Re:The Register's new market: tabloids
on
Online Revenge
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's not verified (making it questionable as news at best, but since it's of a personal rather than public nature, I wouldn't even grant it that much ground to stand on), it is very highly damaging to the guy's reputation (not just as an online seller, but more importantly as a person), and it's potentially dangerous (950,000+ hits and he's getting threats...some sicko among all those visitors just might be crazy enough to do something based on the rumor). The one site linked to obviously has taken a side. If there were any hard facts presented, writing the article at least would make sense, but not providing an avenue into the alleged perpetrator's personal life by linking to a vigilante website.
I hate digging into the big bag of cliche counter-arguments, but here's a case where this one definitely fits: How would you like it if someone displayed your entire personal life (simple or shocking as it may be) in a deliberately disparaging fashion? Or perhaps (we don't actually know in this case), they make a bunch of crap up about you. I knew a guy who's personal and professional reputation was destroyed by a false allegation that was spread freely before any proper investigation was made. The case against him was tossed out in court, but his personal business (bike shop) never recovered and he had to close down and leave town. Assuming that he was innocent, as we have every bit as much reason to believe as the judge did, is this in any way just? Did those who spread the rumor contribute in any way to the betterment of society or did they harm it?
The Register's new market: tabloids
on
Online Revenge
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Fantastic. I thought the register considered itself a somewhat legitimate news entity, but now they've posted a link to a defamatory website of unverified accuracy in an article. Many, many points down the toilet in my book.
Maybe if you're talking first year introduction to satellites classes. As every real astrophysicist knows, however, the only way to crank out cubesats ahead of deadlines in the competitive world is to use a.SAT development environment.
That's a good theory, but as a high ranking member of the intelligence community, I went ahead and looked up the file on the grandparent poster to confirm his credentials. Obviously, my exact methods are mostly classified, but via a mix of data-mining, satellite reconaissance, analysis of public and tax records, and wire-tapping, I have verified his post. The grandparent has real ultimate power.
This isn't directly related to the ribbon, but I'd like to mention power as a major obstacle. I made a rough estimate (completely ignoring losses) suggesting that a 1000 kg climber ascending at 100 m/s requiring on the order of 1 MW (~1300 horsepower). Power beaming has efficiency issues which in turn raises heating problems. Embedded conductors add significant weight to the ribbon without significant strength. I'm unaware of any form of onboard power that is even remotely feasible.
I'm glad to see the research being conducted on this, and I have personally corrected some of the simpler objections like "what if this super-ribbon breaks and kills us all," but the space elevator looks to be further down the timeline than fusion power.
If we don't spend the $10 billion on fusion at some point, we will never have it. We will always be tied down to the limitations of carbon, fissile, and solar-derived energy forms: hydroelectric interferes with river ecosystems, wind is weather dependent, solar takes up a lot of land and is expensive (all the solar-derivatives are location dependent), fission produces lots of toxic and low-level radioactive waste, and there is a statistically significant correllation between carbon fuel use and the amount of annoying babbling the global-warming crowd makes.
Eventually we will outgrow the practical limitations of the "renewable" energy sources. $10 billion is peanuts compared to the amount of money spent on energy annually. It's possibly worth it for the amount of other science produced by operating the reactor, and it's definitely worth it just to determine if we are on the right path to a controllable break even reaction, regardless of whether or not this design actually does break even.
I think that analogy hits very directly at what tiered internet effectively accomplishes.
Now onto the question of whether or not someone who owns a private bridge (since almost all bridges in the US are managed by some level of the government, but almost all the backbones are privately owned), has a right to let FedEx's trucks cross before UPS's when the bridge is crowded if FedEx is willing to pay for the privilege. Meanwhile UPS can wait in the queue.
But wait...transportation projects are taken on publicly because of the cost and land involved. It would not be practical to let PonSys build one bridge across the Mississippi and TransCorp build another right next to it to compete for tolls, when one publicly owned bridge accomplishes the same. That can be accomplished much more easily with network paths. Rather than UPS waiting for the congestion to ease on PonSys's bridge, they'll just plan their route (set their routing rules) to use Trancorp's bridge when PonSys's is backed up. The flat-rate bridge may be more expensive than riding the bottom tier of the other one, but they can still rake it in whenever their competitor is causing unacceptable delays for the shippers.
I have a strong hope this one will sort itself out with resorting to legislation.
I highly recommend anyone writing similar letters to their representatives to Get to the Point in the first paragraph. Identify the bill and how you think they should vote as soon as you're done with the formality of introducing yourself. Just like writing technical reports. The introduction or abstract always sums up the main content so a busy reader can glean the important parts from it immediately. Congressmen don't have time for their constituents...^H^H^H^H... are very busy people and receive quite a bit of correspondance to sift through.
Once you have "voted" in your representative's inbox, then you can and should explain your reasons. In that respect your letter is excellent. The fact that you identified yourself as a small business owner gives him that "Defended small business owners in the Network Neutrality Act of 2006 vote" in his campaign material. Everybody loves that one.
I personally am a little undecided on the bill. While I have heard no promise of any genuine benefit for the consumer and really hope we don't see a tiered internet come to pass, a small part of me thinks perhaps we should let the market kill this one. Surely if enough preference is exerted by consumers and companies like Google and Yahoo taking our side, the tiered internet will leave leave AT&T's backbones dry as the LA river (least cost/shortest latency routing?), and provide the perfect environment for other companies to invest in building high capacity lines. I just don't know if it's worth the risk that AT&T might succeed, though.
We did have data to base the theory on. The data is the known emmissions from the sun, compared to the expected emissions from other suns and such. Based on that, they were probably pretty confident of their models of what the termination shock should look like (the very fact that they can identify it suggests the model can't be too far off). You're right, though, that it's only a starting point. This observation sounds like very good justification for continuing to fund the Voyager program. NASA had been considering dropping it because it is costing several million a year in operations costs.
I for one wonder if perhaps the shape is assymetrically biased away from the galactic center.
Ahem...I seriously thought I'd never have to explain this one on slashdot. It turns out that beyond our solar system, there is a vast amount of space and bodies that provide references against which to measure the motion of the solar system. We call that the "universe."
For further background on this concept, you may be interested to read about galaxies or Copernicus.
The article is interesting, but I don't think it's particularly novel. Consider the way some guys treat their cars. Add in the psychological effect of the battlefield and some degree of attachment is not surprising. Plus, we've long had a tendency to personalize our creations. From naming ships to creating flashy avatars like "Clippy" that wonderful Word assistant that everyone wants to twist into a pretzel and toss into a furnace.
I've also read that some police officers in K-9 units take counseling when their dog dies in the line of duty, because they worked so closely together. The bond between dogs and humans is much more obvious, but I think related.
The classic Mario experience for many of us was side-scrolling on our parent's 19" television. Portability is great and I wouldn't mind having a DS, but plugging in and playing with your friends and not squinting because of the small screen/glare rocks.
The existing phone companies could use their massive financial resources to jump on top of this and beat any startups to the punch, cornering a potentially massive market early on.
Yes, I know it's not as simple as that, but ultimately I see traditional providers as shooting themselves in the foot by trying to restrict change. If you don't have the best way of doing something, sooner or later your customers are going to take their money to the person who does.
A properly operating power plant does not release any radioactive particles. There is still gamma radiation through the sides walls of the reactor. This is typically less than the background radiation from other sources. The fact that it is measurable is more a testament to the sensitivy of the instruments than the radiation level. It has been said that you receive more radiation watching TV for an hour each day than you do living a mile from a nuclear plant (what wavelengths is another question, though). As the section you quote says, they were observing the effects of radiation on the air molecules that change the way radar reflects off of them. I'm not sure what the effect is...probably just ionization of a few atoms.
If they can detect this, they can definitely detect a plume from a containment breach and hopefully map very accurately how it spreads.
I guess my joke flopped a little bit. I was trying to imply that the plaintiff was pursuing profit based on the letter of the law, but the judge recognized the more important issue about the spirit of the law. Most of the law stories that make headlines lately seem to be the ones where the letter of the law gets in the way of the spirit (some patent cases stick out in my mind).
I was almost surprised this didn't get it's own submission (although I don't think it's quite that newsworthy outside our area).
I went up to watch it, but missed out on all but hearing the boom due to some of those pesky trees the environmentalists think are all the rage in Oregon. Just hearing it was still cool though, and the videos are only one order of magnitude less cool than watching the kingdome go down. Knocking it down so cleanly and smoothly is almost as impressive as putting it up in the first place.
The local activists have been all abuzz with joy that it's going down, but mix in occasional comments like "I'm sad to see this monument to the idiocy of nuclear energy gone. It provided a valuable lesson to us." Such comments only more firmly cement in my mind the conviction that the more outspoken a nuclear power opponent is, the less they actually know about nuclear power. Trojan was closed, not due to safety or waste disposal concerns, but due to the operating expenses and the cost of replacing a prematurely failing heat-exchanger. A lot of that is owed to the poor practice of using one-off reactor designs and the complexity of pressurized water reactors. It really drives me nuts to hear them rant from 8 AM until lunchtime about fossil fuel use destroying the planet, then from 1 until closing about how dangerous nuclear power is. I can almost buy it if they play waste disposal issue since I don't have a bulletproof response to the "in 10,000 years" argument (which I think is seriously overrated...what if this, what if that, what if sharks evolve freakin lasers on their heads), but they always focus on the Chernobyl-argument, which is not relevant with current designs and operating practices, and pretty much ridiculous with fusion. Their ultimate mandate is to fix global warming without using anything that has "atoms" in it and without affecting the price of organic fair trade coffee at Trader Joe's.
When the plaintiff is a poor champion of consumers, a court must be especially careful not to grant relief that may undercut the proper function of antitrust.
Holy cow! Is he actually suggesting that there is more to a written law than the exact wording?
I guess I'm going to have to read a little more on this. The impression I got from the article is something to the effect of, "Oh my gosh, Red Hat, Novell, and these other guys all agreed to sell their software for $0! That's price setting!"
I think the instability they refer to in that line is the resonance. For whatever particular reason (any initial disturbance from absolute perfection will do), waves are forming that aren't fully random, and propogating across the bucket at a rate which is harmonically in tune with the rotation, causing these funny shapes. I would venture to guess that in either a fully stable or a fully chaotic system, the doughnut should be round, regardless of rate.
Sounds like you've been reading a little bit of Michael Crichton? The fractals he refers to come from the fact that in any system where multiple outcomes are possible for any given junction, once you add multiple successive junctions, the complexity of figuring out the final outcome quickly exceeds the ability to fully analyze it.
Kind of an aside, I recall playing around with spinning buckets at varying speeds one day in fluids lab back in school when we finished our assignment (which did not involve spinning buckets with water). I don't remember if we saw anything like this, and if we did we ignored figuring it had been noticed before, but I do remember being fascinated for probably a solid hour by the things. So much for intellectual curiosity on our part.
To expand on the parent, the effect is called "similitude." The Reynolds number is a dimensionless number that involves the velocity of flow, the size of any defining flow feature (like pipe diameter), and the viscosity of the fluid. These are the primary factors that effect how a fluid flow will act on a larger scale.
Unfortunately, this sort of thing doesn't work very well on a small portion of a system. Instead, computational fluid dynamics involves breaking the flow up into discrete elements, figuring out what each element should be doing (typically according to the equations used on larger or simpler systems), then figuring out how that effects the element next to it. Then you do the whole thing over again with new initial conditions defined by how all the elements effected each other. Then you do it once more. Then you keep doing it over and over until the difference between subsequent iterations gets small enough to make you happy (assuming you didn't screw up and it diverges). The ability to do this with a computer definitely opened new gateways for engineering with fluids, but it's still only an approximation, and there are some effects they have trouble figuring out. I don't think anyone can really appreciate the difficulty of some of the common problems like long-term or highly accurate weather or climate predictions until they've tried to solve a finite element problem involving just 4 elements (especially if you have complicating factors like heat transfer). Then you look up at the sky and multiply the difficulty by several billion or so.
A couple of my friends in school worked summer research projects with one of our physics professors looking at a related effect known as Stewartson layers (basically, the shear rate of a fluid isn't actually linear across a flow in which velocity changes with position, like we usually model it as...sometimes the flow forms in "sheets"). I don't know all the details, but like the effect in the article, this one isn't well understood.
"Scientifically irrelevant"...I'm sorry, what other platform allows direct monitoring and control over long-term microgravity and exo-atmospheric experiments? Perhaps the benefit/cost ratio of the experiments is questionable, but there is not currently anything equivalent to the laboratory capabilities it offers.
The ISS has supported several hundred past and present science experiments and the numbers will pick up fast once the remaining modules are added and the crew is increased to a standard full complement of 6.
So you're suggesting that the rest of the countries actually pay for it?
Ok, my above words would be flat out flamebait if I didn't qualify them a little further. The US is by far the biggest investor in the ISS. Some of the modules and components come from Canada, ESA, Japan, and Russia, but most of the operational expenses come out of NASA's budget, with I suppose Russia second. If any of the above, except Russia, pulled out today nothing would happen. If the US or Russia pulled out of the project it would be leaning over the brink. If both did, the thing would hit the ground within a couple years.
A very large part of the reason NASA is committed to keeping the shuttles running until 2010 is to finish the station and make good on the international commitment to the project. We're not backing out on this. Not that I agree with what the grandparent proposed, but keep in mind what the US has put into this project next time you feel like getting indignant at someone for forgetting to be fully inclusive in their speech.
Because the military isn't a democracy. Not everyone's opinions/needs/wants matter the same.
In order to operate effectively, the US military maintains a clear cut chain of command: you obey the person with more shiny things on his shoulders than you. The primary purpose is to avoid conflicts in the decision making process. Officers have aids and what-not to help them avoid making stupid decisions, but the final word comes from the highest ranking officer or NCO. You simply can't afford to take the time in the middle of a firefight to debate whether John's plan is better than Phil's. Somebody has to make a decision and that someone is the commanding officer, not his underlings. Credit or blame comes later.
I could go into this a lot more covering things like military economics, but that gets long fast. I'd be willing to bet militaries have studied the chain of command concept in a lot of depth for several thousand years, so there's probably not much chance of coming up with a better control structure for a war.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not verified (making it questionable as news at best, but since it's of a personal rather than public nature, I wouldn't even grant it that much ground to stand on), it is very highly damaging to the guy's reputation (not just as an online seller, but more importantly as a person), and it's potentially dangerous (950,000+ hits and he's getting threats...some sicko among all those visitors just might be crazy enough to do something based on the rumor). The one site linked to obviously has taken a side. If there were any hard facts presented, writing the article at least would make sense, but not providing an avenue into the alleged perpetrator's personal life by linking to a vigilante website.
I hate digging into the big bag of cliche counter-arguments, but here's a case where this one definitely fits: How would you like it if someone displayed your entire personal life (simple or shocking as it may be) in a deliberately disparaging fashion? Or perhaps (we don't actually know in this case), they make a bunch of crap up about you. I knew a guy who's personal and professional reputation was destroyed by a false allegation that was spread freely before any proper investigation was made. The case against him was tossed out in court, but his personal business (bike shop) never recovered and he had to close down and leave town. Assuming that he was innocent, as we have every bit as much reason to believe as the judge did, is this in any way just? Did those who spread the rumor contribute in any way to the betterment of society or did they harm it?
Fantastic. I thought the register considered itself a somewhat legitimate news entity, but now they've posted a link to a defamatory website of unverified accuracy in an article. Many, many points down the toilet in my book.
Maybe if you're talking first year introduction to satellites classes. As every real astrophysicist knows, however, the only way to crank out cubesats ahead of deadlines in the competitive world is to use a .SAT development environment.
That's a good theory, but as a high ranking member of the intelligence community, I went ahead and looked up the file on the grandparent poster to confirm his credentials. Obviously, my exact methods are mostly classified, but via a mix of data-mining, satellite reconaissance, analysis of public and tax records, and wire-tapping, I have verified his post. The grandparent has real ultimate power.
This isn't directly related to the ribbon, but I'd like to mention power as a major obstacle. I made a rough estimate (completely ignoring losses) suggesting that a 1000 kg climber ascending at 100 m/s requiring on the order of 1 MW (~1300 horsepower). Power beaming has efficiency issues which in turn raises heating problems. Embedded conductors add significant weight to the ribbon without significant strength. I'm unaware of any form of onboard power that is even remotely feasible.
I'm glad to see the research being conducted on this, and I have personally corrected some of the simpler objections like "what if this super-ribbon breaks and kills us all," but the space elevator looks to be further down the timeline than fusion power.
If we don't spend the $10 billion on fusion at some point, we will never have it. We will always be tied down to the limitations of carbon, fissile, and solar-derived energy forms: hydroelectric interferes with river ecosystems, wind is weather dependent, solar takes up a lot of land and is expensive (all the solar-derivatives are location dependent), fission produces lots of toxic and low-level radioactive waste, and there is a statistically significant correllation between carbon fuel use and the amount of annoying babbling the global-warming crowd makes.
Eventually we will outgrow the practical limitations of the "renewable" energy sources. $10 billion is peanuts compared to the amount of money spent on energy annually. It's possibly worth it for the amount of other science produced by operating the reactor, and it's definitely worth it just to determine if we are on the right path to a controllable break even reaction, regardless of whether or not this design actually does break even.
This isn't quite a breakdown of compartmentalization, but MikeRoweSoft already had a somewhat similar run-in with Microsoft regarding trademarks.
I kinda hope they're granted the trademark. Then I won't have to listen to people babbling on about web 2.0 anymore.
The constant appearance of pun-chains like this one make me feel like we're going in circles.
I think that analogy hits very directly at what tiered internet effectively accomplishes.
Now onto the question of whether or not someone who owns a private bridge (since almost all bridges in the US are managed by some level of the government, but almost all the backbones are privately owned), has a right to let FedEx's trucks cross before UPS's when the bridge is crowded if FedEx is willing to pay for the privilege. Meanwhile UPS can wait in the queue.
But wait...transportation projects are taken on publicly because of the cost and land involved. It would not be practical to let PonSys build one bridge across the Mississippi and TransCorp build another right next to it to compete for tolls, when one publicly owned bridge accomplishes the same. That can be accomplished much more easily with network paths. Rather than UPS waiting for the congestion to ease on PonSys's bridge, they'll just plan their route (set their routing rules) to use Trancorp's bridge when PonSys's is backed up. The flat-rate bridge may be more expensive than riding the bottom tier of the other one, but they can still rake it in whenever their competitor is causing unacceptable delays for the shippers.
I have a strong hope this one will sort itself out with resorting to legislation.
I highly recommend anyone writing similar letters to their representatives to Get to the Point in the first paragraph. Identify the bill and how you think they should vote as soon as you're done with the formality of introducing yourself. Just like writing technical reports. The introduction or abstract always sums up the main content so a busy reader can glean the important parts from it immediately. Congressmen don't have time for their constituents...^H^H^H^H... are very busy people and receive quite a bit of correspondance to sift through.
Once you have "voted" in your representative's inbox, then you can and should explain your reasons. In that respect your letter is excellent. The fact that you identified yourself as a small business owner gives him that "Defended small business owners in the Network Neutrality Act of 2006 vote" in his campaign material. Everybody loves that one.
I personally am a little undecided on the bill. While I have heard no promise of any genuine benefit for the consumer and really hope we don't see a tiered internet come to pass, a small part of me thinks perhaps we should let the market kill this one. Surely if enough preference is exerted by consumers and companies like Google and Yahoo taking our side, the tiered internet will leave leave AT&T's backbones dry as the LA river (least cost/shortest latency routing?), and provide the perfect environment for other companies to invest in building high capacity lines. I just don't know if it's worth the risk that AT&T might succeed, though.
We did have data to base the theory on. The data is the known emmissions from the sun, compared to the expected emissions from other suns and such. Based on that, they were probably pretty confident of their models of what the termination shock should look like (the very fact that they can identify it suggests the model can't be too far off). You're right, though, that it's only a starting point. This observation sounds like very good justification for continuing to fund the Voyager program. NASA had been considering dropping it because it is costing several million a year in operations costs.
I for one wonder if perhaps the shape is assymetrically biased away from the galactic center.
Ahem...I seriously thought I'd never have to explain this one on slashdot. It turns out that beyond our solar system, there is a vast amount of space and bodies that provide references against which to measure the motion of the solar system. We call that the "universe."
For further background on this concept, you may be interested to read about galaxies or Copernicus.
The article is interesting, but I don't think it's particularly novel. Consider the way some guys treat their cars. Add in the psychological effect of the battlefield and some degree of attachment is not surprising. Plus, we've long had a tendency to personalize our creations. From naming ships to creating flashy avatars like "Clippy" that wonderful Word assistant that everyone wants to twist into a pretzel and toss into a furnace.
I've also read that some police officers in K-9 units take counseling when their dog dies in the line of duty, because they worked so closely together. The bond between dogs and humans is much more obvious, but I think related.
The classic Mario experience for many of us was side-scrolling on our parent's 19" television. Portability is great and I wouldn't mind having a DS, but plugging in and playing with your friends and not squinting because of the small screen/glare rocks.
Somebody mod this back up, please.
The existing phone companies could use their massive financial resources to jump on top of this and beat any startups to the punch, cornering a potentially massive market early on.
Yes, I know it's not as simple as that, but ultimately I see traditional providers as shooting themselves in the foot by trying to restrict change. If you don't have the best way of doing something, sooner or later your customers are going to take their money to the person who does.
A properly operating power plant does not release any radioactive particles. There is still gamma radiation through the sides walls of the reactor. This is typically less than the background radiation from other sources. The fact that it is measurable is more a testament to the sensitivy of the instruments than the radiation level. It has been said that you receive more radiation watching TV for an hour each day than you do living a mile from a nuclear plant (what wavelengths is another question, though). As the section you quote says, they were observing the effects of radiation on the air molecules that change the way radar reflects off of them. I'm not sure what the effect is...probably just ionization of a few atoms.
If they can detect this, they can definitely detect a plume from a containment breach and hopefully map very accurately how it spreads.
I guess my joke flopped a little bit. I was trying to imply that the plaintiff was pursuing profit based on the letter of the law, but the judge recognized the more important issue about the spirit of the law. Most of the law stories that make headlines lately seem to be the ones where the letter of the law gets in the way of the spirit (some patent cases stick out in my mind).
I was almost surprised this didn't get it's own submission (although I don't think it's quite that newsworthy outside our area).
I went up to watch it, but missed out on all but hearing the boom due to some of those pesky trees the environmentalists think are all the rage in Oregon. Just hearing it was still cool though, and the videos are only one order of magnitude less cool than watching the kingdome go down. Knocking it down so cleanly and smoothly is almost as impressive as putting it up in the first place.
The local activists have been all abuzz with joy that it's going down, but mix in occasional comments like "I'm sad to see this monument to the idiocy of nuclear energy gone. It provided a valuable lesson to us." Such comments only more firmly cement in my mind the conviction that the more outspoken a nuclear power opponent is, the less they actually know about nuclear power. Trojan was closed, not due to safety or waste disposal concerns, but due to the operating expenses and the cost of replacing a prematurely failing heat-exchanger. A lot of that is owed to the poor practice of using one-off reactor designs and the complexity of pressurized water reactors. It really drives me nuts to hear them rant from 8 AM until lunchtime about fossil fuel use destroying the planet, then from 1 until closing about how dangerous nuclear power is. I can almost buy it if they play waste disposal issue since I don't have a bulletproof response to the "in 10,000 years" argument (which I think is seriously overrated...what if this, what if that, what if sharks evolve freakin lasers on their heads), but they always focus on the Chernobyl-argument, which is not relevant with current designs and operating practices, and pretty much ridiculous with fusion. Their ultimate mandate is to fix global warming without using anything that has "atoms" in it and without affecting the price of organic fair trade coffee at Trader Joe's.
I'm pretty sure it's a ripoff of someone elses article.
I was a little disappointed to see that it wasn't from our friend RC.
Holy cow! Is he actually suggesting that there is more to a written law than the exact wording?
I guess I'm going to have to read a little more on this. The impression I got from the article is something to the effect of, "Oh my gosh, Red Hat, Novell, and these other guys all agreed to sell their software for $0! That's price setting!"
I think the instability they refer to in that line is the resonance. For whatever particular reason (any initial disturbance from absolute perfection will do), waves are forming that aren't fully random, and propogating across the bucket at a rate which is harmonically in tune with the rotation, causing these funny shapes. I would venture to guess that in either a fully stable or a fully chaotic system, the doughnut should be round, regardless of rate.
Sounds like you've been reading a little bit of Michael Crichton? The fractals he refers to come from the fact that in any system where multiple outcomes are possible for any given junction, once you add multiple successive junctions, the complexity of figuring out the final outcome quickly exceeds the ability to fully analyze it.
Kind of an aside, I recall playing around with spinning buckets at varying speeds one day in fluids lab back in school when we finished our assignment (which did not involve spinning buckets with water). I don't remember if we saw anything like this, and if we did we ignored figuring it had been noticed before, but I do remember being fascinated for probably a solid hour by the things. So much for intellectual curiosity on our part.
To expand on the parent, the effect is called "similitude." The Reynolds number is a dimensionless number that involves the velocity of flow, the size of any defining flow feature (like pipe diameter), and the viscosity of the fluid. These are the primary factors that effect how a fluid flow will act on a larger scale.
Unfortunately, this sort of thing doesn't work very well on a small portion of a system. Instead, computational fluid dynamics involves breaking the flow up into discrete elements, figuring out what each element should be doing (typically according to the equations used on larger or simpler systems), then figuring out how that effects the element next to it. Then you do the whole thing over again with new initial conditions defined by how all the elements effected each other. Then you do it once more. Then you keep doing it over and over until the difference between subsequent iterations gets small enough to make you happy (assuming you didn't screw up and it diverges). The ability to do this with a computer definitely opened new gateways for engineering with fluids, but it's still only an approximation, and there are some effects they have trouble figuring out. I don't think anyone can really appreciate the difficulty of some of the common problems like long-term or highly accurate weather or climate predictions until they've tried to solve a finite element problem involving just 4 elements (especially if you have complicating factors like heat transfer). Then you look up at the sky and multiply the difficulty by several billion or so.
A couple of my friends in school worked summer research projects with one of our physics professors looking at a related effect known as Stewartson layers (basically, the shear rate of a fluid isn't actually linear across a flow in which velocity changes with position, like we usually model it as...sometimes the flow forms in "sheets"). I don't know all the details, but like the effect in the article, this one isn't well understood.
"Scientifically irrelevant"...I'm sorry, what other platform allows direct monitoring and control over long-term microgravity and exo-atmospheric experiments? Perhaps the benefit/cost ratio of the experiments is questionable, but there is not currently anything equivalent to the laboratory capabilities it offers.
The ISS has supported several hundred past and present science experiments and the numbers will pick up fast once the remaining modules are added and the crew is increased to a standard full complement of 6.
So you're suggesting that the rest of the countries actually pay for it?
Ok, my above words would be flat out flamebait if I didn't qualify them a little further. The US is by far the biggest investor in the ISS. Some of the modules and components come from Canada, ESA, Japan, and Russia, but most of the operational expenses come out of NASA's budget, with I suppose Russia second. If any of the above, except Russia, pulled out today nothing would happen. If the US or Russia pulled out of the project it would be leaning over the brink. If both did, the thing would hit the ground within a couple years.
A very large part of the reason NASA is committed to keeping the shuttles running until 2010 is to finish the station and make good on the international commitment to the project. We're not backing out on this. Not that I agree with what the grandparent proposed, but keep in mind what the US has put into this project next time you feel like getting indignant at someone for forgetting to be fully inclusive in their speech.
Because the military isn't a democracy. Not everyone's opinions/needs/wants matter the same.
In order to operate effectively, the US military maintains a clear cut chain of command: you obey the person with more shiny things on his shoulders than you. The primary purpose is to avoid conflicts in the decision making process. Officers have aids and what-not to help them avoid making stupid decisions, but the final word comes from the highest ranking officer or NCO. You simply can't afford to take the time in the middle of a firefight to debate whether John's plan is better than Phil's. Somebody has to make a decision and that someone is the commanding officer, not his underlings. Credit or blame comes later.
I could go into this a lot more covering things like military economics, but that gets long fast. I'd be willing to bet militaries have studied the chain of command concept in a lot of depth for several thousand years, so there's probably not much chance of coming up with a better control structure for a war.