a fairness problem and an economic problem.
A large number of professors are searching for ways to allow students to avoid these costs. Most professors I know allow students to use old editions, check new editions of from the library and offer excerpts of the books online for free. Most students that I know buy books used and don't bother with newer editions unless the professor is adamant about it--even then they usually don't get the book.
This isn't an ethical problem. It isn't one actor imposing his will on a large number of students. It is a market reaction to a group of people who are largely indifferent to changes in costs. in other words, as the economy moves from manufacturing to service oriented, the value of a college degree grows. As that value grows, the willingness to attain it grows likewise. For things that are limited in supply and desirable to obtain, price usually doesn't deter buyers TOO much. As a BA/BS becomes basically required to be competitive (we aren't there yet, but we are close), people will become less sensitive to the price of education. WE ought to look to ways to stop this problem before it consumes too much money and forces too many poor people away from education. That debate is important, but it occurs in parallel with demands for academic independence. In some cases defending academic independence helps keep the cost of education down.
where do you people come from? why do you even bother formating this post to quote me and link this? I mean, why don't you just yell at your houseplant or something? Let me know when you have a modicum of understanding of the following words:
Why not? I mean, there are interesting courses to take but for most students at large universities the course description doesn't really provide a very good guide as to the nature of the course and the expectations. I'm not interested in filler courses completely--they tend to make me not want to show up and to ride on prior knowledge but I will take them for a few reasons:
1. Prereq's: I don't want to take into to biology in order to take a zoology course. I don't want to take (this is probably a better example) Psych 101 in order to take a course on the pathology of brain disorders and the functions of the brain on a chemical level. I know that for some of these courses I can have the prerequisites waived by the instructor, but I don't want to have to go through that with every class.
2. Unknown intended course audience: Is that course on Intermediate Finance aimed at econ majors? Business majors? Is it a requirement to graduate from any particular school? Those will impact how the class is taught and to what level of detail and that is pretty important to me.
3. Non-zero cost of searching: It is actually pretty hard to spend time and sit in on classes at the beginning of the semester to get a feel for how they will meet your needs. I can't look at 20 classes outside of my major in order to see which books are required, what level of involvement is expected and what I will learn. That is just simple too many add/drop forms to work through and too many scheduling problems to work out.
I don't mean to say that students take filler courses that they hate (but this is often the case), but I do mean to say that arbitrary breadth requirements by universities lead to large numbers of students taking Astronomy 100 and so forth.
Libel laws are pretty forgiving in the United States as the 1st ammendment protects a lot of factually incorrect/misleading speech. England and commonwealth countries have stronger libel/slander laws.
Also....why are you quoting a dictionary to suggest that legal trouble is afoot?
I don't think that he deserves a fraction of the blame that the administration and the companies do. I'm not prepared to call this fascist or what-not, but it is pretty indefensible as education and inadvisable as marketing.
The "fake blog" portion of the story is compelling, but it isn't the whole story. all in all, the actions of the university and the coalition (the IACC) were pretty repugnant. The school engineered the course to teach the industry viewpoint and ensured (via industry observers) that the professor did not deviate from the talking points. when the story initially broke, the school decided that it was an internal matter and didn't merit any outside scrutiny.
The professor in question voiced real ethical problems with the course but was basically told to shut up and teach--because he didn't have tenure that was pretty much his only option. The job market for PhD's without tenure isn't exactly robust.
Never mind that this was basically taxpayer subsidized indoctrination.
I think it probably fills up because there is a big requirement at most colleges in order to ensure that students have a strong "liberal arts" background. What really happens is that classes like this get filled up as students look around for easy classes to pad a schedule.
If I had to choose between this class and Intermediate Macroeconomics as a filler, I would probably choose this course.
to what basic smarts are we referring? Distinguishing counterfeit products from the real thing? Can you do that unerringly? Can you tell me the difference between a knockoff of windows XP and the real thing? Can you tell me the difference between a knockoff brake cleaner and a brand name brake cleaner? Maybe, but I would hardly classify that as "basic smarts" or a prerequisite to entering college.
Perhaps you are referring to a willingness to choose the "real" product over the knockoff. Here you are on unstable ground. In some cases (heart surgery, car parts, etc), the quality of the product is not immediately visible to the buyer and can't be divined by inspection. In that case, there is a strong argument to be made that avoiding knockoff products is good sense. You can't eyeball a hydraulic line to see if it will fail catastrophically. In the case of DVD's, CD's and purses, the need is less severe. There isn't a buyer safety issue. if your knockoff version of Rush Hour XXVII sucks, then it isn't the end of the world. the people who suffer are the industry (because they can't sell you a copy of something you already have) so it is THEIR interest that is being protected here, not yours.
what the heck is this supposed to mean? I mean...duh. of course testing can't deal with unknown problems. But you hire people to figure that shit out. The aerospace industry is home to some of the most well tested software in the world (and hardware). Well tested and robust enough that failures occur VERY rarely and when they do they are usually pretty well explained. Don't include NASA's record here, but even if you did, extend it back to the start of unmanned spaceflight and you'll see it is pretty good for the design considerations.
But non of this means that your comment makes sense.
That strikes me as BS. DARPA has been working on ASAT and defenses against ASAT since before it was DARPA. We had to rename all of the ASAt vehicles when Clinton came to office so they didn't sound like purely cold war projects. To think that we have only now come up with this "big sky" approach to defending against ASAT is silly. ASAT is a fact of life when dealing with modern enemies. Hell, we used to worry about russians detonating nuclear weapons in their own satellites just to take ours down. How is a microconstellation going to fix that?
and BTW, I read the article, I just don't feel the need to repeat their stated claim when arguing the negatives, thanks.
Here's my point. In order to hold stationkeeping--in other words, if you give a shit about where your orbit is and how long you can maintain it, each piece of that micro-constellation needs fuel and thrusters. The biggest pieces are still going to be:
Payload Fuel solar Panels
Each component is going to need to replicate those, introducing new chances for failure. On top of that, components and satellites are intricately power and heat balanced. Heat dissipation is very tighly controlled and often certain components are paired well with others in order to radiate heat away at a given rate so that the craft doesn't cook itself and that cyclic stresses don't become a problem for long serving craft. This means that each of those components needs to be engineered specifically where only one did before on top of duplicating hardware.
Also, there are still critical components. There will only be one tranceiver (large). That's a critical component. There will be only one payload microsat. There will be (assuming wireless power transmission) only one power generating microsat. All of those are critical to operation. It isn't more secure and robust just because they say it is. Sheesh.
Now instead of one computer to check for bugs and secure against radiation we need 8-10. instead of engineering one satellite we engineer 8-10. If the government wants to spend more money, then be my guest, because that's what this will do.
there is no good reason for this to be a huge research priority (although arguably, it isn't huge). When I first read the summary, I thought that DARPA was funding a next generation version of Hughes Aerospace's 'modular' satellites system, where Hughes builds 1 bus and offer 1 of three payload configurations to customers.
But I'm more confused as to the goals of this project. I read a few of the linked pdf's and true to form, the government request for grant applications were not enlightening. The best I can hash of it seems like this:
DARPA wants to build and test satellites that are placed into orbit in a micro-constellation of sorts, communicating between various parts via wireless signals. Let's leave aside security and interference concerns, because they are--frankly--minor. My primary concerns would be duplication of elements. Assuming that they still have traditional roles for satellites, such as remote imaging and relay, payloads still need to be handled nicely. The camera for the remote sensing system needs to:
1. Know where it is. 2. Know where it is pointing. 3. Point there without too much wobble.
The first 2 can still be done with a distributed satellite--you just put the start tracker and the computational hardware on another cluster. The second requires that you keep the stabilizing hardware on the same bus as the payload. Beyond that, how will they manage stationkeeping? Each microsat would have to be fitted with jets or be replaced in a few years time.
However, all such action will be imperfect. In a socialist society, the alignment is automatic and perfect, as opposed to constantly in flux.
After the back and forth we have had there is no convincing you. But for the sake of curiosity, tell me how the alignment is somehow perfect in a socialist system and yet flawed in a capitalist system. Tell me what superior font of knowledge informs socialist systems that eludes capitalists (who believe me, would rather have unperturbed growth over the volatility of the business cycle). Tell me how the government can generate the same efficiency outcome as a system driven by the profit motive when not motivated by profit. I'm not ignorant. I understand that governments can manage things well and sometimes have incentives to manage things much better than corporations: public goods, externalities, and other market failures are examples of where government action is preferred. But there is a strong case for areas with no significant market failures to be mediated by the market. How does socialism generate the same optimization as millions of actors seeking out maximum private profit at once?
If you are going to tell me some nonsense about "automatic alignment" without any supporting arguments, don't.
I think that it would strain the imagination to say (I know you aren't saying this) that there wouldn't be a procedure, somewhere to perform exactly those steps. Even a threshold procedure for CSR's to offer rebates if customers are waitng for X + 1 minutes would qualify.
That's not fair. This is an almost totally BS patent, and automation would change little of it. Read the application again. How much of that diverges from a complex system of comping you for waiting? I'm not oversimplifying here. The patent itself is almost the definition of obvious.
It is very true that/. usually makes broad assumptions about patents and patent laws when publishing these stories. This, however, is not a very good example of that wider trend. With the exception of the automation remark, the summary is a pretty accurate run-down of the patent.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I was wondering about that as well. Oh well. Fundamentally this isn't really the greatest forum for discussion. Memes persist and opinions aren't altered. WE go back and forth using words like "academic freedom" and "tentative" but they are blunt instruments, and we don't know their full purpose. Unfortunately this doesn't stop the fact that science is under assault be religious figures who are upset that fact collides with the literal interpretation of the bible. Their attacks have grown progressively more subtle and more effective over the years. We have gone from attempting to jail science teachers to presenting a religious opinion side by side with scientific explanation in order to grant the former some shred of acceptability--like a contact buzz. We now have people claiming that the debate (if there is one) over the purpose of ID needs to be held in K-12 classrooms. Anyone who feels otherwise is accused of shirking from a debate on the subject in general or in the most twisted irony, accused of fundamentalism and intolerance.
This is a full force fight. There isn't room for a compromise. This is about science but it is also about the teaching of critical thinking. If we accept and teach fiction in science classrooms we must do so by abrogating most of our core principles about science--chief among those the notion that skepticism and inquiry should guide the path to knowledge, not intuition.
Wasn't the time to complain about Google's evil street view months/years (?) ago when they introduced it? I mean...it's not like concerns are suddenly no longer valid, they just aren't really topical or 'news' anymore.
I'm torn about Google street view. It isn't like it is filling a valid need (although neither was google earth, but that was cool). I don't have a burning desire to see what the storefront to X restaurant looks like. I should expect that the restaurant will be at the address listed. I could look for my own house or my work, but it seems to me that the marginal cost of providing that service (per road, not per user) is absurdly high. While google earth can populate its database with one purchase of remote imaging data, they need to send out GPS equipped trucks in order to get a single street.
On the other hand...it isn't really violating privacy. It is aggregating information and that aggregation in itself is possibly a privacy violation, but on face, things in public view are not private. If google catches you wanking it on the street corner and you get fired then maybe you shouldn't have been wanking it on the street corner. I am prepared to accept that it is not an unalloyed good. I understand that public information, once converted to an easily accessible form, may cease to be public. If your license plate held your name and address on it instead of a number that resolves to your name and address, you would be much, much less willing to display it. The same may be true here.
but this isn't news.
Creationism wrapped up in the guise of scientific knowledge and academic freedom. This is an OBVIOUS effort by members of the FL legislature to pander to religious groups. It just happens to be couched in an "academic freedom" argument. Don't buy it. It isn't value neutral and it isn't fair.
Students already face an uphill battle in getting over unscientific hunches formed in childhood. Evolution, in its fullness, is a rejection of those hunches. This bill clouds the issue by allowing teachers to present a curriculum that plays to those hunches in order to serve as religious indoctrination. Think about some of the main "tenets" of ID: the notion that complexity cannot occur from iterated evaluations of simple rules--they claim things like the eye are "too complex" to have been formed via "random" mutation. This SOUNDS reasonable, until you realize that it is just a play on our intuition. It isn't true in the slightest. The same with the claim that animals or humans were elegantly designed. While there is what some scientists would call elegance in plenty of biological forms, their implementation shows signs of prior adaptations. It takes a lot of careful study to learn exactly how and why our endocrine system or our vascular system is imperfectly adapted let alone begin to think about how pregnancy is an imperfect adaptation. This is why ID is primed for the 8-12 crowd. Those critical thinking skill are just solidifying. There isn't a large movement to teach ID in colleges because the material would be rejected at greater rates.
This is religious nonsense packages as science. Nothing more.
That's a pretty fair response. I didn't even think of it that way. I guess slashdot could be considered a wikipedia type starting point for some more particular questions like that even if it does seem very much based on the luck of the draw.
You you really listen to legal advice on slashdot? I wouldn't. I would not listen to advice that came from someone where I had no means of verifying their credentials, no recourse if they were wrong and no good way to show people later that I operated in good faith.
are you serious? Do you really think the fundamental problem cited in the article is the existence of the blog? While I conceed the point that students in more hard science fields see corporate sponsorship more regularly, the issue here was that the IACC was obviously dictating course content as well as monitoring the professor for compliance. On top of that, students were forced to do unpaid marketing work for the IACC and not allowed to explore in class the possibility that such a demand might not be right.
I mean please tell me that you read the article (or even some of the comments explaining it) and you came up with "academic research" and "experimenting with a fake blog". Because if you did, I've got a bridge in brooklyn to sell you.
I HIGHLY doubt this. Remember, "never attribute to conspiracy what may be explained by incompetence" (or words to that effect, I dodn't remember the exact quote). Although the people responsible for this might not have been stupid, that isn't a necessary condition. They clearly had the administration by the balls on this one, so why not pursue any goal? They were probably sponsoring a course and some research at the university, so why not move it along?
The backlash inherent to astroturfing is not something that is well realized by corporate figures who are just starting to figure this shit out. Smart marketing companies have this figured out already. They don't bother with astroturfing this obvious. They also know better than to do it in such an obvious way. Most companies aren't that smart. Most are just figuring out this whole 'series of tubes' and are trying to work against it or around it. They are slowly coming to realize the power of the web, but they haven't yet realized the depth of it. This is patently obvious from their attempt here.
Also, as a rule, don't assume that anything on slashdot matters.
That's the accidental lesson here. The course COULD be taught critically. in other words, company materials could be used alongside materials from people critical of international copyright consortiums. Or, 1/2 the class could write a fake blog about the subject with clever but clear hints that it is fake and the other half could be assigned a paper on it (assuming they didn't communicate). Each side could get a bonus for tricking the other or ferreting out trickery.
LOL. I almost didn't want to reply to him because it might ruin the joke. :)
Do you propose that there is a tradeoff? Does the debate over academic integrity somehow preclude a debate over textbook pricing? Also, it is patently clear how and why textbook price increases world. Textbooks are durable goods, but are used only once (usually) by the first owner. The owner then has a strong incentive to resell the book to the next student in line. Textbook makers KNOW this, so it is in their interest to get schools to push to "student editions", "editions with added material" and new editions for each class. Schools are in a position to agree because that means more money for professors who write the textbooks and they don't front the cost. It isn't an ethical problem. It is a fairness problem and an economic problem.
A large number of professors are searching for ways to allow students to avoid these costs. Most professors I know allow students to use old editions, check new editions of from the library and offer excerpts of the books online for free. Most students that I know buy books used and don't bother with newer editions unless the professor is adamant about it--even then they usually don't get the book.
This isn't an ethical problem. It isn't one actor imposing his will on a large number of students. It is a market reaction to a group of people who are largely indifferent to changes in costs. in other words, as the economy moves from manufacturing to service oriented, the value of a college degree grows. As that value grows, the willingness to attain it grows likewise. For things that are limited in supply and desirable to obtain, price usually doesn't deter buyers TOO much. As a BA/BS becomes basically required to be competitive (we aren't there yet, but we are close), people will become less sensitive to the price of education. WE ought to look to ways to stop this problem before it consumes too much money and forces too many poor people away from education. That debate is important, but it occurs in parallel with demands for academic independence. In some cases defending academic independence helps keep the cost of education down.
where do you people come from? why do you even bother formating this post to quote me and link this? I mean, why don't you just yell at your houseplant or something? Let me know when you have a modicum of understanding of the following words:
ethics
severity
continuum
contradiction
proportionality
Don't strain yourself.
Why not? I mean, there are interesting courses to take but for most students at large universities the course description doesn't really provide a very good guide as to the nature of the course and the expectations. I'm not interested in filler courses completely--they tend to make me not want to show up and to ride on prior knowledge but I will take them for a few reasons:
1. Prereq's: I don't want to take into to biology in order to take a zoology course. I don't want to take (this is probably a better example) Psych 101 in order to take a course on the pathology of brain disorders and the functions of the brain on a chemical level. I know that for some of these courses I can have the prerequisites waived by the instructor, but I don't want to have to go through that with every class.
2. Unknown intended course audience: Is that course on Intermediate Finance aimed at econ majors? Business majors? Is it a requirement to graduate from any particular school? Those will impact how the class is taught and to what level of detail and that is pretty important to me.
3. Non-zero cost of searching: It is actually pretty hard to spend time and sit in on classes at the beginning of the semester to get a feel for how they will meet your needs. I can't look at 20 classes outside of my major in order to see which books are required, what level of involvement is expected and what I will learn. That is just simple too many add/drop forms to work through and too many scheduling problems to work out.
I don't mean to say that students take filler courses that they hate (but this is often the case), but I do mean to say that arbitrary breadth requirements by universities lead to large numbers of students taking Astronomy 100 and so forth.
Libel laws are pretty forgiving in the United States as the 1st ammendment protects a lot of factually incorrect/misleading speech. England and commonwealth countries have stronger libel/slander laws.
Also....why are you quoting a dictionary to suggest that legal trouble is afoot?
I don't think that he deserves a fraction of the blame that the administration and the companies do. I'm not prepared to call this fascist or what-not, but it is pretty indefensible as education and inadvisable as marketing.
What a reasoned and thoughtful statement. I'm so glad that you allow for room on both sides of the discussion.
The "fake blog" portion of the story is compelling, but it isn't the whole story. all in all, the actions of the university and the coalition (the IACC) were pretty repugnant. The school engineered the course to teach the industry viewpoint and ensured (via industry observers) that the professor did not deviate from the talking points. when the story initially broke, the school decided that it was an internal matter and didn't merit any outside scrutiny.
The professor in question voiced real ethical problems with the course but was basically told to shut up and teach--because he didn't have tenure that was pretty much his only option. The job market for PhD's without tenure isn't exactly robust.
Never mind that this was basically taxpayer subsidized indoctrination.
I think it probably fills up because there is a big requirement at most colleges in order to ensure that students have a strong "liberal arts" background. What really happens is that classes like this get filled up as students look around for easy classes to pad a schedule.
If I had to choose between this class and Intermediate Macroeconomics as a filler, I would probably choose this course.
to what basic smarts are we referring? Distinguishing counterfeit products from the real thing? Can you do that unerringly? Can you tell me the difference between a knockoff of windows XP and the real thing? Can you tell me the difference between a knockoff brake cleaner and a brand name brake cleaner? Maybe, but I would hardly classify that as "basic smarts" or a prerequisite to entering college.
Perhaps you are referring to a willingness to choose the "real" product over the knockoff. Here you are on unstable ground. In some cases (heart surgery, car parts, etc), the quality of the product is not immediately visible to the buyer and can't be divined by inspection. In that case, there is a strong argument to be made that avoiding knockoff products is good sense. You can't eyeball a hydraulic line to see if it will fail catastrophically. In the case of DVD's, CD's and purses, the need is less severe. There isn't a buyer safety issue. if your knockoff version of Rush Hour XXVII sucks, then it isn't the end of the world. the people who suffer are the industry (because they can't sell you a copy of something you already have) so it is THEIR interest that is being protected here, not yours.
Which part of this is common sense?
what the heck is this supposed to mean? I mean...duh. of course testing can't deal with unknown problems. But you hire people to figure that shit out. The aerospace industry is home to some of the most well tested software in the world (and hardware). Well tested and robust enough that failures occur VERY rarely and when they do they are usually pretty well explained. Don't include NASA's record here, but even if you did, extend it back to the start of unmanned spaceflight and you'll see it is pretty good for the design considerations.
But non of this means that your comment makes sense.
That strikes me as BS. DARPA has been working on ASAT and defenses against ASAT since before it was DARPA. We had to rename all of the ASAt vehicles when Clinton came to office so they didn't sound like purely cold war projects. To think that we have only now come up with this "big sky" approach to defending against ASAT is silly. ASAT is a fact of life when dealing with modern enemies. Hell, we used to worry about russians detonating nuclear weapons in their own satellites just to take ours down. How is a microconstellation going to fix that?
and BTW, I read the article, I just don't feel the need to repeat their stated claim when arguing the negatives, thanks.
Here's my point. In order to hold stationkeeping--in other words, if you give a shit about where your orbit is and how long you can maintain it, each piece of that micro-constellation needs fuel and thrusters. The biggest pieces are still going to be:
Payload
Fuel
solar Panels
Each component is going to need to replicate those, introducing new chances for failure. On top of that, components and satellites are intricately power and heat balanced. Heat dissipation is very tighly controlled and often certain components are paired well with others in order to radiate heat away at a given rate so that the craft doesn't cook itself and that cyclic stresses don't become a problem for long serving craft. This means that each of those components needs to be engineered specifically where only one did before on top of duplicating hardware.
Also, there are still critical components. There will only be one tranceiver (large). That's a critical component. There will be only one payload microsat. There will be (assuming wireless power transmission) only one power generating microsat. All of those are critical to operation. It isn't more secure and robust just because they say it is. Sheesh.
Now instead of one computer to check for bugs and secure against radiation we need 8-10. instead of engineering one satellite we engineer 8-10. If the government wants to spend more money, then be my guest, because that's what this will do.
there is no good reason for this to be a huge research priority (although arguably, it isn't huge). When I first read the summary, I thought that DARPA was funding a next generation version of Hughes Aerospace's 'modular' satellites system, where Hughes builds 1 bus and offer 1 of three payload configurations to customers.
But I'm more confused as to the goals of this project. I read a few of the linked pdf's and true to form, the government request for grant applications were not enlightening. The best I can hash of it seems like this:
DARPA wants to build and test satellites that are placed into orbit in a micro-constellation of sorts, communicating between various parts via wireless signals. Let's leave aside security and interference concerns, because they are--frankly--minor. My primary concerns would be duplication of elements. Assuming that they still have traditional roles for satellites, such as remote imaging and relay, payloads still need to be handled nicely. The camera for the remote sensing system needs to:
1. Know where it is.
2. Know where it is pointing.
3. Point there without too much wobble.
The first 2 can still be done with a distributed satellite--you just put the start tracker and the computational hardware on another cluster. The second requires that you keep the stabilizing hardware on the same bus as the payload. Beyond that, how will they manage stationkeeping? Each microsat would have to be fitted with jets or be replaced in a few years time.
Can anyone fill me in on what I am missing here?
After the back and forth we have had there is no convincing you. But for the sake of curiosity, tell me how the alignment is somehow perfect in a socialist system and yet flawed in a capitalist system. Tell me what superior font of knowledge informs socialist systems that eludes capitalists (who believe me, would rather have unperturbed growth over the volatility of the business cycle). Tell me how the government can generate the same efficiency outcome as a system driven by the profit motive when not motivated by profit. I'm not ignorant. I understand that governments can manage things well and sometimes have incentives to manage things much better than corporations: public goods, externalities, and other market failures are examples of where government action is preferred. But there is a strong case for areas with no significant market failures to be mediated by the market. How does socialism generate the same optimization as millions of actors seeking out maximum private profit at once?
If you are going to tell me some nonsense about "automatic alignment" without any supporting arguments, don't.
This isn't arguing, it's just pointless contradiction.
I think that it would strain the imagination to say (I know you aren't saying this) that there wouldn't be a procedure, somewhere to perform exactly those steps. Even a threshold procedure for CSR's to offer rebates if customers are waitng for X + 1 minutes would qualify.
That's not fair. This is an almost totally BS patent, and automation would change little of it. Read the application again. How much of that diverges from a complex system of comping you for waiting? I'm not oversimplifying here. The patent itself is almost the definition of obvious.
/. usually makes broad assumptions about patents and patent laws when publishing these stories. This, however, is not a very good example of that wider trend. With the exception of the automation remark, the summary is a pretty accurate run-down of the patent.
It is very true that