Because they kept on overlapping on the right side of the video. If you've got good Karma, disable the ads!
So how much is this (and the feedstock)? When will it be available? Actually the second question is probably moot, it's so cool it'll probably be sold out for a long time (at least until it can it self replicate to make more!:)
First Man thought the earth was the center of the (universe) the solar system
Then he thought the sun was at the center of the (universe) the galaxy
Then he thought the galaxy was at the center of the universe
Then he thought planets were rare and that earth sized planets even rarer. Not so! (it looks like)
Not only is Man no longer at the center of the universe in any figurative sense, metaphorically he is even less so. Solid matter (let alone organic compounds) are a vanishingly small component of what makes up the universe with Dark energy, Dark matter and matter in superheated plasma, black holes or cold interstellar clouds making up the rest.
All that remains is to (hopefully) find that Life is not rare then Intelligent Life is not rare and that Technological civilizations are not rare.
But hey, even if so, at least we've got Paris Hilton I mean Kim Kardashian!
As a pre-diabetic myself I'm wondering if this will need to be FDA approved?
I mean aren't active yeast cultures okay in non-FDA approved yogurt? Since these are (I presume) non-pathogenic bacteria, couldn't they also be made available over the counter in pill form (packaged as dried spores?).
I guess you'd still need a prescription for the anti-biotics to clear out the existing flora in your gut though.
"Finally, it speaks to the size and age of the U.S. space arsenal that the Air Force felt it had no choice but to rescue AEHF-1 instead of replace it with a back-up spacecraft. 'The asset inventory is getting so tight that they spent months limping the heap to its proper orbit,' the insider lamented."
Look guys, before you throw away (replace with a backup) a $2 Billion satellite, I damn well hope you try some pretty heroic measures. Those are my tax dollars in (the wrong) orbit! So I'm very glad you didn't have (to use) a backup satellite.
Anyway, does anyone know if the low power thrusters which were eventually used to put this satellite into the correct orbit used the same fuel tank as the clogged thruster? Otherwise 1) I'm very surprised they had enough fuel to get there and 2) they would probably have very little left to last the lifetime of the mission. So let's hope that all the thrusters used a central (hydrazine?) fuel tank and there's plenty left.
Space is hard and while the U.S. program has certainly had its ups and downs at least it hasn't seen the near total collapse as what happened to the Ruskies. They had quite a bad year last year and that blogger walking around their factory just exposed their problems more. If Mars is going to be a "Red" planet it will because of China not Russia.
I hate to bring up something that can only bring up more cost and delay to the exploration and colonization of Mars (and other worlds) but we REALLY need to figure out human biological response to differing gravity levels. Extended stays in zero (micro-gravity) environments have shown that a vigorous regimen of physical activity is necessary to keep astronauts healthy. Will the same be true on the Moon (1/6 earth gravity)? On Mars (1/3 earth gravity)? Will they need to do the same strenuous (and tedious) daily exercises for the same length of time?
Eventually, of course, it'll be "vital" to know if women can conceive, gestate, bear and raise infants in these varying gee environments (at least until they're old enough to exercise by themselves). But that can wait.
This seems to be perhaps the ONE thing that the ISS could do that cannot be possibly done on earth. Perform long term studies of humans in environments where the gravity is 0ISS1. Of course that would involve a big (very expensive) centrifuge or at very least a smaller one capable of using small animals. I understand that there was a (small) one planned but it was cut. Considering the long term importance of this, I would say that they should spend the big bucks and put in a big one (large enough so that coriolus effects wouldn't be noticeable) and study it thoroughly. Since this (human biology) is truly an international issue (rather than one nation planting a flag), I would hope it would get international support. Pinwheels in the sky a la 2001 here we come!
Of course if the results are bad (humans, especially reproducing females, are found to be exquisitely tuned to one gee) we may need to wait until genetic engineering can adapt us to our environment rather than the other way around. In that case I've got a whole host of other "improvements" I'd like to see (radiation tolerance, hibernation capability, vacuum safe bodies...)
So what's to keep someone from doing the exact same thing but attaching grenades to the secondary drones?
As the summary claims, it would be undetectable by radar and, if put into a dive on the final approach, would be traveling too fast for guards armed only with assault rifles to reliably SEE them and shoot them down (gliders also have no heat signature). Seems like a weapon that could be used even against heavily guarded outdoor events like the swearing in(?) ceremony of the U.S. president, the Kremlin military parade or the Pope delivering Mass. Or how about a Justin Bieber concert.
A while ago I thought that maybe a (very) high altitude balloon dropping guided tungsten darts (darts not rods fom God) would be a poor man's ballistic weapon but this might be even better because of a greater cross-range capability.
If the Arctic ocean is going to ice free by 2050, how can the air be "dry" in that region of the world? Isn't the air humidified by the ocean?
I mean, I guess that temperatures are lower on Antarctica (because the land keeps the warming currents far from the interior?). The ice never melts (hasn't for millions of years!) and the air stays drier (i guess though even ice sublimates some water vapor). Still it should be a lot drier right?
I know, I know it is the "M" stands for Magnetic not "Mass" anomaly but maybe they'll find something that indicates an extraterrestrial (intelligence) origin!
Unless, of course, Cameron's just getting the same App as the Orangutans. If the App is made to run Great Britain remotely, would they be better off if they let the Orangutans run it? Would they even know the difference?
Well, I WISH I could be there for the end. Seriously, they've gotta have the best seats in the house for a global (but not universe wide) apocalypse. I wonder if NASA (or the Ruskies) have arranged for at least one of the astronauts to be a young fertile female. That way, the earth can be repopulated!
Anyway, since I'm going to be earthbound the bar "Apocalypse" in Saigon is good place to meet some (very!) bad girls for my last night on earth. Or perhaps even more dangerous would be the "Heart of Darkness" (the Joseph Conrad book which Apocalypse Now was based on) bar in Phnom Penh. Its close proximity to the "Killing Fields" (4 million dead Cambodians) would mean you'd be very quickly overrun if the apocalypse included the undead coming back.
Let's assume that the Aliens DID leave us some thing on the moon for us to find and it's pretty small and non-obvious from a distance (like a giant set of intersecting lines at the center of a huge circle). Don't ask me why, maybe they were lazy or they didn't want something that could be discovered by just looking through a telescope on earth.
Aside from the ideas previously expressed using some sort of technological marker (radioactivity, isotopes or, as in "2001" a magnetic anomaly) where would they put this artifact? Here are some proposed locations:
Assuming that the moon is tidally locked to earth for a LONG time, at the point closest to earth (or on the far side, furthest from earth).
If the moon is not tidally locked for a sufficient period but its orbital axis IS stable, how about at the pole(s)?
Any other ideas? Leading/trailing edge of the moon? In the center of a big (biggest) crater? Tallest mountain or deepest canyon?
Hell, why not just put some stuff in a Trojan or Lagrangian point.
Sort of the same reasoning is at play here, we are looking for the "keys" on the moon not because that's the best way to find SETI but because well it's "easy" (just crowd source it) and cheap (as long as we've already got hi-res photos of much of the moons surface).
It should not be viewed as a replacement for other more serious efforts (that will actually cost money).
The pictures in TFA show that he (and his friends and poor wife) show that he just built the detectors.
While very impressive, he (obviously) didn't build the complete ring. Even at 1:50 scale it would be a mile in circumference. Now that's a lot of LEGOs!
Hmm... Is 1/3 market share much to cheer (or write) about? I guess "Year of the Android" tablet makes a better headline than "Android tablets will make unspectacular gains in 2012".
Then again maybe 1/3 market share IS a spectacular gain for Android in the tablet market.
"So here's (link at bottom) a surveillance telescope that DARPA is proposing to provide CONTINUOUS (that's what's new) real-time coverage of any spot on earth at a resolution of 3m (the example given was to detect Scud launches). Of course in order to do this, it would need to be in geo-sync orbit which necessitates a whopping big lens, in this case 66 FEET ACROSS!
So how come I've never heard about this "membrane optics" technology before? (From the picture it appears to be able to make the "lens" extremely thin and presumably lightweight. No word on how it could be folded or rolled up). I notice that it doesn't seem to have a sun-shade or cowling, doesn't this ruin the contrast? Most importantly, if it was pointed UP (towards deep space) rather than down (towards the ground) could it be used for astronomy? A 66 foot space telescope could be able to directly image earthlike worlds!
What's also interesting is that they claim that, at this resolution it would be able to monitor an area of 100km x 100km. That implies a gigapixel detector (not new but the largest I've ever heard being placed in space). Anyway, at (only!) $500 million, it's gotta be in the same price range as the latest "keyhole" spy satellites. Write your congressman today!"
News flash: NASA will announce something new (presumably more results) from the Kepler planet hunting spacecraft today.
Back to my post: if you can get it to about (I think) 500 AU, it gets to the focal point of the Sun's gravitational lens. The Sun then becomes a GIANT (as in millions of kilometers across) lens, allowing you to see at unbelievable resolutions even at distances of light years. I read somewhere it was at meters(?!) per light year, I can't believe that is true but even at KILOmeters per light year it would be incredible.
Targeted at the right stars it would answer, definitively once and for all if there is life around other stars. (That's if it returns a positive of course).
Of course this would require a whole host of expensive technologies. Gravity assist alone wouldn't be enough to get it out there within a single lifetime so something like ion-drives would be needed. Maybe a solar sail could be used on the outward bound leg but since it would have to SLOW DOWN and STOP you'd still need an ion-drive or something (magnetic sail?). The power requirements for the drive would dwarf that of the requirements of the Voyager probes for example so maybe a real nuclear reactor would be required. Finally some much more powerful communications sub-system would be required to fully take advantage of such an amazing probe; maybe lasers or "relay" spacecraft.
But hey, for only a couple billion dollars we can do some amazing things!
Like in Arthur C. Clarke's story "Sunrise" (I think), a spaceship gets very close to the sun by remaining in the shadow of a sun grazing asteroid.
Probably wouldn't be a good idea to use a comet because of all the outgassing (in addition to being dangerous and literally blowing you away, it would mess up the measurements). Also, a quickly rotating asteroid wouldn't be good as the surface would be re-radiating the heat directly below you. If we could find a sufficiently large asteroid (for it's heat capacity) that wasn't rotating at all (could we stop one?) we could bury the ship inside and get really really close to the sun, much closer than even the upcoming Solar Probe to be launched in 2018 (I think).
If no such asteroid exists that's in the proper orbit, I guess we could move one. Then again, with that kind of technology we could probably just turn on our metaphasic shields and go.
Could humans, with their supremely evolved optic nerve/brain, outperform any A.I. that Google might have now or in the near future? Might it even be cheaper? (Just how much does difficult A.I. cost in the cloud anyway?). Maybe even if A.I. is much cheaper, it would still be useful for using humans for the difficult cases, or as error correction. Best would be for the humans to train the A.I. (and themselves out of a job!)
I always thought this was the only possible reason how the machine intelligences in "The Matrix" could use humans. While they lay in their pods, dreaming their lives away, use the unused portions of thir brains (no, not 90%) to perform tasks that humans are "better" at. Like image recognition or perhaps language. That whole "battery" idea was just stupid.
Then again they should've had their eyeballs plucked out and a connector wired directly to their optic nerve. Kinda would've made making a movie, in which Neo and all the other humans were stumbling around blind, difficult.
Thanks. I guess I should set up an (emergency) twitter account.
Is there a publicly accessible database of all the twitter hashtags? So I'd know which ones to "broadcast" on? (like #takenbypolice or something like that?)
(From the article) So the Intl. Red Cross "bans weapons that cause more than 25% field mortality and 5% hospital mortality". (I assume these are the same guys who came up with the Geneva conventions so maybe there is some enforceability as in a war crimes trial afterwards).
Wow, and I thought all's fair (in love) and war. Doesn't this make every nuke illegal? (the article said this is one of the justifications for banning poison gas). So the concern is that as these drones get better, they may have a lethality approaching 100% making them illegal even if there are zero casualties from collateral damage.
I thought the whole point of weapons was 100% lethality. I guess I never thought about how terrifying such a weapon would be (as if war wasn't terrifying enough). Weapons have gone a long way since the first club wielded by that ape-man in that documentary "2001".
Other than e-mail, what is the best way to get your message across (probably text only) to the largest number of people?
Some sort of newsgroup, bulletin board? Or is it twitter? (But then you need to have a following right? I don't know, I don't tweet).
Heaven forbid that we (in the democratic west) ever face this problem but maybe while traveling we might face a situation where just getting a few characters out of info could mean a world of difference. I'm reminded of the time when that Israeli scientist who blew the cover on their nuclear program was caught. As he was being transported via a van in front of a bunch of photographers, he pressed his palm up to the glass where, clearly legible, was a short message (I think it said where he had been kidnapped). I think there was another short message sent by a journalist right when he was being taken in by the Egyptian police (a long time ago) which helped keep him from "disappearing".
Hope that never, ever happens to me. Maybe having a tiny USB modem should be part of my travel kit.
Even if their story is true, that they jammed the communications to the drone and then spoofed the GPS so it made a landing where they wanted it, at least it didn't shoot at us. (Not so good would be the intact capture of stealth technology. Oh well).
Hopefully that incident will have made our military technologists MUCH more careful about security/jamming and ways our systems can be compromised. As we deploy systems much closer in reality to the T-1000 Terminator (sans human "skin") having them turn on us would probably be the worst of all possible outcomes.
... for his administration making the policy and (I presume) regulatory changes that have allowed this flowering of commercial space transportation.
We'll never beat the Chinese on labor costs. But I imagine Chinese bureaucracies are as inefficient at American ones so putting their government up against our entrepreneurs gives us a chance.
I'm afraid that S. Korea (and the rest of the world) is between a rock and a hard place on how to del with this despot. I mean forget about the small chance of war between the Koreas; a conflict that while producing a very large number of civilian casualties would be over in a week or two with the modern S. Korea army aided by the U.S. quickly recovering from the initial bombardment and then demolishing the N. Korean army.
No I'm talking about the millions who for two generations have led short stunted lives due to starvation and extreme poverty. They have been deprived of any contact with the outside world and have been controlled to an extent that makes 1984 seem like a liberal's paradise. It's really chilling to watch a documentary such as the one made when western doctors went in to provide free critical surgeries to the populace only to see the ones who lives they've saved turn around and condemn their saviors.
One of the main reasons why I do not invest in China is because of their unbending support of N. Korea. Better (they think) to let millions of Koreans die than to let the Americans have an ally abutting them on their northern border. The other reasons include Tibet, Myanmar, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iran and basically all the non-democratic regimes in Africa who they prop up. I fully realize that the West is fully capable of rank hypocrisy but China doesn't even make a pretense of advancing the human condition.
I don't know what to do more than anyone else. Let this horrendous half-century holocaust continue or wage a war which would result on hundreds of thousands of casualties. I think the only way to decide on a firm course of action would be for S. Korea to have a national referendum as to whether or not to save the people who are literally their brothers. This makes planning surprise attack rather difficult though.
(Is "funnier" a legitimate word or not? I'm afraid I'm not a decider).
Slashdot Mirror
Because they kept on overlapping on the right side of the video. If you've got good Karma, disable the ads!
So how much is this (and the feedstock)? When will it be available? Actually the second question is probably moot, it's so cool it'll probably be sold out for a long time (at least until it can it self replicate to make more! :)
First Man thought the earth was the center of the (universe) the solar system
Then he thought the sun was at the center of the (universe) the galaxy
Then he thought the galaxy was at the center of the universe
Then he thought planets were rare and that earth sized planets even rarer. Not so! (it looks like)
Not only is Man no longer at the center of the universe in any figurative sense, metaphorically he is even less so. Solid matter (let alone organic compounds) are a vanishingly small component of what makes up the universe with Dark energy, Dark matter and matter in superheated plasma, black holes or cold interstellar clouds making up the rest.
All that remains is to (hopefully) find that Life is not rare then Intelligent Life is not rare and that Technological civilizations are not rare.
But hey, even if so, at least we've got Paris Hilton I mean Kim Kardashian!
As a pre-diabetic myself I'm wondering if this will need to be FDA approved?
I mean aren't active yeast cultures okay in non-FDA approved yogurt? Since these are (I presume) non-pathogenic bacteria, couldn't they also be made available over the counter in pill form (packaged as dried spores?).
I guess you'd still need a prescription for the anti-biotics to clear out the existing flora in your gut though.
"Finally, it speaks to the size and age of the U.S. space arsenal that the Air Force felt it had no choice but to rescue AEHF-1 instead of replace it with a back-up spacecraft. 'The asset inventory is getting so tight that they spent months limping the heap to its proper orbit,' the insider lamented."
Look guys, before you throw away (replace with a backup) a $2 Billion satellite, I damn well hope you try some pretty heroic measures. Those are my tax dollars in (the wrong) orbit! So I'm very glad you didn't have (to use) a backup satellite.
Anyway, does anyone know if the low power thrusters which were eventually used to put this satellite into the correct orbit used the same fuel tank as the clogged thruster? Otherwise 1) I'm very surprised they had enough fuel to get there and 2) they would probably have very little left to last the lifetime of the mission. So let's hope that all the thrusters used a central (hydrazine?) fuel tank and there's plenty left.
Space is hard and while the U.S. program has certainly had its ups and downs at least it hasn't seen the near total collapse as what happened to the Ruskies. They had quite a bad year last year and that blogger walking around their factory just exposed their problems more. If Mars is going to be a "Red" planet it will because of China not Russia.
I hate to bring up something that can only bring up more cost and delay to the exploration and colonization of Mars (and other worlds) but we REALLY need to figure out human biological response to differing gravity levels. Extended stays in zero (micro-gravity) environments have shown that a vigorous regimen of physical activity is necessary to keep astronauts healthy. Will the same be true on the Moon (1/6 earth gravity)? On Mars (1/3 earth gravity)? Will they need to do the same strenuous (and tedious) daily exercises for the same length of time?
Eventually, of course, it'll be "vital" to know if women can conceive, gestate, bear and raise infants in these varying gee environments (at least until they're old enough to exercise by themselves). But that can wait.
This seems to be perhaps the ONE thing that the ISS could do that cannot be possibly done on earth. Perform long term studies of humans in environments where the gravity is 0ISS1. Of course that would involve a big (very expensive) centrifuge or at very least a smaller one capable of using small animals. I understand that there was a (small) one planned but it was cut. Considering the long term importance of this, I would say that they should spend the big bucks and put in a big one (large enough so that coriolus effects wouldn't be noticeable) and study it thoroughly. Since this (human biology) is truly an international issue (rather than one nation planting a flag), I would hope it would get international support. Pinwheels in the sky a la 2001 here we come!
Of course if the results are bad (humans, especially reproducing females, are found to be exquisitely tuned to one gee) we may need to wait until genetic engineering can adapt us to our environment rather than the other way around. In that case I've got a whole host of other "improvements" I'd like to see (radiation tolerance, hibernation capability, vacuum safe bodies...)
So what's to keep someone from doing the exact same thing but attaching grenades to the secondary drones?
As the summary claims, it would be undetectable by radar and, if put into a dive on the final approach, would be traveling too fast for guards armed only with assault rifles to reliably SEE them and shoot them down (gliders also have no heat signature). Seems like a weapon that could be used even against heavily guarded outdoor events like the swearing in(?) ceremony of the U.S. president, the Kremlin military parade or the Pope delivering Mass. Or how about a Justin Bieber concert.
A while ago I thought that maybe a (very) high altitude balloon dropping guided tungsten darts (darts not rods fom God) would be a poor man's ballistic weapon but this might be even better because of a greater cross-range capability.
If the Arctic ocean is going to ice free by 2050, how can the air be "dry" in that region of the world? Isn't the air humidified by the ocean?
I mean, I guess that temperatures are lower on Antarctica (because the land keeps the warming currents far from the interior?). The ice never melts (hasn't for millions of years!) and the air stays drier (i guess though even ice sublimates some water vapor). Still it should be a lot drier right?
I know, I know it is the "M" stands for Magnetic not "Mass" anomaly but maybe they'll find something that indicates an extraterrestrial (intelligence) origin!
Apple really has the market sewn up!
Unless, of course, Cameron's just getting the same App as the Orangutans. If the App is made to run Great Britain remotely, would they be better off if they let the Orangutans run it? Would they even know the difference?
Well, I WISH I could be there for the end. Seriously, they've gotta have the best seats in the house for a global (but not universe wide) apocalypse. I wonder if NASA (or the Ruskies) have arranged for at least one of the astronauts to be a young fertile female. That way, the earth can be repopulated!
Anyway, since I'm going to be earthbound the bar "Apocalypse" in Saigon is good place to meet some (very!) bad girls for my last night on earth. Or perhaps even more dangerous would be the "Heart of Darkness" (the Joseph Conrad book which Apocalypse Now was based on) bar in Phnom Penh. Its close proximity to the "Killing Fields" (4 million dead Cambodians) would mean you'd be very quickly overrun if the apocalypse included the undead coming back.
Let's assume that the Aliens DID leave us some thing on the moon for us to find and it's pretty small and non-obvious from a distance (like a giant set of intersecting lines at the center of a huge circle). Don't ask me why, maybe they were lazy or they didn't want something that could be discovered by just looking through a telescope on earth.
Aside from the ideas previously expressed using some sort of technological marker (radioactivity, isotopes or, as in "2001" a magnetic anomaly) where would they put this artifact? Here are some proposed locations:
Assuming that the moon is tidally locked to earth for a LONG time, at the point closest to earth (or on the far side, furthest from earth).
If the moon is not tidally locked for a sufficient period but its orbital axis IS stable, how about at the pole(s)?
Any other ideas? Leading/trailing edge of the moon? In the center of a big (biggest) crater? Tallest mountain or deepest canyon?
Hell, why not just put some stuff in a Trojan or Lagrangian point.
Near the lamppost.
Why?
"Because that's where the light is!"
Sort of the same reasoning is at play here, we are looking for the "keys" on the moon not because that's the best way to find SETI but because well it's "easy" (just crowd source it) and cheap (as long as we've already got hi-res photos of much of the moons surface).
It should not be viewed as a replacement for other more serious efforts (that will actually cost money).
Sorry to be a downer but lets face it, once Samsung or another hardware manufacturer collects your money, you're on your own.
That's a big reason why iOS device owners have ALWAYS ranked their satisfaction much higher than Droid users.
Sorry but that's the truth.
The pictures in TFA show that he (and his friends and poor wife) show that he just built the detectors.
While very impressive, he (obviously) didn't build the complete ring. Even at 1:50 scale it would be a mile in circumference. Now that's a lot of LEGOs!
Hmm... Is 1/3 market share much to cheer (or write) about? I guess "Year of the Android" tablet makes a better headline than "Android tablets will make unspectacular gains in 2012".
Then again maybe 1/3 market share IS a spectacular gain for Android in the tablet market.
"So here's (link at bottom) a surveillance telescope that DARPA is proposing to provide CONTINUOUS (that's what's new) real-time coverage of any spot on earth at a resolution of 3m (the example given was to detect Scud launches). Of course in order to do this, it would need to be in geo-sync orbit which necessitates a whopping big lens, in this case 66 FEET ACROSS!
So how come I've never heard about this "membrane optics" technology before? (From the picture it appears to be able to make the "lens" extremely thin and presumably lightweight. No word on how it could be folded or rolled up). I notice that it doesn't seem to have a sun-shade or cowling, doesn't this ruin the contrast? Most importantly, if it was pointed UP (towards deep space) rather than down (towards the ground) could it be used for astronomy? A 66 foot space telescope could be able to directly image earthlike worlds!
What's also interesting is that they claim that, at this resolution it would be able to monitor an area of 100km x 100km. That implies a gigapixel detector (not new but the largest I've ever heard being placed in space). Anyway, at (only!) $500 million, it's gotta be in the same price range as the latest "keyhole" spy satellites. Write your congressman today!"
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/darpas-spy-telescope-stream-real-time-video-any-spot-earth
News flash: NASA will announce something new (presumably more results) from the Kepler planet hunting spacecraft today.
Back to my post: if you can get it to about (I think) 500 AU, it gets to the focal point of the Sun's gravitational lens. The Sun then becomes a GIANT (as in millions of kilometers across) lens, allowing you to see at unbelievable resolutions even at distances of light years. I read somewhere it was at meters(?!) per light year, I can't believe that is true but even at KILOmeters per light year it would be incredible.
Targeted at the right stars it would answer, definitively once and for all if there is life around other stars. (That's if it returns a positive of course).
Of course this would require a whole host of expensive technologies. Gravity assist alone wouldn't be enough to get it out there within a single lifetime so something like ion-drives would be needed. Maybe a solar sail could be used on the outward bound leg but since it would have to SLOW DOWN and STOP you'd still need an ion-drive or something (magnetic sail?). The power requirements for the drive would dwarf that of the requirements of the Voyager probes for example so maybe a real nuclear reactor would be required. Finally some much more powerful communications sub-system would be required to fully take advantage of such an amazing probe; maybe lasers or "relay" spacecraft.
But hey, for only a couple billion dollars we can do some amazing things!
Like in Arthur C. Clarke's story "Sunrise" (I think), a spaceship gets very close to the sun by remaining in the shadow of a sun grazing asteroid.
Probably wouldn't be a good idea to use a comet because of all the outgassing (in addition to being dangerous and literally blowing you away, it would mess up the measurements). Also, a quickly rotating asteroid wouldn't be good as the surface would be re-radiating the heat directly below you. If we could find a sufficiently large asteroid (for it's heat capacity) that wasn't rotating at all (could we stop one?) we could bury the ship inside and get really really close to the sun, much closer than even the upcoming Solar Probe to be launched in 2018 (I think).
If no such asteroid exists that's in the proper orbit, I guess we could move one. Then again, with that kind of technology we could probably just turn on our metaphasic shields and go.
Could humans, with their supremely evolved optic nerve/brain, outperform any A.I. that Google might have now or in the near future? Might it even be cheaper? (Just how much does difficult A.I. cost in the cloud anyway?). Maybe even if A.I. is much cheaper, it would still be useful for using humans for the difficult cases, or as error correction. Best would be for the humans to train the A.I. (and themselves out of a job!)
I always thought this was the only possible reason how the machine intelligences in "The Matrix" could use humans. While they lay in their pods, dreaming their lives away, use the unused portions of thir brains (no, not 90%) to perform tasks that humans are "better" at. Like image recognition or perhaps language. That whole "battery" idea was just stupid.
Then again they should've had their eyeballs plucked out and a connector wired directly to their optic nerve. Kinda would've made making a movie, in which Neo and all the other humans were stumbling around blind, difficult.
Thanks. I guess I should set up an (emergency) twitter account.
Is there a publicly accessible database of all the twitter hashtags? So I'd know which ones to "broadcast" on? (like #takenbypolice or something like that?)
(From the article) So the Intl. Red Cross "bans weapons that cause more than 25% field mortality and 5% hospital mortality". (I assume these are the same guys who came up with the Geneva conventions so maybe there is some enforceability as in a war crimes trial afterwards).
Wow, and I thought all's fair (in love) and war. Doesn't this make every nuke illegal? (the article said this is one of the justifications for banning poison gas). So the concern is that as these drones get better, they may have a lethality approaching 100% making them illegal even if there are zero casualties from collateral damage.
I thought the whole point of weapons was 100% lethality. I guess I never thought about how terrifying such a weapon would be (as if war wasn't terrifying enough). Weapons have gone a long way since the first club wielded by that ape-man in that documentary "2001".
Other than e-mail, what is the best way to get your message across (probably text only) to the largest number of people?
Some sort of newsgroup, bulletin board? Or is it twitter? (But then you need to have a following right? I don't know, I don't tweet).
Heaven forbid that we (in the democratic west) ever face this problem but maybe while traveling we might face a situation where just getting a few characters out of info could mean a world of difference. I'm reminded of the time when that Israeli scientist who blew the cover on their nuclear program was caught. As he was being transported via a van in front of a bunch of photographers, he pressed his palm up to the glass where, clearly legible, was a short message (I think it said where he had been kidnapped). I think there was another short message sent by a journalist right when he was being taken in by the Egyptian police (a long time ago) which helped keep him from "disappearing".
Hope that never, ever happens to me. Maybe having a tiny USB modem should be part of my travel kit.
Even if their story is true, that they jammed the communications to the drone and then spoofed the GPS so it made a landing where they wanted it, at least it didn't shoot at us. (Not so good would be the intact capture of stealth technology. Oh well).
Hopefully that incident will have made our military technologists MUCH more careful about security/jamming and ways our systems can be compromised. As we deploy systems much closer in reality to the T-1000 Terminator (sans human "skin") having them turn on us would probably be the worst of all possible outcomes.
... for his administration making the policy and (I presume) regulatory changes that have allowed this flowering of commercial space transportation.
We'll never beat the Chinese on labor costs. But I imagine Chinese bureaucracies are as inefficient at American ones so putting their government up against our entrepreneurs gives us a chance.
I'm afraid that S. Korea (and the rest of the world) is between a rock and a hard place on how to del with this despot. I mean forget about the small chance of war between the Koreas; a conflict that while producing a very large number of civilian casualties would be over in a week or two with the modern S. Korea army aided by the U.S. quickly recovering from the initial bombardment and then demolishing the N. Korean army.
No I'm talking about the millions who for two generations have led short stunted lives due to starvation and extreme poverty. They have been deprived of any contact with the outside world and have been controlled to an extent that makes 1984 seem like a liberal's paradise. It's really chilling to watch a documentary such as the one made when western doctors went in to provide free critical surgeries to the populace only to see the ones who lives they've saved turn around and condemn their saviors.
One of the main reasons why I do not invest in China is because of their unbending support of N. Korea. Better (they think) to let millions of Koreans die than to let the Americans have an ally abutting them on their northern border. The other reasons include Tibet, Myanmar, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iran and basically all the non-democratic regimes in Africa who they prop up. I fully realize that the West is fully capable of rank hypocrisy but China doesn't even make a pretense of advancing the human condition.
I don't know what to do more than anyone else. Let this horrendous half-century holocaust continue or wage a war which would result on hundreds of thousands of casualties. I think the only way to decide on a firm course of action would be for S. Korea to have a national referendum as to whether or not to save the people who are literally their brothers. This makes planning surprise attack rather difficult though.
(Is "funnier" a legitimate word or not? I'm afraid I'm not a decider).