On the one hand, no matter how much time and effort is put into building a nuclear reactor, there's always a small chance that human error will cause a catastrophic meltdown leading to an almost incalculable loss of human life.
And meanwhile, more people die every few years from pollution from coal power than have ever died in the history of nuclear power, nuclear accidents, radioactive waste, and nuclear weapons (yes, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
A rueful officer explains how his advanced army with a brilliant research division was "defeated by the inferior science of our enemies."
There's some truth to do this, but when it comes down to it the advanced technology available to the US military is a big reason for why its casualty rates are so low compared to what it's been in the past.
Many US Universities (Including MIT) are happy with grades from those exams. So happy that you are not asked to pay school fees if you can run or jump.
I'm pretty sure that MIT doesn't give sports scholarships.
"Haptic" is nothing but a disgustingly pretentious way to say "tactile".
Dictionary definitions aside, in practice "haptic" and "tactile" mean different things. It's perhaps a blurry line, but in general "tactile" interfaces relies primarily on touch (an external sense), while haptic interfaces may rely on both touch and proprioception (and interoceptive sense).
What's up with the "overrated" mod for my comment? It'd be nice if somebody could just tell me what they disagreed with, instead of just modding me down.
Btw, there's also a pretty good discussion about this topic on aerospace engineer Rand Simberg's Transterrestrial Musings. I think what's particularly interesting is this remark by Mike Griffin during the Q&A:
"If one is willing to make use of multiple Earth-orbit rendezvous, a really big rocket is not required" The funny thing is, this is exactly the sort of approach that people have been trying to get NASA to pursue, because it would be able to use currently-existing rockets, cost much less overall, and be ready faster than NASA's current approach. Unfortunately, NASA chose not to do this, largely because it wouldn't be as easy to keep jobs for the 10,000 people in the key congressional districts which compose the shuttle workforce (which, by the way, makes up for the vast majority of the space shuttle's cost.
> Or how about the Muslim men that were asked to leave a flight because they spoke in Arabic?
Are you referring to the "Flying Imams controversy"? Even though it was reported in the media that they were arrested just for speaking Arabic, there was rather more to it than that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Imams_controversy
According to some passengers and flight staff, a number of whom didn't identify themselves, the suspicious behavior of the imams included the following: [4][5] [6][7][8].
* The imams refused to sit in their assigned seats. Instead, it is claimed that they fanned out in the cabin, sitting in pairs close to the front, middle and rear exit rows.
* Shahin and the two imams seated in Coach Row 9 requested seatbelt extensions (a strap with large metal buckles normally used by obese individuals to lengthen their seatbelts) even though flight staff say none seemed to need it. They then placed the extensions on the cabin floor in front of them instead of attaching them to their seatbelt.
* Three of the imams travelled with no checked baggage and one-way tickets.
* According to a nearby passenger who spoke Arabic, the two imams sitting in the back of the plane, while speaking to each other in Arabic, mentioned Osama bin Laden and condemned America for "killing Saddam". That said, I think the fury at Star Simpson is uncalled for. As a student at another nerd school, it's perfectly normal for people to go around wearing circuitry as fashion accessories. It was perhaps a slight lapse of common sense on her part, but she definitely shouldn't serve jail time for it.
The thing is, this wave in tuned to a frequency targeting nerve endings - so it might well not be nearly powerful enough to boil anything, much less your eye.
Actually, I wonder if it causes any damage to the nerves or photoreceptors in the retina, or if it ends up getting reflected by the rest of the eye first.
The Surveyors were launched on Atlas-Centaur rockets, which have an LEO payload of about 5000 pounds. There isn't anything directly comparable currently on the market. There's few offerings that are too small. A Falcon 1 ($8 million, 1500 pounds) won't cut it. A Falcon 9, on the other hand would be significant overkill, with 21,000 pound LEO capacity and a $35 million price tag.
It's too bad SpaceX decided to cancel the Falcon 5, which would've been closer to the needed sweet spot.
I suppose another alternative is to split the payload cost with somebody else. Ideally it'd be another payload headed to the moon, perhaps a government-funded probe. If not, is it at all possible for a single rocket launch to deliver payloads to both LEO/GTO as well as lunar? I'm guessing it's infeasible, but I don't really know.
Are they awarding the prize for the post-launch delivery, or does the organization have to design the ground-based launch vehicle too?
I guess they could build their own launcher, although it seems more likely that they'll purchase services from an existing company. From the MSNBC article it looks like SpaceX is one of the official supporters and is offering a 10% discount on launch services to contestants:
SpaceX says it will offer each team an in-kind contribution that, in effect, represents a 10 percent reduction in the price of a Falcon rocket launch....
But this week, SpaceX's millionaire founder, Elon Musk, told me he thought an unmanned trip to the moon was eminently doable in that price range.
"They might be able to get this done maybe for $20 million, and they could actually potentially make money with the prize," he said.
Musk said SpaceX's two-stage Falcon 1 could get a payload to the moon, as long as the team's spacecraft was equipped with third-stage capability for entering lunar orbit. "I would just take the same engine I was going to land on the moon with, and add some tanks that you could drop off," he said.
Musk said his current pick to win the prize would be Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace, which has spent years developing a succession of rocket prototypes. Led by video-game programmer John Carmack, the Armadillo team is considered the favorite to win the top prize in the $2 million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge at next month's Wirefly X Prize Cup, an annual rocket festival in New Mexico.
A realistic price for this mission by small teams is 50-100 million, with a high risk of failure. I could be faulty, but my assumption is that the bulk of the cost will be the launcher, which would likely be purchased as an off-the-shelf service from SpaceX, Russia, or some-such. I kind of figure that a team would spend its money developing the launcher and lander (expensive, but not -that- expensive), and then after doing that would commit to paying for the launcher. Of course, I think it's also assumed that as with the Ansari X Prize, the prize will only cover part of the cost.
I figure you might know more than most: What's the likely minimal weight for a launcher+lander? What sort of LEO payload capability would a launcher need in order to deliver that amount to the lunar surface? Do any of SpaceX's Falcon 9 launchers (which cost $27-$78 million) have what it takes for that? (SpaceX is coincidentally one of the official supporters of the Google Prize, stating that they'll give the equivalent of a 10% discount to contestants)
If I recall correctly, the only unmanned rovers that have explored the Moon are the pair of rovers of the Lunokhod programme of Russia (then Soviet Union), during the early 1970s. From wikipedia:
Lunokhod 2 was equipped with three television cameras, one mounted high on the rover for navigation, which could return high resolution images at different rates--3.2, 5.7, 10.9 or 21.1 seconds per frame (not frames per second). These images were used by a five-man team of controllers on Earth who sent driving commands to the rover in real time. There were 4 panoramic cameras mounted on the rover.
Power was supplied by a solar panel on the inside of a round hinged lid which covered the instrument bay, which would charge the batteries when opened. A polonium-210 radioactive heat source was used to keep the rover warm during the long lunar nights....
During its 322 Earth days of operations, Lunokhod 1 traveled 10.5 km and returned more than 20,000 TV images and 206 high-resolution panoramas. In addition, it performed twenty-five soil analyses with its RIFMA x-ray fluorescence spectrometer and used its penetrometer at 500 different locations.
Lunokhod 2 operated for about 4 months, covered 37 km (23 miles) of terrain, including hilly upland areas and rilles, and sent back 86 panoramic images and over 80,000 TV pictures. Many mechanical tests of the surface, laser ranging measurements, and other experiments were completed during this time. With regards to a human lunar base, I think the prize could also have great benefits. I think it's pretty much a given that robots and rovers will play an integral support role of a manned lunar base, and getting robots to operate in a lunar environment is still something we have little experience with. The prize will likely lead to discovering plenty of new ideas and techniques which do and don't work on the lunar surface.
Also, rovers are a great way to captivate people's attention. Just look at how much the Mars rovers has increased people's attention at what's going on with Mars. For my generation, lunar exploration (human or robot) is something that exists only in history books. Seeing the Moon through the eyes of a rover (a rover put up by entrepreneurs, not a government) can change that, and increase support for human exploration of the Moon.
Also, I think this is a great way for the "space == science only" crowd to get interested in private space activity. Thus far, many of them have either been ambivalent about private space, or outright antagonistic about it ("just a way for rich people to waste money"). This prize helps cement the idea that yes, private spaceflight can have benefits for science.
Of course you can, very easily. But then you end up with another of those catch phrases: collateral damage.
After seeing Russia's extensive use of fuel-air bombs in populated regions of Chechnya, it's pretty apparent that collateral damage isn't too high on their list of concerns.
> I am for the gov't having the ability to wiretap. I am against the gov't doing this without a proper check to their power.
What restrictions should the US government have to its monitoring of foreign communications? What about communication between domestic and foreign sources?
actually, the tfa says nothing like that. It says liberals tolerate ambiguity better, and conservatives think in a more structured manner. Which is better (if at all) would depend on the situation.
I'm rather surprised that they didn't report what major the subjects were (it seems they were all UCLA/NYU college students). Various studies and common knowledge have shown that people in engineering and the hard sciences tend to be more conservative/libertarian than people in arts, social sciences, and the humanities. Of course, people in engineering/science also tend to think in a more structured manner, and I wouldn't be surprised if all the "conservatives" they had happened to be in the sciences.
Science/engineering aptitude might be an even better explanatory factor for their results than political perspective.
I believe it lies in between the events of the Atrocity Archives and Jennifer Morgue. Concrete Jungle rather uniquely manages to tie together the UK's surveillance camera grid with Greek mythology, and is a lot of fun to read.
I like this quote from Glenn Reynolds (the Instapundit):
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, the most widely read center-right blogger, amplifies Johnson's point. "Different needs produce different approaches," he says. "People on the right think their political machine works, but that the media is out to get them. Hence rightish blogging is more about punditry and reporting, and they've succeeded--note the paucity of lefty bloggers embedding in Iraq, while the number on the right is extensive enough that I can no longer name them all. People on the left, on the other hand, know the media is basically on their side, but feel that their political machine stinks, so they've focused on building a new one. And they've succeeded, too."
Exactly what I was trying to say. I haven't found a GOP site that focuses on organizing the base. Another thing is that the main rallying factor for many/most liberals is an opposition to Bush and his policies, which provides a basis for organizing the base. Those partial to the GOP seem to instead be focusing more on specific issues, and don't really have much of anything to unify behind. For the past few elections there was the whole "Moral Majority" social conservatism kind of thing, but most GOP-leaning bloggers tend to actually be fiscal conservatives and libertarians who are either agnostic about social conservatism or outright hostile towards it.
IMAP? Yup. I think the main problem is that I'd have to start up the thunderbird client on each new machine and then wait as the new mails were updated. Also, I think maybe our school's IMAP's servers were rather slow.
What about starting to type several emails at once, shut down the email client, open it up again, send the emails? Gmail has a "drafts" feature which I use pretty extensively, and I think covers the scenario you describe. In fact, I often start typing a draft of an email on one computer, and then finish writing the draft and then send the email on another computer.
My main complaint is that I've lost emails on a couple of occasions where my web client lost the connection to the gmail server before the draft was auto-saved, resulting in me losing the email I was typing up.
Select three emails, and you see all 3 of them not even a milisecond later. True, although for me things like gmail's threading (where I just need to scroll down to quickly skim all the emails on a particular topic) are more useful to me.
I don't see why I would, IMAP and clients make way more sense to me than using HTML to draw a GUI, that's just silly! Heh, I guess it's a little silly, but it works for me.;)
While Kos frequently rips on the opposition (just like the above sites) Kos also actively tries to organize the liberal base. He lists potential democratic candidates in each congressional district and puts in requests for fundraising and volunteers. From my observations, the left-wing sites like Kos's seem to focus more on organizing the liberal base in general, while right-wing and libertarian sites focus more on rallying specific issues. For example, there's things like Vets for Freedom (based around pro-war support) and Porkbusters (based around pork barrel funding). There's also the flurries that occur whenever some major journalistic funniness is going on, such as Rathergate or Reutersgate, or the Duke lacross/Nifong scandal.
I think the bad feelings (and subsequent reactionary attempts at regulation) come from the fact that the conservative voter base tends to be a bit older and less Internet-savvy. Do you have any examples to support the belief that conservative bloggers support more internet regulation? Everything I've seen on the topic from them are very much against the FEC regulating political blogging.
There's no reason they couldn't have the conservative equivalent of DailyKos, but it just wouldn't get read as much. Instapundit.com has the same google ranking as DailyKos. There's also forums like freerepublic.com which have been around longer than Daily Kos and have a similar amount of traffic.
Using an e-mail client is much easier, faster, and hassle-free, versus webmail. Wow, really? One of the main reasons I switched from thunderbird to gmail is because gmail was so much faster to start, search, and retrieve emails with. Of course, I also had a huge archive of emails that I never deleted, which gmail is geared towards.
I also work across multiple machines, which was much more hassle-free with gmail than thunderbird.
I really don't see a problem with a "Fuck Islam" group, aside from the fact that it doesn't seem to go far enough. How about a "Fuck believing in Deities" group. And more to the point, what's really wrong with that? Here's the Fuck All Religions facebook group.
So... according to the first link, it seems that the "Fuck Islam" group has already been removed. Curiously though the Fuck Jews group, which seems to have primarily Muslim members, is still around, and doesn't seem to have generated controversy. I wonder why that is? There's also a number of "Fuck Christianity" groups around.
Personally though, I'm a fan of the Fuck Benjamin Franklin group. Goddamn him and his glass armonicas.
Slashdot Mirror
On the one hand, no matter how much time and effort is put into building a nuclear reactor, there's always a small chance that human error will cause a catastrophic meltdown leading to an almost incalculable loss of human life.
And meanwhile, more people die every few years from pollution from coal power than have ever died in the history of nuclear power, nuclear accidents, radioactive waste, and nuclear weapons (yes, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
A rueful officer explains how his advanced army with a brilliant research division was "defeated by the inferior science of our enemies."
There's some truth to do this, but when it comes down to it the advanced technology available to the US military is a big reason for why its casualty rates are so low compared to what it's been in the past.
Many US Universities (Including MIT) are happy with grades from those exams. So happy that you are not asked to pay school fees if you can run or jump.
I'm pretty sure that MIT doesn't give sports scholarships.
"Haptic" is nothing but a disgustingly pretentious way to say "tactile".
Dictionary definitions aside, in practice "haptic" and "tactile" mean different things. It's perhaps a blurry line, but in general "tactile" interfaces relies primarily on touch (an external sense), while haptic interfaces may rely on both touch and proprioception (and interoceptive sense).
What's up with the "overrated" mod for my comment? It'd be nice if somebody could just tell me what they disagreed with, instead of just modding me down.
Are you referring to the "Flying Imams controversy"? Even though it was reported in the media that they were arrested just for speaking Arabic, there was rather more to it than that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Imams_controversy According to some passengers and flight staff, a number of whom didn't identify themselves, the suspicious behavior of the imams included the following: [4][5] [6][7][8].
* The imams refused to sit in their assigned seats. Instead, it is claimed that they fanned out in the cabin, sitting in pairs close to the front, middle and rear exit rows.
* Shahin and the two imams seated in Coach Row 9 requested seatbelt extensions (a strap with large metal buckles normally used by obese individuals to lengthen their seatbelts) even though flight staff say none seemed to need it. They then placed the extensions on the cabin floor in front of them instead of attaching them to their seatbelt.
* Three of the imams travelled with no checked baggage and one-way tickets.
* According to a nearby passenger who spoke Arabic, the two imams sitting in the back of the plane, while speaking to each other in Arabic, mentioned Osama bin Laden and condemned America for "killing Saddam". That said, I think the fury at Star Simpson is uncalled for. As a student at another nerd school, it's perfectly normal for people to go around wearing circuitry as fashion accessories. It was perhaps a slight lapse of common sense on her part, but she definitely shouldn't serve jail time for it.
The thing is, this wave in tuned to a frequency targeting nerve endings - so it might well not be nearly powerful enough to boil anything, much less your eye.
Actually, I wonder if it causes any damage to the nerves or photoreceptors in the retina, or if it ends up getting reflected by the rest of the eye first.
The Surveyors were launched on Atlas-Centaur rockets, which have an LEO payload of about 5000 pounds. There isn't anything directly comparable currently on the market. There's few offerings that are too small. A Falcon 1 ($8 million, 1500 pounds) won't cut it. A Falcon 9, on the other hand would be significant overkill, with 21,000 pound LEO capacity and a $35 million price tag.
It's too bad SpaceX decided to cancel the Falcon 5, which would've been closer to the needed sweet spot.
I suppose another alternative is to split the payload cost with somebody else. Ideally it'd be another payload headed to the moon, perhaps a government-funded probe. If not, is it at all possible for a single rocket launch to deliver payloads to both LEO/GTO as well as lunar? I'm guessing it's infeasible, but I don't really know.
I guess they could build their own launcher, although it seems more likely that they'll purchase services from an existing company. From the MSNBC article it looks like SpaceX is one of the official supporters and is offering a 10% discount on launch services to contestants: SpaceX says it will offer each team an in-kind contribution that, in effect, represents a 10 percent reduction in the price of a Falcon rocket launch.
But this week, SpaceX's millionaire founder, Elon Musk, told me he thought an unmanned trip to the moon was eminently doable in that price range.
"They might be able to get this done maybe for $20 million, and they could actually potentially make money with the prize," he said.
Musk said SpaceX's two-stage Falcon 1 could get a payload to the moon, as long as the team's spacecraft was equipped with third-stage capability for entering lunar orbit. "I would just take the same engine I was going to land on the moon with, and add some tanks that you could drop off," he said.
Musk said his current pick to win the prize would be Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace, which has spent years developing a succession of rocket prototypes. Led by video-game programmer John Carmack, the Armadillo team is considered the favorite to win the top prize in the $2 million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge at next month's Wirefly X Prize Cup, an annual rocket festival in New Mexico.
I figure you might know more than most: What's the likely minimal weight for a launcher+lander? What sort of LEO payload capability would a launcher need in order to deliver that amount to the lunar surface? Do any of SpaceX's Falcon 9 launchers (which cost $27-$78 million) have what it takes for that? (SpaceX is coincidentally one of the official supporters of the Google Prize, stating that they'll give the equivalent of a 10% discount to contestants)
Power was supplied by a solar panel on the inside of a round hinged lid which covered the instrument bay, which would charge the batteries when opened. A polonium-210 radioactive heat source was used to keep the rover warm during the long lunar nights.
During its 322 Earth days of operations, Lunokhod 1 traveled 10.5 km and returned more than 20,000 TV images and 206 high-resolution panoramas. In addition, it performed twenty-five soil analyses with its RIFMA x-ray fluorescence spectrometer and used its penetrometer at 500 different locations.
Lunokhod 2 operated for about 4 months, covered 37 km (23 miles) of terrain, including hilly upland areas and rilles, and sent back 86 panoramic images and over 80,000 TV pictures. Many mechanical tests of the surface, laser ranging measurements, and other experiments were completed during this time. With regards to a human lunar base, I think the prize could also have great benefits. I think it's pretty much a given that robots and rovers will play an integral support role of a manned lunar base, and getting robots to operate in a lunar environment is still something we have little experience with. The prize will likely lead to discovering plenty of new ideas and techniques which do and don't work on the lunar surface.
Also, rovers are a great way to captivate people's attention. Just look at how much the Mars rovers has increased people's attention at what's going on with Mars. For my generation, lunar exploration (human or robot) is something that exists only in history books. Seeing the Moon through the eyes of a rover (a rover put up by entrepreneurs, not a government) can change that, and increase support for human exploration of the Moon.
Also, I think this is a great way for the "space == science only" crowd to get interested in private space activity. Thus far, many of them have either been ambivalent about private space, or outright antagonistic about it ("just a way for rich people to waste money"). This prize helps cement the idea that yes, private spaceflight can have benefits for science.
Of course you can, very easily. But then you end up with another of those catch phrases: collateral damage.
After seeing Russia's extensive use of fuel-air bombs in populated regions of Chechnya, it's pretty apparent that collateral damage isn't too high on their list of concerns.
> I am for the gov't having the ability to wiretap. I am against the gov't doing this without a proper check to their power.
What restrictions should the US government have to its monitoring of foreign communications? What about communication between domestic and foreign sources?
actually, the tfa says nothing like that. It says liberals tolerate ambiguity better, and conservatives think in a more structured manner. Which is better (if at all) would depend on the situation.
I'm rather surprised that they didn't report what major the subjects were (it seems they were all UCLA/NYU college students). Various studies and common knowledge have shown that people in engineering and the hard sciences tend to be more conservative/libertarian than people in arts, social sciences, and the humanities. Of course, people in engineering/science also tend to think in a more structured manner, and I wouldn't be surprised if all the "conservatives" they had happened to be in the sciences.
Science/engineering aptitude might be an even better explanatory factor for their results than political perspective.
One of Stross's Laundry novellas, "The Concrete Jungle," is actually available online:
http://www.goldengryphon.com/Stross-Concrete.html
I believe it lies in between the events of the Atrocity Archives and Jennifer Morgue. Concrete Jungle rather uniquely manages to tie together the UK's surveillance camera grid with Greek mythology, and is a lot of fun to read.
I like this quote from Glenn Reynolds (the Instapundit): Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, the most widely read center-right blogger, amplifies Johnson's point. "Different needs produce different approaches," he says. "People on the right think their political machine works, but that the media is out to get them. Hence rightish blogging is more about punditry and reporting, and they've succeeded--note the paucity of lefty bloggers embedding in Iraq, while the number on the right is extensive enough that I can no longer name them all. People on the left, on the other hand, know the media is basically on their side, but feel that their political machine stinks, so they've focused on building a new one. And they've succeeded, too."
My main complaint is that I've lost emails on a couple of occasions where my web client lost the connection to the gmail server before the draft was auto-saved, resulting in me losing the email I was typing up. Select three emails, and you see all 3 of them not even a milisecond later. True, although for me things like gmail's threading (where I just need to scroll down to quickly skim all the emails on a particular topic) are more useful to me. I don't see why I would, IMAP and clients make way more sense to me than using HTML to draw a GUI, that's just silly! Heh, I guess it's a little silly, but it works for me.
I also work across multiple machines, which was much more hassle-free with gmail than thunderbird.
Of course if you don't plan on achieving orbit maybe it doesn't matter. Right. The Wisconsin spaceport is intended only for suborbital spacecraft:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceport_Sheboygan
(subject trimmed to fit into the subject length)
So... according to the first link, it seems that the "Fuck Islam" group has already been removed. Curiously though the Fuck Jews group, which seems to have primarily Muslim members, is still around, and doesn't seem to have generated controversy. I wonder why that is? There's also a number of "Fuck Christianity" groups around.
Personally though, I'm a fan of the Fuck Benjamin Franklin group. Goddamn him and his glass armonicas.