Name a specific time era when reliable vehicles weren't available for launch from America. Cheap and/or affordable might not be the proper term to use here, but I can't think of a time period after the Explorer I satellite was actually launched when America didn't have some extremely reliable launch vehicle for putting stuff into orbit.... and that reliability only got better over time. The Delta and Atlas series of rockets in particular have been available that whole time, not to mention other rockets that were developed and used as well.
For that matter, name a year since 1960 when America didn't send something into space. I dare you to find that mystery year. If the key is "reliable", what was unreliable since 1960 yet used for one of those thousands of vehicles sent up by American launch providers?
Refresh my memory... when was it that the ESA launched humans into space, again?
There was the Hermes spacecraft that was going to fly on the Ariane 5 rocket, but it never actually launched. That said, ESA astronauts have flown on both Soyuz and the US Space Shuttle over the years and have definitely gone into space.... and the ESA still maintains an astronaut corps to this day. If it was necessary, the Hermes could be restarted again even though the ESA doesn't see the point of doing that right now.
Because the USA has never been without a "reliable launch vehicle" since the 1960's.
There has been two times in the USA without a reliable crew launch vehicle though. Once after the Saturn V was retired (about 1975-1980 when the Space Shuttle started to fly) and the current hiatus now that the Shuttle has been retired. There was also the return to flight times with the loss of the Challenger and Columbia where crewed launch vehicles didn't exist.
For sending satellites and other stuff into space though, you are spot on: America has never been without some sort of reliable launch vehicle since about the late 1950's. The EELV program is certainly alive and well right now and has been going for a couple decades so far.
Except by NASA with the Space Shuttle and Roscosmos with the Buran spacecraft. Other than those two vehicles, you are correct.
It is the first rocket to land on its end like originally envisioned by Robert A. Heinlein almost 80 years ago though. It will also be a whole lot easier to cycle this lower stage core than it was to cycle the Space Shuttle.
That said I don't think the barge was ever the target landing location.
I think the barge may still be used in the future. This particular launch of the Orbcomm satellites also happens to be the least massive (meaning the smallest payload) ever flown on a Falcon 9 to date with the highest margins on fuel load with a number of enhancements that actually even improved performance for the rocket compared to previous launches. Due to the large margin and reserve fuel available, it made a terrestrial landing possible.
If in the future a customer wants to have more mass flown to orbit, they may still try for a barge landing due to a smaller tolerances, or in extreme situations on a really massive payload a landing may not even be attempted (for extra cost to the customer of course).
As the stage resue is going to cut the cost of these flights in half (give or take some $$$), I would imagine that most of the customers would likely opt in for smaller payloads that permit a terrestrial landing from now on, government launches excepted.
I read that the engines are being designed for about 10-20 flights before performing major overhauls of the engines. That means the intention is to literally take the lower stage core, bring it directly to the integration building like it came fresh from the factory, and put it together with another rocket several times in a row with only a cursory inspection of the engines themselves.... at about the level that jet engines get between flights at a typical major airport for an airliner.
At about 10 flights, they plan on performing a major tear-down and overhaul of the engines, but I don't know how many flights they think can be pushed out of them. I would guess they are hoping at least for about 30-50 flights before the engines are simply retired. It is a far cry from the RS-25 (aka the SSME for the Shuttle program) that had to be rebuilt completely after each flight.
In the meantime, SpaceX plans on sending the rocket to New Mexico for some extensive testing where the engines are going to be pushed to see if the anticipated engineering limits are going to hold true to actual engine performance where the rocket is going to be flown into space (aka above 100 km) as a part of those tests. Mostly straight up and down testing though and not with the intention to put something into orbit. The launch pad in New Mexico has already been built, but SpaceX didn't want to build another test vehicle when they figured they would simply get one of the recovered cores to perform the testing.
Were they changing U-L-A or U-S-A after the landing? Couldn't really understand why they would do either.
How about because the plant happens to be physically located in the USA, specifically Hawthorne, California.
They are showing how American manufacturing from raw metal can still happen in the USA and doesn't need to be outsourced. Literally every bolt, nut, and line of software (minus some Linux kernel code.... and yes the OS for the rocket subsystems is running under Linux) was made in the USA. They are using some commodity integrated circuits likely not made in the USA, but the boards using those chips were made in that same plant too.
If you are critical about patriotism, you can go to hell.
Just wait until a year from now, and that legacy initiative stuff is really going to start pouring out. He still has slightly over a year left in office though, so the hurry isn't quite there at the moment.
An initiative like this is a complete waste of resources and being done in the worst of all possible ways to get the task being done, which is to encourage young children to understand how to program computers. I really predict that whole dozens of children will actually learn anything from this effort, and that will be even hard to point at who was helped.
At best, what might happen is millions of kids will be introduced to something like Scratch or possible receive a Raspberry Pi, and a few very bright kids might on their own start exploring those computers from the ground up to understand those computers. Some really enlightened educators might even go so far as to teach kids some Minecraft redstone wiring concepts (building circuits with NOR-gate technology can be fun) or if funding was to be dumped into a 0x10^c derived game that taught real hacking at the assembly level to blow up virtual spaceships..... perhaps there might be some progress too.
Then again, I don't think the White House wants a generation of kids knowing how to write driver level software, even though that might be something useful for the future of America and the world in general. My expectation of this initiative is really quite low and teaching materials prepared by these groups are going to be as boring as Army training videos from the 1940's.
This is all because Obama and his enforcer at NASA, Charles Bolden, have made any discussion of the moon verboten.
Hardly. Obama simply cancelled the Constellation program and the billions of dollars that were projected (but never appropriated) to be spent on basically re-creating the Apollo "J" missions and perhaps even the "K" missions that might have happened with Apollo missions 18-21 had funding continued back then. Boldly redoing stuff from the past isn't really colonizing.
WE NEED TO COLONIZE BOTH THESE BODIES FOR THE WELFARE OF OUR RACE!
I agree with the notion, but there has yet to be any major presidential candidate besides Newt Gingrich to even suggest colonizing anything off of the Earth. Even Mr. Gingrich was so ridiculed by all of the other candidates (including Obama I might add) that the idea died a very quick death and hasn't been brought up since.
Blame doesn't belong with just Obama here but with literally everybody.
Is there some condition of the Moon that would be different than Earth?
A bunch of die-hard communists want to make everything in space "a common heritage for all mankind" and get rid of the concept of extra-terrestrial real estate ownership. I really think that idea is going to die as a miserable failure, but that won't happen until a bunch of people who aren't government employees show up at places like the Moon or Mars to pull out a gun to defend territory that they don't want others occupying.
These same people think the conditions on the Moon are somehow different in that regard. I think they are full of crap.
The Administrator for Space Transportation actually started in another agency, and was transferred to the FAA about a decade ago when members of Congress were trying to figure out what part of the government ought to be regulating commercial space transportation systems. To be honest, the whole debate over even creating this agency started when Burt Rutan built Space Ship One, and members of Congress were trying to figure out who could give approval for the flight.
This isn't all that new of a thing, other than perhaps people like you have been living under a rock and clueless about how the government works. Every single private commercial space launch (like for telecommunications satellites.... a multi-billion dollar per year industry even today) that launches from the USA has been for years regulated and received licenses for those launches as well as flight worthiness certificates granted for every kind of rocket and other launch vehicle which has flown more than six inches off the ground unteathered (with exceptions for hobby rockets like the stuff Estes makes).
This isn't the FAA stikcing its finger in this pie, they've been involved here for a long, long time already.
That is one of the things where an open source driver can really make a difference. Driver development will be more continuous rather than coming out in little spurts, and some 3rd party testing of anything changed will happen well before it becomes part of the stable release cycle.
I understand your frustration here, and I would agree with your sentiment of waiting perhaps a year or more to see if this experiment is going to actually work out so far as some responsible driver development.
AMD seems desperate to garner any headlines it can these days. How much open source gaming is really around, and how many will think this is going to sway any gaming developer over to AMD solely?
While open source gaming might be a point here, the real market is toward even full commercial software development companies with decent software developers who can really dig into the source code to tweak their games to the full potential on this hardware. Since they don't need to pay licensing fees, the traditional retail game developers will be able to have some of their smaller projects or slightly risky games that may have slightly smaller budgets to use this hardware instead of projects where they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for various kind of hardware development tools.
That makes a huge difference here, and it means there is a real possibility you will see some real game innovation happening rather than the same old boring copies of copies of "safe" games that now are being made by the major studios.
It isn't nearly the small group of developers writing games that go onto Source Forge or Git you should be talking about here. It is everybody else that could be interested in at least supporting some sort of alternative to Nvida, and there are plenty of really solid commercial reasons to be doing just that.
How were these 1,122 selected? The paper is almost deliberately vague on this point, simply choosing to refer to them as "our sample".
It isn't that big of a deal if you are considering the database of stars that have been found with the Kepler Space Telescope, which is by far the largest source of information about exoplanets available at the moment. You say it was data taken from just one telescope, but the science is about as sound as it gets.
Most of your questions can be answered by simply removing your ignorance about this particular instrument, which is 100% dedicated to just analysis of exoplanets and gathering data about them. While not built specifically for this paper, it was built specifically for papers like this that would discuss information about exoplanets.
The amount of data that this telescope is producing is absolutely enormous. Parked in one of the Earth-Sun Lagrangian points (technically in orbit around the Sun in a parallel orbit to the Earth) it is pointed at one specific and well mapped section of the sky (near the constellation Cygnus to avoid having the telescope ever point into the Sun) and has been watching the same set of stars continuously for several years now.
This isn't a bunch of cherry picked stars to make a point, although the stars in and near the constellation Cygnus might have a population characteristic which is different from other groups of stars. That isn't all that likely though based upon sky surveys as these stars seem to be a part of the main population of the Milky Way and no reason to believe that they should be anything unique or special other than that they are the first long term study of this nature.
The Kepler mission is a really interesting thing to find out more information about, and there is definitely something interesting about this paper. Please don't move along! This is some monumental and historic firsts in the history of mankind and very new science being conducted which has never been previously possible to do without space-based telescopes of this nature.
Yes, he is being serious. This is actually done in a variety of ways. Read up on it before being so critical... and Doppler shifting of stars on a periodic frequency is one of the methods used to detect exoplanets (among a great many other techniques).
Perhaps the GP wasn't using the proper terminology, but then it is you that needs to get a life here as posting on Slashdot isn't a doctoral defense forum.
There is also direct imaging of planets, something that doesn't necessarily need to be edge on. While difficult to pick out planets in that fashion, it has happened for several planets already. That at least provides a sort of gut check to verify the statistical soundness of planets found using other methods.
That said, while life might be more common than you think, you might be right about intelligence - at least at our moment in time. I would be very surprised, however, if we were the first intelligent life in this galaxy.
While I would agree with you so far as intelligent life in the universe as a whole, since that is so huge, I wouldn't bet so strongly about some other sentient species being found in the Milky Way. The problem can certainly be described by the Drake equation, but I also argue that there are additional variables which apply.
On top of that, of all of the species of "intelligent species" you might encounter, how many will be tool using spacefaring species as well? On the Earth there are several other primate species with remarkable levels of intelligence along with dolphins, parrots, and elephants. If there is some intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, it may simply be some critters very much like elephants that certainly have families with close relations and deep emotional communications of considerable depth, but still not really care to build a radio for communications off of their planet and doesn't have books or other ways of recording information for multiple generations (again, not discounting the elephant graveyards where such things actually sort of happen too).
Homo sapiens may be the only such species in the whole Milky Way. I'm not saying it is certain, but dealing with a data sample size of one is sort of tough to make such predictions. At the very least, the big change in the past decade for making such a prediction has finally changed the number of stellar planetary systems that are known and studied well beyond just a single data point and now has some room for statistical calculations with hundreds of known multi-planetary systems and complex interactions between those exoplanets.
The Moon is called Luna by a bunch of science fiction authors and a bunch of folks who for some reason choose not to communicate in English when they are otherwise communicating in English. The proper term when using the English language is simply "The Moon".
Selene and that big hunk of cheese in the sky are somewhat acceptable alternatives, but you can take that for a grain of salt. A great many cultures each have their own term which is used for that fairly large (from an apparent viewpoint of somebody on the surface of the Earth) hunk of rock in the sky and Luna is not just the only alternative either.
In reality, it is a misuse of the term "moon" by folks who get confused when you are talking about satellites of other planets. When it was first used by Galileo (and he wrote in Latin and Italian.... so even he didn't use the English terms in that correspondence) it was in reference to the very large Jovian satellites that surprisingly have very similar characteristics to the Moon found near the Earth in terms of mass, diameter, and materials in the cores of those respective bodies. It was the use of the term "moon" specifically in the English language by Asaph Hall in his work with the U.S. Naval Observatory when he discovered Phobos and Deimos that was likely the culprit who made people think of a "moon" (lower case) being identified with very small objects that really don't share much in the way of any characteristics with the much larger dwarf planet that happens to orbit the Earth.
And yes, I do think it should be given dwarf planet status along with the large satellites of Jupiter and perhaps even Triton. Titan should simply be considered a full on planet, particularly given its atmospheric density and categorized jointly with the Earth, Mars, and Venus as a similar body with the same term.
That is straight out of the IAU definition where a planet must by definition orbit "The Sun", which is the proper noun and name of a very specific star that I happen to see every day.... during the daytime as its apparent magnitude is quite high.
Yes, it is correct that planets can only orbit The Sun. Period.
And I would agree that heliocentric definition really needs some significant work. Stuff that orbits other starts are not planets, but rather exoplanets with a very murky definition as to what is or is not really one of those strange beasts too.
Software isn't real engineering, it's just patterns on a screen. How much quality assurance do you need to make a pretty picture appear on a screen?
An obvious troll here, but I'll bite.
There is a real discipline of software engineering. I'll also note that engineers from other engineering disciplines can't just pick up a programming textbook and learn on their own the skills which are needed for proper software engineering either, but it takes a whole bunch of skills and discipline that often isn't even learned in a typical Computer Science curriculum.
Besides, if you think all software development is about making pretty pictures, you are also clueless about what computers actually do in the 21st Century. Most video game developers are not software engineers, although some do exist even there. Try telling the software engineers working at SpaceX or NASA's JPL that they are not doing real engineering some time... and you'll get an earful from people doing rocket science where a misplaced semicolon out of billions of characters in a code base can make an unfortunate bad day. The trick where JPL engineers were updating firmware on a vehicle sitting on Mars is something that took some real engineering.
when is the last time a passenger jet design was constructed and flown by a "test pilot" to shake out the bugs and check for nasty handling behavior?
You are aware that there still are test pilots who fly prototype commercial jet prototypes and often even push the limits of what those vehicles can do. They test sub-systems for potential failure modes and do other things to "shake out the bugs and check for nasty handling behavior" under extreme conditions that likely would never actually happen on a routine flight.
Admittedly the engineers of these vehicles have a long history to draw from and they are doing mostly minor incremental changes with each new model that is being made, so those test pilots are usually not risking life and property during those test flights.
Such test flights are still a part of any aviation certification program and are required by the FAA before certification is granted for that model.
I couldn't agree more. It sounds like they were more interested in the QA process than actually having people as a part of the overall software development team that try to break code and find flaws.
There are multiple ways to accomplish the goal of finding bugs, where the worst place to have them reported is by customers. Is that what Yahoo is hoping for now?
One of the reasons why new coal plants are not coming on line has to do with what amounts to be a war on coal power plants by the Obama administration. You may agree with the policy and the desire to eliminate coal powered plants in America, but it is due to political decisions and not economics which is driving a huge reduction in coal production.
I would be willing to bet that coal power plants would likely be dominating in electric power production if it was laid open to a pure market where economics was dominating.... and solar power plants would simply disappear except in remote locations where it is impractical to build something like a large scale coal electric production facility. Even in remote locations I tend to see Diesel or some other petroleum-based fuel as the most likely fuel source although solar panels are making a big splash in that direction.
That isn't even remotely true. Helium-3 is commonly used by a number of researchers even now, and you can order some reasonable quantities if you want to obtain a sample... for a price of course. Its number one use right now (other than for fusion research) is as a refrigerant, as it is the one pure gas that you can chill down the most and have it remain in a gas.
I don't know how many refrigerators that need to get down to 3 degrees Kelvin are required by researchers and industry, but if you need such a cryogenic system, it is something that does have a practical use.
Of the various fusion fuels though, the one that seems to be most promising is the Proton/Boron-11 fusion process. Boron is so cheap and plentiful that people use it as laundry detergent and you can pick up a few kilograms of the stuff for just a couple bucks at Wal-Mart or your favorite mass retail store. It also turns out that one of the largest deposits of Boron happens to be in Nevada, so there isn't even a need to worry about "foreign imports" if it becomes something used in a widespread manner.
Otherwise, I agree with you that sending groups to mine Helium-3 from the Moon is sort of silly... unless like I said they want to start making some really efficient refrigerators that can chill things down to very cold temperatures.
Slashdot Mirror
The key-term here is "reliable".
Name a specific time era when reliable vehicles weren't available for launch from America. Cheap and/or affordable might not be the proper term to use here, but I can't think of a time period after the Explorer I satellite was actually launched when America didn't have some extremely reliable launch vehicle for putting stuff into orbit.... and that reliability only got better over time. The Delta and Atlas series of rockets in particular have been available that whole time, not to mention other rockets that were developed and used as well.
For that matter, name a year since 1960 when America didn't send something into space. I dare you to find that mystery year. If the key is "reliable", what was unreliable since 1960 yet used for one of those thousands of vehicles sent up by American launch providers?
Refresh my memory... when was it that the ESA launched humans into space, again?
There was the Hermes spacecraft that was going to fly on the Ariane 5 rocket, but it never actually launched. That said, ESA astronauts have flown on both Soyuz and the US Space Shuttle over the years and have definitely gone into space.... and the ESA still maintains an astronaut corps to this day. If it was necessary, the Hermes could be restarted again even though the ESA doesn't see the point of doing that right now.
Because the USA has never been without a "reliable launch vehicle" since the 1960's.
There has been two times in the USA without a reliable crew launch vehicle though. Once after the Saturn V was retired (about 1975-1980 when the Space Shuttle started to fly) and the current hiatus now that the Shuttle has been retired. There was also the return to flight times with the loss of the Challenger and Columbia where crewed launch vehicles didn't exist.
For sending satellites and other stuff into space though, you are spot on: America has never been without some sort of reliable launch vehicle since about the late 1950's. The EELV program is certainly alive and well right now and has been going for a couple decades so far.
That's never been done before.
Except by NASA with the Space Shuttle and Roscosmos with the Buran spacecraft. Other than those two vehicles, you are correct.
It is the first rocket to land on its end like originally envisioned by Robert A. Heinlein almost 80 years ago though. It will also be a whole lot easier to cycle this lower stage core than it was to cycle the Space Shuttle.
That said I don't think the barge was ever the target landing location.
I think the barge may still be used in the future. This particular launch of the Orbcomm satellites also happens to be the least massive (meaning the smallest payload) ever flown on a Falcon 9 to date with the highest margins on fuel load with a number of enhancements that actually even improved performance for the rocket compared to previous launches. Due to the large margin and reserve fuel available, it made a terrestrial landing possible.
If in the future a customer wants to have more mass flown to orbit, they may still try for a barge landing due to a smaller tolerances, or in extreme situations on a really massive payload a landing may not even be attempted (for extra cost to the customer of course).
As the stage resue is going to cut the cost of these flights in half (give or take some $$$), I would imagine that most of the customers would likely opt in for smaller payloads that permit a terrestrial landing from now on, government launches excepted.
How many times can they reuse the rocket?
I read that the engines are being designed for about 10-20 flights before performing major overhauls of the engines. That means the intention is to literally take the lower stage core, bring it directly to the integration building like it came fresh from the factory, and put it together with another rocket several times in a row with only a cursory inspection of the engines themselves.... at about the level that jet engines get between flights at a typical major airport for an airliner.
At about 10 flights, they plan on performing a major tear-down and overhaul of the engines, but I don't know how many flights they think can be pushed out of them. I would guess they are hoping at least for about 30-50 flights before the engines are simply retired. It is a far cry from the RS-25 (aka the SSME for the Shuttle program) that had to be rebuilt completely after each flight.
In the meantime, SpaceX plans on sending the rocket to New Mexico for some extensive testing where the engines are going to be pushed to see if the anticipated engineering limits are going to hold true to actual engine performance where the rocket is going to be flown into space (aka above 100 km) as a part of those tests. Mostly straight up and down testing though and not with the intention to put something into orbit. The launch pad in New Mexico has already been built, but SpaceX didn't want to build another test vehicle when they figured they would simply get one of the recovered cores to perform the testing.
I guess SpaceX got their test platform today :)
Were they changing U-L-A or U-S-A after the landing? Couldn't really understand why they would do either.
How about because the plant happens to be physically located in the USA, specifically Hawthorne, California.
They are showing how American manufacturing from raw metal can still happen in the USA and doesn't need to be outsourced. Literally every bolt, nut, and line of software (minus some Linux kernel code.... and yes the OS for the rocket subsystems is running under Linux) was made in the USA. They are using some commodity integrated circuits likely not made in the USA, but the boards using those chips were made in that same plant too.
If you are critical about patriotism, you can go to hell.
Just wait until a year from now, and that legacy initiative stuff is really going to start pouring out. He still has slightly over a year left in office though, so the hurry isn't quite there at the moment.
An initiative like this is a complete waste of resources and being done in the worst of all possible ways to get the task being done, which is to encourage young children to understand how to program computers. I really predict that whole dozens of children will actually learn anything from this effort, and that will be even hard to point at who was helped.
At best, what might happen is millions of kids will be introduced to something like Scratch or possible receive a Raspberry Pi, and a few very bright kids might on their own start exploring those computers from the ground up to understand those computers. Some really enlightened educators might even go so far as to teach kids some Minecraft redstone wiring concepts (building circuits with NOR-gate technology can be fun) or if funding was to be dumped into a 0x10^c derived game that taught real hacking at the assembly level to blow up virtual spaceships..... perhaps there might be some progress too.
Then again, I don't think the White House wants a generation of kids knowing how to write driver level software, even though that might be something useful for the future of America and the world in general. My expectation of this initiative is really quite low and teaching materials prepared by these groups are going to be as boring as Army training videos from the 1940's.
Precisely. The Administrator for Space Transportation (AST) works in the Office for Commercial Space Transportation.
Treating it as if this is a new thing or a recent power grab is just a play of ignorance.
This is all because Obama and his enforcer at NASA, Charles Bolden, have made any discussion of the moon verboten.
Hardly. Obama simply cancelled the Constellation program and the billions of dollars that were projected (but never appropriated) to be spent on basically re-creating the Apollo "J" missions and perhaps even the "K" missions that might have happened with Apollo missions 18-21 had funding continued back then. Boldly redoing stuff from the past isn't really colonizing.
WE NEED TO COLONIZE BOTH THESE BODIES FOR THE WELFARE OF OUR RACE!
I agree with the notion, but there has yet to be any major presidential candidate besides Newt Gingrich to even suggest colonizing anything off of the Earth. Even Mr. Gingrich was so ridiculed by all of the other candidates (including Obama I might add) that the idea died a very quick death and hasn't been brought up since.
Blame doesn't belong with just Obama here but with literally everybody.
Is there some condition of the Moon that would be different than Earth?
A bunch of die-hard communists want to make everything in space "a common heritage for all mankind" and get rid of the concept of extra-terrestrial real estate ownership. I really think that idea is going to die as a miserable failure, but that won't happen until a bunch of people who aren't government employees show up at places like the Moon or Mars to pull out a gun to defend territory that they don't want others occupying.
These same people think the conditions on the Moon are somehow different in that regard. I think they are full of crap.
The Administrator for Space Transportation actually started in another agency, and was transferred to the FAA about a decade ago when members of Congress were trying to figure out what part of the government ought to be regulating commercial space transportation systems. To be honest, the whole debate over even creating this agency started when Burt Rutan built Space Ship One, and members of Congress were trying to figure out who could give approval for the flight.
This isn't all that new of a thing, other than perhaps people like you have been living under a rock and clueless about how the government works. Every single private commercial space launch (like for telecommunications satellites.... a multi-billion dollar per year industry even today) that launches from the USA has been for years regulated and received licenses for those launches as well as flight worthiness certificates granted for every kind of rocket and other launch vehicle which has flown more than six inches off the ground unteathered (with exceptions for hobby rockets like the stuff Estes makes).
This isn't the FAA stikcing its finger in this pie, they've been involved here for a long, long time already.
That is one of the things where an open source driver can really make a difference. Driver development will be more continuous rather than coming out in little spurts, and some 3rd party testing of anything changed will happen well before it becomes part of the stable release cycle.
I understand your frustration here, and I would agree with your sentiment of waiting perhaps a year or more to see if this experiment is going to actually work out so far as some responsible driver development.
AMD seems desperate to garner any headlines it can these days. How much open source gaming is really around, and how many will think this is going to sway any gaming developer over to AMD solely?
While open source gaming might be a point here, the real market is toward even full commercial software development companies with decent software developers who can really dig into the source code to tweak their games to the full potential on this hardware. Since they don't need to pay licensing fees, the traditional retail game developers will be able to have some of their smaller projects or slightly risky games that may have slightly smaller budgets to use this hardware instead of projects where they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for various kind of hardware development tools.
That makes a huge difference here, and it means there is a real possibility you will see some real game innovation happening rather than the same old boring copies of copies of "safe" games that now are being made by the major studios.
It isn't nearly the small group of developers writing games that go onto Source Forge or Git you should be talking about here. It is everybody else that could be interested in at least supporting some sort of alternative to Nvida, and there are plenty of really solid commercial reasons to be doing just that.
How were these 1,122 selected? The paper is almost deliberately vague on this point, simply choosing to refer to them as "our sample".
It isn't that big of a deal if you are considering the database of stars that have been found with the Kepler Space Telescope, which is by far the largest source of information about exoplanets available at the moment. You say it was data taken from just one telescope, but the science is about as sound as it gets.
Most of your questions can be answered by simply removing your ignorance about this particular instrument, which is 100% dedicated to just analysis of exoplanets and gathering data about them. While not built specifically for this paper, it was built specifically for papers like this that would discuss information about exoplanets.
The amount of data that this telescope is producing is absolutely enormous. Parked in one of the Earth-Sun Lagrangian points (technically in orbit around the Sun in a parallel orbit to the Earth) it is pointed at one specific and well mapped section of the sky (near the constellation Cygnus to avoid having the telescope ever point into the Sun) and has been watching the same set of stars continuously for several years now.
This isn't a bunch of cherry picked stars to make a point, although the stars in and near the constellation Cygnus might have a population characteristic which is different from other groups of stars. That isn't all that likely though based upon sky surveys as these stars seem to be a part of the main population of the Milky Way and no reason to believe that they should be anything unique or special other than that they are the first long term study of this nature.
The Kepler mission is a really interesting thing to find out more information about, and there is definitely something interesting about this paper. Please don't move along! This is some monumental and historic firsts in the history of mankind and very new science being conducted which has never been previously possible to do without space-based telescopes of this nature.
Wobble. Right. Are you even remotely serious?
Yes, he is being serious. This is actually done in a variety of ways. Read up on it before being so critical... and Doppler shifting of stars on a periodic frequency is one of the methods used to detect exoplanets (among a great many other techniques).
Perhaps the GP wasn't using the proper terminology, but then it is you that needs to get a life here as posting on Slashdot isn't a doctoral defense forum.
There is also direct imaging of planets, something that doesn't necessarily need to be edge on. While difficult to pick out planets in that fashion, it has happened for several planets already. That at least provides a sort of gut check to verify the statistical soundness of planets found using other methods.
That said, while life might be more common than you think, you might be right about intelligence - at least at our moment in time. I would be very surprised, however, if we were the first intelligent life in this galaxy.
While I would agree with you so far as intelligent life in the universe as a whole, since that is so huge, I wouldn't bet so strongly about some other sentient species being found in the Milky Way. The problem can certainly be described by the Drake equation, but I also argue that there are additional variables which apply.
On top of that, of all of the species of "intelligent species" you might encounter, how many will be tool using spacefaring species as well? On the Earth there are several other primate species with remarkable levels of intelligence along with dolphins, parrots, and elephants. If there is some intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, it may simply be some critters very much like elephants that certainly have families with close relations and deep emotional communications of considerable depth, but still not really care to build a radio for communications off of their planet and doesn't have books or other ways of recording information for multiple generations (again, not discounting the elephant graveyards where such things actually sort of happen too).
Homo sapiens may be the only such species in the whole Milky Way. I'm not saying it is certain, but dealing with a data sample size of one is sort of tough to make such predictions. At the very least, the big change in the past decade for making such a prediction has finally changed the number of stellar planetary systems that are known and studied well beyond just a single data point and now has some room for statistical calculations with hundreds of known multi-planetary systems and complex interactions between those exoplanets.
The Moon is called Luna by a bunch of science fiction authors and a bunch of folks who for some reason choose not to communicate in English when they are otherwise communicating in English. The proper term when using the English language is simply "The Moon".
Selene and that big hunk of cheese in the sky are somewhat acceptable alternatives, but you can take that for a grain of salt. A great many cultures each have their own term which is used for that fairly large (from an apparent viewpoint of somebody on the surface of the Earth) hunk of rock in the sky and Luna is not just the only alternative either.
In reality, it is a misuse of the term "moon" by folks who get confused when you are talking about satellites of other planets. When it was first used by Galileo (and he wrote in Latin and Italian.... so even he didn't use the English terms in that correspondence) it was in reference to the very large Jovian satellites that surprisingly have very similar characteristics to the Moon found near the Earth in terms of mass, diameter, and materials in the cores of those respective bodies. It was the use of the term "moon" specifically in the English language by Asaph Hall in his work with the U.S. Naval Observatory when he discovered Phobos and Deimos that was likely the culprit who made people think of a "moon" (lower case) being identified with very small objects that really don't share much in the way of any characteristics with the much larger dwarf planet that happens to orbit the Earth.
And yes, I do think it should be given dwarf planet status along with the large satellites of Jupiter and perhaps even Triton. Titan should simply be considered a full on planet, particularly given its atmospheric density and categorized jointly with the Earth, Mars, and Venus as a similar body with the same term.
That is straight out of the IAU definition where a planet must by definition orbit "The Sun", which is the proper noun and name of a very specific star that I happen to see every day.... during the daytime as its apparent magnitude is quite high.
Yes, it is correct that planets can only orbit The Sun. Period.
And I would agree that heliocentric definition really needs some significant work. Stuff that orbits other starts are not planets, but rather exoplanets with a very murky definition as to what is or is not really one of those strange beasts too.
Software isn't real engineering, it's just patterns on a screen. How much quality assurance do you need to make a pretty picture appear on a screen?
An obvious troll here, but I'll bite.
There is a real discipline of software engineering. I'll also note that engineers from other engineering disciplines can't just pick up a programming textbook and learn on their own the skills which are needed for proper software engineering either, but it takes a whole bunch of skills and discipline that often isn't even learned in a typical Computer Science curriculum.
Besides, if you think all software development is about making pretty pictures, you are also clueless about what computers actually do in the 21st Century. Most video game developers are not software engineers, although some do exist even there. Try telling the software engineers working at SpaceX or NASA's JPL that they are not doing real engineering some time... and you'll get an earful from people doing rocket science where a misplaced semicolon out of billions of characters in a code base can make an unfortunate bad day. The trick where JPL engineers were updating firmware on a vehicle sitting on Mars is something that took some real engineering.
when is the last time a passenger jet design was constructed and flown by a "test pilot" to shake out the bugs and check for nasty handling behavior?
You are aware that there still are test pilots who fly prototype commercial jet prototypes and often even push the limits of what those vehicles can do. They test sub-systems for potential failure modes and do other things to "shake out the bugs and check for nasty handling behavior" under extreme conditions that likely would never actually happen on a routine flight.
Admittedly the engineers of these vehicles have a long history to draw from and they are doing mostly minor incremental changes with each new model that is being made, so those test pilots are usually not risking life and property during those test flights.
Such test flights are still a part of any aviation certification program and are required by the FAA before certification is granted for that model.
I couldn't agree more. It sounds like they were more interested in the QA process than actually having people as a part of the overall software development team that try to break code and find flaws.
There are multiple ways to accomplish the goal of finding bugs, where the worst place to have them reported is by customers. Is that what Yahoo is hoping for now?
One of the reasons why new coal plants are not coming on line has to do with what amounts to be a war on coal power plants by the Obama administration. You may agree with the policy and the desire to eliminate coal powered plants in America, but it is due to political decisions and not economics which is driving a huge reduction in coal production.
I would be willing to bet that coal power plants would likely be dominating in electric power production if it was laid open to a pure market where economics was dominating.... and solar power plants would simply disappear except in remote locations where it is impractical to build something like a large scale coal electric production facility. Even in remote locations I tend to see Diesel or some other petroleum-based fuel as the most likely fuel source although solar panels are making a big splash in that direction.
We don't actual have any helium-3
That isn't even remotely true. Helium-3 is commonly used by a number of researchers even now, and you can order some reasonable quantities if you want to obtain a sample... for a price of course. Its number one use right now (other than for fusion research) is as a refrigerant, as it is the one pure gas that you can chill down the most and have it remain in a gas.
I don't know how many refrigerators that need to get down to 3 degrees Kelvin are required by researchers and industry, but if you need such a cryogenic system, it is something that does have a practical use.
Of the various fusion fuels though, the one that seems to be most promising is the Proton/Boron-11 fusion process. Boron is so cheap and plentiful that people use it as laundry detergent and you can pick up a few kilograms of the stuff for just a couple bucks at Wal-Mart or your favorite mass retail store. It also turns out that one of the largest deposits of Boron happens to be in Nevada, so there isn't even a need to worry about "foreign imports" if it becomes something used in a widespread manner.
Otherwise, I agree with you that sending groups to mine Helium-3 from the Moon is sort of silly... unless like I said they want to start making some really efficient refrigerators that can chill things down to very cold temperatures.