it might be that the profitable part is also the sale of confidential informations... Mafia dons in italy are usually subject to a special prison regime, a.k.a 41-bis , that entails more restrictions on Mafia members than on ordinary prisoners. Collaborating with the authorities gets these people off the hook. As to the ship, the contents of the cargo is still undetermined. What I find particularly galling is that it's widely referred to as "radioactive waste" which implies very weak controls on the sources of said waste. Most of the radioactive wastes by volume comes from hospitals and such, and on paper is very strictly controlled.
.
I have saved more carbon output by insulating my house properly and installing a modern condensing boiler than I could ever save from switching to energy efficient light bulbs by several orders of magnitude. If every house in the UK was brought up to the same standard of insulation as mine is now we could easily meet our Kyoto targets doing just that.
Right you are. It might just be another framing , in that since the price of a LED bulb is small, while not insignificant, our minds are not up to grasping the math involved istinctively.
Mind you, as soon as you sit down in front of a spreadsheet, numbers take on a life of their own.
1. one Led lamp = 40$
2. one incandescent lamp = 1 $
3. reported increase in efficiency="That's 40 times longer than incandescent bulbs. "[source: TFA]
4. result= par for the course.
essentially, the bet is that electricity costs would go up sequentially faster than LED bulb replacement costs, over 20 years. my first computer 20 years ago was an 8088, and I ooohed and aaaaahed at the latest advance: Color screen. So no, i do not think I am up to predicting these kind of things over those time frames.
One more thing irks me tough: spectrum distribution still favour incandescent lamps over LED or high efficiency lamps,i.e. the perceived "quality" of light is still better in incandescent lamps.
So what's to prevent someone's hydrophones from picking this up and realizing that there's a submarine within audible range of the communication?
maybe the fact that it will not be used from the submarine platform. The navy has been investigating the use of blue-green lasers for one way comms to submarines for ages, both to improve bandwidth and to reduce the footprint of the signal. I do not see this as a communication tool, in my view it's an high tech Sonar Ping generator. with enough computing power and using part of the bandwidth to signal the precise location of the laser hits, it might turn into a bistatic active sonar, in which the aircraft/ helo/ UAV platform generates the sound, and the submarine processes the echoes to locate/identify/track/engage the target.
Put yourself in the enemy commander's mind: this small bangs are only comms, or am I being tracked right now? in any case, they have a clue that some other sub is in the vicinity.
It's not anything to do with the placebo, it's that the drugs that are being developed currently don't do anything.
Did you read about how some of the older drugs wouldn't have made it past the trials today?
I think this might have to do with the FDA's mailed fist choking off anything to do with 'snake oil' for years - we've raised generations that expect medications to be safe and effective, and therefore they are, by golly(placebo effect).
I love it. Gullibility by design (TM), the new prescription. The disturbing part of the equation is that price is part of the effect, so I'd expect that a 50$ pill could have a bigger placebo effect than a 5$ pill of identical composition, provided that the patients know it.
Having read the article, I found two things particularly interesting:
1. the author did not put any version of MS internet explorer in the Arena. Now that's understandable, all windows system come with IE installed, so the rationale, as I see it , is that there's no point in benchmarking a program that no one has to choose on its own. I only wonder what will happen if Europe goes forward in forcing MS to sell OEM copies of Win7 without IE installed.
2. the whole "speed" thingy is rather moot in my view. I've been using Firefox for some time now, and I DO appreciate the fact that fewer resources are used, even at the expense of a couple of seconds of starting and/or loading time. After all, it's not a multiplayer game where milliseconds seem to count.
I'm pretty sick of people who won't listen to science. A judge? There no precidence afaict, wtf? Is there one single scientist who isn't employed by greenhouse gas emmitters who thinks global warming isn't real, and that we aren't contributing?
Strangely enough, I am still convinced that the evidence behind the causes and effects of global warming is much less than watertight. For one thing, there is abviously no chance to have a double blind experiment, since we only have one earth. Second, on the timescales we are arguing about, we are trying to extrapolate judgements from a very small data set. The EPA has squashed some internal opinions that went against the common belief, as has been reported on Slashdot (sorry, I could not find the link).
I am also concerned about the amount of public money being thrown about. the issue of wether what I would call "exotic renewable energy", like solar or wind, is likely to become viable in the future is obscured by the massive amount of incentive schemes, fiscal offsets etc. that cloud the issue. finding an honest assesment of energy costs per Kwh before incentive schemes is very difficult, and to my knowledge none of these calculations ever made the manistream media. Having said that, i'd be content with the judge saying "not enough data", and relaunching the issue in the public domain.
They've already paid that - it's called a connection fee...
They're also already getting charged more for the power they do use, since their usage is lower, they get onto a higher cost per KWH rate.
It's more than double dipping if they try to charge more, and too damned bad if their connection fee didn't cover future (I'm not using much of your power anymore).
I think that all these fracas is only the start, if only because the economics of electricity generation and management are much misunderstood and unloved.
First off: NO ONE pays the actual cost of connecting his house to the grid. as a utility, the electricity provider acts under an "universal service" obligation, by which the cost of connecting a ranch house outside the town is subsidized by the guy living down the block from the final voltage transformer. having said that, if every house consumes more or less the same amount of electricity, the system pays itself out of the consumption fee, NOT the connection fee, which in any system I know is low compared to actual cost. Now the more houses reduce the actual consumption, the more the system gets unbalanced, and somebody has to put up more money. Since the body of taxpayers are subsidizing solar to a fare-thee-well, I do not think that grousing would be a viable response on their part. The utility is simply getting back 10 cents on every dollar of tax money that the solar producer gets. eventually, the politicians will step in and make up the difference, since the additional cost is paltry in comparison to the existing body of subsidies.
Encrypt the entire drive with TrueCrypt or something. Use a strong cipher and a very strong passphrase. The laptop is as good as bricked to anyone who gets it.
Use a passphrase that's easy and quick to type. Easy to type doesn't mean it has to be a bad password. My guess is that nobody cares about your documents, unless you work for some government or big company, or unless you're a celebrity. So an 8 or 10 character long password is good enough, and nobody will even attempt to break it.
in that case, I think that a passphrase is in order. Luckily, truecrypt does not limit the password to 8 characters, so any geeky book title will do.
this type of propulsion is already in service in the UK. in this particular case, the Daring class destroyers also use a combined gas and steam turbine to generate the electric power required for propulsion, thereby improving fuel efficiency. the interest in electric propulsion is mostly due to other factors, tough: lower heat/sound signature, higher efficiency at slow speed etc.
James Michener, the writer, was also on the NASA advisory board, and in his fiction Space, there are a few pages on the conflict in the planning stage between the Earth orbit faction, in which the base module would orbit Earth and the lander would go to the Moon surface and back, and the Lunar orbit faction, whose design was more efficient and eventually won. One of the characters says that by doing that the US had foregone the availability of a space station. It is interesting that the fallback plan goes in that direction, because it could be relatively easy to have the cargo craft double as a lorry to the ISS.
both Nokia and Siemens are very big companies with a big involvement in dealing with governments, So I do not think that they were not aware of the ONLY possible use of what they were selling at the time. It further defies my credulity that their respective governments were not aware as well. So, I think that these senators are pushing the wrong button, because they should pressure the governments not to allow that; these kind of companies are so dependent on government contracts that they'd never do anything on open confrontation with their politicians.
There are some things I'd like to explore myself. But I expect it would be something along the lines of tactile variations and relative spherical dimensions, you know - more touchy-feely than pure academic.
What was the size of that grant? How many copies of King magazine can I buy with that?
Yeah, nothing like putting the finger on the problem.
I have a physics degree (and PhD), but I don't consider myself more knowledgable on non-physics topics than someone who doesn't.
If there's one thing I did learn though, is that it's damn hard to go from a set of data to a sound conclusion. *Much* harder than non-scientists think. The unscientific ways of thinking of most of the "sceptic" (though "dogmatic" would be more appropriate) crowd are painfully obvious. Fortunately, my field isn't climate science, so most of the anti-global warming points only leave me banging my head against the wall relatively gently, rather than at skull-crushing speed.
Right you are, but being one of the old guys around, I still think that politicians and the general public should follow Occam's Razor Mind you, very few things take the joy out of life as looking at facts, so there are few takers, on both sides of the fence, who are working to improve climate model while accepting the intrinsic problem that to analyze a long term scale effect you need long term data... everybody would clamor for the head of the climatologist who should come forth and say:" look, we'll be able to answer all your questions in about 250 years."
As a personal user I wouldn't mind if Microsoft decided to pull an Apple and cut off support for all of their legacy stuff. I don't really use much legacy software anymore, and am just about done with PC gaming. If it would streamline the OS and remove some bugs, I'm all for it and would applaud them instead of criticize.
However I can see why businesses aren't happy: many rely on old custom legacy systems. They have websites setup for IE 6, rely on legacy era (ie DOS) applications for obscure equipment, some Sales admin/entry software that can only work on certain environments, etc. And hardware, they don't just have to worry about workstations but external devices (like scales, sensors, lab equipment, etc) that might only work with a DOS-based program through an old COM port.
In short, businesses have a LOT of specialized software that they need to keep running and cannot replace and thus want things to stay status-quo, and I can't really blame them. If upgrading their PCs and OS means spending hundreds of thousands (if not millions) on new software and hardware, you can imagine that they'd like to sit just where they are.
Microsoft will never do that. not ever. If you abandon the legacy systems, many corporate users will have to start afresh on many things which are important to day to day operations, BUT do NOT increase service or revenue. It would be a big economic hit. Given that, many users, especially the big ones, might nag MS about EULAs,consider going open source, consider buying only equipment from vendors guaranteeing the "open sourcing" of the code in the event of MS jettisoning the operating system, etc.
The current space program could be, more accurately, described as "knowledge for knowledge's sake". Compare NASA's funding level now, to when we had a more concrete goal.
the fact that two parties are engaged in something does not change the nature of the activity involved. and anyway, the real space race involved building solid-fueled minutemen missiles,, not Saturns.
But I think the question is why doesn't the government fund research outside of war?
Because it's pretty easy to get people to agree to spend the necessary money, if it might save their, or their children's, lives. And, there's really no other situation where that threat is quite as real, as during war.
Global warming might end up killing us all, but that's a diffuse and abstract concept. The guy pointing nuclear missiles at your city, or launching mortars at your kid is much more concrete.
I think that you guys are missing a big point: the Apollo or Manhattan projects were, to some extent, "useless" research. Building a nuclear bomb had nothing to do with cheap electricity, new materials, and such. The Apollo project was knowledge for knowledge's sake, and yet many of the things done on that project are now familiar to us in everyday life.
this does not seem to have big practical use as of now, if only for the fact that if you do not have access to a screen, for reading what you wrote or sketched, it seems to me unusable. On the other hand, if you are at your desk, the mouse does its job quite well, thank you.
Having said that, it looks like a Wiimote for everyone, and the possibilities are mind boggling. Think of Smart houses, in which by moving your mobile you can raise or lower the air conditioning and such.
Do the ethics or morality of killing people change because of the tool?
probably not, but in the politician's eyes, dying makes it different. If you are not taking casualties, you are much more likely to get involved in "the continuation of politics by other means". Then again, the very big groundswell against the robots' ability to do mass killing is also encouraging risk taking. after all, if no friendly gets killed, and no enemy gets killed either, the appetite for using force is greatly enhanced. Do remember that WWI came after a big period of relatively small and contained wars, mostly engaging professional [read: expendable] soldiers, and either quickly won or lost on the battlefield or contained by diplomats. When WWI came about, none of the parties involved was thinking that it could have such consequences, re "the first world war" by John Keegan, or on a lighter note, Blackadder's explanation of how WWI started.
In Here there's a video of an experimental Raytheon exoskeleton for the US army. It seems that we're a long way from seeing something like "starship troopers" especially because there's a conspicous umbilical cord in the Video, probably for the external power source and computer controls. While Moore's law can cope with computing requirements, there's nothing similar in power production, and especially in power density. Novody would want a battery powered exoskeleton with a 10 minutes charge.
"Yep. I reckon an American pilot in a Boeing could have just flipped a switch and fixed all that. They'd all be relaxing with cold ones as we speak."
Airbus have a rep for not letting the pilot control the plane or giving back control at the last and worst possible moment. But we don't know if the Brazilian crash has anything to do with this.
I'd like to see a computer know to, and successfully land in the Hudson though!
The argument about "Fly by wire" vs "manual control" may be inconsistent with the fact that the US has the longest serving fly by wire aircraft in his inventory now, and the article states "[...]The airplane was constantly on the verge of flipping up or down totally out of control,. and this tendency was being constantly caught and corrected by the fly-by-wire control system so quickly that neither the pilot nor an outside observer could know anything was happening. If the control system were to fail, the aircraft would instantly disintegrate; however, this has never happened." Granted, military aircrafts are very different from large commercial aircrafts, but I suspect that it will be very difficult to pin down the cause of the accident on computers per se. After all, Fly by wire is 70's technology, incorporated in aircrafts built to withstand EMP pulses from nuclear explosions....
on the other hand, it could be a fault in the software logic.
It's not an irrelevant factor. Without any password changes, you are guaranteed to get the password eventually. If you do change passwords, you are trying to hit a moving target. You might get it, you might not, and even if you do, you don't have long before you have to run the attack again.
that implies that the password hacker has a mean to ascertain if a password he tried was a "near miss", i.e."congratulations! you got X characters right but on the wrong place, and Y characters right and in the right place. Try again? Y/N". BTW, Mastermind anyone? Here in italy the security model approved by the law is : 8 char password, change every 90 days. I agree that changing passwords, or even forcing user to use password that are totally different from those previously used, is futile if you do not allow user to pick passphrases instead of password; they'll stick a post-it to the screen. Fixed lenght is a big help to password crackers.
Most software vendors tough use it as such, meaning that a password must be * exactly 8 characters *. Given that, I'll give you my recipe for password generation:
1. look around you, and find something that has a 6 character name; 2. Add the suffix "01" at the end, chenging it to "02" when 90 days have elapsed; 3. ???????? 4. Profit!!
"When cooled and squeezed very hard, the soft metallic element europium turns into a superconductor... which, if harnessed, could make for more efficient energy transfer."
After factoring in the cost of compressing and cooling a big long cable... In other words, not any time soon.
Superconductivity can be harnessed for efficient energy transfer. It's a boilerplate that is attached to any research associated with superconductivity to remind the general public whe they're spending millions of dollars on things which aren't available as direct dividends to their lives.
....hmmmmm, let's see: do you have gym shoes with velcro closure? that was an invention for the apollo program, to avoid having things fly in the capsule. I expect someone at the time said the same thing: "what's the use of sending people to the moon anyway?"
As to High temperature superconducting, the key temperature is the boiling point ofliquid nitrogen, which is relatively cheap and inert. AFAIK, superconducting power cables are in use now.
Slashdot Mirror
It's highly profitable, that's for sure.
it might be that the profitable part is also the sale of confidential informations... Mafia dons in italy are usually subject to a special prison regime, a.k.a 41-bis , that entails more restrictions on Mafia members than on ordinary prisoners. Collaborating with the authorities gets these people off the hook.
As to the ship, the contents of the cargo is still undetermined. What I find particularly galling is that it's widely referred to as "radioactive waste" which implies very weak controls on the sources of said waste. Most of the radioactive wastes by volume comes from hospitals and such, and on paper is very strictly controlled. .
I have saved more carbon output by insulating my house properly and installing a modern condensing boiler than I could ever save from switching to energy efficient light bulbs by several orders of magnitude. If every house in the UK was brought up to the same standard of insulation as mine is now we could easily meet our Kyoto targets doing just that.
Right you are. It might just be another framing , in that since the price of a LED bulb is small, while not insignificant, our minds are not up to grasping the math involved istinctively.
Mind you, as soon as you sit down in front of a spreadsheet, numbers take on a life of their own.
1. one Led lamp = 40$
2. one incandescent lamp = 1 $
3. reported increase in efficiency="That's 40 times longer than incandescent bulbs. "[source: TFA]
4. result= par for the course.
essentially, the bet is that electricity costs would go up sequentially faster than LED bulb replacement costs, over 20 years. my first computer 20 years ago was an 8088, and I ooohed and aaaaahed at the latest advance: Color screen. So no, i do not think I am up to predicting these kind of things over those time frames.
One more thing irks me tough: spectrum distribution still favour incandescent lamps over LED or high efficiency lamps,i.e. the perceived "quality" of light is still better in incandescent lamps.
.....We can at last import energy from kazhakistan!!!!!!
So what's to prevent someone's hydrophones from picking this up and realizing that there's a submarine within audible range of the communication?
maybe the fact that it will not be used from the submarine platform. The navy has been investigating the use of blue-green lasers for one way comms to submarines for ages, both to improve bandwidth and to reduce the footprint of the signal. I do not see this as a communication tool, in my view it's an high tech Sonar Ping generator.
with enough computing power and using part of the bandwidth to signal the precise location of the laser hits, it might turn into a bistatic active sonar, in which the aircraft/ helo/ UAV platform generates the sound, and the submarine processes the echoes to locate/identify/track/engage the target.
Put yourself in the enemy commander's mind: this small bangs are only comms, or am I being tracked right now? in any case, they have a clue that some other sub is in the vicinity.
It's not anything to do with the placebo, it's that the drugs that are being developed currently don't do anything.
Did you read about how some of the older drugs wouldn't have made it past the trials today?
I think this might have to do with the FDA's mailed fist choking off anything to do with 'snake oil' for years - we've raised generations that expect medications to be safe and effective, and therefore they are, by golly(placebo effect).
I love it. Gullibility by design (TM), the new prescription. The disturbing part of the equation is that price is part of the effect, so I'd expect that a 50$ pill could have a bigger placebo effect than a 5$ pill of identical composition, provided that the patients know it.
Having read the article, I found two things particularly interesting:
1. the author did not put any version of MS internet explorer in the Arena. Now that's understandable, all windows system come with IE installed, so the rationale, as I see it , is that there's no point in benchmarking a program that no one has to choose on its own. I only wonder what will happen if Europe goes forward in forcing MS to sell OEM copies of Win7 without IE installed.
2. the whole "speed" thingy is rather moot in my view. I've been using Firefox for some time now, and I DO appreciate the fact that fewer resources are used, even at the expense of a couple of seconds of starting and/or loading time. After all, it's not a multiplayer game where milliseconds seem to count.
I'm pretty sick of people who won't listen to science. A judge? There no precidence afaict, wtf? Is there one single scientist who isn't employed by greenhouse gas emmitters who thinks global warming isn't real, and that we aren't contributing?
Strangely enough, I am still convinced that the evidence behind the causes and effects of global warming is much less than watertight.
For one thing, there is abviously no chance to have a double blind experiment, since we only have one earth. Second, on the timescales we are arguing about, we are trying to extrapolate judgements from a very small data set. The EPA has squashed some internal opinions that went against the common belief, as has been reported on Slashdot (sorry, I could not find the link).
I am also concerned about the amount of public money being thrown about. the issue of wether what I would call "exotic renewable energy", like solar or wind, is likely to become viable in the future is obscured by the massive amount of incentive schemes, fiscal offsets etc. that cloud the issue. finding an honest assesment of energy costs per Kwh before incentive schemes is very difficult, and to my knowledge none of these calculations ever made the manistream media.
Having said that, i'd be content with the judge saying "not enough data", and relaunching the issue in the public domain.
post a big sign saying "# Manolo Blahnik # Richard Tyler # Jimmy Choo # Dolce & Gabbana ALL 50% OFF!!!!!!!", then see what happens.
They've already paid that - it's called a connection fee...
They're also already getting charged more for the power they do use, since their usage is lower, they get onto a higher cost per KWH rate.
It's more than double dipping if they try to charge more, and too damned bad if their connection fee didn't cover future (I'm not using much of your power anymore).
I think that all these fracas is only the start, if only because the economics of electricity generation and management are much misunderstood and unloved.
First off: NO ONE pays the actual cost of connecting his house to the grid. as a utility, the electricity provider acts under an "universal service" obligation, by which the cost of connecting a ranch house outside the town is subsidized by the guy living down the block from the final voltage transformer. having said that, if every house consumes more or less the same amount of electricity, the system pays itself out of the consumption fee, NOT the connection fee, which in any system I know is low compared to actual cost.
Now the more houses reduce the actual consumption, the more the system gets unbalanced, and somebody has to put up more money. Since the body of taxpayers are subsidizing solar to a fare-thee-well, I do not think that grousing would be a viable response on their part. The utility is simply getting back 10 cents on every dollar of tax money that the solar producer gets. eventually, the politicians will step in and make up the difference, since the additional cost is paltry in comparison to the existing body of subsidies.
Encrypt the entire drive with TrueCrypt or something. Use a strong cipher and a very strong passphrase. The laptop is as good as bricked to anyone who gets it.
Use a passphrase that's easy and quick to type. Easy to type doesn't mean it has to be a bad password. My guess is that nobody cares about your documents, unless you work for some government or big company, or unless you're a celebrity. So an 8 or 10 character long password is good enough, and nobody will even attempt to break it.
in that case, I think that a passphrase is in order. Luckily, truecrypt does not limit the password to 8 characters, so any geeky book title will do.
this type of propulsion is already in service in the UK.
in this particular case, the Daring class destroyers also use a combined gas and steam turbine to generate the electric power required for propulsion, thereby improving fuel efficiency.
the interest in electric propulsion is mostly due to other factors, tough: lower heat/sound signature, higher efficiency at slow speed etc.
James Michener, the writer, was also on the NASA advisory board, and in his fiction Space, there are a few pages on the conflict in the planning stage between the Earth orbit faction, in which the base module would orbit Earth and the lander would go to the Moon surface and back, and the Lunar orbit faction, whose design was more efficient and eventually won.
One of the characters says that by doing that the US had foregone the availability of a space station. It is interesting that the fallback plan goes in that direction, because it could be relatively easy to have the cargo craft double as a lorry to the ISS.
both Nokia and Siemens are very big companies with a big involvement in dealing with governments, So I do not think that they were not aware of the ONLY possible use of what they were selling at the time. It further defies my credulity that their respective governments were not aware as well.
So, I think that these senators are pushing the wrong button, because they should pressure the governments not to allow that; these kind of companies are so dependent on government contracts that they'd never do anything on open confrontation with their politicians.
Explore cultural attitudes?
There are some things I'd like to explore myself. But I expect it would be something along the lines of tactile variations and relative spherical dimensions, you know - more touchy-feely than pure academic.
What was the size of that grant? How many copies of King magazine can I buy with that?
Yeah, nothing like putting the finger on the problem.
I have a physics degree (and PhD), but I don't consider myself more knowledgable on non-physics topics than someone who doesn't.
If there's one thing I did learn though, is that it's damn hard to go from a set of data to a sound conclusion. *Much* harder than non-scientists think. The unscientific ways of thinking of most of the "sceptic" (though "dogmatic" would be more appropriate) crowd are painfully obvious. Fortunately, my field isn't climate science, so most of the anti-global warming points only leave me banging my head against the wall relatively gently, rather than at skull-crushing speed.
Right you are, but being one of the old guys around, I still think that politicians and the general public should follow Occam's Razor
Mind you, very few things take the joy out of life as looking at facts, so there are few takers, on both sides of the fence, who are working to improve climate model while accepting the intrinsic problem that to analyze a long term scale effect you need long term data... everybody would clamor for the head of the climatologist who should come forth and say:" look, we'll be able to answer all your questions in about 250 years."
[...]
As a personal user I wouldn't mind if Microsoft decided to pull an Apple and cut off support for all of their legacy stuff. I don't really use much legacy software anymore, and am just about done with PC gaming. If it would streamline the OS and remove some bugs, I'm all for it and would applaud them instead of criticize.
However I can see why businesses aren't happy: many rely on old custom legacy systems. They have websites setup for IE 6, rely on legacy era (ie DOS) applications for obscure equipment, some Sales admin/entry software that can only work on certain environments, etc. And hardware, they don't just have to worry about workstations but external devices (like scales, sensors, lab equipment, etc) that might only work with a DOS-based program through an old COM port.
In short, businesses have a LOT of specialized software that they need to keep running and cannot replace and thus want things to stay status-quo, and I can't really blame them. If upgrading their PCs and OS means spending hundreds of thousands (if not millions) on new software and hardware, you can imagine that they'd like to sit just where they are.
Microsoft will never do that. not ever.
If you abandon the legacy systems, many corporate users will have to start afresh on many things which are important to day to day operations, BUT do NOT increase service or revenue. It would be a big economic hit.
Given that, many users, especially the big ones, might nag MS about EULAs,consider going open source, consider buying only equipment from vendors guaranteeing the "open sourcing" of the code in the event of MS jettisoning the operating system, etc.
The Apollo project was knowledge for knowledge's sake [...]
I guess you never heard of the Space Race.
The current space program could be, more accurately, described as "knowledge for knowledge's sake". Compare NASA's funding level now, to when we had a more concrete goal.
the fact that two parties are engaged in something does not change the nature of the activity involved. and anyway, the real space race involved building solid-fueled minutemen missiles,, not Saturns.
But I think the question is why doesn't the government fund research outside of war?
Because it's pretty easy to get people to agree to spend the necessary money, if it might save their, or their children's, lives. And, there's really no other situation where that threat is quite as real, as during war.
Global warming might end up killing us all, but that's a diffuse and abstract concept. The guy pointing nuclear missiles at your city, or launching mortars at your kid is much more concrete.
I think that you guys are missing a big point: the Apollo or Manhattan projects were, to some extent, "useless" research.
Building a nuclear bomb had nothing to do with cheap electricity, new materials, and such. The Apollo project was knowledge for knowledge's sake, and yet many of the things done on that project are now familiar to us in everyday life.
this does not seem to have big practical use as of now, if only for the fact that if you do not have access to a screen, for reading what you wrote or sketched, it seems to me unusable. On the other hand, if you are at your desk, the mouse does its job quite well, thank you.
Having said that, it looks like a Wiimote for everyone, and the possibilities are mind boggling. Think of Smart houses, in which by moving your mobile you can raise or lower the air conditioning and such.
Do the ethics or morality of killing people change because of the tool?
probably not, but in the politician's eyes, dying makes it different. If you are not taking casualties, you are much more likely to get involved in "the continuation of politics by other means".
Then again, the very big groundswell against the robots' ability to do mass killing is also encouraging risk taking. after all, if no friendly gets killed, and no enemy gets killed either, the appetite for using force is greatly enhanced. Do remember that WWI came after a big period of relatively small and contained wars, mostly engaging professional [read: expendable] soldiers, and either quickly won or lost on the battlefield or contained by diplomats. When WWI came about, none of the parties involved was thinking that it could have such consequences, re "the first world war" by John Keegan, or on a lighter note, Blackadder's explanation of how WWI started.
In Here there's a video of an experimental Raytheon exoskeleton for the US army. It seems that we're a long way from seeing something like "starship troopers" especially because there's a conspicous umbilical cord in the Video, probably for the external power source and computer controls. While Moore's law can cope with computing requirements, there's nothing similar in power production, and especially in power density.
Novody would want a battery powered exoskeleton with a 10 minutes charge.
"Yep. I reckon an American pilot in a Boeing could have just flipped a switch and fixed all that. They'd all be relaxing with cold ones as we speak."
Airbus have a rep for not letting the pilot control the plane or giving back control at the last and worst possible moment. But we don't know if the Brazilian crash has anything to do with this.
I'd like to see a computer know to, and successfully land in the Hudson though!
The argument about "Fly by wire" vs "manual control" may be inconsistent with the fact that the US has the longest serving fly by wire aircraft in his inventory now, and the article states "[...]The airplane was constantly on the verge of flipping up or down totally out of control,. and this tendency was being constantly caught and corrected by the fly-by-wire control system so quickly that neither the pilot nor an outside observer could know anything was happening. If the control system were to fail, the aircraft would instantly disintegrate; however, this has never happened."
Granted, military aircrafts are very different from large commercial aircrafts, but I suspect that it will be very difficult to pin down the cause of the accident on computers per se. After all, Fly by wire is 70's technology, incorporated in aircrafts built to withstand EMP pulses from nuclear explosions....
on the other hand, it could be a fault in the software logic.
It's not an irrelevant factor. Without any password changes, you are guaranteed to get the password eventually. If you do change passwords, you are trying to hit a moving target. You might get it, you might not, and even if you do, you don't have long before you have to run the attack again.
that implies that the password hacker has a mean to ascertain if a password he tried was a "near miss", i.e."congratulations! you got X characters right but on the wrong place, and Y characters right and in the right place. Try again? Y/N". BTW, Mastermind anyone?
Here in italy the security model approved by the law is : 8 char password, change every 90 days. I agree that changing passwords, or even forcing user to use password that are totally different from those previously used, is futile if you do not allow user to pick passphrases instead of password; they'll stick a post-it to the screen.
Fixed lenght is a big help to password crackers. Most software vendors tough use it as such, meaning that a password must be * exactly 8 characters *. Given that, I'll give you my recipe for password generation:
1. look around you, and find something that has a 6 character name;
2. Add the suffix "01" at the end, chenging it to "02" when 90 days have elapsed;
3. ????????
4. Profit!!
"When cooled and squeezed very hard, the soft metallic element europium turns into a superconductor ... which, if harnessed, could make for more efficient energy transfer."
After factoring in the cost of compressing and cooling a big long cable... In other words, not any time soon.
Superconductivity can be harnessed for efficient energy transfer. It's a boilerplate that is attached to any research associated with superconductivity to remind the general public whe they're spending millions of dollars on things which aren't available as direct dividends to their lives.
....hmmmmm, let's see: do you have gym shoes with velcro closure? that was an invention for the apollo program, to avoid having things fly in the capsule. I expect someone at the time said the same thing: "what's the use of sending people to the moon anyway?"
As to High temperature superconducting, the key temperature is the boiling point ofliquid nitrogen, which is relatively cheap and inert. AFAIK, superconducting power cables are in use now.
Every Chelsea player knows that the most important skill is knowing when and how to fall.
There, that should cover just about every nationality besides English.
That's nothing. Here in Italy, Inter played whole swathes of the season with exactly one (1) Italian player in the field.