Well, for a business with 135 employees that doesn't appear to have a dedicated webmaster (that site screams "prepackaged"), it ain't bad. They aren't bothering much with publicity right now, they're trying to get a rocket in the air without spending too much money. They don't even hire interns presently, so it's little surprise they don't put much effort into beefing up their website. I'm still trying to decide if I should send them a resume as an entry-level propulsion engineer, a web administrator, or an "Internet and Rocketry Specialist." Sort of a jack-of-all-trades type guy...
Either way, though, I'd have to move to California, so it probably wouldn't be worth it.
Don't bother counting. Just write a quick script to parse it. Don't forget #include <manager_lib.h>. Here's the output for the first paragraph:
The authors of Inescapable Data share their excitement about what they see as a rapidly-developing convergence of digitaltechnologies having enormous significance for business and culture. This convergence, in their view, is inescapable, life-altering for both good and bad, and presents a frame-shattering paradigm-shift which is mostly unrecognized, and much less examined critically. Inescapable Data is a thought-provoking book meant to describe the new technologies and to examine the special values which arguably will emerge from the convergence." Read the rest of John's review.
Alternately, you can convert paragraphs to articles such as the one above by advancing through the string one word at a time, and at intervals from 1 to 4 words, inserting random elements of manager_lib.h.
Actually, I'm not going to comment on the ref's, other than to state my opinion that they made quite a few more bad calls against Seattle than against whoever the other team was. But it always seems like the team I'm rooting for is getting picked on, so I'm going to just assume that it's not the refs, it's me. If only the rest of the sports fans out there could figure that out.
I find the article interesting as much for the results as for the method. Like my opinion of the calling of the game, I had a different opinion of some of the commercials they mentioned specifically. Of course with a sample size of only 5, that's little surprise. I for one, don't even remember the "I'm going to Disneyland" commercial they ranked highly, but my favorite was the Fed Ex commercial which scored near the bottom in their study.
Of course, it sounds like this was a proof of concept type study rather than a marketing analysis, so the actual rankings aren't really as important as having differentiable data (for the moment). But I do have to say, the study sounds very promising since it placed Burger Kings commercials at the bottom of the stack, where it belongs. I haven't been able to go near a Burger King since they started doing such weird crap on TV. For example: Women wearing Bavarian outfits pouring ranch dressing all over themselves from 5 gallon buckets...WTF, mate?
They do kind of come across that way, don't they. Time Magazine did a somewhat interesting article on Larry and Sergei recently. The millionaire on a spending spree is the overall impression I was left with, although the article presented them as having goals and plans. One of the showcases of the article was the way they develop new projects (most slashdotters probably know Google employees spend 70% of their time on assigned projects, 20% on ideas that seem good, and 10% on whatever the heck seems interesting...the last is reportedly how gmail and google moon happened). You bring your ideas to your manager. If they like it, they take it to the next level. Then it goes before the co-founders. That's basically is throwing it up to see what sticks. Them it's gets thrown up to the public.
The most interesting quote from the article was something to the effect of "(before our public filing) we actually wanted to appear uncoordinated, and it worked. The competition was thinking 'these guys are idiots' while we were secretly growing."
1.) The Mig-25 did turn out to be a lot more lackluster than first thought, but it was worse at low altitude than high, so a low altitude run probably stands a better chance of getting through.
2.) Francis Gary Power's U2 was shot down at 67,000 feet by SA-2 surface to air missiles.
3.) ECM helps more if the plane is hard to see in the first place (stealth or low altitude)
4.) The Valkyrie was limited to a 5000 mile range by it's fuel thirst, and could not carry additional weapons externally. I don't know if it could mid-air refuel.
The B-52 is still in service because the airframe has held up well and it has shown itself to be very versatile. It can carry dumb bombs, ALCM's, SRAM's, Harpoons, JDAM's, or even just ECM gear. There were concerns even from the limited testing about the long-term durability of the XB-70's airframe. FAS has a good write-up about the Valkyrie, along with some sexy pictures. The most incredible part is it was built way back in the 60's, and there's still nothing quite like it (Hey Boeing, where's my SST you promised?).
...at roughly the same efficiency as solar panels. I'm not saying green algae isn't a bad idea, and it is definitely possible growing algae, harvesting hydrogen, and then burning it for electricity may end up being cheaper than building solar panels, but it's not magic. The algae still only utilize certain wavelengths of light (one of the major problems with solar panel efficiency, too), and they still only receive 1 kW/m^2 of energy from the sun on a good day, near the equator.
Edit: before I submitted this, I read the article. It claims an 80% conversion efficiency. This sounds fantastic and tripped my "too-good-to-be-true" meter. My suspiscion is the 80% number is of energy of particular wavelengths or that it's the portion of the total energy utilized by the bacteria to produce hydrogen, but their reference for that number is printed literature, so I couldn't check it.
Presumably you mention these items because they would be useful in the places where they would be made. I've wondered lately if many of these countries would turn out much different if they first developed a modern local economy producing their own needs, then expanded to participate in the global economy, rather than immediately participate in the global economy and trying to stabilize the their needs supply later. Is it possible for a company, even with philanthropic aims in mind, to sustain itself building farming equipment in undeveloped nations?
Some Japanese kid beat Super Mario Brother's 3 in 11 minutes by using an emulator to slow down the game play, then speeding the video back up to normal speed, and even then I think he did it dozens of times over before getting it right. I bet the Numa Numa guy or Star Wars Kid get more smiles from girls in the hallway than a kid who has devoted his life to SMB3. I watched the video once, thought it was way cool. I watched it a second time to show a friend, at which point it lost it's magic. Then I found out it was a setup.
If you find watching people you don't know play video games (complete with clueless, annoying commentators) interesting, that's fine by me. I don't. I can watch a friend for about 5 minutes before either logging on myself or going outside. What I had better not see, however, is ESPN start carrying video games on TV in place sports. It really drives me nuts to see the sports channel showing a poker tournement rather than soccer. And while I'm on that tangent, lose the shades! I understand these guys can't keep a straight face when all they have is a pair of 3's, but wearing sunglasses indoors makes you look like a tool.
In closing, the best of anything is seldom worth your time. I don't watch spelling bees, quilting, debate tournaments, caber tossing, drag racing, ballet, iron chef, curling, etc. The best of things that genuinely interest you are often worth your time, but sometimes not even those. I really thought I'd find battlebots interesting, but nope.
13 years...it's ridiculous, isn't it? Actually, I think the case I mentioned above, while not illegal, is a violation of Facebook's terms of service (by the person doing the hiring, that is).
It occurred to me as I was writing this, that the internet is far from the only way our past or personal life can follow us around. I remember during Judge Alito's confirmation hearings some people grilling him on his brief membership in college of a group that turned out to have some significantly racist or sexist views. And your point about what's PC changing over time is true, too. I recall digging up a joke about the World Trade Center that had first been told years before 9/11, but looking at it in context of those events, I doubt it would be found humorous by most people.
Isn't it great when they assume that you can't find your way around a store that is typically around 500 square feet?
I'm a younger guy, so for several years I wondered why people actually went to Radio Shack. Then one day out of curiousity I actually walked a little deeper in than the Compaq display and discovered...The Drawers (queue dramatic music). I swear, you could base an entire retail chain on the electronic bits and pieces on the shelves and drawers in the back of Radio Shack: switches, LEDs, fuses, soldering tools, connectors, adapters, breadboards, wire, etc. If you added in cheap relays and power supplies, I would go nuts. Or is that what Radio Shack was?
... and the answer. Think: most other hobbyists/hardware geeks probably figured this out sooner, and cut out the middleman. RadioShack really didn't have much choice except to do what they did (keep selling the profitable parts at a higher margin + pimp out their locations to interested folks).
I guess it depends what and how much you need. If all I need are a couple 33 ohm resistors, and a few cheap LED's, it's going to cost less to get them at the local radio shack (which are everywhere) than to drive half an hour to Fry's or even buy them from Newark online once you add on shipping and handling. While I don't flat out disagree, I'm more inclined to side with the theory that their attempts to make the store more popular with the general public left it without many of the things nerds were looking for while at the same time placed them in a much more competitive market. Even Walmart sells mobile phones now and they have extremely low margins to compete with. Very few places sell solder and breadboards in small quantities.
That is, at best, marginally relevant. Britain and Ireland have a pretty deep-rooted conflict over there that really is more political than it is religious. It's not like Benny Hill dressed up as Moses for a skit and the IRA flipped out and started capping knees, or some Irish cartoonist drew a picture of St. Patrick boxing Calvin's ears and the protestants started parking cars filled with explosives in front of people's houses.
I saw an editorial in a recent issue of my alma mater's student newspaper where a girl was claiming to have been turned down for student-employment for lack of discipline or something like that. According to her story, when she asked for clarification, it turned out that the person who made the hiring decision had looked up her facebook.com profile and found a colorful hortatory statement with the president as its object. I'm pretty sure from her description, and a certain facebook profile with no optional information in it for one of the university staff members whom I personally learned to avoid if at all possible, that her story is true. One of my former bosses referred to such people as "dragon ladies."
Yikes! Going beyond the standard resume, references, interview when making a hiring decision obviously carries significant risk of creating unfair prejudices against a candidate. In this case, the person hiring dug into the candidate's personal life, didn't like her style of casual social expression (not necessarily related to her work behavior), and made a decision based largely on that rather than her actual qualifications. This may be standard practice, but its a questionable one.
Gravity would be one method. The article states that sails on the scale they are talking about would only be effective out to about 200 AU (a little bit past Pluto, if I remember right). Even that far out, gravity is still significant (otherwise Pluto wouldn't feel any reason to stick around like it does). I've heard some people mention tacking, like sailboats, to get propulsion against the direction the light is moving, but spacecraft don't have keels. I can't figure out a geometry that would work for that.
Start counting your photons as they pass by, then tell me where they're coming from. It's dark outside because of the inverse sqaure law. We see more photons from the sun than we do from other stars because it's a lot closer. Photons anihilate? Perhaps you're grasping at virtual particles or superposition, but you're trying to fit it in somewhere that it's irrelevant. Anyway, since NASA is working on this (at a slow pace), there obviously already is funding for it.
It really is a pity these "amatuer" scientists don't realize that space is full of stars. (Is this a joke? It's hard to read sarcasm...)
It sounds to me like his concern is not finding a host for himself, but for other people using his applications. He may want to add some of PHP 5's functionallity to his app in order to add new features or improve performance, but his customers can't use it until their host upgrades, and it seems most hosts are still running PHP 4.
BTW, if ya'll will forgive a minor digression: it's about time microtime() was able to return a float value! I never understood why it comes back as a string, and it took me quite a bit of fooling before someone finally pointed out in the user notes:
$float_microtime = array_sum(explode(" ",microtime()));
Good points. I definitely wasn't trying to knock the shuttle program or devalue what we've learned from it. As far as expectations, one of the touted features was cost-saving potential, which it never achieved. Additionally, the shuttle's themselves were originally intended to fly as many as 100 flights each, whereas they're now a little over 100 total. Also, like you, I find the hysteria over Columbia frustrating, especially the claims that the danger alone are enough to justify abandoning space exploration. And when I say wrong approach, I mean simply there are much better ways to achieve our goals. A lot was learned from the XB-70, too, but we also learned during testing that stealth technology and low-level radar-evasion were more effective than simply trying to outperform all the potential interceptors.
I would imagine Atlantis would still be worthy of a museum exhibit, even if they have to take quite a bit out of it over the next 3-4 years. It's not like they're going to be looking it over thinking "that wing could be handy, better grab that." It'll be things like spare fuel pump parts, electronics, life support equipment, plasma conduits, teleporters (ok, just kidding on the last two). Anyway, stuff you wouldn't notice at the museum, and even if they set it up where visitors could actually see inside, they could just replace what the take out with the broken parts from Discovery and Endeavor.
Besides, Discovery should go the Smithsonian. Atlantis may be the most reliable, but Discovery gets all the cool jobs (Hubble, Return-to-Flight, etc). It's sort of a Cal Ripken versus Randy Johnson thing...without the mullet.
China is moving along in their space program, there's no doubt about that, but they have a ways to go before they leapfrog us. So far they've launched two manned flights, both based very heavily on Soviet technology. Their own, original development is still limited.
On our side of the fence, things have changed. The discussion back when we were in grade school was always very general, and typically looked more at supplementing the shuttle with concepts like the X-33 rather than flat out replacing it. Sure a few prototypes were built and tested, but always cancelled, and their roles were never real clearly defined. Now, we have a rough date when the shuttle will be retired, and a manifest for all of the remaining flights. There is a definite replacement under development for both the crew delivery and cargo functions that the shuttle performed. There is also one required function (ISS resupply and crew delivery), one planned function (lunar command module), as well as testbed potential. Unlike previous plans, which proposed new approaches (single-stage to orbit, VTOL, lifting bodies, aerospike, etc), the CEV is based entirely on well-tested technology. NASA's new administrator is a dedicated and realistic individual and is not going to let Congress leave NASA without a crew vehicle once the current administration leaves. Whether or not a new moon program truly comes to fruition, I can't say, but the CEV will.
I would argue that the F-117 was just as much a technology demonstrator as it was a tactical strike aircraft. It showed stealth technology could be used effectively on the modern battlefield, and lessons and technologies learned are being applied to the development of the F-22 and F-35. But then, how does that compare to the space shuttle? We built 5 of those compared to 60 F-117's. I guess the differences between air combat and space flight make the numbers deceiving, since the shuttles were supposed to be a work-horse, and expectation they never fully lived up to. I guess the space shuttle is more like the XB-70, a Mach 3 heavy bomber prototype built in the 60's: technologically very impressive, but ultimately the wrong approach.
Yep, seen it. Now scale that to absolute temperature...or even the average background temperature of space, since that (in addition to atmospheric transmittance and global emissivity) is the prime factor affecting heat transfer away from the earth. When you do that, you'll find the graph looks pretty darn flat. My point is not that the temperature is not changing, but the graph blows it a little out of proportion. Also, you don't directly address the parent's point, because all of the points used to generate that graph are averages taking from millions of wildly varying data points taken globally each year. This variation is what he was referring to.
According to reports I've seen, the worst "runaway" scenarios that have any modeling behind them expect a 4-5 degrees C rise in average global temperatures and some increase in the local variability (the horrific "extreme weather" some people like to toute). It can't truly run away. The earth has to obey the 1st law thermodynamics, too.
Why aren't policy makers doing more? Well, we're actually already doing a significant amount to understand the climate. Quite a few million dollars of government grants go to universities in the US every year, plus there's what NASA and the NOAA spends on weather related research. There are several satellites already dedicated to monitoring things like upper-atmospheric temperatures, sea levels and temperatures, atmospheric gas content, etc. Actually, the ESA tried to launch another one a couple months ago, but that didn't go to well, so now they've got to rebuild it. Given that generous estimates place the global temperature rise at 1/2 a degree over the last 120 years and contain quite a bit of uncertainty, it's hard to justify spending much more money than we currently are on this investigation when there's plenty of other places where resources are needed in this world.
Come on man, be strong. You made a good point. You didn't senselessly deny global warming, nor hysterically accept it. You really should have no reason to be afraid of the Slashdot moderators for what you had to say there. Log in and let your voice be heard!
3 mm. Consider how grassy the data must be. First you have ocean waves ranging from a few inches up to a dozen meters. Then you have tides. Then there's seasonal affects (like river flow rates). Then you have weather. If Hurricane Katrina informed the public on anything science related, it should be storm surge. Furthermore, how does 3 mm compare to the 23 foot (IIRC) global sea rise the article threatened us with (which, by the way, would require something on the order of a 10 degree C global temperature rise to melt all that ice)? It's 2,337 times as much. I understand being concerned based on having a theory and data that appears to support it, but that's getting just a little bit sensationalist.
I've looked for information on standard deviations on the data and sum of least squares or whatever comparisons of predictions to actual data, and it's pretty hard to find.
Actually, I'm not quite sure you understand what he was getting at. He was saying space is going to be difficult to pioneer, even to the point that it's not worth trying right now. My point was that we have done difficult things before, and because people were willing to take risks when it was difficult, we were able to overcome the difficulty and actually make things better. People died traveling west and they died living here. Many saw opportunities but didn't want to go because of the risks. Others faced the risks and succeeded. I won't go into the displacement of the natives, because while that may be relevant to Pacific NW history, it's not to space travel.
Ultimately, I contend that the entire universe is intrinsically hostile to human life, but to significantly varying degrees. Even in the most comfortable places on earth, we still require food, water, and some form of shelter. In my part of the world, that shelter has to supply a little bit of warmth and a lot of protection from the rain. In space, it has to maintain warmth, air pressure, and protection from much higher levels of radiation, and it has to achieve those ends very self-sufficiently. At the basic level, it is the same issue of humans adapting to their environment on a larger scale.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, for a business with 135 employees that doesn't appear to have a dedicated webmaster (that site screams "prepackaged"), it ain't bad. They aren't bothering much with publicity right now, they're trying to get a rocket in the air without spending too much money. They don't even hire interns presently, so it's little surprise they don't put much effort into beefing up their website. I'm still trying to decide if I should send them a resume as an entry-level propulsion engineer, a web administrator, or an "Internet and Rocketry Specialist." Sort of a jack-of-all-trades type guy...
Either way, though, I'd have to move to California, so it probably wouldn't be worth it.
Don't bother counting. Just write a quick script to parse it. Don't forget #include <manager_lib.h>. Here's the output for the first paragraph:
The authors of Inescapable Data share their excitement about what they see as a rapidly-developing convergence of digital technologies having enormous significance for business and culture. This convergence, in their view, is inescapable, life-altering for both good and bad, and presents a frame-shattering paradigm-shift which is mostly unrecognized, and much less examined critically. Inescapable Data is a thought-provoking book meant to describe the new technologies and to examine the special values which arguably will emerge from the convergence." Read the rest of John's review.
Alternately, you can convert paragraphs to articles such as the one above by advancing through the string one word at a time, and at intervals from 1 to 4 words, inserting random elements of manager_lib.h.
Actually, I'm not going to comment on the ref's, other than to state my opinion that they made quite a few more bad calls against Seattle than against whoever the other team was. But it always seems like the team I'm rooting for is getting picked on, so I'm going to just assume that it's not the refs, it's me. If only the rest of the sports fans out there could figure that out.
I find the article interesting as much for the results as for the method. Like my opinion of the calling of the game, I had a different opinion of some of the commercials they mentioned specifically. Of course with a sample size of only 5, that's little surprise. I for one, don't even remember the "I'm going to Disneyland" commercial they ranked highly, but my favorite was the Fed Ex commercial which scored near the bottom in their study.
Of course, it sounds like this was a proof of concept type study rather than a marketing analysis, so the actual rankings aren't really as important as having differentiable data (for the moment). But I do have to say, the study sounds very promising since it placed Burger Kings commercials at the bottom of the stack, where it belongs. I haven't been able to go near a Burger King since they started doing such weird crap on TV. For example: Women wearing Bavarian outfits pouring ranch dressing all over themselves from 5 gallon buckets...WTF, mate?
Google is just a millionaire on a spree
They do kind of come across that way, don't they. Time Magazine did a somewhat interesting article on Larry and Sergei recently. The millionaire on a spending spree is the overall impression I was left with, although the article presented them as having goals and plans. One of the showcases of the article was the way they develop new projects (most slashdotters probably know Google employees spend 70% of their time on assigned projects, 20% on ideas that seem good, and 10% on whatever the heck seems interesting...the last is reportedly how gmail and google moon happened). You bring your ideas to your manager. If they like it, they take it to the next level. Then it goes before the co-founders. That's basically is throwing it up to see what sticks. Them it's gets thrown up to the public.
The most interesting quote from the article was something to the effect of "(before our public filing) we actually wanted to appear uncoordinated, and it worked. The competition was thinking 'these guys are idiots' while we were secretly growing."
1.) The Mig-25 did turn out to be a lot more lackluster than first thought, but it was worse at low altitude than high, so a low altitude run probably stands a better chance of getting through.
2.) Francis Gary Power's U2 was shot down at 67,000 feet by SA-2 surface to air missiles.
3.) ECM helps more if the plane is hard to see in the first place (stealth or low altitude)
4.) The Valkyrie was limited to a 5000 mile range by it's fuel thirst, and could not carry additional weapons externally. I don't know if it could mid-air refuel.
The B-52 is still in service because the airframe has held up well and it has shown itself to be very versatile. It can carry dumb bombs, ALCM's, SRAM's, Harpoons, JDAM's, or even just ECM gear. There were concerns even from the limited testing about the long-term durability of the XB-70's airframe. FAS has a good write-up about the Valkyrie, along with some sexy pictures. The most incredible part is it was built way back in the 60's, and there's still nothing quite like it (Hey Boeing, where's my SST you promised?).
...at roughly the same efficiency as solar panels. I'm not saying green algae isn't a bad idea, and it is definitely possible growing algae, harvesting hydrogen, and then burning it for electricity may end up being cheaper than building solar panels, but it's not magic. The algae still only utilize certain wavelengths of light (one of the major problems with solar panel efficiency, too), and they still only receive 1 kW/m^2 of energy from the sun on a good day, near the equator.
Edit: before I submitted this, I read the article. It claims an 80% conversion efficiency. This sounds fantastic and tripped my "too-good-to-be-true" meter. My suspiscion is the 80% number is of energy of particular wavelengths or that it's the portion of the total energy utilized by the bacteria to produce hydrogen, but their reference for that number is printed literature, so I couldn't check it.
Presumably you mention these items because they would be useful in the places where they would be made. I've wondered lately if many of these countries would turn out much different if they first developed a modern local economy producing their own needs, then expanded to participate in the global economy, rather than immediately participate in the global economy and trying to stabilize the their needs supply later. Is it possible for a company, even with philanthropic aims in mind, to sustain itself building farming equipment in undeveloped nations?
Some Japanese kid beat Super Mario Brother's 3 in 11 minutes by using an emulator to slow down the game play, then speeding the video back up to normal speed, and even then I think he did it dozens of times over before getting it right. I bet the Numa Numa guy or Star Wars Kid get more smiles from girls in the hallway than a kid who has devoted his life to SMB3. I watched the video once, thought it was way cool. I watched it a second time to show a friend, at which point it lost it's magic. Then I found out it was a setup.
If you find watching people you don't know play video games (complete with clueless, annoying commentators) interesting, that's fine by me. I don't. I can watch a friend for about 5 minutes before either logging on myself or going outside. What I had better not see, however, is ESPN start carrying video games on TV in place sports. It really drives me nuts to see the sports channel showing a poker tournement rather than soccer. And while I'm on that tangent, lose the shades! I understand these guys can't keep a straight face when all they have is a pair of 3's, but wearing sunglasses indoors makes you look like a tool.
In closing, the best of anything is seldom worth your time. I don't watch spelling bees, quilting, debate tournaments, caber tossing, drag racing, ballet, iron chef, curling, etc. The best of things that genuinely interest you are often worth your time, but sometimes not even those. I really thought I'd find battlebots interesting, but nope.
13 years...it's ridiculous, isn't it? Actually, I think the case I mentioned above, while not illegal, is a violation of Facebook's terms of service (by the person doing the hiring, that is).
It occurred to me as I was writing this, that the internet is far from the only way our past or personal life can follow us around. I remember during Judge Alito's confirmation hearings some people grilling him on his brief membership in college of a group that turned out to have some significantly racist or sexist views. And your point about what's PC changing over time is true, too. I recall digging up a joke about the World Trade Center that had first been told years before 9/11, but looking at it in context of those events, I doubt it would be found humorous by most people.
Isn't it great when they assume that you can't find your way around a store that is typically around 500 square feet?
I'm a younger guy, so for several years I wondered why people actually went to Radio Shack. Then one day out of curiousity I actually walked a little deeper in than the Compaq display and discovered...The Drawers (queue dramatic music). I swear, you could base an entire retail chain on the electronic bits and pieces on the shelves and drawers in the back of Radio Shack: switches, LEDs, fuses, soldering tools, connectors, adapters, breadboards, wire, etc. If you added in cheap relays and power supplies, I would go nuts. Or is that what Radio Shack was?
That is, at best, marginally relevant. Britain and Ireland have a pretty deep-rooted conflict over there that really is more political than it is religious. It's not like Benny Hill dressed up as Moses for a skit and the IRA flipped out and started capping knees, or some Irish cartoonist drew a picture of St. Patrick boxing Calvin's ears and the protestants started parking cars filled with explosives in front of people's houses.
I saw an editorial in a recent issue of my alma mater's student newspaper where a girl was claiming to have been turned down for student-employment for lack of discipline or something like that. According to her story, when she asked for clarification, it turned out that the person who made the hiring decision had looked up her facebook.com profile and found a colorful hortatory statement with the president as its object. I'm pretty sure from her description, and a certain facebook profile with no optional information in it for one of the university staff members whom I personally learned to avoid if at all possible, that her story is true. One of my former bosses referred to such people as "dragon ladies."
Yikes! Going beyond the standard resume, references, interview when making a hiring decision obviously carries significant risk of creating unfair prejudices against a candidate. In this case, the person hiring dug into the candidate's personal life, didn't like her style of casual social expression (not necessarily related to her work behavior), and made a decision based largely on that rather than her actual qualifications. This may be standard practice, but its a questionable one.
Gravity would be one method. The article states that sails on the scale they are talking about would only be effective out to about 200 AU (a little bit past Pluto, if I remember right). Even that far out, gravity is still significant (otherwise Pluto wouldn't feel any reason to stick around like it does). I've heard some people mention tacking, like sailboats, to get propulsion against the direction the light is moving, but spacecraft don't have keels. I can't figure out a geometry that would work for that.
Start counting your photons as they pass by, then tell me where they're coming from. It's dark outside because of the inverse sqaure law. We see more photons from the sun than we do from other stars because it's a lot closer. Photons anihilate? Perhaps you're grasping at virtual particles or superposition, but you're trying to fit it in somewhere that it's irrelevant. Anyway, since NASA is working on this (at a slow pace), there obviously already is funding for it.
It really is a pity these "amatuer" scientists don't realize that space is full of stars. (Is this a joke? It's hard to read sarcasm...)
It sounds to me like his concern is not finding a host for himself, but for other people using his applications. He may want to add some of PHP 5's functionallity to his app in order to add new features or improve performance, but his customers can't use it until their host upgrades, and it seems most hosts are still running PHP 4.
BTW, if ya'll will forgive a minor digression: it's about time microtime() was able to return a float value! I never understood why it comes back as a string, and it took me quite a bit of fooling before someone finally pointed out in the user notes:
$float_microtime = array_sum(explode(" ",microtime()));
Good points. I definitely wasn't trying to knock the shuttle program or devalue what we've learned from it. As far as expectations, one of the touted features was cost-saving potential, which it never achieved. Additionally, the shuttle's themselves were originally intended to fly as many as 100 flights each, whereas they're now a little over 100 total. Also, like you, I find the hysteria over Columbia frustrating, especially the claims that the danger alone are enough to justify abandoning space exploration. And when I say wrong approach, I mean simply there are much better ways to achieve our goals. A lot was learned from the XB-70, too, but we also learned during testing that stealth technology and low-level radar-evasion were more effective than simply trying to outperform all the potential interceptors.
I would imagine Atlantis would still be worthy of a museum exhibit, even if they have to take quite a bit out of it over the next 3-4 years. It's not like they're going to be looking it over thinking "that wing could be handy, better grab that." It'll be things like spare fuel pump parts, electronics, life support equipment, plasma conduits, teleporters (ok, just kidding on the last two). Anyway, stuff you wouldn't notice at the museum, and even if they set it up where visitors could actually see inside, they could just replace what the take out with the broken parts from Discovery and Endeavor.
Besides, Discovery should go the Smithsonian. Atlantis may be the most reliable, but Discovery gets all the cool jobs (Hubble, Return-to-Flight, etc). It's sort of a Cal Ripken versus Randy Johnson thing...without the mullet.
China is moving along in their space program, there's no doubt about that, but they have a ways to go before they leapfrog us. So far they've launched two manned flights, both based very heavily on Soviet technology. Their own, original development is still limited.
On our side of the fence, things have changed. The discussion back when we were in grade school was always very general, and typically looked more at supplementing the shuttle with concepts like the X-33 rather than flat out replacing it. Sure a few prototypes were built and tested, but always cancelled, and their roles were never real clearly defined. Now, we have a rough date when the shuttle will be retired, and a manifest for all of the remaining flights. There is a definite replacement under development for both the crew delivery and cargo functions that the shuttle performed. There is also one required function (ISS resupply and crew delivery), one planned function (lunar command module), as well as testbed potential. Unlike previous plans, which proposed new approaches (single-stage to orbit, VTOL, lifting bodies, aerospike, etc), the CEV is based entirely on well-tested technology. NASA's new administrator is a dedicated and realistic individual and is not going to let Congress leave NASA without a crew vehicle once the current administration leaves. Whether or not a new moon program truly comes to fruition, I can't say, but the CEV will.
I would argue that the F-117 was just as much a technology demonstrator as it was a tactical strike aircraft. It showed stealth technology could be used effectively on the modern battlefield, and lessons and technologies learned are being applied to the development of the F-22 and F-35. But then, how does that compare to the space shuttle? We built 5 of those compared to 60 F-117's. I guess the differences between air combat and space flight make the numbers deceiving, since the shuttles were supposed to be a work-horse, and expectation they never fully lived up to. I guess the space shuttle is more like the XB-70, a Mach 3 heavy bomber prototype built in the 60's: technologically very impressive, but ultimately the wrong approach.
Yep, seen it. Now scale that to absolute temperature...or even the average background temperature of space, since that (in addition to atmospheric transmittance and global emissivity) is the prime factor affecting heat transfer away from the earth. When you do that, you'll find the graph looks pretty darn flat. My point is not that the temperature is not changing, but the graph blows it a little out of proportion. Also, you don't directly address the parent's point, because all of the points used to generate that graph are averages taking from millions of wildly varying data points taken globally each year. This variation is what he was referring to.
According to reports I've seen, the worst "runaway" scenarios that have any modeling behind them expect a 4-5 degrees C rise in average global temperatures and some increase in the local variability (the horrific "extreme weather" some people like to toute). It can't truly run away. The earth has to obey the 1st law thermodynamics, too.
Why aren't policy makers doing more? Well, we're actually already doing a significant amount to understand the climate. Quite a few million dollars of government grants go to universities in the US every year, plus there's what NASA and the NOAA spends on weather related research. There are several satellites already dedicated to monitoring things like upper-atmospheric temperatures, sea levels and temperatures, atmospheric gas content, etc. Actually, the ESA tried to launch another one a couple months ago, but that didn't go to well, so now they've got to rebuild it. Given that generous estimates place the global temperature rise at 1/2 a degree over the last 120 years and contain quite a bit of uncertainty, it's hard to justify spending much more money than we currently are on this investigation when there's plenty of other places where resources are needed in this world.
Come on man, be strong. You made a good point. You didn't senselessly deny global warming, nor hysterically accept it. You really should have no reason to be afraid of the Slashdot moderators for what you had to say there. Log in and let your voice be heard!
3 mm. Consider how grassy the data must be. First you have ocean waves ranging from a few inches up to a dozen meters. Then you have tides. Then there's seasonal affects (like river flow rates). Then you have weather. If Hurricane Katrina informed the public on anything science related, it should be storm surge. Furthermore, how does 3 mm compare to the 23 foot (IIRC) global sea rise the article threatened us with (which, by the way, would require something on the order of a 10 degree C global temperature rise to melt all that ice)? It's 2,337 times as much. I understand being concerned based on having a theory and data that appears to support it, but that's getting just a little bit sensationalist.
I've looked for information on standard deviations on the data and sum of least squares or whatever comparisons of predictions to actual data, and it's pretty hard to find.
Actually, I'm not quite sure you understand what he was getting at. He was saying space is going to be difficult to pioneer, even to the point that it's not worth trying right now. My point was that we have done difficult things before, and because people were willing to take risks when it was difficult, we were able to overcome the difficulty and actually make things better. People died traveling west and they died living here. Many saw opportunities but didn't want to go because of the risks. Others faced the risks and succeeded. I won't go into the displacement of the natives, because while that may be relevant to Pacific NW history, it's not to space travel.
Ultimately, I contend that the entire universe is intrinsically hostile to human life, but to significantly varying degrees. Even in the most comfortable places on earth, we still require food, water, and some form of shelter. In my part of the world, that shelter has to supply a little bit of warmth and a lot of protection from the rain. In space, it has to maintain warmth, air pressure, and protection from much higher levels of radiation, and it has to achieve those ends very self-sufficiently. At the basic level, it is the same issue of humans adapting to their environment on a larger scale.
That's the shittiest first post ever!