Yeah, there's all kinds of reasons why an alien wouldn't have announced their presence to us in a completely unmissable and unmistakable way. For instance they simply don't care to. Maybe they already know that life in the galaxy is common, and find our particular instance of it a curiosity but noting more, and like you said they see us as basically clever chimps. Maybe they have some kind of Prime Directive and actually try not to make themselves known. Maybe they've studied us to see if we're worth talking to, and decided we're assholes.:P
On another note, one way in which I've heard people argue for the "we'd have already seen them if they were there!" point of view in spite of the difficulties of a universe with a speed limit is by bringing up Von Neuman probes (basically self-replicating probes). Which leads me to suggest that we need another term in the Drake Equation to account for this case: the probability that an advanced civilization not only invents Von Neuman probes, but actually decides to unleash a self-replicating machine to spread across the galaxy for longer than their civilization and likely species will even exist.
It reminds me of Star Control II, where one of the species does exactly that. If you don't deal with the problem, pretty soon you're up to your neck in probes. But hey, that would be the rest of the galaxy's problem!:P
How silly of me to ignore profit when mentioning profit.
You ignored profit when you said "To say it was a failure compared to the XBox, while the XBox was a success with the same number of sales is pretty silly", and yes it was silly to say that and then a moment later point out yourself why that statement was wrong.
But I'm glad we agree the premise that equal sales means equal success was foolish and wrong.:)
It sounds like you are saying that with Nintendo, they had "strategic goals", and therefor they were a failure because they didn't meet those goals, while Microsoft only had "hopes", so the fact that they made less profit and roughly equal sales means they were still more successful.
LOL, no. They both had hopes and strategic goals. Nintendo hoped they'd be as successful as with the SNES. MS hoped they'd be able to dominate the market on their first try. Neither of their hopes and dreams came to pass. Nintendo had a goal of increasing their market share and turning around the trend started with N64. They failed. Microsoft had a goal of having a solid presence in the market to establish themselves as a serious player for the next generation. They succeeded.
First of all, I never said I was neutral. I consider myself fair, but not neutral. However, by this logic, anytime any comparison is made with any metric, someone is "measuring dicks"? Does that mean that you have been measuring the dick of expectations vs the dick of goals?
LOL, no, that's not the logic. The logic is that you're taking something complex and subjective like "success" or "manliness", and reducing it down to an "objective" but stupid metric like "unit sales" or "dick length". Sure it's convenient in that they're directly comparable across the different products and companies, but that's exactly why it is stupid, because it discards all context and the very different definitions of "success" based on the goals of the two companies.
That's not what it's all about anyway. The whole point of my contribution to this discussion was merely to say that Nintendo got about the same market share in the home console market as Microsoft, so it is a misconception of most people is that it did far worse than Microsoft (which was mostly only true in North America).
That's nice; if people thought the GC sold far less than Xbox, they were simply wrong.
My contribution to this discussion is to say that there are very valid perspectives -- particularly, the perspective of Nintendo itself -- where getting equal market share as the brand new entrant into the console business equals doing far worse. Talking about "success" simply in terms of unit sales is overly simplistic whether your figures are right or wrong.
Secondly, the articles I have seen tend to imply that planets are much more plentiful than has been thought, and this is a big problem, because even the post pessimistic attempts at the Drake equation have the galaxy teaming with life. If planets are even more plentiful than previously assumed, then that should equate to even more life, so where is everybody?
The galaxy could be teeming with life, it could even be teeming with intelligent life, and yet we could be completely oblivious to the fact.
This is only a shocking and serious problem if you had assumed that intelligent life would inevitably discover a way around the speed of light.
Think about it -- we're are only just able to identify the existence of planets around other stars, not even ones like ours that are at a comfortable distance from their stars, and still only in a tiny area of the sky. And we can do little more than identify their period and their mass. Actual spectroscopy of exoplanets is at an even more infant stage than simply finding them. The rocky planets we already know of could be teeming with life, and we just have no way of knowing yet!
So the only way we'd know about some advanced civilization is if they were spamming the galaxy with transmissions and probes, and the wave front/probe passed us during the narrow window during which we've been looking. And look at us -- the amount of radiation we as a civilization are blasting out into space has vastly reduced as we've figured out how to be more efficient, or replaced broadcast transmission with fiber-optic cables and so on. So the brief period of time in which we've been looking would have to coincide (accounting for distance) with the brief period in which they were broadcasting enough for us to see. And they have to have been close enough for us to be able to see. And we have to have noticed.
Hell, how do we know that an alien probe, launched thousands of years ago, didn't pass through our solar system just last year?
I'm not about to get all despondent about the Drake Equation based on the logic of "Well why haven't we seen alien life already?" Let's wait until we can do enough research on our own to get even the sketchiest idea of how common life itself is before we start getting worried about why aliens haven't said hello, okay?
"Fanboy dick-waving contest"? I call them like I see them, good and bad, in all the camps.
Ah say, that was a joke, son. Cus see, it's only in this context of trying to rank the consoles from best to worst that you can look just at unit sales and say who won and who tied for second. It's the equivalent of offering to end two guy's dick-waving contest by busting out a ruler; you might be a neutral observer, but you're still measuring dicks.
To say it was a failure compared to the XBox, while the XBox was a success with the same number of sales is pretty silly. It didn't live up to some nebulous hopes or expectations?
Silly is using unit sales as the sole metric of success, and concluding that two consoles with equal sales cannot have differing levels of success.
And what you call "hopes" or "expectations", businesses call "goals", "plans", and "strategy". And they can be very concrete, and so can failure relative to those goals.
So, it's not about how many you sell, how much profit you make selling them, but about whether you wish you had done better? In capitalism, EVERYONE always wishes they had done better, even if they are #1.
It's about that and much more. You've already brought up yourself why unit sales as the sole metric of success is foolish, because it ignores profit (I worked for a company like that; it wasn't pretty). You certainly can't say the two were equally successful from that standpoint, can you? So let's abandon the flawed premise that equal sales equals equal success, okay?:)
But there's even more than just profits, too. See, in capitalism, you can think about more than immediate net margins and unit sales. You can lose money on a product to gain a strategic advantage. You can subsidize the cost using profits from other areas. You can position a product not to overtake a competitor's, but simply to deny them the massive profit taking they'd have if they had the only product in that market. That and more, just to position yourself for greater profits in the future. Can a product with the same unit sales and profit margin be a success or failure based on those strategic goals? Absolutely!
In all honesty, the GameCube just got trounced the previous generation, and I don't recall anyone outside the big 'N' really expecting them to take the crown from Sony.
Which is funny because it's from Nintendo's perspective that I'm saying GC was less successful. I don't think they expected to overtake Sony after releasing the GC a year later. I guarantee you their strategy involved increasing their market share, not losing it! GC made a profit because it was designed to be able to in just about any scenario. Yet its performance was poor compared to the strategic goals of the company.
GC was supposed to be the beginning of the turnaround for Nintendo's home console business, not proof that Nintendo needed to shake up their strategy even more. The N64 generation was supposed to be the low point. It wasn't. Ergo, GC was a failure.
Microsoft, on the other hand, I believe did have high hopes of not just entering the market, but hitting it big.
Yes, but those truly were hopes. In reality, their strategy was obviously one of buying their way into the market, earning credibility in the market, and setting themselves up to become a major player in the next (current) generation. They were not even trying to earn a profit. Whether the long-term strategy pans out or not is still an open question, but did the Xbox succeed in achieving it's step in the plan? Without a doubt.
Same unit sales. Different strategies. Different success relative to those strategies.
Objectivity doesn't mean acting like different things aren't different, or ignoring context.:)
"Elementary particle" has always meant that it was a particle that was not composed of smaller ones. It was fundamental, in a sense. As far as we know, electrons and photons are examples of elementary particles; they aren't composed of any smaller stuff. We used to think protons and neutrons were elementary, but now we know they're made of quarks. We think quarks are elementary.
In between those two periods, collider experiments had shown over four hundred different particles.
So, compared to when we only knew about electrons, protons, and neutrons, and didn't know about photons or the other particles that replace fields as creating the forces, the current theory has quite a few particles. Turns out the universe is more complicated than that, but hey, the modern theory is in its own way more elegant than a giant particle zoo, eh?
Actually I think Nintendo did sell at a loss some of the time. Shortly after Zelda Wind Waker was released, Nintendo offered an awesome deal where you could get the Gamecube and WW for just $100. So in essence I paid $50 for the game and $50 for the Cube. I think Nintendo must have lost a lot of cash on that deal.
They lost hypothetical money that they could have made by selling Wind Waker for full price, but I'd bet my right testicle^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H to play the next Zelda Wii game that bundle had a positive net margin. Maybe it didn't defray the development cost of Wind Waker as quickly, but it surely added a positive value to the bottom line.
If the Cube was a failure then so too was the Box. Vice-versa if the Box was not a failure, then neither was the Cube.
In an absolute sense (of fanboy dick-waving contests), for sure. As far as relative to their expectations, that's more debatable, because they were different. In one sense, Nintendo made money ergo GC was a success, but they surely had higher hopes than to limp along and stay in the game. Microsoft, on the other hand, was simply trying to buy their way into the game and from that standpoint Xbox was a smashing success even though it lost them billions of dollars. I doubt they expected it to go otherwise.
So despite having similar unit sales, I don't think it's inaccurate to say that the Gamecube was a failure and the Xbox a success.
From the standpoint of a GC owner, on the other hand, I say GC was pretty successful.:)
It's funny because the games he talks about being made for adults are actually mostly made for teenagers, and it's a very adolescent mentality to consider yourself too good for "kids stuff".
If the girls are upset there isn't something to be a part of, perhaps they should go rally more girls to form a troop
Yeah, and they can call it the "Girl Scouts".
In any case, this is dumb. Hey genius, the point of Ladies' Night is to attract more ladies, which if you're a straight guy who's going to bars should obviously be viewed as a "good thing". The reason they still charge you a cover is because they don't need to lure you in with no cover charge -- that's what the ladies are for!
And if you're not straight, then that's what "Gay and Lesbian Night" is for. Is that going to be ruled discriminatory next?
The reactor housing for a Tokomak style reactor is tons and tons of radioactive material, which first must be stored in place inside the reactor vessel for 12-20 years until it becomes 'cool' enough to handle and stored for tens to thousands of years before it completely 'cools' and is safe. (Because *that* is what 'highly radioactive' means.)
No, not even close. Highly radioactive means undergoes many fission reactions means it has a short half life means it's gone much sooner. Stuff that lasts tens of thousands of years is less radioactive because that's what that means. Byproducts of fission of uranium and other heavy elements can include a wide variety of long and short lived isotopes. The much lighter reactor isn't anything like that, and the induced radiation is nothing like traditional nuclear waste. It's not "highly radioactive" in the sense you meant, which is "super scary forever".
Also, "tons and tons" is actually rather small for a whole reactor compared to the annual tonnage of waste from other kinds. Storing it for the short period necessary is seriously trivial.
In the same way that getting shot with a.22 is 'trivial' compared to getting shot with a.45.
More like a mother's irrational fear of whiffle ball bats compared to getting shot with a.45, and she's not even sure what a whiffle ball is, but it sounds scaaaaary!
Yeah I was just going by the comparison to the government preventing the BP spill, and the obvious analogy to a regulatory failure involving nuclear power and some disaster. I admit I have not heard anyone .
But seriously, how great an extent of concern are you talking about? Tritium which we can already deal with safely, and the reactor housing which is a tiny scrap of highly radioactive waste which only needs to be stored safely for a short time (cus that's what 'highly radioactive' means)?
That's all great. Yes we have to make sure that's done right. It just seems very trivial in comparison to the real regulatory issues surrounding every other kind of large-scale power plant.
That argument is called DIRECT, as in Directly derived from the shuttle stack. It is an evolution design, which was originally proposed in 1978 and always kept on the back burner should the need arize for heavy lift, which a lunar mission all but demands.
If we must do an Apollo 11 remake, then I'd much rather we go with Direct than Constellation. Ares re-uses a lot of the shuttle too, but it was more ambitious about trying to actually improve more than the silly orbiter-stuck-on-the-side problem. Hypothetically good for technical advancement, practically bad for its schedule and cost.
Personally, though, I'd hold off for a while until it doesn't necessitate a single huge rocket to lift everything needed to get to the moon and back in one launch. I think it makes a lot more sense to have a fuel depot waiting in earth orbit for separate stages of a vehicle to the moon to be lifted, assembled, fueled, and sent off to the moon without having to carry all that extra propellant. If we do it right, we'd have already used the same mechanism to put supplies and a return vessel at the landing site, waiting for them. That way, the astronauts can actually stay on the moon for a while, rather than staying for only as long as the tiny leftover fraction of the mass budget of the moon mission that was allocated for actually being on the moon. Ya know? Make it worth our while? Doesn't that sound more interesting?
Without the urgency of going back to the moon quickly and thus the need for a shuttle-class lifter, the big advantage of Direct isn't there anymore. And without that, a change of technology looks more appealing. Falcon IX, for example, just demonstrated an ability that Direct could never do: aborting a launch once all engines were fired. You hit 'go' on an SRB and detect some abnormal behavior, tough shit. For that and other reasons, I would prefer to go with a liquid-fueled system if possible. And it seems pretty possible since it's already launched with an amazingly low price tag compared to any government-developed system.
Don't get me wrong, I've been impressed with Direct since I first heard about it. I just want to know what programs we'll have to give up to do it, and a good reason that we really need something bigger than a Delta IV so badly to justify giving them up.
If Congress wants to mandate Direct but also give NASA extra budget just for that, then I say go for it!
Okay, your problem then is with exaggerated science reporting then, which occasionally involves complicity with the scientist but much more often pisses them off quite a bit. It's not science-minded people who are doing it, it's journalism hype-sells minded people.
It's a problem, I agree, and the fact that it ultimately turns you off to science articles is a bummer. I'm really not sure how we can communicate to journalists that covering science realistically, even if it seems obscure and unexciting, is better than trying to dress it up as something it isn't and making people disappointed when they find out.
Now I was sure to qualify those things. Now I was sure to qualify those things. These things generally do cancel out by the time you get to our level.
That's still not true. Weird quantum effects have directly observable effects at our level, as in at the level of your eyeballs looking at them.
Diffraction gratings, those novelty license plate holders that seem to shimmer with color at oblique angles, lasers, holograms, are all things that are direct consequences of really bizarre and nonsensical quantum effects not canceling. Hell even the behavior of everyday mirrors and lenses can only be properly understood (as in accurately predicted) using quantum physics. Like, imagine you're looking at yourself in the mirror with one eye closed, and you're looking at some small object in the mirror. You probably think that the mirror image is kinda like a photo, where you could cut out all of the mirror except the part in which you see the object, and that the remaining image would be the same. But it wouldn't, because contrary to the model where light bounces off the object, then off the mirror with angle of incidence equal to angle of reflection, and into your eye, is incorrect. It's actually the constructive interference of the multiple simultaneous paths photons take that results in the image you see.
It's true that much of the time they do cancel out in our every day experience, which is why classical models of the world lasted so long. Yet the discrepancies are there if you're paying attention. And more importantly, once you've worked out a theory to explain those discrepancies and figured out how the effects end up canceling most of the time, you can figure out how to eliminate the destructive interference and keep only the constructive.
What this means is that if gravitational and inertial mass is different at a quantum level, and we can figure out the mechanics behind when and why they differ, then we could quite possibly discover a way to eliminate cases of destructive interference and see the effect at the macro scale just like we do with many other quantum phenomenon.
But I ain't saying that'll be the case. The research itself is exciting enough to me. Just so you know, it's usually the press who goes "ZOMG quantum teleportation that's like STAR TREK!" and gets your hopes up. Yeah it sucks that they do that, but they think that nobody will be interested in their article if they write about what the scientists are actually claiming.
And pardon me, but it sounds like you're saying they're right.:/
If our science students can't find jobs, the problem is a GLUT of science education.
Congratulations, you managed to deduce your way to the problem stated in the summary: Not enough jobs for too many graduates, ergo we are ending up with fewer graduates.
This is fine, until someone else puts a permanent base there.
It should be us who put a permanent base there.
Constellation is not the first step in the process of doing so. It does nothing to help us towards that goal.
The R&D into automated factories and robotic assembly, in-space refuel, cheaper propulsion systems once outside earth's atmosphere, and so on are the first necessary steps.
We should not go back to the moon for a stupid boots-and-flag mission. We already did that; the flag and bootprints are still there. People should not be going to the moon until robots have already built a habitat for them there.
Of actually developing new technologies that will truly expand humankind's frontiers beyond what they've ever been before.
Rather than rehashing a 40-year-old accomplishment, just to prove we still can.
Of course we still can. If we wanted to devote resources to it like we did the first time, we could make it happen. But with no Cold War competition to make putting some boot prints on the moon seem like an urgent need, nobody wants to spend that kind of money, even those who hate social programs as much as you.
That's why Constellation was crippling NASA while still failing to meet its already mediocre goals.
Instead, focusing on basic R&D while leaving the heavy lifting (literally) to private industry, NASA will actually be able to accomplish things. Actual new things, things that will make future trips to the moon cheaper and more than just a boots-and-flag mission. Frankly even if NASA's budget was Apollo-sized I would rather they pour it into these projects.
The future of NASA hasn't looked brighter in decades. It's always darkest before the dawn, and recently it was very dark, but that was caused by the very project the loss of which people are lamenting!
Not quite. In all modern reactor designs the fission stops spontaneously if the temperature gets too high.
No, the fission does not stop, ever, until all the fissile material is gone. Uranium undergoes spontaneous fission because it is unstable. You can control the rate of fission by controlling the amount of neutrons released in fission that will be captured by the uranium and cause more fission events, but you cannot stop the fission.
That, and only that, was my point. Uranium is naturally fissile. Hydrogen isotopes do not fuse under normal circumstances, and it requires a great deal of effort and control to force it to fuse. It's an inherent difference between the two types of nuclear reaction.
I'm well aware that safe reactor designs can be made, which is why as I said I'm pro-fission. But to the extent fission reactors can be made safe (and the 'can' is why you need regulators to make sure people are using best practices), fusion reactors are safe in the same sense, only vastly moreso because the reaction will stop much quicker.
You and basically every other respondent should learn the difference between the reaction being sub-critical due to a negative temperature coefficient, and the reaction actually stopping. It does not stop. The rate decreases as temperature increases so you don't get a runaway reaction, but it does not stop.
Also you should stop assuming that when someone points out that fissile materials undergo fission naturally, they're saying the reactors will have meltdowns (I'm surprised nobody decided to "inform" me that meltdows != Hollywood nuclear explosions).
I'm talking about an inherent difference between fission and fusion. In fission, you can design a reactor such that the reaction will slow if it gets out of control. In fusion, you cannot design a rector such that this doesn't occur, because the reaction actually stops as soon as anything goes wrong.
The reaction stops all by itself. If you're going to argue against nuclear fission, please base your arguments against current designs.
No it doesn't. Good fission reactor designs can be made safe by creating a negative coefficient between temperature and reaction rate. Yet the fission reaction continues because uranium is unstable. Which is why bad and dangerous reactor designs are possible. You need regulation to make sure people aren't building them.
A bad fusion reactor on the other hand simply doesn't produce any power, because the reaction actually stops. That's why regulation isn't a concern.
We should be building fission reactors -- oh look, I'm arguing for nuclear fission! -- but the difference between them and fusion reactors (aside from one existing) is a simple fact that it does no good to ignore.
Now, it's debatable whether the US government is capable of offering such regulation, especially after the BP disaster. But nevertheless, asking for regulation does not make them "anti-nuclear".
Okay, but the problem is that if you think you need successful regulation to prevent a BP spill-like disaster, then you still kinda don't understand fusion power.
The problem with the BP spill is that once a problem occurred and oil leaked, the oil does what it naturally does and continues to be pushed out by the pressure underground. The problem with fission reactors is that when the control rods fail, the enriched uranium does what it naturally does and continues to release neutrons in a chain reaction.
When a fusion reactor fails, the fusion stops on a timescale that to human eyes would be called "instantly". The whole reason nuclear fusion is such a hard thing to make into a power source is that it takes so much damn effort to make the source material actually fuse because that is not it's natural state until you get enough of it in one place that you call it a star. It's inherent in the nature of the power source that it can't go out of control. "Out of control" means "stopped".
I'm an environmentalist, but also pro-fission. Yet I do think concerns about regulation of fission reactors are valid. How worried am I about regulation of fusion reactors? None worried.
The relief wells will kill it without possibility of reuse.
Exactly, making that part of the whole "why they aren't using explosives" conspiracy rather retarded.
At least that's the plan. As for explosions, they my have unexpected side effects that could conceivably make things worse.
Seriously. You know people watch too many action movies when they think every engineering challenge can be solved with a big enough explosion, and more difficult problems simply require bigger explosions. Nukes are the biggest kaboom, ergo they are the perfect solution!
Also, you should be wondering if it was so successful, why have they not attempted it again since the early 80s? Was there some undisclosed event that could make it undesirable?
The Russians? Not fully disclose any and all failures? Surely you jest!
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, there's all kinds of reasons why an alien wouldn't have announced their presence to us in a completely unmissable and unmistakable way. For instance they simply don't care to. Maybe they already know that life in the galaxy is common, and find our particular instance of it a curiosity but noting more, and like you said they see us as basically clever chimps. Maybe they have some kind of Prime Directive and actually try not to make themselves known. Maybe they've studied us to see if we're worth talking to, and decided we're assholes. :P
On another note, one way in which I've heard people argue for the "we'd have already seen them if they were there!" point of view in spite of the difficulties of a universe with a speed limit is by bringing up Von Neuman probes (basically self-replicating probes). Which leads me to suggest that we need another term in the Drake Equation to account for this case: the probability that an advanced civilization not only invents Von Neuman probes, but actually decides to unleash a self-replicating machine to spread across the galaxy for longer than their civilization and likely species will even exist.
It reminds me of Star Control II, where one of the species does exactly that. If you don't deal with the problem, pretty soon you're up to your neck in probes. But hey, that would be the rest of the galaxy's problem! :P
How silly of me to ignore profit when mentioning profit.
You ignored profit when you said "To say it was a failure compared to the XBox, while the XBox was a success with the same number of sales is pretty silly", and yes it was silly to say that and then a moment later point out yourself why that statement was wrong.
But I'm glad we agree the premise that equal sales means equal success was foolish and wrong. :)
It sounds like you are saying that with Nintendo, they had "strategic goals", and therefor they were a failure because they didn't meet those goals, while Microsoft only had "hopes", so the fact that they made less profit and roughly equal sales means they were still more successful.
LOL, no. They both had hopes and strategic goals. Nintendo hoped they'd be as successful as with the SNES. MS hoped they'd be able to dominate the market on their first try. Neither of their hopes and dreams came to pass. Nintendo had a goal of increasing their market share and turning around the trend started with N64. They failed. Microsoft had a goal of having a solid presence in the market to establish themselves as a serious player for the next generation. They succeeded.
First of all, I never said I was neutral. I consider myself fair, but not neutral. However, by this logic, anytime any comparison is made with any metric, someone is "measuring dicks"? Does that mean that you have been measuring the dick of expectations vs the dick of goals?
LOL, no, that's not the logic. The logic is that you're taking something complex and subjective like "success" or "manliness", and reducing it down to an "objective" but stupid metric like "unit sales" or "dick length". Sure it's convenient in that they're directly comparable across the different products and companies, but that's exactly why it is stupid, because it discards all context and the very different definitions of "success" based on the goals of the two companies.
That's not what it's all about anyway. The whole point of my contribution to this discussion was merely to say that Nintendo got about the same market share in the home console market as Microsoft, so it is a misconception of most people is that it did far worse than Microsoft (which was mostly only true in North America).
That's nice; if people thought the GC sold far less than Xbox, they were simply wrong.
My contribution to this discussion is to say that there are very valid perspectives -- particularly, the perspective of Nintendo itself -- where getting equal market share as the brand new entrant into the console business equals doing far worse. Talking about "success" simply in terms of unit sales is overly simplistic whether your figures are right or wrong.
Secondly, the articles I have seen tend to imply that planets are much more plentiful than has been thought, and this is a big problem, because even the post pessimistic attempts at the Drake equation have the galaxy teaming with life. If planets are even more plentiful than previously assumed, then that should equate to even more life, so where is everybody?
The galaxy could be teeming with life, it could even be teeming with intelligent life, and yet we could be completely oblivious to the fact.
This is only a shocking and serious problem if you had assumed that intelligent life would inevitably discover a way around the speed of light.
Think about it -- we're are only just able to identify the existence of planets around other stars, not even ones like ours that are at a comfortable distance from their stars, and still only in a tiny area of the sky. And we can do little more than identify their period and their mass. Actual spectroscopy of exoplanets is at an even more infant stage than simply finding them. The rocky planets we already know of could be teeming with life, and we just have no way of knowing yet!
So the only way we'd know about some advanced civilization is if they were spamming the galaxy with transmissions and probes, and the wave front/probe passed us during the narrow window during which we've been looking. And look at us -- the amount of radiation we as a civilization are blasting out into space has vastly reduced as we've figured out how to be more efficient, or replaced broadcast transmission with fiber-optic cables and so on. So the brief period of time in which we've been looking would have to coincide (accounting for distance) with the brief period in which they were broadcasting enough for us to see. And they have to have been close enough for us to be able to see. And we have to have noticed.
Hell, how do we know that an alien probe, launched thousands of years ago, didn't pass through our solar system just last year?
I'm not about to get all despondent about the Drake Equation based on the logic of "Well why haven't we seen alien life already?" Let's wait until we can do enough research on our own to get even the sketchiest idea of how common life itself is before we start getting worried about why aliens haven't said hello, okay?
"Fanboy dick-waving contest"? I call them like I see them, good and bad, in all the camps.
Ah say, that was a joke, son. Cus see, it's only in this context of trying to rank the consoles from best to worst that you can look just at unit sales and say who won and who tied for second. It's the equivalent of offering to end two guy's dick-waving contest by busting out a ruler; you might be a neutral observer, but you're still measuring dicks.
To say it was a failure compared to the XBox, while the XBox was a success with the same number of sales is pretty silly. It didn't live up to some nebulous hopes or expectations?
Silly is using unit sales as the sole metric of success, and concluding that two consoles with equal sales cannot have differing levels of success.
And what you call "hopes" or "expectations", businesses call "goals", "plans", and "strategy". And they can be very concrete, and so can failure relative to those goals.
So, it's not about how many you sell, how much profit you make selling them, but about whether you wish you had done better? In capitalism, EVERYONE always wishes they had done better, even if they are #1.
It's about that and much more. You've already brought up yourself why unit sales as the sole metric of success is foolish, because it ignores profit (I worked for a company like that; it wasn't pretty). You certainly can't say the two were equally successful from that standpoint, can you? So let's abandon the flawed premise that equal sales equals equal success, okay? :)
But there's even more than just profits, too. See, in capitalism, you can think about more than immediate net margins and unit sales. You can lose money on a product to gain a strategic advantage. You can subsidize the cost using profits from other areas. You can position a product not to overtake a competitor's, but simply to deny them the massive profit taking they'd have if they had the only product in that market. That and more, just to position yourself for greater profits in the future. Can a product with the same unit sales and profit margin be a success or failure based on those strategic goals? Absolutely!
In all honesty, the GameCube just got trounced the previous generation, and I don't recall anyone outside the big 'N' really expecting them to take the crown from Sony.
Which is funny because it's from Nintendo's perspective that I'm saying GC was less successful. I don't think they expected to overtake Sony after releasing the GC a year later. I guarantee you their strategy involved increasing their market share, not losing it! GC made a profit because it was designed to be able to in just about any scenario. Yet its performance was poor compared to the strategic goals of the company.
GC was supposed to be the beginning of the turnaround for Nintendo's home console business, not proof that Nintendo needed to shake up their strategy even more. The N64 generation was supposed to be the low point. It wasn't. Ergo, GC was a failure.
Microsoft, on the other hand, I believe did have high hopes of not just entering the market, but hitting it big.
Yes, but those truly were hopes. In reality, their strategy was obviously one of buying their way into the market, earning credibility in the market, and setting themselves up to become a major player in the next (current) generation. They were not even trying to earn a profit. Whether the long-term strategy pans out or not is still an open question, but did the Xbox succeed in achieving it's step in the plan? Without a doubt.
Same unit sales. Different strategies. Different success relative to those strategies.
Objectivity doesn't mean acting like different things aren't different, or ignoring context. :)
"Elementary particle" has always meant that it was a particle that was not composed of smaller ones. It was fundamental, in a sense. As far as we know, electrons and photons are examples of elementary particles; they aren't composed of any smaller stuff. We used to think protons and neutrons were elementary, but now we know they're made of quarks. We think quarks are elementary.
In between those two periods, collider experiments had shown over four hundred different particles.
So, compared to when we only knew about electrons, protons, and neutrons, and didn't know about photons or the other particles that replace fields as creating the forces, the current theory has quite a few particles. Turns out the universe is more complicated than that, but hey, the modern theory is in its own way more elegant than a giant particle zoo, eh?
Actually I think Nintendo did sell at a loss some of the time. Shortly after Zelda Wind Waker was released, Nintendo offered an awesome deal where you could get the Gamecube and WW for just $100. So in essence I paid $50 for the game and $50 for the Cube. I think Nintendo must have lost a lot of cash on that deal.
They lost hypothetical money that they could have made by selling Wind Waker for full price, but I'd bet my right testicle^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H to play the next Zelda Wii game that bundle had a positive net margin. Maybe it didn't defray the development cost of Wind Waker as quickly, but it surely added a positive value to the bottom line.
If the Cube was a failure then so too was the Box. Vice-versa if the Box was not a failure, then neither was the Cube.
In an absolute sense (of fanboy dick-waving contests), for sure. As far as relative to their expectations, that's more debatable, because they were different. In one sense, Nintendo made money ergo GC was a success, but they surely had higher hopes than to limp along and stay in the game. Microsoft, on the other hand, was simply trying to buy their way into the game and from that standpoint Xbox was a smashing success even though it lost them billions of dollars. I doubt they expected it to go otherwise.
So despite having similar unit sales, I don't think it's inaccurate to say that the Gamecube was a failure and the Xbox a success.
From the standpoint of a GC owner, on the other hand, I say GC was pretty successful. :)
It's funny because the games he talks about being made for adults are actually mostly made for teenagers, and it's a very adolescent mentality to consider yourself too good for "kids stuff".
But I would feel a little silly as a grown man playing a Mario or Kirby game.
Heh.
There was a brief period where I felt insecure about playing video games with bright colors and only cartoon violence.
Then I grew up.
If the girls are upset there isn't something to be a part of, perhaps they should go rally more girls to form a troop
Yeah, and they can call it the "Girl Scouts".
In any case, this is dumb. Hey genius, the point of Ladies' Night is to attract more ladies, which if you're a straight guy who's going to bars should obviously be viewed as a "good thing". The reason they still charge you a cover is because they don't need to lure you in with no cover charge -- that's what the ladies are for!
And if you're not straight, then that's what "Gay and Lesbian Night" is for. Is that going to be ruled discriminatory next?
The reactor housing for a Tokomak style reactor is tons and tons of radioactive material, which first must be stored in place inside the reactor vessel for 12-20 years until it becomes 'cool' enough to handle and stored for tens to thousands of years before it completely 'cools' and is safe. (Because *that* is what 'highly radioactive' means.)
No, not even close. Highly radioactive means undergoes many fission reactions means it has a short half life means it's gone much sooner. Stuff that lasts tens of thousands of years is less radioactive because that's what that means. Byproducts of fission of uranium and other heavy elements can include a wide variety of long and short lived isotopes. The much lighter reactor isn't anything like that, and the induced radiation is nothing like traditional nuclear waste. It's not "highly radioactive" in the sense you meant, which is "super scary forever".
Also, "tons and tons" is actually rather small for a whole reactor compared to the annual tonnage of waste from other kinds. Storing it for the short period necessary is seriously trivial.
In the same way that getting shot with a .22 is 'trivial' compared to getting shot with a .45.
More like a mother's irrational fear of whiffle ball bats compared to getting shot with a .45, and she's not even sure what a whiffle ball is, but it sounds scaaaaary!
Yeah I was just going by the comparison to the government preventing the BP spill, and the obvious analogy to a regulatory failure involving nuclear power and some disaster. I admit I have not heard anyone .
But seriously, how great an extent of concern are you talking about? Tritium which we can already deal with safely, and the reactor housing which is a tiny scrap of highly radioactive waste which only needs to be stored safely for a short time (cus that's what 'highly radioactive' means)?
That's all great. Yes we have to make sure that's done right. It just seems very trivial in comparison to the real regulatory issues surrounding every other kind of large-scale power plant.
That argument is called DIRECT, as in Directly derived from the shuttle stack. It is an evolution design, which was originally proposed in 1978 and always kept on the back burner should the need arize for heavy lift, which a lunar mission all but demands.
If we must do an Apollo 11 remake, then I'd much rather we go with Direct than Constellation. Ares re-uses a lot of the shuttle too, but it was more ambitious about trying to actually improve more than the silly orbiter-stuck-on-the-side problem. Hypothetically good for technical advancement, practically bad for its schedule and cost.
Personally, though, I'd hold off for a while until it doesn't necessitate a single huge rocket to lift everything needed to get to the moon and back in one launch. I think it makes a lot more sense to have a fuel depot waiting in earth orbit for separate stages of a vehicle to the moon to be lifted, assembled, fueled, and sent off to the moon without having to carry all that extra propellant. If we do it right, we'd have already used the same mechanism to put supplies and a return vessel at the landing site, waiting for them. That way, the astronauts can actually stay on the moon for a while, rather than staying for only as long as the tiny leftover fraction of the mass budget of the moon mission that was allocated for actually being on the moon. Ya know? Make it worth our while? Doesn't that sound more interesting?
Without the urgency of going back to the moon quickly and thus the need for a shuttle-class lifter, the big advantage of Direct isn't there anymore. And without that, a change of technology looks more appealing. Falcon IX, for example, just demonstrated an ability that Direct could never do: aborting a launch once all engines were fired. You hit 'go' on an SRB and detect some abnormal behavior, tough shit. For that and other reasons, I would prefer to go with a liquid-fueled system if possible. And it seems pretty possible since it's already launched with an amazingly low price tag compared to any government-developed system.
Don't get me wrong, I've been impressed with Direct since I first heard about it. I just want to know what programs we'll have to give up to do it, and a good reason that we really need something bigger than a Delta IV so badly to justify giving them up.
If Congress wants to mandate Direct but also give NASA extra budget just for that, then I say go for it!
Hehe. Cute.
Okay, your problem then is with exaggerated science reporting then, which occasionally involves complicity with the scientist but much more often pisses them off quite a bit. It's not science-minded people who are doing it, it's journalism hype-sells minded people.
It's a problem, I agree, and the fact that it ultimately turns you off to science articles is a bummer. I'm really not sure how we can communicate to journalists that covering science realistically, even if it seems obscure and unexciting, is better than trying to dress it up as something it isn't and making people disappointed when they find out.
Now I was sure to qualify those things. Now I was sure to qualify those things. These things generally do cancel out by the time you get to our level.
That's still not true. Weird quantum effects have directly observable effects at our level, as in at the level of your eyeballs looking at them.
Diffraction gratings, those novelty license plate holders that seem to shimmer with color at oblique angles, lasers, holograms, are all things that are direct consequences of really bizarre and nonsensical quantum effects not canceling. Hell even the behavior of everyday mirrors and lenses can only be properly understood (as in accurately predicted) using quantum physics. Like, imagine you're looking at yourself in the mirror with one eye closed, and you're looking at some small object in the mirror. You probably think that the mirror image is kinda like a photo, where you could cut out all of the mirror except the part in which you see the object, and that the remaining image would be the same. But it wouldn't, because contrary to the model where light bounces off the object, then off the mirror with angle of incidence equal to angle of reflection, and into your eye, is incorrect. It's actually the constructive interference of the multiple simultaneous paths photons take that results in the image you see.
It's true that much of the time they do cancel out in our every day experience, which is why classical models of the world lasted so long. Yet the discrepancies are there if you're paying attention. And more importantly, once you've worked out a theory to explain those discrepancies and figured out how the effects end up canceling most of the time, you can figure out how to eliminate the destructive interference and keep only the constructive.
What this means is that if gravitational and inertial mass is different at a quantum level, and we can figure out the mechanics behind when and why they differ, then we could quite possibly discover a way to eliminate cases of destructive interference and see the effect at the macro scale just like we do with many other quantum phenomenon.
But I ain't saying that'll be the case. The research itself is exciting enough to me. Just so you know, it's usually the press who goes "ZOMG quantum teleportation that's like STAR TREK!" and gets your hopes up. Yeah it sucks that they do that, but they think that nobody will be interested in their article if they write about what the scientists are actually claiming.
And pardon me, but it sounds like you're saying they're right. :/
If our science students can't find jobs, the problem is a GLUT of science education.
Congratulations, you managed to deduce your way to the problem stated in the summary: Not enough jobs for too many graduates, ergo we are ending up with fewer graduates.
It's the lack of jobs.
That's the problem.
Lack of jobs involving science.
This is fine, until someone else puts a permanent base there.
It should be us who put a permanent base there.
Constellation is not the first step in the process of doing so. It does nothing to help us towards that goal.
The R&D into automated factories and robotic assembly, in-space refuel, cheaper propulsion systems once outside earth's atmosphere, and so on are the first necessary steps.
We should not go back to the moon for a stupid boots-and-flag mission. We already did that; the flag and bootprints are still there. People should not be going to the moon until robots have already built a habitat for them there.
Of actually developing new technologies that will truly expand humankind's frontiers beyond what they've ever been before.
Rather than rehashing a 40-year-old accomplishment, just to prove we still can.
Of course we still can. If we wanted to devote resources to it like we did the first time, we could make it happen. But with no Cold War competition to make putting some boot prints on the moon seem like an urgent need, nobody wants to spend that kind of money, even those who hate social programs as much as you.
That's why Constellation was crippling NASA while still failing to meet its already mediocre goals.
Instead, focusing on basic R&D while leaving the heavy lifting (literally) to private industry, NASA will actually be able to accomplish things. Actual new things, things that will make future trips to the moon cheaper and more than just a boots-and-flag mission. Frankly even if NASA's budget was Apollo-sized I would rather they pour it into these projects.
The future of NASA hasn't looked brighter in decades. It's always darkest before the dawn, and recently it was very dark, but that was caused by the very project the loss of which people are lamenting!
Not quite. In all modern reactor designs the fission stops spontaneously if the temperature gets too high.
No, the fission does not stop, ever, until all the fissile material is gone. Uranium undergoes spontaneous fission because it is unstable. You can control the rate of fission by controlling the amount of neutrons released in fission that will be captured by the uranium and cause more fission events, but you cannot stop the fission.
That, and only that, was my point. Uranium is naturally fissile. Hydrogen isotopes do not fuse under normal circumstances, and it requires a great deal of effort and control to force it to fuse. It's an inherent difference between the two types of nuclear reaction.
I'm well aware that safe reactor designs can be made, which is why as I said I'm pro-fission. But to the extent fission reactors can be made safe (and the 'can' is why you need regulators to make sure people are using best practices), fusion reactors are safe in the same sense, only vastly moreso because the reaction will stop much quicker.
You and basically every other respondent should learn the difference between the reaction being sub-critical due to a negative temperature coefficient, and the reaction actually stopping. It does not stop. The rate decreases as temperature increases so you don't get a runaway reaction, but it does not stop.
Also you should stop assuming that when someone points out that fissile materials undergo fission naturally, they're saying the reactors will have meltdowns (I'm surprised nobody decided to "inform" me that meltdows != Hollywood nuclear explosions).
I'm talking about an inherent difference between fission and fusion. In fission, you can design a reactor such that the reaction will slow if it gets out of control. In fusion, you cannot design a rector such that this doesn't occur, because the reaction actually stops as soon as anything goes wrong.
The reaction stops all by itself. If you're going to argue against nuclear fission, please base your arguments against current designs.
No it doesn't. Good fission reactor designs can be made safe by creating a negative coefficient between temperature and reaction rate. Yet the fission reaction continues because uranium is unstable. Which is why bad and dangerous reactor designs are possible. You need regulation to make sure people aren't building them.
A bad fusion reactor on the other hand simply doesn't produce any power, because the reaction actually stops. That's why regulation isn't a concern.
We should be building fission reactors -- oh look, I'm arguing for nuclear fission! -- but the difference between them and fusion reactors (aside from one existing) is a simple fact that it does no good to ignore.
Now, it's debatable whether the US government is capable of offering such regulation, especially after the BP disaster. But nevertheless, asking for regulation does not make them "anti-nuclear".
Okay, but the problem is that if you think you need successful regulation to prevent a BP spill-like disaster, then you still kinda don't understand fusion power.
The problem with the BP spill is that once a problem occurred and oil leaked, the oil does what it naturally does and continues to be pushed out by the pressure underground. The problem with fission reactors is that when the control rods fail, the enriched uranium does what it naturally does and continues to release neutrons in a chain reaction.
When a fusion reactor fails, the fusion stops on a timescale that to human eyes would be called "instantly". The whole reason nuclear fusion is such a hard thing to make into a power source is that it takes so much damn effort to make the source material actually fuse because that is not it's natural state until you get enough of it in one place that you call it a star. It's inherent in the nature of the power source that it can't go out of control. "Out of control" means "stopped".
I'm an environmentalist, but also pro-fission. Yet I do think concerns about regulation of fission reactors are valid. How worried am I about regulation of fusion reactors? None worried.
The relief wells will kill it without possibility of reuse.
Exactly, making that part of the whole "why they aren't using explosives" conspiracy rather retarded.
At least that's the plan. As for explosions, they my have unexpected side effects that could conceivably make things worse.
Seriously. You know people watch too many action movies when they think every engineering challenge can be solved with a big enough explosion, and more difficult problems simply require bigger explosions. Nukes are the biggest kaboom, ergo they are the perfect solution!
Also, you should be wondering if it was so successful, why have they not attempted it again since the early 80s? Was there some undisclosed event that could make it undesirable?
The Russians? Not fully disclose any and all failures? Surely you jest!
You need about 75 Jupiter masses to get sustainable stellar fusion, ignoring questions of composition.
They were suggesting that it's amazing that our images clearly show it.
Not that it happens.